I wanted to know why my house was consuming electricity even when I was sleeping. So I used a smart socket with built-in meter to determine most of the electricity consumption in the house. Here are the details.

My relationship with Apple laptops and OSX: 2004♥ — 2013 :-( — 2015†.

tl;dr: Apple has stretched my ethical boundaries too far, so I decided to move on. I am now giving Android a shot in combination with a touch screen. So far, lovin’ it.

The issue started when Apple started requiring …

On a day of christmas, I saw an angel…

See the angel deploy her wings:

It’s alive, it’s alive!

root@OpenWrt:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo
system type             : Ralink RT5350 id:1 rev:3
machine                 : VoCore
processor               : 0
cpu model               : MIPS 24KEc V4.12
BogoMIPS                : 479.23
wait instruction        : yes
microsecond timers      : yes
tlb_entries             : 32
extra interrupt vector  : yes
hardware watchpoint     : yes, count: 4, address …

The trick is to not mix the outline with the cast shadow.

Last Friday, an interviewer asked me how I would describe myself.

I stammered: “I’m not exactly sure how to answer that.” So she turned the question around: “How would your friends describe you?”

To be honest, I wonder the same. My current close friends are not very verbose on …

At the falling edge of a sharp spring morning…

… an aspiring teacher shares his experience of Bargoens, also called “Thieves tongue”, a Yiddich-Hebrew-Dutch dialect spoken in Amsterdam between the 19th and 20th century.

Now also with making of:

Tricky, trickier, trickiest.

Blond hair under the sun against a dark background which I don’t want do draw: should I draw the hair or not? Without, it looks too strange; with, too dark. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Also, I do not really like this …

Albert Einstein, that is. Yet another pencil this time. It feels darker, suitable for this model with plenty of shadows.

New tool, new results…

When I left home with my pencil and paper yesterday, I was excited about the sketch I had just started of Andrei. Alas, the pencil disappeared somewhere during my travel… So I had to use a different/new one. It feels “fatter,” also for the first …

Shade first or eyes first, that is (was) the question.

Lessons learned: blond hair is quite difficult; edges only easy if something to draw on both sides.

Achievement unlocked: woman face.

Exercise pays off.

So there’s this thing called “perspective” and it is a bitch to get anything close to right.

The next exercise I need to complete successfully at least once before I can move on to the next chapter is perspective. One-point perspective works all right, it’s kind of easy …

The space in between matters more in drawing than the space inside.

It is told that women are a more interesting drawing subject than men. After testing myself, I respectfully disagree.

This is the profile I drew from a woman I like, whose body I think has good proportions:

These are pictures I drew of men whom I do not know:

I …