known as @hacdias
✏️ These are my blog posts. Visit the archive for an yearly overview.
You know when you are sometimes just browsing the web, and you stumble upon a fascinating place that could be an art piece in a museum? Yes, those weird, odd, interesting websites, either because their old and charming, or because they’re trying with a different concept. Today, I am sharing a few of those places I have found over the last years.
It is no secret that I enjoy tracking things, whether it is books I read, things I watched, or places I have been. When I travel, I track my flights, and that is, as far as I know, something a lot of people do. It also means that there are many tools out there for it. But when it comes to trains, I have never found a very reliable solution… until now!
This was the first book I read by Susanna Clarke. I heard about it at a friend’s birthday party, after someone gifted this book to the birthday person. After seeing how gorgeous the cover was, and hearing a little bit about the story, I decided to buy it!
Around a year and a half ago, I wrote about my espresso setup at the time. This setup has remained almost the same during the last year, except for a few things here and here. More recently, we upgraded our coffee machine, which prompted me to write an updated post and spill the te- coffee ☕️.
One more month has passed, and June is now away from us. We’ve officially entered the last half of the year, at least when it comes to counting months. It was quite a busy month, with travel, new job, events, and the heat! Let’s take a look.
At the beginning of last year, I shared about my filter coffee setup at home. The then current setup was composed by a family of four: the Clever Dripper, the French Press, the Chemex, and the AeroPress. Every device with its own use. It’s been more than a year and a half, and the family has now welcomed a new member: the V60.
I always find it very interesting to learn more about languages, and features that some languages have and some don’t. For example: my partner and I just realized why I sometimes get confused and cannot locate an object when he says “it is there”.
I have never thought about this, but Portuguese does not have a single “there”, we have two “there”, depending on how far the object is from the listener and/or the speaker. If you say “aí”, it means that it is next to the listener. If you say “alí”, it means that it is neither close to the speaker, nor to the listener. Both translate to “there”.
This is what seems to be called a spatial deixis system, which is present in many languages. Germanic languages, such as English and Dutch, do not make such distinctions however. And the problem lies in my internal association between the concept of “aí” and “there”. So, when someone usually says something is “there”, I assume it is close to me and far away from them (the speaker), while it can actually be somewhere else entirely. And this comes because I’m used to have more specificity.
Maybe I should follow a linguistics course.
It’s been a while since I made a “large” infrastructural update on this website. So, I made one. It has been on my plans for some time already, but I hadn’t yet had the time to do it: streamline the storage of media objects, such as photos, videos, PDFs, or anything else.
Last month was Maintainer Month, a month were open source software maintainers are celebrated. A lot of the software in the world - and thus society itself - runs on open source software, which is something not known to a lot of people. During this past month, I read a few posts here and there about people sharing their journey and experience as an open source maintainer, and today I wanted to give my take on it.
May has now come to an end. We started seeing the first signs of summer, warmth and, at the same time, some rain, to keep us refreshed. It was an unusually calm month in my life, I would say. However, I have the feeling that it is the calm before the storm.
A few months ago, I added the possibility to POSSE posts to Mastodon. Now, I just added Bluesky. At the time, I mentioned the API not being as simple, and that’s why I put it off for so long. Looking in retrospect, it wasn’t that bad, I think I was a bit intimidated.
Bluesky and Mastodon have a lot of differences, and the fundamental way Bluesky works (the ATProtocol) makes it such that the essence of creating a post is very different. On Mastodon - or almost any other social media - you just call the API with the text and the server automatically detects links, mentions, etc. If needed, the server embeds a preview of the links in the post.
However, on Bluesky, you need to manually configure all this things. The text is just plain text. You need to indicate where the URL is in the text, where it points to, which mentions exist, whether to embed a website, and if so, the thumbnail, the title, the description, etc.
While all of this is automatically done by Mastodon, it all must be manually done with Bluesky. I think it’s an interesting philosophy, where your “profile” is essentially just a repository of data, and you’re just creating this whole data, and the server is not going to be modifying it. You even get a CID for all the operations you do, giving me a throwback to my previous work at Protocol Labs!
Last September, I decided to finally give my shot at LLMs for code development. At that point, I had barely used any of the most known LLMs for a serious reason. It’s not nine months later, and a lot has changed. With all of the news about Claude 4 and considering I have a work ChatGPT subscription, I decided to give LLMs another try.
April was a fantastic month. Spring is now on full swing, the trees and flowers are in full blossom, and the weather is warming up - perhaps a bit too much. It was also a month of travel, my second intercontinental trip ever. Let’s take a look!
March has ended a few days ago, meaning that this recap is coming a bit later than usual. Maybe it is a product of the weather being nicer, and the fact that I’ve been a bit more busy than usual. It’s been quite some hectic days!
A few days ago, I competed the Couch to 5K program, which is a running program designed to slowly build one’s up to run 30 minutes, or 5 kilometers. Depends a bit on whether you follow the timed or the metric program. I decided to start it back in January, and now, two months later, I’m glad to say I completed it!
