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Electrical engineer, musician, out and about on two wheels, read a lot of books, coffee-addict.
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I turned today's Calvin and Hobbes comic into an animated GIF

2025-06-29 08:00:00

I love Calvin and Hobbes, and so pretty much every day I go to GoComics to see the day's new comic strip. Of course Bill Watterson stopped drawing Calvin and Hobbes in 1995, so today's strip is really from 1995 as the copyright notice in the image shows, but let's not be pedantic here. I still love it.

In today's strip Calvin draws a flip book animation (I hope that's the right term) in one of his dad's books, much to the chagrin of his dad of course.

I wanted to see what this sequence of images looked like as an animation, so I downloaded the image, cut it up and turned it into a GIF with the help of two web tools (this and this).

And here's what it looks like:

No idea why Dad got angry about that ;)

Join the Old Computer Challenge, 2025 edition!

2025-06-28 08:00:00

It's that time of the year again! The Old Computer Challenge 2025 was just announced to take place from July 13th to July 19th, and I'm really looking forward to joining once again. If you've been following me for a while or maybe all the way from the beginning, you know that the OCC was my gateway drug into the small web that I'm now a part of where people still write blogs and communicate via email or the fediverse and where nothing is owned and controlled by evil billionaires, and as such it has a bit of a special place in my heart.

This year's challenge has evolved into not being a themed challenge at all anymore (like it used to be) but rather a week dedicated to having fun with old or low powered hardware and software, and I think that's a good development. Everybody has their own definition of what an "old" system is, and so everyone can decide for themselves what they want to focus on and play around with for the week. That's how it was last year too, and people did a lot of cool stuff like making zines, using old netbooks, using an OS with no GUI etc. And I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone will come up with this year.

What am I going to do this year? I don't have a clue yet! But right now I'm most nostalgic for the late 90s/early 2000s era of computing and the web, so I will probably do something that lives in this time period. Maybe dust off an old laptop running Win2K, maybe use the white Macbook for a week (even though that's more mid 2000s), maybe set up a mini PC with Windows 98. Maybe all of it. Maybe something completely different. I don't know yet, but there's still time to figure it out.

So, if you like playing around with old systems, old software, old consoles, old typewriters or whatever else you might feel nostalgic about (or you never got to use back when it was new and want to try out for the first time), feel free to join the OCC this year. Have a look at the website, register your blog there, join the IRC channel (#oldcomputerchallenge on irc.libera.chat), join the forum, let us know what you're going to do and then have fun doing it and writing about it! The more people are involved, the more fun and interesting it gets.

Linkdump No 61

2025-06-27 08:00:00

Last week I mentioned that in order to make my blog searchable, I created a page that has the full text of all articles online. Well it turns out that that made the AI scrapers really happy because I saw a gigantic spike in traffic the next day, as they were hammering the page over and over again. Talk about unintended consequences... I complained about it on Mastodon and there were some great responses about how to keep the scrapers away. Have a look here if you're interested, and thanks everyone for your suggestions! On to the links.


Articles

Software/Services

Videos

  • Can I Write an Amiga Game? Trying Blitz Basic in 2025 - YouTube
    Neil from the Youtube channel RMC tries his hands at writing an Amiga game and takes us along on his journey of learning the programming language and creating his game.
  • Computer noises - YouTube
    Ben Eater makes some of the best in-depth videos about electronics and how (8 bit) computers function at the hardware level, and here he tackles how to make a computer create sound, from scratch.

Around the Small Web

  • Saving the Masters of the Elements From Getting Lost to Time: Part 1
    The first part of "getting an old game working on a modern version of Windows", which ends on a big cliffhanger... looking forward to reading part 2!
  • Mason Armand
    I was randomly browsing through Neocities sites, as you do, and this one jumped out at me - there's just something about its design. It looks retro in the best way possible. There's a lot more great looking sites on Neocities, have a look.

Misc

  • Web Design Museum - Discover old websites, apps and software
    This website has tons of screenshots from popular and less popular websites through the years. It's really fascinating to follow the evolution of a popular website like Apple.com through the years.
  • The Geocities Gallery
    This site attempts to restore as much of the old Geocities archive as possible, and it's a great nostalgia trip to browse through. It's a lot messier than the Web Design Museum above, but that's exactly what's fun about it.

I moved my Instagram posts here

2025-06-23 08:00:00

For a while I had an account on Instagram and I posted quite a lot of pictures there between 2017 and 2021. The account is still there, but I don't post there anymore because I've kind of fallen out of love with photography and because I disagree with my good friend and frequent guest on the blog Mark who runs Instagram about, you know, everything.

But I still like the pictures I took, and so I decided to host them on my own site instead. It was easier than expected actually because Instagram offers an export of all your data (once you know where to look, because they hide it pretty well) and this contains a html site which presents your pictures rather nicely already.

All I had to do was edit the code for this site a little to make it better fit in, and integrate it into the website. It's not perfect, but it works and it was surprisingly little work.

So now I have a photoblog! Maybe I should take more pictures again. Anyway, here it is, all my old Instagram photos, freed from the clutches of the evil oppressive empire and under my own control.

Feels good.

I can't tell reality and satire apart anymore

2025-06-21 08:00:00

I saw a news story yesterday the someone shared on Mastodon. It sounded intriguing, so I clicked it and I read it. I'm going to share the link with you in a moment, and I initially considered just putting it in my next linkdump, but I wanted to write a bit more than just two or three lines about it.

Here's the headline of the news post:

Exclusive / Reddit in talks to embrace Sam Altman’s iris-scanning Orb to verify users

And these are the first two paragraphs:

Reddit is considering using World ID, the verification system based on iris-scanning Orbs whose parent company was co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

According to two people familiar with the matter, World ID could soon become a way for Reddit users to verify that they are unique individuals while remaining anonymous on the platform.

Ok, here is the full post if you want to read it.

I had never heard of an iris scanning orb or a thing called "World ID" before, and I didn't do any research after reading this post. It stands in complete isolation to me, this is the first time that I'm hearing anything about it. I will look it up after I've written this, but right now that post is all I know.

And I realised, I have no idea if this is real or satire.

I used to be able to tell satire from reality pretty easily because satire is always just a bit too much and too over the top to be taken seriously.

This? It sounds absolutely batshit insane to me, and it feels like satire. Or something straight out of Black Mirror.

But we live in an absolutely batshit insane world now, and so it might just as well be real. Sam Altman might just as well have founded a company that is working on developing an orb that soon we all will be required to have next to our computers and let it scan our eyeballs to prove that we are human.

It's weird. The more I think about it the more it seems like this could actually be real. It certainly sounds like something someone like Altman would dream up and be actually convinced that this is a great idea and not a dystopian fever dream.

I'm going to read up on this now and see if this is actually real. But I wanted to share this feeling here before I do. We really live in a fucked up timeline, don't we.


I googled it. It's real.

The orb is used to verify a person’s World ID—a private, secure, digital passport that empowers millions of individuals to prove they’re human online. 

It does this by first using highly specialized sensors to ensure the person standing in front of it is a human. It then takes and processes a series of iris images to create an iris code, which is a digital representation of the texture of the iris. The iris code is used to verify that the person is unique and has not verified a World ID before.

It "empowers" me to prove that I'm human. Right. Okay.

Can I please be transferred to a saner timeline?

Linkdump No 60

2025-06-20 08:00:00

Remember when I said that I wanted to keep the number of links down? Well it turns out, I suck at it. There's just too much interesting stuff I want to share (and keep, because this is also my personal bookmarking tool of choice here).

Btw, a friend pointed out that it would be nice if my blog was searchable, and I absolutely agree with him. Zolas search sucks however, so I decided to just dump the full text of all posts onto this page (the one that you reach when you click "blog" in the navigation bar) and you can search through them with the search function of your browser. That's gone because it created a ton of traffic by allowing AI scrapers to just access this one site and conveniently download everything. Whoops. Talk about unintended consequences. Anyway, here are the links.


Articles

Software/Services

Videos

  • I weighed an airplane... while it was flying! - YouTube
    This is seriously one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time! Flying object don't become weightless just because they're up in the air, they keep their weight (duh) and that weight is transferred to the ground through the air underneath the object. And so, if you put up a sensitive enough scale, you can measure the weight of an airplane flying overhead, and that's what AlphaPhoenix does here, after visualising the theory behind it with paper airplanes.
  • Convenience is Destroying Culture - YouTube
    A great video about the impact that hiding the inner workings of devices and making everything as convenient and easily accessible as possible has on us as a society. (via)

Around the Small Web

  • # Don’t Make a Blog, Make a Brain Dump
    If you think writing a blog is not for you because you're not a journalist or a professional writer and you don't have anything to say anyway, then I recommend reading this post. And then I recommend getting started :) (via)
  • 🔗 In Praise of Links
    Of course a page with a title like this has to be included here! I saw it on Zak's Link Stash, so now I'm linking you to a page about links that I found on another page about links on my page about links. Yeah.
  • weblogs: a history and perspective
    This is included in the post above, but I found it fascinating so I wanted to point it out here too... a history and perspective of weblogs from the year 2000. It's so early that the term blog hasn't been fully established yet, and the author makes a distinction between blogs and weblogs. Interestingly, the page is still up 25 years later, but I dug out the earliest available capture on the wayback machine for authenticity and nostalgia.
  • How much EU is in DNS4EU? :: Techlog
    Have you heard that the EU is now running its own DNS infrastructure, to be more independent from technologies from... ahem... countries with dubious leadership? Well here's a look at how European these European DNS servers really are. The results will surprise you. Not.
  • Classic Web (@[email protected]) - Indieweb.Social
    A Mastodon account run by Web 2.0 veteran Richard MacManus that regularly posts screenshots of old websites. It's bite-sized nostalgia delivered straight to your feed :)
  • One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Photo Op
    Kind of the same thing, but as a tumblr blog. Which is fitting, because tumblr itself is also a legacy platform these days.