I came across a story of sorts on a website called The Moscow Times that said that Russia was planning to create a reusable rocket to compete with Elon Musk. I did not know that Elon Musk was a rocket. The details in the article from 30 September seem to conflict wildly. The rocket becomes … Read More

I am not going to lie—when I watched Formula 1 in the 1990s, it was mostly because my fellow countryman Jos Verstappen was enjoying a moderate amount of success in the sport. And when I started watching it again in the 2010s, it was because Jos’ son Max was entering the same sport, heralded as … Read More

Ik ben een freelance webdeveloper. Dat wil zeggen dat ik als eenpitter en niet op basis van loondienst voor mijn beroep aan websites werk. Het grootste deel van mijn opdrachtgevers vindt mij zelfstandig of via mijn netwerk. Ik heb echter ook een account op freelance.nl, de grootste marktplaats in Nederland voor freelancers (althans, dat was … Read More

The court of The Hague is perhaps not known as the most even-handed in the world. This is the court where large, foreign media conglomerates shop for copyright jurisprudence. This is also the court that committed a crime in 2014 when it advertised for fresh judges, saying that women needed not apply. That was a … Read More

I was playing around with scaling up images in The GIMP and stumbled upon a method (scale to larger than you need, then scale down to the desired result) that seemed to get exceptionally good results. I wanted to find out if this was a fluke, so I ran some tests. My conclusion appears to … Read More

… about 450 gigabytes in storage. I was looking for a cheap, small form-factor laptop on a comparison site that lists thousands of them and I found plenty of cheap ones. When I made the two screenshots above, I had only selected a screen size, and I had sorted the results by price. The left … Read More

An interesting side-effect to the introduction of the GDPR, the latest EU privacy law, was that (for Europeans at least) several American websites improved. Instead of a dazzling and confusing cornucopia of banners and clickables, the sites of USA Today and NPR refocused on their stated goal, i.e. journalism. See here for two examples: and … Read More

The introduction of the European privacy act known as GDPR seems to have caused a flurry of work in the web development business, but oddly and unfortunately enough I seem to have been immune to this development. So I decided that I would go through the process of improving one of my own websites, just … Read More

(An Experiment and a Fantastically Boring Tale.) In 2011 I bought 50 pens in an attempt to stem the constant trickle of pen disappearances. Like matching socks, ballpoint pens have this obscure, almost life-like ability to get lost just when you need them, and this seemed to be a good reason to buy way more … Read More

When you want to study the contents of PHP arrays, for example when you ask the API of your favourite PHP CMS a question and it returns an array in which the answer is somehow hidden, you can use PHP functions like print_r and var_dump to display the array in a way that makes it … Read More