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Facebook recently released Prophet, a library that makes it easy to create predictions based on time-series data. When the time was right to tinker around, I thought of a dataset I've been collecting for some time now, which is the smart energy meter we have for our house. And with some tinkering to get Prophet to play nice with my containers and Jupyter I had my first prediction in a few minutes: This makes me wonder if I could just pay the predicted amount instead of a fixed fee. continue reading...

Happy new year! Hope you had a blast the past few weeks! I surely did :) As a tradition when a new year starts, I had to make a movie of all my 8:36pm photos of past year. And this time its easier as every, since I saved the After Effects project template of last year. Here's the video: Why shoot a picture everyday you might ask? Here's the answer! continue reading...

It took me a while, but I managed to write this post about the thing I've been spending some time on in the last few months: brewing beer. I started collecting things for my own setup a while ago and took the plunge to buy a kettle: For now the temperature will be manually controlled, and I will be stirring for a while, but I'm slowly working towards and enclosure that covers the pump and a PID for temperature control. continue reading...

This summer I spend 2 weeks in Italy together with Chantal. We started off in Rome, spending our time in Trastevere. We visited all the main tourist attractions, because I hadn't visited Rome before. Time passed by pretty quickly and we traveled to Florence by BlaBlaCar. After a day of traveling, it's great to jump in a pool!

Florence is an amazing city, especially when you can watch the sun set over the city, the food is good and if you dive a bit into Italian culture you'll find hidden gems! Next up was San Gimigniano, a little town with lots of towers. We stayed in an agriturismo for 1 night, I cannot recommend this enough if you are somewhere in Tuscania. We visited Pisa before going to La Spezia, which would be our take off point for the main goal of our trip: Cinque Terre.

Cinque Terre is series of villages at the waterfront of Liguria, and I'd like to show you one image for every village:

Riomaggiore continue reading...

On sunday the 10th of June I left my parents place on a double-bike. Together with a friend we cycled to Zwolle, took a train and prepared ourselves in the evening for a trip to London. As we took the boat to Harwich the next day I didn't know what to expect as I hadn't visited England before. As we talked with locals it turns out it's much more enjoyable if you take the small hilly roads towards your destination. continue reading...

On the 14th of March 2016 I gave a short talk at TEDxYouth Groningen, and the video is finally online! I've embedded the video below, it's in dutch but I'm sure the subtitles will be available shortly. My talk is about the all the photos I took so far at 8:36pm. I started without any specific reason, but found out that you could figure it out while doing it as well. continue reading...

Online services tend to change their functionality or interaction. Sometimes in a good way, other times in a bad way. Most recently LinkedIn made a little change in the way accepting (and replying to) invites works. I personally use LinkedIn as a address book and leave it alone at times, never inviting people but combing trough the invites. I used to reply with a text-expander snippet too see if a connection is valuable, but this seemed to be impossible lately. continue reading...

So far today has been enjoyable, until around noon when someone texted me with a url pointing to nu.nl, showing an article about the Data Protection Authority telling me it is forbidden for employers to use wearables to track their employees (also on tweakers.net). The research the article points to is actually two companies that run my dashboards. Before I get into details, let me state the following: The privacy of an employee is of utmost importance! continue reading...

Just a couple of days ago I read a post from Atlassian explaining some new features, but the most interesting aspect was that they explore gracefully revealing depth. To me this same concept can also be applied to privacy, ethics and more problems. Even though it's about functionality, the same can be applied to complexity. As we are faced with interesting problems about privacy and ethics, would the way of gracefully revealing complexity work for making the right choices or settings the right parameters? continue reading...

I've been thinking about and exploring transparency a lot lately. As I'm building dashboards for employees, transparency is one of the key factors of integration within the workforce. But there are some funny things about transparency and this is why most companies and organisations are having difficulty adopting a transparant way of working. Ownership is spread when sharing processes, this lessens your level of power, but this world is not just about ownership any more, access is what it is all about. continue reading...