Johann's Playground

Hey you! Welcome to my small Website which i use as a place to post interesting stuff, tell you about my day or just to fool around a bit on the internet.

I dont really care how this will look or feel. So If you cant see this properly or if you discover typos, I dont really care.

*If yant to get notified when i post:

Design studios

26.08.2022

Add to this file! :)

are.na

24.02.2022

Are.na is stressing me out. In a good way.

The ease of peeking into peoples minds, ideas, refrences is exhausing. Is it too much? Do they make resources too easy to access? Is opening 200 tabs in an hour a good or bad thing?

In my opinion, it's definitely worth it. The FOMO caused by content / resources whith superb quality, which you haven't found yet, or haven't had time to read into yet. I'm devestated by the idea of loosing my 300+ browser tabs, since there's just so much knoweledge waiting to be consumed.

Maybe trying to escape the rabbithole that is are.na is just a matter of deleting. Deleting the huge backlog of interesting stuff. If you really would have wanted to consume the information, wouldn't you have done it right when you found it?

Don't be scared, jump on are.na and create your own digital garden.

Dating apps and triangulation

21.04.2021

Tinder was fist, all the others followed. I'm talking about the app's feature to show the approximate distance from you to your match. Pretty anonymus, right? No!

This presents any user with the opportunity to track your location via your account on your preffered dating app. By spoofing your own location and placing yourself around the city, you can approximate your matches position to a 1km square.

This is where the problem arises. Bumble specifically only sends the 'approximate' distance to your phone. But in the backend they use a very simple rounding algorithm to round their distances. if the 15 digit decimal point is above .5, they round up, if it's beneath, they round down.

With a bit of software magic, this lets you determine the exact location of the target by changing your own (spoofed) location until the distance switches. With that info you can then triangulate the _exact_ position of any of your matches.

scary.

BTC, ETH and DOGE

21.04.2021

Recently i've been getting into the topic of cryptocurrency a lot more than usually. It was always this thing that I was aware of and was trying to understand.

Now i actually put some time into it and starting to grasp the beautiful technology and huge potential behind it.

I've been mining some ethereum. And it's exiting. Seeing the price fluctuate is both the scary and the fun part of it. This topic implements so much more than just paying or speculating with digital currency.

Stuff like human psychology, meme culture, popularity graphs and brandingof the different coins. The more you get into it, the bigger the topic seems to become.

There are three Cryptocurrencies which i see as worthy to keep a close eye on. These three are:

Bitcoin The largest and most popular of all cryptocurrencies. The creator being Satoshi Nakamoto. He disappeared without any sign shortly after creating the BitCoin network. Since it is an opensource project, it hasn't gone stagnant, but I feel like the project misses a head. Someone to push development, someone to look up to.

Ethereum That's where ethereum comes in. With the creator Vitalik Buterin still alive and well. If you see him in interviews or when giving presentations you will recognize him as a total genius. To be honest, I only really understand 30% of what he says.

With his, and his team's urge to innovate and improve on the project, I see huge potential in Ethereum.

With Ethereum 2.0 coming up and the network moving from a proof-of-work to Proof-of-stake, this has some big potential in surpassing bitcoin.

Dogecoin And then there's Dogecoin. Originally created as a meme to make fun of all the altcoins appearing, all claiming to be better than bitcoin in one way or the other. A meme is a delicate thing. And now it has a price associated with it. Since Elon Musk, Snoopdog, and many other celebrities tweeting about it, dogecoin went to the moon in the last couple years.

The value of a digital currency depends a lot about how people percieve it. A dollar isn't worth anything until a lot of people agree that it's worth something. Perception plays a big role in that. And at the end, the branding of a coin plays a big role in that. I think it's a very interesting topic. Especially when you draw the line to fiat currencies here. e

Tim Hunkin

28.03.2021

I just discovered this maker, Tim Hunkin. He's a total genius and a jack of all trades. He is making extraodinary videos on youtube, explaining all sort of stuff about smart things and components.

If you are into making stuff or are just interested in things and smart thoughts, i highly reccomend you to have a look at his youtube channel or his website.

Starting the day right

26.03.2021

Developing a mornign routine has been one of the hardest things. I start working at 9:30 and leave the house at 9:10. So the question always was, what do i do with all that time in the morning?

A few weeks back I was still waking up at 8:30 every day. or at least browsing Instagram until i really had to get up. That changed in the last couple of weeks. I don't reach for my phone anymore in the morning and just get out of bed. sometimes at 7am, sometimes at 8am. I make a coffee and be a bit productive.

If you want to get shit done, do it in the morning. Where nobody else is awake to bother you. If you don't, you get messages all day, get emails, have people distracting you without even noticing.

In the morning you have a clearer mind, fresh, not cluttered yet from all the shit that is about to come your way.

Start early, finish early. Have a good day!

The Cruise

21.03.2021

This masterpiece of a documentary is set in the late 1990s, it's fun, it's emotional and it will give you stuff to think about. It's not the most scientific of all the documentaries out there but nontheless, very fun.

The main character in this documentary is Timothy Levitch. He is definitely a character.

Watch it on YouTube or anywhere else, it's free. Or if you just want a quick rundown of the movie, check this: Shortcut

this guy is cool.

spring is approaching

28.02.2021

Here, in Amsterdam, the sun is slowly starting to shine again! But first, let me backtrack a little bit.

A few months back, the dutch nation was still thriving. Doing sports, hanging out with friends, going to work...

Then the countrywide semi-lockdown was introduced. Together with an 'avendklok', a curfew that comes into effect from 21:00 to 4:30.

This, in addition to the gray winter weather and cold temperatures made this city slowly go insane. But people weren't noticing. Until the sun came out again. Despite the anti-corona measures, the country was once again, thriving.

Then stuff like this happened:

Pretty crazy times, we're living in.

war for dummies

14.02.2021

It is way easier to send a nuclear rocket to someone across orbit than to build a system to detect and destroy an incoming rocket.

Entertainment addicts

13.02.2021

I don't know if it's just a thing of a specific generation. But I've noticed this more and more since I get to know more and more people in the big city.

I won't stereotype all of the city people to be entertainment addicts but it's definitely a big portion of them.

Maybe it's just me but I find the way these people live their lifes very weird. A short summary would be: They work. And if they don't work, they watch movies. Movies seem to hypnotize them. A story, usually unrelated to their lives, spanning for 1-3 hours. And when the movie is over, they don't take anything from it, but another movie, they can tick off their list of stuff they have seen.. I guess it helps in social conversations when other Entertainment addicts try to connect their own watched-movie knoweledge with the person they are talking with.

I've only noticed this in a lot of people since i've moved to the big city. Yes, it's still the lockdown but I have the strong feeling that having no lockdown wouldn't change the behaviour of these people very much...

I don't know a lot of people from the small town that share this trait..

And if you feel like you are one of these people, please don't feel offended. This is just a thing I've noticed. I won't judge anyone enjoying the life of an entertainment addict. How people want to live their life is always their own choice.

New Design coming??!

20.01.2020

Maybe it's time to step my game up a little bit, I thought today. So after work, I've sat down and created a cool new design for this project! And yes, I'm gonna try to code it myself. Let's see how that goes, lol. It's probably going to be a lot of looong nights but my goal here is to learn something.


I think this is a cool project to try stuff out and give myself a nice challenge.


The design is probably still going to change a lot (probably because of lack of coding skillz) but here is a little taste of it:

This greek place around the corner

18.01.2020

Every day when I am driving home from work and itā€™s dark outside, I drive past this greek place. They have a big sign and beautiful fairy lights hanging on the window. The place really looks cute.



So two days ago I texted with someone and she said they were getting some chinese food. So i got jealous and decided to also get some food. The decision fell on the small greek restaurant around the corner. Itā€™s about a 20 meter walk till there.


So I got there, the people were all very nice. I got a moussaka and some of that pasta that looks like big rice but isnā€™t.


Then I was going to pay the nice woman behind the counter and tried paying with my phone, cuz i placed my wallet in a spot i canā€™t remmeber. Of course it didnā€™t work. So I had to walk back, up the stairs, in my room, grabbed some cash, went back down the stairs, across the street and paid the nice women behind the counter.

The weird thing was that they randomly asked me to show them my face, asked where Iā€™m from and if Iā€™ve been there before. Very weird. But ok.


Food was nice. 7/10.


Deep down inside

18.01.2021

I've bought a VR headset. Yup. I did it.

been thinking about this for a couple of years now but never had the opportunity to afford even thinking about buying one. Because of the increased convinience and decreased price progresssion over the last years, I fiinally took the step.

It's very weird. Wearing a headset which teleports you in a completely different world is something odd, but nice. especcialy during the lockdown periiod here in Amsterdam and the whole world.

It provides a sense of scale while at the same time is making you feel very small.

It's definitely an iteresting topic to stay informed about. A bit on and off topic: I want to reccomend this youtube channel to you. Have a look, you won't regret it.

Vimium

12.01.2020

Over the past couple months, I have become an anti-mouse extremist.

I've spent countless hours in online touch-typing lessons, learned the Vim text editor, and installed a very, very good Chrome extension. It's called Vimium.

If you're like me, and you are more productive with your hands on your keyboard, not having to move your mouse around while browsing the web sounds like a dream come true.

And thats exactly what vimium does. It gives you the tools to navigate the web entirely by using your keyboard. You can do almost anything with it.

I highly reccomend you watch this video and give the Vimium cheatsheet a read. You can also access it at anytime by pressing "?"

Why did i just find this..

03.01.2020

I'm just sitting in my apartment and wanted to listen to some Beatles. So I'm firing up Spotify and searching for 'she loves you'. First song is, as expected 'She Loves You - The Beatles'. After clicking on it, my eye catched a glimpse of another song hiding in the corner. It's tile being: 'Sie liebt dich - Remastered 2009'. Probably just some stupid automatic translation, I thought.

So it peeked my interest and after just 10 seconds of listening to the song I've been craving for the past 5 minutes, I click on the weird German title. Then it hit me.

This is actually a full-blown, Beatles performed, gernman version of 'She Loves You'. It sounds awful.

Have a listen:

About this book and how to become a real pirate

31.12.2020

Hey! We've gotten through 2020! Couple scratches but still in pretty good shape, huh? No?
Ok lets just wait for the vaccine and see what comes after. Mutation was inevidable but will it be as fatal as the first one?

I've been listening to the audiobook version of "Permanent Record" the biography of Edward Snowden. I'm about 30% into the 14hr book and so far it's been great. An inspiring story, showing all the ups and downs of a seemingly normal teenager's life. The stories are beautifully narrated and get right to the point without any boring sidenotes.

If the book was any good, I'll write an edit to this post as soon as I finish it.

Btw, i'm listening on bookbeat right now. It's a comfortable platform to be on but it's mainly fictional books. So if you're thinking about getting into audiobooks, don't hesitate about using one of those platforms like Audible or Bookbeat to explore new books. I wouldn't reccomend buying their subscription though. They are ridiculously overpriced and limit your consumption.

About torrenting

For anyone who wants so save a couple Euro, download the TOR browser, read a bit into it, search for some piratebay proxy that seems legit and enjoy the almost limitless amount of Books as E-book or Audiobook Version right at your fingertips. Download a torrent client and enjoy it while it lasts.

If you're thinking about downloading some movies, I highly recoomend the Webtorrent torrent client. It lets you stream the movie while downloading it. It's amazing for people with a slow internet connection or if you're just impatient.


Enjoy.

Been searching for this..

29.12.2020

Ever found yourself in a situation where you needed to head outside and forgot to charge your phone? If not, you're lucky, if yes, you're definitely not alone.
Of course you could just take a powerbank.. grab to take it and remember that you hazven't charged it in weeks. Of course it's dead.
For a long time, i've been thinking about a way to solve this problem. Having a permanent spot for the powerbank to plug into? Having my normal charger pass through the powerbank? Everything seemed too complicated or too easy to forget and then end up in the same situation as before.

So I've been researching about this totally insignificant problem and stumbled upon this product: it's a wallbrick and powerbank in one. It charges when you're not currently charging your phone. So basically all the time.

Best. Product. Ever.

More shortcuts!

04.12.2020

Ever heard about shortcuts?
Jeah, Chrome got a lot of them. I love telling people about shortcuts because it just makes life so much easier.

If you are watching this on a pc, you can press CMD/STRG + T now. A new tab will open. You might now be inclined to reach for your mouse, move it to the position of the tab, aim for the little x, and then press, to close it again.
But aswell as you can open a tab with your keyboard, you can also close it again. For that you can press CMD/STRG + W.

Shit. You got confused and closed an important tab! Go to the settings, history, and then press reopen last tab? No way. That will just take your attention from whatever you have been doing. Instead, press CMD/STRG + SHIFT + T. This will reopen the last tab you closed.

People ask me, how i can stand, having so many tabs open in Chrome. "You can't even see the titles anymore", they say. But what if you don't have to. It's a struggle to click on a tiny tab and having to be super conscious about not pressing the little x, when trying to select it. The solution to that is just not to select tabs by first aiming, then clicking on them. Guess what, there's a keyboard shortcut for that too. Try pressing CMD/STRG + OPT/ALT + right or left arrow. It might look complicated now but it becomes second nature once you use it for some time. This way you can cycle through your tabs blazing fast.

Try to incorporate these shortcuts in your daily workflow and I'm telling you, pressing CMD/STRG + T, and then directly typing in your google search therm while never leaving the keyboard is beautful!
this is me going thorugh chrome, just using my keyboard. no mouse needed.

Protein folding (boring)

02.12.2020

Since the start of the spreading of Covid-19 and after seeing this livestream by George Hotz for the first time. I've been very interested in biochemistry and protein folding.

But first lets all get on the same page. What is he talking about?
Lets start with Biochemistry. As the name implies, thats basically biology and chemistry combined. It's all about understanding living organisms in a chemical way. Understanding the chemical processes in biological systems, in particular, those inside and between cells in a living organism.

Back then, I was amazed how much this random hacker guy knows about biochemistry and possbily all sorts of other interesting stuff.

So i stared to learn. Take as much information in as possible; learn about interesting stuff as much as i can. Starting with biochemistry. At first it was super interesting, but the interest slowly began to fade. I mean, what could i use this for anyways? But starting this blog a few monts ago drastically changed things. Now I have something that this random knowelege is actually useful for.

after all this talk, lets go a bit more in depth. Protein folding; Proteins are long chains of amino acids. Proteins do most of the work within cells and therefore play a major role in any living organism. They are created in long chains, but after being created they fold into complex shapes. What are you looking at here? This is a simplified representation of a folded protein.
There are two kinds of configurations these might go into: A one-dimensional strand of amino acids is called a "primary structure"
A a configuration like a alpha helix or beta sheet is called the "secondary structue"
If these structures then fold into one new complicated blob, the resulting protein has reached it's "tertiary structure"
Okay, this looks complicated as fuck. Why should I try to understand this mess?
The interesting thing is, that the same proteins always fold to the same structure. This structure tells a lot about the protein. It gives researchers a good idea of which other proteins this one might bind with.

There's also this concept of surface charge distribution which i don't really understand yet.

In any case, understanding structure is crucial to understanding function. But the DNA sequence only gives us the primary structure of a protein. How can we learn its secondary and tertiary structureā€”the exact shape of the blob?

There are about 180M protein sequences in the Universal Protein Database, but we've only discovered about 170k folded protein structures of those 180M.
Predicting those structures is hard. Because simulating nature is. First, add the thousands of atos that make up the proteins themselves to your simulation, then the enviornment, which comes close to 30k Atoms. Add the interactions between all the pairs of atoms. That gets you up to 450M Interactions to calculate.

Scientists and researchers have created various ways to make this happen faster. There are games which integrate human intuition with the computers power to distribute the load over the two systems. IBM chose the bruteforce method of just building a big big supercomputer: And stanford has created a program which makes use of peoples personal computers to harvest the immense power of shared computing. And finally, of course google has recently created and rapidly improved a machine learning model which does the calculations in a way more efficient way. Don't ask me how.

AI is everywhere

26.11.2020

Heyo! Let me tell you about a trendy thing. Itā€™s called ai. Ever heard of it? I hope so. The news use this therm for almost any program that somehow seems to be ā€˜smartā€™. Although that is not always the case. Most of these so called ā€˜Artificial intelligence networksā€™ are probably just simple if, else logic systems.

But letā€™s define the therms first. An artificially intelligent network is used to describe ā€œmachines (or computers) that mimic "cognitive" functions that humans associate with theĀ human mind, such as "learning" and "problem solvingā€.

Having a machine learn isn't such a difficult problem to solve. Doing it right is the hard part. The most used approach nowadays is to have one algorithm produce an output and let another evaluate it. Then have the evaluation network communicate it's results to the creation network. Boom. Artificial intelligence.

This can be done with lots of data, virtually anything. Do it with text, numbers, images (which are basically just a grid of numbers), language, the list goes on and on.

In my humble opinion, the most interesting of them all are the so called "GAN's" which is short for "Generative adversarial network". It's a framework designed by Ian Goodfellow in 2014. This type of Network generates new data based on a supplied training set. The new data should resemble the Training data but shouldn't be the same. I don't feel comfortable enough to tell you anything about how they work yet but I can show you some things they do:

Example one: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ (refresh the page to see a new photo)
This website creates a photo of a non-existent person. Nobody has taken this photo and nothing in it is real. There might be a lookalike of this generated person somewhere on earth but it certainly isn't their photo.

There are a number of other generators which do the same thing for different objects and animals (same here, refresh the page to see a new photo):
Example two: If you see any mistakes in here, let me know! And read about GAN's!

Bad News

23.11.2020

I am tired of news.

How do you read your news? If at all. Most of us probably do it online. Because 'It's just easier and mostly free'. But how do the journalists, and publications make money then? In times where nobody wants to pay for news anymore.
Nowadays our instagram feed, Google News and most online Newspapers are bloated with clickbait titles, random websites, annoying popups and just flatout bad content.

Who knows the feeling of seeing an interesting headline only to be severly disappointed by an article that goes on and on about irrelevant things only to bury the answer to the articles question somewhere in this useless information.

Reddit is better, but it's too much entertainment mixed with interesting information.
About a month ago i found Hackernews by Y-Combinator. Looking at the front page it looks a lot like our all beloved Reddit. The name might throw you off at first but if you're reading this blog, you'll find a lot of stuff on there very interesting. Let me introduce you to their content policy:


"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."


The Community is kind, smart and helpful. News get to the front page via a user-voting system. Just like Reddit does it. If it ain't broken, don't change it. No bloat, no crap. Just stuff that people find interesting and may gratify one's intellectual curiosity.

So i highly recommend you to visit Hackernews by Y-Combinator.
And if you find nothing interesting on there, look again in a couple of days.

Spotify Shortcuts

21.11.2020

Are you using spotify on a desktop or laptop? Then this might benefit you!

Did you know, there are a number of shortcuts to control Spotify with your keyboard? The most common ones are probably CTRL + arrow keys:

Use CTRL + UP or DOWN to contol the volume.
And Use CTRL + LEFT or RIGHT to skip or go back in songs.

There are a lot more, even more useful ones:
Referring to the last post, I've made an Anki deck from them!

What is this Anki thing?!

20.11.2020

Okay, What about this weird Anki think that I'm always talking about? Why is this guy telling me about this ugly looking, seemingly boring software? I'm telling you all that because I wish, I would have known about it a couple years ago when I was still in highscool. It would have saved me so much time and would have made things a whole lot easier!
The key thing, that this program is about, is spaced repetition. It's the process of fighting the so-called "forgetting curve", which usually looks something like this:
What are you supposed to see here? Well, the important thing to note is that it has a very steep drop right fom the start. Stating that you only remember about half of what you learned after just one hour! That is insane! And so inefficient!

This is where Anki comes in. Using repetition, it splits your learning session into small segments which you can just place throughout your day, weeek or month. Just do it whenever you have time! Anki is based on a Flashcard system. We've all used them before, having long learning sessions, going through all of them at once and not recalling anything, next time we look at them. The key is to split it up! That makes your forgetting curve look something like this: Having a good look at it, you will notice, that reviews are continuisly being spaced further apart and the forgetting curve gets flatter each time. Instead of trying in two, maybe three or four sessions to recall memory from a couple days ago, do it every day, save a lot of time.

This article walks you through the basics of what i've just described again. It also gives you a technical intro to Anki and an overview on how to use it.

Super Slow Sound!

20.11.2020

Peter, a colleague of mine showed me this cool tool today! It's a little program called ''Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch'' and it does exactly what it says. It streches sound EXTREMELY Hard. Up to 10^18 times As a written out number, thats 1,000,000,000,000,000,000x!
I had to look up what that number is even called. Apparently it's a Quintillion.

Anyway, it looks like this:

and it does stuff like this:
I'm gonan try it out in the next couple days, I'll keep you posted.