Pesky's links

Melding nieuwe passagiersdiensten per spoor door GoVolta – Den Haag-Straatsburg, Den Haag-Keulen en Amsterdam-Parijs

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 19:50:29 +0000

GoVolta has sent a request to ACM this week for some more(!) plans for international trains. This includes: - (a) The Hague to Luxembourg and Strasbourg via Rotterdam and Brussel-Zuid. On Monday-Friday the morning trains runs to Strasbourg, and the afternoon only to Luxembourg. The weekends only run to Luxembourg. This is scheduled to begin in the 2028 timetable. - (b) The Hague to Cologne via Rotterdam, Utrecht and Arnhem three times a day, from Monday through Friday, and twice a day on weekends. This is scheduled to begin in the 2028 timetable. - (c) Amsterdam to Paris on the high-speed line, three times a day, seven days a week, scheduled to begin in the 2029 timetable. This will be in addition to their currently planned service that will run on the conventional rail network starting this December.

Services (a) and (b) are said to run on loco-hauled carriages or EMU, but for the high-speed service (c) Winkelman has told Treinreiziger.nl that they are looking at old ICE 3M trains.

Envelope privacy patterns

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 19:38:23 +0000

A collection of security envelope patterns by Alice Bartlett which I discovered through Giles Turnbull.

Nobody clicks your share buttons

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 20:03:52 +0000

I've been curious if anyone actually followed through with the share buttons placed some sites use. Ankur Sethi has done some digging and survey says... no!

I discovered this post via ShellSharks' Scrolls.

Mastodon, The Only Good Choice

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 11:49:28 +0000

Tim Bray on choosing Mastodon:

Commercial products, especially social-media services, have never been at peace with third-party clients. Twitter used to be, but then it stabbed those developers in the back. It’s easy to understand why; every product manager has it drilled into them that they must control the user experience. This ignores the ancient wisdom (I first heard it from Bill Joy) “Wherever you work, most of the smart people are somewhere else.”

This is partly what keeps me away from most social media platforms. I find limiting or barring access to my own data published on a platform to be icky. The same could be said, albeit to a lesser extent, for placing barriers in accessing or browsing data on the platform in general. It's what first made my distance myself from Twitter, prior to Elon's takover, and is also what drove me to deactivate my Reddit account.

I Spent a Week in a Hacker House

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 19:16:19 +0000

The dynamics at the hacker house in the TV show Silicon Valley was realistic after all. Matteo Wong writes about his experience living at a hacker house, and interviews owners and residents of some others too.

Discovered via The Morning News.

Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 19:10:05 +0000

A look at official web browsers that once shipped on most game consoles. I remember my time fumbling around with webpages on the PSP.

Overall, the development of console browsers provides an insight into a juvenile web, slowly growing and establishing itself, as well as an insight into game console user interfaces.

Discovered via the weird_wide_web_hole newsletter.

Polderprikker

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 07:50:04 +0000

Find the five locations on the map of the Netherlands, the closer you get the higher the points and there's a new set of locations each day. The game is created by Tijmen Kleini.

What I've learned from a few days of doing this is that my knowledge gets better the closer the location is to a train station.

Websites as anthologies of self

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 10:07:33 +0000

I recently read a post from James' Coffee Blog titled, Websites as anthologies of self, and in there he wrote about some thoughts I've had in my head for a while but never actually explored on paper, or in this case, the screen by means of my keyboard. I consider the writing I do on my blog as a structured outlet for my notes. Each post is a snapshot in time of what I was reading, thinking or doing around that time. Looking through what I have published so far, most of it isn't as personal or creative as James' writing, but I see some similarities in the way we use our blog. He writes:

Every post here is atomic in the sense that it captures a moment in time, while also continuing a narrative I have been writing for years.

Once something is published I don't edit a blog unless thre are any egregious errors, typos or updates. These changes I point out in a separate section at the bottom and direct users to a follow-up post if there is one. I've thought about creating posts that morph into a complete piece over time while out in the public, but I think that content is more suited towards a wiki page with a definitive log of each change over time.

While each of my posts can stand on its own - in James's words, it is atomic - I still draw from past experiences or events in my current writing. In order to highlight that I like to link back to posts I've written. It's partly why I wrote a series of posts about each Sprinter train in the Netherlands, or my first time riding an ICNG train; anything I write about those trains in the future builds on my notes from those posts. The same goes with links I share, the short descriptions that point to the source build over time, and I can collect related topics and roll them up in a post. James, in his writing, phrases this well:

I use my site in a different way, I suspect, from readers. I use my site for creative reference. I use my site to remember if I have covered a topic before. I link to posts that I want to build on as I develop an argument in future posts. And, over time, my website becomes something of an anthology of self.

Homelab 10" mini-rack v2

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 06:35:33 +0000

Logan Marchione built his mini rack out of 20x20 extruded aluminium and it looks great. I had the same idea myself, but wasn't sure if the dimensions would line up with the mini-rack standards by Jeff Geerling s that seems to be what most products are designed for. Logan was able to buy 1U shelves, and a 1U patch panel off Amazon and confirmed they do indeed fit!

I discovered this post through a very negative Hackernews comments section of another mini-rack post using 20x20 aluminium extrusion. This other post, by Louwrentius, uses their own shelves rather than buying ones online.

Another note, I wanted to tally up the cost of building my own mini-rack from extruded aluminium and both posts seem to come out to be quite expensive.

If You are Asking for Human Attention, Demonstrate Human Effort

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 18:27:17 +0000

This can be read alongside the last link I shared from Nolen Royalty about how we view effort in jobs that an AI model could produce. While these posts aren't available response to each other they do with nicely together.

Tom Bedor's a perfect job describing what his post is about.