2026-01-19 08:00:00
Over the last few weeks and months I read a few books about the history of the early internet, so I thought why not talk about them here a bit. I haven't written a book review in ages, so maybe it's time to start doing that again.
Of course this book has to be on the list. It's the autobiography of the man himself, Tim Berners-Lee who single-handedly invented the internet, cured cancer and solved the climate crisis. Ok, he's not that fantastic, but he came up with the concept of the World Wide Web, which is used synonymously with the term internet today, though according to him that's not entirely accurate. The internet in the form of interconnected computer networks had already existed for a number of years, but what was missing was the "killer app" as we would say today that made it attractive to the masses, and that's what Sir Tim came up with at CERN in 1991 with the idea of hypertext, links that allowed you to easily jump from place to place and the web browser that made viewing information on the internet really easy.
The book starts out as his autobiography, describing his upbringing, education at Oxford, how he ended up at CERN in Switzerland and how he came up with the idea and the implementation of the world wide web. Then it turns into more of an autobiography of the web itself, how it developed and changed over the following decades and his involvement in the process. This makes the book feel a little disjointed and I preferred the autobiographical parts over the descriptions of the evolving technology, but it is a great read nevertheless.
What I like the most about Tim Berners-Lee is that because of his academic (rather than corporate) background, he's always been and continues to be an advocate for an open web which isn't controlled by corporations, and the importance of having such a prominent figure working tirelessly to keep the web open cannot be understated.
In 2003, Richard MacManus started a blog called ReadWriteWeb which in the following years became one of the big tech blogs of its time. In Bubble Blog: From Outsider to Insider in Silicon Valley's Web 2.0 Revolution he talks about his experience as an A-list blogger in the 2000s and how the blogging scene grew and developed during this time.
It's been a few months since I read it, so I don't remember many details, but it's a great read which takes us through his beginnings as a blogger, his frequent travels to Silicon Valley where he met many of the other famous tech bloggers of the day, to the acquisition of his blog by Say Media in 2011 and his leaving the company a year after the sale.
Richard is still blogging today, he runs the excellent blog Cybercultural where he chronicles the history of the internet through his unique point of view. He also has a presence on the Fediverse and like Tim Berners-Lee, he's an advocate for the open web.
The full title of the book is Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters. It's the story of how blogging became blogging, from the first people who started sharing links and personal stories on their own websites in the early 90s when the term blog or "weblog" as it was first called wasn't even invented, all the way through the "golden age" of blogs in the 2000s.
It's a fascinating read full of insights into long forgotten websites and blogs, like the first linkblog at the URL links.net written by a man named Justin Hall (here's the first capture of the site in the Internet Archive), who I'd never heard of until I read about it here.
The book spends maybe a bit too much time on the early bloggers like Justin Hall, but overall I enjoyed it a lot. It was written and therefore ends in the late 2000s when blogging was starting to decline and social media was on the rise, but we were still a few years away from algorithmically curated feeds which are the norm now. They had no idea back then what was coming...
I couldn't put this one down. The full title is Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner and it's a very detailed account of the botched merger between the established media corporation Time Warner and the (thanks to the dot com boom) grossly overvalued online provider AOL. This merger went down in history as one of the worst, if not the worst company mergers of all time. Two years after merging, the company was worth a fraction of what each individual company was valued at before.
What went wrong? According to the book, everything. A narcissistic and out of touch upper management, an insurmountable incompatibility in working culture between the two companies, individual departments actively working against each other, fraud, an overheated market which grossly overvalued AOL and which started to deflate pretty much the day after the merger was announced, and on and on. Pretty much nothing worked the way the CEOs of the two companies had envisioned, and after all was said and done thousands of jobs and billions of dollars had been wiped out. The only winners were the CEOs Jerry Levin and Steve Case who were responsible for the whole fiasco, because they both bailed out with millions of dollars in the bank and left it to their subordinates to clean up the mess they created.
If you remember this merger and were left wondering how they could get this so wrong, I highly recommend checking out this book.
2026-01-16 08:00:00
This week I was a guest over on Hyde's blog. He has a series called "Over/Under" where he gives his guests a handful of topics and lets them riff on whether they think the topic is over- or underrated. The topics he picked for me were Italy, Asahi Linux, Dark Mode, Printers and Turkish Coffee. It was quite an interesting experience talking about topics someone else had picked, knowing that they would appear on their blog instead of mine. So if you're curious about my opinions on any of these subjects and if you want to find out if I managed to get myself cancelled for being culturally insensitive, head on over to the post on Hyde's blog!
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2026-01-09 08:00:00
I started writing an intro about current world events, but you know what? I don't want to talk about it. It only puts me (and probably you too) in a bad mood, and I'd rather be in a good mood. So instead, here's a picture from a few days ago when it had just snowed for the first time, and snow always makes everything so much more beautiful! I'm currently reading The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, and I totally get why Calvin loves snow and winter.
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2026-01-08 08:00:00
So here's a story I just thought about because I saw a link to the Italian post on Mastodon which triggered a memory in me.
During my last year of University, in the winter of 2008/2009, I spent a few months in Italy, where I did an internship in an Italian tech company in a small town in the region of Veneto, not too far from Venice. I rented a small apartment in that town through an estate agent and paid the rent straight to my landlord, but because I received electricity and gas from the Italian energy company Enel, I had to pay these bills directly to them.
We had a bit of a rough start, Enel and I, because when I moved into the apartment, the electricity was turned off and it took them an entire week after I registered to turn it back on. I asked why it took so long and the response was "it will be turned on within five working days". And true to their word, they turned it on after exactly five working days. With two days of weekend in between. Thankfully this was in early September when it was still warm, so that was not a big problem, but a week of cold showers, not being able to cook and only having light from a few candles in the evenings was still not exactly fun.
Anyway, once they finally got round to turning the power back on (which must have taken AT LEAST two mouse clicks in their grid administration software!!), everything went smoothly. Paying the bills worked like this: Every month I would receive the electricity and gas bills in the mail, then I had to take these bills to the post office where they would scan them and then I had to pay the bill directly at the post office. I'd never seen a process like this before; in Germany you pay via bank transfer and that's it. But, when in Rome, do as the Romans do I suppose, and despite it being a bit inconvenient the process worked fine, so no issue there.
The problem came when my internship came to an end and it was time for me to return to Germany. How am I supposed to pay the last bill if I'm not in the country anymore?
I went to the estate agent and asked them what to do in this case, and they called Enel on my behalf, explained the situation to them and agreed that Enel would send the bill to them so they could forward it to me. Enel then gave them a long international bank account number, and once the bill arrived I was supposed to transfer the money to that bank account. So far, so good.
So I moved out of the apartment, paid the final rent to my landlord and returned home. A few weeks later the estate agent contacted me via email and sent me the final gas and electricity bills. I then tried transferring the money to the bank account number they had provided, only to find out that it wasn't possible because my bank told me that that bank account didn't exist. Probably some digits got messed up because the number was long and complex and was read out over a bad phone connection.
So I wrote back to the estate agent and asked them if they could get back in touch with Enel and confirm the bank account number. They did and sent me back an entirely new (but equally long) bank account number. So I tried the bank transfer again, and again it didn't work, number not recognised.
So once again I asked the estate agent what to do, and their response was "well, when you're gone you're gone". So I figured I tried, I demonstrated my good intentions and if Enel wasn't able to provide a correct bank account number it was hardly my fault.
And I never paid the bills.
I've been to Italy numerous times since then and nothing ever happened, but every time I'm there I'm ever so slightly worried that at some point a black car will pull up next to me with a bunch of Carabinieri jumping out, guns drawn, screaming at me to get on the ground, and then load me into the car and drive me to an undisclosed location where I'll be held until I paid my debts....
Well, that's probably not going to happen, right?
Right?
...maybe I'll go back for the 20th anniversary and finally pay my bills.
2026-01-05 08:00:00
The other day I took apart an old smoke detector. I looked at it for a bit until I thought I'd figured out how it works, and then I thought, hey, why not write a quick blog post about it, maybe someone else will find it interesting, too. And so I did and I put the post online.
Small problem though: I completely misunderstood how the thing actually works. Whoops.
Thankfully some folks on Mastodon pointed it out to me, so I did some research, realised what I'd gotten wrong, and corrected my post. Fixed and done, problem solved. But a bit of an uncomfortable feeling remained with me.
At the end of the day this is really no big deal, and arguably I learned more by posting the wrong thing than if I hadn't written about it at all, because now people corrected me and so I was, let's say, encouraged to look into it a bit more, which I probably wouldn't have done if I hadn't written the post because I would have just assumed that I was right. So ultimately this worked out well for me, even though I have to admit I was a pretty embarrassed when I realised my mistake.
This got me thinking though how easy it is to spread misinformation online, unintentionally or otherwise. We live in a world where everything from AI chat bots to Facebook tinfoil-hatters all the way to the richest and most powerful people in the world are spitting out a constant stream of misinformation and straight up lies all day long, and by now the web is absolutely drowning in it. And I hate it with a passion.
So my takeaway is this: In a world that's increasingly fake, filled with slop and misinformation and lies and where you can't be sure anymore about what's real and what isn't, I want to make sure that the things I post to the internet are correct. Even if they're as inconsequential and ultimately meaningless as explaining how a smoke detector works. I feel like I owe this to myself, and I also owe it to you, the reader.
It might not make a difference in the grand scheme of things, but it does make a difference to me.
2026-01-04 08:00:00
Last month I've lived in my current apartment for exactly 10 years, which means it's now time to replace the smoke alarms, which you're supposed to do after 10 years. When I was a kid, I always took everything I could get my hands on apart to see what it looked like on the inside, much to the dismay of my parents at times. Now, several decades later, things haven't really changed all that much. So, before bringing the old smoke alarms in for recycling, I decided to take one apart to see what's inside. 1
Here's what the smoke alarm looks like intact, and after prying it open (and almost losing an eye in the process because a piece of plastic snapped off and shot right past my face - oops!) we can see that there isn't very much in there at all.
(1) is the battery (I already snipped the wires so the thing wouldn't accidentally go off in my face), (2) is the piezoelectric speaker (the thing that goes "beep"), and (3) is the smoke detector itself on a small circuit board. Here's a closer look at the internals:
There's also (3) a button to test the functionality and (4) an LED which blinks in regular intervals to indicate that the device is still working. And there are a few electronic components on the back of the board.
So what's inside the smoke detector?
Surprisingly, almost nothing! In fact, there are only two things in there: (1) an LED, which is a light source (infrared, I assume) and (2) a photo sensor, which is a light detector.
So how does it work?
The photo sensor sees a certain amount of light that the LED emits. Since the chamber is black and largely closed with just a few openings around the sides, almost no ambient light can get inside and the amount of light that the photo sensor registers is always the same, no matter if the smoke alarm is in a bright or dark room.
Except when the chamber fills with smoke. Then the photo sensor will see less light than when the chamber is filled with clear air, and that's when the alarm will go off.
I got that completely backwards! Here's how it actually works: The photo sensor and the LED are misaligned, and the path from the LED to the sensor is blocked, which means the sensor can't see much, if any, light from the LED during normal operation. However, when smoke enters the chamber the smoke particles scatter the light, so the sensor can now detect more light from the LED than before, and this causes the alarm to go off. Damn. I should have checked this before writing the post.
Thanks to Lapo Luchini and ClickyMcTicker on Mastodon for correcting me!
It's such a simple thing, and yet it does exactly what it's supposed to do. I love seeing well-engineered solutions like this!
I should mention, there are smoke detectors that are filled with a radioactive material. I double and triple checked to make sure that this wasn't one of those before taking it apart. If you take one apart, make sure you know what you're doing!