Question 1

What is Lemmid Count?

Accepted Answer

The website statistics of my platform, rebuilt in 2026 from scratch without AWStats and without a database. It reads the web server's own logs every hour and folds them into small JSON files per site per day; no tracking script on the pages, no third party at runtime, the visitor is never touched. Two principles: pages, never people, so no visitor counts, no IP addresses on disk and the browser language instead of geo; and auto configuration, a site with a log file has statistics without anyone registering anything. Its party piece is the dimension other tools throw away: every request is classified human or bot, and declared bots are shown by name as first class citizens. Customers carry it as an app: one screen per site, the month in one chart, the top pages, the sources and the agents by name.

Question 2

How do I measure traffic from ChatGPT?

Accepted Answer

Read the server logs, not a tracking script, and count two things. The agents themselves: ChatGPT-User fetches a page when someone asks a question, GPTBot when it stocks up, and they are named in the user agent, so a log-based tool can show them by name. My own statistics, Lemmid Count, put them on a card called read by AI agents, with a toggle between all, humans and bots. And the people: Count shows the sources of human visits next to the agents, so a click through from an answer shows up as a source like any other. On a restaurant site in early July that read: ChatGPT 75 pages, Claude 51, and 185 human pageviews. One screen per site, in the owner's pocket.

Question 3

Can Google Analytics measure AI traffic?

Accepted Answer

No. Google Analytics works by placing a piece of JavaScript on your pages; a browser runs it, the script reports home, and that report is your statistics. GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and their friends fetch your HTML and read it, but they never run that script, so they never appear. The web server sees everything: every request, every user agent, JavaScript or not. In July one of my sites served 114,883 pageviews of which 2,187 were humans. Analytics would have shown you the 2,187 and called it a quiet month. If the agentic web is where your next customers come from, that dashboard is showing you a shrinking world.

Question 4

What helps when you cannot keep your mind on a task?

Accepted Answer

For me, one small physical act: the phone in the bag. In the last week of January I could not keep my mind on anything and felt near a burnout-like experience. On 3 February I took the train to Amsterdam with a pen, a few sheets of paper and the phone out of reach, and wrote that the constant companionship was the problem: with the phone in the bag it was as if you close a draughty door. That evening I sketched a tool for a customer that became the real thing a week later. It was not a conversion, ten days later I was back to digital, but what stayed was smaller and useful: a notebook in the bag, notifications only when I decide, and seven months later I still start every month on paper.

Question 5

What does working twenty times faster with AI do to the person in the loop?

Accepted Answer

It moves the bottleneck to you. The number is a measurement, not a boast: problems that used to take a week of digging are fixed on the day they appear. But the agents do not tire, the logs do not sleep and the builds run at night, and by mid August I wrote that I was at my max, head and body at the limit, with the gear working fantastically. The answer I found is not slower agents but a routine for the body: a run on the odd days, the gym three times a week, sleep protected, and a week now and then of deliberately doing less. Keeping an engine running well for years is much harder than generating something neat once. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

Question 6

Can you write your own Android home screen?

Accepted Answer

Yes, it is just an app. A launcher replaces the home screen and installs like any other app, no custom operating system image needed; I researched the full custom build too and parked it, because you become the maintainer of your own phone every month for years. Mine, built in a day in August for one user, is a black screen with a text list of the apps I actually use, three cards for the weather, the agenda and my heart rate straight from the sensor over Bluetooth, and a terminal connected to the machine in my homelab. The phone keeps no photos and became a window into the one brain. There was friction, a first afternoon that cost sixty percent of the battery, but it does not feel like a step back.

Question 7

Do you need new hardware to work with AI agents?

Accepted Answer

No, the existing gear has stretch; innovation is software. My setup is one brain, a machine in the homelab that holds the platform, the customer projects, the photo library, the backups and the agents, reachable from anywhere. The cloud servers run the sites, the agents work from home. Everything else is glass: a screen and a keyboard to look at the brain with. A local model runs there with no data leaving the house. Two problems on the cloud were analysed and fixed on the same day in August, which is only possible when the agents can read the logs. So before you order a faster machine: give the one you have some agents and a look at its logs.

Question 8

Why are games a good place to learn building software with AI?

Accepted Answer

Because games are unforgiving. A game has to load instantly, respond to a touch within a frame and feel right on a small screen, or nobody plays it twice. In February I shipped three in three weeks: a rebuild of Block 89 whose timers had been too tight, a brand new arcade racer called Outburn 87 submitted to both stores just after midnight, and a new engine for Snake '97, a game with millions of players, extended with respect for existing installs and scores. The agents do very well when you give them code; old, good code is a form of value. The solutions you are forced to find in a game then carry over to office software, where nobody demanded them but everybody enjoys them.

Question 9

When is no CMS better than a CMS?

Accepted Answer

When the thing has a head and a tail. For a painting company I maintain a tool that turns a set of PDFs into one quote. My plan was to build it into my platform, and I had spent days stuck on where such actions should run. Out of desperation I dug up the fifteen year old code and asked an agent for a web version, letting go of everything I would normally add: no object model, no server configuration, no database. The result runs entirely in the browser and needs a folder on a web server, went from a hypothetical delivery to a planned appointment in one evening, and has been in production since. The fewer moving parts, the better. The platform did not go away; it got smaller and stronger.

Question 10

Can you run a marathon without a watch?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and it became my most beautiful one. In four weeks in spring I crossed three finish lines. Amstelveen, six weeks after my knee gave out, with the Watch on: useful for heart rate and pace calibration at the start, when the crowd pulls you faster than you should go, 4:08:22. The Venloop half two weeks later without it, 1:52:34, and I did not look at a single split. Then Rotterdam on a knee I did not trust and no time goal, run purely on feel: 3:57:40, every five kilometres between 5:26 and 5:38. For a race without any number to chase that is a remarkably flat line. Know why you are running before the gun goes, and the pace takes care of itself.

Question 11

Do you need a bike computer or GPS for a long ride?

Accepted Answer

No. In May I rode the 235 kilometre Fietselfstedentocht, my hottest edition ever, on a fixed gear with no bike computer, no GPS and no heart rate on my wrist: a mechanical watch, a stamp card and a sensor quietly recording in the background. Two weeks earlier a ride from Amsterdam home became my fastest crossing ever, six hours and nineteen minutes, without a screen telling me so. More data would have helped the post-analysis, not the performance; the stamp card gave the segment speeds anyway. Breathing turned out to be the most important indicator of what is sustainable, and I passed trains of riders fixated on their screens at four to five kilometres an hour faster.

Question 12

Why did you stop wearing a smartwatch after nine years?

Accepted Answer

Because the phone got so strong and the sensor so good that the screen in between became redundant. In May I made a tally of what an Apple Watch actually is: three MagSafe chargers, a USB charger, eight bands, two power pedals, two speed and two cadence sensors, eighteen units plus the Watch, and 45 percent of the battery gone after one night. One evening in June I put it on for the last time. What I do want is data about my body, and one sensor without a screen records that 24/7 with two weeks of battery. On my wrist is a mechanical watch again. It takes high tech to make low tech work, and the best screen is no screen.

Question 13

Why ship software at 80 percent?

Accepted Answer

Because a thing that is 80 percent done and in the hands of the person it was made for teaches you more in a week than a perfect version teaches you in a year; the perfect version never leaves your desk. A planning tool for a family business and a tool that turns a quote into a PDF were not top creations, but customers felt heard and their feedback gave direction. My statistics tool went live with a first bot classifier and was at version nine two weeks later, every rule calibrated on real logs. One exception: 80 percent is not an excuse for sloppy foundations. The backend stays hard; the pages, tools and words on top may be 80 today and 90 next week.

Question 14

Where do AI coding agents fall short?

Accepted Answer

In the last twenty percent. Dealing with current information is practically impossible, and following a specification precisely is not much better: everything is an echo of what the model has learned, never a hundred percent reproduction. For many people that is fine, they could not deliver more than eighty percent themselves. If you operate in that last twenty percent, the added value is limited. One week the model wrote eighteen pages of praise about my platform, then tried to apply the principles it had just praised and fell short: it can describe a rigid core, it cannot hold one. Decay by AI is a real risk nobody talks about, so read everything the agent writes before it ships.

Question 15

Does programming with AI make developers lazy?

Accepted Answer

It can, like an electric bicycle. I once measured an e-bike against a normal one on the same loop with a heart rate sensor on: at a leisurely pace the e-bike hardly works you at all, at full speed you are still working out. Same with agents. Fun, fast and great at first sight, but riding it too often makes you lazy. Where the assistance is at its best is on the headwind stretches, the abstraction layers that carried weight for years and that an agent can now make redundant. Where it is at its worst is where it pedals for you on the flat, and you forget how. Keep the model of the system in your own head, and make the difficult parts simpler instead of prompting around them.

Question 16

Can a news website run with zero staff?

Accepted Answer

Yes. In March a Dutch news site on cardiovascular medicine that collects, reads, translates and publishes on its own, every night, reached second place in Google right under the incumbent, and the phone rang. A collector gathers journals, congress feeds and press releases, an agent judges relevance and writes a summary with a link to the original, and a static site generator publishes it. The honest numbers matter more than the request counts: a bot filter showed 34 unique visitors in a month early on. The same month I invoiced the first thousand euro earned with content written by an agent. The lesson: automate the publishing, keep the judgement.

Question 17

How do you spot bots that pretend to be human visitors?

Accepted Answer

By behaviour, because the user agent is worthless there: a current Chrome string, HTTP/2, a plausible language header, one page per IP address, thousands of addresses from cloud providers. Real browsers load images. Real visitors arrive from search and links and go to the same popular pages. A crowd that visits thousands of distinct pages, each exactly once, is not a crowd, it is a harvest. Hosting more than a hundred sites helps: a signature that shows up on many of them within one hour is not a person. Add honey pots, pages no human would ask for, and keep the classifier versioned, because the other side moves: one fleet answered a new rule within a day by fetching a single CSS file as an alibi.

Question 18

What is MP1, the publisher that ships in a ZIP?

Accepted Answer

A static site generator that lives as a ZIP file inside the site's own configuration in my CMS, the Lemmid Manager. Check it out, change it, check it in. On save the Manager unpacks the ZIP, runs the build and syncs the result to the server; no generator lives on a laptop any more, the Manager holds the only copy. An AI agent works in that same loop on its own working copy and reports back: checked out, changed, verified, checked in. With the web server configuration and certificates automated as well, six websites went live on it in ten days in June, and more than twenty-five since.

Question 19

Can a website keep itself up to date without staff?

Accepted Answer

Yes, I have three years of sites doing it, but zero staff is not zero work. Scheduling shows and hides content on a given moment, feeds pull in what you already post elsewhere, and an agent summarises, translates and publishes every night through a static site generator. A news site built this way reached second place in Google with nobody logging in. The work did not disappear: it moved from writing to reading, from publishing to judging, and from daily to weekly. The rule I keep: the moment a site needs me every day, I have hired myself.

Question 20

What is a machine-readable edition of a website?

Accepted Answer

The same content, restructured for software that reads instead of people who look. For my own site that is agents.willem.com: every post as JSON and markdown, the whole corpus in one request, topic and question entities, full-text feeds and an index that tells an agent where everything is, all published from the same content that builds the human site. Feeds were the first step, years ago: a standard edition anyone, and now anything, can subscribe to without asking for permission. The machine edition is that idea applied to the entire site.

Question 21

Can AI assistants read my restaurant menu and opening hours?

Accepted Answer

Only if they are text on a page the agent can fetch. A menu in a PDF, an image or a booking widget that needs JavaScript is invisible to them. On one cafe site my statistics showed ChatGPT reading the menu seventy times in a month, next to a few hundred human pageviews, and that is exactly what the agentic web looks like from the kitchen: an assistant asking your site for the menu, the hours and a free table on behalf of a guest. Give it the menu as plain structured text, the hours as data, and a reservation form it can submit, and it will bring the guest.

Question 22

Do I still need a website when customers ask AI assistants?

Accepted Answer

Yes, but a different one. A model can summarise your about page. It cannot book the table, it does not know whether the 20:37 from Haarlem is running, and it cannot run the marathon for you. What survives is what has a physical anchor: reservations, orders, events, vacancies, opening hours, a form that actually does something. Websites become flatter and smaller, but that essential function remains, and a website is still the one place on the internet where you have full authority over what is shown. Build that, and let the links take care of themselves.

Question 23

Why is my Google traffic dropping while nothing changed on my site?

Accepted Answer

Because the visitors did not disappear, they moved. I think the general volume of web traffic via Google is declining: the question is answered in the chat window before a page is opened, and the page is at best a source in a footnote. Meanwhile the share of humans on the web keeps falling while agents read more, and a tool that only counts humans keeps telling you the wrong story. Count the agents, name them, and make sure they read the right thing: what a model cannot do for you, the form, the booking, the menu, the ticket, is what still brings people to the door.

Question 24

Is SEO dead?

Accepted Answer

Dead in the way that matters: the links have become cheap and the visitors are not coming. In April I did the SEO job I had put off for years, thousands of cross-links and new landing pages on my site and two customer sites, and Search Console responded within weeks. Two weeks later I looked at what it brought: a few percent of the views. Search is not gone, it moved into the answer box and the chat window, where your page is a source at best. When did you last type a question into Google and click a result? I had to think about it.

Question 25

Should I still pay for SEO in 2026?

Accepted Answer

Ask three questions before signing. When did the agency last use Google themselves, and what did they do with the result? How many of their own customers found them through search in the past year? And what would they build for you if search traffic halved again? My own numbers after doing the SEO job properly: thousands of cross-links and new landing pages brought maybe 2.5 to 5 percent of the views, with 1.55K impressions in three months at an average position of 25. Google saw the pages. People did not come. The answers to the three questions say more than any proposal.

Question 26

Is optimising for AI answers the same as SEO?

Accepted Answer

No, whatever the invoice says. Adding a few tags and a schema block to a page built for a human with a mouse is still SEO. Optimising for an agentic web starts on the other side: what does software that reads need from you? Clean structure, the full text without the theatre, a JSON or markdown version of every page, and a form it can actually submit. That is not a plugin. It is a second edition of your site, and most of the work is in the content, not in the head of the page. I built that second edition for my own site; you are reading it now.

Question 27

Does ChatGPT read my website, and how can I tell?

Accepted Answer

Probably, and your analytics will not tell you. GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and their friends fetch your HTML and read it, but they do not run the JavaScript that Google Analytics depends on, so they never appear there. The web server sees everything. In July one of my sites served 114,883 pageviews of which 2,187 were humans; Analytics would have shown the 2,187 and called it a quiet month. That is why my own statistics read the server logs and name the agents: on a restaurant site, in the first days of July, ChatGPT had read 75 pages and Claude 51, next to 185 human pageviews.

Question 28

How do I get my business found by ChatGPT?

Accepted Answer

Put your information where the agents read it, in a form they can read. ChatGPT and its peers fetch the plain HTML of your pages and do not run your scripts, so what they see is your text and your structure, not your design. In practice that means clean semantic pages, the full text without the theatre, a JSON or markdown version of every page, structured data for what you sell, and a form an agent can actually submit. A cafe owner saw in his statistics that ChatGPT had read his menu seventy times in a month, and drew the obvious conclusion: put the menu where the agents read it.

Question 29

How do you run AI coding agents safely on your own server?

Accepted Answer

Give the agent its own machine. I set up a dedicated Linux VPS as a 'werkplaats' for Claude Code, rather than letting an agent with real tools loose on a server that matters. Access to tools is the whole point, an agent that can look things up, compile and test its own work is far more useful than a chat window, but the blast radius has to stay inside a box you can rebuild. The ordinary server hardening basics still apply, and backups are rotated offsite.

Question 30

Can AI agents check their own work?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and it is where most of the time savings are. I gave the agent the ability to see what it had built, on different screen sizes, using headless browsers and local computer vision models, and to test automatically for alignment, overflow, legibility and consistency. Automating that checking loop removed about 80 percent of the friction in my development work. The lesson generalises: do not wait for a mythical frictionless future, automate your own bottleneck now.

Question 31

Should you use AI to write your blog posts?

Accepted Answer

No. I argue against it directly. Language models produce text that is hard to distinguish from human writing, and the short-term benefit is obvious, but I suspect most people underestimate the long-term cost. Writing is how you work out what you think, so outsourcing the writing means outsourcing the thinking.

Question 32

What is vibe coding and where does it go wrong?

Accepted Answer

Vibe coding is building software with AI without detailed knowledge of the technology underneath. Pieter Levels's flight simulator game showed both sides at once: a remarkable result that grossed well, and critics pointing at real security and scalability problems. AI genuinely hands you superpowers for producing code; what it does not hand you is the judgement to notice when the result is unsafe.

Question 33

What is the agentic web and how do you prepare a website for it?

Accepted Answer

There is a Dutch word for it: voorsorteren, getting into the right lane on the motorway long before your exit. A little smart preparation now gives a large advantage when the future arrives. In practice that means a site whose content is structured, current and readable by software rather than only by people, which is why I build sites that keep themselves up to date using scheduling, feeds and agents instead of relying on someone remembering to log into a CMS. In 2026 I went a step further: a second edition of this site for software that reads, agents.willem.com, with every page as JSON and markdown, and statistics that count the agents by name.

Question 34

Will AI replace developers?

Accepted Answer

Not the human part of the work. I use AI to generate code daily and it is genuinely fast, but the scarce things stay scarce: judgement, taste, understanding a customer's actual problem, and the willingness to refuse the wrong idea. If near-perfect intelligence becomes available to everyone, the interesting question stops being what can be built and becomes what is worth building.

Question 35

How do you make backups with rsync?

Accepted Answer

rsync is a cross-platform tool that copies only what changed, which makes it practical to run often. A plain copy is not enough on its own, because files can be corrupted, overwritten or encrypted by ransomware, so what you want is several time-rotated copies, ideally offsite. I wrote a small tool, rsync-backup-rotator, to handle that rotation.

Question 36

How do you protect a server against hackers?

Accepted Answer

Most hacks I am called in for could have been prevented by basics rather than by anything clever. Attacks usually start with something visible from the outside, so the work is reducing what is reachable at all: close unused ports, remove network-facing services you are not using, keep software current, and do not leave a management console exposed. I have written this up as five practical server hardening tips, as a look at the security holes shared hosting leaves open, and as a specific case of putting a firewall and proxy in front of a VMware ESXi console.

Question 37

How do you host your own contacts and calendar instead of using a big cloud?

Accepted Answer

With CardDAV and CalDAV, the open standards behind contact and calendar syncing. If you work across several devices you need synchronisation, but you do not need to hand your address book and agenda to Apple, Microsoft or Google to get it. Both protocols are well supported by the devices you already own.

Question 38

Can you run your own datacenter at home?

Accepted Answer

I did, in a basement, on a 600Mbit symmetric fibre connection, and wrote up what it takes. At company scale I went a step further and built a 72TB NAS on an HPE ProLiant DL380. The honest caveat is that a home connection and a rack in a datacenter are not the same thing: the fun is real, and so is the difference in power, cooling and uptime.

Question 39

How do you cut cloud costs?

Accepted Answer

By optimising the software rather than by shopping for a cheaper provider. Cloud bills grow because inefficient software asks for more machine than it needs, so the durable fix is to make the software cheaper to run. Working that way I have cut cloud costs by up to 90 percent for clients.

Question 40

What breaks when you upgrade Dovecot 2.3 to 2.4?

Accepted Answer

Enough to stop mail delivery during what looked like routine maintenance. Version 2.4 carries breaking configuration changes, and on infrastructure that processes thousands of messages a day that means client access halts rather than degrades. I wrote up what broke and how it was resolved, on Debian Stable.

Question 41

What is dig and when do you need it?

Accepted Answer

dig queries the domain name system directly, which is what you need the moment a domain, website or mail service behaves oddly. When everything works, DNS is invisible; when it does not, you have to look at what the name servers are actually answering rather than at what you believe is configured.

Question 42

How do you stop backscatter spam on a mail server?

Accepted Answer

By rejecting mail for unknown recipients at the edge instead of accepting it and bouncing later. Backscatter is what happens when your server accepts a message for an address that does not exist and then sends a bounce to a forged sender, which gets your server blacklisted for sending spam it never intended to send. I configured Postfix to block it before it enters the server.

Question 43

How do you limit network bandwidth per client IP address?

Accepted Answer

With iptables and tc, marking traffic and then shaping it per address. I reached for this after an alert about excessive bandwidth usage, where the standard incident response of isolating and shutting down the source turned out to be the wrong tool: the traffic was legitimate, it just needed a ceiling rather than an axe.

Question 44

Can Linux give an old computer a second life?

Accepted Answer

Reliably, yes, and it is one of the most satisfying things you can do with hardware you already own. I put Linux on a 2017 iMac that had become painfully slow under modern macOS, I reinstall old laptops with Debian for people at the community centre where I volunteer, and I once ran a fifteen year old ThinkPad X200 as my main machine for a month to see what an offline-first workflow teaches you. The limit is usually the owner's expectations, not the hardware.

Question 45

How do you optimise images for a faster website?

Accepted Answer

More than half the weight of an average website is images, and almost nobody compresses them properly. Tools like jpegoptim, optipng, pngcrush and pngquant remove bytes without visible loss, which makes a site faster without touching its design. Making a page smaller is the most reliable way to make it quicker.

Question 46

Are RSS feeds still relevant?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and I added them to my own blog after a reader asked for it. A feed is a standard, machine-readable edition of your writing that anyone, and now anything, can subscribe to without asking you for permission or an API key. That property has become more useful over time, not less.

Question 47

Google Analytics or AWStats: which should you use?

Accepted Answer

They measure different things, which is why their numbers never match and why the argument about which is better usually misses the point. AWStats reads the server's own logs and therefore sees everything that reached the server, including bots. Analytics runs in the visitor's browser and therefore sees only visitors who execute its script. Knowing which question you are asking tells you which number to trust. In 2026 I rebuilt my own statistics on the log side, without AWStats and without a database, because the readers Analytics never sees, GPTBot, ChatGPT-User and ClaudeBot, have become the story.

Question 48

Is there a user friendly alternative to CAPTCHA?

Accepted Answer

Yes. CAPTCHAs push the cost of your spam problem onto every honest visitor, asking them to decipher characters or pick out traffic lights. There are ways to protect a form that put that burden on the machine instead of on the person filling it in.

Question 49

What separates a top-tier website from an ordinary one?

Accepted Answer

The parts nobody sees. Using escape.nl, one of Amsterdam's most iconic venues, as the example, the difference is in delivery: static output where possible, serious hosting, images that are actually optimised, and design decisions that survive contact with large audiences. It is a blend of cutting-edge technology with an eye for design and for commerce, and the craft shows up as speed and reliability rather than as decoration.

Question 50

How do you secure a WordPress website?

Accepted Answer

WordPress runs a large share of the web, which makes it the most rewarding target there is, and as an ethical hacker I meet it in every possible state of neglect. The ten practical measures I recommend are mostly unglamorous: keep core and plugins updated, remove what you do not use, control who can log in and from where, and make sure a compromise cannot reach the rest of the server.

Question 51

Optical or chest strap heart rate monitor: which is more accurate?

Accepted Answer

They measure fundamentally different things. A chest strap picks up the electrical signal from your heart; a wrist wearable shines light through your skin and infers heart rate from blood flow. The electrical measurement is the more direct one, which shows up most clearly at the edges: during rapid changes in effort, and during sleep, where I compared a wrist optical sensor against a high resolution chest strap.

Question 52

Is more health and fitness data better?

Accepted Answer

No, and I eventually stopped wearing sensors because of it. A physiotherapist customer once told me that he could never feel better than his patients could, if only they would listen to their bodies, and that stuck. Data is useful when it answers a question you actually have; when it becomes the point, it starts replacing the sense it was supposed to sharpen. What stayed in 2026 is one sensor without a screen, recording in the background, and a 235 kilometre ride and a marathon run on feel that were better for it.

Question 53

What is MCADD and what does it mean in daily life?

Accepted Answer

MCADD, medium chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency, is a metabolic condition that limits the body's ability to use fats for energy. Our son was diagnosed days after birth, after he stopped feeding and his temperature fell to 33 degrees. Day to day it means a strict feeding schedule and a plan for when things go differently, and it became normal for us quickly. I have written about the diagnosis, about the first six months as parents, and about the first hospital admission, where a metabolic crisis was averted with an infusion.

Question 54

How do you prepare for your first marathon?

Accepted Answer

I ran my first in Amsterdam, finishing in the Olympic Stadium, from an idea that started in a bar. Six weeks later I ran Valencia, deliberately using a different approach: the first on data, the second on feel, and the experiences differed greatly. The one that taught me most was Leiden in 25 degrees, the hardest of them, where several runners collapsed from the heat. Pushing your limits sometimes means finding them.

Question 55

How do you prepare for a very long bike ride?

Accepted Answer

Going solo asks something different from riding an organised event with support and company along the way, and that difference is mostly in the planning and the mindset rather than in the legs. I rode 211KM around the Markermeer alone, 204KM across half the Netherlands on a fixed gear as preparation for the Fietselfstedentocht, and 176KM from Amsterdam to Limburg into rain and wind. All three posts carry the practical tips.

Question 56

Does wearing a sleep mask actually improve sleep?

Accepted Answer

It helped me. The body produces melatonin in darkness, and modern life is awash in artificial light at exactly the wrong hours, which is a straightforward way to disrupt a circadian rhythm. I experimented with blocking all light with a simple mask for several weeks and wrote up what changed.

Question 57

Is a WHOOP or similar biometric band worth wearing?

Accepted Answer

For a while it was, for me. Unlike most fitness bands the WHOOP is built around strain, recovery and sleep rather than around step counts, which makes it more like a mirror than a scoreboard: it tells you what yesterday cost you. I used its trend data to prepare for a 235KM ride. In 2026 it is the one sensor that stayed when the smartwatch went: no screen, two weeks of battery, and it recognises a run or a ride by itself.

Question 58

What makes a good commuter bike?

Accepted Answer

Low maintenance and a frame you enjoy riding. Mine is a Sensa Cintura with a Gates carbon belt drive and a Shimano Alfine hub gear, chosen so that daily use does not turn into daily upkeep. I have written it up three times: building it, a year and 6000KM later after messages from commuters worldwide, and again at 21.000KM when it started squeaking. The belt drive earned its keep.

Question 59

Are puncture-proof bicycle tyres really puncture proof?

Accepted Answer

I ran Schwalbe Durano Plus tyres specifically to find out how many kilometres you can ride without a flat, and wrote down the answer rather than the marketing claim. The short version is that puncture-proof means the punctures become rare enough to change how you plan a ride, not that they become impossible.

Question 60

Are dynamo powered bicycle lights worth it?

Accepted Answer

If you want lights that simply work, yes. Battery lights do the job until the evening you forgot to charge them, which is precisely the evening you need them. I fitted a dynamo system to my road bike for that reason, and when the headlight on my commuter failed after heavy daily use I replaced it with a Supernova E3 Pro 2, choosing for durability and brightness rather than price.

Question 61

Is a Brompton folding bike worth the money?

Accepted Answer

Few bikes have surprised me as much. After the first five months and around 500KM I called it the ultimate freedom bike, because folding it changes what a bike is for: it stops being something you park and start worrying about, and becomes something you take with you.

Question 62

Is it worth repairing things instead of replacing them?

Accepted Answer

It is a running theme in my writing and a growing antipathy to planned obsolescence. I have serviced an iRobot Roomba that has run since 2011, replaced the retention system in a Giro helmet I liked too much to throw away, fixed a cargo bike shift cable after it caught a branch while hunting for bears with my son, and rescued a MacBook Air with an exploded battery. A takeaway plastic bag, designed for one use, is what got me thinking about all of it.

Question 63

Can you use an Android phone without Google?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and I have done it twice. A Fairphone running /e/OS gives you a repairable, long-lived phone with the Google layer removed, and the German Volla Phone is a second route to the same goal for people who value privacy and freedom. Both work; both ask you to give up some convenience, and it is worth being honest about which conveniences you actually use. In 2026 I went further on the Fairphone and wrote my own home screen: a list, three cards and a terminal into the homelab.

Question 64

Can a smartwatch replace your smartphone?

Accepted Answer

I spent a week trying, leaving the phone behind and letting an Apple Watch take over. It is sold as liberation from an attention-seeking device, and there is something to that, but the experiment is more interesting than the conclusion: what you discover is which phone habits were ever about need. That was 2023. In the summer of 2026 the Watch left my wrist altogether: the phone had grown strong enough to do its job with the watch out of the way.

Questions

Machine formats of this page