2026-08-15 08:00:00
This week, something happened in the world of rock music that nobody thought was ever going to happen again - Ritchie Blackmore rejoined Deep Purple live on stage for the first time in decades.
Blackmore is one of my favourite guitar players and easily one of the greates guitarists of all time. Along with late keyboard player Jon Lord and drummer Ian Paice he is one of the founding members of Deep Purple. Deep Purple's band history is long and messy; Blackmore left in 1975 to found Rainbow with Ronnie James Dio on vocals which was hugely successful, then he rejoined Purple from 1984 until 1993 when he left for good and went on to briefly reform Rainbow before he founded the medieval folk band Blackmore's Night together with his now wife Candice Night.
I always liked Deep Purple, but I absolutely love Rainbow, especially the Dio era. With Rising they recorded on of the best albums of all time, which also contains one of the best songs ever written, Stargazer. Blackmore's guitar solos on Stargazer and on Deep Purple's Highway Star are among my all time favourites, and I never get tired of listening to them. I'm not too much into the medieval stuff in Blackmore's Night, but in their live shows they always play some old Rainbow and Deep Purple songs, and those are fantastic. Just listen to this rendition of Soldier of Fortune. There's no doubt that Candice is an amazing singer, and Ritchie's guitar work, particularly the intro is out of this world. His fingers just fly across the fretboard and he makes even the fastest and most difficult melody lines look as if they're the easiest thing in the world to play. Incredible.
By all accounts Blackmore is a pretty difficult person to deal with (even his wife calls him "moody and difficult" in the clip above) and the final split with Deep Purple was not the most amicable one, and so they never played together again. Even in 2016 when the band was inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame they couldn't get their act together, with either the band not wanting Blackmore to be there or him not wanting to perform with them, depending on whose version you choose to believe.
So the fact that they managed to put whatever issues they had with each other aside to appear together on stage for what will probably be the final time is almost a miracle, and it's even wilder that it was Blackmore who got in touch with the band and asked to play a song with them. But the stars aligned; the band played in Long Island where he lives and he was well enough to do it (he's been battling a number of health issues in recent years, and he also had to cut short a mini tour with Blackmore's Night last year because he fell ill). So he knows that it's now or never, an opportunity like this might not present itself again.
And so this brings us back to last Wednesday, when Ritchie Blackmore appeared live on stage with Deep Purple, the band he founded in 1968, once again after a 33 year hiatus. And it was great seeing them play together again after this length of time. If we're being pedantic, his playing isn't as fast and technical as it once was, but the man is 81 and is suffering from arthritis and god knows what else, and he still plays better than I ever will, so that's that. It was great seeing him on stage with the band, and they all seemed to have a blast, as did the audience. And that's all anyone can really ask for.
Who knows what the future will hold. I hope he'll be around and well enough to make music for many more years, but he isn't getting any younger and if this turns out to be his final public appearance playing guitar, I can't think of a better way to conclude his incredible career than this.
Being on stage with Deep Purple and playing, of course, Smoke on the Water.
Legendary. Thanks, Ritchie.
2026-08-14 08:00:00
This week Ruben wrote about Feeling blue after the end of Heartstopper, his favourite series. I've never heard of this series before and I'm also not the target audience for it, but he said something in his review that got to me: "It’s the series I wish young me would have been able to watch, at a time when gay people like myself were only portrayed as stereotypes in mainstream media: one-dimensional props for comic relief." I have to admit I felt a twinge of shame reading this, because growing up in the 80s and 90s I know exactly which type of movies and shows he's talking about. And I'm also guilty of laughing at these stereotypical depictions of gay people without ever considering how seeing this must have felt to a young person who was just discovering that their sexual orientation was different from what was considered normal by society at this time. I absolutely believe Ruben when he says that he still carries around memories of pain and fear from his younger days, and it's awful to think about how insensitive we were about this kind of thing back then, without considering the emotional impact this can and does have on people like him. I think we've gotten better in recent times as a society in this regard, but... we should have done better then, too.
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2026-08-13 08:00:00
A few days ago I wrote a post titled "Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change". I don't write posts with the intention of getting lots of clicks, but this one seems to have struck a nerve (or the headline was clickbaity enough) because it went kind of viral (at least in small web terms). It bubbled to the top at Bubbles and someone also posted it on Hacker News. I don't check these places regularly, but I notice when an unusual number of comments roll in and suddenly a number of new followers appear on Mastodon.
This is not a new phenomenon to me, it has happened a few times before with other posts. But it's always a really weird and kind of scary feeling. Normally a blog post of mine gets maybe a few hundred visitors (according to my web server's logs), which is already a massive number as far as I'm concerned, but this one got over 20.000. The last post that was this popular was "I will never need to buy a new computer again", which got over 40.000 views in a week, which blew my mind then and still does.
Why is this scary? Because it triggers all kinds of insecurities in me. What if I got something wrong? What if people tell me my post is crap? What if I get yelled at? What if I find myself in the middle of a shitstorm? I think many people who put their writing/videos/art out into the world have similar fears.
Thankfully so far nothing even remotely like this has ever happened. I've been writing this blog for three years and so far people have been overwhelmingly kind and positive in their replies. The worst I ever got was maybe a snarky or slightly unfriendly reply on Mastodon here and there, and if I check the comments on Hacker News (which I probably shouldn't) there's the occasional a-hole in there, but even there the majority of comments is civil and respectful, which is positively surprising. This is the internet after all.
Still - it's kind of wild knowing that the post made the rounds and was seen by so many people. It makes me realise that I'm definitely not cut out to be famous. If I had a YouTube channel with a million subscribers, I think I would be perpetually on the verge of having a heart attack. It's a good thing then that I have a blog that despite the occasional (slightly) viral post is still pretty small (smol), and that's also how I like it.
2026-08-09 08:00:00
Recently, someone on Mastodon shared this video titled "Apple Changed..." by a guy named Theo who I'd never heard of, but according to his website he's a guy who "builds things". Apps, presumably. I had nothing better to do (sleepless night...) and I enjoy a good Apple bashing, so I watched the video. In it, Theo spends an hour ranting about how terrible the experience of developing apps for the iPhone/iPad is, how Apple takes 30% of all app store and in app purchases, how awful Xcode is as a development environment and how even as a developer you have to get Apple's approval to run your own app on your own device. And how you need a second device (MacBook) to build an app for your target device (iPad) because Apple won't allow you to build the app straight on the iPad itself. And a lot more.
I'm not an iOS developer (thank god), but I'm of course aware of Apple's restrictive policies when it comes to approving and running apps on their devices, and I have no doubt that everything he says in the video is true, and that it's really an abysmal experience developing for iOS, and that as a developer (and I'd argue as an Apple user, too) you're essentially trapped in an abusive relationship from which there seems to be no escape.
But as I watched this video I kept thinking, this guy is so rightfully angry and pissed off at Apple... and yet he's sitting in front of a brand new MacBook, a brand new iPhone and a brand new iPad.
He correctly points out towards the end of the video that the only thing that matters to Tim Cook is making more money for Apple. There's literally nothing else he cares about. Not your user experience, not the environment, and also not the mental health of children and teenagers using these devices, as much as he tries to pretend that he does. The only metric that matters to Apple is "number on spreadsheet go up". And so yes, Theo might make an hour long video about everything that he thinks sucks at Apple, and he may be right about all of it.
But he still gave them thousands of Dollars.
Apple wants his money, and he gave them exactly what they wanted. The fact that he's making angry videos is simply irrelevant to Apple, because they know that when the next iPhone or MacBook is released, he'll buy that too. So why would they change anything? Because he made an angry video? They might watch it some time when they're bored and need a good laugh, but then they'll go right back to making their devices even shittier for the end user and developer. Because they can. Because people keep buying them.
Like it or not, but if being the customer of a company starts to feel more like being in an abusive relationship rather than a mutually beneficial one, it's time to think about leaving. Yes, this is scary. It's painful. It requires sacrifice. And yes I know, the ecosystem. They lure you in with the promise of "everything just works", and once you're in, you can't leave, at least not without a great deal of pain. You know what that's called btw? A trap.
Leaving sucks. But there's no other way. As long as you keep throwing money at the corporations who treat you badly, why would they change?
This train of thought is heavily influenced by a post by Dave Rupert called "Double your business with companies you like" in which he argues that even though it might not feel like it, we as consumers do have an influence over which company thrives and which doesn't, because where we spend our money influences whose sales numbers go up and whose go down. In the world of tech this is not easy of course because there are a lot of huge and shady corporations out there, and they have an enormous amount of power. But there are still alternatives.
Apple might still try to present themselves as the underdog whose products are for the people who "think different", but they're not anymore, and they haven't been for a long time. They're the evil megacorporation now, and it's time to leave them behind and go to find the real underdogs to support.
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My apologies for accidentally starting a flamewar...
2026-08-07 08:00:00
It's currently Blaugust, and so I'm counting all my blog posts this month as Blaugust posts, including the Linkdumps. I told a friend about it and she laughed, because "blau" in German means "blue", like the colour, but it can also mean being drunk. And I had this thought too... Blaugust sounds a bit like I'm planning to spend the month getting hammered. Sometimes a totally innocent or meaningless word in one language can mean something entirely different in another language. I'm always reminded of this when I see a website hosted on wix.com. Wix is an Israeli company, and I have no idea if it means something in Hebrew... But I know the Germans in the room are already chuckling, because in German that's a slang expression for masturbation. So when I see the word "wixsite" show up in my URL bar, the image that pops into my mind is for sure not what they had intended...
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2026-08-05 08:00:00
I recently repaired the Micro USB socket of an old Raspberry Pi; the one through which the Pi receives it's power. It was a bit of a fiddly soldering job because the connections for the USB port are tiny. Because of this, I briefly considered just sending the power straight into the 5V and GND pins on the Pi's pin header. I've seen projects where a Raspberry Pi was powered through it's GPIO pins, and even ones where the Pi itself wasn't connected to a power supply at all and instead to a powered USB hub through it's normal USB ports and then the USB hub was modified to send the power back through the USB cable into the Pi. These solutions work, but they're not necessarily a good idea, and here's why.
In order to understand how the Raspi is powered, it helps to take a look at the board's schematics. This is the power input section from the Raspberry Pi 1's schematics, which is what I was working on. Newer models have slightly different components, but the functionality is the same.
If you've never seen something like this, this might not mean much to you, so let's walk through it step by step, left to right.
The first component (1) is the Micro USB socket through which the Pi is powered. It has five pins, but only two are connected: GND and VBUS. VBUS is the 5V coming through the USB cable. This is labeled as VIN after the connector, but it's the same thing. It's the Pi's input voltage.
Next in line (2) is a fuse. This will blow if the current going into the board becomes too high, which can happen if a component on the board shorts out or if something is connected to the GPIO pins which draws too much current or shorts the power rails. If that happens the board will appear dead, but the only thing that's broken is the fuse which can easily be replaced.
Then we have a transient voltage suppressor (3), which is essentially just two diodes connected in opposite directions. In normal operation these diodes don't conduct, so this component does nothing. If there is a sudden spike in the input voltage however, which can happen during a lightning strike or from a faulty power supply, these diodes will conduct and short out the voltage spike before it can reach the more sensitive components on the board.
This might seem unneccessary because we already have a fuse, but fuses take some time before they blow open, and during this time the board would receive the high voltage spike which would probably damage the chips and other components. Diodes react much quicker than fuses, so these protect against sudden or very short spikes in the input voltage.
Lastly we have a series of capacitors (4), a big electrolytic capacitor and two small ones. They serve as filters for the input voltage. Low quality power supplies might not deliver a very steady 5V but have some noise or ripple on it, which might cause glitches in the chips. The capacitors smooth out these ripples so that the other components on the board receive a clean input voltage. They also act as buffers for sudden current spikes. If a component on the board or connected to the Pi suddenly draws a large amount of current, the power supply might be too slow to supply the current quickly enough, resulting in a voltage drop. The capacitors can react quicker than the power supply and supply the high current, keeping the voltage stable.
After this the now filtered voltage goes to the 5V power rail of the board (that's the +5V0 top right) which supplies the chips, the USB ports, the GIPO pins and a few voltage regulators which step it down to lower voltages that some components require.
So now back to the original question, why shouldn't the Pi be powered by sending 5V straight through the GPIO pins into the 5V power rail? After all, it does work. But it skips all this protective circuitry that we just looked at. And so if there's a low quality or faulty power supply connected to the GPIO pins, there's a chance that it will damage the components on the board if something goes wrong, killing the Pi in the process and not just blowing the fuse like it would if it were connected to the proper power input.
So in order to avoid risking damage, a Raspberry Pi and similiar boards should always be powered through their dedicated power input.
The exception to this rule of course is if the circuit that sends power into the GPIO pins has the same type of protective circuitry on it that the original power input stage has, in which case the Pi is protected through that and powering it this way is fine.