known as @hacdias
✏️ These are my blog posts. Visit the archive for an yearly overview.
October just passed by. It’s now full-on autumn and I just turned one year older. It was, overall, a great month. Friends have visited, both from abroad and local. Met with some people, steam train rides. Let’s dive into it!
In May 2016, I decided to start taking a daily selfie for the next following years. A daily selfie of my life, a lifie. At the time, I did not really think about for how long I would want to do this. Sometimes I thought about stopping it, sometimes I thought about making a video. However, that time never came, until now.
I have just compiled around 7 years worth of pictures, taken daily. Yes, there are days missing, there are even 1 or 2 months missing at some point. Some pictures also do not perfectly match the frame. Nevertheless, it is quite crazy to see how I have changed over the past 6 years.
Below, you can see the video. This video started in my teenage years and ends as a young adult. Among everything else, you will be able to see 3 different pairs of glasses, 5 different places where I lived, many haircuts, as well as the time where I still wore braces.
It is quite crazy. Am I going to keep taking daily pictures? I don’t know. It doesn’t give me a lot of work, takes a few seconds every day. Chances are that I will. But I still have yet to decide.
Learning a new language is though. It is certainly easier for some than for others and there are countless of variables that will change your experience. For the past three years, I have been learning Dutch, which has been quite of a rollercoaster.
My first full year mark working full time just passed by, and so did my first year working full time remotely. Since this is my first actual job, I can’t really compare it with working in-person. Nevertheless, I want to share my experience, as well as some of the things I think might be the pros and the cons.
Back in March, I joined a gym for the first time. My goal was to be able to overcome some issues I was having, as well as start consistently going to the gym. So I choose to work with a personal trainer to “force” me to go every week, and think of what exercises I have to do. That has worked out well, and I’m quite happy.
I have recently acquired a new - and my first - electric bike from Gazelle, a “staple” Dutch brand, and it is powered by a Bosch motor. Bosch has made this app, eBike Flow, which allows you to connect to the bike and use it to track your complete bike ride. In this article, I am going to go over some of the issues I have had and how I have been trying to solve them.
September passed by quite quickly and with that two thirds of 2023 are now finished. As we now enter the final 🏁 quarter of this year, let’s recap what has happened on my life over the past month. As usual, I feel like a lot has happened, especially when looking at it in retrospective.
August is almost gone, and with it the smells of summer. Day after day, the vibes I get from the weather are more autumny 🍁. Temperatures are finally going slightly down and it’s starting to feel more cozy. It’s been a long, yet satisfying month!
Since June, I have had a “about well-knowns” note in my drafts to write an article about. Unfortunately, I haven’t been writing much the last month or two. However, two days ago, Tim wrote about his own experience with well-known links. That prompted me to finish this article!
This is an unusual post: today I did not finish a book, but I decided to consciously stop reading it. And yet, I give it a 3 stars out of 5, which, for me, doesn’t mean it’s bad. It means it is good, but it is still lacking something for me.
July is now coming to an end, and so is summer in The Netherlands per the looks of it. It has been raining for two or three weeks already, and the prediction is that it’ll continue over during this week. This, of course, after a few days of what I would consider unusually high temperatures in The Netherlands. Let’s recap this month.
Some time ago, I wrote an article where I essentially complained and layed out the issues I have had with the Dutch digital identification (DigiD) system as a foreigner. In the meanwhile, there have been a few minor updates, and some other things that changed in my understanding. Hence, this new article.
June was a reasonably packed month: some times more eventful than others, but that’s how it always is. Let’s make a small recap of what has happened lately.
The author of this article had published two videos on Twitter where he showed an old Windows 3.1 and a new Windows 11 machines opening the same apps (command line, explorer, notepad). In this videos, Windows 3.1 was the fastest, which leads us to think: has any progress been made?
In this article, the author goes in more detail about what happened and why it happens. I do agree with the conclusion that the lack of focus and prioritisation on performance is likely the main reason why our OSes and applications have a lot of latency nowadays.
The author goes over the file format they use for tracking their own habits, or anything else in their life that they want. This can potentially be a good thing to do, and with a parser, some analysis can potentially be made out of the logging.
