Writings

In the beginning of the week, I tested positive for Covid-19. Even though the symptoms were smilingly gone, yesterday and the day before I noticed my sense of smell was quite odd. I could still smell some things, but not all. In addition, breathing in general had an odd smell. This article was a nice read and explains well how Covid-19 can change our sense of smell.

What’s more likely, she said, is that SARS-CoV-2 injures sustentacular supporting cells, which are like helper cells for the main neurons that pick up on chemicals in the air and send signals to the brain. They help maintain a healthy ecosystem in which the neurons can thrive, and they help guide the neurons to grow and make the right connections.

SARS-CoV-2 latches onto specific receptors to infect a cell, but olfactory neurons don’t have that receptor. The support cells, however, do. “Our body’s natural immune response is to bring inflammatory molecules to that site to try to kill the invader,” Patel said.

But that response can overwhelm the structural integrity of the support cells, and they end up as collateral damage. Without the proper support, olfactory neurons can’t successfully relay chemical signals to the brain, effectively silencing smell.

Fortunately, it seems I can smell things well again today, so that’s great. Besides, my self-tests are getting fainter and fainter by the day. It’s a bit annoying I came to Lisbon and had to miss all company activities. I met some friends and family instead, which was also great. I’ll be here until Tuesday.

At some point in my life I realized I didn’t remember most of the books/papers/posts/videos I had consumed few years before.

Sadly, this is a very common problem. We spend our days consuming media for immediate-pleasure. And usually we have thoughts about what we just consumed, but we don’t note them down, or preserve them.

This is a very nice piece on how to build a website in different layers of fidelity instead of layers of technology. Instead of building a progressive app with progressive enhancement, we should simply use different fidelity levels to the original website. Quite magical and I think that’d work very well.

A few days ago, we had the Lustrum Gala of Dekate Mousa, the photography association and it was a very nice experience! During the gala, we all had the opportunity to see the Lustrum Exhibition! Today at 8pm, the exhibition officially opens for the public at the CKE in Eindhoven.

I’m so proud to have 3 of my pictures hanging there, even though it’s such a small thing. If you are in Eindhoven during this and next week, don’t hesitate! It’s free and there’s very very very nice works.

Today I had quite some adventures with Matrix and decentralised messaging protocols. I thought about self-hosting an instance so I tried Synapse, which is the de facto Matrix implementation with all the features available. Quickly I understood that Synapse was too slow for a very tiny VPS so I tried Dendrite which claims to be much more efficient.

So… It run, but it was consuming 100% of all the 2 cores of the CPU of my VPS and yet it didn’t manage to load previous messages of the chats (perhaps that’s a limitation as it doesn’t have all the features yet). As that was a continuous high consumption for over 2 hours, I decided to take it down and create an account at a hosted Matrix instance. I chose tchncs.de, which is hosted in Germany. I didn’t want to go for the default matrix.org because that’s where everyone is and that goes against the decentralisation aspect of the thing.

When - and if - the protocol matures, I hope to see a more efficient implementation tailored for single users or small communities that can still do federation with other instances without dying. I also added my Matrix contact to my contacts page ✨