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. Testing a Basetech energy monitor 2000

   To monitor the power usage of my electric motorcycle and appliances, I bought a Basetech EM2000. Before using it for real monitoring, I wanted to test it to get a feel for the accuracy

2. No AI training data here

   Recently “generative AI” models have become popular. The term however is a misnomer if not an outright lie.

   There is no “generating” going on, but basically little more than re-hashing of the training materials. This is a rip-off of human creativity, in which I refuse to participate.

   So the license of this website has been changed to include no derivatives and no commercial use.

   Using the content of this website as AI training data is explicitly not allowed.

3. Repairing a USB flash drive

   Recently, one of my USB flash drives, a Kingston DataTraveller 100 G3, stopped working. It didn’t register at all in whatever PC I tried it in. So in this article, I will attempt to repair it.

4. Extracting glyphs from an OpenType file

   In order to create a compact representation of a monogram, I wanted to get the raw curve info from the Latim Modern Roman font, not the rendered glyphs.

   This article documents how I did that.

5. Building vkQuake 1.22.0 on FreeBSD

   The FreeBSD port is relatively old, and doesn’t support SDL 2.2. So I built version 1.22.0, which is current at the time of writing.

   The requirements are the same als the port.

6. From python script to executable with cython

   Recently I saw that you could convert python scripts into executable with the help of cython, and I had to try that.

7. On Python speed

   As an engineer, I write a lot of small python programs as tools for specific tasks. Generally, these are not large programs. Most of them are below 100 lines of code (“LOC”, as measured by cloc), although there are a few in the 300−400 LOC range.

   In this article, I will present some observations about these, and draw some conclusion from them.

8. Python 3.11 speed comparison with 3.9

   Since Python 3.11.0 came out recently, I wanted to compare its speed with 3.9.15 on some of my own “benchmark” programs.

   Both versions are in the default configuration as built by the FreeBSD ports system.

   TL;DR Python 3.11 yielded speed improvements in the order of 25% in my tests.

9. Writing speed on FreeBSD 13.1-p2 amd64 with ZFS

   This is a repeat of the test I ran in 2020 on the same desktop hardware, but now using the …

10. FreeBSD 13.1 install on a Lenovo IdeaPad 5

    When I originally got this machine, I needed it for $WORK. That is no longer the case, so I wanted to install FreeBSD 13.1 in combination with ZFS to gain experience with the latter.

    TL;DR Nice and quiet. Slightly faster than my i7-7700 workstation. Except for wifi, everything works.