The German translations are available as epubs through Kobo, and there’s the paper editions in the local bookstore. Not sure yet if I’ll read the German ebook version, as I don’t know if Taylor’s subtle ironic style translates well into German. More likely I’ll visit the local bookstore.

I see this being adopted around me too. Not just CLI’s though, also more APIs, pulling in data sources from elsewhere. And most interestingly: I see adoption by people who did not program or treat their computer as their personal toolbox they can adapt before. Until generative AI lowered their barrier to entry. Going from 0 to using the command line (which coincidentally is what it was until 30 years ago anyway). Even without AI, CLI tools, like Automator on Mac did before, allow the creation of workflows around a piece of software. Matt mentions the Obsidian CLI, and I’ve been using that to manipulate Tasks in Obsidian without going to the Obsidian UI. For about a decade I’ve treated application UIs as just views on my data, with functionality geared towards the viewing, and interfaces as different queries on that data. Going headless means removing the viewer, and using the output of queries directly programmatically. Combined with how I see the arch of generative AI bending significantly towards deterministic code, I look forward to the type of things people come up with. Not their tools, but what they come up with. Because the path to scale of these things imo is not adopting or buying what someone else made, but adopting what someone else came up with conceptually and creating your own local version. Like we do socially too, contagion spreading through effective behaviour, and culturally, the contextual and local sum of all time greatest hits of our group behaviour. The invisible hand of networks rather than markets. It would be highly ironic if unethical corporate extractive AI not only creates the incentive but also actually paves the way for the masses to Walkaway.

It turns out that the best place for personal AIs to run is on a computer. […] ideally your computer. That way they can see the docs that you can see, and use the tools that you can use, and so what they want is not APIs (which connect webservers) but little apps they can use directly. CLI tools are the perfect little apps.

Matt Webb

It may have been the same bull he took a train trip with.

The farm had a locally famous bull, named Adolf (this was the 1920s, so no stigma attached to that name yet). There was a cattle fair in The Hague, on the other side of the country. My grandfather walked the bull to the station, and joined it inside a cattle car, hired for the purpose, for the train ride to The Hague. When he arrived he sent a postcard to the farm, saying ‘gakz’, meaning ‘goed aangekomen, Klaas Zijlstra‘, arrived well. Postage was based on the number of words. This kept it to half a cent. Then he spent three days at the cattle fair on the Malieveld (the largest field in The Hague, used for fairs and demonstrations for some 400 years), where he shared straw with the bull to sleep on in the open air. The bull won first prize. He walked back to the station boarded a cattle car again with the bull for the trip home, and showed up on foot with the bull and a victory cup at the farm.

In the story, the station was sometimes Haaksbergen (the nearest, about an hour’s walk from the farm) sometimes Hengelo station (a 3 hour walk). Although Haaksbergen connected to Hengelo, it was a different station from the one on the line towards The Hague, so it may have been easier to go to Hengelo as they’d otherwise had needed two cattle cars, one for each line. Still, as the railroad company for the Haaksbergen-Hengelo connection was founded and owned by the same textile barons, to connect the factories, it may well have been Haaksbergen, or the also nearby Boekelo on the same line.

As a child I heard the story repeatedly but never really knew when that happened. Thanks to digitised archives I now have more details.

Earlier this week I came across a version of this story online, written by the farm owner’s daughter, and she placed it in 1929. Having a year I then searched the digitised news paper archives for cattle fairs in The Hague, and found it was actually 1928.
In 1928 the Netherlands hosted the Olympics in Amsterdam, from 28 July to 12 August. It was the first edition to be called ‘the summer olympics’. The national cattle fair and exhibition took place just before, from 23 to 25 July, and was dubbed the ‘Olympic cattle fair’ in the press. It was a big event (I found 230 paper articles across the country about it for that week). Opened by two government ministers giving speeches, visited by members of the royal family on each day, the queen mother and the prince consort, though not the queen herself. Prizes were awarded for many different categories of cows, horses, pigs and goats. A special mention in the press talks about a new ‘contraption to measure the pulling strength of a horse’ being demonstrated. Amidst all that was my grandfather, two months before his 23rd birthday, with bull Adolf on a leash. And won first prize.

Which fact ended up in the papers with a photo:

Klaas Zijlstra and the bull, Malieveld 25 July 1928, published in the Utrecht Daily on 27 July 1928, photographer and copyright unknown.

Look at that enormous and muscled beast, coming to shoulder height of my grandfather. And then imagine traveling and sleeping next to it for 5 days!

Tegen radio-gerucht
Raad van Amersfoort neemt maatregelen
De Gemeenteraad van Amersfoort heeft een verordening aangenomen, waarbij verboden wordt radio-luidsprekers in werking te hebben met geopende deuren of vensters.

Is dit waarom je bij rampen ramen en deuren gesloten moet houden alvorens de regionale radio aan te zetten voor verdere instructies? Tegen geluidsoverlast?

De krant waar het in stond had trouwens wel een probleem met focus en branding: het heette Het Ochtendblad van de Avondpost.

Earlier this week I started reading an ebook and was a bit irritated because the book did not show me a table of contents. This seems to be a regular thing in ebooks. Already earlier I have complained here about why ebooks, or perhaps mostly e-readers, make so little use of the affordances of digital files.

ePUB files are really XML in zipped archives. Since I left Amazon and the Kindle reader behind, all my ebooks are ePUB files. XML means that the files are machine readable and highly structured. That opens up possibilities to manipulate them.

I used Claude Code to ask a few questions about ePUB files and how they are treated by e-readers. E-readers deal differently with the information in an ePUB file. They may load a table of content into a local database, and use that to allow navigation, or ignore various pieces of information in the XML altogether.
For fun, I asked Claude Code to check the XML file of the ebook I was reading earlier this week, to see if it actually contained a table of contents that was just not shown to me in my reader. Turns out it did.

I also asked it, if it would take a lot to extract a table of contents from an ebook. It doesn’t, so I now have a first script that finds the table of contents if present, or builds one from the headers in the ePUB’s XML if not. The php script saves it to a markdown file that I can then use in my book notes, to group my thoughts and annotations.

In my Kobo reader, and in my Calibre reader the ToC information that the ePUB file provides outside the regular content of the book (NCX or xhtml), is accessible through the reader’s interface, but not part of the reading experience itself. I generally like my ToC to also be presented in the book, like it is in a paper one, and I actually prefer it not at the start as is usual but at the end, near notes, references, and literature lists, to have all the book’s metadata together to glance at. For that a ToC must be not separate from the book’s content, but within it. It would need to be in the ‘spine‘, the part that is presented for reading by readers.

If I annotate or highlight in a book, those are kept by an ereader separate from the book and refer to specific points inside the XML (through canonical fragment identifiers, CFI). You can alter an e-book, it’s XML after all, but that would shift the position of content fragments, and existing pointers from annotations and highlights would then point to the wrong lines in a book.
So if I add a ToC, grabbed from the existing metadata or constructed, inside an e-book, my preference to having it at the end is actually useful. Because if I add it to the end, it will not shift anything I may have annotated or highlighted already, messing up the pointers in the annotation file.

Next to extracting a ToC I’m also thinking about extracting other meta-information (like indexes, references, lists of images or tables) but a first glimpse into some ebooks suggests that those are not usually listed in the Manifest of an ebook, so would have to be constructed from clues inside the book.
However it will help me read non-fiction non-linearly if I could extract such things, e.g. the figures and tables present. It seems to me a number of such steps should be straightforward from the structure of an ePUB file, others need a parser to extract the right information and shape in a useful form, but still can be done with regular scripts (e.g. show me the first and last two paragraphs of a chapter to get a notion what it talks about), yet others do need a (local) LLM, e.g. to summarise each section of a book separately. I’ll see how far I can get, and learn about the ePUB format along the way, with deterministic code first to extend my personal and local toolkit on my computer.

Update 12-04-2026: I now have a script, that I run in my browser, which allows me to select an ebook from my Calibre library, and then explores it w.r.t. the table of contents, reference and literature sections, and images, and also pulls in the first and last few paragraphs of a chapter (which let’s me explore what a chapter is about, Adler style). All that gets turned into a markdown file that is then put in the corresponding book note in my Obsidian vault using the right template.

Claudine Chionh and Terence Eden both mention human.json, a data file that lists people and sites you know are written by humans, as opposed to generated by AI. A rekindling of FOAF?

In these days of needing to assume anything you encounter is machine generated unless proven to be human made, we continuously have to apply a Reverse Turing test: do I have enough indications to assume something was created by a human.

When I first wrote a Reverse Turing page I mentioned much the same things as Terence Eden does about vouching for other people to be human authors.

Not sure if having a machine readable file makes the right point here though, ironic as it is. Blogrolls, webrings come to mind too, because Long Live the Author.

One element I think we’d need to contemplate is to not just list, but also provide URI’s to some supporting evidence. Expose the depth of a connection. Only met at a vouching party countersigning your credentials, or two decades of in person and online encounters and proof thereof are different in depth and quality, and may well impact how the Reverse Turing test turns out for others perusing your human.json file.

An excellent post by Michael Taggart on how it felt to him to make a much needed bit of code with the help of Claude Code. The results worked, but he hated how it made him feel. He explores those opposing outcomes without trying to resolve the tension. Much in here that I recognise from my own experiences, as well as what I see others do and how they talk about it. Towards the end he talks about ‘the real monster’ here, and I think that is the right frame: we have created a technology monster once more, and Smits’ monster theory (2003) is a tool to bring to bear again. Where will we adapt the monster to our tastes? Where will we shift our cultural understanding of ourselves and the world to make room for the monster? Once we’re done embracing it until the bubble bursts, or rejecting it outright no matter what.

I hated writing software this way. Forget the output for a moment; the process was excruciating. Most of my time was spent reading proposed code changes and pressing the 1 key to accept the changes, which I almost always did. I was basically Homer’s drinking bird.

Michael Taggart

Good blogpost on how ‘speeding up’ code production (x lines committed this week, yay!) by using AI, will likely cause more trouble in an organisation. Because the theory-of-constraints bottleneck in an organisation will never be the speed and volume of writing code.

For non-coders making personal tools, this is I think different.

When you optimise a step that is not the bottleneck, you don’t get a faster system. You get a more broken one.

Andrew Murphy

My website is now part of the web archive in the Dutch Royal Library. It took some experimenting to get it in there. Blogs will be blogs and the amount of links in mine choked the harvester it seems.

Since 2007 the Royal Library has been archiving websites, and now stores some 25.000 websites. My blog, even though it is one of the oldest still maintained in the Netherlands, never was part of that effort. Mostly because it’s not very visible as a Dutch blog, as it is mostly written in English and resides on a .org domain (when I registered zylstra.org, private persons could not yet register .nl domains, only companies could). At an Internet Archive event organised by the Royal Library last year September I asked about archiving and they told me how to suggest my website for archiving.

Late last January I received a message that my website would be included in their archives from now on.

What followed were several test-runs with their harvester Heritrix, which is also used by the Internet Archive. I wondered about how some of my website’s peculiarities would be dealt with by the harvester. Not every posting is listed on my site for instance, although each does have a direct URL. The years’ worth of weekly notes for instance are not listed in this site. Also many postings are never shown on the front page, and if you page through postings on the front page you will never encounter them. This is true for categories of posts like books, photos, and day to day topics. I discussed this with the web-archivist, who ran some tests. My week notes seemed to be included, but the pagination of the category of day to day stalled out at 180 pages, although there were more still.

To my surprise they also ran into volume limits. Apparently because of ‘bycatch’, things they archive from other sites because I reference them or embed them. In the past few years I have stopped embedding things, like photos, except for my slides, which are hosted on a separate domain I have registered. While it was normal that a site’s additional catch is larger than the site itself, for my site it was very different from what they were used to.
First they limited bycatch to 20GB in a test, and they ran out of space, then they set it at 40GB in a test, and still ran out of space. Raising the limits further did not help. In the end they decided to harvest just what is on my zylstra.org domain and not include any bycatch at all. Which is completely fine by me, precisely because I’ve made the effort to bring all kinds of external content ‘home’ to this domain.

Nevertheless it did surprise me that bycatch turned out to be a problem, as they are using a tool the Internet Archive itself uses too. I asked for some examples of the bycatch. They told me it wasn’t even possible to dump a URL list from the bycatch into a spreadsheet as it hit the maximum number of rows (around 65k iirc). I did get some of the URLs that contributed bigger volumes of bycatch. To my surprise I did not even recognise the links, except one.

One was obvious, 2800 attempts to harvest a page on live.staticflickr.com, as I link a lot to my Flickr hosted images, although I no longer embed them but have local versions on this domain.
Others were not obvious to me at all, theguardian.tv, vp.nyt.com and various content delivery networks. I link to none of them in this site. I do link to The Guardian, about 100 times, and to the NYT about 40 times, and I suppose if the harvester follows those links it will find additional material there that explains the bycatch more fully, if it harvests all the targets I link to too.

If that is the case, that it harvests everything I’ve linked to, then it is the long history of this blog that is the issue and makes the harvester hit its limits.

There are some 20.000 external links in this blog’s articles, as far as I can quickly estimate based on a full content export I made this week.
It basically means that if the harvester attempts to harvest all those links and what resources they include, it adds a number of pages to the archive, roughly equivalent to the current archive itself.

A weblog embraces what the world wide web is, a bunch of links to other websites. The name weblog says it. A web-log is a curation hub for web readers, pointing out other interesting stuff, and not trying to keep you here too long. Over 23 years of blogging yielded some 20.000 links to other websites. In terms of linking a blog becomes the web itself as much as it becomes its author’s avatar in terms of its content given enough time.

From now on my site will be updated in the Royal Library’s archives every year on March 5th.

The facade of the Royal Library in The Hague, photo by Ferdi de Gier, license CC-BY-SA ]]> https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/03/on-harvesting-for-the-royal-library-or-how-a-blog-breaks-the-archive/feed/ 0 https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/03/a-rising-new-era-of-personal-tools/ https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/03/a-rising-new-era-of-personal-tools/#comments Mon, 23 Mar 2026 11:45:34 +0000 https://www.zylstra.org/blog/?p=26288

At PKM Summit this weekend one thing that stood out was that many have started creating their own tools, and were using vibecoding to create them.

While the term agency turned out to be unknown to almost all participants, that is of course what such tools create. The ability to do things, individually or as a group, in this case by creating your own tools to get there.
The power of finding new agency was felt and expressed by quite a few, and played a role in a good number of sessions too.

When I first encountered computers, in the early 1980s, creating your own stuff was the norm. It was almost the only option. Making the machine work for myself. Like software to keep my ham radio logs and print QSL cards.
These days I run a good many smaller and larger personal pieces of tooling on my laptop. Things like making it easy to search by date in my photos on Flickr, or posting to my website from my internal notes, or from within my feedreader.
Things that reduce friction, speed things up, reduce dependency on external systems.

Vibecoding, and especially the Claude Code style of vibe coding, is bringing people to create their own tools, who weren’t able to do so before. A pool of latent needs they can now tap into on their own.

Some I know are really now learning how a computer works under the hood through their vibe coding. Testing the limits of their machines, finding out how fast local stuff can be. Discovering the power of APIs, the utility of cron jobs, and learning how to run their own VPS or local servers.
Others are creating little tools that work the way they want. An app to present books from their collection in that one specific way just so. A mobile app for public transport built on your own existing commute patterns and nothing else. Apps pulling in data from several sources and presenting them in one interface that likely only makes sense to themselves.

Tools built by people realising they are pretty predictable to themselves, and that such highly localised and specifically contextualised predictability now lends itself to automation by the intended user themself.
Tools, in short, where, access to and control over data lies fully with the user, where applications are views on that data (and multiple apps use the same data), and interfaces queries on the data. Along the lines of Ruben Verborgh’s 2017 article “Paradigm Shifts for the Decentralised Web“ but then way more personal. The decoupling that is possible between data, applications and interfaces is even more powerful when you can do them all three for yourself. And then mash them up in any which way you want.

Vibecoding is allowing people to jump the barriers to entry to that. And judging by the stories they share, it feels like pole vaulting over them, not just clearing the barriers. That energy then propels them on to do more.

Over the past months I’ve also heard regularly how people are cancelling paid subscriptions to various online services, and switching to their personal tools that fit their use case much more precisely.

There are many ethical, political, and societal issues with much of the gen AI world, and how models come about, and how corporate vendors exploit and leverage their power.
Yet, where these things are not just consumed but used locally as a leg-up to a different level of self-reliance, it looks quite different. Something is brewing it feels like.
A shift, and I’d love to see more people explore and extend their own agency with such tools.

A simple ‘zine folded from an A4 paper provides six small pages, including the front and back. That forces you to be to the point.

I thought of a posting I wrote a little over a year ago, about how personal knowledge management is personal in three ways, and that generally you should always take the P in PKM even more personal than you’re already doing.
Three points to bring across sounded short enough to lend itself for a message in a zine.

The P in PKM is 3 fold personal. (jouw = yours in Dutch)

First, it’s your personal system. You take it with you. It enables and anchors your personal autonomy, and allows you to own your own learning path

Second, it’s your personal knowledge, building on your own curiosity and interests, with your associations, in your language. Your personal network of meaning.

Third, it’s your personal system. Your emergent structures, following your logic, stemming from your personal methods and workflows.

Personal KM is way more personal than you think. And still more.

I attended the PKM Summit the past days in Utrecht. It was fun and inspiring. During the extended lunchbreak yesterday I went outside to enjoy a bit of sunshine and walk around town. Ending up in the Steven Sterk book shop I also browsed the shelves there a bit.

One title, From The Winter Archives, stood out to me. Being primed with thoughts of personal knowledge management and note making, I approached the title from that angle. The book, originally titled Fra vinterarkivene, is a 2015 novel by Norwegian writer Merethe Lindstrøm, and completely unconnected to such associations on PKM.

Five years ago Robin Sloan blogged about how newsletters should have seasons, and I blogged about it in response in more general terms, looking at seasons for any creative output. As were are moving from winter to spring, I was also reminded about the different tasks that come with the change of seasons around the house. Disconnecting the water tap before winter, removing some lights early spring, bringing back down the cushions for the garden benches.

Can my notes, can sections of my notes have seasons? There is always an ebb and flow in attention to certain topics and matters, which translate in the use, editing and creation of notes. That is maybe of a different frequency, a week or a few, a month, not a quarter year like a season. The thought of having a folder with notes named ‘the Winter archive’ crossed my mind, just because it sounded interesting, not because I have any notion about what it might actually contain.

Just a whimsical spring thought, riffing off a book title while my mind was simmering with notions about personal knowledge management.

In the past few weeks I’ve been diving into the online genealogical open data that is available, triggered by a conversation with Y about some of her schoolwork that deals with ancestry and namesakes.
In parallel E did her own deep dive, with some vibe coding assistance, working her way to transform her WordPress site into a static website. This included new workflows to be able to post directly from her notes and note taking apps across multiple devices.

The contrast between the two efforts stands out to me. That contrast is the direction of the arrow of time.

It is fascinating to see the patterns from historic traces my ancestors have left behind, and the stories that emerge from them. I’ve seen wealth, poverty, crime, war, disease, entire careers in the stories spread out over 275 years and more. It is easy to loose oneself in some more data, to find if I can add one more generation further back in time to the overview. The challenge increases as you progress: every generation there’s by definition double the number of people to find (unless you stick to one particular paternal or maternal line and don’t branch out to siblings at all). Finding previously undiscovered connections gives a little kick, similar to weaving a new connection in the now. Yet it yields nothing in terms of the now. No new agency, no new perception of identity, no new capabilities moving forward, no new (creative) artefacts for others to build upon or enjoy. Despite the fascinating stories I uncovered and the more nuanced sense of my family’s history I acquired.

E’s effort, of similar duration and intensity, is way more forward looking. She reduced dependencies on dynamic tools, increased the speed of her website, and learned a lot along the way, such as using git, and automating workflows that involve her devices, her VPS and remote services. She acquired new capabilities and understanding when it comes to creating one’s own digital autonomy. Something she was already helping others with, and now has put a more solid understanding underneath. She made it easier for herself to express herself on her website, reducing the friction in getting her own stories and writings out. New confidence in executing on ideas she already had for a long time. Her side interest is forward looking, constructive, activist.

My father after his (early) retirement mostly spend time on things that were looking into the past. Genealogy in the 1990s, collecting educational resources and material from the early 1900s, the local historic society of the village he was born.

E and I have often remarked how important it is to us to have friends and connections across different age groups, not be stuck in our own cohort and/or older. I have a sense that the side interests you spend time on and their direction of perspective, their arrow of time, help determine if that is easier or harder to do.

The framing is important here too. You can look at internet technology and say you want to go ‘back’ to the way some of those tools were in the 1990s and the zeroes. Or you can say, how can I use the key affordances and principles of what worked before to create something that allows new agency, that can help construct what comes next?

I think I prefer my side interests, and have for most of my life, with the arrow of time pointing forward.

It turns out that in my previous search for my oldest findable namesake I was barking up literally the wrong tree. I am named after my maternal grandfather (born 1903), and his paternal line has several men named Anton (my first name) in a side branch, originating from his great uncle in 1803 (and his namesake was his godfather it seems). That line however is not also the source of my (and my grandfather’s) second name Arnold.

Trying to extend the ancestral wheel for Y, at first I could not get beyond my maternal grandfather’s maternal grandparents and there were no Anton’s to be found there. His mother’s father was named Johannes (born 1835), and his mother’s maternal grandfather was named Cornelis (born 1796). Not having names of parents in turn makes it hard to find siblings. When I then found the names of Johannes’ parents, Hermanus (born 1794) and Johanna, at first that did not bring an Anton to light either.

Dutch family names have been introduced in the early 1810s under Napoleonic rule. Some families came up with something that connected to their profession, locality, or how they wanted to be adressed (I’ll call myself King, ha! Baker! ‘From Smallville’!) Some thought it would be temporary and done away with after the French rule ended, hence family names like Bornnaked. Some already had a form of family name, e.g. based on the farm they lived at.

The Hermanus born 1794 would have been too young to register a family name, and it would have been his father who did. But his father would have been born around 1750-1775, and if there was a pre-existing family name then the spelling could be fluid over several decades, especially if a family moved around between different municipalities. There also can be differences in spelling between church records and civic records. Indeed it turned out that what settled as the family name Meere, was also written down as Meré, Merée, Marré and Marre describing the same people, dates and events. I also came across Meeze several times, which is more likely a transcription error when records were digitised. That way I found both the 1794 Hermanus’ grandfather also named Hermanus, born around 1740, and a son named Anthonie Arnoldus for both of them. With the spelling of those first names, I could then search out more people with the same name.

Now I do have a clear timeline for my namesake, where previously I thought I did if a tenuous one.

Hermanus Meere (b. ca. 1740) had a son Anthonie Arnoldus (1764-1832). He named one of his sons Anthonie Arnoldus (1799-1865) His other son Hermanus (1794-1845) named one son Johannes (1835-1911), and another Anthonie Arnoldus (1837-1870). Johannes’ daughter Theodora (1864-1950) named her son Anton Arnold (1903-1969, my direct namesake), after her uncle, great uncle, and great grandfather. The spelling of the names changed here, losing their religious connotations. There is a story my mother told me that I connected to her parents, but perhaps is connected to her father’s parents given the change in spelling of names: that the couple came from different religious denominations, and that when both reverend and pastor after the wedding came asking about whether their future children would be registered as part of their flock, they decided it would be neither.

An overview of the Anthonie Arnoldus and one Anthonia Arnolda I could find:

]]> https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/03/not-that-anton-the-other-arnold/feed/ 0 https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/03/ys-ancestral-wheel/ https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/03/ys-ancestral-wheel/#comments Sun, 15 Mar 2026 09:50:19 +0000 https://www.zylstra.org/blog/?p=26244 The past days ancestors have been part of our conversation at home, as it is part of Y’s current work at school. We started with the concept of being named after someone. Some time ago from her grandmother, the namesake of her second name, she received a set of multiple ‘birth spoons‘, marked with the initials and dates of those who carried the same name. Y is not just named after her maternal grandmother, but she was too, and her maternal grandmother was too. The line stretches back 6 generations to 1817 that way. Y and I followed the trail in the open online archives, and found out that the line actually stretches to one more maternal grandmother as namesake, which gets us to 8 generations and the mid 1700s.
The question where my first name came from brought us to my maternal grandfather, his great uncle, and his godfather.

By then I had quite a bit of information jotted down, and wondered about storing and structuring, or visualising it in some way. As could be expected there is a machine readable data format for genealogical data, GEDCOM. It was created in the 1980s by the Mormon church, for whom tracking genealogy is connected to some of their core beliefs. As such the data format is heavily centered on nuclear families as opposed to individuals and their lineage. GEDCOM is flat text which promises that it can be read by self created parsers. Searching for a genealogical software tool to make data entry easy, there’s no shortage of paid-for online services, and there’s of course the Mormon run FamilySearch. Local software all looks and feels as if it is 20 years or more old. There isn’t much that is FOSS and can run on a present day Mac. I settled on using GRAMPS, a FOSS project originating in 2001, but with the latest release November last year, and available for Mac too. It’s written in Python, uses a database, and exports in GEDCOM and XML, and it seems to have an API too.

I entered the information I already collected, and then started adding from the open online archives. My father in the early 1990s researched mostly paternal lines. Pre-digitally that was somewhat logical and easier. Historic documents are mostly focused on men, and branching families meant having to visit multiple church and civic archives adding quite a lot to the workload. Online archives offer search over transcribed archive documents, and cover the entire country.

It still costs time, but over the course of a few days I’ve been able to identify all of Y’s ancestors 6 generations deep (early 1800s, 64 ancestors in the 6th generation), and partly up to 9 generations deep (512 ancestors). This allows looking back some 300 years to the early 1700s, and in a few rare cases to the 1650s.

The GRAMPS software provided this visualisation of Y’s ancestors as a wheel around her. Y is at the center, each ring reaches another generation back. The light blue ring is the last fully complete one, beyond that I haven’t searched for everything yet, and not everything is available online either. First names of living persons removed.

Last week I wrote about the search where my first name Anton came from, beyond being named after my maternal grandfather Anton Arnold Bast (1903-1969). I concluded it came from my grandfather’s great uncle, Anton Link who lived from 1803 to 1881.
I also mentioned that finding anything further away than the early 1800s was likely impossible, because, as my father was told when he searched in the 1980s/1990s, the relevant archives in Germany were destroyed during WWII.

The various Basts from 1800-1850 I found in public archives and my namesake Anton Link were born, lived, married, and died in the German village Ransbach, although they also lived, married and died in the Netherlands during those same years.
Ransbach is a small village, between 1000 and 2000 people in 1800-1850, in the old County Nassau in current Germany. It has a Wikipedia page, mostly on account of being old (at least mid 14th century), and having a history of producing ceramics. The Wikipedia page is unremarkable, but one line caught my eye. A single reference under ‘Literature’ to Horst Theisen: Ortsfamilienbuch Ransbach-Baumbach 1550-1930. 2. Bände. Weißenthurm: Cardamina 2019; ISBN 978-3-86424-469-8. Ortsfamilienbuch, means book of family names in the village, and the title suggests it goes back to 1550? Would it have more information on my maternal ancestry? A content overview online even stated that it included people who had moved from Ransbach to the Netherlands.

The publisher has a website, with an online shop with books of local names for many German communities. So I ordered the book, almost 1400 pages in two A4 sized tomes, and took delivery of it yesterday.

A long list of names from a small village.

It is based on local church records (mostly the catholic church), from the mid 17th century onwards, the civic register from 1818 onwards, and builds on tax records and court records for the period 1550-1723. The latter come from the state and federal archives in Koblenz and Wiesbaden (not Cologne where my father inquired). The information for people who moved between Ransbach and Netherlands, or settled there, is based on the same online public archives I already consulted myself, making it easy for me to find the right ancestors in this book of local family names.

For my grandfather’s ancestors the book adds more details, such as exact dates of birth, marriage and death that the Dutch archives didn’t have. It also provides details on one more generation back in time. Born around 1750 they were the ones who came to settle in Ransbach, so the book doesn’t provide further details than that.

And then there is the information of my original namesake Anton Link. His parents, Hermann Link (1771-1844) and Anna Maria Bleyer (no dates) are listed as ‘wandering around Ransbach’ so apparently living rough, despite having 6 kids. His paternal grandfather and further paternal and maternal ancestors however are traceable much further into time, and seemed to have been wealthy enough to leave documented traces. All the way back to 1575, with fascinating glimpses of their lives from tax and court documents. Mentions of building and selling homes, a fistfight at a wedding, being listed as having 2 horses, a fine for grazing their cows on a field without permission of the land owner, renting a kiln to bake pottery, lending and claiming back sums of money or owing them.
No further Antons though, just this single one in the Link ancestry.

So there’s me, named after my grandfather who was born in 1903, in turn named after his great uncle born a century before him in 1803. And no Antons before or in between.

The church records in the Ransbach book provide the key. As mentioned Ransbach was predominantly catholic, and the church not just registered parents but also godparents. Anton Link’s godmother Anna Elisabeth Bleyer probably is his mother’s sister. And his godfather, who seems to be her fiancee at that moment is named Anton Hirtenjohann, born in Heinsberg around 1775. Curiously if I look for Anton Link’s godfather and godmother, despite not finding immediate evidence, I do come across a mention of both first and last names in the right decade as a married couple, where Anton Hirtenjohann is seemingly listed as Anton Arnold Hirtenjohann. Previously I concluded that my and my grandfather’s second name Arnold comes from somewhere unknown (no other Arnolds I came across at all, and Anton Link was named only Anton), yet here Anton and Arnold are again used together. If Anton Link’s godfather is the source of both my first names, I wonder what stories carried those two names forward in the Bast family for well over a century?

More exploration is perhaps in order around my second name, with uncertain outcomes. But I find it amazing already that all of this was traceable from home.

Wouter talks about the weak ties across the years that in hindsight turn out to be key in making a next step, changing course or enter new fields. Never burn bridges he concludes.

I never applied for any of my jobs or roles. At one point I have written some application letters but that never yielded anything, and I learned not to bother with them. Most of the roles I have had didn’t exist before I filled them. My first job I got because my employer saw my volunteer work on a side interest of mine in a different context and asked if he could pay me to do that elsewhere. Then one of their clients hired me to continue some other work inside their own organisation. Another company made a cold sales call to me in that role, but ended up hiring me instead. When I quit my last job, some clients left with me although that wasn’t my doing. I also brought that former employer along to a new client of mine where they then stayed on when I was done. The past two decades of being self employed and then later also an employer myself have been similar. I’ve done high trust complex change projects for people I already knew for years before and had never approached commercially until they reached out. I’ve come to trust that side interests, side activities, conversations and going to fringe events to see who I might meet and what gets discussed there, over time will yield interesting work.

A few years ago I was asked to talk about my ‘career path’ at my old university. Often such talks by others present a linear path created out of clear ambition and goals. Instead I shared that I probably have had half a dozen of conversations in my life that in hindsight turned out to be pivotal in my work. Such as an off-hand remark in a conversation over coffee in Austria that has turned into what is now well over 15 years of work in open data, digital ethics, and data governance. I titled that talk What is it you do again?, as the question pops up regularly. I think the answer has been and is ‘interesting things that happen to cross my path’, and ‘going various places so that more things might cross my path’. Burning bridges is indeed not part of that approach.

Never blow up your bridges. If you manage to build a couple, you can always cross them—and if needed, retrace your steps.

Wouter Groeneveld

In the past weeks I frequently don’t get any results when searching for someone I met inside LinkedIn (the website, or the mobile app). Yet, when I search for them online generally, I get the link to their LinkedIn profile as the very first result.

Another notch against the utility of LinkedIn.

Where does my first name (Anton) come from? This weekend I explored the public archives a bit. Thanks to open data efforts, these days a lot of public archives are online and made fully searchable. The trigger was a conversation with Y about first names and being named after someone else (Y’s second name is after her maternal grandmother, her third name after E’s great-aunt).

I was fully named after my mother’s father, Anton Arnold Bast, who died in 1969, the year before I was born (as an unplanned consequence of a late night tumble returning home from an after summer party). But where did he get his name from? The paternal side of that branch of the family is filled with men named Peter or Jacob, but no other Anton. It also doesn’t come from his mother’s side. My mom (b. 1937) was named after her grandmother (b. 1864), and she after her grandmother (b. 1803) where the archive trail ends. No other Anton there either.

Tracing the lines in the archives back down the generations, I found no clues. Many Peters, many Jacobs, large families, probably poor: one family I came across had 15 children, of which only 5 survived into adulthood. Names being re-used several times within one household. My grandfather had 7 brothers and sisters. Of the eight siblings just four lived to adulthood. My great uncle, whom I remember well, was the second of his name in the household: his brother of the same name had died the year before at less than 3 weeks old.

When I searched for ‘Anton Arnold Bast’ I only found my grandfather, who was born in 1903 in Viersen, Germany (it seems his parents worked there for a few years in the textile industry before returning to the textile mills in Enschede, Netherlands).
Searching for ‘Anton Bast’ yielded some more results. This probably means that my grandfather’s (and my) first and second names come from different sources. The Arnold came from somewhere else.

Another Anton Bast I found was born near the end of 1900, around the same time as my grandfather (1903). This suggested to me there would be a shared Anton somewhere. But at first I did not know what the connection or distance was between this 1900 Anton, and my grandfather from 1903. Wading through the various mentions of yet more Peters and Jacobs I realised that the paternal grandfathers (named Peter, b 1817, and Jacob b 1825, of course) of both Antons were brothers. There are no Antons before then, and there was one Anton (an uncle of the ‘1900 Anton’) who died an infant in 1857. Still not clear where the ‘original’ Anton got introduced in the Bast family, but I now had the precise generation where the name seems to have emerged.

I took a look at those two brothers, and if they had other siblings. They did, a sister Maria Anna Bast (1807-1882). Following her trail I found the ‘original’ Anton: her husband. She was married to Anton Link, born 1803, died 1881.
The infant Anton from 1857 was named after his uncle, and the 1900 Anton and my grandfather in 1903 were both named after the same man, their great uncle. The 1900 Anton had a son called Anton Bast too, born in 1929. He was still alive in 1960 and living in Hilversum, evidenced by a letter he wrote to find out the fate of one of his two brothers, both named Jacob. One, a monk, died 1941 in a monastery near Brussels, according to his brother of causes unrelated to the war. The other was still missing in 1960, although I found a mention later without any context that he had died in 1944. This 1929 Anton may well have had a son or have a grandson also named Anton. The archives don’t mention anything (because the closer we get to our times the less public material is: births after 100 yrs, marriages after 75 years, deaths after 50 years) Yet, there still is an Anton Bast out there according to LinkedIn, and he seems around my age, so perhaps a grandchild like I am?

My grandfather was called Toon, as short form of Anton. This implies the German pronunciation, with a long o sound. I had long assumed that was because he himself was born in Germany, while his parents worked in Viersen for a few years. I’m called Ton, with a short o, the Dutch pronunciation. The 1857 infant Anton was mentioned in the records as Antoon, the Dutch spelling of a long o. This implies the German pronunciation has nothing to do with where my grandfather was born.

Indeed Anton Link, the likely source of my first name, was born in Germany himself. All the Bast’s of that generation and their partners were too. And their father Peter Bast and mother Anna Catharina Schellenpols were too, at the very end of the 18th century. The Dutch civil servants weren’t very good at spelling German place names or personal names it seems, with various spellings for each, but their origins center around the village of Ransbach, close to Montabaur, part of the independent German statelet County of Nassau in the first half of the 19th century.

Their children are sometimes born in Ransbach, sometimes in Hilversum or Den Bosch, alternating within a generation until the 1840s. Around that time it appears the family settled in Hilversum for good. Many of the men and women are listed as ‘koopman’ and ‘koopvrouw’, merchants. The back and forth in the first half of the 19th century between the Nassau region in Germany and Hilversum seems to support the story I heard from my mother that the Bast family were originally pedlars, going back and forth between Nassau and the Netherlands. Further back than the start of the 19th century the traces all end. My father at one point explored further, but the Nassau archives of that period had been moved to the city Cologne and were destroyed along with much of the city during World War II, he was told. Later, decades after my dad’s search, in 2009 the modern day Cologne city archive collapsed due to works on an underground station underneath it. They are still working to restore documents and will be for decades. So whatever might be around won’t be available online.

Zittende marskramer / seated pedlar, drawing/acquarel attributed to Pieter Marinus van de Laar, dated 1834-1862, public domain image, collection Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. ]]> https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/03/the-anton-link/feed/ 3 https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/02/what-about-cognitive-debt-in-our-slow-ai-organisations/ https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/02/what-about-cognitive-debt-in-our-slow-ai-organisations/#respond Sun, 15 Feb 2026 12:34:16 +0000 https://www.zylstra.org/blog/?p=26198 Bookmarked How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt by Margaret-Anne Storey

I enjoyed this short posting by Margaret-Anne Storey, a CS professor. The effect of using generative tools can indeed lead to loss of overview, and uncertainty about the project I recognise. It creeps in very quickly, especially if I’ve started from something exploratory, as opposed to planned. A cognitive debt accrues because of wanting to move fast or move at all, at the cost of understanding one’s actions in enough detail. It hinders being able to make changes later.

It also makes me wonder something completely different. Partially because of examples I saw last week in Madrid of how BMW and Airbus had sped up some specific tasks orders of magnitude with AI:

If we see companies as slow AI, i.e. context blind algorithms working towards a narrowly defined singular goal (this is where the notion of AI turning all the material in the world including ourselves into paperclips comes from), what methods have we come up with to deal with cognitive debt in organisations? My intuitive response is reporting chains, KPIs, and middle management. Consultancy too, hiring an external actor to blame if needed. That suggests to me we actually didn’t, as so much of that is management-theater. Does any board of any company above a certain size actually know what is going on in their organisations? Understand what consequences changes may have? There’s a world of hurt out there caused by ‘reorganisations’ that all too often seem ritualistic more than rational when seen from the outside.

It may also be why companies easily embrace AI, despite e.g. warnings about cognitive debt. It looks the same as current practice, just with the promise of higher speed.

I saw this dynamic play out vividly in an entrepreneurship course I taught recently. .. one team hit a wall. They could no longer make even simple changes without breaking something unexpected. … no one on the team could explain why certain design decisions had been made or how different parts of the system were supposed to work together. … issue was that the theory of the system, their shared understanding, had fragmented or disappeared entirely. They had accumulated cognitive debt faster than technical debt, and it paralyzed them.

Margaret-Anne Storey

While interesting and entertaining, the story never really sucked me in. I kept reading while hovering above it.

Read through the Kobo plus subscription.

• Most of my postings are kept away from the front page but end up in specific categories. These postings do show up in monthly archives and overview pages like for a tag or category.
• Some of my postings are unlisted in the site, yet are publicly available. Mostly these are postings I originally only shared through RSS, such as my week notes. They are not in overviews, don’t show up as search results, but have public URLs, and you can navigate to them if you click next / previous post on their surrounding posts in the timeline.

The crawler that will be used for the archiving is Heritrix, which is also used by the Internet Archive itself.
A quick test of some posts from both of the two types above shows they are likely not in the internet archive. I mailed the Royal Library to ask how Heritrix may or may not deal with my site’s quirks. Or perhaps I can generate a complete site map and make that available?

I think I’ll put this up on the front page

Shout-out to Manuel Moreale for his footer message under each item in his RSS feed. Likewise!

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You’re awesome.

Manuel Moreale

Last Friday I participated in a workshop by Frank Meeuwsen on using Claude Code. I’ve been reluctant to use Claude Code for the basic reason that it uses cloud run models by default. This means that my inputs and any context I provide leave my machine to be gobbled up into the data foraging models. Nevertheless it was fun, I improved on my existing personal feed reader (a presentation layer on top of FreshRSS that allows me to write responses while I’m reading feeds).

However tempting it is to continue vibecoding with Claude Code and watching it work its way through my coding requests, that is not the way to go. After some online searching I found the above two pages, that explain how to point the program Claude Code to use the local end point of either Ollama or LMStudio. That’s more like it!

Now I need to figure out which LLMs that can be downloaded (or run on a VPS perhaps) are best suited to the type of tasks I want to set it. For coding, local agents, translation, and semantic work. There can be multiple models of course, as I can switch them up or run them sequentially (and in parallel if I deploy them on a VPS I think).

Open models can be used with Claude Code through Ollama’s Anthropic-compatible API

Ollama documentation

This means you can use your local models with Claude Code!

LM Studio blog

Set in an ancient convent in a small deserted Italian village, and narrated by what appears to be a renaissance literary style all knowing voice. After a few chapters it becomes more apparent who the narrator is. Took me a bit to get into, because of that narrator, but then enjoyed it. Some nice ideas, funny at times, and entertaining.
Horváth is an Austrian writer, and this seems to be his third novel.

Read in German through the Kobo plus subscription.