This is part 2 of my best music discoveries of 2018. Earlier editions are here: 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 (part 1).| Jan van den Berg
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!| Jan van den Berg
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 picture. | Jan van den Berg
The 2016/2017 NBA season has been a lot of fun so far. Just like the previous season. All kinds of records are being broken. It seems the game is changing. Or maybe it’s because we just keep track of everything now. Either way it’s much more interesting to follow the NBA than it was a decade ago.| Jan van den Berg
Most end-of-year lists are compiled of songs from that current year. That’s fine and all, but great music is timeless and you might discover things later, so my list will be a bit different. These are things I discovered last year, some old some new.| Jan van den Berg
Introduction In the early 90s, the debates over operating system design—most famously between Linus Torvalds and Andrew Tanenbaum—captured the attention of many in the tech community. While the fiery exchanges are often remembered as a clash of ideologies between monolithic and microkernel approaches, there is also a quieter narrative about influence and legacy that runs […] The post From Minix to the Cloud: Tracing the Enduring Legacy of Andrew S. Tanenbaum appeared first on Jan van de...| Jan van den Berg
This week I was playing around with my old theme — Neve — and made some tweaks. For posterity, it looked like this: This site has low volume posts, so I was trying to get a list of posts as my frontpage. But it didn’t really look like I wanted, so I left it. Yesterday […] The post New WordPress theme: Twenty Twenty-Five appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
A search bar An RSS feed An ‘About Me’ link A comment option A way to get in touch A clearly indicated date by post A reverse chronological order of posts A way to quickly jump to a specific date A way to always quickly return to the homepage But you can forget all this, […] The post A good blog has … appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
How to add the values of two (or more) solar inverters together in Domoticz. The post How to add the total of two solar inverters in Domoticz appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
How to get rid of all the thumbnails that are generated by WordPress by default and keep a grip on your wp-content folder. The post Manage your WordPress wp-content folder appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
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 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 […] The post Floccus is the bookmark manager you have been looking for appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
You can find many tutorials online on how to use ssh-agent or ssh-ident correctly. This is a short and simple two line fix aimed at a specific use i.e. a single connection to a jumphost. Add this to your .bashrc So now when you type jumphost: And from the jumphost you can ssh connect to […] The post Simple jumphost ssh-agent config appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
Start PowerShell 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.| Jan van den Berg
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 — and the shell for that matter — interact with one another. I recently realized that even though I’ve been […] The post I don’t understand terminals, shells and SSH appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
I woke up Sunday morning with an unnerving feeling. A feeling something had changed. A disturbance in the force if you will. 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* 🦗🦗 […] The post ChatGPT and humans as prompt fodder appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
If you cannot connect to a remote server from your Chromebook with SSH keys and you get this error: 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.| Jan van den Berg
I love Mastodon. I am a believer. 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 […] The post Five things I’d like to see in Mastodon appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
The green links on your Mastodon profile indicate that you are the owner of that link i.e. that website. 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 […] The post How to get green links on your Mastodon profile with WordPress appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
Yes, you. The person reading this. You should have a place on the internet that is completely yours and where you are in complete control of what you post. 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 […] The post You should blog more appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
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 […] The post Bloglife @ janvandenberg.blog appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
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 […] The post Auto insert date when starting Vim appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
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 […] The post Connecting a Dell 4K monitor to HDMI appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
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 […] The post Podcast: Donald Knuth Lectures on Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
Read here what Cruddiy is and what it can do for you: here is the code. 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 […] The post Cruddiy: table relationship support via foreign keys appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
Frequent visitors might notice a change to the site: I switched WordPress themes. 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 […] The post New WordPress theme: Neve appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
My book tracking app alerted me that I read 52 books over the last twelve months. So, *franticly crunching numbers* yes, indeed, that averages to one book per week! 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 […] The post How I read 52 books in a year appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
I have a soft spot for Bono. The megalomaniac lead singer of probably the world’s most commercial band (“the only band with their own iPod”). The Irish humanitarian multi-millionaire. Yes, I get all the criticism. Still, few singers can belt it out like Bono can. And I will forever stand by that. On May 10th […] The post Bono on Bono – Michka Assayas appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
People like stories, people remember stories. So, tell stories! This is what I learned from Seth Godin. But Spencer Johnson clearly understands this concept too. 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 […] The post Who moved my cheese? – Spencer Johnson appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
This was the third book in a twelve part series of introductions to famous thinkers/philosophers (previously I read Plato and Kierkegaard). You might expect these books to be small (check) and comprehensible (not so much). So like the other two books, this book suffers from the same problems. Sure, you’ll get an introduction on Marx, […] The post Marx – Peter Singer appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
I have a lot of respect for Bill Gates and tend to follow what he does. So this book, just like the one on Steve Jobs, is a nice reminder of the man’s personality and his thinking process. As it spans some 30+ years, there are mild variations noticeable, but overall: what you see is […] The post Impatient Optimist: Bill Gates in His Own Words – Lisa Rogak appeared first on Jan van den Berg.| Jan van den Berg
This is a book just with quotes from late Apple founder Steve Jobs. I already knew most of them, having read more than one book about Steve Jobs. Nonetheless, seeing his most salient quotes in one place is a good indication and reminder of the man’s personality and vision. Since the quotes are all dated […]| Jan van den Berg
This is part 2 of my best music discoveries of 2018. Earlier editions are here: 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 (part 1). Hands down my favorite tracks of 2018 are still One. Sentence Supervisor with Yelena, and City Calm Down with Blood. I have played these tracks more than any other. Both were featured in […]| Jan van den Berg
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 […]| Jan van den Berg
I did a music post for 2015 and 2016, so here is 2017! Whether it’s blogs, podcasts, movies or the YouTube algorithm, if you keep your ears open there’s always new music to discover. So here we go in no particular order. Of course this list couldn’t be complete without Morrissey. So let’s start with […]| Jan van den Berg
Last years’ post was pretty popular, so let’s continue this. You know the rules, so let’s go! I’ve always had a soft spot for Conor Oberst’s (aka Bright Eyes) fragility. After a rough period he dropped a new album, with pearls like this next one. Only 3,594 views so far, we should all be ashamed. […]| Jan van den Berg
Most end-of-year lists are compiled of songs from that current year. That’s fine and all, but great music is timeless and you might discover things later, so my list will be a bit different. These are things I discovered last year, some old some new. I don’t use Spotify or other streaming services. I keep my ears open, read […]| Jan van den Berg
I was impressed by the Netflix miniseries Unorthodox. Specifically with the talented actors, the believable authentic world-building and the spot-on casting (so good). With regards to all of these aspects this is a very good show. Huge parts of the show are in Yiddish which is a unique experience (especially when you speak a little […]| Jan van den Berg
Jitsi offers a great user experience because it doesn’t require an account, you just go to a Chrome URL and you’re pretty much good to go. You get a full blown video chat environment: complete with gridview, screensharing and chat options. No add ons or third party installations needed. I greatly prefer this instead of […]| Jan van den Berg
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 […]| Jan van den Berg
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. What I need from Audacity is: That’s mostly it. Audacity is a very powerful tool, but… Read More »Audacity Tips| Jan van den Berg
I am back to running Windows Terminal + Cygwin, after a stint with MobaXterm. I blogged about it before. Why: 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… Read More »Using Windows OpenSSH Agent with Windows Terminal and Cygwin| Jan van den Berg
WhatsApp is my most used app, but its development seems stagnant. 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… Read More »| Jan van den Berg
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 Cruddiy reached 100 stars on GitHub. Something which I did not expect. We could argue a long time on what a […]| Jan van den Berg
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 port 25 and 465 traffic. At least; for the first month for new customers. This means my new server… Read More »Bypassing Hetzner mail port block (port 25/465)| Jan van den Berg
Here’s a list of software tools I either started using this year or tools I think everyone should be using. 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… Read More »Ten 2022 Tool Tips| Jan van den Berg
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.| Jan van den Berg
Download and install ImageMagick. Go to Windows Explorer and type sendto in the address bar. This will open the following path: C:UsersAppDataRoamingMicrosoftWindowsSendTo 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… Read More »Merge two images in Windows from right-click context menu| Jan van den Berg
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… Read More »| Jan van den Berg
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 made by Bram for more than half my life — at least weekly, sometimes daily. That… Read More »The Legacy of Bram Moolenaar| Jan van den Berg
Yes, you read that correctly. Firefox on a Chromebook! Without tricks. 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.… Read More »Using the SonicWall Connect Tunnel with Firefox on a Chromebook| Jan van den Berg
The Debian documentation is sparse on how to correctly configure incoming SPF checks in the Debian Exim package. 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… Read More »Correctly configuring incoming SPF in Exim on Debian| Jan van den Berg
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 the book, but also watched and read a dozen or so Franzen interviews. Older and newer interviews.… Read More »| Jan van den Berg
[UPDATE July 2022: I switched to using MobaXterm which does the job just fine. I don’t like that it is not free/open but I do like that it comes with an integrated SSH agent, which makes life a lot easier] I had been a happy WSL1 user for many years, but after switching laptops I… Read More »Windows Terminal + Cygwin| Jan van den Berg
I recently switched my LAMP virtual server to a different VPS provider. 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… Read More »| Jan van den Berg
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… Read More »| Jan van den Berg
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 […]| Jan van den Berg
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… Read More »| Jan van den Berg
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 […]| Jan van den Berg
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… Read More »Thoughts on Clubhouse| Jan van den Berg
Do you struggle to organise your work, because it seems everybody wants something from you? Of do you often wonder whether you’re doing the right things? This post helps you to answer those questions. Here are the six basic responsibilities you have as a professional in the modern workplace. Follow these and you are on… Read More »| Jan van den Berg
I suspect Moby-Dick — the quintessential Great American Novel — has the curious accolade of being one of the most famous books ever, while also being one of the least read books. Its reputation greatly exceeds its appeal. Nonetheless, I had always wanted to read this extraordinary 170 year old book. And now that I… Read More »Moby-Dick – Herman Melville| Jan van den Berg
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 course, I won’t. String Theory is a collection of 5 DFW essays […]| Jan van den Berg
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 of the fediverse. Meaning it shares the core principles of the fediverse. With a little bit of reading, I… Read More »Welcome to the Fediverse| Jan van den Berg
