Recent content on Joost Plattel
I’ve been using sockpuppetbrowser for a while in some of my projects. The easy method of opening a CDP connection and getting a browser (which scales to a couple of jobs) is nice enough for projects of mine. While also keeping each proces seperate. However the repo has grown stale and some bugs are nagging me (crashed browsers & memory issues). I’ve hotfixed them in my own branch, but…
“Captain’s Log, Stardate 41153.7” There’s something iconic about the way Captain Jean-Luc Picard begins his entries in Star Trek . I fondly remember it. As a developer, I constantly make decisions, either with or without the help of llms: Why did I choose this solution? What was the goal I wanted to achieve? What alternatives did I consider? What bugs did I encounter and…
The web has always been a playground and we’ve been handed new tools to play with in the form of LLMs. So in the evenings I had time to tinker I’ve explored open data sets and combed through questions that people asked me… With the help of Claude & Cursor I could discover different harnesses and setups that would allow me to make better use of public data. As the LLMs collapse…
Now the software and hardware of wandering.computer have reached a state at which it feels stable, so I started with the next step, learning to type again. In this blogpost I’ll share some of my findings and solutions I’ve come across along the way… The main idea of wandering.computer is to be freed from the desk as a way to write. (I still use transcription, each has their…
Simple tools are the best. As I’m living in the Netherlands one of the tools I frequently use is Buienradar, the weather forecast allows me to make a choice on when to hop on a bicycle (or not!). I used their app, the one from RIVM as well, but visiting the website always felt as the least pleasant way of using it. This afternoon I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to have it in Raycast? A…
Steph Ango wrote file over app in 2023, a cornerstone idea for Obsidian. But with the advent of LLMs, I couldn’t help but think what if: the file is the app ? While working with the team from the PIlot Informatie Autonomie I’ve spoken with people from different fields, expertises and experience. Turns out, most of the work a knowledge worker does is being done with tools that are…
This project has been in the making for quite a couple of months, but since it’s finished I thought it would be cool to write a post about it! We’ve been looking for a replacement of our wine rack that was mounted above our sofa. We wanted something more green, but didn’t have any idea what it should be. Until I came about this tiling planter on Printables . I redesigned the part…
After being inspired by the post that shows Claude Code playing RCT2 , I’d imagine something like that, but for Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe (OpenTTD) . OpenTTD readily available and there’s been some ways of making AI / Bots but they’re pretty much carved in stone once you implement them. There is no way to have them dynamically change their code or ways of work while running.…
Much of the information we create and use daily is locked away in Word documents. This feels familiar, but this approach has several major drawbacks that we rarely acknowledge. Beneath Microsoft’s visual veneer and the apparent simplicity of ’the cloud’ lies a structural problem. We have been addicted for decades to the so-called ‘convenience’ and scalability of the…
Most of this post was also published as the first update by email on wandering.computer . Feel free to subscribe or read the first post here . In the past couple of months I’ve resurrected this project and made quite some headway with a new prototype, which I want to share with you! So without further ado and more walls of text. Here’s the current prototype (of which I lost count, so I…
I assisted Stef Veldhuis on technological components and realization of his artworks. Here’s wat Stef had to say about me: It was a pleasure to collaborate with Joost on two projects that were both technically challenging in their own respect. Joost is an enthusiastic collaborator that understands my aesthetics of transparency and readability in art and technology. His education in the field…
I help organizing the PKM Summit , just like the Quantified Self a wonderfull community of people aiming to learn and tinker with personal knowledge manangement.
Two posts within a week? That’s pretty much magical… I’ll need to have a look on why this happened 👀. Talking about looking at things, one of the functions that Apple used to offer was a Photostream, which worked through iCloud and allowed you to view your photos from your mobile phone on your Mac. This felt seamless to me and allowed me to take a picture and handle it on my…
I’ve been migrating my online feedreading to Netnewswire on my mac. Being in control of how stuff works becomes more and more a trend (and a must in some occasions). A thighly knit web isn’t really transfered that easily so I had a small thing that I wanted to solve and that is starring items for reading them later. In my case, my read it later list is stored in Anybox . I know of…
I lack a lot of spare time (because of reasons) lately, but sometimes I have a couple of hours to tinker around with any of my projects and one of the things on my list to explore was n8n . I set it up locally on my NAS and authenticated some services too see what I could connect together.. Quite fast a simple idea was formed: could I transform my todolist (in Todoist ) into something magical that…
Together with Arjan and Oskar from Manava I advise and help organisation with technology. Arjan best describes my activities as following: Joost builds systems that think and do. A pretty rad (and short!) description of the things I do, from hardware to sofware! If you need a bigger team to tackle things, working with Manava is recommended!
Working with the team from Huub I’ve setup the authentication & authorization stack with Auth0. I’ve also worked on improving endpoints and websocket handling. As well as setting up architecture for multi-tenancy within Auth0 and the FastAPI stack.
With Maurice van Dinther from wafl.nu I’ve created a monitoring/questionnaire tool for the Katholieke Scholenstichting Utrecht (KSU). This allows them to gain insights into how their teams are functioning. The application is build with Django and uses SSO to seamlessly allow users to gather data. The data is shown in dashboards with Chart.js.
With Bas van de Haterd and Rikkert Walbeek we started the Talent Acquisition Audit Institute (TA Audit for short). Our goal is to create bias-free recruitment processes by auditing companies and their talent acquisition. An equal opportunity for everyone to find a job regardless of age, originethnicity or gender, that is our mission. We do this by conducting independent audits and awarding the…
For me this is more of a meta post, as it’s mostly the rediscovery of a personal preference of mine. The best way to learn something for me is doing it while scrambling to figure out how it works and asking for help when stuck. As an example doing a carbage-run through England / Wales with a car I know next to nothing about and lacking understanding of how it works.
For Opal I’ve worked on hardware prototypes under NDA. I’ve been exploring different protocols and low level unix interfaces.
I’ve been wearing a Friend / Omi (not to be confused with the other one ) for a couple of weeks. This project is interesting to me because of the open-source component and community that it has. So I made my own, including it’s own case. One thing I’ve been trying to find a solution for has been trying to get all transcription into my note taking program Obsidian . And I figured…
I’ve been planning to build a Pingo clock for quite some time. Finally having some time available between projects I had most components on hand. With the exception for the bigger LED rings. And I also wanted to have the clock run on Circuitpython instead of Arduino. So I designed a smaller one, with only 7 led rings instead of 9. This also allowed me to print more parts, for example the…
While developing the OV Klok I’ve been exploring how small trinkets and other technological utilities can be configured. Most of the time, it’s either trough a captive portal , a self-served webserver or editing a configuration file. Both options aren’t really user friendly to me… The captive portal is fails at times and doesn’t really work if you have a custom…
A small hardware project that uses and ESP32 and pressure-forming plastic
My office is located in a different city, so I have to commute both ways.. Always taking the same initial transport from either my office or my home.. On both sides I’d love to have a simple display that shows the most recent leaving transport. After some tinkering I’ve cobbled together a piece of hardware (with just 10 solder joints!) and a simple API/crawler that kindly scrapes the…
I’ve worked with Tellart on the Dinner in 2050 installation for the UAE Pavilion. For COP28 the goal of this installation is to make people think about climate change in a very personal way. Visitors would be asked to tell about their favorite dish which would then be transformed into a dish in 2050 with an ingredient swapped out that would have the most impact on climate change. Over 18.000…
As we tinker around with our personal knowledge systems ( PKM ) and make them more intricate and fit for our own patterns, I often tend to look back on how I did things, sometimes to leave them around unchanged.. Since every version is stored in Git, we might as well keep a history. If I would start over again, I would guide myself a bit better by using a series of commandments much like religion…
Working with Bertrand from Symbiose Studio I’ve build the technical side of Intimate Implant. Three objects, each representing an regenerative implant. Three stories that investigate ethics, sacrifice and our relation to technology that disappears. Learn more at Symbiose Studio . Photo by Ivar Pel Each object carries a microcontroller that is running circuitpython and a speaker that allows…
I’ve helped Dilmah Tea with the ordering and forecasting proces. More information soon!
ChatGPT is all the rage nowadays. Personally I’ve used it quite a few times and professionally as a software developer it’s interesting to use. I don’t fear for my job/knowledge (yet!) as it’s mostly integrations and not of the shelf code… (I haven’t tried the hardware space in Chat GPT yet….. paperclips might be optimized ..) ✌️ To figure out how useful…
A wearable keyboard made for typing on the go!
A simple app that let’s you group column views of favorite folders
I’ve been journaling for a thousand days using Obsidian . A habit I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. Until I found Obsidian I just couldn’t make it work, but it does now! In this post I wanted to reflect on my daily notes and some ideas that I’ve been thinking about the last few days. If you’re curious about my current daily note template, I’ve created a…
After owning a couple of mp3 players in my youth, I’ve made the jump to an Apple device with an iPod Mini as my music player. Sadly, it’s in no working condition anymore I’m sure it’s possible to replace the entire inside, but it’s more fun to do something else with it. Thus and idea was born that didn’t come into fruition until a couple of days ago when I had…
Sovn (previously known as Jawsaver) creates smart earbuds to stop teeth grinding & clenching. Bruxism is a problem and to solve that I was asked to create several prototypes of mechanics to see what’s the most interesting strategy to develop into a product. All prototypes where supported with a dynamic earbud platform that let’s a user test different mechanics. Arduino’s,…
I’ve been reading books on my Kindle for a years and I’ve never really had a pretty workflow for it, all the books just simply end up in Calibre and I manually sync my library with the device itself. Lately I’ve spend some time automating the process a bit and I wanted to share that with you! I’ve been using plugins that solve things for me: Goodreads Sync Once you mark a…
While exploring the internet for inspiration and ideas around a wearable keyboard I’ve come across multiple sites, persons and ideas. It seems there’s not really a good index or overview of the history on wearable keyboards. So I thought I’d make one myself! This overview might not be complete, if you’re thinking I’m missing a crucial part, please contact me or open a…
Slowly but surely I’m making progress on my personal project. Creating a wearable keyboard that can be used while walking has been a dream of mine for a couple of years. One of the decision I made upfront is that I makes no sense to rush this project. The main reason is that most of the stuff I create these days either have to be brought to market as soon as possible (by yesterday please!).…
This blogpost mostly functions as a reminder to myself on how to configure Mainsail to use Zerotier . If you’re unfamiliar with any of the two, the first one is a operating system made for running a 3D printer and the second one allows for a network layer for personal computing, connecting devices over SD-WAN & VPN. I was running Octoprint for a while, but after a tip by David from Dato I…
Long overdue, and it’s missing more photos then I’d like, here’s the 8:36pm video of 2021! Thanks to Quinten Swagerman with helping out making it into a video! (Switching to a new mac broke the old After Effects I was still using…) Onto another year!
I’m no stranger to making keyboards and while I’m tinkering with creating a wearable keyboard I’ve stumbled upon many other builds of people that do interesting stuff. I’ve been browsing the usual reddits ( r/mk , r/ErgoMechKeyboards and the likes) I stumbled upon a nice looking project that would get me into ortholinear… I wanted a keyboard different enough that…
As most of my posts, the main reason I write them is to share some thoughts on recent things I’ve been working on. This one is also one of them, as I’ve been cleaning up, moving and mostly re-organizing my stuff. So it’s all about storage and that might seem a bit boring and at times it is. There’s a good reason for me to write about this as I’ve got some things that…
For digital fitness (Digitale Fitheid in dutch) I’ve created a questionnaire where people can discover how well versed they are with technology and digital tools. The small test is developed in Svelte & run on AWS with DynamoDB / Chalice as a backend. Curious about the test? It’s dutch only for now, but you can find it here !
For all the things I organize, inbox zero might just be one of the biggest achievements. Frequently less then 5 emails are in my inbox and every day I work, the todo-list shrinks. But there’s one list that keeps on growing, and that’s my read it later list in Pocket . For years I’ve been collecting stuff I read and find on the internet. Mostly due to my newsletter, The Curious…
In the previous part I highlighted how I managed my notes in folders. In this part I would like to explain a bit more on how make the decision between tags & a linked note. For people unfamiliar with the difference, this is a #tag and a bi-directional linked notes works like so: [[Note Title]] . At least, that’s how it’s implemented in Obsidian . It might be different in other tools,…
While explaining and introducing Obsidian to people I’ve noticed that the free form way of setup allows for so much flexibility. This results in an big amount of questions on how you would structure the links, tags and your vault. And while there are some solutions like PARA or LYT, I think the best system is the one you create yourself. One of the main reasons is that you’ll learn a…
In this age of digital tools I’m wondering if we really need the computer or phone to be the one tool that does it all. You see, specialized tools have been of all times, but we try to develop a smartphone that can do more and more, but if it tries to do everything it most likely will fail to do anything good. I haven’t seen a carpenter bring only one tool to the job, you;ll need a…
A small little web-application that lets you import iCal exports to Roam Research
While I’ve been learning to type again with my keyboard I think I’ve gained quite a few insights on muscle memory. The event of sitting behind a keyboard again after a month of being on a holiday and getting right back into typing has been fascinating me time and time again. However while learning to type with my wearable keyboard I’ve noticed that the orientation of the hands or…