2026-10-16 11:00:00
(I realize it is already mid October, but better late than never!)
During the month of September, I went on a 2 week vacation through France and Switzerland.
My trip started in Paris, with what was the original reason for traveling: meeting some of my co-workers and attending the Kernel Recipes conference. I had a great time meeting all of them, I got to try escargot for the first time in their company, and we went to an interesting escape room game that had social deduction elements.
Then for the next three days I attended Kernel Recipes. It was my first time at this event, and combination of the single presentation track format, the live sketches of speakers and people from the audience, and the auction to gather donations for a FOSS project (this time, the Software Freedom Conservancy) made this a very special event for me. I hope to be back for future editions!
But the real fun started next, as I went on a road trip with my dad, from Paris in France all the way to Lauterbrunnen in Switzerland and back. We stopped at the following places:
Here they are on the map:
We really did a lot in that one and a half week. We explored the catacombs in Paris, visited many medieval towns and drove through many more, went inside more churches than I can remember and rode cable cars back and forth through the Swiss alps just to make the most of our expensive daily passes.
It made me happy to see my dad eagerly making use of his French that he had been practicing on Duolingo for a couple years now. And I'll cherish the memory of the little memes that took form during the trip: like when my dad told me that whenever his uncle would get lost driving he would say "we're wandering", and from then on so too this became our motto whenever we took a wrong turn. After all, we really were wandering.
Here are some of my favorite photos from the trip:
During most of our time driving, we used the car radio to tune to local stations to try to get a taste of the local music. There was one song that played at least 4 times while we were there, so it quite naturally became this trip's theme for me: Tove Lo x Stromae - des fleurs
2026-08-31 11:00:00
This month I attended HOPE - Hackers on Planet Earth. As always it was quite interesting and inspiring. I left full - overwhelmingly so - of excitement and ideas to do interesting things.
Some of the highlights for me were:
A talk from a non-profit that helps North Koreans get rooted devices to be able to have access to foreign information (sometimes simply to watch South Korean soap operas). I was surprised both by the extent and the simplistic nature of the government's surveillance techniques.
Joybubbles movie screening (more below)
A talk on how a guy built a gadget to block ads from streaming services at the HDMI cable level
At the Wikimedia NYC table in the hall, I had my fortune told by a thermal printer that printed the most recent Wikipedia edit at that moment. It read:
Vietnam national football team - 8 + 9
I was impressed.
At the ham radio village table, the guy tabling eagerly answered all my newbie questions on the topic. This led me to buy the RTL-SDR which was suggested as a good entry point. Excited to start playing with it!
A talk about zines got me inspired to make and distribute zines at the library to bring more attention to topics I think are interesting and underrated. The idea that the zine can be a way to share knowledge in a local and physical way captivated me.
During one of my trips to the library this month I read the following in a piece titled "Saying 'Google It' Makes You Sound Old. Search It Up!" by Sophie Haigney for The New York Times magazine:
"[..] as a mode of looking things up, I love Googling. It feels like wandering in an infinite library. Searching something up with a chatbot leads immediately to a conclusion: The journey happens without you, and the answer simply arrives. The search is over, almost as soon as it began."
This really resonated with me. I keep coming back to this idea of the journey being the point rather than just a means to an end.
Hyperbeat (which I previously praised in the "Favorite Game: Hyperbeat" post) talked a lot about that through its narrative. My movie recommendation for the month below, "It Ends", also does. Such a simple yet powerful idea. How many times have I looked at how many pages were left in a book, anxious to finish it so I could get to the next one, instead of enjoying what I was currently reading? The end will be reached in time, so put your focus on the journey and you'll actually get the most of it.
Some random photos I took throughout the month that I liked:
Movie recommendations of the month:
Music recommendations of the month:
2026-08-05 11:00:00
This month, or rather last month as I'm a few days late, I spent back in my home town: São Paulo, Brazil.
During my stay, me and my brother met a few times to play together. He played the drums, I played the piano. We just improvised, as we hadn't practiced any songs and I find improvising more fun anyway. We played in the basement of a family member, and it smelled as dystopian as it looked:
Recordings:
I've recently started making shaders on my phone using the Shader Editor app, and during my visit to São Paulo I wanted to make something with the shape of the piso paulista that is ubiquitous throughout sidewalks in São Paulo. A big part of this apps' appeal to me is that you can access the phone's camera in real time, so you can mix photography and coding into a unique composition. As an added challenge I also made sure that all of the shader code could fit on the screen.
Below are the two compositions I made. For the first one I overlayed the shape (at the time I hadn't noticed it was mirrored) on a notepad where I'd drawn some doodles. For the second one I repeated the shape alternating between the colors from the brazillian flag while I captured São Paulo's main street, Avenida Paulista, with the camera.
On both flights, to and back, I watched amazing documentaries that I have to recommend:
2026-06-28 11:00:00
Last weekend me and my girlfriend went on a trip to Wildwood, NJ. As we walked around, we started noticing way too many cool neon signs. Intrigued, we did some research and made a wonderful discovery: Wildwood is "the Doo Wop capital of the USA".
Naturally we decided to walk back to the hotel that night taking pictures of as many neon signs as we could. My favorites:
2026-04-07 11:00:00
Every once in a while you play a game that is unlike any other, that transcends genres, that you can feel the author speaking through it to you, and that you can tell will stick around in your mind in some way or another probably forever. Hyperbeat is one of those games.
I love how the way to interact with anything in the hub is to just wait while a musical rest fills in, I love the 1 FPS walking animation, I love how philosophical the entire narrative and dialogues are, and how the different songs are used to emphasize feelings in the dialogue. And I LOVE the soundtrack.
The gameplay is hard, yes, and I missed many beats even in the tutorial. But you can clearly feel yourself improving as you play, and it's very rewarding.
This is how my character looked by the end of the game:
Thank you to Noclip2's Computer Worlds video for featuring this game, otherwise I might have never experienced it.
Now if you'll excuse I'm going out for a walk, because I feel excited and I can't sit still while listening to the Hyperbeat soundtrack.
2025-12-29 11:00:00
This year I bought more shirts than ever. Mostly because I decided to go to as many concerts as I possibly could.
With the year coming to a close, I thought this would be a good moment to look back at the shirts I collected throughout the year and see the story that they tell. So here it is, my 2025 retrospective through shirts:
From top left to bottom right: