Frank Meeuwsen

Time to hit the arcade again

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 09:24:49 +0100

It has been almost a year since the last time we visited the National Videogame Museum here in the Netherlands. It’s not really a museum in the classic sense of the word. The curators created some really nice time capsules, small bedrooms from different decades with the correct console game, TV, posters, popculture-references and great insights in the creation of videogames and its culture.

But most of all it’s a walhalla of arcade cabinets. Around 300 free to play games, from the old classics like Asteroids, Outrun and Galaga, to Japanese sitdown cabinets, a whole section dedicated to rhythm and dance games and modern games around the Pokemon and Mario franchise.

Me and my son visit the museum at least once a year during the school holidays. Today is a great day, since they just moved to a bigger space. I look forward to how it looks and will try to play a few of my favorites from last time: Guitar Hero, Star Wars Podracer and Densha De Go! This is a 3D trainsimulator, where you get to drive the realistic train routes in Japan. But also the golden oldies like Galaga, Donkey Kong and Outrun. Lets-a go!

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 14:00:21 +0100

I think I’m a background character (NPC as the game parlance goes?) in the Pokemon-cards-unpacking vlog of a supposedly famous Youtuber here at Pokemonkelworld. Since he had all sort of fans and photo-ops afterwards. I am fascinated.

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 13:49:34 +0100

Me, my son and his best friend are at a local Pokemon fair. They talk in tongues right now. I have no clue about V-Max, Shinies, Mystery packs and trading rules. I always find subcultures fascinating and I love to hang out in their small ecosystems, even though I don’t understand how the whole trading system and hierarchy of cardpacks work. Same as with other geek-subcultures, the people here are nice, friendly and positive, regardless of age and experience level.

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 15:03:17 +0100

Ik ben vandaag gestart in het audioboek van de klassieker 1984. Ik zag de film ooit en nu dus de Nederlandse versie van het audioboek. Ik hoef je niet uit te leggen hoe herkenbaar de verhalen zijn. Maar vooral, hoe ze op alle soorten denkrichtingen, overtuigingen en geloof zijn te leggen.

Posting from Emacs to micro.blog

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 09:05:57 +0100

One thing I love in open networks and decentralized services is the possibility to post from where ever you want. I could already do this in WordPress, in micro.blog it is the same situation. I can post from Drafts. I can post with an iOS Shortcut, I can use third party apps. And now I am testing to see if I can post from Emacs with this script. I downloaded it, installed it in my init.el file and changed the app-password and destination-address. Why do this? Because it is possible. Because I love to tinker and play around with tools like this.

Update: I had to add the request package and change one line for a moment, since markdown-regex-link-inline wasn’t there, and I think it is something of a custom function from the original author.

Update 2: After I posted this succesfully as a draft, I realized this script really just posts whatever you send it from Emacs. Since I write in orgmode in Emacs and there is some Denote frontmatter in the post, I have to tweak the original script to convert orgmode to markdown and remove the frontmatter. I think this is not impossible. To the garage!

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 06:38:46 +0100

I like the new Tiny Theme 2.0 with Microhooks because

Potential use-cases for this microhook are displaying posts based on category

Which is something I really want for my blog!

Burn on the Bayou, a tribute to CCR

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 23:40:20 +0100

I love covers. I was a heavy listener of the podcast Coverville, I see it’s still going strong since 2004! But I digress.

I love covers, I love good stonerrock and I love the music of Creedence Clearwater Revival. So this album is right up my alley: Burn on the Bayou: A Heavy Underground Tribute to Creedence Clearwater Revival. There are great renditions of those great songs. CCR was on the music scene for only 4 years, but boy did they delivered some all-time classics. Whether it’s a fuzzy I put a spell on you, or a stoner Proud Mary or a grooving Sweet Hitchhiker, you can find 32 swampy songs for your pleasure.

Burn on the Bayou: A Heavy Underground Tribute to Creedence Clearwater Revival by Ripple Music

Use visual tools to scratch your own itch

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 19:22:37 +0100

If you read Jim’s story on how he helped himself to find out where specific newsletter traffic is coming from. And you have a bit of technical knowledge on building code and well… “corporate” reporting/analytics dashboard, you can’t help but smile a big smile. Because what he has built for himself is such an elegant and creative solution. Especially how he creates something that’s in the first of use for himself, but you can already see how others might benefit from this as well. Plus it shows the possibilities of the tool he professionally works on, Quadratic.

And the best part was I could do all of this from my browser in a visual way. No local environment setup. No garbled strings of text in a console with me trying to parse and decipher the data. Simply fetch data, render it to a structured grid, filter/manipulate it, and find exactly what I want.

All of this is possible in multiple ways. From dragging and clicking your own solution in no-code tools like Make.com up to having your own development team and creating a complete suite of reporting tools. I like this middle ground where code, visual spreadsheets and “scratching your own itch” coalesce.

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 16:46:04 +0100

Vandaag vierden we de 12e verjaardag van Finn. Weer zo’n mijlpaal. Natuurlijk is hij al een flinke tiener, maar ergens is 12 zo’n extra leeftijd. Hij heeft vandaag met 7 vrienden van school en de BSO+ zijn verjaardag extra goed gevierd. We hebben VR games gespeeld, hij heeft een berg Pokemon kaarten en Robux gekregen en natuurlijk hebben we lekker pizza’s gegeten. Nu is het weer stil en heb ik mijn eigen weekend. Wat lezen, schaakles en niks doen. Heerlijk.

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 10:13:40 +0100

If RSS and an RSS-reader is too much of a hassle for you, try out RSS By Email. Just send the URL you want to subscribe to and you’ll get updates by email. Easy.

Blogging is Punkrock Publishing

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 10:42:52 +0100

James hits it on the right spot when he writes about the indie web:

To have a personal website is, presently, an act of rebellion. It is a statement. You are saying: I want to define my experience on the web.

He compares the indie web to the punk music scene. As I once said, blogging as a whole is an act of Punkrock Publishing! You are in control, you can make your own rules, you define what when and how you want to publish. With the creative confinements you decide for yourself.

Why does Facebook hide comments in a private group?

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 09:33:03 +0100

In my last post (in Dutch) I wondered if I should join a Facebook group. I’ve been off this network for 6 years and I don’t miss it one bit. Or so I thought. But that’s not the point now. I can’t see any comments and I need help from the internet!

I joined a private group and introduced myself. I got some nice thumbs-up and likes, next to some comments. But for some reason I can’t see those comments. And from what I understand, others can’t see the comments as well. When the administrator of the group adds a comment with my name in it, that’s the only comment I can see. In the screenshot below you see there should be 9 comments, but I can only see my own and one from the administrator.

I have seen every corner, toggle and select-box of the settings and privacycenter on Facebook, but I can’t find any clue on what might be wrong with my settings. Is there anyone here who might know where to find a solution to this very strange problem?

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 23:50:00 +0100

Ik mag me gelukkig prijzen als ik de berichten op Facebook lees in de Nederlandse groep van PSC patiënten. Inderdaad. Ik lees een groep op Facebook. Met een email account dat nergens anders aan is gekoppeld. Zonder direct herleidbare gegevens naar mijn persoon. Ik blijf zo’n hekel hebben aan dat platform. Maar het is de enige plaats waar een actieve community is van PSC patiënten. De verhalen in de community zijn hoopvol, beangstigend, vriendelijk en soms schrijnend. De reacties zijn altijd ondersteunend en luisterend.

Sinds mijn diagnose in september 2022 heb ik wel eens gezocht naar communities buiten Facebook. Er is een subreddit, Engelstalig uiteraard. Dat is het wel. De rest van de internationale communities zitten allemaal op Facebook. Nu denk ik dat het Venn-diagram van mensen met PSC en mensen met bovengemiddelde interesse in een decentraal internet zonder Big Tech, niet veel overlap zal kennen in de twee cirkels. Dus misschien moet ik er maar aan toe geven. Want ik heb steeds meer een community nodig. Om met gelijkgestemden te praten over hoe het soms voelt om deze ziekte te hebben. Zoals vandaag. Achteraf een hele vreemde en toch mooie dag.

Begin januari was mijn periodiek bloedprik-moment. Even wat bloed aftappen om de waarden van GGT, ALAT en ASAT te meten. Dat zijn metingen van enzymen die een beeld geven hoe het met mijn lever gaat. Vorige week werd ik gebeld door mijn vaste leverarts. De waarden zijn enorm gestegen sinds de vorige meting en dat verrast haar. Ik moet een MRI-scan laten maken, om te zien wat er gaande is bij mijn organen. Dat kon vandaag. Met voorrang en met spoed. Normaal zijn er wachtrijen van een paar maanden, maar dit had voorrang vond de arts.

Een MRI is op zich niet heel spannend. Je ligt 40 minuten in een buis terwijl een magneet foto’s en opnames maakt van je interne organen. Het maakt kabaal en je moet stil liggen.

Vandaag werd ik ook uitgenodigd in een Whatsapp groep (Ja, ik weet het… Meta) waar een reünie wordt georganiseerd voor mijn Bredase stamkroeg in de jaren ‘90, Hier Te Breed en Daar Te Lang (HTB). In de appgroep gaat het de rest van dag hard met herinneringen, foto’s, hernieuwde kennismakingen en playlists.

Zo aan het einde van de dag laat ik alles even bezinken en ik schrik me plots wezenloos. In de app-groep komen foto’s langs waar ik zelf ook op sta. Dat is natuurlijk prima. Maar het zette me ineens aan het denken. Piekeren meer. Ik zag mezelf weer terug als dat onbesuisde, grenzeloze menneke van 22. Geen zorgen over wat zou komen.

Het contrast met de ochtend dat ik in die buis lig terwijl een MRI-scanner mijn organen checkt of alles wel in orde is. De eindigheid die deze ziekte met zich meebrengt. Ik denk er vrijwel nooit over na. Tot vanavond. Plots. Terwijl ik naar 16 uur 90’s rock luister in de reünie-playlist. Terwijl ik foto’s zie van vroeger. En ik weet even niet hoe ik dat logisch moet combineren met het gegeven dat ik deze ziekte in me heb. Deze progressieve, ongeneeslijke kloteziekte.

“Jij bent die ziekte niet”, zei een goede vriend toen ik hem voor het eerst over vertelde. Dat klopt. PSC overheerst niet mijn leven en ik wil ook niet dat het dat doet. Maar op dit moment hoor ik tegelijk met de punkriffs van Bad Religion weer het gedreun van de MRI scanner vanochtend in mijn hoofd. En dat maakt het lastig. Misschien dus toch maar dat voorstelrondje in de Facebook-groep doen.

A local browser startpage built with orgmode

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 20:38:35 +0100

I am inspired by Andy’s venture to create a local startpage in his browser. It makes so much sense.

It is a local page on your own computer, so it’s blazing fast
There is no tracking on this page
The page is under your control, you can make of it whatever you want
It works in any browser.

The past couple of years I’ve dabbled a bit in Emacs. I try to learn this ancient yet modern system. Especially orgmode and the extensive config rabbit holes. Like agenda en todos en journal. Last week I decided Emacs is a hobby. I just want to tinker and play with it. I don’t have a grand vision how Emacs might replace Obsidian, Things and Day One for me in my daily work and life. It’s like repairing an oldtimer in your garage in the weekends. You still have your regular car and maybe one day you’ll take some rides with the oldtimers. But it’s not a vehicle to rely on for your daily commute. This decision allows me to play and fool around with it. To learn how such a system work. Just for the joy of it.

Andy’s blogpost all of a sudden gave me a project for Emacs. I use start.me as a service for my own startpage since 2020 or so. It just works, it’s great. I once had a short discussion on Mastodon to make my own startpage with some framework but I never got around to actually do this. The service from Start.me is great, but I only use the bookmarks. I never look at the weather or any other advanced widget. I have a categorized bookmarks and 2 RSS feeds with news. That’s it. That might be something I can build myself, based on orgmode and export to HTML. Orgmode has built-in support to store bookmarks, tags, categories. I don’t change the bookmarks that often so it’s more than OK to have those in an org-file and export to local HTML when changed. The biggest challenge is the HTML to show the bookmarks in columns and cards. But I’m not in a hurry. I can figure this out.

I’ll try to keep a log from the garage here on this project.

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 08:08:42 +0100

Well… I started my day by messing up some configuration in my iOS feedreader Fiery Feeds. Which connects to my BazQux feedmanagement. Folders and settings are all messed up. I think because I tweaked too much at once in Fiery Feeds. The app has a “restore backup” setting. But I’m always a bit hesitant on these type of actions. When was the last backup? Will I see this first when I click the button? So I know what I have to do today. Because I cannot not care about this. Right?

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 08:44:24 +0100

I love how a morning coffee and 20 minutes of mindmapping clears the mind. Cat Bowie is added to blur some words.

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 00:19:11 +0100

Well. Now I want my own booklist on this site to look like this as well. I love this! Also check out Chase’s mothership with some nice meta-blogging about blogging. My favourite genre

🔖 Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time.

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 23:16:29 +0100

Indieblog.page:

Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time.

I love the Open Random Blogpost in my bookmarkbar. At least once a day I just click it a few times to see what pops up. And it’s almost always a delightful surprise. Highly recommended and I’d wish it had some direct ties with a micro.blog directory/discovery or with the blogs and pages on the omg.lol community.

Incoming webmentions visible on micro.blog

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 22:32:05 +0100

Today on Micro.blog News -:

Added a new page to show incoming webmentions to your blog. You can find it under Account, near the Replies section.

Well, that’s awesome! Now I can see the larger network/ecosystem of links to my posts. I love this. the complete list is only visible to the blog-author. If the mentions use proper markup, they will also be included as replies to you in the timeline. I hope we see some iterations where I can publish other (less proper marked-up(? mark-upped?) webmentions as well. So I can show my readers what other motherships are connected to my mothership. Which will help the ecosystem as a whole.

How Buildings Learn

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 21:52:37 +0100

📚 Tonight I started in How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand. I got this book as a gift from my good friend Ewout Wolff, when I organized the moviescreening for We are as Gods about the author’s life and work. Ewout is as big a fan of Brand as I am, so this book is a joy for me to read in.

How I use Obsidian to make a weekly note every Sunday

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 11:22:06 +0100

Sunday-morning for me is the perfect time to write my Weekly Notes in Obsidian. In my private weekly notes I summarise the previous week. I do this based on browser-bookmarks to open calendars and lists, history in apps and things I’ve written myself. My Weekly Note template has these headings and input:

How was your week? A free-writing area to jot down some thoughts on the previous week. It can be personal, professional, hobby, whatever pops up when I see this question.
Work. I look back at the workweek in bulletpoints. Based on my work-calendar in Google Workspace
Home. A look-back to the week at home. Based on the familycalendar in Fastmail
Reading. This is for the audio/e-/paper books I read. I try to read 30 minutes a day. Or listen to an audiobook for 30 minutes. I do this because I fell into this nice calculation by Tim Urban. Which is true, because he’s Tim Urban.
Watching. I use my Watch History from Youtube and Netflix to see what I’ve watched over the last week. I add whatever I find worth keeping to the list. I sometimes add a photo from my photoroll in MacOS.
Articles. This is something I am working on. Right now I use MacOS/iOS Shortcut to add interesting articles to a drafts in Drafts. Every sunday, I just cut and paste the draft in this note. Pretty easy. The list is something between “that was interesting to look back to” and “I need to read this” and “I must not forget to see if I want to read this”. I would love to add Starred Articles from my feedreader, but I haven’t figured out how to do this. I also try to get back in the habit of using Readwise Reader. But yeah… it’s a moving target, this reading-habit… When I want to see all the articles from the previous weeks, I have this dataview on a separate page. This creates a table with all my linked articles from the weeknotes.
Listening. This is a fun one. I check my Last.FM stats every week and find a few of the nice tracks I listened to or want to listen again. Right now I try to listen to more new alternative music that’s coming out, instead of staying on repeat in the nineties…
Updated files in my vault. This dataview shows a table of the new and updated files in my Obsidian vault in the last 7 days. It also gives me a look back on what I worked on or ideas I dropped in the vault.

Every Sunday I start a template that opens this Weeknote and I open the previous week. This gives me nice overview of where I was and where I am now. My next step is to take a look back every month to these week notes and see where and how I can move forward.

🔖 Emissions from ChatGPT are much higher than from conventional search

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 11:42:59 +0100

Emissions from ChatGPT are much higher than from conventional search • Wim Vanderbauwhede:

it is possible that the emissions from a ChatGPT query are more than a hundred times that of a conventional search query

Bob den Otter (Pivot, Mijnkopthee, Two Kings) overleden

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 09:47:22 +0100

Gisteren bereikte me het nieuws dat Bob den Otter is overleden. Bob is een van de echte Bloghelden van de Lage Landen. Hij is de maker van Pivot, de eerste blogsoftware uit Nederland. Pivot is een open-source platform, een van mijn eerdere blogs draaide lang op deze software. Natuurlijk had Bob ook zijn eigen blog, het populaire Mijnkopthee.nl. Bob stond eveneens aan roer bij Two Kings, het bureau voor Ambachtelijk Webdevelopment.

De Ouwe Weblogkliek is een kleine Whatsapp groep met een aantal bloggers van het eerste uur. Daar las ik het nieuws, snel daarna op Mastodon. Bob had zelf een week geleden nog gepost over zijn ziekenhuisopname en Liquorhypotensie Syndroom. Helaas is Bob donderdag door complicaties overleden, in bijzijn van familie en geliefden.

Ik heb Bob al jaren niet meer gezien of gesproken. Mijn herinnering aan hem, is als een van de meest vriendelijke, toegankelijke en spontane mensen die ik tegenkwam op de vele weblogmeetings. Daar was hij altijd bezig om zo snel mogelijk zijn naamsticker te verwisselen met die van andere gasten. Samen met Bob experimenteerden we op Lowlands 2004 met mobiel bloggen, mobloggen. De iPhone, Instagram, WiFi, 4G en al dat andere wat we nu normaal vinden, dat bestond nog niet. Maar we probeerden het en Bob stond altijd vooraan om mee te denken en met slimme technische oplossingen te komen.

We zullen je missen Bob.

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 14:20:37 +0100

Finished reading: Harlem Shuffle: A Novel by Colson Whitehead 📚

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 11:00:11 +0100

The day starts with the streets full of snow here in Utrecht. Unfortunately my head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton. The flu has hit me hard after a few days of lingering inside of me. It is time to take a break and rest. Thanks @jean for the nice snail mail I received this week. These small presents really make my day.