Blog

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 closed 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. ...

I used to have cover images for some posts on my blog. I felt they added some needed pizzazz to the site. Turns out I was wrong. It added a splash of color to the index page, sure, but it also brought some issues. First was that some images were too big, spacing out blog posts on the index page, forcing users to scroll way too much to go through the posts list. I tried to remedy this by cropping the images and making them all the same height. This, I found, works for some images, but ruins others. No bueno. ...

I hate the fact that I cannot enjoy the moment anymore. I used to be able to sit down and watch a movie. A whole movie. Start to finish; watch it. No breaks. No peaking at my phone. No little distractions. I’d get up to take a piss, or grab a drink, sure, but I was into the movie. Not just movies though. Music! I used to be able to enjoy music on its own. Just having an album on I took the time to go out and buy and just enjoy it playing. Nothing else, just the music. ...

At least, from your computer. Hear me out. I’ve only recently gotten into reading people’s personal blogs. It’s very relaxing to read the personal thoughts of real people. Not just thoughts, sometimes there’s ideas, tips, tricks, ways to improve something for yourself or, and this is my favorite one, a link to a new blog to explore. My list of blogs to keep track of is constantly growing. I discover new people weekly. The point here is, there’s a lot to read and reading takes time. And while I absolutely enjoy every minute I spend reading all these great posts, time is something I, well we all, only have a limited amount of. ...

Now, this kinda sorta makes sense, but also it doesn’t. I’ve been seeing this quote more and more online and it irks me a little. It’s just, well, wrong. When you pay for Netflix, you take out a subscription. You pay to receive something, and receive it you do. You get access to something. It’s like a newspaper. You subscribe and pay a fee and every morning, a newspaper shows up on your lawn, in your mailbox, or wherever they put it for you. You don’t own the newspaper’s office. Ok, you own the paper you got delivered, but it’s value fades after a day. The news is old and the thing is useless. ...

I am debating slash pages. This website is a blog, or at least it aims to be. This time around, I didn’t just start blogging. No. I also got into reading other people’s blogs. I have a blogroll page where I list some of the ones I enjoy reading. This particular page, the blogroll, is located under my domain, Jorisvandijk.com, then a forward slash / and then the name blogroll. So https://jorisvandijk.com/blogroll. Pages like this, pages under the main domain name right after the slash, these are called slash pages. At least they are in the blogosphere (what a word). ...

I love my new blog website. I like to share useful things I found or did. I prefer to post content that’s educational, but not dry. A more personal take-you-by-the-hand-and-pull-you-along kind of educational. I like to think that’s pretty much the style I have. There’s an issue, though, I also want to yap about other things that may not have any educational value. Just thoughts or experiences or ideas. Straight from my head to this website. ...

Hugo As I wrote in my Hello World post, I have switched to Hugo. And so far, I am loving it. It’s fast, it works great and I have not had to hack together solutions for things I wanted the site to do, but that were not included in the platform (looking at you, Eleventy!). I like how the backend of it works and I like the way you make new posts or run the site locally for testing. I like how you can use a pre-built theme, but then override it so you can make it your own, without having to touch the actual theme files - this also makes updating the theme later possible. ...

And once again a new Hello World post is born. This is the umpteenth iteration of this website, as I cannot seem to stop wanting to change things up. I like trying out new ideas. Sometimes they lead somewhere, mostly they don’t. The last version of this site placed the content into a more documentation-like website format. I thought I’d like that more than a blog — mainly for organizational purposes. A bit more structured than the throw it at a wall and see what sticks blog approach. ...