This weekend I will be at the PKM Summit in my hometown of Utrecht. A two-day community-based event on everything regarding Personal Knowledge Management. Yes, it will a geeky and fun event on how to take notes. And actually do something with them. I look forward to two days in this safe and comfortable bubble of note-taking enthousiasts who also love to configure everything and anything under the sun when it comes to Obsidian. Or even Emacs perhaps? The timetable doesn’t say anything about Emacs-themed talks. And I am too much of a padawan to give a talk about this DIY kit for building Your Personal Text Editor myself. I still have to think about what I want to take out of it and plan accordingly. And I have to figure out how to combine this conference with the annual Mariokart Tournament on Friday evening at our corporate clubhouse!

The fine people at Neatnik keep coming with cool stuff. Next to the omg.lol universe, this summer we will see web1.land. I love the domainname. I love their explanation:

Web 1 Land is a place for people who remember and love the best parts of the web–or people who missed that era and want to experience it today. It’s a place where you can have fun writing HTML without the overhead of today’s “modern” content publishing ecosystems. A place where you can be yourself, do your thing, and make your web pages.

I love reading the latest P&B with Sara Joy. Her blogging adventures are filled with relatable stories and I really enjoy her recommendations of other blogs and sites. The whole series of People and Blogs is worth a read by the way!

The Gaslight Anthem live in Utrecht

The last time I saw The Gaslight Anthem live, they had just released their breakthrough album “The ’59 Sound”, way back in 2009. After that, I sort of checked their later albums every now and again, but somehow they fell of the radar with my listening habits. Last night they played TivoliVredenburg in my hometown Utrecht and I’m glad I bought the tickets way in advance. Their latest album History Books hits the right nerve for me and I listened to their back catalogue the last couple of days.

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De tweede Dungeons and Dragons quest met het hele gezin was weer de moeite waard. We zijn veilig in het stadje Phandalin aangekomen. Om daarna samen met zoonlief in de Stonehill Inn een bar-brawl te starten met vier oude vijanden. We konden het niet laten. Vrouw en dochter keken ons hoofdschuddend aan vanaf de tafel, terwijl we bijna het onderspit delfden. Gelukkig schoten ze ons toch te hulp. Nu is het weer tijd om uit te rusten en daarna op zoek te gaan naar de leider van de lokale Redbrands bende…

DnD charactersheet and the polydice
Mijn charactersheet en dobbelstenen

Irene en Karin ken ik inmiddels al jaren uit de Nederlandse weblogwereld. Zij zijn recent het platform Rocktheblog gestart, een blog over bloggen. Met advies voor zowel beginners als de ervaren bloggers. Ik kreeg een aantal leuke vragen voorgeschoteld over mijn drijfveren, inspiratie en bloggeschiedenis voor een artikel op de site. KLIK!

Voor de weblog-geschiedschrijvers onder u, ik heb mijn weblog-geschiedenis eens op een rij gezet. Van 2000 tot nu. Alle titels, alle URLs.

Zin in de dag! Vandaag spelen we het tweede hoofdstuk van het Dungeons and Dragons avontuur waar we in februari mee begonnen. Het complete gezin speelt mee, en ik ben benieuwd welk avontuur we vandaag beleven. Finn (12) telde de dagen al af tot vandaag, hij heeft enorm veel zin om weer in zijn rol te kruipen. Vanavond gaan we naar The Gaslight Anthem. De band zag ik voor het laatst in 2009 (denk ik?) en leadzanger Brian Fallon zagen we in 2016 nog eens op Lowlands. En de zon schijnt! Wat een dag, nu al!

Blogrolls are on a roll! (I know, I’ll see myself out…) Even de OG Blogfather Dave Winer now has a blogroll on his homepage and started a dedicated site blogroll.social for a fresh look on blogrolls. I like where this is going!

Jim Nielsen’s short manifesto professes his love to the hyperlink

Interconnectedness is the whole point. Links form the whole. Without links, there is no whole. No links means no web, only silos. Isolation.

It reminds me of an earlier post by Adrian Roselli about the beauty of hyperlinks

They represent the ideal of a democratized information system.

Which leads me invariably to the classic from The Cluetrain Manifesto:

Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy

This is what lead me to the web in the first place. The possibility to link to anything else on the web was an eye-opener to me. It gave me whole new world to explore and find new connections, new people. That’s why blogging and personal sites will always remain important to me. They give the freedom to discover and link on your terms.

What a nice coincidence with the web being 35 years young today!

Blogrolls are your personal algorithm

I’m kicking the tires of the new recommendations and blogrolls option in Micro.blog. Last november and december I confessed my love for these type of artefacts from the early web. Blogrolls are a great way to find new voices on the personal web. They are handrolled BigAlgorithm-free lists of cool sites, curated by the author. This first implementation in micro.blog is pretty nice. I will keep my current blogroll-page for now, but have updated the link to the OPML file, since it is now connected to this domain.

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An update to my previous post about SXSW. There is a good groupblog from a couple of Dutch attendees. It is in Dutch, but Deepl Translate can do wonders for you…

SXSW isn’t all that popular on the social networks I frequent nowadays. The music/film/interactive festival in Austin used to be all over the timelines but not as much this year. At least in the network around me which is still skewed towards digital technology and -marketing. But a quick look just gave me:

  • Mastodon: A lot of talk about how SXSW has changed and isn’t the festival it used to be
  • Bluesky: Discussions mainly about the movie events
  • Micro.blog: Zero current search results

Is SXSW still relevant? Or is it now just for three-lettered government agencies recruiting for talent? Which leads to bands cancelling SXSW in protest of these sponsorships, connected to the genocide in Gaza?

Blogs for my 17-year-old daughter

“Hey dad…”, she says, as she walks in the room, “here’s the thing… I want to be less on social media. I get stressed, annoyed, it’s just too much. I want to find more on what I really like. On my own terms, not some algorithm. I want to read more blogs. On the topics that interest me.” It’s not often my heart makes a little jump. But today was the day it did.

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Dune: Part Two. What a ride. We watched it yesterday in ScreenX, a panoramic film format with dual-sided, 270-degree screens projected on the walls in a theater. It was an experience. Not only the expanded screen, but the story. The movie. The sound. The visuals. Those 166 minutes flew by. The story of Paul Atreides, still alive and living among the Fremen in the deserts of Arrakis. If there is one movie you should really see in the theatre first, let it be Dune: Part Two.

I love how Colin titles his blogpost “The greatest productivity hack of all time” since it feels clickbaity. But following Colin for a while, I was curious. And not disappointed. The app Structured has a good premise and within two minutes I bought the yearly Pro-version. I look forward to use it and see how it helps me focus more on the tasks at hand.

Oh I love how the site for XOXO Fest 2024 lets you play with the light/dark toggle. Try it for yourself.

Finally got around to update my NOW-page again. It’s been a while…

Finished 1984

Finished listening: 1984 by George Orwell 📚 This book will stay with me for a long long time. Of course I was already familiar with the synopsis of the story and a lot of the terms used in it (newspeak, thought police) but the way Orwell lays out the hopeless situation of Winston is so chilling to listen to. How Orwell extrapolated the economic and societal situation after World War II and how he used his imagination to create a totalitarian world, even better than the ones we’re “used” to… I found so many parallels with our current society.

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Well…here’s another rabbithole for me to get lost in… Child themes for Tiny Theme, made in CSS. Please give me a gallery with examples so I don’t mess up!