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 edited just two files to achieve this. .bashrc An alias in .bashrc to type just one letter and start the file in Vim in insert mode: .vimrc I added… Read More »Auto insert date when starting Vim
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 fine — brightness, contrast etc. — but the overall experience was more sluggish. Especially when moving my mouse. Ah of course, this new resolution calls for different mouse speed settings! But after… Read More »Connecting a Dell 4K monitor to HDMI
Download and install ImageMagick. Go to Windows Explorer and type sendto in the address bar. This will open the following path: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo The files here will be available as actions from the Windows “Send to” right-click context menu. Create a new (text) file in this directory and add the following line: magick.exe %1 %2 -resize “x%%[fx:max(u.h,v.h)]” +append -set filename: “COMBINED-%%k” “%%[filename:].jpg” This is essentially what will be executed when you… Read More »Merge two images in Windows from right-click context menu
My book tracking app alerted me that I read 52 books over the last twelve months. So, *franticly crunching numbers* yes, indeed, that averages to one book per week! I follow a couple of blogs of people that read way more than I do. Like these guys, respectively read 116, 105, 74 and 58 books in 2019. I don’t know how they managed to do so, but 52 is definitely… Read More »How I read 52 books in a year
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 aspects this is a very good show. Huge parts of the show are in Yiddish which is a unique experience (especially when you speak a little bit of German). It felt genuine and intimate. I like that the story works with… Read More »Unorthodox – Netflix miniseries
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 gridview, screensharing and chat options. No add ons or third party installations needed. I greatly prefer this instead of Zoom, Google Hangouts or Microsoft Teams or what have you. Jitsi is also a great… Read More »Jitsi finetuning and customization
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 first command uses find to print all files (and specific attributes) from a specific location to a file, prefixing the size of the file in the name. This way all files with the same filename and… Read More »Use find (1) as a quick and dirty duplicate file finder
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 recovery stats https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ Worldwide charts and figures split out per country https://covid19info.live/ Different dashboards updated hourly http://covid19dashboards.com/ Direct link to the Dutch RIVM URL with national stats https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/actuele-informatie-over-coronavirus Background A collaborative guide to COVID-19 care https://covid-at-home.info/ Corona Science Journal (very thorough but broad information): https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/corona-science/ How to explain to children why… Read More »Corona Links
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 carry around for a year — I decided the following things are important. Must haves A5 format. Everything else is too big or too small. Hardcover. No flappy stuff. Lined paper Not too wide or… Read More »The perfect notebook
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 application and named it Foster and you can find it here. Here’s what I did — with gifs–, so you might build your own. Name I named it Foster. Because of *this* blog post — it accompanies the application, so it’s self-referential. And also, because… Read More »Foster: how to build your own bookshelf management web application
If you have set up your database tables correctly you might be using double-precision floating numbers to store currency values. This works great because dollars use dots to represent decimals. The problem starts when it’s not actually dollars you are storing but euros, and maybe you need to copy query output to Excel or LibreOffice Calc to work with these Euro values. Both of these spreadsheet programs don’t know how… Read More »Use PostgreSQL REPLACE() to replace dots with commas (dollar to euro)
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 ‘broken’, but I still managed to salvage my data — which is more important than the card. Here’s how. Broken file system: fsck or dd? What didn’t work for me, but you might want… Read More »Save data from your broken Raspberry Pi SD card with GNU ddrescue