Bert Hubert's writings
Bert Hubert's writings
Bert Hubert
Software developer, entrepreneur, former government regulator, current government advisor, amateur scientist.
Latest Posts
(On this page in Dutch I post daily bits of realistic but hopeful Corona news. Here is a somehat rough translation of an article on antibodies I posted there, because I think it might also be useful for people that don’t speak Dutch)....
Several sites are now shipping “COVID-19 self test kits” or perhaps “Coronavirus self test kits”. These claim to detect the virus in 10 minutes based on a drop of blood. These rapid self-test kits are currently: Likely fake Even if not...
Gisteren verscheen het rapport “Patiëntveiligheid bij ICT-uitval in ziekenhuizen” van de Onderzoeksraad voor veiligheid. Omdat ik een bescheiden bijdrage heb geleverd aan dit rapport voel ik me geroepen een stukje te schrijven over wat...
This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. In a break from the usual GPS/Galileo, DNA and C++ posts, here is a bit on 5G and national security. It turns out that through PowerDNS and its parent company...
Welcome to the Galmon project! Our goals are to monitor the major Global Navigation Satellite Systems, including GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou, but also Space Base Augmentation Systems like WAAS, EGNOS and GAGAN. Galmon is an open...
Last year I wrote a post listing what I had been doing in 2018, because it turned out it was a lot, so much that it was useful to summarise it somewhat. This year there is less to report, but people have wondered what I’ve been up to....
What is life? This question keeps many people awake at night and has led to rafts of definitions, some involving features (procreation, metabolism and so forth), some involving chemistry, entropy or energy flux and some are of a more...
Note: This article covers a lot of well-trodden ground, although this post has the benefit of 1) being rather brief and 2) advancing slightly on from earlier work. Noam Chomsky wrote 39 dense pages of philosophy on this subject in...
Dear anonymous internet user, dear corporate employee hiding behind a gmail.com address, dear “GitHub account with a single issue”, Thank you for your interest in my free software, my project or the documentation I wrote for you. I am...
This page collects links to raw and live sources on how well the planet, including its vital infrastructure, is doing right now, potentially visualised attractively. But the key thing is, we want Real Data, from the most direct sources....
By bert hubert / bert@hubertnet.nl This post is an excerpt of a far longer post on Galileo, its structures and the cause of the outage. Here we’ll only focus on the outage - the potential underlying reasons behind it are described in the...
By bert hubert / bert@hubertnet.nl In this post I want to document some mostly non-technical aspects of the EU’s Galileo Satellite Navigation Network. I will also share some observations on how things are going, and perhaps how they...
The Netherlands is struggling with a shortage of primary school teachers, which as a nice side effect means that I get ample opportunities to do technical propaganda in the name of education. This is a quick writeup of a lesson on how...
Note: For context, please see this article on the Economist Job. I also want to thank Job Snijders who was of great help in writing this article. How the Internet Leaks A few weeks ago large swathes of the internet stopped working around...