known as @hacdias
✏️ These are my blog posts. Visit the archive for an yearly overview.
2022 marked the year that I went to my first actual concert. By actual concert I mean a concert that I paid for for an artist I wanted to see, in an actual concert hall. And, of course, I listened to a lot o songs thorough the year. This is the recap of 2022 in Music. Let’s see what I’ve been listening to this year.
December is concluding and with it, we’re closing in the end of 2022. With the end of this month, I am writing one more retrospective about the events that have happened in my life during the past month. I am still on the fence whether or not I am writing a “year in review”. I will likely do a post for music and one for movies and TV shows with some stats. But I’m not sure I will write a generic year in review.
Online services. We all have accounts on those. Be it Instagram, Facebook, Twitter Mastodon, or some other thing that is sucking the life out of us. Even though we are the same physical being behind all of those accounts, we don’t always come out the same way to all of them. We look different, we sound different. Maybe that’s the nature of what we post there. They are all online identities.
I started reading this book in June and, even though I was enjoying it, life happened and I started reading very infrequently. I feel like this is a cycle that happens every year: in the beginning of the year I read a lot, during winter, and spring. Then summer comes and I stop reading.
Last weekend, Christiaan and I went to the Christmas Market in Aachen. The first time I went to a Christmas Market was in 2019, in Zurich, during a work trip. Until then, I did not even know that Christmas Markets were a thing. Since moving to The Netherlands, I’ve been wanting to visit one of these magical markets, but, unfortunately, Covid-19 made that impossible. Fortunately, last weekend we made that wish come true.
Tom describes his experiences on implementing part of the ActivityPub specification on top of his Jekyll-based static website. It is indeed quite interesting to me to see how he achieved it, mostly through “serverless” lambdas and whatnot. He notices, very well, that ActivityPub can be quite messy and is very active when compared to other technologies, such as RSS.
Similarly, most dynamic functionalities of my website could be implemented on top of a static website (as they once were). However, I’m not following that route now. Who knows if in the future I won’t switch back. An interesting… continuous… food for thought.
In the beginning of last month, I wrote a post about trying out the new payment system for public transit in The Netherlands, OVPay 💳. On it, I mentioned quite a few things regarding different operators. It’s been around a month, and I’ve had the opportunity to travel again on Hermes 🚍 buses using OVPay. Here’s the update.
November has been a pretty intensive month in many different regards: from my parents visiting The Netherlands for the first time, to my partner and I moving in together to a new apartment. Besides, we’re getting closer and closer to the end of the year, which means there are some cosy events I am looking forward to 🎄🍷.
Two days ago I shared that I was able to engrave my name in the Alumni Avenue. I now share some pictures from the graduation ceremony that took place on Monday. During the ceremony, each supervisor makes a little speech about each student. Even though I knew that was a costume here in The Netherlands, I was still surprised by it. I’m now sharing the pictures and video with you. They are, after all, public. I am really glad this chapter is concluded and I’m looking forward for the future.
Note: photos and video are copyrighted by TU/e. Photos are originally on Flickr, and video is originally on YouTube.
My university has this thing called “Alumni Avenue”. It’s one of the air bridges between buildings, but this one is special. On this one, old masters students can engrave their names in the glass. On Monday, it was my turn, right before the graduation ceremony.
It was quite an intriguing experience: I’ve never engraved anything in glass, so it took quite some time to make sure it was clear and visible 😅 There’s some pictures from the graduation, which I will post once I have access to them!
In the spirit of what has been happening to Twitter, Max added a verified checkmark to his personal website. Then, Jim followed with the idea. Since I also found the idea quite funny, now I also got myself a verified checkmark 😂. And it costs less than having one on Twitter!
For years, the blue checkmark in many social media have been used to show status, even though the original goal, as far as I understand, was for authenticity. Unfortunately, common users, or as some media platforms put it, “non-notable people”, were never able to be verified.
My website is owned by me, I pay for it. It is authentic and I can guarantee that the person behind it is myself. That could be an argument to put this badge up there. However, I’m just going with it because it is funny.
When Wouter published an article on government website design mistakes, I immediately thought: I have a very similar topic in the back of my mind that has bothered me since I moved to The Netherlands. It is not related to a website per se, but to a service that is used to login into many public services: the DigiD.
The Netherlands 🇳🇱 is testing a new payment system for the public transit called OVPay 💳. The gist is that you’ll be able to simply check-in and check-out from buses, trams, trains, and every other kind of transit with your debit or credit card, without needing to either buy a ticket, or have an OV-chipkaart (the public transit card).
Similarly to his last article, Jim dives into the concept of website fidelity, which is a way of reducing the amount of resources a website consumes by lowering its fidelity to the original visuals and features. I quite like this idea.
Website owners aren’t necessarily incentivized to start stripping stuff out of their websites in order to support lower fidelities (including a fidelity of zero JavaScript). What you need is like an agent: somebody who works on your behalf as a user and can do for you what site owners won’t — a user agent if you will 🥁.
Note that “fidelity” in this case is not solely a control over the appearance and functionality of the website, but the actual content of the site itself. For example, at full fidelity on a news site you might have an image, title, byline, and short description for each article whereas at low fidelity you might only have the title for each.
I want to stress this point: I see the promise of website “fidelity” not just as a preference for less JavaScript and CSS but content itself. Providing users this kind of control would require website owners be involved, as I’m not sure you could do that well solely as a browser feature or extension.
October is probably one of my favorite months of the year. Not only because of the vibes falling onto us 🍁 - no pun intented -, or my birthday, but it is also usually packed with events happening here and there. But before we continue, I wish you a great All Hallows’ Eve 🎃!
