The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science: Costa & Royal Society Prize Winner (English Edition) eBook

This very entertaining and interesting book is now only €3,99 on Amazon. 

https://www.amazon.nl/Invention-Nature-Adventures-Alexander-Humboldt-ebook/dp/B00PW4O1SQ

I haven't finished it yet, but 30% in it reads like a fictional coming of age boyhood adventure. And I guess Von Humboldt's life really was like that 😂 

When Reading Went Silent

By the 18th and 19th centuries, the practice of silent reading became widespread. We may not think of reading silently  as a subversive act, but many historians recognize it as the key to rising individualism and private thought. 

https://bookriot.com/when-reading-went-silent/

The (Mini) Shortkit

Welk AI hulpmiddel kun je het beste voor welke situatie gebruiken?

Dit handige lijstje geeft wat ideeën: 
https://www.theshortcut.nl/mini-shortkit

Jane Goodall has died



https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45441069

I knew about Goodall for a long time. I guess she was on a podcast or documentary that I've consumed. 

I found this comment by Evanb on HN very interesting:

If you find Jane Goodall inspirational, you may be delighted to learn about Anne Innis Dagg [0], whose studies of wild giraffe predates Goodall's study of chimps. The documentary "The Woman Who Loves Giraffes" [1] is fantastic and has 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. The reason you might not know Dagg's name is essentially that she was denied tenure for being a woman.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Innis_Dagg

[1] https://thewomanwholovesgiraffes

Subscribe to my lists of stuff to do in…

If you're on an Apple device you can now share your lists of places to visit that you crated in Apple Maps. 

These lists publishable as a URL. I love making lists of places that I've been to or would like to visit next time I'm around. In fact some places I've had bookmarked for years before it got to visit them at all. 

So here are several of my favorite places to visit in London, Ireland and Schotland. 

Here are my favorite places to visit in Eastern Europe. 

And here are my favorite places to visit and things to do in the USA and Canada. 

Enjoy your travels 😉 

GDP per land area.

I knew about the GDP (gross domestic product), a metric for how well an economy is doing.

Mostly, GDP is measured per capita, or in other words, per citizen. So China has a lot of money, but seems poor because it also has a lot of people who need to share that money. It's a few bucks per citizen. 

There is however, also another metric, one that maybe is even more useful for comparison. 

The GDP per land area. In this metric some of the most profitable land areas on the planet are… exactly where you would expect them to be. Check is out here: GDP per land area. 

My only true surprise was Malta. In my imagination it's not a particular rich island. But I guess I was wrong? Or maybe they have a lot of money "on paper" (like Luxembourg's) because the banking laws are very flexible? 

Wool? Or Polyester?

So I'm in Austria with my wife and I see these cute Woolen socks. I want woolen socks. Did I mention I like wool already?

Anyways, I checked the label on these cute baby’s because I’m that kind of guy. It pays to check labels. These socks are mostly…. Plastic 🤔

I am not paying €12,90 for socks that are only 20% wool. What a fraud. 

Thanks for reading my blog. You are awesome. 

A culture hub map of Los Angeles.

This article by Fast Company was interesting on its own: Here's what happened when an artist mapped every visible word in NYC

But when it referenced a cultural map of Los Angeles, a city I love to hate on, my interest was especially tickled: 

In 2018, the research collective Slab used Google Street View to create Culture Map, a cultural and ethnic map of Los Angeles. By mapping the city's signs, posters, and flyers, they found 58 different culture hubs, which they noted was far more than those officially designated by the city.

Slab's algorithm, which folded in data from eight years (from 2011 to 2018) could detect many languages. 

Even my native Dutch has a place under the Californian sun 😊 

 

Book reviews: Lords of easy money. By Christopher Leonard.


This book gives a short reason for why the FED was formed a good 100 years ago.

It also explains what the FED does (they determine the price of money, or at least the price of US Dollars) and goes into details about how they do this.

This is where things get really interesting, because how exactly does the FED create and destroy money? How do they force the market to pay more or less interest for say a mortgage or a CDO?

Ben Bernanke, Jerome Powell, Janet Yellen, Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker are all introduced and their tenure described. All that is explained, not in dry textbook for, but by focusing on the people and decisions that got the USA in the deep trouble it is now.

Yes. You read that correctly. Inflation and unemployment are low, stocks are doing greats and other metrics look healthy too. And yet, the FED is not only keeping trillions of government and corporate debt on its balance sheet, but even in these "strong" conditions it also has to keep interest rates low.

The book ends with a sobering thought: the next few decades the US and world economy will have a hard time recovering from the Quantitative Easing (money printing) and Zero Interest Rate Policy that the FED launched after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008.




Please hesitate to call.
Greetings,
Jan

EarthRoamer

Boys and their toys. 

I never knew I wanted a camper van. But after watching some of the very manly trucks campers on Earth Roamer, I have a new want in my life. 

Dutch coffee

#TIL: All of Asia called Cold Drip coffee "Dutch Coffee"

Open for work, starting now.

I'm about to get married this autumn 🍂 😃 🥳 

So naturally most of my time was spend helping my girlfriend fiancé move her stuff to my house.  And basically make it our house. So, most of my furniture is gone. The walls have different colors. My books move an entire floor and the floors have all changed from carpet to PVC. 😅

Anyways. It's been about one year ago that decided to take a sabbatical. 

I'm open to work again. So if you know an opening in 

• general administration
•  (technical) writing
• writing (technical) quotes
• or oracle PL-SQL development 
• Or something that's I have never done yet but would love to learn like Microsoft Dynamics

… then, let me know 😊. 

I'm looking for roughly 2/3 days per week work. Remote or on-site close to Breda, NL. 

Your help is greatly appreciated 💕 

Best Portable Power Stations - Price Comparison | GearScouts

The Gear Scouts website offers a helpful comparison chart for those who're looking into getting solar panels. 

I ran into this site by happy accident. A HN post mentioned running an old iPhone 8 on solar, and naturally, I was interested in the off-grid nature of this set-up. 

The Translator’s Dilemma: Thinking Versus Doing? - Public Books

How (un)-important is a translator to get the true meaning and depth of a text across? 

This article asks this question to some professional translators. 

https://www.publicbooks.org/the-translators-dilemma-thinking-versus-doing/

An interesting turn of phrase I came across was this: Hahn and Searls have each Englished over 60 books from multiple languages.

Yes, English as a verb is Englished. This was new to me 😂 

Red team blues - a story only made possible by misunderstanding Bitcoin

I am currently enjoying "Red team Blues" by Cory Doctorow (Funny side note: for a long time I thought his name was made up. It's not.)

Anyway, Red Team Blues describes a modern day whodunit investigation by the protagonist Martin Hench. In the story, a cryptographic backdoor is programmed into a fictional cryptocurrency called Trustcoin. This backdoor seems to fall into the wrong hands and Martin's job is to recover the cryptographic keys. Furthermore in the story, Trustcoin is explained to be better than Bitcoin because one can interact on this blockchain privately. This sounds a lot like the real-world usage of Cashu e-cash, Fedimint, Liquid, Monero or Beam just to name a few projects that either build on Bitcoin, or roll their own Blockchain. 

Without giving away any spoilers, about 2/5 into the story Martin and his client both think he's solved the mystery. He is then to be paid about $300 million. Several pages in the book are then used to describe how that much money can move hands. It is in worldwide real estates, numbered accounts, weird sounding LLCs on the Cayman Islands, and so on.

This book came out in 2023, so I would guess Cory should know that holding and moving $300 million in Bitcoin is trivially simple. Also, he could have known that building yet another privacy crypto project is nonsense because money tends to be winner-take-most. But I guess that would have made the story shorter and less interesting? Or maybe he, like most people, isn't understanding how truly useful and liquid Bitcoin and adjacent projects are yet? 

I guess only mis-understanding Bitcoin can make one a sceptic, and only misunderstanding it gives you the need to make a 'better' alternative. It so happens that this week I was listening to a podcast episode on Tetragrammaton where Rick Rubin is interviewing Jack Mallers. In it, he explains the how?, what? and why? of Bitcoin. If you want to understand Bitcoin better, give the episode a listen. Bonus: even the adverts on this podcast are a joy to listen to. I only wish more podcasts were made with such love for the craft. 

Are there any good blogging platforms left in 2025?

We don't do it because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy. - jest at the famous JFK quote.

I'm one of those stubborn bloggers persons who like to blog. Why? Because getting things off my chest is a liberating feeling. Or sometimes I have a "deep" insight that I feel the universe, or at least posterity, should be able to look back at. One of my blogs is mostly tech focussed, and sharing tips and tricks is as much a service to the Congregation (shout out to all my fellow fans of Alastair Reynolds' Ness-sisters) as to my future self. I can't remember the number of times that I had to look at my own blog posts to find the exact FFmpeg commands that I need. 

Everyone has their own reason(s) to blog. But the reason I kept at it is mainly because it is almost free. That it is (or can be) free is a coincidence of history as much as anything else. You see, since about 2003/2004 I've been blogging on platforms such as my own site hosted by my provider. But when I switched from Sun-web (or was it Surf-web?) to HCC-net, and then to XS4ALL, I felt tired of Ftping over my files and telling all my friends about a new domain name once again. I needed a static web address, or better yet, my own domain name. So Janromme.com was bought. 

I also needed a hosting solution that would just work. Blogger.com was big at the time, and appeared to be free as well. It wasn't until recently that I discovered that my beloved website was infested with banners for random advertisements. You see, I've been using Nextdns and add blockers for decades now, so I never realized the garbage that people who don't use these tools see on the internet, including on my own beloved website.

"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold". I've recently decided that I want to switch over from blogger.com to another hosted solution. Blogger's way to make money is to show my readers adverts. I don't want that any more. So I've been looking into different hosting providers like Montaigne, Ghost, Pica.page, njump.me, Picapods, Alto, Micro.blog, Blot.im and EX0Text.  

I accept that I will need to pay for hosting. But since I want to set this up and forget about it for another decade or two, it will have to be both ridiculously cheap and durable. I know that nothing lasts forever, but a service that is too cheap will go bankrupt or be acquired by another party that will stop its services. It would also be really nice if I could upload my posts as Markdown files. That way, switching over to another platform in 20 years time will be easier. 

I guess this graph (I've got permission to use this picture, the original version is hosted here) illustrates my point nicely: the cheaper and easier the hosting is, the more likely it is that a blog will be actively used and will stand the test of time.

So I am currently in the market for a new blogging platform. The minimum requirements are in no particular order:

• Custom domain name support 
• RSS support (I've got no clue how many people read my blog through RSS, and that is a liberating feeling).
• File hosting included (for pictures and video's)
• Close to free (I am willing to pay $50 per year) but that's only about $4 per month. Only Picapod comes close to this pricing. Blot was $4 when I signed up, but for new customers it's already pricing at $6 at the time of writing. 
• Easy posting/uploading. The way I use Blogger is by sending an email to [mysecretaddress]@blogger.com and the email with pictures included is just posted at my blog.  Blot is quite easy too. I just save a markdown file in my Dropbox folder, and voilà, it becomes a new blog post. 
• Easy to set up and forget. This is where Pica falls flat on it's face: you are renting a VPS, which requires attention.
• Cheap to maintain for the builders. After all, if the company or person quits tomorrow, I'm bereft of a good hosting solution once again.
• I want to be the customer, not the product, so no inserted advertisements. 

If you have any tips, mail me or comment on HN.

update: shout out to sirodoht and treetalker for pointing me to mataroa. Mataroa seems to cost just $9 per year, has everything I listed above, except for the file hosting part, and is probably my new blog platform soon™️

All Clothing Is Handmade | Ruth Kitchin Tillman

I've been annoyed for a while now about the low quality of a lot of the clothing I see in stores these days. 

I know "fast fashion" has an "upside" namely, it's relatively cheap. Why the price of raw cotton doesn't reflect the huge impact on the environment and the need for lots of drinking-quality water, is beyond my current understanding. I guess the countries and companies involved rather have the income now and the bad outcome for the environment is only an afterthought, I guess?

Anyways, because cheap cotton and linnen exists and because cheap labor is also abundant, we now have fast fashion. And fast fashion gets out of fashion fast, too. So we throw it away. 

This ends up in land fills or the cotton is recycled into cleaning cloths, at an extra expense of more water and energy. 

This is a long story to get to my point: I prefer slow fashion. I try to buy stuff that I will still wear ten or 15 years from now. You can do this too. Extra points if you manage to buy that high quality clothing for cheap in a second hand store 😊. 

The fact that some clothing from certain countries has a low-quality feel to it, has more to do with choices and less with the quality of the workers involved. This article wonderfully explains the economic reasons for some low quality production: https://ruthtillman.com/post/all-clothing-is-handmade/ 

stupiddovenests

TIL of the existence of a subreddit, devoted entirely to "stupid dove nests".  

If you are looking for so good, wholesome, Christian, clean and belly bunching humour, then check it out 😂