The Strange Saga of WebTV in the Netherlands – a firsthand account

Another Slice of Dutch Internet History There has been a long list of failed internet technologies over the past few decades. Much like the current AI rush, the early internet was a bit of a Wild West. People had many ideas and tried almost anything to see what would stick. One of those failed technologies was WebTV. For a short time, it looked as though this piece of technology might also find its way into Dutch homes. Except it didn’t. This is the story of how WebTV was killed before it even launched in the Netherlands, including what I consider […]

Pucker factor 10

My commutes are always an adventure I’ve been commuting between Almere and Amsterdam for over 28 years now, and some stretches of road just never seem to get safer. The speed limits are clear, the lanes are marked, and yet people still drive too fast, follow too closely, or simply don’t pay attention. Over time, I’ve learned where the “hot spots” are – places where something stupid is almost guaranteed to happen at least once a week. Since I drive a leased car, the financial side doesn’t worry me too much – any damage is handled automatically. I’ve had a […]

Homelab shenanigans

Some more homelab shenanigans After setting up my to Proxmox nodes (not a cluster yet: I am still exploring how to set this up) and messing around a bit with it, I went full-out. After all; if you have the hardware why not use it? So what have I set up so far?  So, what did we accomplish so far? Well a bit of a list actually. It cost me a couple of weekends working on this, but the result is kind of satisfying so far. All in all I: Setup Immich which has been great as a Google Photos […]

Nostalgia is not about how things were

Nostalgia is not about how things were: It’s about how we remember them. I think we like to believe nostalgia is a faithful archive – a clean backup of the past we can mount and browse at will. But it isn’t. It’s more like a compressed snapshot: lossy, selective, and quietly edited over time. What we remember is rarely the full system state. The frustration, delays, the things that didn’t work out – they all get filtered out. What remains are the highlights: the warmth of a familiar routine, the excitement of discovery, the comfort of things that felt simpler […]

“Homelabbing” (not what you think)

Most of us have several hobbies and I am no exception. It is probably no surprise that – given my job – one of my hobbies is IT related. I am, what one would call, an avid “Homelabber”. Now, before you start thinking about a “Walter White” and Jesse Pinkman-like “home lab” this kind of homelabbing is probably not what you might think it is. What is “homelabbing”? Homelabbing is the practice of setting up personal servers, networking gear, and storage devices in your house to act as a private IT laboratory. It allows enthusiasts – like myself – to […]

State of the Blog

With so much going on in the world and in life, it’s a good thing to pick up blogging again. The last year I have spend a lot of time on my homelab and I think it’s cool to start writing about that (and other things). So I figured out I should get my site up and going again. So first order of business was to finally install a valid SSL again, which I did using Certkit.io. Which proved easier than I thought. So here we are: SSL up and running again. Well that’s all the exiting stuff for now. […]

Life Happens

Been too long again. It’s time to let the creative blogging juices flow again. But first I need to figure out the technical status of the Blog. SSL and such is a pain in the but, so maybe it’s time for a radical change! Move away from Site5. We’ll see! To be continued!

Are we back or….

As they say: life happens. So yeah I’m still trying to resurrect my blog. Yeah right now the SSL is expired and all that goodness.  I’m still looking for a good cheap VPS solution where I have 100% access to the server. But it’s not that easy to find a suitable one. In the meantime I’m just busy with my other hobbies (mostly watches) and setting up my ‘new’ 32TB NAS. And work. Lots of work. So yeah this might take a while. Maybe by the time I’m ready the subtitle of the blog will say “Rantings from a 60+ […]

Ressurection

Soooo, after neglecting this blog for a few years while trying some other webhosts and never investing enough time in it, I decided to pick things up again here. As you will notice, all the going back and forth between other webhosts, had led to me loosing all my images from older posts. As it goes I made a backup, but that backup only had links to the images & illustrations and not the actual items. I’ll need figure out how to handle that, but hey – at least my thoughts are still there. I’ll probably integrate my Twitter feed and […]