"3.9 Be strict when sending and tolerant when receiving." (RFC 1958)
Proposed diagnostic construct. Not recognized by any legitimate diagnostic body, though widely reinforced by social institutions. Diagnostic Criteria A. Persistent pattern of cognitive, emotional, and social functioning characterized by a strong preference for normative coherence, rapid closure of uncertainty, and limited tolerance for sustained depth—intellectual, experiential, or…
I recently fell into one of those algorithmic rabbit holes that only the internet can provide. The spark was a YouTube Short by @TechWithHazem: a rapid-fire terminal demo showing a neat little text-processing trick built entirely out of classic Linux tools. No frameworks, no dependencies, just pipes, filters, and decades of accumulated wisdom compressed into Read More sort -u vs sort uniq: a tiny…
Today marks exactly 25 years since I registered amedee.be. On 12 December 2000, at 17:15 CET, my own domain officially entered the world. It feels like a different era: an internet of static pages, squealing dial-up modems, and websites you assembled yourself with HTML, stubbornness, and whatever tools you could scrape together. 🧑💻📟 I had Read More 25 Years of amedee.be – A Quarter Century…
Or How I Discovered That Fusion Is… Fine, I Guess 🕺 Last night I did something new: I went fusion dancing for the first time.Yes, fusion — that mysterious realm where dancers claim to “just feel the music,” which is usually code for nobody knows what we’re doing but we vibe anyway.The setting: a church Read More A Field Guide to Dance Communities
When you move out of a cohousing, you don’t just pack your boxes — you pack your shared life.And in our case, that meant making an inventory of everything that lived in the house at Van Ooteghem:Who takes what, what gets sold, and what’s destined for the containerpark. To keep things organised (and avoid the Read More 🏡 Spreadsheets, Photos, and the Art of Moving Out
After days of boxes, labels, and that one mysterious piece of furniture that no one remembers what it belongs to, we can finally say it: we’ve moved! And yes, mostly without casualties (except for a few missing screws). The most nerve-wracking moment? Without a doubt, moving the piano. It got more attention than any other Read More Phew, We Actually Moved! 🎉
You know how you can make your bootloader sing a little tune?Well… what if instead of music, you could make it play Space Invaders? Yes, that’s a real thing.It’s called GRUB Invaders, and it runs before your operating system even wakes up.Because who needs Linux when you can blast aliens straight from your BIOS screen? Read More 👾 GRUB Invaders: Because Bootloaders Deserve to Have Fun Too
We hebben de sleutels nog niet, maar ik plan toch al een verhuisdag op woensdag 29 oktober. (To be confirmed, maar het komt dichterbij!) Waar ik hulp bij kan gebruiken 💪 De dozen en meubels staan nu op de 2de verdieping. Ik probeer vooraf al wat dozen naar beneden te sleuren — want trappen, ja. Read More Verhuisdag Part 1: Dozen, Dégage en Deeg! 🍕🚐📦
So, you know that feeling when you’re editing GRUB for the thousandth time, because dual-booting is apparently a lifestyle choice?In a previous post — Resurrecting My Windows Partition After 4 Years 🖥️🎮 — I was neck-deep in grub.cfg, poking at boot entries, fixing UUIDs, and generally performing a ritual worthy of system resurrection. While I Read More 🎵 The Secret Soundtrack of GRUB: Making…
As a solo developer, I wear all the hats. 🎩👷♂️🎨That includes the very boring Quality Assurance Hat™ — the one that says “yes, Amedee, you do need to check for trailing whitespace again.” And honestly? I suck at remembering those little details. I’d rather be building cool stuff than remembering to run Black or fix Read More 🧼 Pre-commit: Because oops, forgot to format is so last year
Sometimes Linux life is bliss. I have my terminal, my editor, my tools, and Steam games that run natively. For nearly four years, I didn’t touch Windows once — and I didn’t miss it. And then Fortnite happened. My girlfriend Enya and her wife Kyra got hooked, and naturally I wanted to join them. But Read More Resurrecting My Windows Partition After 4 Years 🖥️🎮
🚪👋 Goodbye, Meta’s walled gardens Facebook and Threads now flag my own blog links as spam unless I pay to “boost” them. So I’m done posting new articles on my Facebook Page and on Threads. I’ll still use my Profile to check events and photos, but the Page/Threads era is over. If you want my writing without algorithms, takedowns or zuckerbots, subscribe via RSS, email, or follow me here. 🎻 I’d…
Mood: Slightly annoyed at CI pipelines 🧨CI runs shouldn t feel like molasses. Here s how I got Ansible to stop downloading the internet. You re welcome. Let’s get one thing straight: nobody likes waiting on CI.Not you. Not me. Not even the coffee you brewed while waiting for Galaxy roles to install — again. So I said Read More 🚀 Smarter CI with GitHub Actions Cache for Ansible (aka “Stop…
There comes a time in every developer’s life when you just know a certain commit existed. You remember its hash: deadbeef1234. You remember what it did. You know it was important. And yet, when you go looking for it 💥 fatal: unable to read tree deadbeef1234 Great. Git has ghosted you. That was me today. Read More 🧟♂️ Resurrecting a Dead Commit from the GitHub Graveyard
At some point, I had to admit it: I’ve turned GitHub Issues into a glorified chart gallery. Let me explain. Over on my amedee/ansible-servers repository, I have a workflow called workflow-metrics.yml, which runs after every pipeline. It uses yykamei/github-workflows-metrics to generate beautiful charts that show how long my CI pipeline takes to run. Those charts Read More 🧹 Tidying Up After…
Have you ever fired up a Vagrant VM, provisioned a project, pulled some Docker images, ran a build… and ran out of disk space halfway through? Welcome to my world. Apparently, the default disk size in Vagrant is tiny—and while you can specify a bigger virtual disk, Ubuntu won t magically use the extra space. You Read More 📦 Auto-growing disks in Vagrant: because 10 GB is never enough
Let’s talk about environment variables in GitHub Actions — those little gremlins that either make your CI/CD run silky smooth or throw a wrench in your perfectly crafted YAML. If you ve ever squinted at your pipeline and wondered, “Where the heck should I declare this ANSIBLE_CONFIG thing so it doesn’t vanish into the void between Read More 🧪 GitHub Actions and Environment Variables: Static vs.…
When using Ansible to automate tasks, the command module is your bread and butter for executing system commands. But did you know that there s a safer, cleaner, and more predictable way to pass arguments? Meet argv—an alternative to writing commands as strings. In this post, I’ll explore the pros and cons of using argv, and Read More Safer Commands with argv in Ansible: Pros, Cons, and Real…
Not every day do I get an email from a very serious security researcher, clearly a man on a mission to save the internet — one vague, copy-pasted email at a time. Here’s the message I received: From: Peter Hooks peterhooks007@gmail.com Subject: Security Vulnerability Disclosure Hi Team, I’ve identified security vulnerabilities in your app that may Read More 🎣 The Curious Case of the Beg Bounty…
Ever wondered what it’s like to unleash 10 000 tiny little data beasts on your hard drive? No? Well, buckle up anyway — because today, we’re diving into the curious world of random file generation, and then nerding out by calculating their size distribution. Spoiler alert: it’s less fun than it sounds. 😏 Step 1: Read More Creating 10 000 Random Files Analyzing Their Size Distribution: Because Why…
If you’re running Mail-in-a-Box like me, you might rely on Duplicity to handle backups quietly in the background. It’s a great tool — until it isn’t. Recently, I ran into some frustrating issues caused by buggy Duplicity versions. Here’s the story, a useful discussion from the Mail-in-a-Box forums, and a neat trick I use to Read More How I Tamed Duplicity’s Buggy Versions — and Made Sure I Always…
File deduplication isn’t just for massive storage arrays or backup systems—it can be a practical tool for personal or server setups too. In this post, I’ll explain how I use hardlinking to reduce disk usage on my Linux system, which directories are safe (and unsafe) to link, why I’m OK with the trade-offs, and how Read More 🧱 Let’s Get Hard (Links): Deduplicating My Linux Filesystem with Hadori
A few weeks ago, I was knee-deep in CSV files. Not the fun kind. These were automatically generated reports from Cisco IronPort, and they weren’t exactly what I’d call analysis-friendly. Think: dozens of columns wide, thousands of rows, with summary data buried in awkward corners. I was trying to make sense of incoming mail categories—Spam, Read More 🔍 How I Accidentally Discovered Power Query
Lately, I’ve noticed something strange happening in online discussions: the humble em dash (—) is getting side-eyed as a telltale sign that a text was written with a so-called “AI.” I prefer the more accurate term: LLM (Large Language Model), because “artificial intelligence” is a bit of a stretch — we’re really just dealing with Read More In Defense of the Em Dash — A Beautiful Line of Thought ✍️
Soms zit het mee, soms nét niet. Het herenhuis waar we helemaal verliefd op waren, is helaas aan iemand anders verhuurd. Jammer, maar we blijven niet bij de pakken zitten. We zoeken verder — en hopelijk kan jij ons daarbij helpen! Wij zijn drie mensen die samen een huis willen delen in Gent. We vormen Read More Help ons zoeken: drie mensen op zoek naar een warm huis in Gent
Heb jij altijd al willen samenwonen met fijne mensen in een warme, open en respectvolle sfeer? Dan is dit misschien wel iets voor jou. Samen met twee vrienden ben ik een nieuwe cohousing aan het opstarten in Gent. We hebben een prachtig gerenoveerd herenhuis op het oog, en we zijn op zoek naar een vierde Read More Samenwonen in Gent? Wij starten een nieuwe cohousing en zoeken nog iemand!
I am excited to share some wonderful news—Sibelga and Passwerk have recently published a testimonial about my work, and it has been shared across LinkedIn, Sibelga s website, and even on YouTube! What Is This All About? Passwerk is an organisation that matches talented individuals on the autism spectrum with roles in IT and software testing, Read More 📰 Featured by Sibelga and Passwerk: When…
A few weeks ago, I set off for Balilas, a balfolk festival in Janzé (near Rennes), Brittany (France). I had never been before, but as long as you have dance shoes, a tent, and good company, what more do you need? From Ghent to Brittany… with Two Dutch Strangers My journey began in Ghent, where Read More 🚗 French Road Trip to Balilas: From Ghent to Janzé with Strangers Turned Friends
In the world of DevOps and continuous integration, automation is essential. One fascinating way to visualize the evolution of a codebase is with Gource, a tool that creates animated tree diagrams of project histories. Recently, I implemented a GitHub Actions workflow in my ansible-servers repository to automatically generate and deploy Gource visualizations. In this post, Read More 🎥 Automating…
This spring was filled with music, learning, and connection. I had the opportunity to participate in three wonderful music courses, each offering something unique—new styles, deeper technique, and a strong sense of community. Here is a look back at these inspiring experiences. 🎶 1. Fiddlers on the Move – Ghent (5–9 March) In early March, Read More 🎻 Spring Tunes: Three Inspiring Music Courses I…
Maintaining documentation for Ansible roles can be a tedious and easily neglected task. As roles evolve, variable names change, and new tasks are added, it is easy for the README.md files to fall out of sync. To prevent this and keep documentation continuously up to date, I wrote a GitHub Actions workflow that automatically generates Read More 📚 Automating Ansible Role Documentation with GitHub…
After my last blog post about the gloriously pointless /dev/scream, a few people asked: “Wasn’t /dev/null good enough?” Fair question—but it misses a key point. Let me explain: /dev/null and /dev/zero are not interchangeable. In fact, they are opposites in many ways. And to fully appreciate the joke behind /dev/scream, you need to understand where Read More 🤔 “Wasn’t /dev/null Good Enough?” —…
If you are part of the Fediverse—on Mastodon, Pleroma, or any other ActivityPub-compatible platform—you can now follow this blog directly from your favorite platform. Thanks to the excellent ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, each blog post I publish on amedee.be is now automatically shared in a way that federated social platforms can understand and display. Follow Read More You can now follow my…
It started innocently enough. I was reading a thread about secure file deletion on Linux—a topic that has popped up in discussions for decades. You know the kind: Is shred still reliable? Should I overwrite with random data or zeroes? What about SSDs and wear leveling? As I followed the thread, I came across a Read More 🐧 Falling Down the /dev Rabbit Hole: From Secure Deletion to /dev/scream
Managing multiple servers can be a daunting task, especially when striving for consistency and efficiency. To tackle this challenge, I developed a robust automation system using Ansible, GitHub Actions, and Vagrant. This setup not only streamlines server configuration but also ensures that deployments are repeatable and maintainable. A Bit of History: How It All Started Read More Automating My…
In my previous post, I shared the story of why I needed a new USB stick and how I used ChatGPT to write a benchmark script that could measure read performance across various methods. In this follow-up, I will dive into the technical details of how the script evolved—from a basic prototype into a robust and feature-rich tool—thanks to incremental refinements and some AI-assisted development.
When I upgraded from an old 8GB USB stick to a shiny new 256GB one, I expected faster speeds and more convenience—especially for carrying around multiple bootable ISO files using Ventoy. With modern Linux distributions often exceeding 4GB per ISO, my old drive could barely hold a single image. But I quickly realized that storage space was only half the story—performance matters too.
From the AI-generated Wikipedia summary for a 10 year old: The Advent of Code is an exciting annual computer programming event that takes place during the holiday season. It s a fun challenge for programmers of all levels! Every day in December leading up to Christmas, a new coding puzzle is released on the Advent of Read More I m starting with Advent of Code (again)
The blog has a new layout. Some of the most important changes: Do you have any suggestions or comments on the new layout?
When I first bought my Fitbit, I was genuinely excited. It looked sleek, had all the right features—heart rate tracking, sleep analysis, step counting—and promised to help me better understand and improve my health. For a while, it felt like a good investment. But over time, my enthusiasm faded. The more I used it, the Read More Why I m not happy with my Fitbit
I have a dual boot on my desktop pc: Windows 11 and Ubuntu Linux. I hardly every use the Windows installation. Maybe for some games, but Steam has gotten better and better at supporting games on Linux. Or when you need to login on some government website with your eID and you can t use the Read More Find the Windows 11 product key using Linux
Last month I moved from Merelbeke to Ghent. I registered my new address on the government website, and last week I was invited to update my eID with my new address. I made an appointment with one of the administrative centers of the city. The entire process took less than 5 minutes, and at the Read More Unboxing the Ghent box (video in Dutch)
Why do something the easy way if you can do it the hard way? I converted an ODT file to PDF using Pandoc and LaTeX, instead of opening it in LibreOffice Writer.
When Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) was released, I wanted to upgrade my system from Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri). But I had one critical requirement: Do not replace my 5.13 kernel series! This was primarily for compatibility reasons with specific drivers and tools I rely on. See also my other post about my ridiculous amount Read More 🐧Upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS while keeping 21.10 kernels
Because curiosity killed the cat, not because it s useful! 😀 Start with a clean install in a virtual machine I start with a simple Vagrantfile: This Ansible playbook updates all packages to the latest version and removes unused packages. Then bring up the virtual machine with vagrant up --provision. Get the installation size I ssh Read More How big is a clean install of Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish…
When you first encounter Gitmoji, it might feel like a whimsical idea — adding emojis to your Git commit messages? Surely that is just a fun way to decorate your history, right? Well… yes. But also, no. Gitmojis are much more than just cute little icons. They are a powerful convention that improves collaboration, commit Read More Gitmojis are not just cute emojis
I use CrashPlan for cloud backups. In 2018 they stopped their Home solution, so I switched to their Business plan. It works very well on Linux, Windows and Mac, but it was always a bit fickle on my QNAP NAS. There is a qpkg package for CrashPlan, and there are lots of posts on the Read More Suspending cloud backup of a NAS that cannot be reached
I have a NAS, a QNAP TS-419P II. It s about a decade old and it has always served me well. Due to various reasons I have never used it in an efficient way, it was always like a huge external drive, not really integrated in the rest of my filesystems. The NAS has a couple Read More Mounting NAS shares without slow startup
Jag brukade skriva på den här bloggen på nederländska. Nu är det mest på engelska, men undantagsvis är det här blogginlägget på svenska. I september 2020 började jag lära mig svenska på kvällsskolan i Aalst. Varför? Det finns flera anledningar: Jag spelar nyckelharpa, ett typiskt svenskt musikinstrument. Jag går på kurser hemma och utomlands, ofta Read More Jag lär mig svenska 🇸🇪
Armed with the information from my previous research on a possible kernel bug, I opened a bug report on the Ubuntu bug tracker: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1963555. It wasn t long until my bug got confirmed. Someone else chimed in that they had also experienced USB issues. In their case it were external drive devices. Definitely a showstopper! As Read More The hunt for a…
