Jottings

For years, I completely left LEGO by the wayside. Granted, Disney characters like Heihei look absolutely brilliant on the dining table, but ever since I laid eyes on the Minecraft sets, I have been utterly smitten.

The square, blocky aesthetic aligns flawlessly with the LEGO of my childhood, sparking the imagination far better than the flawlessly executed Disney models ever could. Amusingly, I have never actually played the Minecraft game itself, yet the charm of the designs won me over regardless.

Standing at an impressive 30 centimetres with a sleek, minimalist form, the Skeleton feels almost like a piece of art; it now stands proudly atop my piano right next to the bust of Bach. Meanwhile, the massive Ender Dragon — complete with its articulated, moving wings — is a proper eye‑catcher. Even the smaller sets with their minifigs are delightful, thoroughly bringing out my inner child.

I am already eagerly anticipating the next addition to the collection: the upcoming Chicken Jockey set, due for release on the 1st of August. A giant pixelated chicken with a baby zombie on its back is exactly the sort of brilliant, blocky absurdity that will look fantastic on display.

A quick update on a cause close to my heart. My friend Eva is taking on something extraordinary: a 450 km walk across Swedish Lapland to raise money for research into and support for rare blood disorders.

As of today she has raised €764 — a wonderful start, and I’m genuinely moved by everyone who has contributed already. That puts her just past the halfway mark. She hasn’t yet reached her target of €1500, so there is still a good way to go.

If you have a little to spare, please consider supporting this incredibly kind and courageous initiative. Every contribution, however small, goes directly towards helping people living with rare blood disorders — and it would mean a great deal to Eva as she takes on each of those 450 kilometres.

👉 Support Eva’s walk at evastraube.com

Thank you.

There is a distinct moment in any smart home journey when sheer utility gives way to character. It usually happens the moment you tire of addressing a device by its clinical factory model or its sterile room assignment in an app. For me, that transition involved giving the household appliances actual names.

It completely changes one’s relationship with the surrounding tech. Instead of triggering a generic automation for an inanimate object, you are interacting with a digital flatmate — one who occasionally sighs, complains, or offers commentary on the state of the living room.

A few fixtures in the daily routine have earned their titles:

• Aletta (The Dishwasher): Named after Aletta Jacobs, the pioneering Dutch physician and suffrage leader. It felt fitting that the appliance taking on the heavy lifting of daily chores should be named after someone who championed liberation from traditional domestic drudgery.

• Marvin (The Robot Vacuum): Named after the chronically depressed android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Watching a small, circular vacuum dejectedly bumping into chair legs and wandering into corners naturally evokes a sense of cosmic melancholy. He often emits the digital equivalent of a sigh before continuing his slow, existential shuffle across the floor.

• Joost (The Voice Assistant): Named after the quintessential butler from the Olivier B. Bommel stories. It adds a layer of quiet dignity to the system. Whenever a command is issued, there is a comforting sense that a polite, steadfast presence is ready to manage the household affairs behind the scenes.

The real magic happens when you connect these entities to local AI models. Instead of receiving dry, system-generated notifications, you can bake the original persona right into the prompt. When the living room needs cleaning, it is no longer a generic alert; it is Marvin sending a weary message about the futility of sweeping up dust that will only return. When a task is completed, Joost can announce it with the understated refinement of a proper gentleman’s gentleman.

Bestowing proper names turns standard automation into something far more engaging. It is no longer just about optimising a smart home; it is about bringing a bit of wit into the code.

For longer than I’d care to confess, amthonie.nl led visitors straight to a Gravatar page — perfectly functional, but about as personal as a waiting room leaflet. As a developer, it felt faintly embarrassing not to have a small digital home of my own.

So I finally built one. This first version is now alive and quietly humming: a modest, hand‑crafted static site that I own entirely.

Returning to the basics has been unexpectedly pleasant. After years of grappling with heavyweight frameworks and labyrinthine tools, writing plain HTML again felt like rediscovering a small, forgotten joy. Building something without a lumbering backend or a sulking WordPress instance was wonderfully liberating.

Comparing today’s web with the one I first tinkered with in the nineties remains a peculiar delight. Back then, we heroically assembled pages with nested tables and spacer GIFs, like digital Lego bricks. Now, modern CSS performs feats that would have caused my younger self to faint politely.

And yet, the open web has become curiously rigid. Search engines behave like fussy librarians, insisting on immaculate structure before acknowledging your existence. Still, claiming this tiny, independent corner feels entirely sensible.

A polite round of applause goes to GitHub Pages, which hosts this tiny outpost with admirable patience. Each time I nudge an update into the void, a small collection of automated helpers scurry about: one compresses my styles, another turns my scribbles into actual pages, and together they ensure the whole thing doesn’t collapse into a dignified heap. It’s a pleasantly low‑maintenance arrangement — the sort of system that behaves itself without demanding biscuits.

The layout and design are still in their awkward teenage years — full of potential, but not yet behaving as they should. I’ll keep nudging and tidying the interface until it grows into something presentable. With luck, it may even become charming.

Thanks for stopping by. Your visit has greatly improved the local atmosphere.