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Channel: Jacques Mattheij
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A Critique of Makani, the Google X Kite Based Power Project

My credentials in the wind industry are just about ‘0’, the only reason I’m writing this is because I’ve been a life-long wind power enthusiast, I’ve built (a prototype 2.5 KW 5 meter wind turbine and...

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Volkwagen and the Blame The Engineer Game

Volkwagen is a house in deep trouble. The dieselgate scandal just doesn’t seem to go away and even though the company is now under new management it seems that things are getting worse and worse as...

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Cloudy With a Chance of Lock-In

re lots of products that came to market in the recent past and that will come to market in the near future that use some kind of cloud hosted component. In many cases these products rightly use some...

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The World That Could Have Been

For a very brief (way too brief) time the world was a much better place. A very large publisher (Springer) probably inadvertently decided to sell all their books online for the low price of $0. Silly...

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CEO

In this post I’m going to try to give potential and actual CEO’s (and other C level execs to some extent) some actionable advice when it comes to how they conduct themselves in the hope that this will...

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New Employee Questions for Start-ups

So, you’re about to be hired by that hot new startup. Great, congratulations. But wait, congratulations may be a little bit too early. Young companies can - and do - have all kinds of problems and you...

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Trackers

A couple of weeks ago I went to the local shopping centre looking for a thermometer. After entering one store upon leaving without buying anything a tracker was assigned to me. I didn’t think much of...

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Another Way Of Looking At Lee Sedol vs AlphaGo

Imagine a contest in which we are going to pit man against machine. But instead of measuring who is best in playing the game of ‘Go’ we are going to measure who is fastest. In the one corner: Human,...

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My Passion Was My Weak Spot

For many years in the beginning of my career I’d been more than happy to work for free or even at a loss as long as the work was interesting. I was so totally in love with computer programming and the...

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The Myth Of The Evil VC

If there is one story of a persistant nature that seems to pervade the start-up world it is that VCs as a rule are evil, they’re out to get you, will drag you down to their level and then beat you with...

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The Problem With Electric Vehicles

Electric Vehicles (EVs) are all the rage these days. They’re wicked fast off the mark, they are nearly silent at low speeds and they are perceived as ‘green’, what better way to make yourself feel good...

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YCs Basic Income Experiment

Ycombinator has decided to move forward on their ‘Basic Income’ experiment. That’s a pretty bold step and I absoltely commend them on doing this, experiments like this are a lot more valuable than hot...

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Pinched Nerve Due To Desk

About a week ago I bought a really nice solid wooden table for a song in a second hand store. Hauling it home was quite the job, the thing weighs a ton. Fortunately the legs came off otherwise I’d...

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To Stay Or Not To Stay

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Facing a sizable fraction of his own party that wanted to secede from the EU David Cameron made the gambit of the century: Let’s have a referendum and...

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Just Say No

I grew up in Amsterdam, which is a pretty rough town by Dutch Standards. As a kid there are all kinds of temptations and peer-pressure to join in in bad stuff is something that is hard to escape. But...

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Sorting 2 Metric Tons of Lego

One of my uncles cursed me with the LEGO bug, when I was 6 he gave me his collection because he was going to university. My uncle and I are relatively close in age, my dad was the eldest of 8 children...

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Sorting 2 Tons of Lego, The software Side

For part 1, see here. Overview of the software components All the software written for this project is in Python. I’m not an expert python programmer, far from it but the huge number of available...

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How to Improve a Legacy Codebase

It happens at least once in the lifetime of every programmer, project manager or teamleader. You get handed a steaming pile of manure, if you’re lucky only a few million lines worth, the original...

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No politics please, we're hackers, too busy to improve the world

If there is one thing that never ceases to amaze me it is that the hacker community tends to place itself outside and by their own perception above politics. This is evidenced in many ways including...

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I Blame The Babel Fish

One of my favorite writers of all time, Douglas Adams has a neat little plot device in that wholly remarkable book ‘The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy’, called the Babel Fish. Let me quote the master...

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Sorting 2 Tons of Lego, Many Questions, Results

For part 1, see here. For part 2, see here Reliability The machine is now capable of running un-attended for hours on end, which is a huge milestone. No more jamming or other nastiness that causes me...

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The Web in 2050

If you’re reading this page it means that you are accessing a ‘darknet’ web page. Darknets used to refer to places where illicit drugs and pornography were traded, these days it refers to lonely...

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E-Stop and Fuel, software that keeps you awake at night

Computer code that I’m writing usually doens’t keep me up at night. After all, it’s only bits & bites and if something doesn’t work properly you can always fix it, that’s the beauty of software....

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Dark Patterns, The Ratchet

A dark pattern in the design world means something that is purposefully created to mislead users and to get them to perform actions against their own interest. Since we are supposedly required to...

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Trainification

I love cycling. Sometimes I think I love it just a little bit too much. Such as the day two years ago that I took my Zephyr Lowracer for a spin and ended up in the hospital with my right leg broken in...

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GDPR Hysteria

In another week the GDPR, or the General Data Protection Regulation will become enforceable and it appears that unlike any other law to date this particular one has the interesting side effect of...

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GDPR Hysteria Part II, Nuts and Bolts, actionable advice

Part I of this is here, if you haven’t read it yet please do so before reading this installment, it will help to establish context. So, after geting the most repeated fallacies about the GDPR out of...

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So Your Startup Received the Nightmare GDPR Letter

Apologies for the typo in the url… Some dumb lawyer figured it would be fun to give GDPR trolls a form letter to use to inflict maximum damage on unsuspecting companies. The reason why this is dumb is...

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What is wrong with Microsoft buying GitHub

According to Bloomberg Microsoft is said to have agreed to buy GitHub. GitHub which reportedly has been losing money being acquired is a major development because of its central role in the development...

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The Briefcase

Long ago, in the mid 80’s I worked for a bank in the IT department on the Western side of Amsterdam. I lived in the east part and moved around town by bicycle, most because it is by far the fastest way...

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ET (Don't) Phone Home

I recently became aware of this article where a Google exec says - he’s serious - that ‘Nest owners should probably warn their guests that their conversations are being recorded’. That’s assuming the...

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A Company You Have Never Heard Of

Have you ever wondered what causes large teams of search and rescue people including all their gear to magically spring into action within hours of a plane crash, no matter where in the world it has...

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MP3 to MIDI Conversion

For the last three months I’ve been working on a project that combines my twin passions: music and computer programming. The problem is an interesting one, the formal name for it is ‘automatic music...

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Anatomy of a Scam

There is a lot of material about the not-so-nice VCs who take advantage of young and inexperienced founders. But the reverse also happens, founders that try to get money out of VCs for projects that...

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Covid-19, a Retrospective

It’s been a couple of years now, since the 2020 Coronavirus disaster. Society is still not completely back to normal, and I doubt it ever will be. For instance, you can clearly see which movies were...

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Please don't lie

The Netherlands is one of the wealthiest and most favored countries when it comes to dealing with nature. If it weren’t for our continuous watchful eye on nature this country would - in the most...

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Restoring and MIDI-fying a Baby Grand Piano

As much as I love digital instruments, synthesizers and other electronic gear I also really love the look and feel of instruments made from wood, brass, steel and felt. There is objectively no...

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Dealing With Insomnia

A couple of months ago I received a present, a small book titled ‘Why we sleep’ by Matthew walker. It is an interesting book that takes you through the physiological and psychological effects of...

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The Social Media Problem

After seeing some of the weirdest stuff ever show up in my Twitter timeline I decided to dig in and see for myself what is going on in the underbelly of the beast. Someone I follow had just re-tweeted...

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Why Johnny Won't Upgrade

Software distribution has over the years gone through an enormous revolution in efficiency. Originally, software was developed on things called ‘plug boards’, a matrix of sockets that allowed quick (or...

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Letsencrypt, the Good, The bad and the Ugly

Letsencrypt is a pretty neat concept: free secure certificates for web servers, in order to increase the adoption of HTTPS across the web. The basic idea is that certificates should be free, that the...

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COVID-19 Round 2 is Here

If you’ve been following the news you probably are aware that the number of people that test positive for COVID-19 is rapidly rising. As most people that know a bit about historical pandemics have...

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Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

I’m pretty sure that the hardest choice in my life to date has been the one between my two loves: music on the hand and computer programming on the other. The programming won out, I figured it would be...

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Piano Practice Software Progress

First an apology. I started this project because during the first 9 months of the COVID-19 pandemic business was down to a fraction of what it was before then, and I had a lot of time on my hand. But...

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COVID19 Predictions for 2021

More than a year ago already I posted a fictional COVID19 retrospective, reading it back today it is pretty eerie to see how many of the predictions made in it have come true or are about to become...

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Long Range E-Bike

Electric cars are fantastic compared to ICE vehicles, but E-Bikes are even better. Much lower environmental impact and far more suited to medium range travel such as commuting. Here in NL they sell in...

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Kernenergie vs Zon en Wind

Dit is een antwoord op de Tweet thread van @Inge_v, die een hele berg redenen aangaf waarom ze vond dat Kernenergie de enige optie is in plaats van zon, wind en andere renewables. Het begon met: Ik ben...

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My Friends the Complot Theory Believers

I have friends from all walks of life. Most of them are smart and skilled. Some of them believe the most outrageous things. For instance, there is this one couple that I know that refuse to believe in...

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The Golden Egg Circus

In 1989 I got a call from a friend to come along to visit a studio in Landsmeer, near Amsterdam, where something quite amazing was being constructed, a circus with nothing but eggs, both as the...

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Drastically Reducing Our Powerbill

Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine the price of gas and electric power in the European Union has gone up enormously. Russia, a major supplier of gas to the EU has been sanctioned heavily, buying...

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