Viola
September 07, 2026
I bought a viola. It was time.
My new viola
A viola is like a violin, but the strings are tuned C, G, D, A, where a violin’s strings are G, D, A, E, making a viola a fifth lower. In a string ensemble, like a quartet or string orchestra, its function is that of the alt/contralto in a choir, the first voice "under" the soprano. Indeed, in Dutch, the instrument is called altviool. In German, it's called a bratsche, after the sound it makes when you accidentally sit on one.
Its default key is different too. Where violin parts use a G key, viola parts mostly use a C key, and occasionally the G key in higher fragments.
The same note (C) in a C (viola) and a G (violin) key
The shiny instrument in the picture above is built in 2009 by Jay Haide. It was bought by someone living in the greater Amsterdam area who had received violin lessons as a kid, but never continued playing since. He told me that during the Corona pandemic, like so many of us, he was looking for a new hobby and bought this viola. It didn’t work out for him, so he put it up for sale at Marktplaats.nl. He sold it to me some weeks ago for a price that I could well afford.
Whereas my violin has a black tailpiece and black tuning pegs, those on this viola are a light brown colour. The chin rest is attached in the middle. Each string has a fine tuner. On my violin I only have a fine tuner on my E string, as tuning higher strings needs more precision. On a violin this would mean it's a study violin.
The dust became visible in the picture only
The sound of the instrument is of that of a very good study viola, and more than I had expected for the price I bought it for. There are ample layers of depth in its tone that can be reached quite easily.
The strings that the previous owner had used, are not of my favourite kind, and they were a bit worn too, showing darker streches here and there, so I replaced them. Replacing all four strings on a viola (or any string instrument for that matter) means having to do a lot of tuning while rehearsing, especially the first days, but after a week they kept their tuning quite well, even overnight.
The bow that came with the viola was black and rather light. I found I have to use more pressure than is comfortable to reach the deeper sound of especially the lower strings. I also bought another, heavier, bow, but when rehearsing for a longer period, that bow's weight itself felt more exhausting than putting the pressure on the original bow. It's good that I have both now so that I can choose.
My default musical instrument is a violin, but last May, during rehearsals of an orchestra project, I was approached by someone in our violin group. She told me she and some friends were looking for a new viola player for their octet (2 violins, viola, cello, double bass, French horn, bassoon and clarinet). They had organised a very interesting upcoming project, and she asked if I would be interested. Their plan was to play Franz Schubert’s Octet in F Major, as well as a new arrangement by Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen of Schubert’s “Moments Musicaux”, six lovely pieces originally for piano. The latter would be the Dutch premiere of the arrangement.
Normally, when preparing for a project, I go to imslp.org or archive.org to see if I can find the sheet music before obtaining the official ones. With a new piece, there wouldn’t be any there. What I did find, was a viola adaptation of Carl Flesch’s violin scale book I remember painstakingly having to work my way through, long ago, when I still had violin lessons. I didn’t know that even existed.
There will be a single concert, on Sunday afternoon, November 22 29, in the Amstelkerk in Amsterdam.
Moon with Venus
September 03, 2026
During the start of an evening at the beginning of our holiday in Italy last June (Italy really is a gift that keeps giving), the moon and Venus were just two degrees apart from each other in a cloudless sky.
So what was I to do, with my astrophotography setup safely and uselessly at home and just my Fujifilm X20 in my hands?
Venus (centred) with the moon (F2.8, 1/40 sec., 28.4mm focal lenght) July 17th, 2026 at 21:09:10
Well, reflecting, perhaps use that little wall right at the edge of the terrace. It was made of bricks so it looked quite reliable. Or, if you must take a fully zoomed in picture from the hand, by all means, go ahead. But why not use the timer to have at least a chance of holding it still while pointing at an object 0.91319 au away?
Orbital positions on 17 jul 2026, 21:09:10 according to Celestia Space Simulator
We might even have been able to enjoy phases in Venus that way.
Bottled water
August 31, 2026
When I was in University, I was in a student symphony orchestra. One thing we often did was go on tours to other cities, meaning that we found a student orchestra abroad. We’d visit them and have them visit us the next year. We did that with, among others, student orchestras from Barcelona, Hannover, and Oslo. When the Osloinians came over to visit us, one of them asked us if they could drink the water from the tap.
We found this a silly question. Of course they could. We weren’t Greece, were we now?
But their question wasn’t that strange. After all, when I go south, I also start buying bottled water as soon as I pass the border, since I “know very well” that I can’t drink the tap water there. And Groningen, where I lived then, is south of Oslo.
Only two bottles of water left in the fridge of our cottage in Italy, last month. We must buy more!
So during our last stay in Italy, we went to supermarkets often to keep a steady supply of water in our cottage fridge. This we did out of habit, and not because we actually looked into it. Tap water we only used to shower and cook. And when we stayed for a night in the Swiss Alps on our way home, we drank the water from the tap in our hotel, since we fully expected it to be safe.
Water safety is crucial so buying those Italian bottles felt like a no-brainer, but think of all the plastics, worldwide, created, distributed, consumed and then thrown away, just because tap water is unavailable or unsafe. I use toothpaste in pill form and shampoo in the form of a soap bar to cut back on plastic usage. Why even bother, though, if everybody outside North-Western Europe buys water in bottles? Bottles that themselves need litres of clean drinking water for their production?
Out of curiosity, just how much would be involved in making tap water drinkable world-wide?
Here’s an infographic by Statista on the popularity of bottled water:
A sample of countries showing how many respondents regularly buy bottled water
Looking at the graph above, apparently we weren’t the only ones buying our water from the supermarket in Italy. 70% of Italians between 18 and 64 years old do so regularly. Oddly, percentages in Germany and Sweden are quite high as well. Personally, barring special circumstances, I would never buy bottled water in the Netherlands, nor would I have any reason to. Tap water where I live is safer than bottled water. What is going on here?
Yale University does research into Environmental Performance Indexes (EPI) by country, and Vividmaps makes nice infographics based on those. Here’s one about the quality of drinking water from the tap:
The quality of drinking water per country
According to this data, the best tap water is found in the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, and some others where I would expect it, but in Greece and Malta as well. Unexpectantly, Italy’s tap water is safer than Denmark’s. Not by much, but still. When comparing with the other graph above, whether people regularly buy bottled water, does not follow actual water quality.
The problem, in many European countries, seems not that the water isn’t safe to drink, it’s its reputation. If people keep telling each other tap water isn’t safe, they will keep buying water in plastic. What seems needed, is a tap water reputation campaign.
Whether that will be easier than actually improving tap water quality in a country, will no-doubt depend on the plastic water bottle lobby.
Re: How I use AI (and it me)
August 27, 2026
Mere days ago, 82Mhz wrote how he uses AI. It sounded pretty much just like what I do. Privately, I don’t use it to do my thinking, but I will use it for help and correcting. I use LanguageTool to correct my English and even my Dutch spelling and keep me from using Americanisms when writing English. It is good, but it claims to be a “Free AI Grammar Checker”. It isn’t free, though, so perhaps it also doesn’t use AI.
Anyway, when DuckDuckGo’ing, I use the presented AI answers if they are what I was looking for. I often use DuckDuckGo Translate as well. People have tried to automate translation since the 1940s, but it simply can’t be done without a large body of examples put in a vector space.
What, after all, is AI but a fully intentionless general use of statistics from a massive collection of training data? I was reading about the dot com boom of the early 2000s. Apparently that is a bit of a mis-nomer and it should have been called the ISP bubble. When that popped, these ISPs left behind a high quality broadband network. If the AI bubble pops on April 14 next year, we'll have all these data centres that can be used for hospitals, schools and local governments to finally stop depending on American tech companies.
I also use AI on my phone. Not voluntarily, but for instance when selecting a word from the word predictor in my on-screen virtual keyboard. Text editing on phones is a horrible experience. Anything to make that more smooth is welcome. It’s also a small dedicated locally run AI, so the water and electricity usage won’t deprive entire cities of that.
I take personal notes, in my wiki, without the use of AI. Whenever I look up something online, I archive the answer on my Wiki. When I use it in my code, I add a comment in a way close to my original search, so I know I can find a working example next time I look for it. This not only causes me to use AI less, it also does wonders for my memory.
At work, I use AI when I’m told/expected to.
Coffee (2)
August 24, 2026
The device below is our coffee maker. It is mundane, ugly, practical, doesn’t get in my way, does its job (make coffee from electricity, a paper filter, water, and ground beans) and keeps the coffee warm when it’s done without using electricity because the pot is a thermos. It has a switch at the back to turn it on or off, and a button at the front to have it start making coffee. While it is doing that, the button is illuminated until it’s done.
A Philips coffee maker hard at work
In other words, it is perfect.
Did I mention how it hasn’t WiFi and I don’t need an app on my phone and a cloud subscribtion (AI tokens for a year included!) in China to see how long the coffee will still be warm enough to consume and how close we are to 1.000 cups after which mandatory maintenance is needed?
Again, perfection.
I’m not going to bore you with how to make coffee using one of these. It’s just that I seem to have promised a second part of last time's post about coffee, and for once, I wanted to actually follow up on that promise.
The coffee maker is obviously embedded in our morning routine, normally at the end of breakfast. When we have people over, we postpone until they arrive and use civilized cups with saucers and spoons as grown-ups are supposed to do, but when we are on our own, we use mugs because they can contain twice as much coffee. Our eldest has recently started drinking coffee too. He has a Harry Potter mug.
Making coffee by hand
Many don't like the coffee that comes from devices like the one above. I get it, but the taste is not the only important thing about coffee. To me, it is at least as much about the social aspect of it, at home, at a Mediterranean coffee bar, or at the office. Most of all, it is a moment of rest, of clarity, of zen. The problem with the taste, though, is mainly that in the machine the water goes through the filter a bit too quickly. As a result, it does not get enough flavour. It is better to boil the water first and patiently pour it on the coffee by hand. There are metal filters for that, so you don't even have to throw away paper filters that way.
In the weekends at home, our fondness of Italian coffee tradition has secured its decaffeinated position just after dinner, just before one of us puts our youngest to bed. During the working week, we don’t even always have dinner together, with all the music and sports activities in the late afternoon and early evenings going on, let alone coffee.
Zen is for the weekends, I suppose. And for crowded Italian coffee bars.
My new viola
The same note (C) in a C (viola) and a G (violin) key
The dust became visible in the picture only
