I finished watching Get Back. Read my article about the first 30 minutes here. It’s safe to say this is hands down one of the best documentaries ever. I could not look away. Truly amazing. In between 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… Read More »Get Back part 2
I am only 30 minutes in to the 8 hour long — highly anticipated — Peter Jackson documentary and I already have many thoughts. I need to get these out before further viewing, because I have a feeling 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… Read More »The Beatles: Get Back
In classic yak shaving fashion; this weekend I created a static responsive image gallery generator. It’s one PHP file that — when run from the command line — generates a clean, fast and responsive (aka mobile friendly) video and image gallery with navigation from a directory of images and videos. The output is one single index.html file. The generator itself is a single PHP file (~300 LOC). And running it… Read More »Corbin: static responsive image and video gallery generator
For my Dutch speaking readers: on my other blog piks.nl janvandenberg.blog I started blogging daily. Six days a week you will find a short thought or observation that explicitly aims to be above 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… Read More »Bloglife @ janvandenberg.blog
I have a file where I keep notes & ideas. And I try to have as less friction as possible to add ideas to this file. To achieve this I made it so that when I am at my terminal I edited just two files to achieve this. .bashrc An alias in .bashrc to type just one letter and start the file in Vim in insert mode: .vimrc I added… Read More »Auto insert date when starting Vim
When I installed my new monitor — the Dell S2721QS — and attached it to my Dell laptop, something felt… off. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, the resolution was fine (3840 x 2160), screen was fine — brightness, contrast etc. — but the overall experience was more sluggish. Especially when moving my mouse. Ah of course, this new resolution calls for different mouse speed settings! But after… Read More »Connecting a Dell 4K monitor to HDMI
I see a shiny grassy green diamond, some guys in uniform. One guy on a patch of dirt in the middle throws a ball, and another guy tries to hit it with a stick. If he hits it he wins, if he doesn’t: the other guy wins. It looks like most sports. On second glance however, I realize things are not as clear. The guy with the stick — I… Read More »A European watches Major League Baseball
Remember 2020? Yeah, I know. Well here is the list you’ve been waiting for. Previous lists are here: 2019, 2018 part 1, 2018 part 2, 2017, 2016 and 2015 As usual: a you get couple of words and a 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… Read More »2020 Music Discoveries
You can’t Listen on demand Restart/replay a conversation Record a conversation or audio snippets Trace back when a conversation started See who is talking, you can only hear them Send (text) messages 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… Read More »Thoughts on Clubhouse
Download and install ImageMagick. Go to Windows Explorer and type sendto in the address bar. This will open the following path: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo The files here will be available as actions from the Windows “Send to” right-click context menu. Create a new (text) file in this directory and add the following line: magick.exe %1 %2 -resize “x%%[fx:max(u.h,v.h)]” +append -set filename: “COMBINED-%%k” “%%[filename:].jpg” This is essentially what will be executed when you… Read More »Merge two images in Windows from right-click context menu
The man with access to the nuclear launch codes has been deemed unfit for Twitter. And the country that doesn’t believe universal healthcare is a human right, all of a sudden believes access to Twitter should be an inalienable right. Interesting times! 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… Read More »Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach
I recently read ‘Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About’ by Donald Knuth from 2001. Recommended reading if you like reading about how a world-renowned computer scientist wrote a book about how he wrote a book that deals with another book! Sounds recursive 😏 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… Read More »Podcast: Donald Knuth Lectures on Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About