Giacomo Joyce – James Joyce

A couple of years ago I stranded about half-way into Ulysses. It did not click. One of the greatest novels ever written, but I had little use for it. So I put it aside for another time. Recently I came across a rather insightful video (highly recommended) about Joyce and his work, and all of […]

The Death of Murat Idrissi – Tommy Wieringa

Tommy Wieringa is of course famous for his novel Joe Speedboot. A tremendous novel, where Wieringa demonstrates heaps of writers’ finesse. This book — the Death of Murat Idrissi — is no different. Even though this is a short and easy read, it touches on a lot of subjects and themes and has the Tommy […]

Gid – Get it done!

Last weekend I built a personal ToDo app. Partly as an excuse to mess around a bit with all this ‘new and hip’ Web 2.0 technology (jQuery and Bootstrap) 🙈 But mostly because I needed one, and I couldn’t find a decent one. Decent? Decent in my opinion would be: Self hosted Self contained Use […]

Create a Chrome bookmark html file to import list of URLs

I recently switched RSS providers and I could only extract my saved posts as a list of URLs. So I thought I’d add these to a bookmark folder in Chrome. However, Chrome bookmark import only accepts a specifically formatted .html file. So if you have a file with all your urls, name this file ‘url.txt’ […]

Generation X – Douglas Coupland

I am a Douglas Coupland fan. And I think his debut Generation X still holds up as one of his best novels. I probably read it for the first time over ten years ago. And I have since then read several other Coupland novels. (I also reviewed jPod extensively in 2007 on my Dutch blog). […]

The Trumpet of Conscience – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. was only 39 years (and 2 months and 19 days) old when he was murdered. Thirty-nine. I never realised this — until I am 39 myself now. When he died he had already received a Nobel prize and over 100 honorary degrees from all over the world, but more importantly, he […]

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again – David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace could write. And not just write, he could really write extraordinarily well. In related news: water is wet. Wallace’s writing struck me as an epiphany, a beacon of light, a clear and unmistakable differentiator between merely good writing and exceptional writing. I have known about DFW for some time now, and I […]

About WordPress, emojis, MySQL and latin1, utf8 and utf8mb4 character sets

PSA: the MySQL utf8 character set is not real Unicode utf8. Instead use utf8mb4. So you landed here because some parts of your website are garbled. And this happened after a server or website migration. You exported your database and imported this export or dump on the new server. And now your posts look like […]

Thomas Dekker: The Descent (Mijn Gevecht) – Thijs Zonneveld

I finished this book in one sitting. Partly because Zonneveld has a pleasant writing style. But also because the rather recent story of a hugely talented and (very) young cyclist who early on in his career got involved with dope and raced towards destruction is fascinating. It’s the (auto)biography of Thomas Dekker but it is […]

Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse Five is a well-known classic. And I had been wanting to read it for quite some time now, and now that I finally did, I must say it was absolutely not what I expected. In a good way. The book is a sort of autobiographical non-chronological story about the bombing of Dresden, but it […]

The Fall (De Val) – Matthias M.R. Declercq

Matthias M.R. Declercq pulled of two remarkable things. Not only did he manage to find this extraordinary story about friendship, ambition and sacrifice, he was also able to write it down in exceptional fashion. The events described in ‘The Fall’ (‘De Val’) are real, but the book is not necessarily a biography. The story revolves […]

Why We Sleep – Matthew Walker

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker is one of the most profound books I have ever read. It has directly impacted my attitude towards sleep and subsequently altered my behaviour. Books that change your behaviour are rare and this is one of them. You should read it. We all know that sleep is important. But […]