2026-01-28 08:00:00
I remember when I was a kid my dad told me that he watched the first moon landing in 1969 live on TV, which blew my mind because the moon landing did (and does) seem like ancient history to me, like something that happened in the distant past. I mean, TV was still (mostly) in black and white! But of course it was only 13 years before I was born, so naturally my dad was around back then and he could watch it live on TV, along with about a billion other people.
The first mission to land on the moon was Apollo 11, and its crew consisted of three astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin (the first and second man, respectively, to walk on the moon) and Michael Collins who stayed behind in the command module which orbited the moon, while the other two took the lunar module down to the moon's surface. Carrying the Fire is Michael Collins' autobiography in which he chronicles his time as a military test pilot in the US Air Force and as a NASA astronaut during the 1960s where he flew in space twice, once on Gemini 10 and once on Apollo 11, which became the mission that made history as the first successful landing of humans on another celestial body.
In addition to being a test pilot and an astronaut, Michael Collins is also a great writer and narrator and as such he wrote the book without a ghostwriter, unlike many of his peers. With around 500 pages the book is quite long and detailed (his first space flight on Gemini 10 lasted around 70 hours, and it seems like he takes the reader through every single one of these hours) and he doesn't get to the Apollo flight until about 300 pages in, but thanks to his talent as a writer it never gets boring and is quite an entertaining read throughout.
Because he wrote the book himself, we get a good idea of who he is as a person and he gives a pretty honest and unfiltered look into the space program from his point of view. Some parts are quite hilarious to read, like his bone-dry recitation of the entire 20-step checklist for urinating in space ("2. Place penis against receiver inlet check valve and roll latex receiver onto penis. 3. Rotate selector valve knob (clockwise) to the “Urinate” position. 4. Urinate. 5....") or him calling the Gemini capsule a flying men's room because, well, the "toilet" was a plastic bag and there was no privacy at all, your crewmate was sitting right next to you the whole time. And you can't just open a window in space...
[Edit]: Interestingly, I just watched a video by Scott Manley published the day before I posted this, where he discusses the whole "pooping in space" situation, both back then and today. [/Edit]
The highlight of the book is of course the flight of Apollo 11, and his unique perspective as the man who didn't land on the moon but stayed behind in the command module (called Columbia) orbiting the moon while the other two astronauts flew the lunar module down to the moon's surface (the lunar module was called Eagle, which is why Neil Armstrong announced over the radio "the eagle has landed" after their successful landing). Had anything gone wrong during the landing or had they failed to take off again from the moon, there would have been nothing he could have done to save his crewmates and he would have had to return to earth alone, knowing that he left two men, friends, behind to die on the moon. The sense of relief he felt when Armstrong and Aldrin successfully returned after about a day on the moon and climbed back into the command module really comes through.
The book was written in 1974, five years after the moon landing and as such it pretty much ends with their successful return to earth and a three week quarantine to make sure they didn't bring any harmful microorganisms back from the moon. There is one last chapter which feels like an epilogue, a sort of "where are they now" where he describes his life after he left NASA shortly after the mission had ended. In this chapter he also shares how the flight to the moon has shaped his thinking and his philosophy of life - that seeing the earth from the outside and as a whole makes you aware of how fragile it is, how beautiful it is and how insignificant our quarrels down here really are, which is a sentiment that I've read from many other astronauts as well.
Overall I really enjoyed this book. It's quite a long read, but it's never boring thanks to Collins' engaging writing style. The only bits that made me roll my eyes a little were some of his comments on women; the man was born in the 1930s and grew up in the 40s and 50s, and it shows. At one point he refers to an airline stewardess as "honey"; he's glad there weren't any women in the space program because that would have just complicated things and he muses what it would be like to fly in space with one thousand women (and their two thousand weightless breasts, "bobbing beautifully and quivering delightfully in response to their every weightless movement …"). I suspect if he had written the book later in life, he might have left some of this out. These comments are few and far in between though, and for better or worse they also serve as a time capsule, offering a view into the mentality of the time.
If you're interested in the NASA space program of the 1960s, I highly recommend having a look at this book because it gives a quite detailed and unique perspective into it. And despite a few cringy bits here and there it is really well written and worth a read.
2026-01-24 08:00:00
Oh nice, a blogging challenge, sort of. I saw this post on David's blog titled "What is the oldest thing you own", which is a reply to someone else's post, and I thought I'd write a reply to that, too. Looking around, I realise I don't have many really old things in my possession. I have a lot of old things because I like buying used and I generally like old books, records, tech etc., but most of what I have was still manufactured during my lifetime. But there are still a few items which are older than that.
This camera used to be my Dad's, and in fact it still is, but he will never use it again and he has the habit of sometimes just throwing stuff out, so I thought it might be best to prevent this from ending up in the trash by taking it home with me. He got it as a present from my mum as far as I know, but I'm not sure when. The first pictures that exist of me were taken with this camera, so it's definitely older than me. I guess it's from the late 70s. It's a pretty simple camera, but this also means there isn't much that can break and it still works perfectly.
In the 90s, everybody was buying CDs and getting rid of their vinyl records, so as a teenager with not a lot of money I enjoyed going to flea markets and second hand record stores to buy used vinyls, which were dirt cheap back then. You could get 6 or 7 albums for the price of one new CD, which was pretty nice. And since I like music from the 70s and 80s, that worked out great for me. I still have all these old records, and some of them date back to the early 70s, like this one. This is Uriah Heep's first album "...Very 'Eavy ...Very 'Umble" from 1970.
I think this is the oldest thing I have. A book of logarithm tables, which you needed to have as a mathematician or engineer in the age before electronic calculators. I'm not sure where I got this from anymore; maybe I found it at University when some department was clearing out it's library or archive. It was printed in 1943, during the second world war. I guess they needed a lot of engineers back then to build weapons and other war machinery. Thankfully there are no swastikas in this one.
So now, over to you! What's the oldest thing you own? Put it in a post and feel free to tag me or send me the link!
2026-01-23 08:00:00
Man, following the news this week was exhausting. Everything has kind of this ugly orange tint... I think it might be time for another news diet. There are still interesting things happening though, they just kind of disappear under all the awfulness. Did you know that next month a crew is scheduled to fly to the moon? This will be the first time since the Apollo program ended in the 1970s that a crewed spacecraft will leave the relative safety of low earth orbit, where the space station is orbiting, and make the 380.000 km trip to the moon and back. They're not going to land on the moon (that's planned for the next flight), but they will be the first people to see the moon up close since the Apollo 17 crew in 1972, and also the first ones since then to see the earth in its entirety. It must be an incredible feeling seeing this blue marble slowly get smaller and smaller in the window and realising how ridiculous all these problems are that we love to create for ourselves down here. Maybe I should curate my news feeds a bit better, because I'd still like to be informed about all the good and interesting things people are doing, and not just about all the terrible stuff. Well, back to earth for now.
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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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