How not to suck at Supercharging

A recent trip to the U.K. showed me the reality of opening the Supercharger network to non-Tesla cars. I hadn’t really seen much of that in Belgium yet, but then I don’t use the Superchargers a lot when I’m close to home. The occupation rate of the stations I tried in the U.K. was higher than before (2021-2022), with anywhere from 25% to 75% of the stalls occupied by other brands. And that is not without its challenges.


Now I Can Just Print That Video

It all started with Instagram Reels showing me too many yummy cooking videos. I wanted to try some recipes out myself. But I didn’t want to have to keep my phone in the kitchen, and I didn’t want to have to keep unlocking it to see the next step. I wanted to print the recipe out, and have it on the counter while I was cooking. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could just print that video?


Learning Hungarian in an hour

In 2007 I wrote a post “Learning Bulgarian in an Hour” based on this article: How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour. Let’s see how that works out with Hungarian.


Put your (software) version in a file

I’ve started using my setver bash tool for easy semver versioning of components and projects. One of the design decisions I made back then, is that I would always have a VERSION.md version file in the root of my project. This file only contains the current version number. This version is also stored in the composer.json (PHP), package.json (JS) files and git tags, but I wanted a system that also works for my bash projects. In the end, it turns out that was a clever decision.


Realistic daily range of an electric vehicle

I have been driving my Tesla Model Y 2021 for almost 18 months now, and while I do not really suffer from EV Range Anxiety, I would like to nuance the official range of the Tesla Model Y LR, which is 330 miles / 533km range. That number very much feels like a theoretical maximum. It is not the number you should have in mind when you’re deciding on the next car to buy.


Microtime in bash: sub-second precision

Post #8 in this bash benchmark series, measuring the speed of common bash operations.


Using bashew in GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions, used in countless CI/CD setups, are a good example of the ubiquity of bash scripting. Most of the run: lines in an Action YML document are nothing but (a sequence of) bash command lines.


Idea: Automatic Expense Reporting

Every end of the month, as I spend several hours getting on top of all my receipts, expenses and invoices, scanning barely legible paper tidbits with my phone, I’m thinking to myself, surely there must be a better way? I mean, we are 2022, after all?


Sane GDPR cookie management

I have been working on GDPR-related issues recently, and I need to vent a little. While it might be a good thing that the privacy concerns, that led to GDPR, were raised by lawyers, unfortunately the implementation was left to lawyers, too. Let me rant first and talk about a solution afterwards.


Benchmark: hash functions

Post #7 in this bash benchmark series, measuring the speed of common bash text manipulations.