I finished this book in one sitting. Partly because Zonneveld has a pleasant writing style. But also because the rather recent story of a hugely talented and (very) young cyclist who early on in his c...
Slaughterhouse Five is a well-known classic. And I had been wanting to read it for quite some time now, and now that I finally did, I must say it was absolutely not what I expected. In a good way. Sla...
Matthias M.R. Declercq pulled of two remarkable things. Not only did he manage to find this extraordinary story about friendship, ambition and sacrifice, he was also able to write it down in exception...
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker is one of the most profound books I have ever read. It has directly impacted my attitude towards sleep and subsequently altered my behaviour. Books that change your beha...
Jaap Bakker, a local storyteller from a small rural town in the Netherlands (Urk), has written down anecdotes and jokes from the last hundred years or so. Either things he experienced first hand or th...
If you have set up your database tables correctly you might be using double-precision floating numbersto store currency values. This works great because dollars use dots to represent decimals. The pro...
Pick up any good management book and chances are that Peter Drucker will be mentioned. He is the godfather of management theory. I encountered Drucker many times before in other books and quotes, but...
For some reason I had never read the David Allen classicGetting Things Done. But I found out that 18 years after its release it's still a good introduction to time and action management. Getting Thing...
Today marks my ten year anniversary on Twitter! There are few other web services I have been using for ten years. Sure, I have been e-mailing and blogging for longer, but those are activities --like b...
Blauwe Bananen (Blue Bananas) is a management book that was number one for 38 days on managementboek.nl. It is aimed at people who generally don't read management books. So it sometimes tries to be un...
Writing short introductions to classic philosophers are hard. This book tries, but falls a bit short as a true introduction. Plato - R.M. Hare (1983) - 117 pages Plato, the first documented, Western p...
This classic management book started off with two confusing and underwhelming chapters, but ended up being one of the best three management books I have ever read. And I would highly recommend it to a...
This is part 2 of my best music discoveries of 2018. Earlier editions are here: 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 (part 1). Hands down my favorite tracks of 2018 are still One. Sentence Supervisor with Yelena...
Everything you read and hear about Bad Blood by John Carreyrou is true. It is an incredible -- TRUE -- story, told exceptionally well, about the lethal cocktail of greed, ambition and narcissism. Bad...
Kierkegaard - Patrick Gardiner (1988) - 154 pages In general, philosophy has a reputation of being hard to understand, and Kierkegaard certainly does nothing to lessen this reputation. He was largely...
On my honeymoon in 2009 I asked the store clerk at the Hemingway house on Key West: "what's a good book to start with?". She recommended The Sun also Rises. The Sun also Rises - Ernest Hemingway (1926...
I picked up this book in the bargain bin of a HMV in Manchester in 2006, when I was on a -- sort of -- pilgrimage. But I left it on my bookshelf for 12 years, thinking I probably knew most of it alrea...
I literally received this book from the hands of Jimmy Carter himself at a book signing in New York. I never met a president before — even if only for a few seconds — so I was keen to read his book! M...
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf (1927) - 254 pages This was an exhausting book to read. Because it reads like a prolonged poem with a stream of thoughts about everything and anything and with very...
Paper always beats rock and scissors. Because one of the few inventions greater than writing itself, is writing on paper. Paper writings are absolute, self-contained and transferableunits of knowledge...
Advent of Code is a yearly programming contest created by Eric Wastl and it is currently being held at adventofcode.com. That means that this site spawns two daily programming challenges -- until Chri...
It's been over a week since I 'finished' the most anticipated game of 2018 (or maybe even of the last five years); Red Dead Redemption 2. I say finished in quotes, because I clocked in around 50 hours...
For a movie where you can't expect surprises about the main story line — because it's in every history book — this movie certainly did not disappoint! In fact, First Man is a phenomenal movie. The ope...
This week my Pi stopped working. After hooking up a monitor I saw kernel errors related to VFS. So the file system was obviously broken. Oops. The end conclusion is that the SD card is physically 'bro...
Why you should read the Phoenix Project: a Novel About IT, DevOps and Helping Your Business Win.
Long time readers will know I love sharing my music discoveries. You can read the 2015, 2016, 2017 editions here. At the half-point of 2018 I feel it is time again because of some exceptionally exciti...
Most people know sort and uniq(or even diff) and usually use a mix of these tools when comparing two files. However sometimes, there is a shorter solution than piping different commands together: comm...
The following lines are in my .vimrc file and make working with Vim all the better! I keep it pretty basic, so I don't use the very popular fugitive.vim or NERDTree plugin. Put these lines in /.vimrc...
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder is one of those books that always seems to pop up when 'computer-people' share book recommendations. Exhibit A, exhibit B, exhibit C and so on -- you get the...
I did a music post for 2015 and 2016, so here is 2017! Whether it's blogs, podcasts, movies or the YouTube algorithm, if you keep your ears open there's always new music to discover. So here we go in...
Here's a chronological list of some of the physical things/tools/gadgets I bought in 2017. Physical as in, I'm leaving out experiences, books and cryptocoins. Here we go. The Sony MDR-ZX110 headphones...
Setup a Django MySQL CRUD program in 10 minutes with virtualenv, pip and Python.
When the first trailer for Super Mario Odyssey came out it underscored the magic all Mario games seem to share. Because my four and five year old, who have no prior sentimental knowledge of Mario, mad...
Read why 11 O'Clock Tick Tock is the best song from the U2 Red Rocks set and how it was a forebode for things to come. As it hints to what lies ahead.
This book by Ashlee Vance sat on my wish-list since it came out two years ago. So, long overdue, last week I finally got to it and boy, what a 'fantastic' read it is. There is lot to say about the man...
When the Joshua Tree came out in 1987 it catapulted U2 from a great rock band to the greatest rock n roll band in the world. Critically and commercially there was no way around them anymore. With four...
Hacker News is pretty much my goto site and sometimes I submit links or take part in the discussion. However when I recently tried to get a list of the links I submitted ordered by Hacker News score,...
This book had been sitting on my to-read list for way too long! But I finally found a second hand copy, so here we go! You could say this is the official autobiography of Linus Torvalds, the creator o...
You are probably aware that there are a lot of ways to visualize or model business and management related things. There are few fields of expertise with so many models and theories (sure, math and phy...
We're at a point now that we can already reflect on the influence and legacy of NYC band the Strokes. A new book"Meet Me in the Bathroom" has been labeled as "the First Great History of New York’s 21s...
[caption id="attachment1639" align="alignleft" width="300"] Old watch[/caption] Three years ago I got a Casio WV-200E-1AVEF. It's a good watch. I wear it everyday. What I specifically like about it is...
I keep track of the podcasts I listen to in a Google spreadsheet. This week I entered the 500th one. I started to keep track in november 2015, after a few months of listening. And I probably even forg...
This blog is powered by WordPress. That means that the content you read was edited in the WordPress administrative interface and that same content is now presented to you by the WordPress engine! Word...
Welcome to j11g.com, my personal blog about anything and everything that interests me. So mostly technology, music, books and podcasts. To get started you'll find a collection of posts from the piks.n...
Last year I wrote about Snapchat and their unique approach to things. I'd like to think that my predictions at the end of that blog came true 😎. Why? Because we see Instagram betting big on streaming...
The 2016/2017 NBA season has been a lot of fun so far. Just like the previous season. All kinds of records are being broken. It seems the game is changing. Or maybe it's because we just keep track of...
RSS. It's kind of a weird acronym and people can't even seem to agree on the true meaning behind those three letters. It doesn't sound too sexy, but it does sort of have a recognisable logo. If you ha...
Last years' post was pretty popular, so let's continue this. You know the rules, so let's go! I've always had a soft spot for Conor Oberst's (aka Bright Eyes) fragility. After a rough period he droppe...
You may notice something different on your favourite blog. Left of the URL in the address bar there is a little green lock! This means piks.nl is now served to you via SSL/TLS. You know, https:// inst...
Sure, I am not the biggest Star Wars fan. Not by a long shot. But I do have a mild admiration for the first original trilogy, which made quite an impression on my younger self (he isLukes' father! Go...
Best-of lists signify another year is coming to a close. People feel a need to sort and order things to make room for what is to come. Or something like that. So here is an assorted list of best new t...
Last week Google was kind enough to provide me a Chromebook. I had been eyeing one for some time, but I had no reason why I would need one. I have a laptop, smartphone and a tablet. So what would a Ch...
Last week I had the chance to visit China, specifically Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Shanghai. These are my observations of China, completely biased and uninformed, for personal future reference. https://t...
Snapchat is everywhere these days. And with everywhere,I mean a lot of people are talking about it like it's some sort of elusive enigma only the young kids are able to tune in to. The digital equival...
Today's big news is that Microsoft has made bash available on Windows 10. No container, no virtual machine, no recompiled sources: Here, we're talking about bit-for-bit, checksum-for-checksum Ubuntu E...
In 2004 I picked up this book about Donald J. Trump. Published in 1987, it is a story about the, then just, 40 year old Trump's insane real estate successes. And I was genuinely interested. From what...
I've always loved timelines. Visually seeing where things are in time resonates pretty strongly with me. This love goes back to my earliest memories of the dentists' office where a huge year-round cal...
Most end-of-year lists are compiled of songs from that current year. That's fine and all, but great music is timeless and you might discover things later, so my list will be a bit different. These are...
So you read the previous post and now you're wondering what podcasts to listen to. Well you're in luck, because this post will tell you. What's to like? But first, why listen to podcasts anyway? Sure...
ren·ais·sance (rĕn′ĭ-säns′, -zäns′, rĭ-nā′səns) 1. A rebirth or revival. 2. A situation or period of time when there is a new interest in something that has not been popular in a long time. Podcasts h...
(This is a crosspost from my other blog, that actually got hacked. This is for you, a Google search user, struggling with a hacked website). Last week I noticed some strange behaviour on my site. When...
This weekend I read On Writing - A memoir of the Craft by Stephen King - something I should have done 10 years ago. This book is not a work of fiction as you might expect from mr. King but rather it i...
On my last vacation I finally got around to reading Masters of Doom by David Kushner. This book from 2003 keeps popping up every now and again and people always rave about it. I put it on my Amazon wi...
We recently returned from a trip to Hurghada, Egypt. Hurghada is located by the Red Sea with amazing underwater life and verysunny and hot 'above-water' life. We had a wonderful time! We didn't visit...
The story of Minecraft sounds like a great movie script. Notch as the protagonist genius programmer, who, from an underdog (indie) position, single handedly changed the game industry by just doing wha...
I still love Twitter. I've been using it since 2009 and it holds a special place. For reasons that I only recently learned to put in to place. Twitter is a protocol. It's a (unique) way of communicati...
This month marks one year of me owning a Playstation 3. What started out as a quest for an 'easy' Netflix device, ended in getting a PS3. Maybe it seems I am a bit late to the game,because the PS4 is,...
This week, part of the internet broke. Again. Some important people even called it an 11 on a scale from 1 to 10. And I don't disagree. After the recent Apple goto fail SSL bug and NSA RSA debacle thi...
I always enjoy reading usesthis.com. Especially from "software people". And I am always a bit surprised when I read what hardware some people use >8 hours a day. Some people really use some old stuff!...