All the things I think and like to share
Do you hear all this noise? It's frightening. The sky is pink, and orange, and yellow all washed-out by the grey of the clouds. A group of people is going by, they are laughing, they are living. And I wonder how. I'm trying to understand, how can I go by? How can I laugh? How can I live? Why aren't they walking alone? The room is getting dark, the colors have faded. I can't hear the people…
And then, there is the silence. The silence when you've just finished a book. It's a weird silence, not a silence as far as sound goes. Roadwork is still roaring by the window, the fan is still humming slowly, the dog is still munching on its kibbles. But a silence of the mind. The characters have been jumping out the pages and into your mind, each speaking with their own voice, sharing vivid…
When I brew my coffee, I generally do it in 4 parts. One is the blooming phase, I pour 50ml and wait until it's all gone through. Then I do three other 50ml pours with 10 seconds between each. To count these 10 seconds, I use crocodiles, like so: "Un crocodile, deux crocodiles, trois crocodiles,...". Crocodile is the word we use in the french speaking part of Belgium. I think I have seen Americans…
My mom reads my notes (Hi mom 👋), and we could say that her English is rusted to the bone. So I guess that in order to understand what I write, she probably uses the "Website translation" feature offered by Google. That got me a bit worried because in my experience, Google's translation tools have been very hit or miss, sometimes giving me exactly what I want other times some bullcrap that…
Sometimes online, I stumble upon posts of people born before music streaming was a thing and they explain how listening to new music back then was an experience. They would go to the shop, buy a CD or vinyl after struggling to choose. Then they'd come home, and listen to the music they had just bought. Nothing more, simply sitting there and listening. This is really foreign to me as I've always…
This is my entry for this month's IndieWeb Carnival hosted by James . For the past half an hour, I've tried to write a note describing my very special relationship with museums, but I seem to be unable to transcribe the emotions I feel when I think of the different moments spent there. Every word I can use to try to explain how I feel seems weak compared to the sour pinch in my heart when I recall…
I used to take my online privacy really seriously, having no social media, not using google or its services, using fake email addresses and fake names, always erasing cookies and site data, all the protections one can take to be tracked as little as possible. But sharing my life is something that I love, and I don't want it to be private. I find it so awesome that thanks to internet, random people…
They built a new tram in my town, and it is pretty fantastic. It has a modern look, runs smoothly, has little delay between two trams, inside heating, is spacious and well lit, is kept really clean etc. But for some reason, the engineers that designed this tram thought it would be a good idea to make the door buttons "detect" your press rather than actually get pressed down. This means that even…
About a month ago, I made a note titled "Switching back to Laravel" . The idea was to make of my website what I wanted it to be, a place for me to create and collect stuff that I like and that makes me feel things. In that post I was asking about how long I was going to be able to keep up without feeling the need to change it all over and now we have an answer, about a month. And when I wrote that…
This note will seem outdated, it is. If you want to understand, you should read this one afterwards. If Laurel Schwulst's website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge , mine is more like Stretch Armstrong ; being pulled and torn from both sides because I am unable to make up my mind for any comfortable length of time. This "place on the internet" as I call it is now changing once…
Hey there, Lately, my algorithms have been feeding me a lot of "chronically offline" content. You know, this is content where people swap their smartphone for a dumbphone , they delete social media apps, they read books, they use an iPod to listen to music, they practice outside activities, etc. And like, this is really appealing to me, I love the idea that as a society we are slowly falling out…
A while back, I shared a note about how I had cut down my phone usage a lot and what it had changed for me. And for a few months, I actually stuck to it. But lately, I've been watching or listening to videos from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep. And for the times when I can't watch videos (like when I'm walking in the street, for example), I will put a podcast or music to occupy…
I've been seeing more techno-solutionist talk online lately. Maybe it's just my algorithms that decided to show me more of that or maybe people are actually talking more about it. Either way, it made me think about this subject and it's implications, and also made me quite scared. When I talk about techno-solutionism in this post, I mean it in relation towards climate change. Here's a definition…
I consider myself a simple boring guy, I like ed, I enjoy eating plain pasta, I wear only a few clothes in rotation, and my favourite way of writing and reading text is plaintext. There is something appealing about .txt files for me, it's only characters that all look mostly the same, none are bold, none are bigger, none have a background. Plaintext works everywhere, every computer can render it,…
I haven't written a note in a while. A couple weeks I'd say. And it's not that I don't know what to talk about or that I don't want to. It's just that in life you are given 24 hours each day, and you have to figure out what to do of these 24 hours and writing a new note wasn't it for a while. My brain is constantly spewing out ideas, be it new pages to make, notes to write, silly songs to sing,…
You might have noticed that there are absolutely no dates on this website. And that is because I have a real problem with them. I think this started with Youtube, I've always felt that since there is so much content constantly appearing, I shouldn't look at older videos. And this might be a valid point, because if I had to catch up with every video of every channel I like, I would never find time…
A couple weeks ago, I went on an adventure. I used to do go on adventures all the time as a teenager, but I don't get around to doing it as much these days, work and responsibilities got in the way. (Though getting a dog will maybe get me to do more). What I call an adventure, is basically living your life like you're in some fun open world video game. You get out of your house with your stuff in…
I would love to have a bike, to be precise, a cargo-bike. I live in a flat city and having a fast and easy way to do my groceries and move around would be nice. But here's the thing, I live in a flat, on the fourth floor of a somewhat old building that doesn't have an elevator. The corridor is already taken by neighbours' bikes or stuff from the restaurant at the bottom floor and I don't have…
I went to the hairdresser today, I always go to a random one. I found that it's often faster to go around until you find one that can take you right away rather than wait at one where there is a queue. She did a great job, my hair is now short and dries up in seconds when I'm out of the shower. But while there, I couldn't help but think that, if she decided, she could slit my throat at any moment,…
I am presently waiting in a sandwich shop, radio going in the background, noises of knives against cutting boards, the whooshing of the coffee machine, someone on the phone and cars roaring outside the window. The city is a noisy place, and for a long time, I hadn't noticed. This is because I've always lived either in or near a city, so my soundscape has always been filled with noise. And since…
My favourite code editor is ed. For those who don't know, ed is one of the first editors to have been made, it's part of a class of editors called "line editors", which means that you are only editing complete lines of text. You can append after a line, insert before it or change a specific part using regexes, but you cannot put your cusor on a word and edit there. Ed doesn't even have a cursor.…
I have been considered an adult for a few years now, that's to say I've had my own place away from my mother's for a while. And I've noticed that there is a certain amount of things you aren't taught in pre-adult life. (Maybe you were but I wasn't and I know many other people who weren't). Then at some point you become an adult to the world, and you eventually have to face these things. Generally,…
Yesterday I discovered the Internet phone book , and I was really excited to buy one because this project resonates with me. Unfortunately, it is sold out pretty much everywhere and I'm not going to the USA or Greece to get one (though I wish I could). Since then, they restocked! And I was able to get my hands on one 🙌 Despite this, I still had a thorough look at the website , and I discovered…
I have been coding for a few years now, and in that time, I have done nothing but remove complexity from my coding setup and I feel like I've reached a point where I'm happy with it. My favourite editor is ed , but I can't really use it much, therefore, I've settled on Neovim [^1]. I like the keyboard centric editing it offers, and it's actually really fun to use once you've mastered the Vim…
Rose colored sunglasses on my nose, I walk in the rain waving to the dogs I cross path with that reply by looking back happily with their tongue sticking out and their tails wagging. I see a puddle, jump over it, almost fall in it then celebrate this new long jump world record. The rain has stopped and I keep looking at the sky hoping for a rainbow to appear, don't see the red light and almost get…
I love brushing my teeth. The feeling of the hairs of the brush scraping on each tooth removing bits of food and undesirable stuff. The frothing of the toothpaste filling up your mouth more and more as you brush. The clean and minty taste that tingles your tongue, nose and eyes. For me, it's a moment to reflect, a moment spent with myself in front of the bathroom mirror. A moment to prepare myself…
Since I was born in the early 2000s, I've been around browsers most of my life. The first one was Firefox, it was the one installed on the family computer and I didn't even know there were other browsers at the time. To be fair, there was no difference between the browser, the search engine and internet in my mind. Then I discovered Internet Explorer while trying to kill the time at my…
