known as @hacdias
✏️ These are my blog posts. Visit the archive for an yearly overview.
February is now past us, so it’s time for me to quickly recap what has happened last month, this time a few days later than usual. I was hoping to have posted more during last month. However, I made a few updates to the website with the intention of making that easier!
Yesterday, we visited the Harry Potter Studios. Since it was quite far away from the center, it took some time to get there, and consequently most of the day. It was worth it. It’s one of those one in a lifetime experiences to see the actual set of one of your favorite franchises. And the butter beer was delicious 🍺!
More iconic even, was the visit to the Transport Museum Shop. Yes, to the shop and not to the museum itself. Sadly, we didn’t have time to visit the museum yesterday. I would say that this shop is quite dangerous for me since I like everything transit. I ended up buying what I think is the most iconic souvenir I could get: a pillow with the same fabric as the seats of the trains from the Elizabeth Line! I love it!
We arrived last night at St Pancras with the Eurostar. It’s the second time doing this trip using the train, and despite taking much longer than the flight, I’m glad I made that decision. It probably helps that I never took the flight from Eindhoven to London, which takes around 40 minutes.
The advantage of the train is, most often than not, that you can just hop in the train and not spend much time as you need to do in an airport. However, since we live in Eindhoven, we need to first go to Rotterdam, do passport control and security. Only then board the train. So the time argument is actually not in our favor, for us. Nevertheless, we still chose to do it.
I always forget how ginormous London is. According to Wikipedia, there’s around 8.8 million people living here. That’s almost as many as in Portugal and half of the Netherlands. It’s nice to be back.
I’m looking forward to enjoy the next few days in London visiting a friend of mine, and checking a few places where I haven’t been yet!
Today I had the nth appointment for my wrist. Yesterday, we had done an echo just to make sure that there’s no damage or cysts. Fortunately, when it comes to those types of abnormalities, everything seems fine. The conclusion seems to be that my wrists are slightly more mobile than they should and therefore it’s just much easier to get an injury. And that the tendons need to do a lot more work than they would usually need to…
The next steps were not fun: getting an injection directly in the inflamed tendon with some substance that is supposed to help it come to a more rested space. That was performed immediately. I wouldn’t recommend that.
At the end of the month I’m also getting a custom made brace to also ensure I can give my wrist proper rest. The injection plus the brace plus exercises to make sure that my wrist becomes stronger should do the trick. I’m cautiously optimistic.
January is coming to an end, meaning that around 8% of 2025 has already passed. It felt like a slower month, definitely slower than the previous months in the sense that there was nothing big happening. However, the things that happened, I’m very glad with.
A few months ago, I hinted at the fact that I wanted to try out going for a run. And even though I didn’t share more about it, I did it. Back in September, I decided to try going for an interval running session. However, I had absolutely no running equipment at the time, so I just put on some gym clothes and my sneakers, and went.
Similarly to previous years, it’s time to share my musical habits throughout 2024. Around a month ago, I published my Spotify Wrapped 🎁, but, as usual, I don’t trust it completely. If they’re sharing it before the end of the year, how can it successfully show the statistics for the whole year? Here I am again, with my (almost) complete data from Last.fm.
Now that the last year has ended, I can finally collect all the data from the different services, and start my yearly analysis. This year, we’re starting with the “Year in Popcorn”. In contrary to last year, I brought back the plots by reusing both the data from my website for the movies, and the data from Trakt for the series.
December is coming to an end, and with it so is 2024. It was a year full of change, challenges and adventures. I managed to tick off quite a few items from my impossible list, achieve fluency in Dutch, and start a new job. All of this things, combined, made it a positively challenging year.
December is now coming to an end. It’s time to recap about what has happened during this last month, before writing my final Year in Review. This month was quite of a rollercoaster, I visited a few places, met with people a few times and watched a lot of stuff.
Just like last year, a lot of “App Defaults” posts have started popping up in my RSS feed. So, I decided to join with an updated list, featuring more categories than last year:
In the course of 2025, I hope to further reduce the Google services from this list, especially when it comes to documents and cloud file storage. To be fair, I don’t really use it that much, only for maintaining one or two spreadsheets, and I rarely make slides or written documents. Moving these to local files would be ideal, but it is also undeniable that the versatility of Google Docs makes it very compelling to use.
Keep an eye on my uses for an always up to date version of this list!
A friend of mine just sent the link to this AI-powered accent guesser from Bold Voice. After trying it out for a few times, it guessed me as either Romanian or Bulgarian, but always with a low confidence. However, a few friends of mine from certain countries got more than 95% confidence on their country, even when trying to fake an accent from somewhere else.
It’s that time of the year again, and Spotify Wrapped is back. Just like I did last year, and the year before, I decided to share the “results” from one year of listening to music here. As usual, I will do a better analysis at the beginning of next year with all the data from Last.fm.
The eleventh month of the year is now gone, and it’s almost time for Sinterklaas and then Christmas. November had more events than I was actually planning for, but it all ended up going well. Let’s recap!
October is now two days away. Halloween is gone - which I always enjoying mentioning despite never doing anything for it -, and my birthday too. I’m now 25, a quarter of a century, a very interesting-feeling number. Some would say it’s now closer to the 30s than to the 20s. Let’s recap what’s happened this last month!
