2025-01-26 08:00:00
Earlier this week, and in fact for the last few weeks due to certain events in the world, I fell down a news rabbit hole. I would excessively scroll news sites, jump from site to site, read all the articles about certain topics, refresh and start at the top again. I had gotten addicted to doomscrolling the news, just like people get addicted to endlessly scrolling Instagram, TikTok, X and so on. It wasn’t good for my mental health, and it just took a lot of time that could have been spent doing something more fulfilling instead. So I had to stop.
By now though I know myself well enough to know that I can’t just decide to not look at the news anymore and then it’s decided and done. That’s not how my brain works, and in fact that’s not how most peoples brains work. I might have the best intentions, but as soon as I’m stressed or bored I’ll go right back to my “addictive” behaviour, which is to pick up the phone or the laptop and start checking the news again, probably without even realising that I’m doing it.
So what do I do? Behavioural psychology tells us that in order to stop doing something we don’t want to or should not be doing, we have to make the unwanted behaviour harder to do and to remove or replace the internal and external triggers that trigger the behaviour in the first place. In my case this means making accessing the news more difficult and impractical to do, removing the external trigger that causes me to doomscroll (maybe it’s a bad idea to have the phone in my pocket all the time, and to have the laptop sitting on the couch right next to me) and to figure out what to do instead when the internal triggers of boredom and stress arise.
I decided to start by making accessing the news more difficult. So I made a list of all the sites I don’t want to look at anymore and then I blocked access to them. There’s a lot of different ways to do this, some are easier than others, some require installing additional software and some can be done with the setup you already have. I have a Pi-hole ad blocker running on my network which makes blocking access to unwanted domains really easy and available for all my devices, so I went down this route. If you don’t have something like this running, there’s still options, and I’ll give you some pointers later.
Here’s what I did:
First, I created a list of all the sites I want to block. It looks something like this:
0.0.0.0 heise.de
0.0.0.0 www.heise.de
0.0.0.0 golem.de
0.0.0.0 www.golem.de
0.0.0.0 spiegel.de
0.0.0.0 www.spiegel.de
0.0.0.0 zeit.de
0.0.0.0 www.zeit.de
0.0.0.0 tagesschau.de
0.0.0.0 www.tagesschau.de
And so on, you get the idea. The 0.0.0.0 means that access to any of these domains will be redirected to the IP address 0.0.0.0, in other words the request from my browser to access one of these sites will be sent into the void and the site cannot be reached, which is exactly what I want. (Yes I know I could use regular expressions to include subdomains, but this was quick and easy to set up and it does everything I need.)
I then saved this file in a folder on my web server and pointed Pi-hole to it under the “Adlist” section. i could have also just listed the individual domains in Pi-hole under the “Domains” section, but I kind of like the idea of having everything I want to block in a single file. Once this is done, Pi-hole needs to be told to load the file either by running pihole -g on the command line or by navigating to “Tools -> Update Gravity” and clicking the update button.
The result is that when I enter one of the above URLs in my browser, I just get a “page not found” error, which is exactly what I want 1. And the nice thing about using a global ad blocker like Pi-hole for this is that it works for all devices in my home, even for the phone as long as it’s on WiFi.
So, does it work for me?
Surprisingly, yes. I feel a bit out of the loop, but nowhere near as bad as I thought I would. Sometimes I have the impulse to look at a news site, and it’s usually (no surprise there) when I’m bored and I don’t know what to do next. These are the times when I reach for the phone or the laptop and start scrolling, but just knowing that I can’t do that because most things that would usually grab my attention are blocked is already enough to discourage me from picking up the device altogether or at least from spending too much time on it. I still check Mastodon and my RSS feeds way too often, so that’s something to keep working on, but blocking the news is definitely a good thing.
So if you’re like me and you find yourself spending way too much time on news sites or Facebook or YouTube or whatever it may be, try blocking it and see how it goes. It’s easily reversible of course, but for me at least it adds just enough friction to discourage me from constantly unblocking and re-blocking the sites, and that’s all that’s needed it seems.
But how do I keep up to date now with what’s currently going on in the world? Well…
This is the Sunday newspaper, which hopefully covers everything of relevance that happened during the week, and it also goes more in depth on a lot of topics than online news articles usually do. I haven’t read a newspaper in forever, so I’m really curious to see if that’s enough for me to feel like I’m informed about what’s going on in the world without following the hyperactive news cycle. I’ll give it a try, and maybe there will be a part 2 to this post in a few weeks.
I still need to figure out how to stay up to date on tech news, so if you have any good ideas on that, let me know!
So what if you want to block some sites on your computer but you don’t have Pi-hole or a similar solution running on your network? You can do the same thing locally on your computer. Just write the things I posted above into the hosts file on your computer and it will do the exact same thing, redirect access to these sites to nowhere 1. The hosts file exists on every operating system, here’s where you can find and how to edit it:
On Linux: /etc/hosts
On Windows: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
On MacOS: /private/etc/hosts
You could also install a browser extension that blocks certain sites, or if you’re already using an ad blocker extension like uBlock Origin, you can add the sites you want to block in the settings under “my filters”. On mobile things are probably a bit trickier, but I’m sure there’s apps that can block certain URLs, though I haven’t looked into this.
2025-01-24 08:00:00
So, it’s Friday again, another week has passed. And well…. it has been a week. Maybe it’s best not talk about it. I decided to go on a news diet yesterday and so I’m blissfully unaware about what’s been happening recently, and it’s probably for the best. Here are some links that I promise are totally safe to click on.
Articles
Around the Small Web
Misc
2025-01-19 08:00:00
There’s this idea that people like our friend Mark Zuckerberg have been pushing on us all for the past two decades, that we need to be connected to the whole world. Wouldn’t it be great to have one platform that everybody is on and everybody can share their opinions on things on, so we can all talk to one another and be one happy family of humans? Well as it turns out, no, it’s not great. In fact, it’s an absolutely terrible idea.
For most of human history, which spans about 300.000 years, humans lived in small tribes or villages of a few dozen to a few hundred individuals at most. Dunbar’s number suggests that we can maintain stable social relationships with around 150 people, give or take a few dozen, because that’s the number of people that we had around us for most of our existence as humanity, and that’s what our brains evolved to be able to handle comfortably.
Only in relatively recent history did we start to live in cities with tens or hundreds of thousands of people in them. Even more recently we invented electronic means of communication, first the telegraph, then the telephone, and then the internet. Then we made telephones and the internet wireless and accessible from everywhere, not just from a device tethered to the wall in your home. And then we invented social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and all the rest of it. So now, for the first time in human history, we can be connected with people all over the planet at the same time, all the time. If I’m bored waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store, I can just pull out my phone and read what some guy on the other side of the planet has posted five seconds ago.
And while that might sound like a good idea on paper, our brains have not evolved to handle this. On his podcast, Cal Newport often calls this “a neolithic brain trying to get by in the modern world”. When a person in my immediate circle or neighbourhood is behaving antisocially by being openly racist or homophobic or threatening towards anyone, I have an emotional reaction to that and an urge to push back, because it affects me. I’m right there after all. When a random person on a different continent is doing the same thing online, it doesn’t affect me in the slightest. I don’t know the person, I’ve never met them and never will. But my stone age brain doesn’t know that, and my emotional reaction is the same as if that person were in the same room with me.
And now we couple this with an algorithmic sorting of the messages that people post which ensures that I always get to see the most outrageous stuff in my timeline, because that causes an emotional reaction, which makes me interact with that person, which means I stay on the platform longer and make the platform money, and we have an explosive situation at our hands.
Zuck, Dorsey, Musk and friends know that of course. But they either ignore and downplay the negative effects their platforms have because changing something would hurt their bottom line, or they openly fuel the fire and enjoy seeing just how far they can drive the division of society. We’re all witnessing in real time what happens when a big social network is being taken over by a emotionally unstable person who is fundamentally unsuitable to run it.
It’s 2025, social networks have been around for about 20 years, and by now we can pretty confidently say we’ve run the experiment, the results are in and it’s pretty clear this stuff isn’t working the way it was intended to.
So what do we do? Abandon all hope and sit in a corner and cry? Sometimes I feel like it… But I think a more productive and meaningful approach is to get off these networks. Leave Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok and whatever else you’re using behind. Delete your accounts, delete the apps from your phone and don’t get on these platforms anymore. Block them if you have to.
But you don’t have to become a hermit and go offline permanently. Instead, you can use the internet in a way that is more compatible with the way our brains work. Find smaller communities around things you like and interests you have. Are you interested in board games? Retro computers? Knitting? Woodworking? Reading? You can start looking for blogs, online forums, small Mastodon instances etc. that center around the thing you’re interested in. Then follow these blogs, register specifically to those forums or smaller networks, and interact with the people there. It might take a while, but you can find like-minded people on the internet who share your interests and values, and you can build a community around that, engage with the people there and ignore the rest. If you’re particularly adventurous, you can even try to find local groups around your particular topic of interest, join them and then actually meet and hang out with people in real life. Crazy, right?
The point is, you don’t need to be connected to the whole world and read every little outrageous thing that people all over the world are writing all the time. It’s terrible for you and your mental health, and it’s terrible for society as a whole. Find a community of people that share your values and interests, interact with them and ignore the rest. You’ll be better off, I can pretty much guarantee it.
2025-01-17 08:00:00
It’s below freezing outside, I’m sitting in my favourite Café with a nice warm cup of coffee, and a minute ago a guy wearing shorts walked in and sat down next to me. And I can’t stop wondering - what’s up with that? Did he forget to put on pants this morning? Has he failed to notice that it’s the middle of January and he’s living in Germany? Unfortunately I’m too shy to ask, so I guess we’ll never learn the answer. But we can console ourselves with some interesting links at least.
Articles
Software/Services
Videos
Around the Small Web
2025-01-14 08:00:00
Chris O’Donnell has tagged me in this year’s blogging about blogging challenge, and it’s been a while since I last blogged about blogging, so why not blog a little about blogging. You know?
I thought about starting a blog or a website for a very long time, but never felt that I had anything to say that people might be interested in. When I discovered the Old Computer Challenge in 2023 and saw that a lot of people were blogging about it, I thought yes, that’s something I have things to say about, so I decided to just go for it and give it a try.
I’m currently using Hugo. I didn’t want to use a CMS like Wordpress, I wanted something that I understood and was in control of. At first I thought about writing the entire page by hand, but when I discovered SSGs (static site generators) it felt like that was exactly what I was looking for; I could write the framework of the site by hand but then the SSG would take care of actually assembling everything.
Hugo was an impulse decision because it seemed to be the most popular one and I had to learn from scratch how the whole SSG thing worked anyway, so I just went for that.
I’m not totally happy with it to be honest, there’s still some stuff I don’t really understand and recently an update broke the generation of my site, so I had to roll back to a previous version… but unless I find the time and energy to research other SSGs or write my own, I guess I’m sticking with it.
Nope, first time blogger here :)
Posts in Hugo are written in markdown, and I use Obsidian for that. I have imported the contents folder of my blog as a vault into Obsidian and write the posts in there.
I did my best to automate the process; I have a script that I call with the name of the post as an argument and it creates the file in the correct folder from a template with all the relevant metadata already filled in, so I can start writing straight away.
For publishing I have another script that runs Hugo, commits the new post to a git repo, pushes the repo to my webspace, there it checks out the latest commit, moves everything into the correct folder, announces the post on Mastodon and gives me back the URL of the Mastodon post. Then I copy the Mastodon URL, paste it into the metadata of the blog post and rerun the publishing script. This automatically creates the “Reply on Mastodon” line at the bottom of every post.
It sounds like a complicated process and it kind of is, but because everything is scripted it’s really just “run script, write post, run other script” and that’s it.
I like writing in coffee shops, so I have developed this routine of going to a Café on the weekends and bringing my laptop with me, and a lot of my posts were written or started/finished there. But I also write at home sometimes when I have an idea for a post.
It depends. The linkdumps I usually write in a single sitting and then publish them immediately, with the other posts it’s maybe 50/50… some I write from start to finish and hit publish straight away, but I also have a drafts file with a dozen or so posts in various stages of completion that I come back to regularly.
I don’t really have a favourite, but I always enjoyed writing about the OCC because that’s what I started out with and there’s a very nice community around the event.
Yes, in 2025 we’re committed to continue working hard on bringing the most value possible to our readers by integrating affiliate links and sponsored slots into the blog, and we’ll soon be ready to announce our new premium membership program where subscribers can get early access as well as exclusive behind the scenes footage….
No, the plan is to just keep writing, stay consistent and given the current state of the world, try to find some positive and uplifting things to write about so that we all won’t go completely crazy. Hopefully.
I’m going to nominate Matto, Jon and Dom.
Update: Here are their posts.
2025-01-12 08:00:00
If you’re in your early thirties or older, you remember the breakneck pace at which computers were improving in the 90s and 2000s. If you brought home a shiny new 400MHz Pentium 2 system in 1998, it was literally outdated and replaced by a faster model with higher clock speed and more RAM/bigger harddrive by the time you had set it up and gotten familiar with it. But that’s not the case anymore, and it hasn’t been the case in a long time.
Of course today the development of hardware and the rate at which CPUs are improving is still fast and Intel, AMD, Apple etc are still coming out with faster and better chips all the time. By now though we’ve reached such a high level that unless you’re a high profile YouTuber who has the desparate need in his life to slash the render time of his 4k videos in half, dude!!!, there is simply no need for this amount of processing power for the average person. Certainly not for me.
In 2011 I bought a desktop system with an Intel i5 2500k CPU. It wasn’t the fastest machine available at the time, but it was pretty good. In 2019, eight years later I kind of felt the itch to upgrade and have something faster, so I got a system with a Ryzen 5 3600. Again, not the fastest machine you could buy, but pretty good. And it definitely was faster than the old i5, everything felt much snappier and the computer outperformed its predecessor in every possible way.
Now this system is 6 years old, and I’m starting to feel that same itch again. I haven’t upgraded my computer in a while, so maybe it’s time for something new? Ryzen 9000 maybe? With or without X3D?
But here’s the thing: I don’t need it. I don’t have a single usecase for which I would need this much processing power. In fact, I could still use that i5 from 2011 and it would do everything I want it to do perfectly fine. I didn’t need to upgrade, I just wanted to. And I don’t need to upgrade now either. That Ryzen 3600 system is still plenty fast, and it will be for the rest of the decade at least. I’m writing this post right now on an 11 year old laptop. I write all my posts on this laptop. It’s fine. It works. No need to replace it. And no need to replace the desktop system, which is at least twice as fast as that laptop, either.
And this means that until something drastic and unforeseeable happens in tech or in my life, for the rest of my life I will never have to buy a brand new computer again. I can just keep using the hardware that I have for as long as it works, which is hopefully at least a decade, and when something inevitably breaks or just doesn’t cut it anymore, then I can replace it with a five year old component from the used market that my friend the YouTuber just had to get rid of because those slow ass render times, dude!!!, and I’ll be fine.