Each year I make a puzzle for Easter. This year I used generative AI to create some of the images, and now I wondered: could AI also solve the puzzle? The answer is: not yet, but it’s close! The Easter puzzle 🐣 🔗The puzzle is a yearly tradition since 2020, back when The Thing was a thing and we all had to stay inside. Some people learnt to knit, others read books, I made a series of cryptographic puzzles 😅

My yearly tradition is to create a bunch of cryptographic puzzles for Easter. And this year is no exception. Play the puzzle now! Some tips 🔗 The puzzles are very difficult, so it may take you a long time for each puzzle. That’s by design! Work together if you can Print the puzzle (thinking is easier on paper) Focus on a couple of puzzles and then take ’time off’ to give your mind time to process it Start ‘outside in’ by writing down words related to the theme and then see if they fit with a puzzle This year’s puzzle 🔗I’ve been working on a story about a ‘corporate wizard’ and I realized these words are fun ‘puzzle-words’.

Everybody’s doing AI. And so am I! Last week, I got bored and decided to mess with the OpenAI-API. This resulted in a script that reads in a blog-post and then generates a square image to go with it. Not exactly rocket-science, but it was fun to mess with. Read on to see my findings! What I wanted to achieve 🔗My goal was mainly to explore the OpenAI API, see if I could build something on top of it.

This blog used to run on Jekyll. I was quite happy with that, until some kind of Ruby change meant Jekyll stopped running and I got into an arms race with Ruby versions. Jekyll needs Ruby A.64, the gems for Jekyll need Ruby B.85, the gem-updater won’t work with Ruby A.64, OSX ships with a different Ruby, Linux on the server yet another… Added to that, my theme used gulp as a task runner and needed lots of npm modules.

Stepping into a new world. The world of Freelance Last year’s theme was “everything, everywhere and all at once”, and I asked myself: I started many more projects than I finished: will 2023 will be a year of wrapping up this undirected energy? And it’s safe to say: no, I did not wrap up projects. I (again) started many more than I could finish. Still, 2023 has a very different feel than 2022.

There’s a lot of talk about AI’s impact on artists. Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Dall-E, ChatGPT, they are already taking over and this is just the beginning. I don’t think so. An AI can make beautiful images, but these images do not have the same worth (in the eye of humans) as does real art. I can frame a print of the Mona Lisa and hang it in my living room. It will look amazing.

Welcome to this year’s easter puzzle! This crypto puzzle is super-sweet and is all about our favorite sugary treats! It can be candy, desserts, ice cream or sugary-drinks. Think gummy bears, snickers, pop tarts, cookies, brownies, lemonade… I hope you brushed your teeth because the glazing is going to get some action! Solving these cryptograms can be as easy as saying what you see out loud, but some may take more time.

This week we bought an Apple TV. It complements our Chromecast: now we can buy the movies we want to watch on iTunes if they are not on Netflix. But this blog post is not about the machine: it’s about the attention to quality of the Apple services. I got a couple months of “free” services (LOL, I paid that with the ridiculous profitmargin on the physical product): two months for Music and three months for TV+.

At the beginning of every new year, I take a look back at what happened in the year before. I don’t write this article for other people (although nearly 80 people read my review last year), but for myself. It’s writing-therapy. These yearly reviews are a way to reflect and learn, but also a ‘congratulations’ to myself. I often get the feeling that I didn’t accomplish anything, and with my yearly review I realize that my years are actually quite action packed.

Two years ago, I participated in the first edition of the Rijswijk Talent Award. It was a great experience. I got challenged to do something new, and got a lot of recognition for it (I won!). This year there was a new edition, and of course I couldn’t resist participating and even my daughter entered the competition! Transition 🔗The theme this year was “transition”, which I found quite challenging. The concept is very vague and difficult to grasp, and at the same time applicable to nearly everything.