Ik ben een heel tevreden klant van KPN Internet. Om diverse redenen gebruik ik de Experia Box niet, maar ik wil wel graag TV kunnen kijken met de KPN Interactieve TV Set Top Box. Vroeger ging dat “vanzelf goed”, tegenwoordig is daar wat werk voor nodig.
In augustus 2021 werkten deze instructies goed, maar er kunnen dingen veranderen bij KPN natuurlijk!
UPDATE mei 2024! Als je van KPN bericht hebt gekregen dat je je TV ontvanger moet vervangen, en je krijgt op kpn.

This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities.
Earlier this year I was very happy to be interviewed by Thomas Ramge for Germany’s Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation (SPRIND). Many podcasts are just two guys talking to each other, but here Thomas brought along a lot of expertise & spent serious time preparing, which contributed hugely to having a productive conversation. Even if it is still two guys!

Recent barstte het weer los, de felle discussie tussen artsen en dikke mensen. Een belangrijk onderwerp, maar ook een onderwerp waarover een hoop zomaar geroepen wordt. Veel artsen en beleidsmakers zien een foto van dikke mensen en roepen “Zucht, leefstijl”. En dan vraag ik me weleens af, hebben jullie ook maar één te dikke vriend of vriendin met wie jullie hier weleens over praten?
Want zolang we elkaar niet begrijpen is er een groot probleem.

This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities.
Recently I participated in a very useful panel that aimed to demystify European digital sovereignty. Even though we spoke for more than an hour (video), we obviously were not able to fix all of Europe’s sovereignty problems!
The event was organized by Scaleway (previously Online SAS or Online.net), a 100% subsidiary of what I think is Europe’s most innovative telecommunications company, Iliad.

Een extra update, twee weken na de vorige, want er is al weer voldoende te vertellen.
Deze keer weer een aantal vragen op verzoek: De cijfers stijgen ineens heel hard, wat betekent dat? Is het veilig om naar evenementen te gaan? Zou mijn dochter/zoon zich moeten laten vaccineren? Werken de vaccins nog wel?
Wat de f is er aan de hand met de cijfers ineens Goeie vraag. Ze gaan omhoog en hard ook.

UPDATE: Zoals gezegd had ik Eneco om een reactie gevraagd en die is gekomen. In het kort, Eneco vertelt me dat de website een onjuiste weergave van zaken gaf. De teksten zullen aangepast worden. Het niet instemmen met ieder kwartier meten & analyse van gebruik zal geen effect hebben op het automatisch doorgeven van meterstanden voor de rekening en het online overzicht.
Wel is het dan zo dat de Eneco App minder inzicht kan verschaffen zonder ieder kwartier verse data, maar dat is natuurlijk niet anders.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I am no friend of the surveillance capitalism that currently powers the web. It is becoming well-neigh impossible to develop any software or host any content without some component tracking your users & sending data to third parties.
Even though I try very hard not to fall for this, periodically I discover that my sites also embed things that embed things that potentially leak your details to third parties.

In de vorige Corona update eind mei schreef ik over “delta”, toen nog bekend als de Indiase variant:
Het is helaas te vroeg om nu een eindoordeel te vellen over deze variant. Wat we wel weten is dat in de UK de vaccins prima standhouden - de overgrote meerderheid van de mensen in het ziekenhuis is ongevaccineerd.
Dit is nog steeds waar. Toch weten we nu een stuk meer.

Afer 8 years, I have updated this this post for 2021-era Linux (and also to fix bitrotted links). I am extremely joyful to report that the (hard) problem from 2013 appears to have been solved! There is a small addendum at the end to reflect this happy news.
Back in 2013, I started writing code to do a simulation of biological system, and I got stuck after 20 lines. My test code tried to go through a million time steps doing basically nothing, and it was taking a minute to do it.

This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities.
Europe’s communication needs are currently almost exclusively delivered by Chinese hardware that connects us to US-based platforms. For a variety of reasons, this is not a good idea.
As stated recently by Charles Michel, President of the European Council, “Interdependence is natural, even desirable. Over-dependence, however, is not”.
Photo by Sara Kurfeß on Unsplash
At the core, the problem is that almost no consumer-oriented platforms or software products are being created in Europe, or more precisely, by European companies.

Reeds vorig jaar verschenen, maar zonder de aandacht gekregen te hebben die dit boek verdient.
Uitgeverij Prometheus, 460 pagina’s. bol.com, amazon.nl & kindle
“Een spoor van vernieuwing” laat zich lezen als memoires van een markante topambtenaar, maar ook als een interessante geschiedenis van de ontwikkeling van de rampenbestrijding, de inrichting van de politie en de opsporing, de BVD (voorloper AIVD) en de oprichting en ontwikkeling van wat we nu kennen als de AFM.

Recently I was doing some work decoding the new Galileo High Accuracy Service data. In short, this new service will allow Galileo (“European GPS”) users to achieve decimeter-level accuracy, which is nice. This “HAS” data is transmitted highly redundantly by making good use of Reed-Solomon encoding.
To work with this data, I attempted to learn more about Reed-Solomon and I found almost all explanations were useless to me - oodles of advanced math, but no guidance of how to use R-S in practice.

Ja daar zijn we weer! De vorige update uit maart was getiteld “Licht aan het einde van de tunnel”. Nou wil ik niet al te veel pochen, en resultaten uit het verleden bieden geen garanties voor de toekomst, maar het klopte allemaal best behoorlijk. De spectaculaire daling in ziekenhuiscijfers kwam in werkelijkheid een week later dan ik verwacht had. Ok.
Ik wil graag mijn Facebook- en IRC-vrienden bedanken voor hun vele goede vragen en suggesties voor deze post - want er zijn nog genoeg goede vragen over.

Wir haben Coronamaßnahmen, aber Menschen weigern sich, mitzuhelfen. Es gibt effektive Impfungen, aber Menschen verkünden laut, diese niemals nehmen zu wollen.
In diesem Text bringe ich einige Vorschläge, wie du einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Aufklärung der Menschen leisten kannst. Ja, genau du. Viele Leser meines Blogs sind die “Haustechniker” in der Verwandtschaft, die das WLAN einrichten, den Fernseher aufbauen oder schwierige Dinge erklären. Gute Aussichten, als jemand gesehen zu werden, den man um Rat fragen kann und der sich auskennt.

This page is nothing special, I put recipes there I look up from time to time on the monstrous ad-laden recipe sites that also tell me your life story.
I use cups because they aren’t the worst.
Dutch Baby First: Heat cast iron pan, heat oven to 220C.
Ingredients:
3 large eggs 1/2 cup of full fat milk 1/2 cup of flour tablespoon of sugar / vanilla sugar 4 tablespoons of butter More butter for preparation Whisk first four ingredients together, while melting the butter.

I love Europe, and I want to see the European Union succeed. I also love the Internet, and I want to see it thrive as well. And it therefore pains me that it now appears that the European Union might inadvertently be picking an ugly fight with “The Internet”.
UPDATE: I am EXCEPTIONALLY happy to report that through robust engagement with European institutions who understood the problem, the root servers are now fully out of scope of the NIS2 directive!

This part of the history of PowerDNS is mostly about our business adventures & merger with Open-Xchange. The technical history of this period is described in part 3a.
Business
In 2013, PowerDNS was in a crucial phase. Existing business was going well, but we were receiving pointed signals there was trouble on the horizon.
Some existing customers were close to deserting us, because we could not provide them with the top-down attention other vendors were lavishing on them.

Er is in Nederland een levendige discussie gaande of we in moeten zetten op kernenergie of niet. Afhankelijk van wie je spreekt is kernenergie een groene en noodzakelijke manier om onze CO₂-doelen te halen, of is het overbodige onzin.
Ik ben een groot gelover in het idee van kernenergie. Maar onze auto’s en huizen kunnen we niet aandrijven met ideeën. Die drijf je aan met kerncentrales.
En daar hebben we het nooit over, de kernindustrie.

Brief post, in response to the many many many technical people that propose to print their own mRNA vaccines “now that the source is out there”.
I’ve spent a lot of time individually explaining why this is unlikely to happen any time soon, and I thought it a good idea to explain it here as well.
Mountains of details on how the vaccines are actually produced can be found on this awesome page by Jonas Neubert and Cornelia Scheitz.

UPDATE: Back in December 2020 when this article was first posted, I noted that some receivers might not be able to deal with the advent of production signals from the eccentric satellites. This has indeed proved to be a problem for U-blox F9 series receivers in a specific configuration. The application note links to this article (thanks!) and also (correctly) states that the signals from the eccentric satellites do not in fact comply with the Galileo Open Service ICD.

En toen was het toch weer tijd voor een Corona Update, de eerste sinds november 2020.
Doordat er zoveel nieuws is geweest over varianten en vaccins is het zicht een beetje kwijt op waar we nu zijn. En dat is des te vervelender nu de cijfers weer omhoog lijken te gaan.
Daarom een samenvatting die eigenlijk heel rooskleurig is, zelfs met de varianten. Dit betekent overigens niet dat de maatregelen al opgeheven kunnen worden!

In short, if you need engaging in-depth articles on your scientific project, your research breakthrough or the grand new technical/space/molecular/medical thing you are building, you can hire me!
(Semi-)Popular science writing I do a lot of what I call “(Semi-)popular science writing”. My recent article dissecting the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 vaccine has racked up over 1.5 million views (so far), and it has done the rounds of the pharmaceutical world where it got favourable reviews.

In previous posts I described how the two currently approved mRNA vaccines both use ‘modified nucleosides’ to enhance their efficiency.
Meanwhile, a company called CureVac has created an mRNA vaccine that uses regular, unmodified, RNA. It is currently being tested in large scale trials. In this post I explain what the challenges are with this plain RNA approach, and we reverse engineer quite closely what CureVac has done with regular RNA to (hopefully) deliver an effective vaccine.

This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities.
Periodically I read about governments or institutions wanting to stimulate innovation, often to achieve a certain (worthy) goal. Frequently, the far larger amounts of money that other countries or continents are spending on innovation are then bandied about as justification.
And I die a little inside every time that happens.
Money and innovation have a very intricate relation.

There are lots of calls to invest in improving cybersecurity.
But it struck me that it doesn’t work like that. Not getting hacked is not so much a question of buying the right stuff. It is a question of doing the right things and understanding what you are doing.
It is easy to demand that people ‘invest’ in something. You can even supply them with the money to do so.

Hi everyone,
With apologies for flooding the airwaves and timelines with way too many posts and tweets, here’s one more post, the last COVID-19 related one for a while.
I’ve been trying to provide high quality answers to the many questions I receive via email and various social media. I’ve also been trying to help many many people that found worrying news online & sent it to me, either for reassurance or simply to challenge me.

This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities.
Hi everyone,
This is a transcript of my presentation over at the European Microwave Week 2020, actually held in 2021. You can find the video here and the slides here. I’d like to thank Frank van Vliet, general chair of the EMW, for inviting me to do this talk.
The words have only been edited lightly - it is still presentation style, so here and there the sentences are not written like how they’d be in a more formal piece of work.

Translations: 中文, 日本語
As a followup to Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine, here is a look at the genetic code behind some of the other vaccines. I recommend at least skimming the earlier post before delving into this one, unless you are already fluent in modified mRNA bases and protein expression mechanics.
To get an extremely full background on all vaccine work, I kindly refer you to excellent posts from Derek Lowe and Hilda Bastian.