known as @hacdias
✏️ These are my longer-form posts. Visit the archive for an yearly view.
February has been a total rollercoaster. Nice things and not so nice things have happened during this month. But overall, let’s keep a positive attitude towards the future. Let’s dive into the events that constituted this month.
Last month, I traveled from The Netherlands 🇳🇱 to Switzerland 🇨🇭 by train. More specifically, I traveled from Eindhoven to Engelberg, which is a small alpine town in the centre of Switzerland. When I wrote this post for the first time, it was mostly a rant, but now that some time has passed, I decided to rewrite it and finally publish it.
Some time ago, I decided to buy a gratitude journal 📓. I have been writing on and off on it for quite some time, definitely over a year and maybe two. Over this time, I think I can say that this has been beneficial for me. And I wanted to share this experience with others.
My thesis, specifically the part regarding Vertical Federated Learning, has been turned into a paper which has been presented during the UbiSec 2022 conference. Now, it has been published. It is called BlockLearning: A Modular Framework for Blockchain-Based Vertical Federated Learning.
January, the infamous first month of the year, is reaching an end. It was a very eventful month, but, by this time, I feel like I say that for every month that passes. I am honestly hoping that February will be a slightly more boring month in that sense.
This is the story on how whipped cream and cocoa powder have stressed me over the last two weeks. I hope that that is a seemingly weird enough sentence to keep you on reading. Or not. If you don’t want to keep going, it’s also fine. But let me tell you more.
A few years ago, I published an article where I did a small analysis of my Trakt data, which contains the shows and movies I have watched. I decided to bring that back again under the name “Year in Popcorn”. I considered “Year in Movies & Shows” but I thought that was too long and unappealing 😅.
2022 marked the year that I went to my first actual concert. By actual concert I mean a concert that I paid for for an artist I wanted to see, in an actual concert hall. And, of course, I listened to a lot o songs thorough the year. This is the recap of 2022 in Music. Let’s see what I’ve been listening to this year.
December is concluding and with it, we’re closing in the end of 2022. With the end of this month, I am writing one more retrospective about the events that have happened in my life during the past month. I am still on the fence whether or not I am writing a “year in review”. I will likely do a post for music and one for movies and TV shows with some stats. But I’m not sure I will write a generic year in review.
Online services. We all have accounts on those. Be it Instagram, Facebook, Twitter Mastodon, or some other thing that is sucking the life out of us. Even though we are the same physical being behind all of those accounts, we don’t always come out the same way to all of them. We look different, we sound different. Maybe that’s the nature of what we post there. They are all online identities.
Last weekend, Christiaan and I went to the Christmas Market in Aachen. The first time I went to a Christmas Market was in 2019, in Zurich, during a work trip. Until then, I did not even know that Christmas Markets were a thing. Since moving to The Netherlands, I’ve been wanting to visit one of these magical markets, but, unfortunately, Covid-19 made that impossible. Fortunately, last weekend we made that wish come true.
In the beginning of last month, I wrote a post about trying out the new payment system for public transit in The Netherlands, OVPay 💳. On it, I mentioned quite a few things regarding different operators. It’s been around a month, and I’ve had the opportunity to travel again on Hermes 🚍 buses using OVPay. Here’s the update.
November has been a pretty intensive month in many different regards: from my parents visiting The Netherlands for the first time, to my partner and I moving in together to a new apartment. Besides, we’re getting closer and closer to the end of the year, which means there are some cosy events I am looking forward to 🎄🍷.
In the spirit of what has been happening to Twitter, Max added a verified checkmark to his personal website. Then, Jim followed with the idea. Since I also found the idea quite funny, now I also got myself a verified checkmark 😂. And it costs less than having one on Twitter!
For years, the blue checkmark in many social media have been used to show status, even though the original goal, as far as I understand, was for authenticity. Unfortunately, common users, or as some media platforms put it, “non-notable people”, were never able to be verified.
My website is owned by me, I pay for it. It is authentic and I can guarantee that the person behind it is myself. That could be an argument to put this badge up there. However, I’m just going with it because it is funny.
When Wouter published an article on government website design mistakes, I immediately thought: I have a very similar topic in the back of my mind that has bothered me since I moved to The Netherlands. It is not related to a website per se, but to a service that is used to login into many public services: the DigiD.
