Babble

In the past I’ve written about the em dash and how people associate it with text written by AI. My conclusion was that I’ve been using it for ages before AI was a thing and the joke at the end was that I should stop using it, so AI might stop using it, so I can use it again. Well, turns out I have not always been using it. See, there’s different dashes and due to my personal inconsistency and a plethora of text editors, different dashes have appeared in my writing over the years. The one I used most is the hyphen (-). This mark should actually be used (among other things) to connect compound words, like open-source, or for prefixes and suffixes, like co-founder and secretary-general. ...

For a while I have been bitching about YouTube. Here, here, and here just on this site alone. I’ve moaned about it on Discord and in real life too. My main gripes are it’s all AI slop and there’s nothing worth discovering on the homepage of the site anymore. You could keep scrolling and never hit anything worth watching anymore. Unfortunately this didn’t seem to dissuade me from trying anyway. I found myself mindlessly typing the domain in the address bar only to tumble down this list of pointless video thumbnails never actually clicking anything to watch. I could do this for far longer than I’d care to admit to. And I did often. ...

It has been a busy weekend. I completed four different projects all to do with entertainment. It started with me rummaging around in my electronics bin and bumping into the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 WH on Friday evening. I hadn’t actually done anything with this Pi before, so I decided on a whim to see what I could do with it. A little surfing later and the idea of playing retro games on my TV in the living room with my Xbox controller seemed like an amazing thing to me. ...

Bananas are amazing. They taste great on their own, in a dessert or even on toast. They’re teaching aids for a sex-ed class and make-believe handguns. There’s likely no human male on the planet who hasn’t pointed one at a fellow human and uttered the word “bang”. Bananas conveniently come in their own packaging and can be carried along with ease in a backpack, tote bag, or even pocket. Bananas aren’t perfect though. They do, for example, force other fruits to ripen prematurely12. ...

So you’ve now got yourself a dumb phone. You bought an e-reader for reading and an old iPod for them tunes. You’ve deleted Candy Crush—I worry that reference is old as fuck now—and instead you’ve gotten yourself a small gaming handheld, be it a vintage Game Boy or one of those cool new AliExpress ones. You jot down whatever’s important on trusty old paper, in that little book you’ve got in your back pocket. Along with it you obviously got a pen. A special pen, perhaps one you meticulously picked out. It might even be a fountain pen. ...

When you see one, it’s AI. In any text, if there’s a dash anywhere, AI wrote it. It’s a guarantee. Except, it is not. I recently dove into my old websites in my This Domain post. I noticed something. All the way back in 2004 I used dashes in my writing. They show up in the screenshot I took of my site in 2012 as well. Twice even! Both the first and the second post have one. There’s three of them in the first post of this website even. ...

The Jorisvandijk.com domain goes back quite a while. Using any whois tool, you can discover it’s been registered 17 years, 3 months and 26 days ago on January 31st 2009. It first appears in the Wayback Machine1 on the 13th of July 2003. Have a look at it in all its glory. July 13th 2003 As you can see it’s not completely cached. The iframe on the left got lost. If you read the text you’ll notice this is not the first iteration of this site either. I upgraded from using tables for the UI, to using div elements. Cool. 2003 is six years older than 2009. But looking at the footer of the site in the image, you can see the real date it was once registered. 1997. That’s 29 years ago! This address is ancient. It predates the likes of YouTube and even Google (by a year, give or take). ...

I recently noticed myself wanting stuff, then thinking on it only to realize I didn’t really. It’s like ADHD greed and I blame YouTube. Anyway, this got me thinking. What do I own that I really do value? I own things I would replace on the spot if I lost them, but there are also things that couldn’t be replaced. So there are things I value enough to acquire them a second time, but there are also things I value more. Things that cannot be replaced. ...

I have too much shit. It’s been 40 years of me gathering it and storing it. On my dad dying I inherited even more shit. Shit that’s even harder to part with. I like a bare environment. My living room sports two couches, a coffee table, a tv dresser with a tv and sound bar, a large closet, a dinner table, six chairs, a sideboard, two plants a lamp and a statue. That’s it. There are no more furnishings. No clutter, no fluff. Well, ok—the two sofa’s each have two pillows. I had to fight the wife to get it down to four total. Oh, and the house came with a wood burner, which I’ve placed a stand with a set of tools like thongs, a poker, brush and scoop next to. There’s also a single photo frame on the large closet with six photos too. We also have a decorative samovar on the wood burner. Still, when comparing to living rooms of people I know, mine—well ours is quite sparse. A better example; the bedroom. All it has is a bed, a dresser, two nightstands and a wooden ladder on which the wife hangs clothes in between clean and dirty (don’t ask, I have no clue). In the kitchen there’s a breadbox, salt, pepper, oil and a coffee maker on my counters. Oh, and a fruitbowl. ...

It’s been a while since I wrote one, but the other day I finally finished my tutorial on setting up Proxmox Backup Server. It’s a detailed account of what I did. I mainly write these to clean up the notes I take while working on things. If I left the notes as-is, in a few months I’d have no idea what I actually did. The notes simply don’t contain everything, so while it’s still fresh in my mind, I turn them into a tutorial. I do so mostly for myself, but hopefully its useful to others as well. ...