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Olivita in Leuven
This week we went for dinner at Olivita in Leuven. This is a Spanish restaurant in the city center. Probably because we are in the middle of the exam period and there is soccer world championship ongoing there were not many people walking around in the streets and the restaurant was almost empty. As the weather was nice we decided to eat outside. This is just in front of the restaurant on the sidewalk so not a particularly charming setting. But as it is in the city center there are mostly only pedestrians, cyclists, scooterists and the odd public transport…
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Serendipity
In the previous blog post I mentioned I was scouting around for a good Python course for my 15 year old son and went of on a tangent about whether AI means you don’t need to know Python at all. Needless to say I still believe that you can benefit from being able to program even with the advent of AI, else I would not be looking for good course for my son. I found a 100 day bootcamp on Udemy which looks quite interesting. It is quite cheap so this could be an option. I don’t think he is…
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Why Practical Python Courses Matter for Young (and older) Learners
Recently I was scouting around for a good Python course for my 15 year old son. They way they are teaching it in school is not very practical. There is a lot of text explaining concepts in a web application with questions and code cells where you have to type code and execute. He is learning all these things but there is no connection to reality. I asked him: you learned all these commands, write a program that asks a user to give their weight and height and that calculates their bmi and then tells them in what bmi category…
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HTML For the World Wide Web, Elizabeth Castro: Part 4
Chapters 6 & 7. Page Layout & Hyperlinks Chapter 6 is about styling the layout of your page without css using attributes of for example the <body> tag to set the background colour. All of this is no longer done and this particular example didn’t work in my browser. Some other tags that are no longer part of HTML5 like <center> to center text still worked though. Most of it can be forgotten with the exception of the following tags which are still HTML5. The chapter about hyperlinks is more up to date but still has some outdated content, like…
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Top Finalists of 2026 Queen Elizabeth Concours Shine at Leuven’s Cello Concert
On Thursday we went to 30cc in Leuven to listen to the number 1, 2 and 3 finalists of the 2026 cello Concours. We saw Leland Ko, Tae-Yeon Kim and Ettore Pagane each play a piece individually with the Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra and then at the end they played a short piece, the 3 of them together without orchestra as a bonus. Needless to say these are three outstanding musicians and the orchestra is also of international fame. There was a lot of variety in music as each musician chose their piece to play. We heard work from Antonin Dvorak,…
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Dutch Mountain Trail Hike Preparations
As mentioned in another post we are planning to walk part of the Dutch Mountain Trail this year. So; not the complete 100km but a little over half of it during 3 days. And we will walk sections, returning to our hotel every day. Some of the preparation started with a hotel found in Heerlen and ordering the official guide book. Delivery was fast, within a week of ordering it I had it in my mailbox. It has a handy, small format so we can take it with us during the hike. It has maps and directions, plus information about…
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HTML For the World Wide Web, Elizabeth Castro: Part 3
Chapter 4 & 5: Creating Images and Using Images Chapter 4 about creating images you can ignore. It still deals with antiquated hardware limitations with respect to connection speed and monitor colour depth. Today, with connections allowing to stream video and online gaming the connection speed is not the same concern it was in 2000. Of course, if you are using images just to show them on the web page=screen then it makes no sense to use large high quality images. It will just take time more loading without adding benefit. Sizing your images correctly still makes sense but it…
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HP-28S Advanced Scientific Calculator
Very long ago, when I was in high school I got my first hp calculator from my dad: a HP-15C. He gave it to me because I had issues with brackets on a standard calculator and with RPN you don’t need brackets. I believe this was in third grade. When things got a bit more advanced I got an HP-28S which was a huge step forward in user friendliness. The HP-15C only has 1 line on the display while the HP-28S has 4 lines and a stack which you can manipulate visually on the screen, like swapping the numbers in…
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Thinking Small. The Long, Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle, Andrea Hiott (ISBN 9780345521422, Ballantine Books)
I read about this book in the newspaper when it originally came out in Dutch in 2012. When I was young an uncle had a Beetle and I liked driving around in the car. The boxer motor really generates a unique sound. As a result this book caught my interest and I bought it. But then it disappeared on the ever growing stack of books to read. Until a month ago when I picked it up and read it. I have to say the book turned out to be much more than I expected from it. It is not just…
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HTML For the World Wide Web, Elizabeth Castro: Part 2
Chapter 3: Styling Text Chapter 3 about styling text is really obsolete. You can still use almost all tags mentioned in the chapter but many are no longer part of HTML5 and should be replaced by styling with CSS. From that point of view this chapter is not a good guide. A short list below.
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