Like so many: I did not know Bram personally. But I’ve been using a tool made by Bram for more than half my life — at least weekly, sometimes daily.

That tool is a text editor. The best one there is: Vim.

Vim

For those wondering: a text editor, what’s so special about that?

Vim is not like any other piece of software. Vim is a special piece of software. The most apt description I could find is this one:

Vim is a masterpiece, the gleaming precise machining tool from which so much of modernity was crafted.

This description is not a hyperbole.

Vim is the tool that was there when software took over the world. When modernity was created — i.e. everything we owe to computers — Vim was there.

An essential tool to all of it.

Like a power-drill, hammer or screwdriver, Vim is also a tool. A means, not an end. And a specific tool you must learn to use.

And undoubtedly, various alternatives exist, yet Vim sets itself apart as a true precision instrument that, in the hands of adept users, has the power to craft exquisite and practical creations while eliciting immense pleasure and fulfillment in the process. Much like a skilled carpenter or watchmaker equipped with an array of specialized tools, Vim caters to those who engage earnestly with computers. Its seamless functionality and versatility provide a deeply gratifying experience, granting users the ability to shape their digital work with finesse and artistry.

Another way to describe Vim is that Vim is a programmable editor. It’s the editor that you give commands — i.e. that you program — as you program.

When you learn Vim, when you use Vim, when you create with Vim; it becomes an extension of you. It’s a way of working, but more importantly: a way of thinking. Being sufficient in Vim is being able to almost work at the speed of thought. In a way, Vim is the closest thing to a neuralink we have.

But this post is not about Vim (I highly recommend this video if you want to learn more), this post is about Bram.

Bram

Bram worked on Vim almost daily for over 30 years. Constantly tightening and improving it. An almost unprecedented achievement. A true labor of love.

And you notice this when you use Vim. Everything works smoothly, it is fast and rock-solid. I can’t remember a single time in over 20 years when Vim froze or crashed.

Vim, like many successful innovations, owes its origins to the contributions of those who came before. It stands on the shoulders of giants. It began as an imitation, derived from a port of a clone based on an idea by Bill Joy. However, Bram Moolenaar emerges as the true architect of Vim’s triumph and the evolution of vi-like editors. Bram is the giant on which they stand.

Through Bram’s skillful craftsmanship, Vim has become an unparalleled piece of software that brings immense joy and satisfaction to its users. I vividly recall a moment 22 years ago when I had to ask someone how to close the editor, and the memory of that initial blush of shame has not faded entirely. And, even today, I find myself continuously discovering new features and capabilities in Vim, a testament to its rich and ever-expanding potential.

Bram gave the world something very rich and powerful.

And, Bram never asked for a penny for this. What Bram asked (at most) was to donate something, anything, to his foundation: ICCF Holland. In previous Vim versions, you would sometimes also see this friendly request when you started Vim.

Vim’s code is open and free in the traditional sense, and Vim can be considered charity-ware, with its own license (which is compatible with GPL and more).

And what all these little facts tell you is maybe all you need to know about Bram.

And everything I’ve read over the past few days — here, here, here, here and here  (and many more places) — about Bram confirms this image.

The image of a hyperintelligent, dedicated, and selfless human-being.

Someone who has made a major impact on the world of computer science.

A Mensch.

Someone who liked to share.

(When I think of Bram I always think of his personal site where he shared his photos.)

Sad

Perhaps all these things add up to why it hit me when I read the news that Bram had passed away. In the message, his family made it clear that Bram was ill (‘a medical condition that progressed quickly over the last few weeks‘). This was unknown to most people and made the news all the more surprising.

And it made me even sadder when someone pointed out Bram’s recent GitHub activity.

The activity slowly fades away. It’s like a bright light went out and no one noticed.

Bram’s legacy

Vim is so intertwined with everything I do that I never doubted for a second that I can continue to use Vim. But when you see the GitHub activity, you can’t escape the thought that Vim was Bram and Bram was Vim. And Bram was of course the Vim BDFL for a reason.

When someone like Ian Murdock passed away, there were clear structures in place that never put Debian in jeopardy. And when Linus Torvalds dies, I expect it to be the same.

But is that also the case with Vim – Bram’s life work? I read on the mailing list that a number of longtime contributors will continue Vim. Of course. But what strikes me is that even those people — who were so close to the project — did not know about Bram’s medical condition. That must have been Bram’s deliberate choice and let’s respect that. But it does raise questions about the future of Vim.

Time will tell what happens next. But one thing is certain. Vim is not going away. And Bram’s legacy is not a GitHub activity chart. Bram and Vim’s spirit are everywhere. Whether it is in new emerging editors or in the letters j and k that you show up in all kinds of unexpected places. Vim, the way of working, the way of thinking — the programmable editor — is an extremely powerful and valuable idea. One that’s been perfected by Bram and captured in the form of an almost perfect piece of software honed over 30 years. And even if Vim were to disappear, which I don’t expect, that idea is certainly not going to disappear. And that is Bram’s legacy.

If you want to: please contribute and donate what you can in memory of Bram Moolenaar.

The post The Legacy of Bram Moolenaar appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

Or at least, not many tricks.

Why?

When you want to use the SonicWall Connect Tunnel software (from the SMA 1000 Series) on your Chromebook the suggested SonicWall Mobile Connect app does not work properly. I don’t know why, but there is a solution.

The solution

In one sentence: install the (Java based) SonicWall VPN Connect Tunnel software and install Firefox in the Linux VM on your Chromebook.

How?

Here we go.

Enable Linux virtual machine on your Chromebook: i.e. set up developer mode.

This used to be a whole thing, now it is very easy.

Just flip a switch in the settings. No joke.

Great! You now have an (almost) full-blown Linux OS at your disposal!

You can do things.

Next, start the Terminal app and select Penguin (this the default name on a Chromebook for your Linux VM).

You get a prompt.

Next, download the SonicWall Connect Tunnel from within your terminal with wget.

Get the correct URL from here.

wget https://software.sonicwall.com/CT-NX-VPNClients/CT-12.4.2/ConnectTunnel_Linux64-12.42.00664.tar

Unpack the downloaded file:

tar -xvf ConnectTunnel_Linux64-12.42.00664.tar

Install it:

sudo ./install.sh

Next, install the Java Runtime, you need this for the SonicWall VPN:

sudo apt-get install default-jre

Install a webbrowser:

sudo apt-get install firefox-esr

Now you can start the Sonicwall VPN:

startctui

You are presented with the familiar SonicWall tool. And after connecting to your VPN, you can start your browser from your terminal (start a new terminal tab, the other one has startctui running):

firefox-esr

Or just use the Chromebook global search to find and start the Firefox browser.

Being a GUI application installed in your container, somehow Chrome recognizes this and gives you the option to start it from the Chromebook menu and/or pin it to your dock.

This does not work with the SonicWall GUI.

And that’s it.

The strange part is that Firefox is able to use the VPN connection, your regular Chrome browser won’t. I figured that his is probably for the same reason that the default SonicWall app does not work (maybe it does work with Firefox, something for you to try out!).

The post Using the SonicWall Connect Tunnel with Firefox on a Chromebook appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

It is sparse in the sense that it tells you what to install (spf-tools-perl) but it is not clear WHERE to put the very important macro. It only says:

This is provided via the macro CHECK_RCPT_SPF, set it to true.

Fine, but where!?

Answer: you should put this macro at the top of your configuration file (/etc/exim4/exim4.conf.template).

At least I did and put it on line 23. After trying out different places.

Next, you run:
update-exim4.conf
/etc/init.d/exim4 restart

And that’s it. I couldn’t find it anywhere so I put it here.

More on SPF

With this setting, Exim will check your incoming mail for valid SPF records. Because the check was not in place on my server it was possible for spammers to say to my mailserver that they were sending mail on behalf of my mailserver!

This is *not* what you want.

SPF best practices

When configuring this I also found I had a couple of mistakes in my SPF records.

1. I had set a SPF record on a wildcard (*.j11g.com) subdomain. But this does not work properly. Specify the subdomain, and configure the record.
2. I was missing a MX record for the subdomain. Also specifically set this.
3. There was an IPv6 error in my SPF record. A semicolon (of course). There are lots of sites to test your SPF records. Here is a good one and another. They will point out errors.
4. I use an include in my SPF record. I am still not sure where to put it, but it looks like the best practice is to put it before the IP addresses. Like so:
   
   v=spf1 mx include:spf.solcon.nl ip4:157.90.24.20 ip4:212.84.154.148 ip6:2001:9e0:8606:8f00::/56 ip6:2a01:4f8:1c1c:79a1::/56 -all
5. I switched from ~all to -all. To drop all mail that does comply with the SPF record.

Tests

me@remoteserver:~# telnet server.j11g.com 25
Trying 157.90.24.20...
Connected to server.j11g.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 server.j11g.com ESMTP Exim 4.92 Sat, 22 Jul 2023 10:17:30 +0200
ehlo jan.com
250-server.j11g.com Hello remotemachine.test [77.72.*.*]
250-SIZE 52428800
250-8BITMIME
250-PIPELINING
250-CHUNKING
250-STARTTLS
250 HELP
MAIL FROM:info@posthistorie.nl
250 OK
RCPT TO:janvdberg@gmail.com
550 relay not permitted
RCPT TO: jan@server.j11g.com
550-[SPF] 77.72.150.187 is not allowed to send mail from posthistorie.nl. 
550 Please see http://www.openspf.org/Why?scope=mfrom;identity=info@posthistorie.nl;ip=77.72.*.*

The log on the server looks like this:

2023-07-22 10:18:03 H=remoteserver (jan.com) [77.72.*.*] F=<info@posthistorie.nl> rejected RCPT janvdberg@gmail.com: relay not permitted
2023-07-22 10:18:29 H=remoteserver (jan.com) [77.72.*.*] F=<info@posthistorie.nl> rejected RCPT jan@server.j11g.com: SPF check failed.

The post Correctly configuring incoming SPF in Exim on Debian appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

I recently created a 5 hour music project: a DJ radio show.

What I need from Audacity is:

• Copy and paste audiofiles together (cut, split, trim files): easy enough. Audacity is very intuitive for these kinds of things.
• Have a bit of backgroud music (jingles/tunes) over someone talking: so align or layer tracks.
• Fade tracks in and out.
• Export to one big file.

That’s mostly it.

Audacity is a very powerful tool, but also great for just these few things.

Tips

The biggest challenge when working with different audiofiles are volume differences. So most of these tips revolve around making sure the volume is correct.

Do not use the GAIN slider!

Firstly: do NOT use the gain sliders (at the beginning of each track) to adjust volume. This will bite you in the butt later. Especially when you have lots of different audiofiles on one track (which I have).

This might work if you have maybe one or two tracks. But in my case, adding different audio files (with different volumes!) to the same track; the gain slider becomes useless. This is the reason I five tracks, I used the gain slider on one of the tracks in the beginning. I later found out that this was a dumb move and it was too much work to retweak the volume of the audiotracks, so I left the gain as it was, and started a new track.

The tip is: use effects to change the volume of audiofiles!

Note: For all of the effects to work you first need to select (part) of a track or audiofile.

Effects: Amplify

Amplify voice tracks (especially), and always use the recommended setting. Audacity knows how much it can amplify. Do this.

Under Effect -> Volume and compression.

Effects: Compressor

Compress with -30 / -60 / 3:1 / 0.10 / 1.0. I picked these settings up from here.

This will top off peaks, and boost your voice tracks to a maximum for much louder and clearer sound.

Under Effect -> Volume and compression.

Effects: Fade-in / Fade-out

Use these to fade tracks in and out. Or crossfade tracks.

Select part of a track and select either In or Out.

Use longer or shorter stretches, listen to what sounds right.

Effects: Normalize

If you want to reduce volume, use this. Play around with the setting. Again: do not use the gain sliders. The great thing is (as with most effects) you can use it on parts of an audiofile. Just select the part you want to normalize or amplify.

Also: see the Envelope Tool below (I did not know about this tool after finishing my project).

Export to MP3

I use the default settings. Audacity does the mix for you when you export your project (File->Export->Export as MP3). So I don’t mix everything down to one file before exporting (Tracks->Mix), there is no reason and you can’t really tweak your project anymore afterwards.

Overall Audacity does a good job of creating a good mix.

Things I later learned

After I finished the project I was pretty happy with the result but I picked up two new tips from this great YouTube video:

I have not used the next two effects, but for a next project I definitely might.

Effects: Auto Duck

Duck part of a track so the volume is lower. Great for voice-overs.

Envelope Tool

With the Envelope Tool (F2) you can drag and slide the volume of an audio file. Amazing.

One thing I wish I knew

Audacity is really good, I love it. There is one thing however — I am pretty sure there probably is a shortcut for — but I have not figured it out yet.

When cutting an audiofile at the end or beginning (which I did a lot near the end of the project), the length of the audiofile shrinks and the audiofile MOVES to fill the newly created gap! But every other track/audiofile after does not move. So I wish I knew how to automatically move ALL tracks and audiofiles over to fill the newly created gap all while keeping all the tracks correctly aligned.

What I do now is (after the cut) select everything (with my mouse) and move it to fill the gap. Seems there should be an easier way to do this.

The post Audacity Tips appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

The flow being: adding, changing, removing, moving bookmarks *in* your browser, straight from the bookmark bar and with the shortcuts you already know.

Because Floccus is nothing more than a browser extension.

How does it work?

Floccus is actually not a bookmark manager — because your browser does that already!

FLOCCUS IS JUST A SYNC TOOL.

Floccus periodically makes an .xml file of all your bookmarks (the bookmarks, the bookmark folders, the positions etc.). All the bookmarks that you see on your bookmark bar.

And the MAGIC is that it stores and syncs this file on a central location: WebDav, Nextcloud or Google Drive (I use this).

It works like this.

You connect Floccus extension to your Google Drive on one browser, this is your Floccus account. Now you can export this account (a json file) and import it on all your other browsers.

The Floccus extension that sits in all your browsers does nothing more than periodically sync this file and merge changes (when necessary): new bookmarks or deletions will sync to all browsers because the Floccus extension “manages” the bookmarks (based on the xml file).

That’s it.

It’s so elegant and simple that at first I didn’t get it. Sure there are options available for sync behavior, sync interval, folder mapping, setting a passphrase and more. But for most people the defaults are fine.

I use Floccus to sync two browsers (Brave @ work and Chrome @ home) and I absolutely love it! All my bookmarks are available on any browser I use (Chromium, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi and Microsoft Edge are all supported).

Floccus is the bookmark “manager” I have been looking for!

The post Floccus is the bookmark manager you have been looking for appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

Add this to your .bashrc

alias jump='eval ssh-agent && ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa && ssh -A -i "~/.ssh/id_rsa" jan@jumphost.domain.name'

So now when you type jumphost:

• An ssh-agent will start
• Relevant keys are added to the agent
• You ssh to the jumphost with agent forwarding (-A)

And from the jumphost you can ssh connect to anywhere because you forwarded your keys.

Possible drawbacks:

• The primary benefit is that with this method your ssh keys stay on your local machine (and not on e.g. the jumphost). But it also means you still have to enter your ssh passphrase for each session: in my case this is not a problem I usually need one session to my jumphost. If you set up lots of sessions, this may be a problem because you have to keep entering your passphrase (usually one of the reasons of running ssh-agent in the first place) and every session starts it’s own ssh-agent.
  If you do not use as ssh passphrase this is not an issue (though you really should use a passphrase).
• Your ssh-agent will run forever. So add this to ~/.bash_logout

pkill ssh-agent

Drawbacks:

• *Any* bash logout will kill your ssh-agent. Again: not a problem if you just use one session at a time.
  

This setup works for quick access from a let’s say a secondary machine to my jumphost, to quickly check some things. On my primary machine (for real work) I just use this.

The post Simple jumphost ssh-agent config appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

Find where your WSL vhdx file is located. Usually under:

C:\Users\yourname\AppData\Local\Package\Linuxdistroflavour\LocalState\ext4.vhdx

Start diskpart (from PowerShell or CMD): diskpart.exe

Run:

select vdisk file="C:\Users\Jan van den Berg\AppData\Local\Packages\TheDebianProject.DebianGNULinux_76v4gfsz19hv4\LocalState\ext4.vhdx"

and next:

compact vdisk

The post Compact WSL partition and reclaim storage space appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

I recently realized that even though I’ve been daily remotely logging into Linux systems for all of my adult life (and type in the shell and Vim) I didn’t really grasp how these things actually work.

Of course I conceptually know what a (virtual) terminal is (entering input and displaying output) and what the shell is for (the interpreter). And SSH is the remote login protocol, right? (Or is SSH a pseudoterminal inside another pseudoterminal, who’s to say)?

The distinction between these three elements is a bit fuzzy and I do not have a clear concept of it in my head. The test being: could I draw it on a whiteboard? Or: could I explain it to a novice? The answer is probably: not really.

So I went on a bender and found these four (well-known) links that explain things like tty, rawmode, ptms/ptx, pseudoterminals and more.

• A Guide to the Terminal, Console, and Shell
  Historical background and good explanation of how the shell and terminal work.
• Terminals and pseudoterminals
  Useful visuals and explanation of pseudoterminals.
• What exactly is TTY?
  More on the TTY: historical background and flowcharts.
• The TTY demystified
  The previous link borrows heavily from this one.
• What happens when you open a terminal and enter ‘ls’
  Historical background and good visuals.

This post functions as a bookmark placeholder. I will add more links when I find them.

There’s lots of information here if you’re interested. And of course: you mostly don’t actually need to know any of these things to do your work — we are all forever standing on the shoulders of giants. But I *want* to understand these things. And I think I understand them a little bit better now. Maybe you will as well.

The post I don’t understand terminals, shells and SSH appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

Mainstream media seems blissfully unaware of what happened. Sure, here in the Netherlands we had a small but passionate demonstration on primetime TV, but e.g. the NY Times so far has *nothing*

But something most definitely happened. My personal internet bubble has erupted the last few days with tweets and blogposts and it was the top story on every tech site I visit. I have never seen so many people’s minds blown at the same time. It has been called the end of the college paper as well as the end of Google. Things will never be the same. Or so they say.

I am of course talking about ChatGPT by OpenAI it is based on GPT-3. It’s not AGI, but it’s definitely a glimpse of the future.

This post is to gather some thoughts and …. to test this thing.

When GPT-2 came out a few years ago it was impressive, but not in an earth shattering kind of way. Because you could still place it on a scale of linear progress. That this thing existed made sense. And it was mostly fun and also a bit quirky. People experimented with it, but the hype died down soon enough iirc. This was however the prelude.

GPT-3 was already lurking around the corner and promised to be better. Much better. How much? From what we can see now in the ChatGPT implementation the differences are vast. It is not even in the same ballpark. It is a gigantic leap forward. To justify the difference with GPT-2, GPT-3000 would be a better name than the current name.

GPT-3000

The impressiveness is twofold:

• The correctness. ChatGPT all feels very real, lifelike, usable or whatever you want to call it. The quality of output is off the charts. It will surpass any expectations you might have.
• The breadth. There seems to be no limit to what it can do. Prose, tests, chess, poetry, dances (not quite yet), business strategy analysis, generating code or finding errors in code or even running virtual machines (!?) and simulating a BBS. It can seemingly do anything that is text related; if you are creative enough to make it do something.

Sure it’s just ‘a machine learning system that has been trained to generate text and answer questions’. But this goes a long way (of course there are also critical voices).

And for the record: I was surprised by a lot of examples I saw floating online. Even though I shouldn’t have been.

Unlike any other technology that came before, GPT-3 announces loud and clear that the age of AGI is upon us. And here is the thing; I don’t know how to feel about it! Let alone try and imagine GPT-4. Because this is only the beginning.

GPT-3 is proof that any technology that can be developed, will be developed. It shares this characteristic with every other technology. But there is another famous human technology it shares a specific characteristic with i.e. the atomic bomb. The characteristic being: just because we could, doesn’t always mean we should.

But alas, technology doesn’t wait for ethics debates to settle down.

And now it’s here, let’s deal with it.

First thoughts

I am no Luddite, though I am very much a believer that new things are not necessarily better, just because they’re new. But with GPT-3 I do feel like a Luddite because I can’t shake the feeling we are on the brink of losing something. And in some cases — within a matter of days — we have already lost something; which was ultimately inevitable and also happened extremely fast.

People have always been resistant or hesitant when new tools arrive. Take the first cameras — or decades after those, the digital cameras — instead of seeing possibilities, people initially felt threatened. Which is a very human reaction to new things that challenge the old way of doing things. It’s the well-known paradoxical relation we have with innovation of tools. Paradoxical, because in the end the new tools mostly always win. As they should. Tools are what makes us human, it’s what separates us from almost every other living being. Tools pave the way forward.

And this is just another tool. Right?

But here is the crux. Somehow this seems to be more than just a tool. The difference being that the defining characteristic of a tool is that it enhances human productivity and GPT-3 seems to hint at replacing human productivity.

Decades of hypothetically toying and wrestling with this very theme (i.e. can AI replace humans?) in sci-fi has all of a sudden become a very real topic for a lot of people.

No, I do not think it is sentient. But it can do an awful lot.

The future belongs to optimists

Let’s try and look at the arrival of GPT-3 from an optimistic perspective (yes, this could be a GPT-3 prompt). My optimistic approach is that GPT-3 (and AGI next) will force us to make us more human. Or even better: it will show us what it means to be human.

Because GPT-3 can do everything else and do it better (for arguments’ sake lets just assume that better is better and steer away from philosophical debate about what better even means).

GPT-3 will cause the bottom to fall out of mediocrity, leaving only the very best humans have to offer. Anything else can be generated.

So what is that very best that makes us human? What is it that we can do exclusively, that AGI can never do? What is so distinctly human that AGI can never replicate it?

One of the first things that came to mind for me was whether AGI could write something like Infinite Jest or Crime and Punishment. Literature. Earthshattering works of art that simultaneously define and enhance the human experience. Literature in my opinion is the prime example of the ultimate human experience. Could AGI … before even finishing this question: yes, yes it could.

Is that a bad thing?

What we’re seeing is the infinite monkey theorem in action. AGI can and will produce Shakespeare. The data is there. We have enough monkeys and typewriters.

As long as you feed it enough data it can do anything. But who feeds it data? Humans (for now). I am not ready to think what happens when AI starts to talk to AI (remember Her?). For now it feeds and learns from human input.

Maybe AGI is where we find out we are just prompt fodder and humans are not so special after all? Maybe that’s why I woke up with an unnerving feeling.

The proof is in the pudding

Or maybe, it is because ChatGPT could enhance everything I have written so far and make it more clear and concise.

Because it definitely can.

Of course I tried this and it gave the following suggestions.

First part

The blog post was too long so I had to cut it in two parts.

Second part

The first paragraph here is actually the eight etc.

I have chosen to keep the original text as-is with the screenshot suggestions so you can see the difference.

It is really good. What more can I say?

The post ChatGPT and humans as prompt fodder appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

Load key "/.ssh/identity/id_rsa": invalid format

Here is the tip: add an enter to your private key file!

Yes really!

I spent way too much time figuring this and only found the solution when I stumbled on the solution here.

The post Fix for when your SSH keys are not working on your Chromebook appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

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 few things I would really like to see. In no particular order.

Threads

Threads in the timeline feel clunky. I see replies to long running threads scattered through my timeline. They are hard to follow and they make the timeline messy. Threads should be bundled together more coherently in my timeline.

Algorithm

There I said it. I *do* think there is room for an algorithm on Mastodon. Specifically one that is proposed by jefftk in his blogpost ‘User-Controlled Algorithmic Feeds’.

It makes a lot of sense since the user is in control.

Hover for profile

Easy one I think. I want to hover over a (profile)name and get a popup with the most relevant information for that profile without going to that profile! I don’t want to leave my timeline. It’s since switching to Mastodon that I noticed how much I rely on this (also see: Verification ).

Advanced View

Could be more advanced. I want different (more!) and persistent columns for different hashtags or searches.

Verification

Sure rel=me is one way to verify. But with more and more brands and people moving to Mastodon I’d like to see another (better?) way to verify accounts. Not everyone has their own site.

But, this is hard. Also see bird-site. And I also don’t have a solution.

I do like presscheck.org though. It’s a good effort. But I worry how this scales.

The post Five things I’d like to see in Mastodon appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

You can achieve this by adding a little line of code to your website (see Link verification).

When you have a basic HTML website, adding this piece of code is this trivial.

However when your site runs on WordPress, it’s a bit different.

I found a tutorial that only works with a newer version of Gutenberg (in anticipation of a 2023 WordPress release). But there is also another — easier — way.

When you run a regular WordPress 6.1 site, this is how you do it.

I link to my social media profiles from a menu. My guess is that most people want to use it like this. And one of these links in my menu is a Mastodon link. This is the link where you need to add the me value for the rel attribute.

These are the steps:

1. Select Appearance
2. Select Menus
3. Select your specific Menu (in my case Social Footer Menu).
4. Select Screen Options
5. Checkmark the Link Relationship (XFN)
6. add me to your menu under Link Relation (XFN).
7. Save!

Step 5 is the trick. This step will add an extra — otherwise hidden — option field to your links.

I got this tip from this here.

Now you just have to wait for your Mastodon instance to check your links. This happens periodically (I would say daily?). But I notice you can also trigger this check by (making a change and) saving your Mastodon profile.

And that’s it.

Look how green!

Your Mastodon instance will check your links periodically. But I notice you can also trigger it by (making a change and) saving your profile.

The post How to get green links on your Mastodon profile with WordPress appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

What really struck a chord with me was not so much the specific Crossroads discussions in these interviews, but the things Franzen says about reading and literature in general.

And I noticed similarities in interviews that are sometimes decades apart.

I created a supercut video of two specific Franzen interviews that are 20 years apart. In this video a younger and older Franzen talks about reading, literature and love. See if you can spot the commonalities.

David Foster Wallace kicks off the video (who else?). If you didn’t already know that Franzen and Wallace were friends you can tell by just watching them converse. It’s a delight.

In the YouTube description I also link to the two original videos, which are much broader and interesting in their own right (do watch them!) but this supercut specifically highlights ideas Franzen has about reading and literature.

Here is a list of questions (one of these is rhetorical*). The questions serve partly as a videoguide as they are answered in the video. But you can also try and discuss them beforehand, or even after watching the video (e.g. for your own book club).

Questions

• What good is reading anyway? Why read?
  • What does Wallace say about it, what did Franzen’s mother say about it (fiction)?
• What are we missing nowadays (according to Wallace)?
• Are people that read “a priori not of the mainstream”? How do you feel about that?
• Do you have examples of a text where: the more you look at it, the more you find in it?
  • Maybe read an Emily Dickinson poem.
• Should reading be entertaining, what does ‘entertainment’ mean?
• What is the only driver of change (according to Franzen)? Do you agree or not (if so why)?
• What should come first in literature (according to Franzen)?
  • How does this match up with what Wallace says about this?
• Will the power of technology be so strong that fewer people will able to find a private space in which to develop a relationship with books?
• What is love other than pleasure in the company of?*

The video ends with 2016 Franzen making remarks about technology. Remarks that perfectly tie in to what Wallace — in 1996 — says at the beginning of the video about the influence of technology on reading.

Here is the video:

The post Jonathan Franzen on reading and literature appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

It clicked for two reasons.

Forget the Metaverse

Mastodon is part of the fediverse. Meaning it shares the core principles of the fediverse. With a little bit of reading, I got a better understanding of what the fediverse actually is, and how Mastodon fits in.

The idea is as old as it is clever. And it really is clever.

Technically the fediverse “is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks“.

Let’s expand the explanation with an emphasis on what this means for a user:

The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks where a user can create a personal account on any specific instance but can connect to everyone else on every other instance.

Distributed instances is the key idea here.

The fediverse has many applications. There even is a reading sharing application (why didn’t I think of this?). But for now let’s focus on Mastodon. The fediverse microblog equivalent. Every user on any Mastodon instance can connect to any other user on any other Mastodon instance (mostly). And all these instances are run by different people.

Just like email

The best analogy might be email. You can roll your own email server, use your company’s email server, or Gmail or Outlook or what have you. But — and this is important — you can send and receive email to and from anyone with a valid email address.

Just like you can with a Mastodon address, powered not by SMTP but the ActivityPub protocol.

The idea is brilliantly simple, and it is how the internet is actually supposed to — and always used to — work and it has lots of upsides.

Upsides

Instances are run by individuals or groups who set their own rules. And thus every instance has a unique user experience or feel. There are many specific instances with distinct communities.

There is (theoretically) no real technical limit to the amount of users an instance can have*, but my guess is that most instances will top off somewhere to keep the instance manageable and moderation feasible. Just like most real life communities.

Because moderation is done per instance (implicitly by rules, explicitly by blocking users), this makes moderation distributed by default and thus scale-able. Did I mention it was clever?

*I would like to suggest Dunbar's number to the power of two: 22500 users per instance.

Open

Mastodon is open. In the realest sense. And I love the open web.

Everything on Mastodon is open and uses RSS: accounts, hashtags and more all are expressed as RSS feeds. I just love love love that part.

The openness comes with great upsides:

There is no ad-driven algorithm.

Don’t like the moderation rules on your instance? You can move your account to another instance.

Want to see the source code? Here you go.

Want to run your own instance? You do you!

Momentum

Apart from not really understanding the fediverse, the other reason it didn’t click in 2017 is because no one I knew was there. Kind of important for a social media platform. But this classic chicken-egg problem got a gigantic kickstart with the recent influx as a result of the exodus from that.other.site. And Mastodon finally seems to have hit critical mass: there are enough people to make it interesting, thus attracting even more people. It really has come alive in the last few short weeks.

There are lots of curious people checking out the new thing, of course time will tell how many will stick around. And compared to other social media sites, the numbers are still really small, but gaining!

However I would think the end goal of Mastodon should (and is) not necessarily a question of replacing Twitter. Both will most likely co-exist — 44 billion dollar usually doesn’t evaporate just like that. But having Mastodon makes the world that much better, and it gives the users a choice.

I don’t think it is necessarily that people are fed up with new Twitter leadership (it’s only been a week, right?), but I do believe people are fed up with the Twitter experience in general drawing them to — finally viable — alternatives likes Mastodon.

And most of these experiences are things that Mastodon implicitly or explicitly addresses. Things like: moderation, accountability, community, ownership and resiliency.

But I also notice lots of Twitter people — mostly with large followings — are hesitant. I follow quite a few US tech people, and most seem bullish on Musk. Few are not. We’ll see.

But apart from that there are other challenges.

Challenges

Let’s name a few.

• Usability: Signing on, using Mastodon, understanding the Mastodon/Fediverse idea, finding and adding accounts. It’s not entirely intuitive, and thus a barrier.
• Performance: call it growth spurts. But most Mastodon instances are suffering greatly at the moment, hindering the user experience.
• Security: the openness also brings challenges!
• Twitter: IF (big if) Twitter somehow is able to address some of their issues this would provide a big pull force.

This all being said the main challenge at this time seems to be:

• Discoverability: where is everyone, where are interesting accounts, where are the people I know?

Mastodon needs to do better than sharing spreadsheets for finding interesting accounts. But I do understand that this is the paradox of the open web. Having open, distributed content hinders discoveribilty (also see: podcasts).

Either way, the distributed character of Mastodon makes it here to stay. The only way is up for the foreseeable future. It’s pretty great to finally have an open, distributed real application, that is not blockchain.

Eugene Rochko

I would like to point out something. Mastodon is the project of one person. Started in 2016. Sure lots of people hatched on since, but to me it is indicative.

Most revolutions start with one person. They might not be the first or their idea might not be original. But timing, the right decisions and right personality are usually what tip the scales in these types of events. Also see: Linus Torvalds.

It seems Eugene is a true Mensch. Working many hours a week providing great software for a moderate salary (people working on Google ads make 20 times that).

A person with his talent could easily work somewhere else and make more money. But it is obvious he is not in it for the money.

And it is obvious he has thought longer and more about certain things than most people.

If you allow the most intolerant voices to be as loud as they want to, you’re going to shut down voices of different opinions as well. So allowing free speech by just allowing all speech is not actually leading to free speech, it just leads to a cesspit of hate.

Eugen Rochko in Time

It’s not just the software that makes the difference. It’s the people making the software that do.

The post Welcome to the Fediverse appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

Why:

• Windows Terminal is pretty good: it doesn’t get in your way, and it’s fast (*very* important).
• Cygwin gives me access to grep, awk, vim and much more.

In the end MobaXterm just had too many quirks. Specifically when changing screens — docking / undocking which I do a lot during the day. However, one thing I really did like about MobaXterm was the integrated SSH agent (MobAgent).

That part worked really well.

That was what kept me from switching back to Windows Terminal and Cygwin.

But I recently found out that Windows 10 comes with its own SSH Agent (?!). That was news to me.

So I now use the Windows SSH Agent. So, not Pageant or OmniSSHAgent or any other Windows SSH Agent or keychain, because these all have issues (I tried them).
Also running eval $(ssh-agent) for every new terminal window (that zombies when you close your shell) kind of defeats the purpose of having an SSH agent.

How?

First you need to tell Windows to start the OpenSSH Authentication Agent on boot:

PowerShell can tell you if the agent is running:

And now comes the tricky part. Using Cygwin AND using this ssh-agent i.e. adding and retrieving keys to and from the agent.

Of course you can add keys with ssh-add or by adding the -A parameter to the ssh command.

PS C:\Users\Jan van den Berg> ssh-add.exe .ssh\id_rsa

But you need to understand this next bit first.

When invoking ssh in Cygwin you invoke a different ssh client than the default Windows SSH client. One is the Cygwin ssh client, and the other one is the one that comes with Windows. I blogged about this before.

Spot the differences in this next image:

And here is the secret (that took me way too long to figure out, thanks ssh -v)

Only when invoking the latter (ssh.exe) you get access to the Windows OpenSSH Agent!

This is especially tricky when you want to specify identity files. Make sure you use the right paths, the Windows SSH client will look in other default paths. Something to consider.

My workflow now is as follows: I have defined a couple of bash aliases in my Cygwin .bashrc file so when I fire up Windows Terminal (fast) I can jump to a specified SSH host with one or two keypresses — all the while using the correct SSH keypair with a passphrase I only have to enter once per Windows boot! (edit: I assumed it would be per boot, but it seems the Windows SSH agent holds the keys forever, that may actually be too much of a good thing….).

alias ms='/cygdrive/c/Windows/System32/OpenSSH/ssh.exe -A -i 'C:\Users\Jan van den Berg\.ssh\mm-id_rsa' jan@myserver'

The post Using Windows OpenSSH Agent with Windows Terminal and Cygwin appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

How often, you ask?

Let me reiterate what I said last week on Twitter; so I can point people to this post in the future and because I can point people to my own site instead of Twitter (see how this works?).

Me: “I made a decision last year to write a blogpost every day. Making that decision is half the job. There is no ‘when should I blog’ anymore, only ‘what should I blog about’. A question which sort of miraculously answers itself when you decide to blog every day.”

Internet person: “And how is that going?”

Me: “184 posts and counting. And 136 drafts. That’s the most surprising aspect: start blogging and everything is a concept (things picked up in a podcast or book etc.). https://janvandenberg.blog (Dutch though).”

And this is true: when you start blogging, everything is a blog. You start to notice things. Which is a very rewarding experience on its own. That alone is reason enough to start blogging.

The post You should blog more appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

Which is not always a bad thing for software, but WhatsApp could really improve some things, especially when those improvements seem trivial. Some wishes could even be classified as bugs: which they should really fix.

In no particular order (for iOS).

• Multi-select on media search
  When you use the global search (pull down on iOS) and select a category (Photos, Documents etc.) you cannot multi-select on the exposed grid. I use this grid for selecting/deleting stuff. But deleting one thing at a time makes the whole experience rather tiresome.
• Mass delete media types
  In the same vain: give me a button to mass delete gifs. Sure they’re fun, but I don’t need to keep them around. Especially Giphy or Tenor gifs. This probably goes for other media types as well.
• Search re-index
  When you switch / upgrade your phone and restore a backup, you better pull down on the search bar and enter a search and WAIT for the re-index to finish. Sure I can live with that, but when you forget to do so, you only get to search new chats….(until you switch phones). At least give me a way to kick off the re-index again.
• More than just starring
  Now I can only star a message. That’s it. I need labels.
• Move archived chats to somewhere else
  This one is truly baffling. WhatsApp decided to put your archived chats — you know, chats that you don’t need direct access to — at THE TOP OF THE CHATS, and all active and current chats are below the archived chats. Stunning. I accidentally click / tap multiple times per week on these archived chats. Please move them somewhere else.
• Preview on links!
  What is up with this? This worked fine, then it stopped working, then it worked half, and at the moment when you copy/paste a link, there is no preview. But when someone replies to your link: there is a preview! Also when you directly post a Twitter URL: no preview. But when sharing the link from the Twitter app to WhatsApp: sure, you get a link preview.
• More post reactions
  They *finally* added this last week! It keeps chats cleaner and more pleasant. But it seems I can only choose from 5 emojis. I need more!

I may not be a typical user, my WhatsApp archive dates back 12 years, and is around 40GBs. I sent 166378 messages and received 573376 messages at the time of writing. I keep pruning larger images/videos, but most chats I want to keep, it’s like a diary for me.

So maybe my wishes go against what WhatsApp wants to be: a very basic, low-entry one-to-many chatapp. But really, I’d happily pay for some of these features, but I guess a pro app is (no not the WhatsApp business app) is out of the question?

The post WhatsApp should really fix these issues appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

Two years later Cruddiy reached 100 stars on GitHub. Something which I did not expect.

We could argue a long time on what a GitHub star as a metric actually represents, but for this post it represents: hey, more than one person had a need for this thing.

Cruddiy is a small collection of PHP files that you point to your MySQL/MariaDB database and you run it (usually) just once and after a few steps/questions — no coding required — it will generate a set of pretty good looking PHP forms for you — usually one per table. The generated forms have basic CRUD functionality, search, pagination and sorting. The forms are based on Bootstrap and you have seen these forms a million times before. You can use them as they are, or use them as a starting point i.e. scaffolding to further improve on (coding required). And here’s the good part: you can delete Cruddiy when you’re done.

Simple?

Most developers reading this will probably now scream say: hey, but you can use framework X or framework Y! And yes, this is true and I have used and done all of that. But I do not like installing a ton of dependencies to generate just a few simple PHP files (which they are): and this is more or less always the case. Read the original post for more background.

So Cruddiy is my attempt to keep things as simple as possible.

I am allergic to pulling in lots of files and folders that clutter my system, especially when I don’t know what all these files do. So Cruddiy does not use Composer, Laravel, Symfony, Docker, or other dependencies. Nothing of the sort. It’s just plain PHP files, that generate other PHP files.

Cruddiy was created to scratch my own itch, and I have used it several times since. But judging by the number of GitHub stars and comments and thank yous I received I think it’s an itch for more people. Part of the reason I put it on GitHub is because I spent more time on it than was probably warranted, and I wanted an excuse to warrant the invested time. Cue famous XKCD comic:

So putting the code on GitHub is a way to shave more time off — other people’s time, but still: time.

Also another XKCD comic comes to mind:

Cruddiy is a small project in every sense — in lines of code, number of commits, number of contributors, and number of GitHub stars –, but still, through Cruddiy I experienced the magic of people on the other side of the world, finding and using something I created. The internet is amazing.

Here are some things that I picked up by putting things out there.

1. Opinions

Everyone has one, right? I was excited when I received the first patches from a complete stranger and pulled them in, thinking how amazing this was. However this person was very opinionated how things should work, which bothered me a bit. And he talked to me like I worked for him. But I didn’t pay too much attention to it, I thought maybe this is how it works?

But when Cruddiy stopped working correctly and had some other weird bugs I removed most of his code and decided: you can fork Cruddiy however you please, but this codebase here is how I want things. And there is absolutely no obligation for me to pull in your code, especially code that fundamentally changes how things work. (It still bothers me a bit that he proposed to move the code to a different folder. I might still revert this).

It was a hard lesson because I had already developed a bit more based on his code so reverting wasn’t very straightforward and involved some Git tricks that I never want to use again.

I still find it weird, that I just blindly trusted someone and his opinion purely because I was so surprised that other people had an actual use for Cruddiy. But if I had kept at it Cruddiy would have probably withered (being broken and all) and ended up being unusable.

One of the key takeaways here is: something might be open source but you still need people to take care of it e.g. make important decisions for it, it will not survive on its own because there are too many opinions out there. And preferably that person should be you. This is true for arguably the biggest distributed software project in the world — Linux — right down to a very small project like Cruddiy.

That being said, the above example was of someone being opinionated i.e. rude. But a lot of people seem to have a strange way of asking for things. Please spend some of your valuable time fixing this and that for me, kthxbye.

2. Audience

Judging by the level of questions and requests I receive, I noticed the average Cruddiy user isn’t a computer programmer.

And this is expected, since Cruddiy is a no-code solution.

I do however find it somewhat baffling that there are people who find their way around GitHub without either having a decent understanding of code or Git/GitHub.

Case in point: I had contact with someone who had good ideas — and who sent me actual codepatches, which I merged. But this person did not know how to use git or GitHub. Which is … surprising, to say the least!

This person also asked if I had a Discord server (!?) which he found easier to communicate by than e-mail.

This tells me a couple of things:

1. GitHub is much more than a code sharing site, it’s also where people go for solutions sans Google.
2. There is still so much to win for GitHub, it’s not simple enough yet. Make it simpler to use and more people will use it.
3. Discord is successfully replacing e-mail for some people.

3. Licensing

I started Cruddiy under GPL2, because, well why not? Lots of projects use GPL2.

However I did some reading and switched to AGPL-3.0 License, I think it is important to share changes. However: I was and am still not sure if Cruddiy fits the AGPL bill: is it really a networked piece of code (isn’t everything on GitHub in a sense a piece of networked code)?

I am no license expert, and might be wrong about this interpretation but I see AGPL-3.0 as GPL3.0 with an add-on.

The lesson is: think about what license your code should have before putting it out it online.

4. Releases

This was one of the more surprising learnings. Usually when I pull code myself from GitHub I always look for the latest commit. But this is not normal?

Early on I created some tags and based one or two releases on these tags. Just to play around with tags and releases. It wasn’t until later when a user had some weird errors that I found he was using a very old release. Why? Because it was the only release available and that is were people look! Duh…

So now I make it a habit to tag commits and release the tag.

5. GitHub quirks

There are two:

1. This is a possible GitHub caching thing, but I noticed I always get a flurry of stars, then weeks nothing, then again a flurry of stars. Nothing particular about this, just strange behavior that might have something to do with caching.
2. I have NO idea how people find Cruddiy: there is no Google analytics. Do they find my blog first and then GitHub or the other way around? I would have like a bit more insight into this.

6. Energy

Most of the work I put in Cruddiy was at the start (a good chunk of my evenings for a couple of weeks). The project is still only 60 commits old (again; very small). There are many more ideas Cruddiy *could* do, but which *I* don’t need now. So this means things stay mostly as they are.

I notice when people point out bugs: I am driven to fix these. But pro-actively sitting down and adding new features is not something I do. I maybe could, but I don’t. I need a real use-case for it. Last week I added a navbar solution, which greatly improves the visual of Cruddiy, but this was only because someone showed me he hacked a navbar on top of Cruddiy, which drove me to incorporate it in Cruddiy that same evening.

7. Looking at your own code

I am not a professional developer. That is not my day job. So most software projects I embark on are either small or ephemeral. Cruddiy however has forced me to look at code that I wrote up to two years ago, and yes everything they say about writing clear code is true. Here is what I found:

1. Don’t try to be clever, first and foremost: make it clear. So future you might understand what it is you were trying to do.
2. Write code as if you’re explaining to someone else (again: that someone else is future you).
3. Don’t think you don’t need to comment code because it makes sense by itself: comment code!
4. Less lines of code is not always better. Do not trade clearness for conciseness.

Putting code out there

I do not feel obliged (anymore) to adhere to every wish out there. But I do want things to work as I promised. So I have to admit it also gives me a bit of anxiety when people have errors or bugs and I can’t take over their keyboard, I have to guess at their config/setup, which bothers me a bit. Just as it bothers me when I try and help people and never hear from them again.

Also I don’t think I have become a better developer, if anything it may have been detrimental to my skills: since wanting to fix things quickly doesn’t necessarily produce the best code.

But these are all minor inconveniences. They do not weigh up to the sheer enjoyment I get from the idea that someone, somewhere out there is using something I made to help solve a problem.

So if you have the choice: put your code out there!

The post Reaching 100 stars on GitHub: what I learned from putting code online appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

I had been a happy WSL1 user for many years, but after switching laptops I more or less had to upgrade to WSL2. Which is the same thing but not really.

The thing is, WSL2 startup times are annoyingly slow. And I hate slow. Computers have to be fast and snappy.

So after poking around — many blogs and Github issues — I decided to ditch WSL and move on.

So I entered the world of terminal emulators and unixy environments, which can be overwhelmingly confusing at times.

Windows Terminal

First I settled on Windows Terminal as a terminal emulator. I already starting using this for WSL (which comes default with MinTTY).

MinTTY is used *a lot* and many tools are actually MinTTY under the hood. Cygwin also comes with MinTTY by default. And MinTTY is pretty good, however: it has no tabs.

Windows Terminal is the only terminal emulator I found (on Windows) that does tabs decently! The only other ones I found were ConEmu, but it feels a bit less snappy, and cmder (which uses ConEmu so it has the same problem).

Once you have tabs, you don’t want to go back.

Windows Terminal is a native Windows binary, so that might explain that snappy feel.

So Windows Terminal it is.

But now, how do I get that Linux feel on Windows! WSL1 was pretty perfect, an almost native feeling Linux environment.

There are many alternatives and emulation option (like running VirtualBox or MinGW et al.) but why not go with good, old, trusty Cygwin solution. Their tagline is enticing:

Get that Linux feeling – on Windows

That sounds good!

Cygwin

I knew Cygwin from way back, and I noticed it still hasn’t changed its logical, but somewhat archaic installation procedure.

Cygwin installs itself in a folder with a bunch of recompiled for Windows GPL tools, to create a hierarchy that LOOKS and FEELS like a Linux environment.

Fine, whatever.

As long as I can use, grep, rsync, ssh, wget, vim and awk, right?

And I can. Cygwin makes a whole lot of recompiled GNU tools available for Windows — including the above.

However a basic Cygwin installation is pretty minimalistic, so I had to run the installer a few times to get all the software packages I needed (like ssh, vim and wget they are not installed by default). This makes Cygwin a bit different: you can — and usually have to — run the installer a few times to get everything you need.

Next I added Cygwin to my Windows Terminal and made it the default. And with ‘added’ I mean I made a Windows Terminal profile that starts the bash.exe program that comes with Cygwin and drops me in the Cygin homedir (which is actually a Windows path).

A terminal emulator in itself does nothing except handle input / output, and running a shell program like bash enables you to interact with your files (or OS) by sending input signals trough a terminal emulator and processing its output signals.

Cygwin comes with MinTTY by default (of course): if this had (decent) tabs, I’d probably chuck Windows Terminal.

In Windows Terminal you can click a profile together, which edits a JSON file, but you can also directly edit the JSON if you know what you are doing.

Improvements

I think I really like that Cygwin keeps everything in one folder and doesn’t mess too much with my Windows installation, or path settings and all that. I think (?) it’s just a folder (pretty portable).

Two things though.

Prompt

Cygwin needs a better looking prompt. Well here you go:

export PS1="\u@\h:[\e[1;32m]\w \e[m \D{%T}# "

Try it, you’ll like it. Colors, path, username, time, it has everthing! Put it in your .bash_rc

SSH

I could not figure out why my SSH keys weren’t working when connecting to my server. But when I dropped into verbose mode (ssh -vv) I saw ssh wanted to use keys from C:\Users\Jan van den Berg\.ssh instead of the Cygwin homedir /home/jan/.ssh

I spent waaaaay too much timing thinking why Cygwin would do this, until I noticed the SSH binary I invoked was the default Windows 10 OpenSSH client, which will default to looking in the Windows homedir for ssh keys instead of the Cygwin homedir.

So you have to specifically invoke /bin/ssh (or you can remove the Windows OpenSSH client, or change symlinks, or change paths, whatever works for you).

The lesson is: be aware that Cygwin is just a bunch of Windows executables, and it will therefore also look in your Windows path.

Conclusion

I think I am pretty happy with this setup, mainly because it starts almost instantly! And that was the whole point.

The post Windows Terminal + Cygwin appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

However it wasn’t after I migrated that I found out Hetzner blocks all outgoing port 25 and 465 traffic.

At least; for the first month for new customers.

This means my new server cannot talk SMTP with the rest of the world i.e. my server cannot send mail!

(Note: you can however connect to mailservers that listen on port 587).

I can see why they would do this, however this is less than ideal if you have a production server with a couple of webshops.

So, now what?

My server cannot send mail itself but it can also not connect to a smarthost (a different server that does the mail sending), because smarthosts are typically also on port 25/465.

I do however have a Raspberry Pi in my home network. What if I run a mail server on a different port there, say 2500?

So, my VPS can relay the mail there. But I don’t want my Pi to be connected to the internet and send mail. So then what? Why not relay from the Pi to an actual smarthost. Which smarthost? Well my ISP offers authenticated SMTP so I can relay mail from my VPS to my Pi and from my Pi to my ISP. And my ISP can send the mail to anywhere.

This could work.

The setup

This is what it looks like.

There are two mail server configurations in place. I use exim4 on Debian and you can easily run dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config to (re)create a valid Exim config.

This command will (re)create a file which holds all specific Exim configuration: /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf

It’s a small and easy to understand file. Here follow the complete contents of both files, for reference.

Hetzner VPS exim4 config

dc_eximconfig_configtype='satellite'
dc_other_hostnames='topicalcovers.com;brug.info;piks.nl;j11g.com;posthistorie.nl;server.j11g.com'
dc_local_interfaces='157.90.24.20'
dc_readhost=''
dc_relay_domains=''
dc_minimaldns='false'
dc_relay_nets=''
dc_smarthost='212.84.154.148::2500'
CFILEMODE='644'
dc_use_split_config='false'
dc_hide_mailname='false'
dc_mailname_in_oh='true'
dc_localdelivery='mail_spool'

Note: use a double semi-colon to specify a mailserver that listens on a different port.

Raspberry Pi exim4 config

dc_eximconfig_configtype='smarthost'
dc_other_hostnames=''
dc_local_interfaces='192.168.178.135'
dc_readhost=''
dc_relay_domains='posthistorie.nl,topicalcovers.com,piks.nl,j11g.com,server.j11g.com,willempasterkamp.nl'
dc_minimaldns='false'
dc_relay_nets='157.90.24.20'
dc_smarthost='mail.solcon.nl'
CFILEMODE='644'
dc_use_split_config='false'
dc_hide_mailname='false'
dc_mailname_in_oh='true'
dc_localdelivery='mail_spool'

For this to work you also need to edit your file /etc/exim4/passwd.client with the a valid mailboxname and password:

mail.solcon.nl:authorizedmailboxname:pa$$word

Or use an asterisk ( * ) to use the credentials for every mailserver. If you (only) use a smarthost, this is fine.

SPF records

The above configs are what you need to do on your Hetzner VPS and your Pi. Next, you need to change your SPF records.

The SPF records tell the receiving mailserver that the sending mailserver is allowed to relay/send mail for a specific domain.

As you can tell I have multiple domains, so that means editting multiple SPF records. Here is what one SPF records looks like. This is public information, anyone can (and should) look up your domain SPF records.

This is the raw SPF record:

v=spf1 mx ip4:212.84.154.148 ip4:157.90.24.20 ip4:212.45.32.0/24 ip6:2001:9e0:8606:8f00::1 ip6:2a01:7e01::f03c:91ff:fe02:b21b ip6:2001:9e0:4:32::107 ip6:2001:9e0:4:32::108 ip6:2a01:4f8:1c1c:79a1::1 ~all

You can see it’s a mix of IPv4 and IPv6. For readability, the next image is what it actually says.

MX – All mail for this domain should be send TO a specific IPv4 or IPv6 address.

Next: you can see which IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are allowed to send mail for this domain. So where mail is accepted FROM.

So if my VPS wants to send a mail to @gmail.com it will relay the mail to my Pi, which will happily accept the mail, and will relay it to my ISP mail server, and my ISP mail server will try to deliver the mail to Google Mail. Google Mail however will CHECK if the IP address for my ISP mail server MATCHES the SPF records. If Google finds that the IP addresses from my ISP mail servers are not in the SPF records, it will not accept the mail. But if they match, Google Mail will accept the mail.

The post Bypassing Hetzner mail port block (port 25/465) appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

Bitwarden

The best password manager. Free if you like, or only $10 per year if you want to have a little bit more features or just want to support the project.
My advice: pay the $10, Bitwarden is the best bargain for a great password manager and you support development of new features. It has good browser integration and a slick iOS app and even a CLI interface.

My passwords are safer because of Bitwarden.

Brave Browser

I started using Brave this year after listening to this. Sure you can rack up crypto (Brave Attention Tokens), but I mostly use it because I don’t like being too tied to Google, but I actually do like Chrome. The great thing is, that Brave is Chrome under the hood: so I can have my Chrome extensions! Also Brave has bookmark sync across devices, I need that too (most other Chromium based browsers don’t have that).

QR Codes

Don’t call it a comeback.

QR codes have been around for years, and I’ve always wondered what their use case for personal use might be. Well, that became abundantly clear the last year or so.

It turned out there is a use case for friction less, touch less, platform independent data transmission. Who knew?

ShareX

Most people know how to take a screenshot, but ShareX is what you really need: it is excellent!

I set it up, that with two clicks I can take a screenshot and upload it directly to my server and ShareX puts the newly created URL and the image itself under my paste button (so if I paste to a textbox I get the URL string, if I paste to say a blogpost I’m editting I get the image). Amazing. I use this tool a lot. Looking at my screenshot folder I have taken around 1277 screenshots this year.

Node screenshot

One thing however, I have not figured out — yet — in ShareX is how to take screenshots from scrolling (large vertical) pages. I recently learned how to do this. Open the inspector, select a node and take a screenshot. I’ve been using it more than I expected.

Windows Terminal

In 2021 I switched from WSL Terminal to Windows Terminal. It has tabs and better zoom scroll support.

Video speed controller

Please everyone. Install this extension. I watch a lot of talks online, but most people tend to talk slowly: not anymore with this extension! It will speed up any video content. You can use the mouse menu or with the s/d keys to speed up or slow down videos.

RSS

Ngl, I strongly believe RSS is the embodiment of how the web should work. An open, platform independent protocol to share information.

I deeply love RSS.

As a matter of fact: if your technology does not support RSS, you may be hostile to the open web.

WordPress

I love, love, love WordPress and I have been using it since 2005. This site runs WordPress, as does my other blog on which I blog daily.

I’ve published close to 100 blogs this year with WordPress. It never fails.

When people talk about the features of web3: being something decentralized and where anyone can publish, I think: WordPress! The future is already here.

Cruddiy/Corbin

Shameless plug.

When the pandemic started, I created Cruddiy. At the moment this two dimensional array battering piece of PHP code has undergone many revisions, has 80+ stars on GitHub and received many thank you’s and even a couple of contributions. It’s fun.

Cruddiy is a code generator, and it does a lot of maybe hard to follow things, but the code it generates is as clean as it comes.

If you have a MySQL/MariaDB database, Cruddiy enables you to create forms like this, in seconds, without any programming:

Last month I created Corbin. Which has also been a lot of fun and useful for easily creating self-hosted image albums. A single PHP script, that again — like Cruddiy — generates a clean and portable HTML file. Maybe I should think about creating a generator generator .

That’s my list. I am always curious to know your tool tips! Share them in the comment box below.

The post Ten 2022 Tool Tips appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

The LAMP server that is serving you this site. So the migration worked!

Here are the steps, for future reference. Mostly for myself, but maybe you — someone who came here from Google — can use this too. This should work on any small to medium sized VPS.

Let’s go!

Lower your DNS records TTL value

When you switch to a new VPS, you will get a new IP address (probably two: IPv4 an IPv6). And you probably have one or more domain names, that point to that IP. Those records will have to be changed for a successful migration.

You need to prepare your DNS TTL.

To do this, set your DNS TTL to one minute (60 seconds), so when you make the switch, your DNS change will be propagated swiftly. Don’t change this right before the switch of course, it will have no effect. Change it at least 48 hours in advance of the change.

Set up a new VPS with the same OS

Don’t go from Ubuntu to Debian or vice-versa if you don’t want any headaches. Go from Debian 10 to Debian 10. Or CentOS 8 to CentOS 8. Or what have you.

This blog focusses on Debian.

Install all your packages: Apache, MySQL, PHP and what else you need.

My advice is to use the package configs! Do not try to to copy over package settings from the old server, except where it matters, more on that later.

This starts you fresh.

PHP

Just install PHP from package. Maybe if you have specific php.ini settings change those, otherwise you should be good to go. Most Debian packages are fine out of the box for a VPS.

I needed the following extra packages:

apt-get install php7.4-gd php7.4-imagick php7.4-mbstring php7.4-xml php7.4-bz2 php7.4-zip php7.4-curl php7.4-mysql php-twig

MySQL/MariaDB

apt-get install mariadb-server

Run this after a fresh MariaDB installation

/usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation

Now you have a clean (and somewhat secure) MariaDB server, with no databases (except the default ones).

On the old server you want to use the following tool to export MySQL/MariaDB user accounts and their privileges. Later we will will export and import all databases. But that is just data. This tool is the preferred way to deal with the export and import of user accounts:

pt-show-grants

This generates a bunch of GRANT queries that you can run on the new server. Run this on the new server (or clean them up first if you need to, delete old users etc.). So that after you import the databases, all the database user rights will be correct.

Set this on the old server, it helps for processing later.

SET GLOBAL innodb_fast_shutdown=0

Rsync all the things

This is probably the most time consuming step, my advice is to do it once to get a full initial backup, and once more right before the change to get the latest changes: which will be way faster. Rsync is the perfect tool for this, because it is smart enough to only sync changes.

Make sure the new server can connect via SSH (as root) to the old server: my advice is to deploy the SSH keys (you should know how this works, otherwise you have no business reading this post ;)).

With that in place you can run rsync without password prompts.

My rsync script looks like this, your files and locations may be different of course.

Some folders I rsync to where I want them (e.g. /var/log/apache) others I put them in a backup dir for reference and manual copying later (e.g. the complete /etc dir).

#Sync all necessary files.
#Homedir skip .ssh directories!
rsync -havzP --delete --stats --exclude '.ssh' root@139.162.180.162:/home/jan/ /home/jan/
#root home
rsync -havzP --delete --stats --exclude '.ssh' root@139.162.180.162:/root/ /root/
#Critical files
rsync -havzP --delete --stats root@139.162.180.162:/var/lib/prosody/ /home/backup/server.piks.nl/var/lib/prosody
rsync -havzP --delete --stats root@139.162.180.162:/var/spool/cron/crontabs /home/backup/server.piks.nl/var/spool/cron/crontabs 
#I want my webserver logs
rsync -havzP --delete --stats root@139.162.180.162:/var/log/apache2/ /var/log/apache2/
#Here are most of your config files. Put them somewhere safe for reference
rsync -havzP --delete --stats root@139.162.180.162:/etc/ /home/backup/server.piks.nl/etc/
#Most important folder
rsync -havzP --delete --stats root@139.162.180.162:/var/www/ /var/www/

You run this ON the new server and PULL in all relevant data FROM the old server.

The trick is to put this script NOT in /home/jan or /root or any of the other folders that you rsync because they get be overwritten by rsync.

Another trick is to NOT copy your .ssh directories. It is bad practice and can really mess things up, since rsync uses SSH to connect. Keep the old and new SSH accounts separated! Use different password and/or SSH keys for the old and the new server.

Apache

If you installed from package, Apache should be up and running already.

Extra modules I had to enable:

a2enmod rewrite socache_shmcb ssl authz_groupfile vhost_alias

These modules are not enabled by default, but I find most webservers need them.

Also on Debian Apache you have to edit charset.conf and uncomment the following line:

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

After that you’re good to go and can just copy over your /etc/apache2/sites-available and /etc/apache2/sites-enabled directories from your rsynced folder and you should be good to go.

If you use certbot, no problem: just copy /etc/letsencrypt over to your new server (from the rsync dump). This will work. They’re just files.

But for certbot to run you need to install certbot of course AND finish the migration (change the DNS). Otherwise certbot renewals will fail.

Entering the point of no return

Everything so far was prelude. You now have (most of) your data, a working Apache config with PHP, and an empty database server.

Now the real migration starts.

When you have prepared everything as described here above, the actual migration (aka the following steps) should take no more than 10 minutes.

• Stop cron on the old server

You don’t want cron to start doing things in the middle of a migration.

• Stop most things — except SSH and MariaDB/MySQL server — on the old server

• Dump the database on the old server

The following one-liner dumps all relevant databases to a SINGLE SQL file (I like it that way):

time echo 'show databases;' | mysql -uroot -pPA$$WORD | grep -v Database| grep -v ^information_schema$ | grep -v ^mysql$ |grep -v ^performance_schema$| xargs mysqldump -uroot -pPA$$WORD --databases > all.sql

You run this right before the migration. After you have shut down everything on the old server (except the MariaDB server). This will dump all NON MariaDB specific databases (i.e. YOUR databases). The other tables: information_schema, performance_schema and mysql: don’t mess with those. The new installation has created those already for you.

If you want to try and export and import before migration, the following one-liner drops all databases again (except the default ones) so you can start fresh again. This can be handy. Of course DO NOT RUN THIS ON YOUR OLD SERVER. It will drop all databases. Be very, very careful with this one-liner.

mysql -uroot -pPA$$WORD -e "show databases" | grep -v Database | grep -v mysql| grep -v information_schema| gawk '{print "drop database " $1 ";select sleep(0.1);"}' | mysql -uroot -pPA$$WORD

• Run the rsync again

Rsync everything (including) your freshly dumped all.sql file. This rsync will be way faster, since only the changes since the last rsync will be synced. Next: import the dump in the new server

mysql -u root -p < /home/whereveryouhaveputhisfile/all.sql

You now have a working Apache server and a working MariaDB server with all your data.

Don’t even think about copying raw InnoDB files. You are in for a world of hurt. Dump to SQL and import. It’s the most clean solution.

• Enable new crontab

Either by copying the files from the old server or just copy paste the crontab -l contents.

• Change your DNS records!

After this: the migration is effectively complete!
Tail your access_logs to see incoming requests, and check the error log for missing things.

tail -f /var/log/apache2/*access.log

tail -f /var/log/apache2/*error.log

Exim

I also needed exim4 on my new server. That’s easy enough.

apt-get install exim4

cp /home/backup/server.piks.nl/etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf

Update: it turned out I had to do a little bit more than this.

The post Migrating a LAMP VPS appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

It’s safe to say this is hands down one of the best documentaries ever. I could not look away. Truly amazing.

In between watching this over the last week I accumulated quite a few articles (from blogs, newspapers, and my RSS feed) that I did not want to read before I finished watching.

But now I have read them all. I’ll share them here, because most of these say what else I would want to say about the tremendous experience that is Get Back.

Links

In no particular order: here are interesting links for further reading paired with key quotes.

• https://adjacentpossible.substack.com/p/learning-from-get-back
  
  Key quote: “There’s something about listening to a song come together that’s almost as pleasing as listening to the finished product”
  
• https://scribe.rip/fluxx-studio-notes/10-lessons-in-productivity-and-brainstorming-from-the-beatles-ea14385e27a4
  
  Key quote: “They never seem to discuss or argue over these changes, they just play it to see if it works.”
  
• https://adactio.com/journal/18666
  
  Key quote: “The revelation for me was really understanding that this was just four lads from Liverpool making music together. And I know I shouldn’t be surprised by that—the Beatles themselves spent years insisting they were just four lads from Liverpool making music together, but, y’know …it’s The Beatles!”

Key quote: “Without the guiding influence of Brian Epstein to tell them what to do and when to do it, they’re adrift. It becomes the Paul McCartney show – simply because he’s the only one who seems to want to produce anything. That, of course, builds up the resentment of the others from being bossed around – but in the absence of a unifying figure, what else could be done?”

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29480027
  
  Key quote: none specific: read the discussion, interesting observations.
  
• https://www.gawker.com/culture/the-beatles-were-friends
  
  Key quote: “The Beatles were not actually at constant wit’s end, but friendly all along. They bickered a lot, and some of the rehearsals seemed to go nowhere.”

• https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/12/06/beatles-get-back-documentary-songwriters/
  
  Key quote: “Every idea starts somewhere and somehow. There’s going to be a genesis moment for every piece of media we’ve ever seen. The gift we have is that they were filming it. They were rolling.”
  
  Key quote 2: “One of the most instructive moments is how many bad ideas there are that get abandoned. The ability to self-edit and criticize themselves and keep working on something until it’s the thing we all know.”

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvyTXSYtPmc
  
  No key quote here since it’s a video, really good and fun YouTube analysis of Get Back.

I re-subscribed to the NY Times for the following three stories (the images are clickable links, NYT articles seem to embed rather nicely in WordPress).

Key quote: “Our movie doesn’t show the breaking up of the Beatles,” Jackson said, “but it shows the one singular moment in history that you could possibly say was the beginning of the end. (…)There’s no goodies in it, there’s no baddies,” Jackson said. “There’s no villains, there’s no heroes. It’s just a human story.”

Key quote: “There are many ways to watch Mr. Jackson’s opus — as an intimate glimpse at the dissolution of the greatest rock band of all time; as an epic psychodrama of friendships collapsing; as the settling of the perennial “breakup” debate among hard-core Beatles fans; or as The Guardian put it, as “eight hours of TV so aimless it threatens your sanity.”

Key quote 2: “Even as wine, beer and more flows, the Beatles stay disciplined, working and reworking lyrics and arrangements until they get them right. “To wander aimlessly is very un-swinging,” Mr. McCartney says. “Unhip.” “

This is the strangest take on the doc, and one I don’t think I agree with, but interesting nonetheless.

Key quote: “It’s as if she is staging a marathon performance piece, and in a way, she is.”

Final thoughts

I’m bound to come across more links, and I might update accordingly for posterity reasons.

The only new thought I want to add here is the following.

Songs are what made the Beatles. A long string of unique, genre defining and defying songs. Songs in general are containers of words and sounds that can mean different things to listeners. And often such meanings may be unintended or unplanned by the creator.
The Beatles created their songs, by making music and finding words (how else?). Sometimes inspired by events, but more so it seems because it just sounded right*. They grabbed the muse as it appeared to them through endless repetition and trial and error until they had something that sounded right. That this something had the power to ultimately become something very meaningful to whomever, that is not up to them or even their goal. They just know that something right is a song that might mean something to other people as well, not just them. That is the definition of a great song.

The Beatles tried to make great songs — by endlessly chasing them — but without intent to change the world or someone’s view of the world.
So when someone lays in awe on the bedroom floor from a Beatles song, that has never been a direct aim (how could it). Not even the Beatles could directly chase after this goal to try and reach someone, because it doesn’t work that way. You can only try and make something that sounds right to you and hope it does for other people as well. And what it means to other people might be something different than what it means to you. Everybody applies their own meaning to art.

And this of course goes for most things that people make. Whether it be art or other things people make. There are many things to take away from Get Back, but this is a main one: make something you would want (to listen to) yourself, the rest follows and is mostly not under your control.

*There are plenty of examples where this is not the case, Bon Iver‘s first album comes to mind as well as Arcade Fire’s first album Funeral. Those are examples of inspired music from specific events that translate experienced emotions into words and sounds that vividly try to encapsulate and mimic those emotions. But still, even here the following is true: it might still mean something else to a listener.

The post Get Back part 2 appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

I need to get these out before further viewing, because I have a feeling I will change my mind many times over during viewing.

Let’s go Beatle by Beatle.

Paul

It’s very apparent that Paul is the undisputed leader of the band. There are no two ways about it. More than any other Beatle, Paul is the one who’s always pushing forward, making suggestions, making cuts, judging, keeping things moving. All in his soft spoken characteristic manner.
Also it’s uncanny how little Paul has changed from then to the grey haired Beatle I grew up to know. His mannerisms, speaking style, the confidence it is all exactly the same as he is now.

Of course the Beatles are always about Lennon and McCartney and it’s clear from watching the two, how they feed off one another. And what each brings to the table.

John

Lennon always seemed to me to be the person that wanted to be in the foreground and was very outspoken. But in this documentary so far he says very little, but you can see he first and foremost clearly enjoys being around the other guys, enjoys making music. He very much listens and responds to Paul. And he is all about making music.

They are not so much rehearsing songs as they are trying out bits and pieces: hooks, bridges, choruses, small parts of songs, again, again, and again. Throwing away what doesn’t work, keeping what does.

It’s like a relentless but gentle machine and John and Paul are constantly looking at and critiquing each other’s contributions. In a good way.

George

George struggles to get heard. A gifted musician, but walled in between two of the greatest singer-songwriters to ever live. It feels he is still — after a decade — trying to get Paul, and John to notice him, to get them to listen to what he has to say, to get heard.

It’s obvious Paul and John highly appreciate George, but his songs have to be better for Paul and John to notice.

Ringo

Ringo listens intently, makes very few suggestions and only jokes around a little bit. He clearly knows what is expected of him, makes no fuss. He is very aware of what is going on and what his role is.

(Yoko)

Maybe it’s because of the editing, but Yoko is present but has not said a word. Which makes it a bit weird. Why is she there, why is she the only wife/girlfriend? The others seem to ignore her.

Get Back

It is absolutely amazing that this footage exists, the viewer gets to witness something extra-ordinary.The greatest band in the world, and that ever was (there will never be another Beatles) and who by that point have already achieved anything and everything and changed the face of music and the music industry in general, are filmed in full color during the creative process. A process which, by the way, is insane: creating a complete set of new songs in two weeks. But if any band could do it, it’s the Beatles of course.

I love the way they talk to each other and make suggestions, it is ever so polite and all focussed on making great songs and having fun while doing so.

But I am most floored by how down to earth and down to business the four are, while they beat sounds into submission and into songs. There are lots of other people walking around and they drop in and out of frame, but the four Beatles with their chairs in a circle, facing each other, that’s where it happens.

Very much looking forward to the rest of this documentary. I saw this clip surface on Twitter, it is just bonkers. You get to witness how an era defining tune is constructed out of seemingly thin air:

The post The Beatles: Get Back appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

The generator itself is a single PHP file (~300 LOC). And running it on a sample folder with images and videos looks like this:

The above generates one single index.html, that looks like this on a desktop browser:

Notice:

• The evenly spaced grid with a mix of portrait and landscape images also evenly spaced
• The Fancybox image animations
• The navigation buttons
• The slider at the bottom
• The indication of video files with a SVG play button
• The autoplay of video files
• How the user doesn’t leave the gallery page

In the above example I use both the mouse and keyboard for navigation, both are possible.

Here you can look at the sample gallery yourself.

What does it do?

Here’s what the generator does:

• Checks for image orientation (landscape vs portrait) issues and fixes those.
• Generates thumbnails from valid images (png/jpg etc.) with respect to orientation.
• Converts non-web friendly video formats (3gp/mov) to mp4 with ffpmeg (few other tools do this!).
• Adds a play button overlay to video files, to make them stand out.
• Generates one index.html file, that together with your image and thumb folder constitute your gallery: copy it to any webserver and it will run, you don’t even need PHP to the gallery (hence static).
• Generates a nice looking, evenly spaced, grid with thumbs that point to your images and videos and that looks good on mobile.
• Uses Fancybox to pop and animate images and videos in a container with navigation.
• Single PHP file that does everything (~300 LOC), you need FFmpeg to process videos, and it pulls in Fancybox via CDN.

Why did I make Corbin?

Because it’s fun, and because I was looking for a way to quickly share a folder of images and videos, with nice previews (i.e. thumbs), that also is viewable on a smartphone — and that is *not* Google Photos. Most solutions can’t do that.

Other things I wanted:

• Portable generator: one single PHP file is just that. It will run on any server with PHP 7.x and FFmpeg.
• Portable output: one self-contained index.html file, one images folder, one thumbs folder. That’s it. There is no database or a bunch of help files (e.g. CSS).
• Something understandable: most other solutions are more complex or clutter your system with files. This tool does not touch the original image folder, it just creates one thumb dir and one html file (converted videos also get saved in the original image folder).
• Something malleable. E.g. it’s pretty easy to add the file names to the index.html. Just edit one line of CSS.

Corbin?

Yes, because:

• Anton Corbijn is my favorite photographer
• Corbin sounds like core bin aka core binary. And this tool does one core thing for me.
• According to Urban Dictionary a corbin “is a very trust worthy , funny and amazing person”!

What’s next?

Corbin does what I need for now. Things that might be added later:

• Recursive folder gallery generation.
• Sorting options for images (name, date etc.).
• Pagination?
• More templating options?
• On successive runs don’t convert mp4 videos or regenerate thumbs.
• More error checking (file types etc.), much more error checking.

I know there are tons of solutions out there, but this one is mine. And it does exactly what I want.

Feel free to poke around! I assure you there are bugs.

The post Corbin: static responsive image and video gallery generator appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

Six days a week you will find a short thought or observation that explicitly aims to be above current events. I aim for timeless truths; observations and thoughts that are true regardless of time and place.

Blogging daily is a deliberate attempt to not start my day with doomscrolling or consuming other people’s content, but to sit down and kick the creative gear.

The first 21 blogs are online.

Visit: piks.nl janvandenberg.blog or add the feed to your reader.

The post Bloglife @ janvandenberg.blog appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

• I type one letter;
• The file opens in insert mode;
• the current date and time are inserted;
• and Vim starts a new line with a space indentation so I can start typing, right away.

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:

~/.bashrc
alias i="vim -c 'startinsert' /home/jan/notes/ideas.txt"

.vimrc

I added two lines to my .vimrc.

The first inserts the date: 2021-11-05 21:40:50 (conform ISO 8601).
The second start a fresh new line with four spaces.

~/.vimrc
autocmd VimEnter ideas.txt $pu=strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
autocmd VimEnter ideas.txt $pu='    '

The post Auto insert date when starting Vim appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

It’s something else, like I went back to pre-SSD.

The monitor was connected to the HDMI port of a USB-C connected Dell WD19 dock, was this port faulty? Or maybe the cable? I changed cables, I changed ports, no change. Then I tried plugging in directly to the HDMI port of my laptop — a Dell Latitude 5590. No change.

Ah maybe I should connect to the Display Port of the dock instead of HDMI. So I broke out the DP cable. Nope, same feeling.

Hmm things just feel slower, maybe my laptop GPU isn’t handling this too well, nope, GPU graphs look fine.

And then it hit me:

It’s the refresh rate, dummy!

Of course. My 4K screen has a max refresh rate of 60Hz, but the Intel Graphics tool only showed an available max refresh rate of 30Hz, because my HDMI port cannot output 4K@60Hz. Bam!

So my monitor was connected on 30Hz, and this is not a good experience. Things feel off, sluggish, like your computer is out of breath. Maybe for some people this is barely noticeable but it’s there. So how to solve this?

As stated I also use a dock, but the ports on the dock (2xHDMI and DP) can’t handle this output either (the bandwidth of the single USB-C port can’t drive 4K@60Hz AND power AND ethernet AND etc.). Here’s what I did, and sadly it involves ditching the dock.

The USB-C port on the laptop is able to output 4K@60Hz, so I got a USB-C to DisplayPort cable, connected it to my monitor, and it worked. However this means I cannot use the USB-C port to connect to the dock. But I’d rather don’t have a dock than look at a screen that feels…. off.

The post Connecting a Dell 4K monitor to HDMI appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

And it’s not just the hats though. Belts too. Which athletes wear belts? Really.
Both teams wear collarless uniforms that look like they haven’t changed in a 100 years, which must be intentional. Some wear long pants, others wear knee socks. Either way, the uniforms are buttoned up and either striped or clear. But always neatly tucked in. Except for the guy trying to catch the ball — behind the guy with the bat — he has his own thing going on.

And then there is this oversized strange looking leather glove. It makes the players look like crabs who lost a claw. But every player wears one like it’s perfectly normal. The glove is mostly used to catch balls, but it also doubles as an accessory to share secrets with teammates that you want to keep from the other team, whose players must all be prodigious lip readers.

So everyone wears a glove. Except the guy with a bat. A bat that’s either made of wood or metal. Okay, so let’s see, if you have the bat you get three attempts to try and hit the ball? If you hit it correctly, you have to run to a first designated stop — or a base — and if you make it to this first base without your ball being caught or you ball arriving there before you — because someone picked it up and threw it there — you’re safe. Three more bases for a point. If you hit it really hard you might try and run to two, or even three bases in one go. But this is hard. Only if you hit it out of the park, you get to go past all bases and collect a point. That’s called a homerun. But mostly you try to make it to first base, and you wait for your teammate to try and hit the ball. If he does, you get a chance to run to second base (or more). Unless of course a ball is caught or hitters haven’t hit the ball for a combined number of three times, then teams switch sides.

Pitchers — as the guys that throw the ball are called — seem to center themselves by straightening their hat — a lot — so that their cap is perfectly perpendicular to their faces. And they like to fondle the ball between their fingers while either specifically looking at it or distinctively not. Then they do a little bit more hat straightening before curling up by pulling their knee to their chest, channeling all their power into their throw to make the ball fly around 90 mph between a small rectangle box that is only visible on TV and not to the players. And they do this again and again and again. He has to throw the ball three times correctly between the rectangle — without being it being hit — for the hitter to be out. If he throws it four times outside the box, the hitter is free to walk to first base.

Hitters also seem to try to get in a meditative state of mind. There are quite a few mannerisms and straight out ticks they perform while standing at the plate. They touch the middle of the plate, swing the bat an exact numbers of times, pull the fingers of their gloves — different gloves — an even number of times. Adjusting, centering, focussing. If you look closely some guys have stains on their right collarbone or shoulder, it’s where the bat touches as they twist and twirl it while waiting for the ball to arrive. It seems that wooden bats are tarred up, for grip, maybe? It’s not as much a physical as it is game about focus and wits. Nonetheless you have to throw the ball really hard, and hit it really hard. It is a multidimensional game.

Players all look very serious and focused. There is no flopping or cheating, everybody knows the rules and umpires are on top of things. And maybe it’s this aspect that I like most. It’s a fair game.

It quickly becomes clear that this a game of variables. Lots and lots of variables. And watching a baseball game must be a supremely different experience from playing the game. Watching the game I am constantly assessing stats, making small calculations, holding variables in my head. There are so many intangibles to keep track of, your head needs to clear out the rest of whatever it is working on. Watching baseball is almost meditative. For the guys on the field however, the only focus can be the next pitch.

I learn that an inning has two parts — a top and a bottom — and a pitcher has to try and strike out hitters three times for a team to change sides, this constitutes an inning. As I learn this the numbers on the screen start to make a little bit more sense, it’s as if I am slowly let in on a secret. A very old and unchanged secret.

A secret that can be endlessly explored and excavated further. There is no shortage of variables to do so. So an RBI is a Round Batted In, that seems important. And I am glad the announcers explain what the 7th inning stretch is. This sport is drenched in tradition and statistics, and if you want you can drown in it. Not only are there 120 years of history to dive in to, even with such a long history the sport is still evolving and historic events occur in this day and age.

Baseball is played all over the US: little league, high school, college, minor league and more. But Major League Baseball is of course where the best of the best compete. There are 30 teams in the Major League Baseball. Which doesn’t seem excessive for a country as big as the US. But teams play 162 games in a regular season. Please read the last sentence again, this is not a typo. This adds up to 2430 baseball games in one MLB season! You might call that excessive and very on-brand for the US. So the number of games and stats to obsess over are dazzling. And maybe it’s because of these numbers, but there is something about this sport. Because special things tend happen or are — statistically speaking — bound to happen. And they do. All of the time.

And so much so that you might even call this sport romantic. This makes complete sense.

The post A European watches Major League Baseball appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

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 YouTube video. All killer, no filler. I promise.

Note: I only noticed when I compiled the list that a lot of songs are about death…

Let’s kick it off with Molchat Doma. What’s that? Glad you asked! Molchat Doma is russian doomer music and the perfect soundtrack for 2020. Their album Etazhi is probably my most played album of 2020. It’s a rare album in its complete tonal consistency and overall freshness. This next track Volny is one of the highlights. The video alone should receive all sorts of prizes. Enjoy, and don’t worry there is more Molchat Doma on the list.

Small song, country feel. 272 views. Steph Copeland ft. Chris Wong. When I lay my head to rest, there will grow a garden from my chest.

This next song is quite the trip! If the first few notes don’t grab you by the throat, maybe Ben’s performance will. This is actually three songs into one. Take your time, this is a very intense performance. And do stick around for what happens after four minutes.

I like me some Bruce and you know it. Bruce is like a machine and delivers, always. And the title track for the docu/album is as Springsteen as they come. Banger!

While we’re on the subject of old rockers with guitars, let me just share this rendition of an old folk song. I can picture this song to be the last song in every Irish pub before closing time (you know, pre-covid etc.). You cannot not love this.

Ok last old guy with a guitar. I can’t quite put my finger on it but the remaster of Pocahontas is much better than the original?? It’s the tempo, maybe. I don’t know. Anyway here is Neil Young singing he wished he had a thousand pelts so he could sleep with Pocahontas (?!), read the wiki if you want to know more. It’s quite the trip.

Lets pick up the tempo. I am a sucker for urgent sounding songs like this. The pacing here is terrific. And only 278 views. How?! This song is STRAIGHT FIRE. Time! Let the room untouched!

Talking about urgency, Fontaines D.C. know everything about that. The band with multiple entries on last year’s list just keeps producing one great track after. This band is everything a band should be. And if this next track doesn’t convince you, I am sorry for you.

One of the few women on the list. Katie Pruitt. Poppy but she has skills. I like it! The Fleetwood Mac is strong in this one.

Back to the UK. If you are still wondering where Arctic Monkeys got their inspiration, look no further. I was thoroughly surprised when I found out this song actually predates the Arctic Monkeys because this song is MOST definitely the inspiration for Teddy Picker. Not the other way around. Alex Turner you cheeky bastard!

Let’s stay in the UK shall we. Bands like the Enemy, with clear tracebacks to the Jam can only spring from the UK. A quintessentially British song.

Here is a very special song by Empress Camelian. This song has everything you would want from a laptop artist. Or any artist for that matter. And this is exactly the kind of song I hope to find when I scour the internet. Intimate and melodic. You’ll be surprised.

Ok I lied, here is another old guy with a guitar. Bob Dylan. Of course. Dylan released his 39th studio album in 2020 Rough and Rowdy Ways. And a few alternate takes and reissues surfaced. Good stuff for fans of the man that’ll turn 80 (!) soon. But the one song that had everybody talking, because of its length and content, was Murder Most Foul. There is a lot to unpack here, because not only is it a Bob Dylan song, it’s also almost 17 minutes. Clear your schedule please.

Ok so this is a Dutch track, but I can’t not include this. These boys hit all the right notes. The guitar is definitely a callback to best Dutch popbands of the 80s. But don’t be fooled, there is more here than what it looks like, and it already looks just terrific.

Paul Simon is and will always be one of my favorite songwriters. This song was written just after Nixon got elected and is probably one of his most political songs. And I only recently learned what makes the melody for American Tune so great. Can you hear it?

I am sorry what’s that? You want sci-fi m83-ish sounds? Say no more.

I promised a little bit more of Molchat Doma. Well here it is, for the acquired taste palette. This track is just completely bonkers, but in a good way, image what that sounds like live.

Oh, Bright Eyes how I love thee. This guy can hardly do wrong and just keeps churning out instant classics. And this is a fantastic live rendition of a fantastic song. Handsdown the best Covid performance I saw this year. For the daily double bonus: can you tell who the drummer is?

This track was removed from Youtube. So I’ll share another rather similar one.

You know what, that is a GREAT question Jason Isbell?! What have *I* done.

Declan McKenna was on my list in 2015, when he was just a 16 year old kid, because the talent was so obviously apparent. This next track — 5 years on — proves that his talent has not been wasted. He already has quite the following and is on his way to becoming a bona fide popstar. This is his 2020 hit. Poppy, sure. Delicious, yes. You can’t hide talent like this.

Save the best for last. This is hands down the best song of 2020 for me (Molchat Doma takes home the album award). Wolf Parade. The video, well it’s… something and the artist went ALL out. The song itself is a grower. And I admit It didn’t click on my first listen. But hidden in this song is something quite remarkable. There is no greater build up to an outro break in all of 2020 — or maybe even the decade — than the 3:28 mark in this video. Just when you start wondering where this song is going, the essence of this track lays it soul bare. It is astounding and it’s the absolute pinnacle of an already absolutely incredible song. One for the ages. Turn it up to 11. Please do also check out the some of the live versions. The live performances really punctuate what this song is about. Drums, keys, guitar and a singer who doesn’t hold back. A delight to watch. This is what it is about. To say that he loves you, would be unfair towards you.

The post 2020 Music Discoveries appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

• 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 to other Clubhouse users
• Share pictures, videos, gifs or audio files
• Use it on Android

You can

• Listen to audio conversations as they happen
• See avatars of who is in the conversation
• Start a group audio conversation with people you know
• See Clubhouse member profiles with who they follow and who follow them
• Minimize the app and do other things while listening
• Receive conversation notices, as they happen, based on people you follow*

What you get

• Raw, unscripted watercooler conversations

So there are a lot of things Clubhouse doesn’t do and only a few things it does do. But the almost archaic possibilities of the Clubhouse app are a large part of the appeal. The constraints punctuate the experience.

Ephemeral group conversations are of course as old as humans. And we didn’t even have to wait for the internet and smartphones for this human need to be implemented in technology. Theoretically the Clubhouse experience was already possible — pre-internet — with the plain old telephony system and it is also basically what happens on the amateur radio network frequencies (this is still a thing).

Which is why it is remarkable that it took to 2020 for such an app to exist on a smartphone. Was the idea maybe too simple? No. Clubhouse may be a primal experience but it is also a logical iteration from text messages, Instagram Stories, Snapchat and TikTok. Clubhouse adds something new to this line of — increasingly real-time — social interactions, by taking away a lot of barriers. And by being the only one that is actually real-time.

The Clubhouse experience is the lowest bar to participation of any social app out there. You don’t have to leave the house, sit at a desk, straighten your hair, you don’t even have to be able to type. It is just you talking or listening to people.

And Clubhouse strips down the human need for sharing without showing your face (Zoom), or having to be overly creative (TikTok). Remember that Instagram and Snapchat filters are not only successful because they are fun, they also obfuscate what you don’t want to be seen. Clubhouse doesn’t have this problem.

Realness

This all boils down to the lowest denominator of participation of any social app out there and the result is a very real experience. So real that it hardly makes sense for people to get ‘verified’ (blue checkmarks) you know right away if the person talking is who they say they are. I was listening to a room with Steve Ballmer, and trust me, that was Steve Ballmer.

It’s the algorithm

So Clubhouse offers one of the oldest human experiences of just people talking. But here is the really clever part and why we did need the internet and smartphones.
*The Clubhouse algorithm sends a push notification when conversations you might be interested in are happening. This is probably also the only reason Clubhouse uses profiles and following/followers lists. Because your interests are, of course, based on people you follow. And this — social graph — is exactly what the internet and smartphones bring to the table that the telephone system and amateur radio can’t.

So now what?

A lot of Clubhouse conversations are about Clubhouse. Also a lot of people on Clubhouse are talking about social media and social influencing in general. It feels very meta. But I guess that is what typically happens when these things start.

Clubhouse is the hottest new app at the moment, either because of their clever iOS only, FOMO inducing invite only approach, or because of the tech VC entourage that pushes the interest for the app, or maybe because that the pandemic has emphasized the need for humans to connect. It’s probably a little bit of all of the above. But you also know because of the app’s succes either one of these two things will happen: 1. Facebook will buy Clubhouse or 2. Facebook will clone Clubhouse. We’ll see.

I see different paths forward for Clubhouse and I am curious to see how it will pan out. And the app right now is very bare, which is also the appeal. So it’ll be interesting to see how and whether they will pivot, maybe they will start adding features, maybe they will introduce recording conversations (podcasts)? And they of course will have to find ways to monetize. And they will have to do so all while the question looms: will it stay fun or is it just the newness that is appealing?

The post Thoughts on Clubhouse appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

And the result looks like this. Click image or here.

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This week more Americans died from Covid than on 9/11, the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war combined, and that fact isn’t even in the top 10 news stories right now.

The news is dominated by the insurrection and the presidents’ direct incitement of it. And the subsequent (social) media bans that followed. And most notably his account suspension on Twitter.

Most news seems to be focused on the Twitter ban — his preferred outlet — and this has made a lot of people angry, specifically the ones being so called silenced. Which is strange: because I don’t know why GOP politicians are upset about the president losing his Twitter account. They’ve never seen any of his tweets anyway–at least, that’s what they told reporters every time they were asked, right before they ran away.

But it’s not just Twitter. Also Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon are banning the president, and other apps are pulled and online stores are closed etc. This has people arguing that their first amendment right is violated. In doing so they fail to understand that first amendement is not just to protect the president from his people, but to protect the people from the president.

The relation the USA has to freedom of speech is uniquely American and the complicated nuances and general differences between tolerance and freedom of speech, are paradoxical. But nonetheless: freedom of speech does not entail freedom of reach.

Just like the second amendment was written with slow loading muskets in mind — one round every few minutes — it is now abused to argue the right to automatic weapons that fire hundreds of rounds per minute. And the same is true for the first amendment which was developed to — maybe — reach 40-50 people by standing on a scaffold in a park, is now being abused to argue the right to broadcast opinions to 80 million people. These are clearly different things.

Conflicted

Over the last few days I have heard several arguments against or for banning. Let’s look at some of them.

• They waited until the democrats had the majority, weak!

Well, it seems the platforms waited until the election was officially called and the electoral college had spoken. Imagine what would have happened if they blocked the president before it? That would have been a much more impactful decision. And then you could have really argued they influenced elections. Now the platforms at least think this argument can never be thrown at them. I take it a lot of lawyers have looked at the timing of this decision.

There have been plenty of reasons already to block the president, citing Terms of Service violations. But if you don’t do it out of the gate (i.e. four years ago) it becomes increasingly more difficult to pick a good time. So we now had to watch and escalate this whole thing steadily for four years.

• Twitter silenced the president!

Well, it is the president himself who chose to make Twitter his default media outlet. The person with access to every news channel and newspaper in the world chose Twitter, the outrage amplifier, as his biggest news outlet and contact with the people.

Sure Twitter has silenced him, but he still has plenty of other ways to reach people. This proves however that Twitter is not a right, it’s a privilege and it has rules.

This being said, other well known dictators still do have a Twitter account. The difference might be direct incitation?

Still, you can say plenty about the power Twitter yields and the inherit risks involved. Same goes for Facebook et al. of course. They do have great power (too much), and therefore great responsibility. And I do believe regulation should be in place, but that’s another topic.

• Twitter is a private company, they can do whatever they want!

Well, this is true (the section 230 discussion aside). And this is also how free and open markets should work. He is still entitled to his opinion and spreading this wherever he wants (see above). So we’re not watching “censorship” we’re watching an open source, free market approach to safety measures on the web.

I’ll say this though, Twitter is the de facto pulse of society, whereas Facebook is the personal newspaper and I am willing to state when something is de facto that it has inherent responsibilities following from that. But clearly there are lines and they have chosen to draw the line. As is their right.

That doesn’t mean you can’t feel conflicted about the whole situation. Which I do.

Who dis?

This all being said there is just an incredible amount of complaining about cancel culture, from people that actually tried to cancel the election and the democracy.

The good news is that a test of a secure democracy isn’t whether mobs storm the seat of government. The test of a secure democracy is whether democratic processes survive and continue *in spite of* mobs storming the seat of government. And democracy is proving itself secure in the USA.

In the end what happened was no surprise, at least if you had eyes and ears. And this is not about who the president is, we know who he is, this about who America is. If you want to know who he is, there is an hour long tape of someone who is out of options and plain and simple wants to cheat.

And we can all see and hear with our own eyes what happened. And no, it is not a media narrative.

Now what?

Part of the damage is done. These companies missed the chance to change course years ago. There is no separating Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube from what happened on Wednesday.

The insurrection took longer than necessary, and it sure took time before law enforcement showed up. But the president waited so long, because he was waiting for it to work. And he deliberately took his time. This was the Trump coup. And he got exposed.

The insurrection was a blatant grab to seize power, but it was also to bully and frighten people and to literally terrorize people.

Accountability here is important. Because every time the president hasn’t been held accountable, he’s gotten worse. Every time.

Some people ask: Why would you impeach and convict a president who has only a few days left in office? The answer: Precedent. It must be made clear that no president, now or in the future, can lead an insurrection against the U.S. government.

And there are other reasons of course, the president would loose a lot of benefits.

But even with the president out of the equation, 147 Republicans voted to overturn election results. The USA is in deep trouble. And most Capitol stormers themselves seem deeply troubled. And white. It’s frightening.

One of the indigestible facts of the USA is that most of its terrorism and nearly all its mass shootings are committed by mostly conservative-leaning white men…earnestly committed to their white supremacist-misogynist identity politics.

So there is a lot of work to be done, before we can discuss healing.

To end on a positive note, fortunately stories like these also have heros.

(This post is constructed by assembling tweets from my timeline into a more or less coherent story. I’ve hardly typed any words. For readability all blue links are referenced tweets. Twitter is great.)

The post Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

That last book is of course the bible and the book Knuth wrote about it is ‘3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated ‘ — published in 1991. And in 1999 Knuth gave a series of lectures at MIT ‘on the general subject of relations between faith and science’. In these lectures he explains how he went about writing this book and the thought process involved. So the lectures make for an enjoyable deep dive on creating such a book and how Knuth’s brain works, paired with discussions and insights on religion and things like eternity and finiteness.

And it is this series of lectures that are bundled together in ‘Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About’ — almost verbatim. But, the lectures have also always been available as audio files (sadly no visuals) on Knuth’s homepage. And I listened to those a few years back, and as I read this book I was reminded that I had created a RSS feed for these files, effectively creating a Knuth podcast!

I mostly created the file for myself to have the convenience of listening to the lectures in a podcast player. But I have also dropped the link to the XML file here and there over the years, and I noticed 607 unique IP addresses hit this link this month alone! There are only six lectures and one panel discussion and never any new content, so I am not sure what these numbers mean, if they mean anything at all.

But I also remembered I had never blogged about this, until now. So without further ado here is the link:

https://j11g.com/knuth.xml

You can add this to your favorite podcast player. I have added the feed to Overcast myself so it looks like this which is nice.

Having the audiofiles available in a podcast player enables you to track progress, speed up/down parts and have an enhanced audio experience.

I do remember writing an email (no hyphen) to Knuth’s office and I received a nice reply that they thought it was ‘a great idea’, and they were actually also thinking of starting their own podcast ‘based on these materials’. However I haven’t found any link to this yet, so for now it is just this.

If you are more into video, here is a great conversation Donald Knuth had with Lex Fridman last year. Published exactly a year ago to this day. The video is not embeddable but you can click the image to go there. Recommended.

The post Podcast: Donald Knuth Lectures on Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

TLDR: Cruddiy is no-code Bootstrap 4 PHP form builder for MySQL tables.

I started Cruddiy when the Covid-19 lockdowns happened this spring, to keep me busy. And I released it on GitHub. After 25 stars and 13 forks on GitHub and a couple of really encouraging messages on the original Cruddiy post, I thought it was time for an update.

Cruddiy now supports table relationships via foreign keys.

This means:

• You can add new or delete existing table relations by picking columns that have a foreign key relation.
• You can add specific actions for each table relation, like:
  • ON UPDATE : CASCADE / SET NULL / RESTRICT
  • ON DELETE: CASCADE / SET NULL / RESTRICT
• Picking specific actions will result in different behavior. Please read up what these mean (mostly you want ON UPDATE CASCADE and ON DELETE CASCADE).

Having table relations in place wil have the following results for Cruddiy:

• On the Create form the field will be populated with the correct key information.
• On the Update form: the correct stored value will be preselected but you can still choose (update) different values from the select list.

Note 1: the table relationship builder is the first step in the Cruddiy CRUD creation process. However it is completely safe to ignore this step and move to the next step! I would even strongly advise doing so if you are not sure what you need to do, because it might break things. Also if you just want one or a couple of simple unrelated forms it is perfectly safe to skip this step.

Note 2: the table relationship builder is of course just a GUI for something you can also do in PHPMyAdmin or MySQL from the commandline. However, Cruddiy makes it visible and easier to work with table relations.

Some screenshots:

The post Cruddiy: table relationship support via foreign keys appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

Here are the six basic responsibilities you have as a professional in the modern workplace. Follow these and you are on the right path.

I wrote these down as a reminder to myself and to pass on to people. Because it is easy to lose sight of your basic responsibilities. I also noticed a lot of young professionals struggle with what is asked of them.

Regardless of your specific job — whether you are a manager or engineer — just starting out or a seasoned professional, the following basics will always apply:

1. Know thy time
2. Add value
3. Use your leverage
4. Manage expectations
5. Track your tasks
6. Prepare for a different job

I distilled these from my experiences as an engineer, Engineering Manager and CTO for a tech company. And all of them were shaped or sharpened by reading and applying what I read.

The basics are presented as instructions. The key action per item is bold and at the bottom of each item are the book references in cursive.

Know thy time

Time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday’s time is gone forever and will never come back.

Peter F. Drucker

This is the most important thing you can learn about the most valuable asset you have: your time. Every second is unique and you can only spend it once.

Know where your time goes and demand that your time is used wisely.

Know

Measure your time. There are many ways. Here is the most basic one: write down, during the day what you did and then every morning — and this key: take a moment and reflect on the previous day.

• What worked, what didn’t, what are you happy about, what not?
• What would have liked to done differently?

Do this every day and you will see patterns emerge, and you will learn more about yourself and your talents and your future (more on these two things later).

If you have never tracked your time: this is the most basic thing you can do. As you become more skilled in this, weekly, monthly or yearly reflections provide even more insight. As will discussing and reflecting on your accomplishments with an accountability partner or coach.

Demand

You value your time, and will even more when you start writing down your daily accomplishments.
And you should also demand people to take your time seriously. Examples:

• Skip meetings if you don’t feel you can add value or if you think you can add more value somewhere else.
• Shorten your meetings, someone shoots an invite for an hour? A very common thing that happens in organisations. Reply to make it half an hour.

Companies and teams have the characteristic to follow Parkinson’s law. Study this. This is a real thing organisations and teams struggle with. Be on the lookout for it.

If you cannot manage your time you can’t manage anything else.

Read on and you will see that this specific instruction permeates all other instructions.

Read Drucker and Aurelius to know more about this responsibility.

Add value

You are paid to add value. You are not paid for your time; for simply clocking in 8 hours every day. If you are, your company is doing it wrong and you are on the wrong path.

If you are an engineer there are only two things that add value, and only two:

Creating things and solving problems.

That’s it.

You help your company by creating things and solving problems that their customers pay for. This is your contribution. Everything else is a byproduct of the above. And if it isn’t, immediately stop doing it.
You are by no means paid to have meetings, they can be a necessity, a means to an end, but never the end itself.

Meetings are also arrangements for people to socialize. This is fine and has its purpose (teambonding or building trust or just fun). But again, the real purpose and goal is to always add value.

Yes, but I am a manager?

Make no mistake, as a manager you are paid for the exact same two things. However as a product-, customer- or teammanager, your work is often less tangible or more indirectly related to the above. But if you drill down, your responsibilities as a manager are:

• Decide priorities of things that need to be created or solved
• Keep track of projects and commitments
• Communicate within team and with other teams
• Help team members grow

These four duties as a manager (or senior engineer) are to ensure the team is still doing either one of these two things: creating the right things or solving the right problems. There is no difference in responsibilities, just different tasks.

Read Grove, Drucker and Evans to know more about this responsibility.

Use your leverage

If you combine the above two instructions (Know thy time and Add Value) it leads to this: you are always trying to spend your time to add as much value as possible.

Whether you are an engineer or manager: you have unique talents. This is your leverage, this is what enables you to add value, this is why you were hired. Use your talents as a leverage to always try to add the most value.
You know your talents. And if you don’t, start writing down what you did the day before, reflect on it and I assure you your talents will soon emerge (Know thy time). And with this knowledge:

Always ask: where can I at this moment add the most value?

Is sitting in a meeting with junior engineers to train them the best use of my time? Or should I try to finish building this database cluster? Or should I call this supplier and discuss their proposal? Different tasks that ask for different talents. And the answer is never straightforward and depends on many things. You have to decide.

But the rule of thumb is: always pick the activity where your unique talents can have the most impact to the added value of the team or company at that moment.

Read Grove to know more about this responsibility.

Manage expectations

In trying to reach the goals of either creating things or solving problems there are only two outcomes.

1. You reach the result: you created what was expected or you solved the problem. Great!
2. You communicate early that things weren’t going as planned. Not great, but this happens all the time.

It is your responsibility to manage expectations and try to eliminate surprises.

For companies: surprises are bad, avoid them. A job is not a birthday surprise party. Your coworker does not like surprises, nor does your manager and I can assure you his / her manager even less (unless it is their actual birthday of course).
The way to avoid surprises is to communicate often and early. And sometimes this is the only tool you have to manage things that are beyond your control (suppliers, illness etc.).

Of course always focus first on the first outcome (reach the result), but don’t wait to communicate when commitments or expectations are on the verge of being broken.

Read Allen, Drucker and Crucial Conversations to know more about this responsibility.

Track your tasks

You cannot slay the dragon until you can see it.

Cal Newport

If you have a job where you don’t have to write down what your team, manager, customers, third parties need from you, you are either a genius or your job cannot be very satisfying. Let’s assume you are not a genius and that you have a challenging job. You need to start writing things down. You need a system to keep track of everything that is in your head, to get it out of your head and actively work on it.

Clear your head by writing everything down. Please don’t use precious brain cycles to keep track of what needs to be done. I repeat: you are not paid to keep track of things. You are paid to add value. You do not add value by keeping track of things, you add value by creating things or solving problems.

At the simplest form this is the opposite of Know thy time where you write down and reflect on what you did the previous day (backwards). Track your tasks is, at the most basic level, a list of what you will do today (forward). You can combine these two activities in one sitting, every morning. It will only take a couple of minutes.

Write down what you want to achieve today.

This not only gives you a reflection point for the next morning (Know Thy Time) but it will also structure your day and give you a good guideline of when you need to demand your time to be taken seriously (“Sorry I can’t work on that right now because..” etc.).

It will also ensure that you add value and it will be an invaluable resource in deciding whether you need to manage expectations.

Of course there are all sorts of ways to structure this to prioritize or specify your tasks. Here are the three main ones:

• First things first
• Start with the end in mind
• Do one thing at a time

You can discuss at length about these, but see it as starting point. The key thing here is: you need a system: pen & paper, a computerfile or specialized tools. It does not matter what system you use. But please: clear your head.

Read Allen, Grove, Drucker and Covey to know more about this responsibility.

Prepare for a different job

This is not your last job. You will need to find another job. Prepare for this. This is your responsibility. Now. Not when you find yourself looking for a new job.

Know where your time goes and you will know your talents. You will also need to know or find out if your talents apply to other areas.

Actively prepare for a different job by always testing your talents against other jobs.

Know the difference between skill and talent. A good employer will look for talent more than skill. Say you are masterfully skilled in the custom, specialized CRM of your current employer. Your next employer will not have this CRM. This skill is useless. Your talent however could be you are very quick in picking up working with CRMs in general.

See training as a continuous process and not an event. You should always be trying to learn new things. Look to train for things that are generally applicable.

Don’t know what to do next? Write your own eulogy, be candid. What would you want people to say or remember about you? This is not some morbid experiment but one that will reveal your true desires. See if they line up with your talents. Where is the gap? Actively try to close this gap.

Read Drucker, Kotter, Covey and Johnson to know more about this responsibility.

Conclusion

This post is a summary of every responsibility you have as a professional. It presents a coherent model of six principles that can sharpen your views on your professional responsibilities.

This post also offers a variety of literary references as a starting point for you to dig deeper into the mentioned subjects. Because every subject here is, of course, much broader and deeper than will fit into a blogpost.

Why?

This question was left unanswered. And for all intended purposes it could as well have been at the top of the post. Why indeed a summary of principles and instructions?

Simple: you spend about half your waking life at your job. This is time you can only spend once. So this is extremely valuable time.

Your time is valuable and important and you want to spend it on something that is both satisfying and fulfilling. You don’t want to spend your days propped up behind a screen doing things until you can clock out, right? This a a dead-end. And you know it. I believe that a job that is satisfying and fulfilling provides meaning and leads to a richer life. And I am sure these instructions can you help you achieve that.

This post is also available in Dutch .

The post Working 101 appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

Moby-Dick stats

Moby-Dick clocks in around 650+ pages and 212,000 words. It’s not a small book but it’s also not the biggest book I ever read. But it was definitely one of the hardest, and one that demanded a dedicated and focused effort to finish.

Long story short: reading Moby-Dick is hard work and it’s not exactly the most riveting thing I ever read.

It doesn’t keep you on the edge of your seat. Surprisingly very little happens for such a big book. You can summarize the entire thing in one sentence (yes, I’ll get to the allegories later).

That is not to say that this is not a smart book. Herman Melville’s IQ probably bordered on genius and he pulled out all the stops with Moby-Dick. However, those two things don’t necessarily make for a good book. Why is it then than Moby-Dick is so revered? I can think of a few things.

Words, just so.many.different.words

Melville’s dictionary must be the most abused book ever. Because if there was an Olympics for using the most different words, Herman Melville would win first, second and third place. This is actually a scientific fact: “About 44% of the distinct set of words in this novel occur only once”

Read that again: 44% of all words in Moby-Dick are used only once.

If you don’t believe me just open this book on any page and you can tell this right away. Moby-Dick is not like any other book.

It is divided in 135 small chapters — and one very important epilogue — each chapter deals with a dedicated subject. And it seems Melville took it as an exercise to fill each chapter with as many different words as he could. Not only that, he likes to use long, half page long rambling sentences. There is also an enormous variation in style per chapter; from dialogue to scientific descriptions to inner thoughts to poetic or philosophical or almost theatrical treaties. And to top it all off, this is all done in English from 170 years ago. Just to give you an idea of what a chore it is to read.

And all of these things are reasons Moby-Dick stands out among other books. Another is because it’s about whaling.

Whaling

Whaling in the 19th century was astoundingly difficult and fantastical venture. If I hadn’t known about it and you would explain it to me I wouldn’t believe you. People actually set out on wooden ships for three or four years and just randomly sail around the world until they found some whales?! Whales that are actual leviathans and that can kill any man in an instant? And when they do spot these whales, they set out on even smaller wooden boats to try to harpoon these 100 foot creatures, BY HAND?! Surely this is all made up! This cannot be real! But it is.

Whaling is an absolutely insane endeavour. And this makes it a terrific backdrop for a story.

I would like to argue no man before or after has know more about whaling than Melville. He not only writes from his own experiences as a whaler, he also had probably read everything ever written (at that point) about whaling and whales. And he uses all this knowledge to bombard the reader with more facts than your brain can handle, about whaling, whales and whalers.

He also shares detailed glimpses of 19th century Nantucket life. Which makes this book a time-capsule of the American spirit. These are reasons this book is so revered in the English speaking world. So much so, that it is regarded as the definitive Great American Novel.

Even though the book suffered greatly from negative reviews and criticism about alleged blasphemy. And it wasn’t until a good 70 years later that Moby-Dick started to be regarded as the classic we now all know. (But this is a story by itself).

Allegories

On to the good parts. Moby-Dick is not really about the demonstration of Melville’s mastery of language or even about whaling. These two things make it unique, but what makes it good is what is under the surface (see what I did there?).

This book is absolutely brimmed with allegories, allusions and metaphors. Some small, some encapsulate the entire plot, some are even displayed by the book’s structure.

The most clear-cut one is of course that the whale Moby-Dick represents fate itself. But there are many more. Philosophical or contemplative of nature. You can talk and discuss and debate on this endlessly.

Meta

There is one meta-allegory I particularly like. In Moby-Dick we read about a whaler, Ahab, that sets out to kill this mythical monster Moby-Dick, a sperm whale he lost his leg to previously. We as a reader slowly get to experience how this whaler goes maniacally insane and takes his crew with him. Until they all go under.
In a sense this is about Melville himself and his experience and difficulty writing this book! And we, the readers, are the crew.

This is just one take. But there are many more direct allegories, about names, stories and references. Specifically the boats and captains Ahab and Ishmael meet along the way, are loaded with biblical references and meaning. I am sure I probably missed a whole bunch too. Melville uses these narrative devices to deal with many different themes. And it is exactly this what sets Moby-Dick apart from other books. There is a score of things that aren’t said, but implied.

My copy of the book ends with a couple of letters from Melville about his book and his struggles in getting it published. Right after the letters the book, oddly enough, shares a couple of very negative reviews from the time of publishing. I am not sure why they are in there. Maybe to demonstrate that people did not recognize the genius at once? Or how remarkable it is that this book still became a classic? I am not sure.

Conclusion

All in all Moby-Dick is a distinctive and unique reading experience detailing a story about a very specific time and endeavour. And I can now boast “I read Moby-Dick”, and I am glad I did but I will also say I didn’t really enjoy reading it all that much.

I think I understand what Melville set out to do and I admire his genius. I also think I understand the appeal of this book 170 years later. This book makes you work and that is not a problem, but there were times that I really had to force myself, and that does not happen to books that are favorites of mine.

Melville was a genius wordsmith and put many ideas in this book for people to contemplate over for generations to come. But as is the case with music, I don’t care how many different notes a guitar player can hit on his guitar in 1 minute, that is not music, that is a demonstration of mastery. In the end it is about what songs this mastery produces. And in this case, I think I wanted to have liked the song more.

The post Moby-Dick – Herman Melville appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

I have been a happy user of the Independent Publisher theme since this site started, and I still use it on my other blog. It’s a terrific theme and I like a lot.

But because I really like clean and simple aesthetic I made quite a few tweaks to it, specifically to the fonts and CSS.

My favorite themes are usually black and white themes. Two of my favorite examples of this aesthetic are https://kevq.uk/ and https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/. Both excellent looking sites in my opinion, and a joy to read.

So I looked closely at those sites and copied a few things from them. For example: both use the gorgeous Merriweather serif font as the main font for the body text. So did my site (this wasn’t the previous theme default font). I really like serif fonts, they add a sort of legibility and make big text blocks more readable.

But I always kept tweaking the theme: letter-spacing, font-size, colors and more, and I was never 100% happy with it. Especially when things looked good on the desktop, it would look a bit off on mobile. Or the other way around.

Neve

Last week I came across this tweet for a new theme called Neve from ThemeIsle and the example was striking enough to give it a try. And I was happily surprised but how easy, complete and fast this theme was out of the box. I have made exactly 0 CSS tweaks to it. What you’re seeing now is default Neve. I have tried *many* themes over the years, and always most lack something. Neve checks all the boxes for what I have been looking for, for quite some time.

And even though Neve uses sans-serif fonts, I found this theme to have the most overall consistent experience (desktop and mobile) and the configuration options are plentiful. And it’s really fast: which is really important. My site feels snappier because of it.

So I made the decision to switch themes. And I like it a lot. The last couple of days I go to my own site, revisit old posts, just to see how they look and I am always pleased with the appearance. The line-spacing is just right, the header font-weight perfect, it looks good on dektop and mobile, it’s clean and it’s fast.

Gripes

There are two gripes.

1. I noticed when you don’t center an image, the image caption will sort of blend with the text. And it will not really be clear that the caption belongs to the image. The fix is easy though: center your images and the caption will be centered. Another solution could be to make the caption font smaller or use a different shade of grey to make it more distinct.
2. The other gripe is one I have to examine a little bit closer, but I don’t think the Neve quote blocks look all that good. If anything a good quote might be best served by a serif font to stand out a bit. But, this is by no means a deal breaker, but I might take a closer look at this.

But also I don’t want to tweak too much. I actually really like that I can use this theme with default settings and that it looks really good. So if you’re looking for a great, clean, fast theme: give Neve a try!

The post New WordPress theme: Neve appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

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 a personal best for me and this blogpost is about how I did this.

When I say that I have read a book, I mean: I read it cover to cover. No skimming or skipping, or glossing through. That’s not reading. And no audio books. Nothing against that, but my point is to read a book as the author intended it (of course, this is different when you study a subject and need to pick and choose parts).
Full disclosure, I am currently experimenting reading Moby Dick with the book in hand and the audio book playing along. It’s fun, and a good way to get your teeth into such a classic. But I still need my eyes to follow the words and I don’t think listening to an audiobook while doing other things is the same experience. A book is not a podcast.

Getting serious

I’ve always liked reading but if I had to state a regret it would still be that I wish I had read more. There is always a certain anxiety when I enter a library or bookstore. The average human, or even a frantic reader, will never read more than a few thousand books in their lifetime. So I can never read just what my local library has in stock: even if it takes a lifetime. There are just too.many.books. With this in mind, a minute watching TV is a minute wasted reading.

I realised I find few activities more rewarding than reading. With this realisation in mind I consciously decided that I would take reading more seriously. And of course I still watch a little bit of TV and movies, but just a bit more consciously.

Here are some principles I developed around reading to keep me on track.

Principle 1: Track broadly

For me, this is key. So much so, that last year I wrote my own book tracking app, to exactly fit my needs. In my app I cannot only track what I have read, or am currently reading, but also what I want to read.

I used to use a spreadsheet, whatever works for you, but I was often getting lost in what I was reading (see Principle 2). So having this app definitely helps.

Principle 2: Read widely

This may be the most important principle on multiple levels. It not only means that I want to read many different books or genres but also that I like to read them simultaneously.

Of course I have favorite genres or subjects, but I try to be open-minded about every book (I wouldn’t snuff Danielle Steele). You never know what you might learn about yourself.

Levels

And before I meticulously kept track, this is usually where I got lost. Not every book demands the same energy or attention level and you should be able to switch it up without regret.

Which I do. So at a certain point last year I was reading 11 different books at once: diaries, biographies, novels, management books, historical books. You name it. Because my app allows me to directly see what I started it’s easy to keep track of this and — most importantly — switch it up when I am not feeling a certain book. Instead of dreading picking up a certain book for months or a half read book getting lost on my bookshelf I just move on to a different book, and know I will eventually get to that book. My app tracks it. And I always do! Some books I haven’t touched in months but I pick em up again after some time when I feel like it, and more often than not it’s usually a better experience. I have now had this experience more than once. And it was quite the revelation. The lesson is: different moods ask for different books.

So far I only actively stopped reading two books, with no intention of reading any further ever (this is fine!). So this is rare. Most books I start, I have already done a little bit of research, to know enough that I want to read them.

Another benefit when you switch a lot between books is that I noticed it helps to retain what the books are about. It’s a different experience when you read a book over two months as opposed to two days. Because you have to actively remind yourself of what the book was about again.

Principle 3: Buy loosely

The app allows me to add books to my wish list, and as you can see in the screenshot I bought 90 books last year. Mostly from thrift stores, they are absolute goldmines. And yes, I don’t read e-books. I need to feel paper.

The ‘Books I want‘ list from my app is a guideline for thrift store visits, but mostly I just look all over the place. And I used to be a bit hesitant to buy a book, as it would indicate a future commitment to myself to read it. But since reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan and his thoughts on famous writer Umberto Eco’s personal library (here and here), I have been able to shake this habit a bit. So if a book looks interesting: buy it!

Tips

So those are the three main principles. Here are some other tips that help to keep your reading on track.

• I dislike using a highlighter. It ruins books. Even if it’s just paper that got for 50 cents a thrift store.
• I have used the classic highlighters and last year I moved to a pencil highlighter, a little bit less permanent but still not great. So since a couple of months I use TRANSPARENT bookmark stickies.
  • They are not permanent.
  • I can still read what I highlighted.
  • I can remove them without tearing the paper.
• It doesn’t matter what type of book it is, I read every book with a stack of sticky bookmarks and annotate what I like or want to remember. (This would definitely be my number one reason to move to eBooks at some point..).
• To retain things, I usually read the sticky parts again after finishing or when picking up a book if it has been a while.
• Read everyday. Even it’s just a couple of minutes. Don’t break the chain. Create a habit.
• Put your phone on mute. I do most of my reading between 8 and 10 pm. If you text or call me between those hours, I probably won’t see or hear it.
• Write! After all, what good is reading if you don’t write? I tend to blog about every book I read (few exceptions: i.e. when it’s a really small book). This helps with retention and thinking about what you liked or want to remember. And also you create your own little archive. I often look up my own posts, to see what I was thinking.

So there you have it! Now, let’s see what’s on TV.

The post How I read 52 books in a year appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

On May 10th this year, Bono turned 60. So I thought it would be a good time to (re)read his 2005 biography.

I got this book, with a bunch of others, in 2006 at an HMV in Manchester. Good times.

It sort of took me back a bit when I realised that most of this book was written in 2003 and 2004, when Bono was only a couple years older than I am now. By then he was of course already a very well established and very famous person. The book is written somewhere between two U2 albums: All That You Can’t Leave Behind and How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. So it finds Bono in a sort of musical lull, but with VERY high energy on issues like humanitarian aid en debt-relief causes.

Banter

The book is written as a dialogue, which is a very interesting concept! But I don’t think the chemistry between this Irishman and Frenchman works all the time. Or, I just don’t get their banter, because it’s cringy at times and the questions often go in directions I don’t want them to go (I would have asked different things!). It is also strange that there seems to be an effort to put everything down verbatim (with inserts like “Bono laughs” or “pauses reflectively”) while clearly this book and the interviews have been edited. Which is fine! But why the emphasis on this fake realness?

I am also not sure of the reason for this biography, other than to emphasize Bono’s humanitarian efforts. This biography therefore also suffers what so many biographies suffer from: high on current events, low on what actually made the subject into the person they are now (Neil Young’s biography is the worst example of this).

Granted, Bono is very vulnerable in discussing his youth and parents. This was probably the most revealing and most interesting part. Also because these are few of the actual biographical parts of this biography. I also enjoyed how Bono talked about his religious beliefs. You don’t always get this from the music. But the tête-à-têtes Bono had with Bush and Clinton were probably very on topic in 2005, but they seem like something from another lifetime in 2020 and less relevant.

So I get this is not a book about U2 but about Bono, but I would have expected a little bit more stories about music. And this is not like Keith Richards or Bruce Springsteen‘s tremendous biographies, which were written when they were much older and are much more about the music.

So now that I am done complaining, I could just say that this book is less of a book than more of a collection of what could be magazine interviews, but HOWEVER: I still liked it!

I mean, it’s about Bono. And he definitively is one of a kind. How could you not like it!

The post Bono on Bono – Michka Assayas appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

This little book embodies the concepts of how to deal with change in one memorable parable.

Johnson probably wasn’t the first to do so, but this concept — packing management theories as stories — is everywhere now. And this little book, probably has a lot to do with this trend. It was after all the bestselling book EVER at Amazon.com’s tenth anniversary. Go figure.

The post Who moved my cheese? – Spencer Johnson appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

Sure, you’ll get an introduction on Marx, and you get a better understanding of what influenced his thinking and what his special relation to Hegel was. Interesting, enlightening, great!

However for an introduction I find the language, specifically in the critical parts, way too scientific. So I am always struggling with the question for who are these books written? Clearly an experienced philosopher would not pick up an introduction like this? And for someone just dipping their toes — it is after all an introduction — I think the language can be a bit overwhelming. So writer, who are you trying to impress? The material is there, but it could do with a bit of editing.

The post Marx – Peter Singer appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

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 flashbacks and you are thrown right in the middle. And a lot is left unexplained, specifically Hasidic customs. Some, you intuitively understand (e.g. consistently touching/kissing doorposts) while others left me puzzled (an entire kitchen wrapped in tin-foil?). The show does not over-explain and it keeps the story going, but it does provide enough pointers to dig deeper.

The final audition scene tied a lot of things together — families, friends and worlds — while at the same time it made it clear that some bridges were definitely burned. Wonderfully done.

Loose ends?

However, there were some things that could have been better, or that made little sense. Spoilers ahead.

• How long was Esty in Berlin, are we watching days, weeks or even months? Sometimes I thought this was a couple of days. But that didn’t always make sense.
• Why did the grandmother die? Esty was never made aware of this, so what was the purpose of this tragic subplot?
• What was the meaning of Moishe’s successful gambling scene? The fact that he won in a pokergame didn’t add anything new to his character (we already knew he had an ambivalent personality) or the story, but they made it seem significant — including his full monty dive into a Berlin river.
• I understand that a miniseries that is almost shorter than the latest Scorsese does not have time for everything. However, the relationship Esty quickly gets with the coffee-guy felt a bit forced and far-fetched for her character arc. You don’t go from removing your sheitel to sleeping with a guy in two (?) days.

This being said, maybe some of these are setups; loose ends for another season? It could very well be, because there are still some story lines left to explore (specifically Moishe). I would watch it.

The post Unorthodox – Netflix miniseries appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

As it spans some 30+ years, there are mild variations noticeable, but overall: what you see is what you get and with Bill Gates and that is head-on, rational straightforwardness and a passion for software.

The post Impatient Optimist: Bill Gates in His Own Words – Lisa Rogak appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

Since the quotes are all dated I particularly noticed 3 types of Steve.

• The brass, cocky, young Steve (everything up until 1985, before his Apple exit)
• The reflective, contemplating Steve (from 1985 – 2000 the in-between NeXT/Pixar years)
• The seasoned, wise Steve (2000 – 2011)

You can probably date the quotes based on their spirit to either three of these periods.

The timeline after the quotes was a great plus for this book as well as the references! However this book was not without mistakes, there never was an iPhone 4GS (a 4S sure) and the iPod was introduced on October 23 2001 (not in november).

The post iSteve – George Beahm en Wim Zefat appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

No, this law is a vehicle, for these 9 loosely connected stories to present — very clever — logical puzzles often with a philosophical or ethical undertone. And this is what makes this work hold up, even after 70 years (this was written in 1950 ).

Our views on robots might have changed but the questions remain valid. And it not so much the robots Asimov makes us think about, but even more so about what it means to be human.

The post I, Robot – Isaac Asimov appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

Jitsi is also a great piece of software to host. And installing and hosting your own video software conferencing software has never been easier.

Here are some tips to run the Jitsi stack smoothly on your server and how to customize Jitsi Meet.

Tips

• Put Ngnix in front of Jitsi. This helps to handle the bulk of the web requests. Otherwise Java will take care of this, and this is not what Java is particularly good at.
• Use JRE11 to run jicofo and jitsi-videobridge2. The latest Debian 10 (Buster) comes with both JRE8 and JRE11. Make sure to use JRE11. This made quite a bit of difference in our tests.

ii openjdk-11-jre-headless:amd64 11.0.7+10-2ubuntu2~18.04 amd64 OpenJDK Java runtime, using Hotspot JIT (headless)

• Always use the latest Jitsi packages. They get updated quite frequently, and you definitely want the latest. E.g. last Friday the latest release had a bug, this was fixed the same day. So make sure you always run the latest version.

root@meet01:/# cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jitsi-stable.list
deb https://download.jitsi.org stable/

We run the following packages.

ii jitsi-meet 2.0.4548-1 all WebRTC JavaScript video conferences
ii jitsi-meet-prosody 1.0.4074-1 all Prosody configuration for Jitsi Meet
ii jitsi-meet-turnserver 1.0.4074-1 all Configures coturn to be used with Jitsi Meet
ii jitsi-meet-web 1.0.4074-1 all WebRTC JavaScript video conferences
ii jitsi-meet-web-config 1.0.4074-1 all Configuration for web serving of Jitsi Meet
ii jitsi-videobridge2 2.1-197-g38256192-1 all WebRTC compatible Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU)

• Running from package also has the benefit that the package maintainers tune several kernel parameters specifically for video chat with the installation. You definitely want this.

Other tips

With all of the above you should be good to go. The following two tips are optional and more user specific, if you still run into (bandwidth) issues.

• Ask clients to scale their video quality to low definition. There is a server wide setting that should theoretically be able to enforce this, but I have not been able to get this to work.

• Use Chrome. Jitsi does not work on Safari at all, but should work just fine on Firefox. However it seems specifically designed for Chrome. In my experience: when everyone is on Chrome, Jitsi Meet seems to work best.

Customizing Jitsi Meet

Every time you upgrade your Jitsi packages, all your custom changes will be overwritten. You can run this script after every upgrade to change your personal settings. Please change appropriate settings for your installation.

#Run this after a Jitsi upgrade

cp -ripv own-favicon.ico /usr/share/jitsi-meet/images/favicon.ico
cp -ripv own-watermark.png /usr/share/jitsi-meet/images/watermark.png

sed -i 's/Secure, fully featured, and completely free video conferencing/REPLACE THIS WITH YOUR TITLE TEXT/g' /usr/share/jitsi-meet/libs/app.bundle.min.js

sed -i 's/Go ahead, video chat with the whole team. In fact, invite everyone you know. {{app}} is a fully encrypted, 100% open source video conferencing solution that you can use all day, every day, for free — with no account needed./REPLACE THIS WITH YOUR OWN WELCOME TEXT/g' /usr/share/jitsi-meet/libs/app.bundle.min.js

sed -i 's/Start a new meeting/REPLACE THIS WITH YOUR OWN TEXT/g' /usr/share/jitsi-meet/libs/app.bundle.min.js

sed -i 's/jitsi.org/yourowndomain.com/g' /usr/share/jitsi-meet/interface_config.js

sed -i 's/Jitsi Meet/YOUR OWN TITLE/g' /usr/share/jitsi-meet/interface_config.js

/etc/init.d/jicofo restart && /etc/init.d/jitsi-videobridge2 restart && /etc/init.d/nginx restart && /etc/init.d/prosody restart

The post Jitsi finetuning and customization appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

But this post is not about the podcast but about the book!

After the first 50 episodes creator Andrew Hickey bundled the adapted episode transcripts into the first volume of a book series. And, of course, I had to get it, as an unmissable reference and to support the podcast.

Here are some thoughts on the book’s look and feel as it arrived in the mail this morning. So this is not a book review!

• I’ll start with what I don’t like (and what can’t be the author’s fault at all). This book is printed-on-demand , and your mileage may vary, but on my particular copy the cover has been cut off prematurely. So the letter “c” from the word “Music” is right on the edge of the cover. It bothers me a bit and it’s a shame that such a wonderful book has to suffer this fate.
• It’s quite a meaty book (I like that!). But I ordered the paperback and the postal service wasn’t too careful with it, so there are already some dents on the book. So you might want to get the hardcover.

• I was FULLY expecting the spine to have “Volume 1” or a at least a number on it, but that is not the case. I say this because I intend to buy every copy and imagined the series, identifiable by their consecutive numbers, would look majestically encyclopedic on my bookshelf.

• I love the black and white cover. It’s classy and timeless.
• As stated, it is a meaty book. I love holding it, it has a very nice feel to it. And the paper is pleasant, not too bright or hard.
• For a reference book the font is well chosen. I believe it’s Chord Symbol, which is fitting when you think about it. But more so, this font makes it easy to quickly skim and scan parts, which makes sense for a reference book (my intended use).
• The “Contents” (chapters) section only has the song titles, not the artists. I can think of a few reasons: especially in the early days, some songs were often done by multiple people (even at the same time). And after all it is a podcast about SONGS. But still, the podcast does have artist names. So I don’t quite understand this distinction.
• The chapters also have no numbers. Which is not a problem. But it seems the reference / link to the podcast has (deliberately?) been cut. The chapters seem to have no link to the podcast episodes.
• The absolute best parts of this book are the song index and the regular index. These are indispensable. I absolutely love them and they will often be my starting point when I want to look up something. They are very well done and look exhaustive.
• The page numbers are on the top of the page on the outside. Which is how I like it, this makes thumbing back and forth to the index easy.
• I thought I couldn’t love Andrew Hickey’s work more than I already did, but then I read his acknowledgement to Donald Knuth! I cannot state how much I adore this. (Knuth holds a special place in my heart, and I even host a podcast RSS feed for a couple of his lectures).

Conclusion

My wish for this podcast is that it will become so famous that Andrew Hickey will get a regular book deal, and the nuisances that come with print-on-demand will become a thing of the past. Nonetheless, this book is already a spectacular body of work by someone truly passionate and gifted, and a book that will look good on any bookshelf.

I love that this fantastic podcast, is now available in a format that can be picked up a 100 years from now and still be instantly accessible. Go buy it!

The post Volume 1: From Savoy Stompers to Clock Rockers – Andrew Hickey appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

Sounds obvious, right? But it usually takes a few iterations before software gains critical mass. And for a (critical) mass number of users, you need to remove roadblocks. Roadblocks that power-users or early adopters don’t mind dealing with, but for regular users make all the difference.

Here are some examples of software that were not always the first, but did remove the right roadblocks and cleared the road for the masses.

Netscape (Mosaic)

Netscape is probably the most classic example of this. You already had the internet and the World Wide Web. And you had Gopher, FTP and SMTP and the likes. But critical mass? You needed something much simpler! Something that didn’t require typing in difficult commands after connecting to some remote server. But a graphical user interface where you could just point and click*. That’s what really brought the masses to the World Wide Web.

(*You could argue that Windows 95 did exactly the same, eleven years after the Mac did it).

VLC

Remember when you had to download specific video codecs for your media player? I do and trust me you don’t want to do that. VLC was like a breath of fresh air because it took care of all that stuff.

VLC was not the first (or last) desktop video player. But it was the first that bundled all codecs and made sure you could pretty much throw every imaginable video format at it, and it would just play it! It removed that roadblock.

YouTube

Remember emailing videos? Sure that might work. But how can you be sure the receiver has the right codec (see above)? Or that the receiving email provider won’t mark the video as spam or too big for email? YouTube completely removed all barriers for uploading, sharing and viewing videos online in one go. Just from the browser and without a subscription. A lot of roadblocks: gone.

Spotify

CDs were already a thing of the past. But downloading, paying for and managing individual songs was still a lot of work. Spotify managed to figure this one out, and it turned out this is actually what a lot of people wanted. Every song available, at all times for a fixed fee? Talk about removing roadblocks.

WhatsApp

WhatsApp was not the first or only IM/chat software, not even by a long shot. So why did it succeed (in most parts of the world) as the number one smartphone chat app? Because they removed multiple roadblocks.

Early on WhatsApp put a lot of time and effort in making sure their software worked on any kind of cellphone, and specifically older, less powerful phones. Remember they offered a Java ME version? Because they understood chat is not a one-way street. It only works when everyone involved has the same access. Founder Jan Koum learned this from personal experience when trying to chat with family on the other side of the world on shabby internet connections.

And he and co-founder Brian Acton even carried around old phones for a long time. For this exact reason.

Slack

I never had a need for Slack (I’ve been using IRC for over 20 years), but I can clearly see what they did: they removed roadblocks.

While still offering pretty much the same core functionality as IRC offers: persistent group chat (emphasis on persistent). But: without the need of choosing servers, or setting up proxies or using intimidating software and all that other difficult stuff. They took care of all that. Oh, and you can share animated gifs.

iPhone

The iPhone is an amalgamation of hard- and software. But it probably belongs on this list, for all the same reasons. It was not the first smartphone, but it was the first that did everything right and it didn’t feel second grade (hardware and software wise). Before the iPhone there where many different smartphones in every shape and form, after the iPhone every smartphone looked like the iPhone. That should tell you something.

Zoom

I have personally never used Zoom, and from what I learned I probably won’t any time soon. But I can clearly see what’s happening here. All the (dirty) tricks they did with the installer and audio-stack: it is all about removing roadblocks. You can (and should be) critical of these kinds of tricks, but you can’t deny it made them the current go to app for video group chat, leaving Skype and the likes in the dust.

(I also think they have the best/easiest to remember name. That probably also helps. I could see it becoming a verb.)

C programming language

I maybe going out on a limb here, but I think C’s portability is undeniably a large factor in the succes of C (among other things). Because C was highly portable, it removed many roadblocks for the years ahead where many different hardware platforms all needed a higher level language but did not want to reinvent the wheel. C removed that roadblock and subsequently became a dominant language.

GPL

Entering dodgy terrain here. Not actual software, but a license. There are *many* licenses out there. But GPL was one of the first that removed many important roadblocks, about how to share and and distribute software that paved the way for a whole lot of other things. And caused an explosion of software in the 80s and 90s (GCC, GNU/Linux et al.)

Others?

These are just some examples but I always like to hear others! What software do you think removed a bunch of roadblocks to pave the way for mass adoption?

The post Ten pieces of software that removed roadblocks appeared first on Jan van den Berg.

String Theory is a collection of 5 DFW essays about tennis. It mostly covers 90s era tennis — Sampras and Agassi — but it closes with 2006 Federer. With DFW’s untimely death in 2008 I find it rather pleasing that by attending the 2006 Wimbledon final, Wallace got to witness, and write about the phenomenon that Federer is. And writing this in 2020, it is even more remarkable that Federer is still playing and competing with the best. Think about that for a second will you.

That said, his piece on Federer is not the best in this collection. But with Wallace that doesn’t mean it’s bad, because for any other writer such an essay would still be the summit of their writing career.

Though it seems with Federer that Wallace was, understandably, genuinely awestruck and smitten in such a way that he finds it hard to describe what makes Federer so special. And that probably says more about Federer’s remarkable talent than it does about Wallace’s.

But it is not just that what sets this essay apart from the others for me, but it is that there is less of Wallace himself in this specific piece. His surprised, bemused and bewildered observations of sometimes unrelated random events or encounters, sprinkled trough his essays, either in footnotes or the main body, are what make his writing so enjoyable. You can find this in most essays, but just a little bit less in the Federer one.

Take his complete letdown by the bland biography of famous tennis player Tracy Austin. I find it hilarious because it bothers him so much. Even though that (hilarity) was not the goal.
Because, mind you: in the end, even from such a dull an uninspiring sport biography, Wallace manages to ask valid questions about genius and talent and let’s you know the premise was not to be agitated and write amusingly about that, but to ask questions.

The essay about Michael Joyce might as well be the greatest thing ever written about tennis (or dare I say, sports in general?). It’s a complex and nuanced, highly technical, hyper personal but still general analysis of what constitutes greatness. He makes you see things with different eyes, while he is learning to see it for himself. Just amazing.

The lack of this personal observations with the Federer essay are a breeding ground for questions. Was this deliberate? Does this mean he was bored with this style? Was it a style? Questions you can endlessly debate.

Fact is never has their been a greater collection of stories about the game of tennis than what you’ll find in String Theory.

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