
My little digital garden. Reap what I've sowed in the collections.
Mostly Technical is a great podcast
I’ve regularly listened to the Mostly Technical podcast for almost a year and always enjoyed it. It’s fun, entertaining and very instructive.
In the past few days I got fed up with all the other podcasts in my rotation, which I listen to while walking. So I just decided to go back to their first episode and listen to all of it again.
…Updating Zelfpluktuinen.nl sucks!
A friend mentions a couple of locations missing on Zelfpluktuinen. Man… updating this sucks - it’s a bunch of scripts, tsv files, google docs sheets, etc.
I need to organize this better. Will start working on some proper tooling to expand, update, improve this. And, who knows, create an additional web directory.
So far we have an average of 80 visitors per day. Not bad - since google search still didn’t index all the pages. Kind of a surprise is that a non-insignificant portion of the traffic comes from chatGPT. That was surprising.
…Mid summer walk in Amsterdam
We went for a lazy walk in Amsterdam, enjoying the nice weather. I was for a few days in Portugal before and summer on these two places is quite different - I rather spent August in Amsterdam than in Portugal, to be honest. I guess I’m an eternal spring kind of guy. During the walk I took a few pictures. You can see the entire photostream in Flickr.

- Photo 1: Basilica of Saint Nicholas
- Take 2. Now without road constructions in front of it. Originally named St. Nicholas inside the Walls—referring to its location within Amsterdam’s historic city walls—the church was designed by archiect Adrianus Bleijs (1842–1912) in a blend of revival styles, mainly Neo-Baroque and Neo-Renaissance. It was completed in 1887. In December 2021, the basilica received a relic of St. Nicholas—a rib fragment kept at Egmond Abbey since 1087.

Zelfpluktuinen.nl is now live
I’ve just released a web directory, called Zelfpluktuinen, multilanguage, i.e. both in dutch and in english with u-pick locations in the Netherlands. Just a nice thing to have for myself, as I do enjoy going to these places (and the concept).
I’ve crawled a lot of these websites, and now I regret some of the decisions I took. But that’s part of what this site is supposed to be; on keep improving stuff.
…Winter holidays in Madeira
Lovely time in Madeira - few days in Fajã dos Padres followed by a couple days in Funchal. Great weather, great food, wonderful sea water temperature. Couldn’t ask for more.

Brugge
Went for a one day trip to Brugge. I didn’t go there for quite a while. What a lovely place.



This is Holland
You got that right.
Zen Buddhists say
Spring is comming
Spring is comming.