Category: Day to Day

Day to day finds and observations, not presented at the front page.

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..is supposedly taking place next Monday in Den Bosch. This may come as a surprise for those, like myself and BarCamp co-originators Chris and Andy, who remember visiting the second ever BarCamp globally 16 years ago, in Amsterdam on 20 and 21 October 2005. Or those who attended any of the Dutch BarCamps thereafter documented on BarCamp.org (albeit sparsely, I admit). Mediamatic kindly provided the venue in PostCS for that first Dutch BarCamp.

I heard E guffaw as she read that LinkedIn posting and after hearing why, couldn’t resist kindly pointing out their mistake and linking to the relevant BarCamp.org page for that first BarCampAmsterdam of 16 years ago.


Roland in a BarCamp Amsterdam 2005 t-shirt. Image Ton Zijlstra, license cc by nc sa


Part of the BarCamp Amsterdam schedule in 2005. Image Ton Zijlstra, license cc by nc sa

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My blog tells me it’s 18 years ago today I installed Skype and made my first call with Dina Mehta and Stuart Henshall the same day. That was three weeks after Skype launched in public beta. I don’t remember, nor does my blog for me, when my last Skype call was. Sometime after the 2011 Microsoft acquisition for sure. Maybe when they switched from the original peer to peer to a central server model? More likely it was around the time when they confused the world by having Skype and Skype for Business as completely separate things yet using the same name, from the fall of 2016. I uninstalled it by 2019 I think. My meeting and conversation notes mention ‘skype call’ for the last time somewhere during 2015.

Are there any current p2p voip applications that can capture the fascination that Skype held in 2003? Has it gone ‘under the hood’ as a protocol, living in different silos? Or is there an existing ecosystem of apps and users still around? Is Skype p2p voip a thing that could be useful to recreate?

[UPDATE: I should have thought to look for it in my blog: I did ask the same questions about what the Skype of now would be, a little under a year ago.]

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Our 5 yr old is as any her age well aware that dinos roamed the world ‘a very long time ago’ even before humans existed. Two weeks ago we discussed the Dodo (because it figured in a cartoon she likes), and how it died out in the late 1600’s.

Last night as I brought her to bed she asked me what werewolves are, and I told her that ‘vroeger‘ (an unspecified long time ago) people believed there were people who turned into wolves at full moon. “Did you believe that when you were young, vroeger?” she asked. So I specified that with my vroeger I meant a long time before even I was born, some 300 to 500 years ago.

To which she replied:

“Ah, so that was after the dinos, but during the time of the Dodo.”

Indeed, that’s correct 😀
I love how this shows how she is constructing mental images of the order in time of things and clears up the mists of time for herself. The dino’s demise at one end, us at another, and a marker for when the Dodo went extinct, with belief in werewolves somewhere before that marker. Vroeger.

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I removed all embedded videos from this blog, as part of the ongoing mission of ensuring no third parties can track readers of this blog. There were 4 types of video embeds in this blog.

  • Qik.com embeds of live streaming I did on occasion. Qik is no longer active and I simply removed all embeds.
  • 23Video embeds, which E used for FabLab related videos. While 23Video still exists, E’s account is no longer active, so I simply removed those embeds as well.
  • YouTube embeds, which I all replaced with a still image and a link. Some videos were no longer online.
  • Vimeo embeds, which I also replaced with a still image and a link. Interestingly enough, Vimeo embeds were not working for videos Vimeo listed as ‘unrated’. In those cases you would need to be logged into Vimeo to see them, defeating the purpose of embedding them. There were also Vimeo videos where I am certain noone has access to the account anymore (as they were channels for projects I was involved in). I wonder what will happen to them over time.

This was a straight forward effort, as I hadn’t embedded many videos here in the first place (40-50 in total).

What stood out to me was that of all those videos, two videos were no longer on YouTube because they were moved to a self hosted environment (videos of the C3 conferences, no surprise given the background of its organisers). A good move, but probably still hard to do for many, and without the easy reach YT and others provide.

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Over the years I have linked to many books from this blog, usually to an Amazon page with an affilliate link. In the early days (2003-2004) of such affilliate links I made 70 USD at one time, and then nothing. Over time linking to Amazon, links that included a tracking pixel for years, became less helpful for readers to find books, and more helpful for Amazon to track readers.

I stopped linking to Amazon last year April, but this blog still held the links I previously made. When I deleted my Amazon affilliate account they gave me a gift card with the outstanding balance: 35 cents. They still got their tracking on the links I used here though, so those links needed to go. Removing such links isn’t much work, but I wanted to maintain the usefulness of my postings, by linking to an author’s homepages, Wikipedia entries, as well as to the publisher’s page, Wikipedia page, Internet Archive or Open Library page for their books. That work does cost time, and is now finished. I no longer link to Amazon on this blog anywhere (nor Amazon’s Goodreads), and no Amazon tracking pixels remain.

I do still buy e-books from Amazon, although that too is ever so slowly shifting to other sources (directly from publishers for instance). It’s just that I no longer send any website visitor’s data their way as well.

Drosophila, fruitflies, have little water content it seems. At least that is what I am led to conclude from today’s empirical data. As I opened the door of the microwave to warm some soup for lunch a fruitfly followed the soup bowl into the device. I closed the door and started the device for 3.5 minutes at 600 Watts. As I opened the door to retrieve my soup the fruitfly flew out as well and continued its life unchanged. Here ends my lab journal.