On August 17th 2004 my firstborn son Gerard passed away suddenly at the age of 17. This text will remain where ever I have a website in rememberance of him.
Home automation setup
Oct 20, 2020
Several people have been asking me lately to describe my home automation. This is a start of it. I dont have the idea I am doing something special, but it if helps them. It’s also a nice way of having it documented I guess.
All raspberry pi’s run metrics2mqtt and temp.py. They feed information into the mqtt network about the state and behaviour of the raspberry pi. Things I find the most interesting are the cpu usage, diskspace and temperature.
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I became a Grandpa
Jul 09, 2019
Today I became a grandpa for the first time. Logan Gerard Smits is born. I am so incredibly happy for Carmen and Coen. If there are people that will be great parents it’s those two. (yes I am prejudiced).
I am sitting here behind my desk, looking at this screen, listening to gregorian chants and trying to understand my feelings. Like I said I am over the moon with happiness and at the same time a great sadness is in me.
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Kotlin extensions
Apr 04, 2019
Extensions are a very powerful mechanism to extend functionality on a class. As a lot of classes in the java eco system are closed for (easy) adding functionality. The extension system of Kotlin makes it easy.
Here are a few I really like to use:
/** * Rounds a double to the specified decimals */ fun Double.round(decimals: Int): Double { var multiplier = 1.0 repeat(decimals) { multiplier *= 10 } return round(this * multiplier) / multiplier } /** * Opens a file on the classpath as an InputStream */ fun String.
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Gerard & my believe system
Oct 13, 2018
I was going trough some old old archives and I found the blog I had when Gerard died. Most of the entries are what you expect pain, loss and anger from a parent. I did find my attempt to write down my believe system and I decided to at least repost that one. This was written august 22, 2004.
An event like Gerard’s death will always bring your believe system into play.
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