Faith – Jimmy Carter

I literally received this book from the hands of Jimmy Carter himself at a book signing in New York. I never met a president before — even if only for a few seconds — so I was keen to read his book! Carter always struck me as an interesting person. A multifaceted outlier: deeply religious […]

To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf

This was an exhausting book to read. Because it reads like a prolonged poem with a stream of thoughts about everything and anything and with very little dialogue. Two things are very clear though: Woolf went very deep and therefore this book can not be anything else than autobiographical. Feeling already exhausted as a reader, […]

Ten notable books I read in 2018

In 2018 I read 24 books (25th in progress). Here is a list of 10 books that stood out in one way or another. Some are recommendations. Besides music biographies, computer history and management/business books, I tend to read bestseller novels from a few years ago. By then the crowd has decided what’s good and […]

Can we replace paper?

Paper always beats rock and scissors. Because one of the few inventions greater than writing itself, is writing on paper. Paper writings are absolute, self-contained and transferable units of knowledge, which after publishing become and stay available and accessible for hundreds of years or more. Don’t take my word for it, there is this great […]

Advent of Code

Currently the yearly Advent of Code contest created by Eric Wastl is being held at adventofcode.com. That means the site is sprouting two daily programming challenges, until Christmas, to see who can solve them fastest. But it is not just about being fast of course, Advent of Code is a great way to improve your programming […]

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Red Dead Redemption 2

It’s been over a week since I ‘finished’ the most anticipated game of 2018 (or maybe even of the last five years); Red Dead Redemption 2. I say finished in quotes, because I clocked in around 50 hours in a little less than three weeks just to finish the main campaign, but the more I […]

First Man

This summer I heard that there would be a movie about the moon landing starring Ryan Gosling. That was all I needed to know. I had to go see it. And for a movie where you can’t expect surprises about the main story line — because it’s in every history book — it certainly did not […]

Save data from your broken Raspberry Pi SD card with GNU ddrescue

This week my Pi stopped working. After hooking up a monitor I saw kernel errors related to VFS. So the file system was obviously broken. Oops. The end conclusion is that the SD card is physically ‘broken’, but I still managed to salvage my data — which is more important than the card. Here’s how. […]

The Phoenix Project

When a co-worker handed me a copy of The Phoenix Project, the 8-bit art on the cover looked fun. But the tagline — ‘A Novel About IT, DevOps and Helping your Business Win’ — sounded a bit like the usual buzzword management lingo. But I was clearly wrong, I loved this book! It is unlike […]

Linux server principles

This is a list, in no particular order, of principles to adhere when running a secure Linux server. SSH – Never allow direct SSH root access (set PermitRootLogin No). SSH – Do not use SSH keys without a passphrase. SSH – If possible, do not run SSH on a public IP interface (preferably use a […]

My 2018 music discoveries (first half!)

Long time readers will know I love sharing my music discoveries. You can read the 2015, 2016, 2017 editions here. At the half-point of 2018 I feel it is time again because of some exceptionally exciting bands! So here we go. I’ll start of with a band that is actually twice on this list. They’re just […]

GNU coreutils comm is amazing

Most people know sort and uniq (or even diff) and usually use a mix of these tools when comparing two files. However sometimes, there is a shorter solution than piping different commands together: comm is your answer! The comm(1) command is one of the most powerful but also underused text tools in the coreutils package. Comm’s […]