Bij de Open State Foundation (waar ik voorzitter ben) zoeken we een nieuwe directeur! Herken jij je in het profiel (PDF), en ben je net zo bevlogen als ons team om digitale transparantie bij de overheid te bevorderen en onze democratie te versterken? Dan horen we heel graag van je! Nadrukkelijk ook als je vindt […]

In reply to Setting up Webmentions by Alex Hyett It’s always good to see a blogger adding Webmentions to their site. Cross-blog conversations are to me what blogging is about. And Webmentions are a useful piece of plumbing to make it so. If your set-up works, then this should show up at your end. Blog […]

Last week I spent a few days in Switzerland. I went to Zürich on Thursday to meet up with a few people, having a pleasant chat with Beat Döbeli about his 30 year old PKM system Biblionetz, and a nice dinner with long time open data friend André Golliez, who chairs the Swiss Data Alliance. […]

The Open State Foundation has its office on the old naval yard in the heart of Amsterdam. Right next to the national maritime museum, in the 17th century warehouse of the Dutch admirality, and across from the 1960’s former Base Commander’s home our (as I’m a board member there) offices are surrounded by other small […]

Het is DOEI! Dag, de eerste zondag van de maand om mezelf en anderen aan te moedigen weer een stapje te zetten weg van BigTech. Stap je mee? Blogpost:

Favorited The Archivist In Me Turned This Blog Into a Book by Wouter Groeneveld On occasion I’ve mentioned here that one way of ensuring longevity of this blog is to publish it as one or more books with a proper ISBN, and have the national library store their two obligated copies. We did this in […]

Trains at Atocha station Madrid I spent the week in Ciudad Real in Spain, under an hour by high speed train (~200km) south of Madrid. I was there for a plenary meeting of CEN/CENELEC’s joint technical committee (JTC) 25 that works on European standards for data management, data spaces, and cloud & edge. The need […]

There is a lot of sloppy journalism out there. Obvious questions not asked, basic facts not gotten straight, numbers literally not adding up, tens to thousands of orders of magnitude errors. The perennial sensationalist phrasing and populist use of emotion laden words as supposedly neutral wording. And then there is ignorance of basic knowledge becoming […]

This weekend we took a train to Rotterdam. We decided to spend a day there, as our Canadian friends Peter and Lisa were coming up from Bruges in Belgium, which was the last stop on their cycling holiday. Before meeting them and after coffee the three of us strolled to and through Museumpark and visited […]

We spent a week and a half in Portugal this spring. Traveling together is something we do well with the three of us, and something I find healing. Although I found it hard at times to be in the moment, and to not let myself get irritated over small things. It was Y’s first ever […]

As I mentioned in my previous post The Long Walk, I struggle to get out of the house and away from my laptop to take short walks in the neighbourhood during the day. We live at the northern edge of Amersfoort, and across the small Laak river in easy walking distance there’s a polder at […]

It is now two years ago that during a day trip E and I had a conversation about my wellbeing in which I broke down in tears and we came to the conclusion there and then that I was burnt out. A good moment to take stock of where I am at. What came before […]

In reply to Stop and think by Paolo Valdemarin This made me stop and think. My company contains a well above average number of actual philosophers, 50% of our team. Some with PhDs. Usually combined with practical technical knowledge. Not sure if it gives us a better handle at the future though. Yet, ‘holding questions’ […]

In the past week I’ve started three personal experiments that use AI (in this case Claude Code). For each, the experiment lies in automating steps in my cognitive work that are useful or necessary but not the actual cognitive work itself. They’re helper activities, supporting the main task. For two of the three that is […]

Since the start of last year I have not been spending any money at Amazon. I’ve been happily buying my reading elsewhere. Today for the first time I ran into a genuine bump. I noticed that Canadian SF author Dennis E. Taylor released a fifth book in his fun and entertaining Bobiverse series last year, […]

Favorited Headless Everything For Personal AI by Matt Webb I see this being adopted around me too. Not just CLI’s though, also more APIs, pulling in data sources from elsewhere. And most interestingly: I see adoption by people who did not program or treat their computer as their personal toolbox they can adapt before. Until […]

My grandfather Klaas Zijlstra (1905-1993) was a farmer and cattle raiser. He grew up in Fryslân and always wanted to be a farmhand it seems (his father was a housepainter). There was ambition too, from leaving school at 12 and moving out on his 16th, he sought out farmers to work for that had a […]

Uit de Haagse krant van woensdag 25 juli 1928: Tegen radio-gerucht Raad van Amersfoort neemt maatregelen De Gemeenteraad van Amersfoort heeft een verordening aangenomen, waarbij verboden wordt radio-luidsprekers in werking te hebben met geopende deuren of vensters. Is dit waarom je bij rampen ramen en deuren gesloten moet houden alvorens de regionale radio aan te […]

Earlier this week I started reading an ebook and was a bit irritated because the book did not show me a table of contents. This seems to be a regular thing in ebooks. Already earlier I have complained here about why ebooks, or perhaps mostly e-readers, make so little use of the affordances of digital […]

Favorited AI Policy and Human.json by Claudine Chionh Favorited Adding human.json to WordPress by Terence Eden Claudine Chionh and Terence Eden both mention human.json, a data file that lists people and sites you know are written by humans, as opposed to generated by AI. A rekindling of FOAF? In these days of needing to assume […]

Favorited I used AI. It worked. I hated it. by Michael Taggart An excellent post by Michael Taggart on how it felt to him to make a much needed bit of code with the help of Claude Code. The results worked, but he hated how it made him feel. He explores those opposing outcomes without […]

Favorited If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem – you have bigger problems by Andrew Murphy Good blogpost on how ‘speeding up’ code production (x lines committed this week, yay!) by using AI, will likely cause more trouble in an organisation. Because the theory-of-constraints bottleneck in an organisation will never be […]

My website is now part of the web archive in the Dutch Royal Library. It took some experimenting to get it in there. Blogs will be blogs and the amount of links in mine choked the harvester it seems. Since 2007 the Royal Library has been archiving websites, and now stores some 25.000 websites. My […]

At PKM Summit this weekend one thing that stood out was that many have started creating their own tools, and were using vibecoding to create them. While the term agency turned out to be unknown to almost all participants, that is of course what such tools create. The ability to do things, individually or as […]

At the European PKM Summit the past two days, Frank Meeuwsen ran a continuous atelier where people could make their own ‘zines and lino cuts. A welcoming space to make something by hand at an event full of inspiring but abstract conversations and talks. A simple ‘zine folded from an A4 paper provides six small […]

I attended the PKM Summit the past days in Utrecht. It was fun and inspiring. During the extended lunchbreak yesterday I went outside to enjoy a bit of sunshine and walk around town. Ending up in the Steven Sterk book shop I also browsed the shelves there a bit. One title, From The Winter Archives, […]

In the past few weeks I’ve been diving into the online genealogical open data that is available, triggered by a conversation with Y about some of her schoolwork that deals with ancestry and namesakes. In parallel E did her own deep dive, with some vibe coding assistance, working her way to transform her WordPress site […]

It turns out that in my previous search for my oldest findable namesake I was barking up literally the wrong tree. I am named after my maternal grandfather (born 1903), and his paternal line has several men named Anton (my first name) in a side branch, originating from his great uncle in 1803 (and his […]

The past days ancestors have been part of our conversation at home, as it is part of Y’s current work at school. We started with the concept of being named after someone. Some time ago from her grandmother, the namesake of her second name, she received a set of multiple ‘birth spoons‘, marked with the […]

An odd Wikipedia reference led me to the source of my name as well as mid 16th century ancestry. Last week I wrote about the search where my first name Anton came from, beyond being named after my maternal grandfather Anton Arnold Bast (1903-1969). I concluded it came from my grandfather’s great uncle, Anton Link […]