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 Duchy 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/ 2 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.

Vimeo was bought by the infamous Italian Bending Spoons last year (who previously bought Evernote, Meetup, Wetransfer, Eventbrite). For years Vimeo was a very usable video platform away from the mess that is YouTube. E used it in the past to host videos. My blog links to Vimeo videos 18 times (I stopped embedding things in 2020 to avoid the tracking that comes with it).
Bending Spoons now seemingly doing away with all video-savvy staff at Vimeo does not bode well for its future as a service. Relocation of whatever you may have at Vimeo seems advisable. Bending Spoons has repeated this pattern across all their acquired digital services: extreme cost cutting, raising annual subscriptions, while maintaining the status quo. (via Stephen Downes)

The news comes just months after the Italian tech holding company Bending Spoons bought Vimeo for $1.38 billion last year.

Gizmodo

Last September I attended a session at the Royal Library in The Hague, where also Brewster Kahle presented the European efforts of the Internet Archive, and the collaboration between these two organisations was discussed. There I learned that in order to be considered for archiving I could now actually submit a request to be considered. Which I did. With their decision now taken.

Currently the Dutch Royal Library archives some 25.000 websites, out of the 10 million or so existing websites in the Netherlands, i.o.w. just a quarter of 1 percent.
My blog is probably one of a small number of personal blogs in the Netherlands that has resided on the same URL this long (23 years) and is still active. Other bloggers from way back when and before I started, like Frank Meeuwsen, have switched domain names several times over the years. Frank’s blog has been included in the archive since 2018.

Conservation in the digital archive is not a recognition, as the Royal Library aims to preserve a representative subset for future research purposes. A recent wave of additions covered e.g. all kinds of web initiatives from during the pandemic, preserving a window on that period.
It is however a way of shaping digital longevity, something I mentioned here some years ago. Then I suggested submitting collections of postings as books with their own ISBN numbers. That still is a good route I think. Being part of the digital archive is definitely a step towards digital longevity too.
I do like that my site is now included in the archives of the Dutch Royal Library.

On March 20 and 21 the European PKM Summit is taking place for the third time in Utrecht, Netherlands. I’ve helped a bit, like for earlier editions with suggesting speakers and workshop hosts for this event.

I am donating a ticket for a student in the Netherlands to attend this two day event. I did the same last year and the year before.

Are you a student at a university in the Netherlands (doing a bachelor’s or master’s) with a strong interest in personal knowledge management (pkm)? (note that it says interest, I don’t expect you to be highly sophisticated or experienced in it!)
Is your interest in pkm to strengthen your personal learning and deepen your interests, rather than increasing (perceived) productivity?
Would you like to go to the PKM Summit on 20 and 21 March in Utrecht, but as a student you cannot afford the 254 Euro ticket price?

Then I have one (1) conference ticket available! Let me know who you are and what fascinates you in pkm or attracts you to the event. If there are several people interested I will choose one. I will donate the ticket a month before the conference, by February 20th, so state your interest before then.

The single condition is that you attend the event on both days and participate actively in the sessions. If you have other ways to attend (by e.g. volunteering for the event staff) then that is preferable. This is specifically for someone who would otherwise not be able to go. I’d be happy to briefly meet you as well at the event, but if not that is perfectly fine too. It would be great however if you would share some of your impressions of the event afterwards online on the open web, especially if that is something you’d normally do anyway.

Interested? Email or DM me (in Dutch, German or English)! My contact details are in the right-hand sidebar.

Going to school the first day in 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020.

A young woman runs a pawnshop for choices people regret with her father in Japan. One day her father disappears and a young man, seemingly by mistake, ends up in her pawnshop and helps her solve the mystery. Beautiful, light read. Many fun ideas, such as people who are waiting on a train, but those trains may take generations to arrive.

Bought on the Kobo platform.

It boggles the mind.

It figures too, because individual agency, and having individual technological capabilities, is subversive seen from an authoritarian perspective. Next to things like ham radio, and e.g. coders, this also applies to (digital) makers. When in Ukraine Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk fell to Russian covert invasion in 2014 something similar happened in the Donetsk FabLab. The guy who founded and ran the FabLab in Donetsk, K (whom I previously met because he contributed to some of the Dutch FabLabs too), saw himself confronted with one of his regular visitors and half a dozen uniformed others, all armed, coming to tell him his work was subversive and his FabLab was hereby shut down. He went home, picked up his family and drove west.

I have a ham radio license (callsign PE1NOR). Since I was 9 years old I was involved in the radio hobby, and I obtained my license when I first went to university. For some years I’ve let it lapse, but have since renewed it. At the time I thought about being registered as having this capability and the potential risk of that exposure. On the other hand, having the license and having the equipment at home, even if I am no longer active in the hobby itself, also means I can assist in cases of higher probability than prosecution in my own country: emergencies. In emergencies the first thing to go down is regular telephone communications. As long as there’s electricity, or charged batteries at least, my radio equipment will work. In the Netherlands a network of ham radio operators have formed the DARES Dutch Amateur Radio Emergency Service, and they have agreements with a range of Dutch ‘security regions’ (groupings of municipalities), to supply emergency radio connections for civil protection. That is how you build on the technological capabilities of people.

Abbreviations are widely used in ham radio, because when using Morse code it means you can convey meaning faster.
Besarab signs his posting with three of them:

73, goodbye
QRT, stopping transmission
SK, silent key (meaning a morse key that fell silent, i.e. the operator died)

“Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.

“I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT” (source, confirmed by Norways PM)

There is no way to actually respond to this, as there’s so much to unpack. The toddler crying ‘I wanna’ part, the ‘reasoning’, the lack of factual basis, the narcissistic false boasting, the fact this is how a US president communicates directly to heads of government (as opposed to tossing red meat on his social media account to his base), the scattering of capital letters, what it implies about his mental health, that his environment is enabling this.

There is no rational way to respond to any of it. At all.
Other than writing off the USA completely and fully for the foreseeable future.

And doing our damnest to prepare and build resilience with utmost urgency against the inevitable global consequences. While Nero is calling for his aides to bring him his fidicula. Or throwing ketch-up. Riddikulus!

(the misspelling in the title is intentional)

I started blogging in late 2002. In May 2003 Rob Paterson popped up in my comments, based on Prince Edward Island, Canada. He was connected to other bloggers I had regular interactions with. From that first comment over the years a connection grew. The ‘real world’ neighbours of another blogging friend, Nancy White, dubbed her online connections as her ‘imaginary friends’ and when we showed up for her fiftieth birthday in 2008 we had a laugh about it together with them. Rob was one of my ‘imaginary’ friends I’ve made over the years. An extremely kind and gentle one. After connecting through our blogs, we met in Copenhagen in person, and later at his then home on Prince Edward Island in 2008. He picked us up at the PEI airport at midnight, because in his words “no one should come to PEI unmet”. Most recently we met in 2019.

I’m not sure how to explain how people can loom very large internally although you hardly interact and meet, but that’s how it is. Rob always felt near, from that very first comment on my blog. Around the time I went independent and quit my job, he shared advice that E and I have taken to heart ever since, a way of thinking which has helped secure our autonomy. He connected me to other people who became close, such as Peter, who since our first coincidental meet-up has become a dear friend, while being an ocean away as much as Rob. A weaver of connections, and regularly that is how I describe my own role and work, as weaving a network of connections. No small thing, as it’s the basket that carries humanity. It seems way more relevant in this day and age, although I suspect it has never been different and never will be.

Rob was diagnosed quite suddenly and unexpectedly as having mere weeks to live last summer. I am grateful we exchanged messages in the days before his death August 20th, to be able to express my gratitude for our connection over 22 years and vice versa. These past months saying goodbye and grief was my modus operandi, and Rob’s passing was not the main point of my attention this summer. That doesn’t change my feelings about it however.

Rob touched my life. In a good way. Taught me to be more forgiving, to judge less, without letting an absence of judgment erode drawing your own lines. To be more curious in an open way, like how Clarke described meeting Rob some years ago. Other blogging friends such as Chris Corrigan have phrased it well, and his daughter Hope did so beautifully.

Rob’s choices in the way he died and Frank‘s, my friend and business partner of 15 years, both around the same time, both through medical assistance, I look at as loving, humane, and dignified, as well as an expression of autonomy, something that is at the very top of values for myself. I am glad that such expression of autonomy, taking the direction of the end of your life into your own hands is legally supported here in the Netherlands, for physical medical reasons at least. Last week I signed a petition for that same autonomy for a self determined ‘completeness of life’. An elderly gentleman asked me to at Utrecht railway station and was handing out folders. I had already passed him by, before I realised what he said. I went back and accepted the information I needed to sign. Staying autonomous means taking action too.

Thank you Rob, for your gentle presence. Over the past 22 years, and, as I’m sure, moving forward too.

(I had written this last September, when my friend and business partner of 15 years Frank had just died, and Rob two weeks before that. It stayed in my drafts since then. Not because the text wasn’t ready: I made a few small edits before posting it now. Mostly because I wasn’t ready, I suppose, in the turmoil that early September and the summer before it meant. Rather than delete it, and leaving it unsaid in this space, I’m posting it 4 months delayed.)

I will be in Madrid for the 2026 edition of the annual Data Spaces Symposium. Ping me if you want to meet-up.

Read through the Kobo Plus ebook subscription.

In my recovery from burn-out, I’m balancing my energy, learning to take the right amount of rest and breaks, and better follow my energy when doing work or chores. I still find it hard to get started on most of anything, and get myself going.

I’ve taking up interstitial journaling to help me switch between tasks (in which you describe what you just did, any thoughts or feelings about it, what you think you might do next and if there’s anything that makes you balk at it etc.), and that has been very useful in the past year or more. It helps me ease into the next thing.

Starting is however a different thing. I find I need to talk myself through how to choose between different possibilities, and also to make tasks smaller. To do that it’s currently not enough to think about by immediatel making lists or outlines of the steps / components involved as I normally would and then move them around or split them up.

What helps is talking myself through things by formulating steps in long form, not just list them. That yields formulations of the type "ah wait I better do this first then and afterwards go do that, but wait I also need to think of somesuch, and perhaps make a call". Making internal dialogue explicit. It feels like reading along with texts that LLMs generate for themselves to consume in my AI sandboxes. Where there is some very verbose output going back and forth for some time, and then at the end it gets collapsed into a 5 point todo-list.

Alsmost as if I am prompt-engineering myself to get the responses and output I want. Not anthropomorphising AI, but the other way around, basically chat-botting my self. Not at all sure what to think of that! If I do it in speech-to-text (Spokenly running a local model), making such inner dialogue explicit, it is even a lot more words for what basically is a task list. Odd.

Today is Koppermaandag in the Netherlands, ‘cupping monday’. The first Monday after 6 January, when graphics artists and printers show their skills by making something: a Koppermaandag print.

Traditionally, since the early 1400s, Koppermaandag was the day that members of all guilds would have a festive day for the new year. ‘Kopperen’ (‘cupping’) as a verb comes from kop (cup) and stands for feasting and drinking. The tradition waned in the 18th century with the dissolution of the guilds, and only the printers kept doing it, until that too faded. Since World War II several groups of graphics artists and printers have taken up the tradition again. That is how I know of it: E’s great-uncle was a member of the Groninger group of artists De Ploeg and in 1962 a founder of the Grafisch Centrum Groningen. There they made their Koppermaandag prints. The 1965 print was drawn by him and shows him flattened under the printing press.

Last June during a workshop for Y’s birthday with Roy Scholten in the Grafisch Atelier Hilversum I saw their Koppermaandag prints. The next day I marked Koppermaandag 2026 in my calendar, with the intention of doing something for it by myself.

For me knowledge work has always been artisanal in nature. It is a form of professional work where your tools are personal, where your path is your own. Autonomy within networks, learning in networks, creating in and with networks. This makes personal knowledge plus your approach to maintaining it and learning important (usually dubbed personal knowledge management, or pkm). Having your own system for your personal knowledge is both what allows you to create your professional autonomy (your insights woven into connections that have meaning for you), and what ensures your continued professional autonomy (you take it with you when you go someplace else).

For today I wanted to combine those things. Knowledge work as artisanal profession. This links it back to the original guilds. Second the personal aspect of it, and third making something by hand to print, like the card I made (be)for(e) Christmas. The latter links it to the modern Koppermaandag tradition of graphics printers and artists.

I made a card, with the text (P)KM and the number 26. KM for Koppermaandag as well as for Knowledge Management and the P for personal. My personal koppermaandag, and personal knowledge management. The background is a network. The nodes are concepts, things, actors. The connections between them are the insights that grew from combining them, forming a neighbourhood and context for each node. Something I associate both with Bruno Latour‘s ANT and George Siemens‘ connectivism. The frame around it is not closed, and some connections cross it, because while always defined and bounded in each moment a personal knowledge network is not enclosed nor stagnant.

The design I cut in lino, in what must be the first time since primary school. Then I printed it on our small press. The letters and the lines are wonky. That does make it an accurate demonstration of my capabilities though, as per the tradition of Koppermaandag.

Happy (personal) Koppermaandag!

]]> https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/01/koppermaandag-and-artisanal-knowledge-work/feed/ 1 https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/01/not-the-elves/ https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/01/not-the-elves/#respond Sat, 10 Jan 2026 14:17:42 +0000 https://www.zylstra.org/blog/?p=26063 Last Thursday our Christmas tree was picked up by the grower again. Every year we get the same tree, delivered to our door in December, picked up again in January. We never saw the delivery or pick-up happen, so we joked it was actually done by Christmas elves. The grower puts it back in the soil for the year. This time we did see the pick-up. Turns out, elves or not, they wore the grower’s working outfits.

E and I talked about how long we’ve had this specific tree. (The previous one did not survive a drought period one summer).
My blog tells me we first had this one in 2022, so this was our fourth Christmas with this tree.