known as @hacdias
✏️ These are my longer-form posts. Visit the archive for an yearly view.
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.
The Netherlands 🇳🇱 is testing a new payment system for the public transit called OVPay 💳. The gist is that you’ll be able to simply check-in and check-out from buses, trams, trains, and every other kind of transit with your debit or credit card, without needing to either buy a ticket, or have an OV-chipkaart (the public transit card).
October is probably one of my favorite months of the year. Not only because of the vibes falling onto us 🍁 - no pun intented -, or my birthday, but it is also usually packed with events happening here and there. But before we continue, I wish you a great All Hallows’ Eve 🎃!
I have been recently dabbling with the idea of a second brain, or just note taking in general. I feel like I’ve been through this many times in the past years. I don’t take that many notes, or at least, I don’t take that many notes that I would want to make public. Most things I note down are private things that I do not want to make public. I considered using the private posts on my website, but I don’t think I would trust them enough.
September is finally gone and with it, my vacations. Now it’s time to start another chapter of life and work full-time for the first time in my life. Here’s some of the nice things that happened last month.
My master thesis has been finally published online. It is called Impact Analysis of Different Consensus, Participant Selection and Scoring Algorithms in Blockchain-based Federated Learning Systems Using a Modular Framework, and it was supervised by Nirvana Meratnia.
August is ending and with it, most people’s summer vacations. It’s time for school, university and work again. However, I did not have that much of a vacation yet.
Today I had a bit too much time that I decided to work on my website. In the morning, I made a few tweaks to the home page in order to make it more useful: added some contact and social media links, as well as links for some pages on my website that are not included in the navigation bar. I think I achieved a neat result.
July is ending for most of us in a few hours and August will start. This is when most people go for vacation and have their summer holidays. Let’s look at what I’ve been doing during July, which has been a very very busy month - I feel like I’ve been saying this every month.
