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I’m teaching a short course on programming and AI for middle schoolers. called a “talentuur”, (Talent hour).

This is a list of all lego sets Krijn has, for future reference. Images on this page are from brickset.com. At the bottom of this page are some instructions on how to make a list like this yourself.

A weekend together with my old group of adventurers in a familiar vacation cottage below Groningen. The imagined Sunwane Island was the real destination as we embarked on a fantasy quest The boys taking a break on a hunebed

I visited the AI conference in Groningen called aigrunn. This article has some notes on the sessions I attended. These notes are primarily for my own reference and not very well formatted, sorry!

This year I visited pydata in Amsterdam. Here are some of the sessions I visited with tutorial links, my brief thoughts on some keynotes, and a programming puzzle that really interested me.

I’ve recently started playing chess with my son. He’s just starting, so playing against him is very easy for me, even though I’m by no means a good chess player. In order to make the game a bit more fair, and thus more fun for both of us, I want to introduce a handicap for me. I found a table with handicaps1 in the wikipedia chess handicap article. Based on this list I created the following 10 levels of play, where level 1 gives the player the most advantage.

Recently I’ve started to learn to play the piano. There are a lot of resources available to start learning, but where to start? I remembered seeing a video of a kind of game where you could learn to play the piano. Synthesia as I found out it is called, is unfortunately not free, and also does not really teach sight reading. Therefore I considered it more of a novelty than a real learning tool, however fun it looked.

This year I intend to join Advent of Code again. While we wait to celebrate Christmas we can solve some programming puzzles together. This year I will join the ING leaderboards. You can also check out my solutions for Advent of code 2021, or see me publish my solutions for 2023.

This year I visited aiGrunn. I got the tip to visit this event from a coworker. When looking online I immediately recognized the art style from PyGrunn. Overall the visual impression and style was very well executed. I really liked how they integrated the Groninger word for egg (ai) into the design and opening talk. The audience was asked to hold an imaginary egg and respond to a series of questions with “ai”. The final question was a very relieving and self-aware “who’s tired of these questions?”

Freedom has taken on a new dimension in the information age. The internet has transformed the way we interact, share information, and express our thoughts. It’s a powerful tool that has the potential to connect us with a global audience, yet the concept of freedom in this digital world is not as straightforward as it may seem.