known as @hacdias
✏️ These are my blog posts. Visit the archive for an yearly overview.
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!
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.
