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Detail of the Inky Impression e-ink display with a star map depicting on it.

inkystarmap – an always up to date starmap on the wall

Last year I did a talk at Pycon Ireland 2024 about e-ink displays, in which I gave several examples of ways you can program e-ink displays on a Raspberry Pi with Python. For this talk I developed one extra application: displaying a star map on an e-ink display. But the e-ink displays I had available back then were a bit small for this purpose.

Enter Pimoroni’s new Inky Impression 13.3 inch e-ink display. As soon as it arrived, I worked on the star map again. It turned out that 9 months later, some things had changed. But after 2 evenings experimenting, I got a new working version. Now utilising the gradient display of the Python package starplot. On the new 13.3 inch display with brighter colours, it worked perfectly.

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By Marcel-Jan Krijgsman, ago

Growing up, the story of how I became a skeptic

In this blogpost I will reveal something about myself, which I never shared anywhere in my long life on the Internet. It’s rather personal and I don’t like to share a lot on that online. The more because of what the great data aggregators nowadays do with that. But to tell this story, I need to explain what happened to me and how that changed things. Also, I’m fine, really. I do 100+ km bike rides now and this week I rode 60 kms with an average speed of 33.5 km/hr, so that hopefully proves I am currently pretty healthy.

 

Never grow up!

Stories like this always start by saying that when I grew up I was in every aspect a normal kid. But I’m actually not sure :). Anyway at age 11 my parents noticed that I was not growing very much. This fact was underscored by the fact that my 4 year younger brother was getting taller than me: I was about 120 cm (4 feet) at the time. My mother decided this needed to be checked out by a doctor. And before I knew it, I was dragged to a local medical facility where a nurse drew some blood. I can honestly say I hated people poking needles in my arm very much. (more…)

By Marcel-Jan Krijgsman, ago

Starting at Port of Rotterdam per 1 May 2018

Next week (1 May 2018) I will start as a Hadoop specialist/data steward/data custodian/data something something at the Advanced Analytics team at Port of Rotterdam. We haven’t worked out a fancy data something title yet. I’m already working at this team as a consultant. I’ve been involved with security and data governance of the data lake (for people outside Big Data: a data lake is simply a Hadoop cluster).

The World Port Center

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By Marcel-Jan Krijgsman, ago

The new product anxiety cycle

Am I the only one who has this? Let me know.

Phase 1: Discovery of New Product

Suddenly everybody talks about New Product. It’s said it changes everything. Articles about New Product appear on Hacker News for weeks. Then colleagues on LinkedIn even mention New Product (Warning! People you know, know New Product!). (Or they’re just linking to articles about New Product, so they look cool. Either way: they must know New Product!)

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By Marcel-Jan Krijgsman, ago

Dataworks Summit München 2017 – day one

Just left the beergarten party at Dataworks Summit 2017 in München. Okay, let’s see how well I blog after three of these large beers. Luckily I took notes before. Tell me when I start to become incoherent.

So actually for me the summit started yesterday at the Partner day, but today the breakout sessions started. I’ve attended a cool hands-on session on Apache Ranger and Atlas yesterday. These are the new security and governance tools for Hadoop. And I think we can say that the days that you could say Hadoop is largely insecure are about to be over.

The first session today I attended was the keynote of course. I was a little bit late, but it turned out that the second row seats were largely available, so I had a good view of the speakers. A couple of them tried to convince us that (big) data was going to change everything. I already knew that. (more…)

By Marcel-Jan Krijgsman, ago