Writings

The maximum temperature today - which means now - is around 24C and clear skies ☀️. I just got the not so unexpected urge to write something about biking. I say unexpected because I am back from a 40km ride from Eindhoven, to Oirschot, through Middelbeers and back.

Welkom bij de vijfde deel van deze serie: vergeet niet om in te checken. Vandaag ga ik een beetje praten over mijn nieuwe en toekomstige Nederlandse lessen, Nederlands schrijven, en ietsjes anders.

March had quite a lot of highlights for me, despite the bike shituation. Let’s take a look and recap what has happened the past month. I always have to go through my calendar and check stuff for these posts!

At the beginning of last month, someone tried to steal my bike. They almost managed to cut through the chain lock completely. This leads me to believe that they were probably caught by someone and stopped. I went to the bike shop and bought a much better chain lock made of different materials that are resistent to this type of cutting.

Changing phone number within the same country is hard. But it is definitely not as hard as when changing to a foreign number. If you’ve ever moved abroad or live abroad, and wanted to mostly ditch your previous phone number, you know what I am talking about.

Some weeks ago, I read a post from Jan-Luka’s where he talked about what to do with his new domain. The most interesting part for me was not what to do with the domain, or the domain itself, but what the domain is: a numeronym.

Welkom bij de vierde deel van deze serie: vergeet niet om in te checken. Vandaag ga ik een beetje hebben over mijn afgelopen cursus Nederlands, de toekomstige cursussen en mijn plannen, en ook over het proces om hoopelijk drietalig te worden.

February is complete. That means that around 16% of the year is also gone. Many things happened this month - I feel like I say this every month though. Let’s take a look at everything that happened, from some trips, to my Dutch language course ending.

Over the past days, my partner and I did a small trip to Vienna - and also Bratislava. This post is not going to be about the trip and the cities themselves, but about the transport to and from Vienna: the Nightjet. This was our first time trying out night trains, so it was quite a journey.

Welkom bij de derde deel van deze serie: vergeet niet om in te checken. Vandaag ga ik een beetje hebben over mijn nieuwe Nederlandse lessen, mijn kleine reis naar Brussel, en ook alle media in het Nederlands die ik de afgelopen maand heb geconsumeerd.

This past weekend I went to Brussels for FOSDEM with Sebastiaan, who has already written a bit about it. FOSDEM, if you don’t know, is the largest open source software conference in Europe - or in the world, not sure. This was not my first time attending, but it was positively chaotic as usual.

January was a very busy month, which I did not really expect. More importantly, it’s already gone. One twelfth of the year has already passed. How crazy is that? Let’s quickly dive into the latest events.

Some weeks ago, I sort of discovered this Grafana dashboard from a Hackerspace here in Eindhoven. Since then, I’ve been wanting to create such an “observability” dashboard for the microclimate inside my home, and also balcony. I already own quite a few temperature and air quality sensors, so it can’t be that hard - I thought.

A few days ago, I was navigating the web as normal. After some clicks here and there, I found myself on this page. I looked around and realized: it is a digital shoebox. I resonated with the author: I too keep around (shoe)boxes with the most random things. So I decided to also create my own digital shoebox.

At school, I participated a few times in the Youth Parliament. The Youth Parliament is an initiative of the Portuguese Parliament that gives a chance to young students to somehow get a feel of what politics involve. In the end, the measures that come out of this are actually debated by the real politicians in parliament.