Ronald Langeveld

Zero configuration NextJS deployment to a self hosted VPS with Kamal. A comprehensive guide.

One of the biggest quality of life improvements when it comes to deploying over the past few months has been learning how to use Kamal and have learnt to use it properly without getting lost in the complexities. Kamal is a simple tool for deploying web apps to any server using Docker containers with zero downtime. Although originally developed for use with Rails, it can be used to deploy just about any web application to the web. Best thing about it, is it can be setup on a new VPS without exp

A morning that could have been way different

The past week Jiwon and I spent some time exploring Bangkok and Koh Samui. The weather was perfect and every single day was filled with laughter, joy and a sense of connection. There's much more to share about our adventure, but for now I want to reflect on something that shook the hell out of me. Early this morning, I dropped Jiwon off at Bangkok Airport for her flight back to Korea. I headed back to my hotel feeling a mix of emotions - sad that our trip had ended but also excitement knowing t

From backing up nostalgia to the butterfly effect.

It started with an obsession Unlike many people I know, our family have very little to no official historical records prior the 1900s. Example I was always fascinated when I have classmates who went to school with me and they would tell stories like, "My great, great grandfather came from Maniago, Italy to work at the paper factory in the 1800s. Now uncle own the best pizza restaurant in town and I go to Italy every year for 6 months to spend time with relatives still there and practice speaki

Be the beetle

Today was one of those days where it seemed like the world constantly throws messages at me. I'm a touch emotionally heavy, taking into account I yet again changed location a week ago after ±3 months in Seoul, with a stint in Scotland in between and still settling and getting into my new routine. This morning to clear some thoughts I decided grab a coffee and walk through the nearby mall. I switched on Apple Music and left their algorithm do the thinking for me and I'll listen to whatever songs

Flights taken since 2024

Complete list of all the flights I have taken since 2024 2024 1. Durban - Johannesburg 2. Johannesburg - Abu Dhabi 3. Abu Dhabi - Dublin 4. Dublin - Madrid 5. Madrid - Palma 6. Palm - Madrid 7. Madrid - Lisbon 8. Lisbon - Amsterdam 9. Amsterdam - London (Dublin bound, but diverted to London due to bad weather) 10. London - Dublin 11. Dublin - Abu Dhabi 12. Abu Dhabi - Johannesburg 13. Johannesburg - Durban 14. Durban - Dubai 15. Dubai - Bangkok 16. Bangkok - Kuala L

Asia is a great continent if you shoot film

Currently hanging out in Kuala Lumpur, and just yesterday around 4pm, I dropped off two rolls of C41 Kodak film at this local indie film lab. Cost me 17 MYR per roll—that's about 3 Euros each. Got the scans sent to my inbox by 7pm the same night, and yes, that was a Sunday. I've experienced this level of service consistently in Thailand as well. For a bit of perspective, back in January, I handed a roll of Kodak over to a film lab in Amsterdam, shelled out 12 Euros, and ended up waiting a week

30 Years on Earth: The Waves I've Ridden

As I hit the big 3-0 in August (yes 8 months ago at time of writing), I paused to reflect on the epic ride so far—a journey with more ups and downs than a 12 foot day at Pipeline. Here’s what catching life’s waves for three decades has taught me: 1. Resilience is Non-Negotiable: Life's tossed more wipeouts at me than a rookie on a ten-foot wave. From clown-induced traumas at a circus to brutal schoolyard showdowns and heartbreaks that could rival any soap opera, I've learned resilience is not j

Those Irish cliffs and Guinness

📍Republic of Ireland📸Fujifilm X-E4. Straight out of camera, using Kodak Ultramax 400 and Kodak Tri-X film recipes from Fuji X Weekly

Tropical Winter

One morning about a week ago I noticed an offshore westerly wind when I woke up. And a fairly big swell to go with it. It was freezing cold too due to snow falling on nearby mountains the previous night. I grabbed my camera and drove down to the beach to look at the waves. It was quite a special morning. Here's some of the highlights, all JPEG's straight off the camera. Pretty happy with how some of these photos came out - and perhaps lucky that the lineup was so close to the rocks, which m

Surf Contest Day

Went out last weekend to take some photos of the vibe at the beach during a surf contest. 📍Scottburgh, South Africa📸Fujifilm X-E4 with Pacific Blues film recipe.

Abandoned Waterslides

Childhood memories down the slide.

Kuala Lumpur in black & white

Went out on a Sunday morning with my Fujifilm X-E4 and decided to only shoot JPEG's. I applied one of the stock film simulations, ACROS which is based on Fujifilm's ACROS film, manufactured in the early 2000s. This is what came out.

Address is Approximate

I first discovered this video when I was 18 years old, early 2012. I had just gotten my first DSLR, at the time and spent a lot of time on Vimeo for inspiration & to learn about cinematography and photography. What was special about Vimeo? Vimeo is different to YouTube. Much different. At the time, Vimeo had a completely different vibe to it. It was more focused on high-quality, artistic content rather than viral videos and clickbait. It was a place where filmmakers, photographers, and other c

From the land of Khao Soi

📍Chiang Mai, Thailand📷Fujifilm X-E4

Bangkok Cyberpunk

Had a quick stop over in Bangkok en-route to Kuala Lumpur late December 2022. Made most of my evening there behind the lens. Great city! 📍Bangkok, Thailand📷Fujifilm X-E4 using Jeff Davenport Night film recipe

Reliving the moment

Growing up my dad would always film holidays, Christmas, birthdays and when visiting family and friends on his Sony Video 8 Handycam. We'd get back home and then I'd be all excited to have all the footage recorded onto a VHS tape from the camera and watching it for the first time. The VHS tape would go into a box with the rest of our home video collection. Every once in a while we'd pull one out and relive that holiday, birthday or whatever funny was captured on video. A few years ago I spent

What Sixty40 could be like if it relaunched 20 years later.

As a passionate software developer, I often find myself going into a nostalgia trip trying to think what it would be like to rebuild and relaunch Sixty40 in 2022. I used to live on Sixty40 and it played a huge role into growing my passion for the sport. After all, it's approaching it's 20th birthday as the domain sixty40.co.za was registered on 16 February 2003, according to whois. However, the internet is a much different place today than it was in the 2000s. We live in a time where photogra

Sixty40 nostalgia

I've been bodyboarding since around 2008. It's the sport that drove me through much of my teenage years. I made close friends thanks to it and it introduced me to the idea of exploring, travelling and it drove me to combine the passion and combine it with other passions such as photography, filmmaking and tech. As I got into bodyboarding, when I was 13 years old, I was already a keen internet user. I quickly came across across Sixty40, a bodyboarding focussed website. It was filled with news ar

I got covid

In May I got covid. I managed to avoid it for the greater part of the pandemic. Now I'm a statistic. Symptoms was pretty rough to be honest - I expected it to be borderline a cold. It was worse. I was bed bound for about 4 days without any desire to do anything. Fever from time to time, lack of energy and not much of an appetite except, except a weird craving for citrus fruit - like grapefruit. Still have a cough and it's been a few weeks already.

Sailboat

The Future of Bodyboarding

TLDR - Why is bodyboarding still not thriving? Over the years, we’ve seen multiple bodyboarding body’s, amongst them are Global Organization of Bodyboarding (GOB), International Bodyboarding Association (IBA), the Association of Professional Bodyboarders (APB) and now the International Bodyboarding Corporation - which I didn’t even know exists, prior to writing post, which means their marketing is super weak and I spend a good chunk of my free time watching bodyboarding videos on youtube and in

Cyclone Swell

The most ironic sport

It’s been about 4 months since I started playing golf modestly-serious again. While I played a lot as a kid and during my pre-teen years, it’s something that faded a bit when surfing took priority in High School. I’ve been going to the range now once or twice a week and try to hit the course at least once a week, even if it’s only 9 holes. One thing I realised standing on the range the other day, is that it’s an extremely ironic game. You have to spend hours practicing golf, hitting thousan

How to create smart playlists for Apple Music on your iPhone

I’ve been using Apple Music since it’s initial launch in 2015. It launched in South Africa long before Spotify and being a Mac + iPhone owner at the time, it was the obvious answer to my music needs. Recently on my Macbook I started playing with Smart Playlists on the Music App. For those unfamiliar with Smart Playlists, basically it allows you to programmatically create playlists. Think adding songs only from a certain year, a specific genre or heck even the number of time’s you’ve listened to

Mind Travel

It’s been about a year and a half since the Covid-19 pandemic started. I came back home to South Africa at the end of 2019, to spend Christmas with the family and my grandpa who a few months before was diagnosed with stage-4 lung cancer. My plan then was to spend 3 months with the family and then head back to Thailand, Malaysia and hopefully Japan. Little did we have an idea what would happen soon after, that would essentially wipe out all non-essential travel at local and international level a

I built an internet performance analytics tool isplogger.com

If you’re family, friend or follower (like on Twitter), you most certainly know by now they struggles I’ve had with my internet connection in most of 2020. If not, I recommend reading these posts to familiarise yourself the the bigger picture of why I build ISP Logger: * Rain Speed Test * How I got Fibre Problem: My internet connection is extremely unstable or slow at specific times of the day and then other times of the day it works fine. It is very difficult to explain to customer suppor

Kruger 2020

Using Sass with Django

Quickstart - Check out the Repo on Github After nearly 2 years of almost exclusively building frontends with ReactJS, I decided to give full stack Django a visit again. I needed to build a simple & stable CRUD application and figured, going the SPA (Single Page Application) route will be perhaps a touch overkill, especially considering I need to write backend and frontend seperately. When I left Django first, I was still using using CDN’s to load css libraries like Bootstrap and Bulma directly

How I got fibre

Draft, expect typos, spelling and grammar errors, etc ——- last updated 8 September 2020 Spoiler: I don’t have fibre yet, but will have soon. It’s a humid Sunday afternoon in mid February 2020 on the KZN South Coast. Everyone in the house is hot, moody and stressed out because of the internet that drops to dial-up speeds. Netflix and YouTube cannot even be attempted. No matter how many times I call, email, tweet, etc customer care, there’s nothing they do to solve the issues. Rain was our ma

Rain Speedtest

If you’ve been following me over the last few months, you would most certainly know how many internet related issues I’ve been having since the start of 2020. If not, let’s quickly recap from the very beginning of our internet situation at home in South Africa… 1999: Get Dial Up for the first time. I think it was an Mweb Big Black Box or something like that. I was only allowed to use the internet between 7pm and 7am and weekends. I think calls were unlimited for R7 during those hours. 2007:

How to integrate Paddle to your React JS application

Grab the project’s source code from Github here! Being from South Africa, I unfortunately don’t have true access to Stripe - which is the goto Payment Processor most startups today. Due to some backwards South African laws, apparently it’s illegal for South African Payment Processor to accept any currency other than ZAR (South African Rand). As a startup trying to reach the international market, quoting in Rand is probably the worst idea ever. Nobody is going to trust a new product in an unkno

Arriving in Chiang Mai

The morning of my flight to Chiang Mai, I checked in online and had that sorted. Good thing I did that as I noticed my flight is from Don Muang Airport and not the big airport where I arrived. My airbnb host explained that I can the train to the last station on the BTS line and then get a bus from there for 30 baht. Much better than 400 baht to the airport I guess. It all went so smoothly, I was actually way too early for my flight so indulged in some fast food before my flight. It was a short

First few days in Bangkok

On 10 October 2019 I spontaneously booked a 3 month trip to Thailand. It’s been a few months coming. I made myself a promise to spend New Years outside of South Africa. After some friends, mostly remote workers and software developers said they’ll be spending time in Thailand, specifically Chiang Mai, I thought it’s a great idea to join them there. A few days prior to leaving for Thailand, I spent the weekend in Johannesburg/Pretoria for my cousin’s wedding. It was pretty cool meeting up with

How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends (and photos)

Facebook is boring, it used to be great now it’s boring. I used to have 200 friends now I have 1500. There is no way I know 1500 people. Draconian measures must be taken to save my relationship with the social network. The unfriend button is my path to making Facebook an enjoyable experience once again. Despite Facebook’s very best algorithms my feed is mostly posts I don’t want to see. Let me clarify what posts I don’t want to see means; Anything from Upworthy Posts about dead dogs Injured do

Remember who you are

Whenever I feel some self-doubt vibes creeping up I watch this video and somehow I feel better again. :)

Coding for beginners

How do I build something? I’m not a programmer. If you wanna learn to make apps, build websites, etc and don’t have a budget to hire a developer, you should really take a couple of months and learn to build products. With a bit of effort and dedication you can develop and idea into software that actually work and does the way it should. Of course, you probably won’t be rebuilding Crysis that quickly, but you’ll certain be able to start building things that everyone will envy you for. How to p

J-Bay is always magical

I've been coming to Jeffreys Bay for many years, ever since I can remember. Little did I know back then that it's home to one of the best waves in the world. In recent years as I started getting into bodyboarding I learnt more about the surfing side of J-bay. Geographically it's one huge point break... While most of the coastline in this part of the world faces South, the mile long point break bends inwards and faces directly east, meaning those gale force prevailing Westerly winds, usually c

I made a Telegram bot that tells me local surf conditions.

After I made Downtime bot, I decided to go a bit further and make it related to something I’m truly passionate about. Surfing. It started off with mapping out my local knowledge about surfing here. * Wind Direction * Swell Direction * Swell Size I also had to write a bit of code to convert the wind speeds to KMH from MPH. Feet is fine. Wave size should always be measured in feet. Once I got that figured out I had to convert it into code, which I made available for you all on Github. The

Getting Downtime Bot featured on Product Hunt.

Launching products is what I love doing….. well, creating products and seeing it come to life and then sharing it with the world.. It think it’s the coding part that’s addictive. Writing code and then to see my computer finally doing what I asked it to do is what makes my dopamine levels rocket. It’s satisfying. I went to a small surfing town called Jeffreys Bay over the Christmas holidays. It was great! I got to surf some epic waves, saw family and even went sandboarding. It’s an epic change o

Brown water surfing

코끼리 King Dumplings

Elephant King Sized Dumplings at 3000won.

One night at the Han-River

A couple of days prior, my friend Corey invited me to go “camping”. At first we wanted to stay at an actual camping site, specifically Nanji – the spot where we used to have our annual South African Braai. However, to our disappointment, the camping site was fully booked, so we resorted to Yeouido Park. At 5:00pm we departed from Uni and arrived at the river around 40mins later, after a ridiculously long transfer (in terms of walking) at Jongro-3-Ga station – It’s a big station. Yeouido is arg

Peace Camp 2016 - Highlights

In my previous blog post, I promised to update my blog as often as possible… although due to limited wifi & free time, spending 40 minutes everyday writing an article was basically out of the question. The 2016 Peace Camp, hosted by the MPVA (Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs)  was action packed from day one. I told my friends how we practically did in a week, what most people living here haven’t done all their lives! We stayed at Yonsei International University, located in Songdo – a

On my way to Peace Camp

Not too long ago, I got invited to the annual Peace Camp in Korea. They are flying hundreds of descendants of Korean War Veterans from around the world in to Korea for the week. Easy for the organisers, South Africa (me) already lives here. I’m writing this blog post from the bus on my way to Yonsei University in Incheon, which will be my home for the next week. Honestly, I didn’t do much more than simply skimming through the itinerary, so I barely know what to expect – which is good because I

The other side of Gangnam

One of my German classmates in Korea posted a photo of him standing next to a shack on Instagram with no context. I initially thought the photo what taken somewhere along his travels through Africa, and coming from South Africa myself, I thought that's brave thing to do taking the potential safety risks into account. Turns out the photo was taken not too far from us, in fact it was taken right outside the infamous ultra luxurious Gangnam district, where there's no shortage of supercars and $400

Hiking to Daecheongbong at Seoraksan National Park

Over a weekend in early November 2015 my friends, Ricardo, Stefan, Fabi, Carlos and I jumped on a bus to Sokcho and hiked up one of the biggest mountains in South Korea. I'm writing this almost 7 years later, but backdated to fit in with my other posts. To this day it remains one of my most memorable weekends. This trip was largely planned by my German mates, Fabi, Ricardo and Stefan. Carlos spontaniously joined us at the end when another friend pulled out last minute and we had an extra spot.

Our trip to Timbavati

The week I've been looking forward to all holiday have finally arrived - To spend a week with my family and some family friends in the Timbavati Game Reserve. We decided up front, to spend 1 night in the Kruger National Park, at Lower Sabie to ease the drive to Timbavati. Therefore, we would have to drive to Komatipoort. But in order for us to get to Komatipoort - or at least, to make the drive fairly shorter, we decided to take the route through Swaziland. Our bags were packed, got our passpor

2013 in photos

How the bodyboarding changed my life... #The Accident

A Series I'll be starting of how The Surfing and Bodyboarding lifestyle I lived during High School changed my life. Going Back In Time ~~~~ February 2007 I was 13 years old, new into High School and ready for the new “bigger” world to open up after I just finished Primary School. It was that time of my life that demanded that I try to “fit in” through good and bad, no matter what. One day, sometime during February I met up with some classmates after school at the Scottburgh beach, since that wa

The First Semester

Just a short overview of the first semester. I will post more individual stories. I arrived back in Korea end February, just before the University year began. It has been an amazing holiday back in South Africa - nothing beats seeing friends and family and eating South African food again. As I arrived, it a cold, wet evening. And I couldn't even check in at my dorm-flat at the University. Instead, they booked me in at a guesthouse about 30mins west of the Uni. Was a tiny place, but at least I

Gwanghwamun at night

Where the echoes of history whisper, Gwanghwamun beckons with timeless charm, inviting you to capture moments of tranquility and heritage through your lens.

Jumping off Bloukrans Bridge

Long Exposure Photography at Yoeinaru

I finally got around to try something new, something I always wanted to do, but never really had the time or equipment to do successfully. Last night everything came together perfectly - I have my tripod, my DSLR and a beautiful evening. I rushed down to (Yoeinaru) 여의나루 station at about 5:30pm, just before sunset, as I knew it's about 35 mins away from school with the subway, excluding a huge transfer - I estimate it's almost a 1 km walk just to transfer at Jongno 5 -Ga station. I finally arri

September 2012 in photos

Arriving in Seoul for the first time - first few days part 2

Yongsan is known by Koreans, as the “best” place to get any electronics in the city of Seoul. At first, the prices will look very deceiving, seeing that almost every decent laptop goes into the million WON’s. But anyway, once you convert the money back into your currency, you’ll realise that it’s actually very competitive pricing. On the Monday, I finally met some students who’s on the same scholarship is me and I knew will be in the same classes. The people are from all over the world, such as

Arriving in Seoul for the first time

💡This is a post I wrote to share with my grandparents when I just arrived in Korea back in 2012. I was barely 18 years old and for the first time independent + in a new country. It's actually embarrassing but funny at the same time, which is why this post is for members only. I departed from Johannesburg International Airport on Wednesday, 22 February 2012 - I just knew, it will be 2 long flights, as I will stop in Dubai for 3 hours at mid night. On my way to Dubai, I was lucky to have no-one

Korea Photos 2012

Fun surf - 06 October 2011

Offshore winds and a little swell, provided us with some solid fun, on a rather shallow sandbar. Was good to be out in the water on a beautiful morning like this! Enjoy

Me and my GoPro

So, I was lucky to recieve a GoPro HD Hero for my 18th birthday, just over a month ago. Something that I have been tempting to get for months now. I've only been in the water a few times with it, due to lack of swell. But I realized its not only a water camera, but it should be used for all sorts of things from having fun with friends, just chilling on the beach or even going for a jog. Because it's so light, its easy to take it along wherever you go! Just a few pictures:

Reasons why we Bodyboard

1) We can get barreled on anything 2) Bodyboards fit in the boot of a car 3) Bodyboarding and Mountain biking use the same muscle groups 4) We take-off deeper. Feel free to add to the topic. Click here for full forum discussion.

Exploration Pays off!

It was a very undecided morning as far as swell around the area was concerned. It was full high tide, not much swell, but at least the offshore was pumping! We checked out a few spots and they were absolutely tiny. We headed north to a few beaches, and we realized somewhere must be going off, as there are lots of lines, just none breaking. We made another two stops at known Point Breaks and found it to be breaking. Nothing epic, but good fun for a day like this. Good to do some exploring, It al

What a good weekend!

No epic swell or heavy winds, but the long swell periods on light offshore breezes in the morning made sure we are in for some fun waves. We started of searching for waves yesterday morning. Everywhere was rather small or not really doing it. We eventually decided to go look at beaches not really known as surf spots. And behold, at our 5th stop we were welcomed with epic 3-4ft square barrels breaking on a shallow sand bar! Surfed there for about 2 hours and go so shacked on almost every wave!

Just a few pictures

We have had some swell over the last 24 hours, but nothing to get extremely excited about. Waves was about 4-6ft overhead. A few pictures of unridden goodness.

My weekend, so far...

So, waves have been pumping today here on the South Coast of KZN! Epic 6ft barrels, offshore and clean perfect swell!...... I wish! Was actually like 2ft onshore mushy slop. So def not a very favorable weekend surf-wise - Onshore expected to stay for the rest of the weekend. Other than craving for good waves, something of great importance, yet not something very enjoyable kept me busy.... I had to study these devils for Mondays Test: Yip, thats right the infamous Calculus... Not great friends

Pictures of this morning

Waves unfortunately weren't firing! But there were a few ones to relief the crave for waves.....

What a week!!

What a week! Cyclone swell was pounding our coast last weekend, well mainly Sunday to Tuesday. Thereafter we've been pounded with school work... Geeeezzz, I thought Grade 11 was suppose to be heavier than Gr12. Otherwise, I managed to get in contact with Marqua at Wavescape. Super stoked of my video that's on their home page!! http://www.wavescape.co.za/video/the-latest-clips/due-south-charna.html More onshore this whole weekend. Hopefully something early tomorrow morning to relief the crave

Wave Breaking on Aliwal Shoal

A solid left, breaking on Aliwal Shoal... Caused by a big EAST Cyclone swell and a Spring low tide.

Surf Story 2010

In the April holidays of 2010, I was lucky to paddle out at a semi secret localized spot for my first time even though it wasn't quite doing it's thing - was still heavy. I also got waves at Back beach and and surf'd the heaviest Close-out bank at main beach; Not much size, just power and beauty. In the long July holiday and I was stunned how good main beach can actually get. Perfect waves of point running for hundreds of meters in one cylindrical shape, no matter what size and what wind was b

What a week!

My first week of School went by.... hectic..... Hate these routines. Waking up at 6:00, eat, clean, then mission for 15 minutes to school.....Repeat At least it's weekend now. And we got a PS3 in the house :) This little fella! Now just for an HD Tv....... There were some waves this morning. Waves wrapped around point and hit a shallow little bank. Had a few barrels! Was super crowded though - too much townies... Sea is still a little brown, from all the rivers that came down. Had loads of ra

Welcome

Actually decided to start a personal blog.... Well since I saw most bodyboarders have one, so I thought 'why not' ! Enjoy

18 January 2011–South Coast KZN

18 January 2011. 4-6ft SW Swell. Low Tide. Light Offshore breeze