Blogs

This year we opted to spend the summer in France. Me doing nothing and N. doing the things she procrastinated over combined with the same almost nothingness. One thing that we both noticed this summer was our internet, or the intermittent lack thereof. Now I’m a man who likes proof above suspicion, and we both suspected Orange, our internet provider in France. Their tests showed we should have a 2 Gigabit connection, abundant I would say. Tests I ran showed completely different results, like 6 Megabit. And that is not enough nowadays. While running the speedtest (once each hour) I also recorded the speed of the WiFi connection at that moment. Patterns emerged, I could no longer blame Orange, it was our WiFi that somehow had downgraded itself, or the problems that were always there became more apparent. ...

Long before Europe switched to the Euro as their currency we had a multitude of currencies and as a consequence even more exchange rates. At that time I worked as a computer programmer, mainly concerned with travel agencies. For one customer we needed to build an interface with their financial system. The travel system we built was used for both booking and keeping (virtual) stock, like pre-ordered hotel rooms and plane seats. Every invoice, either selling or buying needed to be forwarded to the financial system with each detail replicated. ...

Back in January a couple of people I follow on mastodon were chattering about Navidrome and I read what it could do. It seemed interesting, a music server that can play your downloaded music and stream it to any android or iphone, with the help of a simple http server. Back then I couldn’t find the energy and time to go on that journey, I was running Squeezebox / Lyrion for over 2 decades and am satisfied with what it produces. But remote access is not trivial with this software. Navidrome on the other hand is build with exactly that in mind, stream music to any hardware capable of playing streamed music. And that includes any phone running Android or iOS , and there are many clients (apps) available. ...

It started with a headline in the Guardian, some old memory of Minitel made me click. I stopped reading after I read about Félicette. A cat that went into space and came back alive. And apparently it was the first animal to survive a space flight. There is a link in the article to a French video from 1963. It shows the testing and selecting the right cat, there were a couple in the laboratory and all had electrodes in on their brains attached. Of course this was not the first animal in space. People of my age might remember Leika the dog who orbited the earth and was sometimes mentioned alongside Yuri Gagarin. But all the animals that went into space before this cat did not return alive! After seeing the video I learned the only in 2019 there was a statue for this cat erected at the International Space University in Illkirch-Graffenstaden. There is also a huge fan whom has written a book about her.

A couple of months ago I started using Obsidian on my work laptop, as a note taking application, a permanent clipboard, or to quickly write a prepared ‘daily’ for the stand up when I don’t want to leave out anything important that happened the day before. Soon enough I installed it on my private laptop as well and started typing away. The third vault I created would became my xbrl-quickguide. Each chapter was a note, and soon enough I had a slew of tabs open, re-ordering them as a table of contents and in the meanwhile writing. Sometimes linear, sometimes more chapters at once. But when the end of the writing the first version came into sight I thought, “this all fine, but this is not presentable as a ‘guide’”. I need some tool to convert this markdown files into a pdf or an e-book. ...

We had planned the first week of January back in December. Stay in France till Wednesday the 7th, drive home to Rotterdam and go to the office. That was until it all fell down. First there was this thing called the weather. The winter had finally arrived for the first time in 5 years and it made traveling home on Wednesday at least ‘adventurous’. We did not take the gamble and drove home one day early, Tuesday night. That proved a wise decision, we had some hinder from mist and floating snow (really it didn’t fall down), but as soon as we hit the tarmac of the highway everything was almost normal. Only the absence of say 50% of the usual traffic. After a 3 and a half hour drive we were home, only 10 minutes slower than usual. Not bad for a winters night. That of course would not have been possible were it not for the gritters and people manning those machines to keep the roads usable. They did a splendid job from France through Belgium and The Netherlands. ...

I decided I should have a website again where I can publish my ramblings, discoveries or things I like to share. I also decided that I would not spin up some blog engine and start typing. No Wordpress or any other CMS. Just some Markdown files and a site generator. Like most I ended up with Hugo, which I knew from name, but never worked with. My Markdown editor was decided way before that, I wrote my XBRL Quickguide already in Obsidian and was quite fond of it. ...

In more than one way I’m fond of traditions. So to complete this attempt to reinvigorate this website, there has to be a section called ‘blog’.

A couple of years ago I decided to not move my weblog to the new server. I had been dragging it around from 2001, it had served it’s purpose. The wayback machine has a couple of snapshots what began on a dot-com domain. We individuals could not buy a dot-nl name in those days. I ended it and never looked back. ...