When I was a kid, my sister and I had a tower of VHS tapes we watched endlessly. Fast-forward to today, and my children's movie collection is vastly different. It's completely digital and di… Read More

I've been writing [a monthly newsletter](/newsletter) for the past 2.5 years. In every edition, I link to interesting articles related to science and technology. I thought it would be intere… Read More

In this post, I’ll show you how I integrated Obsidian into Alfred so I can search my vault from anywhere on my Mac. I just open Alfred, type “note” followed by my query, an… Read More

Every new year I reflect on the previous year and set new goals. I'm focusing primarily on my YouTube channel and newsletter, but there are personal reflections in here as well. Last year wa… Read More

Using smart light bulbs means you can no longer use your physical wall switches because the bulbs need constant power. I think that's pretty dumb. Using a physical switch can be way faster t… Read More

Six years ago, I reworked my anagram solver so it would run on top of AWS Lambda and DynamoDB. However, this year I realized I didn't need server-side code or a database at all. I could make… Read More

I recently integrated Home Assistant with Apple Reminders so that automations can create new todos. This is trickier as it sounds, because Reminders has no API that can be accessed from Home… Read More

Last year I migrated this website from Jekyll to Eleventy. This year, I’m finally implementing WebP images to save bandwidth and make this site even faster to load! This simple change… Read More

In 2019, [I built an energy monitor]({% link collections.posts, "2019/2019-07-07-Home-Energy-Monitor-ESP32-CT-Sensor-Emonlib.md" %}) to keep track of our electricity consumption. Then, in 20… Read More

Every new year I reflect on the previous year and set new goals. Last year has been my most successful year on YouTube so far, and I'd like to share some statistics and thoughts. I will also… Read More

I've been working on a few IoT projects recently, and while prototyping, I need a simple but flexible data store. I just want to push data to an API and query and visualize it later on. The… Read More

When using AWS IoT Core, most tutorials will tell you to include device certificates in your firmware. While that does work, it means you won't be able to run over-the-air updates. In this… Read More

When Cloudflare announced that their Tunnel service would become free, I saw an opportunity to strengthen the security of my Home Assistant instance. Until now, I have been using Cloudflare'… Read More

Governments are pushing CO2 sensors to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, but proper ventilation is equally important for our health and even our cognitive performance. In this blog post we'll l… Read More

My YouTube channel has been attracting a lot of spammers. They try to trick people by saying they know how to profit from trading cryptocurrencies or that they can recover lost wallet keys… Read More

Like many others, I'm generating a lot of digital data. Constantly taking photos, writing scripts, taking notes, coding projects, and making videos. I'm storing all these files on Google Dri… Read More

I'm a big fan of ESPHome. I have 24 devices running it, and I only buy new IoT devices when I know they can run ESPHome. ESPHome is a modular firmware that you have to configure with YAML f… Read More

Here's how to run Unraid as a virtual machine under Proxmox. This is useful when you're already using Proxmox and if you want to use Unraid as a NAS Read More

Building a battery-powered IoT device? Then you'll want to monitor the battery's percentage. Here's how to do it properly Read More

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Jekyll has been powering this site for many years now. It replaced my WordPress setup, and I haven't looked back. Over the last few months, I have become fed up with Jekyll. It's slowing me… Read More

I’m a huge fan of Home Assistant to automate various things around the house. I often look at other people’s setup for inspiration, and one thing struck me. Many people have clut… Read More

The ESP32 camera is the cheapest microcontroller with a built-in camera that you can buy. The OV2640 sensor has a max resolution of 1600x1200, but sometimes you don’t need the entire i… Read More

For the past 4 years, I have made a habit of reflecting on the previous year and set goals for the new year. This year is no exception, but now I try to set better goals while reflecting on… Read More

I’ve become increasingly reliant on Home Assistant to automate various tasks around the house. But how do you safely expose your instance to the internet for remote access? You want t… Read More

If you have flashed your Shelly 2.5 with ESPHome, make sure to configure GPIO16. Otherwise, the pin will be short-circuited and cause the unit to heat up significantly, creating a potential… Read More

Adblocker usage is quickly rising, with some estimates saying that almost 25% of internet users have one installed. Not only do they block advertisements, but also analytics scripts (like Go… Read More

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Shelly products to automate various devices in my house. They’re well built, tiny and rock solid, and best of all: compatible with ESPHome… Read More

The release of ESPHome v1.15 brought better support for infrared climate control. This was enough to finally make my YTF IR Hub useable. Here’s how I flashed ESPHome onto it and how I… Read More

Luftdaten (now Sensor Community) is a global sensor network that measures air quality around the world. Best of all: it’s open-source and anyone can build a sensor. I was very curious… Read More

With the release of iOS 11, Apple switched from JPG to HEIC to store your photos. The High-Efficiency Image File Format saves a lot of storage space on your devices while still maintaining y… Read More

I’ve been adding more and more devices to my smart home lately, so naturally, my garage door opener had to follow. But instead of swapping it out for a new unit, I used a Shelly 1 and… Read More

Static websites are still a hot topic. They are fast, and they’re incredibly secure because there isn’t a CMS to hack. Once you build a static website, however, the question beco… Read More

Last year I made that video in response to a sponsorship offer that I got from various VPN providers. They all told me the same thing: our service is the best way to protect your privacy, an… Read More

Many devices in my home have become “smart” over the last couple of months, with one big exception: my trusty 3D printer. It’s a super reliable Prusa i3 MK3, but it lacks a… Read More

I have a few ESP32’s running in my house. A few of them are running 24/7 and require an always-on WiFi connection. That’s been quite tricky to implement. I used to include variou… Read More

My DIY home energy monitor has been running for almost a year now. It’s been recording my electricity consumption every second and everything is neatly archived in my AWS account. Sti… Read More

Every year I sit down and take a look at how my YouTube channel has been doing. I reflect, evaluate, and set goals for the coming year. This year is no exception. January 13th, 2020, marks m… Read More

By now, it's no secret that the ESP32 is my go-to chip for making IoT devices. They're small, powerful, have a ton of onboard features, and they're relatively easy to program. However, when… Read More

Running an ESP32 on a battery is a tricky operation. The chip is a powerhouse, and with power comes great responsibility. In this post, I’ll outline how I got an ESP32 to run for over… Read More

I'm a geek and got infected with the "smart home" virus. I bought a smart doorbell, smart cameras, smart TV, smart outlets, smart buttons, smart thermostats… A ton of devices in my ho… Read More

Lately, I’ve been building some IoT devices and every time I used the ESP32 micro-controller. It's a powerful micro-controller and has built-in WiFi, which means I can connect it to AW… Read More

One day I was wondering: how much electricity is flowing through my apartment right now? Looking online I found various sensor devices like Smappee and Sense, but those are relatively expens… Read More

Lately, I’ve been using GitLab CI more and more to replace my Jenkins server. The main purpose is to run unit tests on my code and to deploy it to various services. A few older project… Read More

It's been three years since I started my YouTube channel, Simply Explained. In previous years (2017, 2018) I wrote blog posts where I reflected on what I did right, wrong and what I would im… Read More

This is part 4 of my blog posts series in which we create a blockchain in Javascript. In the previous blog posts, we added wallets and mining rewards to our simple blockchain. But the curren… Read More

About a week ago I found out that Troy Hunt had published a new course about modern web security. I decided to check out the introduction video and that made me realize that I don't have a C… Read More

This is part 3 of my blog posts series in which we create a blockchain in Javascript. In the previous blog posts we created a simple blockchain and implemented proof-of-work to protect it fr… Read More

This is part 3 of my blog posts series in which we create a blockchain in Javascript. In the previous blog posts we created a simple blockchain and implemented proof-of-work to protect it fr… Read More

Exactly 2 years ago I started my YouTube channel and a year ago I published a blog post called "My first year on YouTube" where I wrote about what I had achieved and what my goals were for t… Read More

I've been hosting this website on AWS since 2012 and a lot has changed in the cloud business. So I was wondering if AWS Cloudfront is still the best place to host my static website. What abo… Read More

I've been hosting this website on AWS since 2012 and a lot has changed in the cloud business. So I was wondering if AWS Cloudfront is still the best place to host my static website. What abo… Read More

A couple of months back I made a Slack bot that allows everyone in the office to place an order for coffee. We have 1 person who is responsible for ordering coffee. He needs to be able to ta… Read More

In my previous blog post we created a simple blockchain in Javascript to demonstrate how a blockchain works. However many people commented and said that the implementation wasn't complete an… Read More

Buying and trading cryptocurrencies is all the rage right now. But how do you actually keep track of your investments? Especially if you do them on various websites. There are a few websites… Read More

Almost everyone has heard about cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, but few people actually know how the technology behind these work. In this blog post I'll create a simple blockcha… Read More

Last year I wrote a blog post about how to use LXC containers on a VPS. I've been running this setup for quite a while now and it has been great. However, my approach involved making full co… Read More

Exactly one year ago I started my YouTube channel. It was something I wanted to do for a long time, but only got around to last year. In this post I will reflect on my first year on YouTube… Read More

Last year I reviewed two pairs of bluetooth earphones: the QCY Qy7 and a pair from EC Technology. I've been really impressed with both these earphones because they are cheap, comfortable and… Read More

When my girlfriend and I moved in together, we decided to sit down each Saturday and plan ahead what we we're going to eat the following week. We used to do this with pen and paper but as a… Read More

Last week Atlassian announced a new feature for BitBucket called Pipelines. It’s a continuous integration service that is integrated into BitBucket and is powered by Docker. I immediat… Read More

After waiting months for an invite, I finally got an e-mail (on my birthday!) from Scaleway telling me that I was invited to try out their cloud servers. I quickly accepted the invite, creat… Read More

On the 13th of April 2009 at exactly 21:08 I ordered a new MacBook Pro from the Apple online store. This was the first 15 inch MacBook Pro with the unibody design and it replaced my PowerBoo… Read More

Gone are the days of manually deploying code to servers! I recently started using Jenkins to deploy several simple websites that I've built over the years. However, some of these websites ar… Read More

When I was in high school (2011) I wrote a simple anagram solver in PHP. It used a MySQL backend to store multiple dictionaries and was pretty fast. Fast forward to 2015: the anagram solver… Read More

Earlier this year I reviewed the cheap QCY Qy7 wireless Bleutooth headphones and concluded that they offer amazing value for a very low price. However, two weeks ago I started using another… Read More

I've been wanting to add HTTPS support to my website for quite some time and never got around it. Enabling SSL has several benefits such as increased privacy and a slight boost in search ran… Read More

Uploading big files to Amazon S3 can be a bit of pain when you're on an unstable network connection. If an error occurs, your transfer will be cancelled and you can start the upload process… Read More

About three weeks ago I received an iPhone 6 from my employer. At first I was a little sceptical and wondered if I should keep the iPhone. I have owned an iPhone in the past, but I've been u… Read More

A lot of companies these days are using Slack for their internal communications. And can you blame them? Slack is easy to use and fast as hell (I promise you Slack didn't pay me to say write… Read More

About 2 weeks ago I received my first pair of bluetooth earbuds. I searched the cheapest earbuds with some decent reviews and ultimately found a lot of QCY Qy7 headphones. I order the ones f… Read More

About a month ago I started building a mini arcade machine. A lot has happened since my first post. In the last couple of weeks my girlfriend and I sanded and painted all the wood panels. Th… Read More

I'm a geek. I like geeky stuff. For the past couple of months I was looking for a reason to buy myself a Raspberry Pi. I thought about integrating it in my room and in my car. I thought abou… Read More

A few months back I was contacted by a non-profit organisation for building an online donation system. They found me after reading a news article about the meta search engine that I develope… Read More

Social networks are everywhere online. Share, like and tweet buttons are popping up on a lot of webpages these days. The social buttons however have a big impact on the performance of a webs… Read More

On September 24, 2014 a Bash vulnerability was discovered that could lead to arbitrary code execution. The bash shell is used in many operating systems, including Linux, BSD and Mac OS X. A… Read More

I have a small RamNode VPS that I use as a VPN server. I also host my personal wiki on there and use it to document interesting things that I would otherwise forget. The information in my wi… Read More

At the end of 2012 I launched a search engine that combined the offerings of six different second hand websites in Belgium. It was called 'Zoekertjesland' and indexed well over 3 million ite… Read More

When I'm on the road and connecting to free public WiFi access points, I always use OpenVPN to prevent my traffic from being intercepted by others. It's also very practical to circumvent the… Read More

A little over a year ago I moved away from Wordpress and started using Jekyll for this blog. I also started using Amazon S3 as a cheap but very reliable hosting provider. The past weeks I'v… Read More

Some time ago I discovered Chris Pirillo on Youtube and I wondered what he had above his desk. Some sort of LED lights in different colors that change every now and then. I thought it was a… Read More

At home I have an iTunes library of almost 200 music albums totaling 17GB. I also have multiple computers that I constantly use. At school and on the go I use my MacBook Pro and at home I us… Read More

A few weeks ago I started using Jekyll for my blog and moved it to Amazon S3. I also configured AWStats to analyze Amazon S3 access logs. Yet, I never explained how I moved to S3, how I auto… Read More

A few weeks ago I switched from Wordpress to Jekyll. I also started using Amazon S3 to host my blog. I've been pretty happy with my new blog and the performance of S3. There's just one thing… Read More

A few months ago I had the idea to start blogging. So what do you do when you want to blog? You setup a blog script on your webserver! I decided to go with Wordpress since it's so popular an… Read More

In 2009 I bought the first Unibody Macbook Pro (Macbook pro 5,1) as a replacement for my four year old PowerBook G4. I’ve used it ever since and absolutely love the machine! Over the y… Read More

At home, I have a problem that I know is very common: the range on our WiFi router is not enough to cover every bit of the house. (Well actually it does cover our house, but in some places i… Read More