Category: English
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Photos of the 2026-08-12 eclipse
Here are a couple photos I took at yesterday’s partial (88% in the Netherlands) eclipse. These photos were taken with a Sony α99-II with a 70-400 G zoom lens at 1/250 or 1/125 with aperture f11. The lens was fitted at the front with a home-made Baader Astrophysics ND-5 foil filter, that filters out 99.99%…
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Is this email safe?
(Nederlandse versie hier) “This looks legit, right? No spelling errors, and it looks just like the emails you regularly get from PayPal?”Trust no one. It’s surprisingly easy not to take any email at face value, and I want to show you how you can do that. I know that this is a long read, but…
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So… what’s all this about EVs and F-stops and stuff?
Sometimes, when people see me dragging a large camera and some heavy lenses and tripods around, they assume I know a bit about photography. Or sometimes I just mutter something obtuse like “an F-number is just a ratio between lens opening and focal length” that tips them off. Fact is, I grew up in an…
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Of cars with batteries and homes with batteries
First and foremost: I hope you will have a magnificent, healthy, trouble-free, fruitful and generally happy 2026! For us, December was another month of no bucket-kicking in our circle of family and friends! Oh, how fondly I remember the time that this wasn’t even worth mentioning… December was, for us, the month that we got…
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Getting the MyCitroën app to work on a Connect-NAV-E4-equipped car
(Ha, after 7 years, I get to do more fooling around with car multimedia systems!) We recently replaced our 13 year old Octavia with a Citroën C5 Aircross PHEV. To get one thing out of the way first, I know from personal experience (as a devoted owner) that the CX and the XM were years…
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November — Emergency response cats, cars, home batteries
First thing to get out of the way: nobody we know keeled over this month. That’s a nice change. It was close, though. A week ago, a brother in law dropped to the ground in the middle of the night with a cardiac arrest. Since everyone else was asleep, nobody would have noticed — if…
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Adobe Customer Support — A Tale Of Woe
The kindest thing I could possibly say is “there is potential for improvement”. Earlier this year, I decided to quite Adobe Photoshop Elements, in favour of a photo-centric Adobe CS solution, containing Lightroom and Photoshop. On the positive side: the capabilities of this suite, especially Lightroom, goes way beyond what you can do with Photoshop…
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So… Labour is losing the plot as well.
Watch out: here comes an opinion. So, in England, if you wear a keffiyeh, you can be arrested ant taken into custody by the police. Apparently, it has recently been arranged by the UK government that it is okay to do so. Or, if you’d have worn this you could have been unceremoniously thrown into…
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October: Some forgotten stuff from September, and continued dust biting
Let’s get the dust biting stuff out of the way first. First, another member of the extended family passed away pretty unexpectedly — we just posted a get-well-card, but she never got to see it. Sjaak Voorn And then, on October 29, after having suffered from cancer since forever ago, Sjaak Voorn finally turned off…
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Why I don’t hate AI
There is a current trend, most notably among artists, but also by the general public, to hate AI and the horse it rode in on. This post aims at (hopefully concisely) explain why I do not fully subscribe to that. AI is a tool. Like all tools, its usefulness is determined by how it is…