The Legacy of Bram Moolenaar
This weekend we learned that Bram Moolenaar had passed away at the age of 62. And this news affected me more than I expected. Like so many: I did not know Bram personally. But I've been using a tool m...
Tag: favorites
Audacity Tips
This is a public note to myself for working with Audacity; which I don't do too often, and I want to make sure I don't forget it. I recently created a 5 hour music project: a DJ radio show. The finish...
Floccus is the bookmark manager you have been looking for
Floccus does exactly what you want because Floccus doesn't break your bookmark management flow. The flow being: adding, changing, removing, moving bookmarks in your browser, straight from the bookmark...
I don't understand terminals, shells and SSH
Confession time: I don't fully understand how terminals, shells and SSH really work (and my guess is you don't either). And I don't mean the cryptography behind SSH. I mean how SSH and the terminal an...
ChatGPT and humans as prompt fodder
I woke up Sunday morning with an unnerving feeling. A feeling something had changed. A disturbance in the force if you will. I know that look Mainstream media seems blissfully unaware of what happened...
Jonathan Franzen on reading and literature
I've been on a bit of a Jonathan Franzen bender lately. I frequently write about him on my other site. The kickstart for all this was a book club meeting about Crossroads) for which I not only read th...
Welcome to the Fediverse
It was 2017 when I signed up for the Dutch instance of Mastodon. The newfangled thing. But it wasn't until last week that it clicked . It clicked for two reasons. Forget the Metaverse Mastodon is part...
Reaching 100 stars on GitHub: what I learned from putting code online
When the pandemic started in early 2020, I needed something to get my mind off things. Frustrated with most database form generation solutions I created Cruddiy and put it on GitHub. Two years later C...
Bypassing Hetzner mail port block (port 25/465)
I recently switched my VPS from Linode to Hetzner. I got more CPU, RAM and storage for less money. Pretty good right? However it wasn't after I migrated that I found out Hetzner blocks all outgoing po...
Corbin: static responsive image and video gallery generator
Corbin is one PHP file that — when run from the command line — creates 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.
Podcast: Donald Knuth Lectures on Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About
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...
How I read 52 books in a year
Principles and habits I developed to read one book per week. With these you can also start reading more.
Ten pieces of software that removed roadblocks
Successful software is not defined by the number of lines of code or number of clever algorithms. More often than not, successful software is defined by how many roadblocks it removes for the user. So...
String Theory - David Foster Wallace
If you read this blog, you know DFW is one of my favorite writers. I even named my book app, in part, after him. So I could be short about String Theory it's a absolute pure delight to read but, of co...
Cruddiy: a no-code Bootstrap CRUD generator
November 2020: Cruddiy now supports creating and deleting table relations (based on foreign keys) for cascading deletes/updates and and prepopulating select lists . Read more here. So you have a MySQL...
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Today is February 21st, David Foster Wallace's birthday. So it's rather fitting that today I finished reading his magnum opus: Infinite Jest. The notoriously long and difficult book from 1996 with vis...
Humankind: A Hopeful History (De Meeste Mensen Deugen) - Rutger Bregman
I don't know what the English title translation for Rutger Bregman's latest book will be. But I do know two things. One: there will be one. And two: it will be a bestseller. I do know now, and yes it...
PHP: how did it become so popular?
PHP empowers a gigantic part of the internet. So it is, by definition, a very popular (i.e. prevalent) language. But it also very popular (i.e. well liked) to dislike PHP as a serious language. This c...
Popular post postmortem
Yesterday I wrote a story about how Git is eating the world. And in less than 24 hours more than 10.000 unique IP addresses visited this article! This is not the normal kind of traffic for this site. So that calls for its own article.
Git is eating the world
Software is eating the world and Git is the fork with which it is being eaten.
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 s...
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 migratio...
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: co...
The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder is one of those books that always seems to pop up when ' computer people' share book recommendations. Exhibit A, exhibit B, exhibit C and so on you get the pi...
I still love RSS (you can too!)
RSS. It's kind of a weird acronym and people can't even seem to agree on the true meaning behind those three letters. It doesn't sound too sexy , but it does sort of have a recognisable logo. If you h...
Let's encrypt all the things!
You may notice something different on your favourite blog. Left of the URL in the address bar there is a little green lock! This means piks.nl is now served to you via SSL/TLS. You know, https:// inst...
China Observations
Last week I had the chance to visit China, specifically Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Shanghai. These are my observations of China, completely biased and uninformed, for personal future reference. https://t...
Snapchat
Snapchat is everywhere these days. And with everywhere, I mean a lot of people are talking about it like it's some sort of elusive enigma only the young kids are able to tune in to. The digital equiva...
How this site got hacked
(This is a crosspost from my other blog, that actually got hacked. This is for you, a Google search user, struggling with a hacked website). Last week I noticed some strange behaviour on my site. When...