Welcome

This is my home in the virtual world, where I write about things that I want to share. The freely available software that I've written as well as some of the photographs I've taken over the years can also be found here. Please use the navigation links on the right if you are looking for something.

Recent articles

1. Enjoying the sunshine

   On the 8th and 9th of March 2014 it was unseasonably warm. In fact the temperatures on both days have been the warmest on those dates since recording began in 1901.

   Here in Eindhoven the temperature reached 21 °C today! So I got out the lawn-chair and enjoyed the sunshine!

   

2. New Zealand 2013/2014: favorite pictures

   At the end of 2013 and beginning of 2014 I spent a month on holiday in NZ, and had a great time. Below is a selection of my favorite pictures from that holiday.

   The comments are interspersed between the pictures. They belong with the picture above.

   

   The beach at Napier ...

3. Public key

   What follows is the public part of the openpgp key that I use to sign my e-mail and software packages.

   Update

   On 2014-03-02 I generated a new 4096-bit key which is going to replace my old key.

   Old key:

   pub   1024D/C321A725 2000-08-29
       Key fingerprint = 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914 ...

4. Python number conversions

   Sometimes one has to convert numbers from and to different formats. Below are some examples in Python that I picked up over time. What you see are excerpts of IPython sessions.

   To and from hexadecimal (base 16):

   In [1]: hex(100)
   Out[1]: '0x64'
   
   In [2]: int(0xa7)
   Out[2 ...

5. Daal

   This is a recipe that I got from my big sister. She got it from her friend Charlotte. Thanks to both. :-)

   • one onion, finely chopped
   • two big cloves of garlic, finely chopped
   • one green chili, seeds removed, finely chopped (or some dried chili, like piri piri)
   • one carrot peeled and ...

6. Travel in New Zealand

   To get from Auckland to Napier I had booked a domestic flight because that should take only one hour instead of eight by bus!

   Do make sure that there is sufficient time between the arrival of your international flight and the boarding of the domestic flight. We ware slated to ...

7. Travel to New Zealand

   On the 18th of December I left for NZ. Compared to my previous journeys I did not do a stopover but just switched planes. This time in Seoul. This switch took quite some time; the arrival and departure gates were far apart, even taking into account that you had to ...

8. vid2mkv

   My digital camera can also produce movies, like most camera's these days. It saves them in AVI format, with relatively poor mjpeg compression and uncompressed sound.

   So I wrote this python script to convert these AVI files to Theora / Vorbis streams in a matroška container. It takes the AVI ...

9. vid2mp4

   Videos with H.264 video and AAC sound im MP4 containers seem to strike a very good size performance balance. So I modified a copy of vid2mkv to use ffmpeg to create this kind of files instead.

   To speed up the processing of multiple files, this script runs the conversions ...

10. Laptop repair

    In November my four-year old laptop started acting up. First it shut itself down a couple of times when doing heavy calculations. Later the screen started showing artefacts in text mode and would hang the X server. I bought this machine from BTO because they offered quite a lot of ...