Jan van den Berg
We're about to go on vacation. And I have decided not to take my newish Macbook Air M4 . Just on the off-chance something might happen to my favorite piece of technology. And also: we'll be travelling a lot and staying in lots of different places and I do not want to use brain CPU cycles every day thinking about whether I should take my laptop with me or put it in the hotelsafe or leave it in the…
Due to global supply chain disruptions and macroeconomic shifts, hardware prices have increased across the board. Flash storage media is no exception. Depending on the brand and speed class rating, a legitimate 1TB SD memory card typically retails somewhere between 150 and 250 Euros . That is no small change. While prices used to be slightly lower, they were still far from cheap — and in the…
💡TLDR: My 20+ year-old WordPress wp-content directory was a complete mess. After many failed attempts to clean it up, I finally managed to do so. I've written before about the mess that is my WordPress /wpcontent folder on my daily blog . This WordPress installation is 20+ years old. I made some bad decisions and was not always completely aware of how WordPress handled images, which also changed…
My daughter has had a laptop for two years now. For school. But not just for school: the thing is used for everything (read: lots of Minecraft). And if she isn't using it herself, the youngest one is sitting on it. So, it gets used. At the end of April, she started complaining: my laptop keep shutting down randomly! I took a quick look: what is all this junk? VPN software and whatnot (long story,…
Cloud photo solutions are fantastic right up until they start hitting you with subscription limits, heavy web tracking, or bulky interfaces. Recently, I wanted to self-publish a chronological historical photo archive of our local event, Urkerdag , across multiple years. Each photo folder represents one year, nearly 5000 photos spread across 15 folders. Instead of reaching for heavy JavaScript…
I've been a very happy Pure Blog user for some weeks now. There was one small thing left: migrating my old comments from WordPress to Pure Comments , another piece of minimalist quality software by Kev Quirk . This is a public note on how I did it. YMMV. The Strategy Follow the Pure Comments docs to install it. After that, the main challenge is matching the old WordPress database IDs to the new…
I noticed one of my sites was running slow. So I logged in and saw that my server load was climbing. Being a webserver the first place to look are the serverlogs. With a quick tail -f in the /var/log/apache dir I saw 1000s of these flying by: 2a01:4f8:1c1c:79a1::1 - - [01/Apr/2026:22:01:38 +0200] "GET /images/WINKEL2025-24/Img9369.JPG HTTP/2.0" 200 46672 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 Joomla!/5.4.4 Joomla"…
After exactly six years, I conclude that Cruddiy has served its purpose. It is time to archive. A Look Back Exactly six years ago today, I put my quarantine project Cruddiy on GitHub . Cruddiy is a tool that can write PHP code for you. In the period that followed, I continued developing it and wrote about it several times . The last time was here about two years ago. That is also roughly when…
I came across the so-called Ecograder score. Ecograder helped us understand the environmental impact of our website and provided a clear roadmap to build a better site that’s both people- and planet-friendly.” Sharon Miller, Director, Digital Experience and Analysis, DePaul University My site — because of Pure Blog — gets the highest possible score. With only 0.01 grams of carbon dioxide emission…
Can you spot the difference between the following punctuation marks? A hypen - or an em-dash — . Maybe you can, because the web safe font renders the em-dash just fine. However in the Pure Blog backend — which uses the Menlo font — it's pretty hard to tell. This is what I see: This is not a really big deal, I just had to do a double take at first, because they look way too similar. But there is…