I am a computer person who likes toying with networking, security, and data. Also creates software. Over here I post my (rather occasional) writings that are too long for Mastodon and Bluesky.
Even though it's already June, I still wanted to make a (short) post about the things I did for April Fools this year. Like previous year I spent some time making some fun contraptions, where asking "why?" would be the wrong question. Sadly this year I had a bit less time to do something, and admittedly I already did some of the best ideas last year, but I am still quite happy with the result.…
Dit is een vervolg op Vibe coding bij het Ministerie van Defensie . Kort samengevat: het Ministerie van Defensie had een detacheringsopdracht online gezet waarin stond dat ze op zoek waren naar een "senior vibe/AI developer". Daarop had ik een woo-verzoek (wet open overheid) gedaan om daar meer over te weten te komen. Mijn post op LinkedIn over mijn woo-verzoek bij het Ministerie van Defensie over…
I've always liked giving a slight twist to everyday objects, and clocks are no exception. Seeing the time is so ubiquitous that it's hardly something you ever think about. This post is about two interesting clocks I made. Admittedly they're more art pieces and I doubt you'd want to use them for your day-to-day life. The first one shows some (interesting) history facts. Time (in most of the world)…
Zo'n tien jaar geleden was de blockchain een enorme rage. In talkshows werd gepraat over alle problemen die nu opgelost konden worden met de blockchain. In de krant en op TV werd geprobeerd om de werking van de blockchain begrijpelijk uit te leggen, zoals bij EenVandaag en NOS op 3 . Veel publieke organisaties zijn in die tijd een blockchainpilot gestart. De gemeente Zuidhorn kreeg destijds zelfs…
Recentelijk kwam ik erachter dat het Ministerie van Defensie op zoek is naar "een gedreven Vibe-Coder en AI-developer specialist die als onmisbare schakel gaat fungeren binnen een OSINT Dev-Ops-team gericht op de ontwikkeling van een schaalbaar, veilig en niet-herleidbaar OSINT-platform". Ik las het via de Mastodon van Bert Hubert, en mijn wenkbrauwen begonnen te fronsen (en gezien de reacties was…
For a long time I’ve been fascinated by DVD menus. VHS tapes and streaming video just start when you insert them (as long as they last person remembered to rewind them), which is functional but boring. DVD menus always felt like tiny works of art. Plus I was curious just how much you could do with them. In the end I made DVDgotchi : https://youtu.be/vGi-anqQgrg Here’s where it started: I try to do…
rsync is quite an amazing tool to sync files from one location to another remote location, and that for nearly 30 years. Just to be clear, this article is not trying to bash rsync (or /bin/bash rsync for that matter). No, rather it’s a display of how versatile rsync really is… along with the question of whether that versatility makes it a good idea to use it for critical internet infrastructure.…
For the last six year I have designed and sent Christmas cards to friends, family, and colleagues. I figured I would make a small blog post about them because some thought does go into it every year. I’m not a big Christmas person — I don’t like the music, I don’t decorate, and I like eating well any day of the year (whilst avoiding gluttony). However, Christmas does present the perfect…
If you have read my blog before, then you know that I bought a Stream Deck a bit under a year ago . You also probably know that I like doing silly things with software. My Stream Deck was an excellent candidate for this. tl;dr: I ended up turning my Stream Deck into something I can stream video to, here’s a demo and a link to the GitHub repository: https://github.com/Koenvh1/ScreenDeck .…
This is a story about Dakar Desert Rally, a game I have a love-hate relationship with. It’s not the first time I write about this game, I previously showed the printed roadbooks I made for Dakar 18 (its predecessor) and Dakar Desert Rally. This time it is about the game modding I have done to get an external dashboard for Dakar Desert Rally working, because I found another niche game which is…
Recently I assembled a new PC. I figured I would take the opportunity to write a bit about how that came to be, as well as reminisce about the good old times, because as my last upgrade has been about 8 years ago, and I think it’s quite an interesting story altogether. Let’s go back to the beginning: the Big Bang. Many billions later Sinclair would invent the C5 and some years after that I was…
Voor de verandering schrijf ik een keer in het Nederlands, want dit onderwerp leent zich niet zo goed voor het Engels: het gaat namelijk over de Rijksoverheid en over podcasts (ironisch genoeg is er geen goede Nederlandse vertaling voor “podcast” — misschien komt “audio-uitzending op aanvraag” het dichtste bij, maar echt lekker klinkt het niet), en het Rijkspodcastregister dat ik opgezet heb.…
Some time ago I wrote about backups , my love-hate relationship with most back-up software available, how Duplicati had let me down when it came to rebuilding my database, and I switched to my own solution. Let’s have a look at what happened since then. My own solution works remarkably well. I thought it was quite fast at first… and I still do. That part of the story is very short — it just…
I am a big fan of doing silly things seriously. Going through with a plan fully, where the motivation is pretty much “because I can” is a blast. They make people laugh. Most April Fools “jokes” are quite terrible in that regard, generally just an announcement to then say “Ho ho, April Fools!” — and the audience goes mild . Real jokes take some effort, and make everyone laugh in the end. They can…
In Splitsing drie links niet snijden 500! I wrote about how I ended up making a Dutch co-driver voice for EA WRC. Whilst I was doing that, I ended up rummaging through the game files. It’s always interesting to see how the game works internally. Whilst I was going through all the assets, I was wondering if I could do something with it — I ended up printing the pacenotes for all 252 stages in EA…
I have data. Admittedly most of that data does not have a lot of value, such as a list of motorway mile markers in the Netherlands and their coordinates from 2021. Still, I have no reason to throw it away, thus I just keep it on my disk just in case I ever need it. I have been doing this since the very start, and I still have some of my earliest files. If I lose those files nothing bad would…
I will preface this by saying that this will mostly be pictures. I think there’s more to show than there is to say. I like simracing (driving virtual race cars). Becoming one with this machine, even if it’s virtual, is a blast. Over the years I’ve expanded my setup - from a wheel clamped to my desk to a dedicated setup with bells and whistles. I like my setup, but I always still had one thing on…
(this is a continuation of the previous part , and the first part ) Previously I received the result of how my request was handled, which was, in summary, only blacked-out text. I have now received the final response, which ends this adventure with the UK Cabinet Office. When I received the blacked-out text about how my FOI request was handled I requested an internal review, because I thought it…
I’m Dutch, and even though this blog post is written in English, I’m a big proponent of the Dutch language. I also like rallying, not in the political sense, but in the “going very fast in a car through the forest” sense. Traditional rallying consists of a car, a driver, and a co-driver - the latter reads out the pacenotes for the stage you are on, giving the driver an idea what the road ahead is…
I picked up a Christmas project. For quite some time I had wanted to toy around with telephones, because I’ve always been intrigued by the world of automated phone numbers. The fact you could dial a number, and the response from the other end could be dynamically generated? Magical. Plus even though I have unlimited calls it still feels special in a way. Anyway, at some point during the last year,…
Previously I wrote about a mysterious switch I found in the car I had recently bought , and my search to see what it did. It got quite some attention, including on Hacker News (although in true HN fashion, most of the comments are not about the previous blog post, but about the mandatory data connectivity that is included in every car, such as for example the mandatory eCall system in new cars in…
Last week I bought a car. After twelve years of service, my old trusty Peugeot 107 in blue has had its best. Expensive repairs were coming at some point , and I did not feel like waiting around for them to come. Plus the existing list of faults (like the high oil usage of about a litre per month, a brake that sometimes blocked without reason, or the smell of exhaust fumes that sometimes came into…
(this is a continuation of the previous part ) The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has not come back to me yet regarding the original freedom of information (FOI) request. Admittedly that was not fully unexpected given the usual timelines they work with (on average 6 months), although I would not have minded being an exception. In the meantime I did get an update on the meta-FOI request,…
A friend of me alerted me on 1 May 2024 that a Call for Input was published by the Minister for Women and Equalities, back then Kemi Badenoch. The call was titled: Call for input: Incorrect guidance on single-sex spaces and gender self-identification . This title is, in my opinion, quite suggestive. But let's not fill in the blanks for them. They probably identified a problem. Let's see what Kemi…
For the last months I have been working on RPKI Relying Party security. The question I asked myself was: is it possible to disrupt RPKI Relying Party software by introducing a malicious CA/repository into the tree? The short answer is: yes. For a more indepth look into what I did, I wrote the following blog post at RIPE Labs:…
It seems that a lot of hyperboles get thrown around nowadays. I have read a lot of cases where people say you should never do this, or you must do that, as if there are absolutely no exceptions ever. A few cases I have seen: You must always use HTTPS You should never expose MySQL to the outside world You must use two-factor authentication Your program must be unit-testable The list can go on and…
This is a follow-up to the previous blog post, which you can find here . Astiga's new synchronisation system has run for about a month now. Which seems like a nice time to evaluate it. Some stats: About 50 TiB has been synced in a month, which is a bit under 2TiB per day. That also has to do with the start, as I expect to break the 60TiB barrier for March 2020. Compared with the old system, that…
Lectori salutem. If you are reading this, then I am going to presume that you know that Astiga is a music streaming service that streams music from your cloud storage (WebDAV, OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) to your browser, phone, television, terminal or whatever you use. You may have noticed that Astiga got a new synchronisation system (the system that gets the files from your cloud…