Lately, I moved buildings for my work towards a building which is very close by Eindhoven Airport. Only 430 meters to be precise.

The air-planes and kerosene smell triggered me about the health risks, and air quality inside the building as well as at home. The fact is that we have more and more cars/trucks within the residential areas (too bad still running on fossil fuel). Meaning our health is at risk, and apparently nobody cares. My idea was measuring is knowing, so lets start measuring!

Lately I moved to my new home. My idea was to setup a good stable and high performance LAN network within my home. This project sounds pretty easy at first, but it was harder than I initially suspected it to be.

In this article I talk about my goals for this project. The list of materials to get you started and creating your own network. I will talk about some useful unix tools for network analysis. How-to setup your own NFS (Network File System) server. Last but not least, I will give some Linux network tweaking advise and share my future plans.

I got a running GitLab server on my Debian Jessie server. GitLab Community Edition is an open-source git repository manager, but also supports code reviews, wiki’s, issue tracking and much more! GitLab is very similar to Github in a way, however you have full control of the server. You are running your own git server.

Normally Github will do all the system administration, upgrades and such for you. They make sure your code is safe and saved no matter what. Since I use GitLab, I need to take care of my own server. What you definitively not want is; to lose all your precious data!

Most of the people know I’m using Telegram. But I never explained the reasons why I use Telegram. Let me explain why I think you should also use Telegram. Telegram is an alternative of WhatsApp.
Read the full article, and be amazed by the features of Telegram.

I was triggered by a name ‘OpenRCT2’ on the web. I was wondering if that was a game just like 0 A.D. (an open-source re-implementation of Age of Empires). And yep it was, OpenRCT2 stands for “Open-source RollerCoaster Tycoon II”.

I was thrilled when I discovered about OpenRCT2. It’s a re-implementation of the classic hit game called RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 from Infogrames (Atari). Only in US; Rollercoast Tycoon 2 sold 940,000 copies and earned $21.6 million by August 2006.

Recently I found the benefits of using git hooks. I want you explain in this article more about git hooks. What are git hooks in the first place? What for hooks are there? (no I’m not talking about a fish hook). And how to use git hooks in combination in my favorite open-source git server: GitLab.

Git hooks

Most of the people know about the new augmented reality game named “Pokémon GO”. You grep your smartphone go out-side and gonna catch “m all. I won’t explain what a gym is or a pokéstop are or even how to battle. Instead I purely focus on how the game technically works.

I share some history behind the game. Explaining some bugs and try to predict the future. Also don’t forget to read the “Did you know” section at the end.

I was searching for a good and free TLS certificate which is signed by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA). A CA is an organization for issuing digital certificates. You need to have a Certificate Authority when you want to use HTTPS, secure HTTP web server connections. You know; when you visit a secure web-page (https://) and you will see a green lock-icon in your web-browser. This icon indicates that you have an encrypted connection with this website.

In this article I will explain how TLS certification requests normally works and how Let’s Encrypt works. Let’s Encrypt is a Certificate Authority, who provides free and trusted domain certificates. Eventually, I explain how to setup Let’s Encrypt yourself using Nginx webserver.

Developers who running PHP-enabled websites such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento or even PHP frameworks like Laravel and Symfony should know about the new major PHP version. As a developer you should think about switching to PHP7. I will talk about the how-to use it, some history, the benefits of PHP7 and finally how to get PHP7 on your system.
And uhm… what about PHP version 6?

Usage

About about 98% of the websites are still using PHP version 5.*.  PHP 5 is now more than 11 years old, so it’s time to move to PHP 7 and clean up obsolete functions. The PHP project has a list of deleted functions, which helps you porting PHP 5 to PHP 7 code. And list of removed APIs & extensions.

I always like to debate and dream about new technologies and the future. Which is sometimes  sci-fi, but most of the sci-fi becomes reality. I would like to share some of my (crazy?) predictions and technologies I think become truth and fully accepted within several years from now.

Ik had per ongelijk de Netgear router gebrickt, of in ieder geval de router startte niet meer goed op. Als een apparaat (router, smartphone, game console) bricked is, betekend dat hij niet goed geconfigureerd is, corrupte firmware of een hardware problemen heeft.

Waardoor het betreffende apparaat niet meer goed kan functioneren. En daardoor zou de router enkel nog bruikbaar zijn als jawel een &“brick” (=baksteen). Oopsy!

Niet lang geleden heb ik mijn server opnieuw opgezet. Ik maak gebruik van Debian 8 (Jessie) als Linux distributie, en heb veel verschillende services geïnstalleerd en geconfigureerd (waaronder een mail server, webmail, cloud storage en git). Gelukkig hield ik alles netjes bij in een logboek. Ik zou graag mijn stappen willen delen, zodat iedereen een eigen server kan opzetten.

Ik ga ervan uit dat je beschikt over enige basis kennis van GNU/Linux (Debian). Ook al beschik je niet tot nauwelijks over deze kennis, zou het toch mogelijk moeten zijn om deze handleiding stap voor stap te volgen.