CarPlay

I’ve rented several cars in France, Japan, Greece and Spain over the past few years. Gasoline-slurpers, EV’s such as a Volvo EX30 and a Polestar 2, small, mid-sized, all with automatic transmission, etc. But one thing I keep noticing when I return home and start driving my Tesla Model Y again: I miss Apple CarPlay.

Although Tesla adding Apple Podcasts and Apple Music lessened the pain a bit (but not a lot, as Podcasts does not contain my private feeds), I still miss the native iMessage experience, Apple Maps, but more important: WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Waze, FlitsMeister and A Better RoutePlanner. And sometimes, even Microsoft Teams.

Scanner

When my father died in 2018, a few boxes of slides and negatives were left behind in my parents house in Lelystad. After it was sold, it lingered in the house of my sister’s in-laws in Nieuwenhoorn, but that was sold too. And after a large cleanup of the collection which moved to my sister’s house, I’ve decided to take this boxes home with me and bite the bullet on buying a PlusTek OpticFilm scanner.

Ryan Palstra

Ryan Palstra was born August 13th, 2025 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. After a few days at a Birth Center, he and his mother are now resting at home. He is all healthy and sleeps a lot. Due to his face, the look in his eyes, his length of 52 centimeters and long legs, I have a sneaky suspicion he’s mine ;)

Goodbye Wordpress

After years of running WordPress, I’ve finally bit the bullet and moved to a Static Site Generator, in my case: Hugo. After long deliberation, I decided not to move most of the old content over.

I registered palstra.com in 2000, and at that time, still built it by hand in plain HTML, sometimes with help of some tooling. In 2004, I moved over to Movable Type, and after some time, migrated to WordPress.