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Jan Henckens

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Reconnecting

Back it my first job, I had a coworker with whom I got along really well - I became a regular at the family home, got to know her daughter, we works at festivals together, etc, etc.

After leaving that job, which I did a little over 13 years ago, I lost touch with them. Sad, but that's how it goes.

3 years ago I moved out of the city and in with my girlfriend. A couple of months later Instagram - through god knows which algorithm - suggested that I follow her daughter. There I discovered that she ran a restaurant in the next village over from where our house is.

Time goes on, I sort of forget about it again. Until a couple of days ago when I get a text from that colleague - telling me they're retired now, they moved out of the city years ago so well and that she had heard that we now live close by. A couple of messages later and we're having dinner next week.

I'm really happy she got in touch and I'm really looking forward to catching up them all of them ❤️

There's a War Going On But No One Can See It

I came across this one while making a Christmas list to send to my family and my Dad gifted it to me.

Huib Modderkolk, a dutch investigative journalist, writes about his experiences covering the world of cybercrime, digital espionage and hacking. The book centers around a couple of stories, happening in or around The Netherlands between 2012 and 2022.

It goes in depth into the hacking of Belgium's national telecommunications provider Belgacom by CIA & GCHQ (link to The Guardian story about it) and gets pretty detailed and technical at times.

I'm quite technical and am interested in these topics so I knew some things before reading this book. Still it was a good refresher on the general premise of cybercrime and hacking, and it highlights the fact that it isn't something happening only in movies or fiction books. It is happening everyday and It is happening here as well.

Personal

Spending my time more consciously

I don't really believe in big new year's resolutions or making big changes on an arbitrary date but this year I'm going to try and change some things.

Keyboards

On mechanical keyboards

The idea of a mechanical keyboard has been intriguing me for a couple of years now but I never really took it further because I wanted to stick to an AZERTY layout. But an couple of months ago, one of my coworkers got into the hobby big time and that got me doing some more researching well, here we are. Guess what I'm typing this on 🙂

Tools Command Line Web Development PHP

Running Composer 2 alongside Composer 1

Composer 2.0 launched in October of last year and you really should be using it. It's much faster than version 1.x.

Web Development Craft CMS

Using template hooks to enhance Craft CMS

Template hooks allow you to insert a template or some custom CSS or Javascript into a page, for example in the Craft CMS Control Panel.