Getting a fix into Mastodon
Show, don't tell: how I vibe-coded my way to a Mastodon core fix after years of bug reports.
How to Tune a LAMP Stack on Debian for Maximum Performance
How to tune tour LAMP stack without extra tools.
Rescale your Hetzner VPS and save money
Rescale with Hetzner and save money. Get more resources for less.
From Minix to the Cloud: Tracing the Enduring Legacy of Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Andrew S. Tanenbaum Introduction In the early 90s, the debates over operating system design—most famously between Linus Torvalds and Andrew Tanenbaum—captured the attention of many in the tech communi...
New WordPress theme: Twenty Twenty-Five
This week I was playing around with my old theme -- Neve-- and made some tweaks. For posterity, it looked like this: Neve theme This site has low volume posts, so I was trying to get a list of posts a...
A good blog has ...
A search bar An RSS feed An 'About Me' link A comment option A way to get in touch A clearly indicated date by post A reverse chronological order of posts A way to quickly jump to a specific date A wa...
How to add the total of two solar inverters in Domoticz
How to add the values of two (or more) solar inverters together in Domoticz.
Manage your WordPress wp-content folder
How to get rid of all the thumbnails that are generated by WordPress by default and keep a grip on your wp-content folder.
The Legacy of Bram Moolenaar
This weekend we learned that Bram Moolenaar had passed away at the age of 62. And this news affected me more than I expected. Like so many: I did not know Bram personally. But I've been using a tool m...
Using the SonicWall Connect Tunnel with Firefox on a Chromebook
Yes, you read that correctly. Firefox on a Chromebook! Without tricks. Or at least, not many tricks. Why? When you want to use the SonicWall Connect Tunnel software (from the SMA 1000 Series) on your...
Correctly configuring incoming SPF in Exim on Debian
The Debian documentation is sparse on how to correctly configure incomingSPF checks in the Debian Exim package. It is sparse in the sense that it tells you what to install ( ) but it is not clear WHER...
Audacity Tips
This is a public note to myself for working with Audacity; which I don't do too often, and I want to make sure I don't forget it. I recently created a 5 hour music project: a DJ radio show. The finish...
Floccus is the bookmark manager you have been looking for
Floccus does exactly what you want because Floccus doesn't break your bookmark management flow. The flow being: adding, changing, removing, moving bookmarks in your browser, straight from the bookmark...
Simple jumphost ssh-agent config
You can find many tutorials online on how to use or correctly. This is a short and simple two line fix aimed at a specific use i.e. a single connection to a jumphost. Add this to your .bashrc So now w...
Compact WSL partition and reclaim storage space
Start PowerShell wsl --shutdown Find where your WSL vhdx file is located. Usually under: Start diskpart (from PowerShell or CMD): Run: and next:
I don't understand terminals, shells and SSH
Confession time: I don't fully understand how terminals, shells and SSH really work (and my guess is you don't either). And I don't mean the cryptography behind SSH. I mean how SSH and the terminal --...
ChatGPT and humans as prompt fodder
I woke up Sunday morning with an unnerving feeling. A feeling something had changed. A disturbance in the force if you will. I know that look Mainstream media seems blissfully unaware of what happened...
Fix for when your SSH keys are not working on your Chromebook
If you cannot connect to a remote server from your Chromebook with SSH keys and you get this error: Here is the tip: add an enter to your private key file! Yes really! I spent way too much time figuri...
Five things I'd like to see in Mastodon
I love Mastodon. I am a believer. Not that I think it will replace Twitter or anything like that. But it is definitely its own thing. True to the original ideas of the internet. There are however a fe...
How to get green links on your Mastodon profile with WordPress
The green links on your Mastodon profile indicate that you are the ownerof that link i.e. that website. You can achieve this by adding a little line of code to your website (see Link verification). Wh...
Jonathan Franzen on reading and literature
I've been on a bit of a Jonathan Franzen bender lately. I frequently write about him on my other site. The kickstart for all this was a book club meeting about Crossroads) for which I not only read th...
Welcome to the Fediverse
It was 2017 when I signed up for the Dutch instance of Mastodon. The newfangled thing. But it wasn't until last week that it clicked. It clicked for two reasons. Forget the Metaverse Mastodon is part...
Using Windows OpenSSH Agent with Windows Terminal and Cygwin
I am back to running Windows Terminal + Cygwin, after a stint with MobaXterm. I blogged about it before. Why: Windows Terminal is pretty good: it doesn't get in your way, and it's fast (very important...
You should blog more
Yes, you. The person reading this. You should have a place on the internet that is completely yours and where you are in complete control of what you post. How often, you ask? Let me reiterate what I...
WhatsApp should really fix these issues
WhatsApp is my most used app, but its development seems stagnant. Which is not always a bad thing for software, but WhatsApp could really improve some things, especially when those improvements seem t...
Reaching 100 stars on GitHub: what I learned from putting code online
When the pandemic started in early 2020, I needed something to get my mind off things. Frustrated with most database form generation solutions I created Cruddiy and put it on GitHub. Two years later C...
Windows Terminal + Cygwin
UPDATE July 2022: I switched to using [MobaXterm which does the job just fine. I don't like that it is not free/open but I do like that it comes with an integrated SSH agent, which makes life a lot ea...
Bypassing Hetzner mail port block (port 25/465)
I recently switched my VPS from Linode to Hetzner. I got more CPU, RAM and storage for less money. Pretty good right? However it wasn't after I migrated that I found out Hetzner blocks all outgoing po...
Ten 2022 Tool Tips
Here's a list of software tools I either started using this year or tools I think everyone should be using. Bitwarden The best password manager. Free if you like, or only $10 per year if you want to h...
Migrating a LAMP VPS
I recently switched my LAMP virtual server to a different VPS provider. The LAMP server that is serving you this site. So the migration worked! Here are the steps, for future reference. Mostly for mys...
Get Back part 2
I finished watching Get Back. Read my article about the first 30 minutes here. It's safe to say this is hands down one of the best documentaries ever. I could not look away. Truly amazing. In between...
The Beatles: Get Back
I am only 30 minutes in to the 8 hour long -- highly anticipated -- Peter Jackson documentary and I already have many thoughts. I need to get these out before further viewing, because I have a feeling...
Corbin: static responsive image and video gallery generator
Corbin is one PHP file that — when run from the command line — creates a clean, fast and responsive (aka mobile friendly) video and image gallery with navigation from a directory of images and videos. The output is one single index.html file.
Bloglife @ janvandenberg.blog
For my Dutch speaking readers: on my other blog piks.nl janvandenberg.blog I started blogging daily. Six days a week you will find a short thought or observation that explicitly aims to be above curre...
Auto insert date when starting Vim
I have a file where I keep notes & ideas. And I try to have as less friction as possible to add ideas to this file. To achieve this I made it so that when I am at my terminal I type one letter; The fi...
Connecting a Dell 4K monitor to HDMI
When I installed my new monitor -- the Dell S2721QS -- and attached it to my Dell laptop, something felt... off. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, the resolution was fine (3840 x 2160), screen was...
A European watches Major League Baseball
I see a shiny grassy green diamond, some guys in uniform. One guy on a patch of dirt in the middle throws a ball, and another guy tries to hit it with a stick. If he hits it he wins, if he doesn't: th...
2020 Music Discoveries
Remember 2020? Yeah, I know. Well here is the list you've been waiting for. Previous lists are here: 2019, 2018 part 1, 2018 part 2, 2017, 2016 and 2015 As usual: a you get couple of words and a YouTu...
Thoughts on Clubhouse
You can't Listen on demand Restart/replay a conversation Record a conversation or audio snippets Trace back when a conversation started See who is talking, you can only hear them Send (text) messages...
Merge two images in Windows from right-click context menu
1. Download and install ImageMagick. 2. Go to Windows Explorer and type sendtoin the address bar. This will open the following path: C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo The files here w...
Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach
The man with access to the nuclear launch codes has been deemed unfit for Twitter. And the country that doesn't believe universal healthcare is a human right, all of a sudden believes access to Twitte...
Podcast: Donald Knuth Lectures on Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About
I recently read 'Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About' by Donald Knuth from 2001. Recommended reading if you like reading about how a world-renowned computer scientist wrote a book about how...
Cruddiy: table relationship support via foreign keys
Read here what Cruddiy is and what it can do for you: here is the code. TLDR: Cruddiy is no-code Bootstrap 4 PHP form builder for MySQL tables. I started Cruddiy when the Covid-19 lockdowns happened t...
Working 101
Do you struggle to organise your work, because it seems everybody wants something from you? Of do you often wonder whether you're doing the right things? This post helps you to answer those questions....
Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
I suspect Moby-Dick -- the quintessential Great American Novel -- has the curious accolade of being one of the most famous books ever, while also being one of the least read books. Its reputationgreat...
New WordPress theme: Neve
Frequent visitors might notice a change to the site: I switched WordPress themes. I have been a happy user of the Independent Publisher theme since this site started, and I still use it on my other bl...
How I read 52 books in a year
Principles and habits I developed to read one book per week. With these you can also start reading more.
Bono on Bono - Michka Assayas
I have a soft spot for Bono. The megalomaniac lead singer of probably the world's most commercial band ("the only band with their own iPod"). The Irish humanitarian multi-millionaire. Yes, I get all t...
Who moved my cheese? - Spencer Johnson
People like stories, people rememberstories. So, tell stories! This is what I learned from Seth Godin. But Spencer Johnson clearly understands this concept too. Who moved my cheese? - Spencer Johnson...
Marx - Peter Singer
This was the third book in a twelve part series of introductions to famous thinkers/philosophers (previously I read Plato and Kierkegaard). You might expect these books to be small (check) and compreh...
Unorthodox - Netflix miniseries
I was impressed by the Netflix miniseries Unorthodox). Specifically with the talented actors, the believable authentic world-building and the spot-on casting (so good). With regards to all of these as...
Impatient Optimist: Bill Gates in His Own Words - Lisa Rogak
I have a lot of respect for Bill Gates and tend to follow what he does. So this book, just like the one on Steve Jobs, is a nice reminder of the man's personality and his thinking process. As it spans...
iSteve - George Beahm en Wim Zefat
This is a book just with quotes from late Apple founder Steve Jobs. I already knew most of them, having read more than one book about Steve Jobs. Nonetheless, seeing his most salient quotes in one pla...
I, Robot - Isaac Asimov
If one writer is responsible for how we think about robots it is, of course, Isaac Asimov. The terrifically prolific writer and groundbreaking author of the science-fiction genre, produced numerous wo...
Jitsi finetuning and customization
Jitsi offers a great user experience because it doesn't require an account, you just go to a Chrome URL and you're pretty much good to go. You get a full blown video chat environment: complete with gr...
Volume 1: From Savoy Stompers to Clock Rockers - Andrew Hickey
One of my favorite podcasts is "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs". I've written about it before, it's an absolutely terrific podcast. But this post is not about the podcast but about the book! Aft...
Ten pieces of software that removed roadblocks
Successful software is not defined by the number of lines of code or number of clever algorithms. More often than not, successful software is defined by how many roadblocks it removes for the user. So...
String Theory - David Foster Wallace
If you read this blog, you know DFW is one of my favorite writers. I even named my book app, in part, after him. So I could be short about String Theory -- it's a absolute pure delight to read -- but,...
The Trial - Franz Kafka
Max Brod is probably the worlds' greatest publicist. He famously refused his writer friends' dying wish to destroy all his work after his passing. This friend was of course, Franz Kafka. And against K...
Cruddiy: a no-code Bootstrap CRUD generator
November 2020: Cruddiy now supports creating and deleting table relations (based on foreign keys) for cascading deletes/updates and and prepopulating select lists. Read more here. So you have a MySQL...
Use find (1) as a quick and dirty duplicate file finder
Run the following two commands in bash to get a listing of all duplicate files (from a directory or location). This can help you clean out duplicate files that sometimes accumulate over time. The firs...
Dylan Thomas - Sidney Michaels
This book is a play from 1965, based on several accounts of the infamous travels Welsh poet Dylan Thomas made in the early 1950s to the US. If you know anything about Dylan Thomas you probably know he...
My Music Discoveries of 2019
Here are my favorite music discoveries of 2019. Earlier editions are here: 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 (part 1) and 2018 (part 2). You know the drill. A few sentences and a YouTube video. No less than 1...
Corona Links
This is a collection of COVID-19 related information links. Stats Worldwide map, with counts https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/685d0ace521648f8a5beeeee1b9125cd Worldwide stats with specific rec...
Remote - Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1237773562322259970 I saw this tweet yesterday, and If you know me, you know I will not pass on an opportunity for a free book! But more seriously, I have known J...
The Quotable Walt Disney - Disney Book Group
I picked up this book on our honeymoon to Disney World. But I never read it, because; how do you read a book full of quotes? The answer is slowly! Just grab it every now and then. And read a few pages...
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! - Ralph Leighton and Richard Feynman
The next day I rolled up my picture, put it in the back of my station wagon, and my wife Gweneth wished me good luck as I set out to visit the brothels of Pasadena to sell my drawing. Richard Feynman...
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Today is February 21st, David Foster Wallace's birthday. So it's rather fitting that today I finished reading his magnum opus: Infinite Jest. The notoriously long and difficult book from 1996 with vis...
Gung Ho! Turn On the People in Any Organization - Ken Blanchard & Sheldon Bowles
Gung Ho! is a management book written by well-know author Ken Blanchard. It was somehow never on my radar, so because of the strange title and my unfamiliarity I wasn't expecting too much, and I only...
The perfect notebook
I keep a daily journal. And journaling daily make pocket planners usable as journal notebooks. I tend to be particular about certain things. So when searching for a new notebook -- one that I will car...
A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs
This year I've listened to 519 podcasts and 36 of those were episodes of A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. But it's safe to say that A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is my fa...
Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie
It's clever. It's smart. It's eloquent. It's articulate. It's masterfully written. It's the archetype of the whodunit. It's the absolute queen of adverbs. It's quintessential Agatha Christie. I enjoye...
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F* - Mark Manson
When this book came out it was seemingly everywhere. Especially in airport bookshops (I don't know if that's a good thing or not though). Or maybe I am imagining things and the book just sticks out, m...
Humanity's Last New Year's Eve – Niccolò Ammaniti
In 1996 -- when he was just starting out -- Ammaniti published a collection of short stories titled Fango. This particular story (which was also made into a movie) is one of the stories from Fango pub...
Humankind: A Hopeful History (De Meeste Mensen Deugen) - Rutger Bregman
I don't know what the English title translation for Rutger Bregman's latest book will be. But I do know two things. One: there will be one. And two: it will be a bestseller. I do know now, and yes it...
Me and You - Niccolò Ammaniti
It's probably fair to say Niccolò Ammaniti is one of my favorite writers at the moment. This being his third book I read since last year. Me and You - Niccolò Ammaniti (2010) - 126 pages He has a gut...
The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When The Black Swan came out in 2007 it caused quite a stir. And understandably so. Taleb has a distinctive and fresh view of looking at the world through the lens of an emperic skeptic. The Black Swa...
Churchill - Sebastian Haffner
Writing a Churchill biography is not an easy assignment, even though it would be difficult to butcher the job. Churchill lead an unprecedented rich and varied life and just writing down the bare facts...
Capitalism without brakes - Maarten van Rossem
In his highly distinctive 'tone of voice', Maarten van Rossem provides the most succinct available lecture on the root causes which lead to the 2008 financial crisis. Capitalism without brakes (Kapita...
Dream Dare Do - Ben Tiggelaar
Dare Dream Do (Dromen Durven Doen)is one of the all-time bestselling Dutch self-management books. Tiggelaar is a popular figure and he has a charming, personal and pragmatic writing style. Dear dream...
The Unicorn Project - Gene Kim
When I read The Phoenix Project last year, I was smitten. I loved the combination of using fiction to describe how to apply -- management and DevOps -- theory to true to life situations. So when the p...
Foster: how to build your own bookshelf management web application
foster /ˈfɒstə/ verb 1. Encourage the development of (something, especially something desirable). "the teacher's task is to foster learning" TLDR: I made a personal bookshelf management web applicatio...
Iedere dag vrij - Bob Crébas
I remember exactly where I was when, in 2004, I heard that Dutch ad site marktplaats.nl was sold for a staggering 224,5 million euros to eBay. A polder Cinderella story. This success was, however, no...
A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway, the writers' writer, is famously known for having spent his early years in Paris. Freshly married, this struggling and then unknown writer was honing his craft and subsequently defining wha...
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen Covey
When I started college in 1998 this was literally one of the first books I had to buy. It was part of a -- cheaply thrown together -- five-pack of paperback management book 'classics'. And my particul...
Een Mooie Jonge Vrouw - Tommy Wieringa
I have written about Tommy Wieringa before. And this little book is once again a clear example of the mans' writing ability. Effortlessly and thoughtfully he creates a smallstory -- a tragic love stor...
PHP: how did it become so popular?
PHP empowers a giganticpart of the internet. So it is, by definition, a very popular(i.e. prevalent) language. But it also very popular (i.e. well-liked) to dislike PHP as a -- serious -- language. Th...
Glove Pond - Roger Thorpe
Roger Thorpe is just as good a writer as Douglas Coupland is. As a matter of fact, he is also as real as a Douglas Coupland character. Glove Pond is his first novel. Glove Pond - Roger Thorpe (2007) -...
Gomorrah - Roberto Saviano
When Gomorrah came out in 2007, apart from spawning a popular TV series), it shook the world. The workings of Italy's lesser known 'other mafia' -- the Camorra -- are laid bare and Saviano subsequentl...
Sex, Blogs and Rock-'n-Roll - Ernst Jan Pfauth
The rather sensationalist title would normally be a reason to not want to read this book. But since this book came out in 2010, the author E.J. Pfauth has become known for more than just this book. He...
Popular post postmortem
Yesterday I wrote a story about how Git is eating the world. And in less than 24 hours more than 10.000 unique IP addresses visited this article! This is not the normal kind of traffic for this site. So that calls for its own article.
Git is eating the world
Software is eating the world and Git is the fork with which it is being eaten.
Giacomo Joyce - James Joyce
A couple of years ago I stranded about half-way into Ulysses. It did not click. One of the greatest novels ever written, but I had little use for it. So I put it aside for another time. Recently I cam...
The Death of Murat Idrissi - Tommy Wieringa
Tommy Wieringa is of course famous for his novel Joe Speedboot. A tremendous novel, where Wieringa demonstrates heaps of writers' finesse. This book -- the Death of Murat Idrissi -- is no different. E...
Create a Chrome bookmark html file to import list of URLs
I recently switched RSS providers and I could only extract my saved posts as a list of URLs. So I thought I'd add these to a bookmark folder in Chrome. However, Chrome bookmark import only accepts a s...
Generation X - Douglas Coupland
I am a Douglas Coupland fan. And I think his debut Generation X still holds up as one of his best novels. I probably read it for the first time over ten years ago. And I have since then read several o...
The Trumpet of Conscience - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. was only 39 years (and 2 months and 19 days) old when he was murdered. Thirty-nine.I never realised this -- until I am 39 myself now. When he died he had already received a Nobe...
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace could write. And not just write, he could really write extraordinarily well. In related news: water is wet. Wallace's writing struck me as an epiphany, a beacon of light, a clear...