known as @hacdias
✏️ These are my blog posts. Visit the archive for an yearly overview.
I’ve rarely bought magazines in my life, let alone subscribe to them. Recently, however, I learned about the Standart magazine, a print magazine that focus on the world of coffee culture. I felt compelled to try it out, and, luckily, they have a trial subscription.
A few days ago, I wrote about my quest for a better search engine. For the past few months, I had been using Kagi, but I have since canceled the subscription. As a consequence, I returned back to DuckDuckGo. However, I felt it wasn’t able to satisfy my needs… but was I right?
I have received a few answer e-mails and I decided to give DuckDuckGo one more chance. In one of this e-mails, there was a tip, which revealed to be very useful: Christof suggested turning on the country toggle in order to improve the local results.
I have no idea how I missed the existence of such toggle, since it’s a very in the UI, but it seems to do the trick. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to affect more generic searches, so I can just keep it on the whole time.
And if I want to get Google’s results, but in a more private way, I can also just use !s to check on Startpage, just like Kev suggested. I have been doing this for the past few days and haven’t had much issues since.
A good thing about this is that I don’t need to go figure out how to make Startpage the default search engine in my current browsers, since that’s also another nightmare. Fortunately, DuckDuckGo is available as option in the browsers with opinions about which search engines the user should be able to use.
The Ministry of Time is the debut novel from Kaliane Bradley. It is set in a world where the British ministry has started a new initiative to gather “expats” from different points in history in order to understand if time travel is feasible.
From February up until now, I have been using a paid search engine, Kagi. Two weeks ago, I canceled my subscription to try giving DuckDuckGo - or maybe another search engine - a go. However, I still find the search results quite lacking!
Time and time again, I have come across articles about writing “useless” software, or programming as play. These sort of articles always wake up something in me. They focus on programming as a fun, playful thing, instead of making things with a hard purpose.
I enjoy discovering other people’s blogs online, whether it’s personal blogs, or gardens, or whatever you want to name thems. I’ve probably spent too much time just navigating other people’s websites, especially in what is called the Small Web. However, this Small Web is also not so small, and discovering new blogs is not always the easiest.
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.
