Lars van Maanen's homepage

Hello! I am Lars van Maanen. I am a Biology BSc student at Wageningen University. I was born in the town of Hengelo (O), in the East of the Netherlands, on July 18th, 1999, and I have remained living there for the first twenty years of my life, before moving to Wageningen for my studies.

I like to go cycling, especially in natural areas. However, I also like doing all kinds of technical things with computers, from configuring bootloaders (and assisting others in doing so through internet forums), via building R packages, to maintaining my own email server on a VPS. Generally speaking, Slackware is my operating system of choice, but I am fine with running other Linux distributions. (A little warning: I do not thrive in Windows-only environments.)

I also love (and I may spend a little too much time) watching 2D animated (mainly hand drawn and cel painted) movies and TV series, without making any silly distinctions between Japanese アニメ and "Western" works, and unhindered by the immature inclination of confusing violence and gore with maturity. (Yes, this sentence is indeed intended as a jab at most self-described cartoon lovers on Reddit and IMDB.) I myself lack any sort of artistic talent, though; although I did succesfully compile OpenToonz on my computer and I do own a drawing pad, so maybe, maybe, the talent may develop yet.

I shall be honest with you: I mainly created this page, so that my hosting provider would allow me to get reverse DNS on my server, which I need, because a few other mailservers require all sending mail servers to have rDNS. Personally, I believe it is ridiculous to require an SMTP server to have a PTR record; after all, the SPF record (which is far easier to create) serves the same purpose, but with the added functionality of supporting multiple IPs and domains as "save". DKIM is even better, as it also protects mails from getting messed with on their way from server to server. In a sense, I would describe the requirement for rDNS as legacy and completely redundant. And also as a lot of wasted time.

As for my hosting provider's requirement for having a website on a server for getting rDNS... Well, for obvious reasons, I can't be too hard on them for this, of course, but... Has anyone ever had a website blocked or rejected because of lacking rDNS? No, of course not. It is with emails that this happens, so requiring a mail server would make more sense.

However, now that I have to make a website anyway, I might as well give it a purpose, like, turning it into a fancy resume.