Five years ago I decided to switch from WhatsApp to Signal. Today, it is more relvant than ever to stop using WhatsApp and to switch to a responsible alternative. Why?

How could sending texts with WhatsApp harm democracy?

Simply put, for a democracy to work it is important that we have mutual agreements (called laws) and that we stick to them. No one should stand above the law. There are fines for when one violates the law. And for severe violations, offenders may be enprisoned to protect other people.

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Recently, I have come across quite a few emails where someone pretended to be the CEO of the company who asks employees a favor, specifically to advance money for buying gift cards. Despite having quite a few mechanisms in place to prevent spam, these emails managed to pass the spam-check. Why? Because only the sender display name and content are fake. In this post I will show how to detect and block these messages using the Microsoft’s Exchange 365 console.

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It was back in February 2016 and I was writing my master thesis. Evidently, I was rather busy and the timing of the Tele2 ADSL-modem to crash every hour couldn’t be much worse. I rang Tele2 to explain the defect of the device and that I wanted to request a new one. They weren’t willing to provide a new modem without running their diagnostics first for a couple of days. Nor were they willing to provide me with the ADSL connection credentials that would allow me to install my own modem. I was not okay with the situation.

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Why I no longer want to use WhatsApp.

Many of you are probably aware that, for a long time already, WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. To be precise: Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014 (source). My faith in Facebook was never that great and in 2017 it didn’t get any better because it turned out that Facebook misled the EU during the approval process for the aquisition of WhatsApp. During that process, Facebook stated that they could not combine WhatsApp and Facebook accounts. However, in 2016 they combined the accounts to provide more relevant advertisements (source). That Facebook didn’t learn from the imposed fine of € 110 million needs little explanation (source, source). As if the selling of insight in personal behavior for advertising purposes wasn’t bad enough, it appeared that the data Facebook collected was abused to influence political campaigns. For that, they received a fine of $ 5 billion – reflecting the severity of their crime.

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Control over the temperature during bulk fermentation and proofing is absolutely indispensable for obtaining consistent baking results. Also, pre-ferments made with complex methods such as the [3-stage Detmold method] (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/keyword/3stage-detmolder-rye) cannot be made without proper control over the temperature.

Recently I started making 80% whole grain rye bread using the 3-stage Detmold method and figured it was time for me invest in a proofing cabinet. With these kind of technical things I have a tendency to search the web for it, decide it’s not good enough or too expensive and start with a super-ambitious project to build something myself. Then, after having bought all the components and spent a couple of evenings on it I realize I was a bit too ambitious because I made it extremely difficult for myself and consequently the project takes years to finish. Highly frustrating. This time I did it differently: I borrowed a Brod & Taylor proofing box from a friend and actually learned a couple of things before spending any money:

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