(Warning: Due to the momentous events of the past week, this post is 80% South African politics. If this is not your thing, eject right before the large warning further down! Maybe next week we’ll be back to our usual programming, all depending on how above-mentioned momentous events play out.)

Between all of the retinal excitement of the (gorgeous) new Justice League trailer and the release of the new Ghost in the Shell movie (pretty but soulless the reviews seem to be saying), you might have missed the new Valerian trailer.

Read More

This edition of the not-quite-Weekly Head Voices covers the period of time from Monday March 6 to Sunday March 26, 2017.

As is becoming sort of a tradition around these parts, I get to show you a photo or two of our over-nerding antidote trips into the wild.

This is the path to the Koppie Alleen beach in the De Hoop Nature Reserve. Paths and photos of paths make me all pensive:

Read More

Intrigued by the trailers of the movie The Arrival, which I have not seen yet, I read the short story compilation Stories of your life and others by Ted Chiang.

The short story Story of your life, on which the movie is based, has a fascinating premise. However, I do hear that the film does not spend that much time on her discovery of and assimilation by the alien writing system “Heptapod B”, which to me was one of the more interesting threads.

Read More

Too much nerdery took place from Monday February 20 to Sunday March 5. Fortunately, be the end of that period, we found ourselves here:

bibtex references in orgmode

For a technical report, I thought it would be handy going from Emacs orgmode (where all my lab notes live in any case) to PDF via LaTeX.

Read More

The week of Monday February 13 to Sunday February 19, 2017 might have appeared to be really pretty boring to any inter-dimensional and also more mundane onlookers.

(I mention both groups, because I’m almost sure I would have detected the second group watching, whereas the first group, being interdimensional, would probably have been able to escape detection. As far as I know, nobody watched.)

I just went through my orgmode journals. They are filled with a mix of notes on the following mostly very nerdy and quite boring topics.

Read More

It turns out that when you, or one of your offspring, accidentally drop an Apple TV 4 remote from about a metre, the lovely touch surface shatters almost exactly like the screen of a smartphone:

Unfortunately, you now have to purchase a new remote, which over here is going to cost more than half of what the whole Apple TV unit, including remote, cost initially.

Read More

This WHV is all about the weeks from Monday January 30 to Sunday February 12, 2017. I’ve mostly been in heads-down mode on two projects, so this post will be shorter than is usually the case.

I had my very first beer after the 30-day long Experiment Alcohol Zero (EAZ) on Friday, February 3. It was a good one:

EAZ has taught me that it would not be the worst idea to limit alcohol consumption slightly more.

Read More

I’ve been spending some time doing research on the relative (perceived) performance of flagship Android phones compared to iPhones. I will probably not write the extended post I was planning to, as it seems that it’s hard to answer this question scientifically, and, perhaps more importantly, it makes people Very Very Angry.

I would still like to leave you with some interesting reading material. Hence this quick note.

From this discussion post (December 2016) by CodingHorror, aka Jeff Atwood, one of the two founders of the whole StackOverflow empire, where he measures the relative performance of his discourse web-app, the following choice quote:

Read More

Today it happened again.

A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes

(quote not by Mark Twain, origin quite interesting)

Someone on facebook forwarded an article that was full of badly written and utterly unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about topic X. (topic X could be anything: politics, health, whatever)

To me, it was instantly clear that the article was 100%, undiluted, hogwash.

Now you probably think that I must have decades of experience separating the internet wheat from the chaff.

Read More

Monday January 16 to Sunday January 29 of the year 2017 yielded the following possibly mention-worthy tidbits:

On Saturday, January 21, we had the privilege of seeing Herman van Veen perform live at the Oude Libertas Theatre. The previous time was a magical night many years ago in the Royal Theatre Carré in Amsterdam.

Herman van Veen is a living, extremely active and up to date legend. To most Dutch people you’ll ever meet he is a formidable part of their rich cultural landscape.

Read More