We moved countries! 🚚: a lot has happened since I last logged something here. At the end of November, we moved from Finland to Belgium. It became a tumultuous multi-day undertaking despite long preparations, but luckily we could count on the support of a handful of great friends, who I want to warmly thank once again! 🙏 Helsinki waved us goodbye with some snowfall, and it’s been good to be back in Belgium. In mid-February we will settle into our new long-term Brussels apartment.
I’ve been in India 🇮🇳: for almost a month now, for family matters (a wedding, birth, …), and a small vacation next week (Sri Lanka). Escaping the West-European winter for a while, and entering the realm of the merciless mosquitoes. It’s probably also been my longest stretch of out-of-home remote work so far, and I’m happy with what we’ve achieved last month. The period before hadn’t been easy with our moving preparations, and my colleagues having welcomed a newborn.
Emulation & projects 🎮: to cope with the intense fall and winter period of 2024, I let off steam with a temporary obsession for handheld retro gaming. I got XU Mini M & Retroid Pocket 5 consoles and re-indulged into childhood favorites such as Pokemon FireRed, WipEout Pulse and Shaun White Snowboarding (PSP). More recently the free-time pendulum swung back into the project sphere, and I built a new version of my 2018 “No Feed” prototype. The angle is slightly different now: I primarily wanted to keep an eye on the things shared by close friends and family without opening algorithmic social media home feeds. This time, I’m using a headless Chromium browser to periodically scrape the social feeds of people, which lets my system know when there is new a new post. Only then, and at my desired frequency, will the system generate a new item in an RSS feed; displaying a list of first names and links to account pages to check. It ties into my habit of opening my RSS feed reader daily. After the first tests I’m optimistic: it helps me keep in touch with close ones, nothing more, nothing less!
About this feed: if you’re reading this in an feed reader (cool!), I just fixed a bug which lead to all my blog post’s Atom guids being the same JS function code. That function had to be called to produce the correct guid - whoopsie. This might mean that you’ll see duplicates of my posts, my apologies for that. I’ll try to ensure this is a one-time thing.