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Electrical engineer, musician, out and about on two wheels, read a lot of books, coffee-addict.
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Linkdump No 52

2025-04-25 08:00:00

You know, sometimes I struggle writing these intros. I mean, what's been happening this week? We learned (once again) that big corporations and their high level executives are behaving like gigantic AI company logos while ordinary people write and build and do amazing things. In other words, it's been a completely ordinary week. I still found some cool stuff that I think is worth sharing, so let's dive in!

Articles

Software/Services

  • Rockbox - Rockbox mail archive
    A new version of Rockbox, the alternative Firmware for iPods and other mp3 players was released. Haven't had a chance to try it yet, but i have an iPod classic so I'll definitely give it a try over the weekend.
  • adwaitapod • d00k.net
    I've mentioned it in some old articles before, but now is a good time to recommend it again - D00k (Evan) made a theme for iPods running Rockbox, and it's simply amazing. He continues working on it and occasionally posts updates on his Mastodon account.

Videos

  • Commodore 64 from Scratch: CPU Design and Build. - YouTube
    Building a C64 from scratch - but not in the way that you usually see on Youtube where people buy a newly manufactured case, a new mainboard and so on and put together a computer in this way, but like really from scratch, using off the shelf logic chips and starting to recreate the functionality of the machine in this way? That's what this guy is doing. It's the first in a series of 9 videos that have yet to be released, it's very in depth, but it's endlessly fascinating (if you're into this sort of thing of course).
  • 68000 - The CPU ahead of its time - YouTube
    Speaking of CPUs, MVG takes a look at the CPU that powered many of our favourite machines, from the Amiga 500, the Atari ST and the Apple Macintosh to the Sega Megadrive and a number of high-end Texas Instruments calculators. If the previous video is too technical for you, this one's a bit easier to digest ;)

Around the Small Web

  • Strange Coincidences
    Armin followed my challenge and wrote about some weird coincidences that happened to him.
  • Why I'm Expanding My Blogging Presence | MyNotes
    Stefano decided to take up writing a personal blog again and I immediately subscribed because I've been following him for a while now on Mastodon and I really like his writing and his take on things.
  • Honest and Elitist Thoughts on Why Computers Were More Fun Before
    Carl throws out a controversial idea: "Computers were more fun when they weren't for everyone". I'm sure not everybody will agree with it, but I can see his point and I mean, I am here in this retrocomputing space for a reason, so who am I to disagree ;) Jon is in the same boat.
  • C64 Assembly In Parts | Hackaday
    Michał Sapka started teaching himself C64 assembler and he made it on Hackaday with his posts about it, so congratulations!
  • Are you f* kidding me, Apple?!
    Apple cares deeply about its users and the quality of their products, so they aim to improve their latest barely functioning pile of garbage gift to the world by training it on the personal data of the few remaining people who are still submitting bug reports to them. Way to go, Apple! Gotta keep the shareholders happy!

Misc

  • Out-of-Print Archive
    This is a fantastic project - an archive of old games magazines from before 2000 that focuses on quality of the scans and on completeness of the collection. I really love projects like these; I wish there was something like this for magazines from Germany, too.

Coincidences

2025-04-20 08:00:00

I have no idea why, but yesterday thoughts of some weird coincidences that happened to me over the years popped into my head, so I thought why not write some of them down.


A few years ago was the 20th anniversary of graduating school, and we had a reunion of our class at our old school. I was planning to go, but my girlfriend came down with Covid three days before, and I decided to skip the reunion because I was sure I was also going to get it and I didn't want to get anyone sick, especially not my parents where I would have stayed (I live about 200km from where I grew up and went to school). A friend went to the reunion and shared some pictures with me, and there was one woman in the pictures I didn't recognise at all at first. After he told me her name I remembered that she was in our class but dropped out years before graduation. I hadn't thought about her in at least 25 years.

One week later I was just randomly walking through the city centre in my current home town when I bumped into this exact woman. Turns out she lives in the same city now. Had I not seen this picture a week prior, I would have never recognised her.

Oh, and I didn't get Covid of course.


As a student, I lived in Italy for a few months where I did an internship at a local tech company.

Years later I was back in Italy, in a completely different city, visiting a friend who was doing an internship in a company there. We were walking through town when I heard my name being called from behind. I turned around and one of my fellow interns from that company I used to work at stood there, staring at me in disbelief. She was also just randomly in town on that day, and we happened to cross paths.


I first moved to the city I live in in 2011, and then in 2015 to a different part of town where I still live today. A few years ago I bought something from a local seller off of classified ads. The seller gave me his address, and it was my old address... and when I showed up it turned out he lived in the exact apartment I had lived in before. So around seven years after moving out from there, I was suddenly back in my old apartment; only it wasn't mine anymore. That was a pretty crazy feeling!


Years ago I was in a sports class and I became friends with some of the people there. The person I got along with the best was a girl a bit younger than me, and we're still good friends to this day. After maybe two years of knowing these guys, having a Whatsapp group and occasionally hanging out with them outside of the sports class too, I invited them over to my place. Then the following conversation unfolded:

Her: "What's your last name again? [to ring the right doorbell]"
Me: "It's xyz"
Her: "I know a Marianne with that name"
Me: "My sister is a Marianne with that name"
Her: "I know my Marianne from attending University in K"
Me: "My sister went to University in K..."

As it turned out, she and my sister were next door neighbours and in their University dorm and they were best friends back then. Years later and in a completely different city she and I crossed paths and struck up a friendship too. And it only took us two years to figure it all out!


And there we are, just a few random stories I felt like telling.

But maybe this could be another blogging challenge - what are some of the craziest coincidences that happened to you? I'm not going to challenge anyone by name here, but I'm going to challenge you. I'm sure everyone has stories like these and I'd love to hear them, so write them down, share them on your blog and let me know.

Oh, and happy Easter to you if you're celebrating, and if not then happy weekend!

Linkdump No 51

2025-04-18 08:00:00

This week marks the first anniversary of my (nearly almost) weekly linkdumps! I wrote the first one on April 20th last year, and due to its historical significance it has been preserved here in its original form for future generations to marvel at.

I started numbering them right from the start so I had clearly intended to write more of them, but I don't think I planned to make it into a weekly series, that kind of just happened naturally. Friday is my day off from work and so it has become my Friday morning habit to bring my laptop to my favourite Café and sit down with a good great cup of coffee and put together a new linkdump. I think I missed two weeks due to being ill, but otherwise I'm surprised myself with how consistent I've been at writing these. In fact, let's analyse why I've been so consistent:

  • I made it a habit that I do at the same place at the same time every week
  • I made it enjoyable by having a cup of coffee and being at a nice place
  • I made it fun because I get to pick which links I put in, I write a little story for each link and occasionally I come up with a silly intro, just because I feel like it
  • And one of the biggest factors - I often get very nice and encouraging feedback from you, which is really heart warming and motivating because it tells me that people like and enjoy what I'm doing here.

So with that I want to say a heartfelt thank you for subscribing, reading, following along, commenting, sending me messages and just generally making this a very enjoyable experience! And now let's see what the AI has in store for us this week. You might be surprised...

Articles

  • Why do AI company logos look like [redacted]?
    Nature has this weird quirk where it loves to evolve crabs over and over again, and it seems AI company logos also all evolve into a particular shape... I had to censor the headline to not spoil the fun, but this is by far my favourite article about AI from the last couple of months.
  • Retro Gamers Like To Revisit The Games They Played When They Were 10 | IFLScience
    Breaking news: We're nostalgic about the things that we used to love when we were kids. I'm not a big gamer, but I can absolutely see myself in this - some of my favourite games are the Monkey Island adventures I played on my Amiga and Super Mario World which I played at a friend's house who had a SNES. Oh, and Stunt Car Racer! Anyone remember this? Why is there no modern remake of this game? I would buy it...
  • A winter wedding photography workshop in Denmark
    The title might lead you to believe that this is just a post about how to take pretty pictures of a bride in a white dress, but it's so much more than that. It's a reflection about being with a group of like-minded people, being in nature, being exposed to the elements and working on your craft. It's calm and quiet and profound and it really speaks to me. The pictures he posts are also just stunning and leaps and bounds above the usual cheesy wedding photographs. I highly recommend checking out this article.

Hardware Projects

  • What if - Commodore C64C Mini with working Petscii Keyboard - YouTube
    This person made the C64 mini into a C64C mini with a functioning keyboard. Honestly this video should have been a blog post, but the C64C (which is the later revision) is the one that my dad had when I was a kid, so this is the more nostalgic one for me and this one looks great.
  • The Typewriter - a wooden distraction free writing device
    I know, I know - you can just take an old laptop, install a minimal Linux distro with a text editor and you get the exact same thing. But I like single purpose devices, I like a good DIY project and I like the idea of having a devices that's made to just write and nothing else.

Around the Small Web

I made the harddrives in my desktop computer swappable

2025-04-16 08:00:00

Here's a slightly stupid, but fun little thing I recently did. I bought a device off of Ebay which I'm not entirely sure how to call in English. Amazon suggests it's called mobile rack, maybe? [Edit: I've been informed by Dave and наб on Mastodon that it's called a hot-swappable drive bay. Thanks!]. Looks like this:

It's a hard disk bay that allows you to quickly swap drives in and out without crawling around under the desk and opening the computer. I stuck this in my desktop PC and now I can quickly swap drives in an out. Neat, huh?

Why though?

Glad you asked! I realised I have a stack of old spinning hard drives and small SSDs lying around from upgrading to larger storage over the years, and I didn't really know what to do with them so they were just kind of sitting in a drawer, collecting dust.

I also like playing around with different operating systems, and sometimes I need different OSes for different tasks. My main OS is and will probably always be Linux, but I also (kind of reluctantly) have a copy of Windows 10 running for making music because a lot of pro audio software is only available for Windows or Mac, and audio on Linux has always been kind of a pain, so I prefer running this on the OS it's meant to run on.

So I always had one SSD with Linux and one with Windows in the computer anyway, and I thought if I make them easily removable and swappable then I can potentially have many more drives with different software for different tasks available that I can just swap in whenever I need them.

Now just to get this out of the way - yes I know I can just install the drives inside the computer. I know I can install multiple OSes on the same drive. I also know about booting from USB and about virtualisation.

But this solution just feels kind of nice. Now I have a stack of drives on my desk, and when I sit down at the computer I pick the drive that's right for what I want to do. Make music? Put in the music making SSD. Code or surf the web? Put in the Linux SSD. Game? Put in the gaming SSD. Ponder if I'm really living life to the fullest? Put in an old spinning hard drive and watch a boot screen for ten minutes until the desktop appears. The possibilities are endless!

For real, this feels a little like going back to the days of physical media, where you had a box of floppy disks next to your computer, or a stack of cartridges for your console and you would pick one and put it in before starting up the machine. Having a boot selector that allows you to pick which OS you want to start when you turn on the computer is no doubt more convenient, but this here just has a different feel to it. And it cost next to nothing; the mobile rack was 5€ used, I already had a bunch of SSDs and mechanical drives lying around and if I need more, a 128GB SSD can be had for less than 10€.

I don't know where I'm going to take this yet, but I can totally see myself setting up a disk with a retro gaming distro, or maybe one that boots straight into an emulated Windows 98 setup... and maybe I should get an old floppy disk storage box to keep my disks safe.

On blogging and negativity

2025-04-14 08:00:00

Here's a few unstructured thoughts I've been mulling over recently about the direction of this blog, the state of the world, spreading negativity and all the rest of it. This post is largely inspired by two posts over on Brandon's journal, "Is Anyone Else Tired of the Internet?" and "Re: I’m Part of the Problem", which I highly recommend reading.

So... the world is kind of shitty right now, isn't it? As a brief recap, here's a summary of what's been happening over the last six months or so: Everything sucks. The end. Thanks for reading!

I don't like what's going on right now, not in the world of tech, not in the world of politics, not in the world in general. I'm pissed off. Many of us are. I could probably write half a book about how pissed off I am, how shitty everything is, how much I hate what the rich and the powerful are doing to society and the internet and the world as a whole.

But should I?

Would it help anything? Would it make the world any better? Would it make me feel better? It might be cathartic, though how much this is actually true is at least up for debate. And would it make you as the reader feel better? Would anyone even want to read it?

Well at least to that last question I have an answer. Remember that Elon Musk post I put out a few weeks ago? Chances are you don't, because hardly anyone read it. I checked the logs. It got around 200 hits on the day I published it, and most of them were from Mastodon bots accessing the URL because I announced it in a post. Many other posts get 600, 800, sometimes over 1000 hits on the first day. So there's a pretty clear data point: Nobody wants to read this kind of thing.

Including me.

If I see a blog post titled "Why Musk is awful" or something along those lines, I'm going to skip it. I recently limited my exposure to the news precisely because I was sick of seeing Trumps and Musks stupid mugs every single day on every single site. I'm sick of them and I don't want to talk or hear or read about them and their entourage anymore. Fuck them. I hope Trump's hair falls out. I hope Musk's ketamine addiction makes him stupid. Actually, that last one might have already happened...

Okay, deep breath. At the end of the day, it is what it is. The world is pretty crappy right now, I can't do much about it, I still have to live my life and I turn to the internet for a bit of fun and distraction. I love reading posts where people talk about messing around with old hardware, or setting up their homelab, or rewatching old TV shows. Where people talk about their latest camping trips, review books or songs or movies or just talk about what's been going on in their life, their philosophy, their values. That's the kind of content I like, because it makes me feel good.


Now, I don't want to talk about anyone else or speak for anyone else here. After all, we all have our personal websites because that's where we can write about whatever we want to write about, without anyone being able to tell us what to do or not to do. That's perfect, and that's how things are supposed to be.

At the same time though, if all we do is write about how terrible everything is, and how angry we are, and every blog post is just doom and gloom, then this place (the small web) will also stop being fun. And that would be a shame.

How do we deal with this?

At least for me, moving forward I'll do my best to keep the negativity in check. I'm going to focus more on writing about things I like rather than things I dislike. Ranting or venting is okay in small doses, but overall I want to write about fun things, music, books, retro tech, or just random stuff that pops into my head sometimes and that I think is worth sharing. I think that's better for me, and it's probably also more fun to read than post after post about how terrible everything is. We all know that already anyway.

So, more fun and uplifting stuff, less complaining about politics and AI. There's enough good things to think and write about. One exception though: I reserve the right to relentlessly poke fun at the awful people in the world, because a) they deserve it and b) what better way to deal with them than to laugh at them.

So that's it, rant over. Thanks for reading, and now we will return back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Linkdump No 50

2025-04-11 08:00:00

Linkdump number 50! Can you believe it? In celebration of this milestone, this post will be fully AI generated and contain nothing but articles about how humans will soon be enslaved and made to serve their new AI overlords or face extinction a bright and glorious future for us all where man and machine will live in perfect harmony and everything is amazing and there will be absolutely no need for anyone to, say, scorch the sky or join an underground resistance, that's for sure!

Articles

  • Wealthy Americans have death rates on par with poor Europeans - Ars Technica
    I have a friend who is a medical doctor and who used to work in the US for a while... she came back almost traumatised by the state of healthcare and health in general over there. That's anecdotal of course, but this article backs it up with pretty shocking numbers.
  • This thing will fail
    This is a long article, and CW it's about Trump, but it's somewhat uplifting because the author argues that Trumpism will ultimately fail because it's not about building a community or bringing people together, rather it's divisive and hate-filled and ultimately morally empty.

Software/Services

Hardware Projects

  • Self-Hosting A Cluster On Old Phones | Hackaday
    Smartphones are some of the most frustrating devices ever, because they have an insane amount of compute power, but because they're so locked down and lack any real kind of i/o there's not much you can do with them once they become obsolete, even though they pack just as much if not a lot more power than your typical Raspberry Pi-style SBC. It's good to see projects like these that still make use of old phones.

Videos

  • f4mi - YouTube
    Not a video, but an entire channel. F4mi (Fami) makes videos about retro tech, but because she's from a younger generation her videos focus on tech from the 2000s, which in my opinion is the last interesting era of tech before everything was crushed into the "glass rectangle with a screen" form factor and became mind-numbingly boring and forgettable.

Around the Small Web

  • The ultimate twilight of creativity — tearoom.earth
    A reflection about the meaning of creativity in a world where seemingly every story has already been told and where everything can be generated by AI at the push of a button (or the input of a prompt). "[...] whatever it is, don’t make AI do all the work for you. It’s really neither fun nor rewarding." Exactly.