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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 72

2025-09-12 08:00:00

an animated 90s style GIF that has the word Links in green font on black background

There was some great news about Apple this week! What? No, not the iPhone thing. They made a phone that's only 5,5mm thin! Well except for the part of the phone which isn't 5,5mm thin of course. Let's not look at that part. But no, I'm talking about another device. Apparently there were games made and sold for the clickwheel iPod. They haven't been available for a long time, and because they are all DRM protected restoring them was and is a royal pain... but somebody managed to do it and now all of these games are available again. And somehow I find this much more interesting and exciting than the latest iPhones with all their islands and plateaus and whatnot.


Articles

Software/Services

Around the Small Web

Misc

  • Byte - a visual archive
    Have a look at this! It's all pages of every single Byte magazine on a single website that you can zoom into. I think I'm most fascinated by how fluid it is, even on my old underpowered laptop.
  • All 54 lost clickwheel iPod games have now been preserved for posterity - Ars Technica
    This is the thing I mentioned in the intro. All games for the clickwheel iPod preserved. Installing them is kind of complicated though because you have to deal with a VM with a special version of iTunes in it... People seem to forget, but even back 20 years ago Apple was all about keeping control over what people could and could not do with their devices. The iPod was the first device where they really acted this out. If it hadn't been for this preservation effort, these games would probably be lost forever.
  • Introducing quote posts - Mastodon Blog
    Mastodon is about to get quote posts. Don't know if that's a good or a bad thing honestly, but I guess we'll see soon.

Linkdump No 71

2025-09-05 08:00:00

an animated 90s style GIF that has the word Links in green font on black background

September has begun, and this means summer is pretty much over and autumn is around the corner (though some people dispute this ;)). To those who love summer autumn feels like the world is dying, but for me it's always been my favourite time of the year. The heat is gone, the morning air is crisp and cool, the leaves are starting to fall, you can collect chestnuts in the park, make apple pie and pumpkin soup... what's not to love! Despite nature shutting down, autumn always feels like the time for a new beginning to me - the school year used to start in autumn, the university year too, and I think this autumn it's time for me to make some changes. But we'll talk about that some other time, for now, here's the links for this week.


Articles

Software/Services

Hardware Projects

  • I used a RISC-V to make an analog tape drive - YouTube
    A person who I would describe as a madman built a functioning miniature tape drive out of an old dictation device that can store data via USB. And he made it look like the C64s tape drive, because of course he did.

Around the Small Web

Linkdump No 70

2025-08-29 08:00:00

an animated 90s style GIF that has the word Links in green font on black background

I've been staring at an empty coffee cup for the last 10 minutes, and I can't think of a clever intro to write today. Is this the universe trying to tell me that I should have another coffee? It probably is. No, it definitely is. What else could it be! You know, blogging is a really inexpensive hobby when you just look at the cost of web hosting and owning the domain, but if I factor in the amount of coffee that is needed to get the gears in my head turning? Better not think about it too much and just enjoy the experience :)


Articles

  • The defense against slop and brainrot
    "What I am doing to prevent myself from stagnating and rotting." - In the age of AI it's easier than ever to never use your brain and just turn to AI to do the thinking for you, but that's a mistake. This is not a new idea, but the author puts this together very well.
  • Google will block sideloading of unverified Android apps starting next year - Ars Technica
    Step by step power and control over our devices is being eroded and taken away from us...
  • Tech-Free Homes: The New Luxury Trend
    Every trend has a counter movement... we live in a digital world, and some people are deliberately going back to analogue, and apparently now people are starting to discover that maybe having a simple light switch is a better solution than having a crazy expensive high tech smart home system that turns the lights on when it wants and not when you want. Who could have known! (via)

Software/Services

  • Is it really foss?
    Is the software you're using really FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), or are there restrictions to it? Here you can check. (via)
  • Smolweb Validator
    Last week I recommended Adëles smolweb validator to check if your site conforms to the smolweb guidelines, and now she created an online version, so checking is even easier.

Around the Small Web

  • no shorts
    Do you get updates for the YouTube channels you're following via RSS, but you hate shorts? Here's how to get rid of them.
  • Keep going | An Almost Anonymous Blog
    That feeling that we all know, that nobody cares about our writing (or other art) and there's no point in even doing it? That's normal. Keep going. It will pass.
  • Rubenerd: Andreas suggests a better Techtember
    Yesterday some guy suggested to use September to throw away all digital devices and go back to living like a caveman or something, I don't know, I only read an AI generated summary of this post.... but Ruben expanded the idea to 'deleting digital detritus', which I interpret as 'getting rid of digital tools and services we don't need. I hadn't even thought of that, I was purely focused on hardware, but doing some decluttering in the digital realm makes total sense, too. Great idea Ruben, and thanks for the shoutout :)
  • Eine Art Projektabschluss-Bericht 😉
    I know this is in German, but bear with me, it's worth it. Here's what the post is about: On the day his daughter was born, the author came home from the hospital, didn't know what to do with himself and had the idea to write down his thoughts and feelings in the form of a letter to his daughter. He thought he might do this for a month, but then he wrote another letter, and another, and another... and he kept writing them for two decades straight. Now his daughter is 20, he wrote the last letter and he declares the project complete (the headline says "a kind of project closure report"). Even if you don't read German, I recommend clicking through to the site to see the incredible stack of notebooks filled with hundreds of letters from a dad to his child, chronicling the first 20 years of her life. What an amazing project!

Misc

'Techtember' is upon us and I think we should use it to get rid of some superfluous tech

2025-08-28 08:00:00

I recently heard the word 'Techtember' for the first time. I had to look it up to see what it means. Here's an explanation:

Techtember refers to the annual period when many companies unveil their latest products and services.

In other words, it's that time of the year when large corporations desperately try to convince us to buy their latest and greatest thing which is essentially the same as last year's thing, but with more AI, more megapixels, a bigger camera bump and in four new and exciting very muted colours that will make your face fall asleep. Now that all big smartphone manufacturers have locked themselves into an arms race where they have to bring out a new device every single year or get left behind in the dust, we also get these events every single year in or around September.

I think we should make use of 'Techtember', but instead of getting some new crap we don't need, take the opportunity to go over our existing tech stack and get rid of some stuff that has accumulated over the years which we no longer need, and maybe slim down the amount of tech that we use in the first place.

Because, I don't know about you, but I just have way too much stuff.

20 years ago I had a laptop, a cellphone, a Discman, an mp3 player and a tiny 14 inch TV set. That was it, and I was happy with that.

Today, if I started writing down all the tech that I have accumulated since then and that I have lying around, I would probably have a mental breakdown. And I'm not even a person who runs out every time something new is advertised, but still... lifestyle creep is absolutely a thing.

Here's just one example: I started out with that one laptop with a 15 inch screen. A couple of years later I bought a desktop PC and a 22 inch monitor. Then a few more years later I got a 24 inch. Then a 27 inch. Now I have a 34 inch ultrawide monitor that's almost as wide as my desk.

But do I really need this huge ass monitor on my desk? Am I happier than I was with the one 15 inch screen? More productive? No. What I am is a good consumer, because I bought a bunch of stuff I didn't really need because (embarrassingly) I saw these things in some tech Youtuber's videos, thought they looked cool and wanted to have them. Hedonic desire, simple as that. Oh, and I still have all the other monitors sitting around too of course, collecting dust.

Maybe it's time to get rid of the big monitor and go back to a smaller one again. One that doesn't scream "I am the most important item in this room", but one that's just enough for what I need. And do that for some other things as well that are sitting around unused, or that are way too overblown for my actual needs.

So that's going to be my 'Techtember'. Thinking about what I really need, getting rid of things that are just gathering dust and going back to a simpler solution when that's enough.

Making modern Debian look like 20 year old Ubuntu. Why? Because!

2025-08-24 08:00:00

I used to be a Windows user, but I was always interested in Linux and I played around with various Linux distros since the late 90s, and I finally made the switch to using Linux as my main OS in 2007, because I needed Linux for a University project. The distro I chose back then was Ubuntu 7.04. The old Ubuntu versions from the 2000s were all vaguely "Africa-themed", because Ubuntu's founder Mark Shuttleworth is South African. So the colour palette was always a lot of yellow, brown and orange tones, which I quite liked. Mac OS X at the time was blue Aqua themed, while Windows Vista had a green-ish nature theme going, and Ubuntu's desert themes looked equally good in my opinion.

In 2010 Ubuntu switched to a more purple colour scheme (and it's still purple to this day), but I always liked the yellow Africa themes better and I feel quite nostalgic for them.

Recently I installed the latest Debian "Trixie" on my Eee PC. I chose the Mate desktop variant as that's supposed to be quite light weight, which is important for an underpowered Netbook from 2010. It runs... okay. Not great, but it's usable. The default theme looks clean and modern, but also a bit... bland and uninspired in my opinion. But since Mate is essentially Gnome 2 which the old Ubuntu versions used as well, using it felt quite nostalgic for me, and I started wondering if it was possible to style it to look like Ubuntu from the past?

Here's what Debian Trixie with Mate looks like out of the box:

Nothing wrong with it at all, but like I said, I find it a little boring.

Here's what Ubuntu 7.04 looked like:

Probably not to everyone's taste, but I like it. Especially back in the day after staring at Windows XP for 6 years, it was a breath of fresh air. (Of course today I'm nostalgic for Windows XP, but back then it started to look quite dated)

So, can I make modern Debian look a little more like oldschool Ubuntu?

No. The End.

Ok, kidding. Yes, of course. Here's how.

Wallpaper

This is the easiest part, I went to this site, downloaded the wallpaper for 7.04, set it as a wallpaper in Debian and that's it. Quick and easy.

Window decorations

The old Ubuntu themes are called "Human", and thankfully someone has created updated versions for modern desktop environments (guess I'm not the only one nostalgic for the old look) here. I installed it according to the instructions in the github repo with these commands (I had to install wget first for this to work):

sudo wget -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/luigifab.gpg https://www.luigifab.fr/apt.gpg
echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/luigifab/packages/ubuntu questing main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install human-theme-gtk

I didn't bother installing gtk3-classic, gtk4-classic and pango like they're recommending because I wanted to see if I could do without. I went into the Mate settings under System -> Preferences -> Look and Feel -> Appearance and selected "Human Orange" from the Themes tab.

Fonts

Next I changed the fonts to "Sans" and "Monospace" and reduced the size to 10px:

Icons

And lastly I wanted the old icons back, but that was a little trickier. There is an icon pack from old Ubuntu, but it's from a later version where the icons already have the later purple theme. Maybe I could have searched a little more, but since I already had a VM with Ubuntu 7.04 running (to get the screenshot above and to see what it originally looked like), I ended up copying the icon theme from the folder /usr/share/icons out of the VM and into the ~/.icons folder on my Debian installation. (I compressed the folder with tar, copied it to my Raspi jumphost with scp, and pulled it from there into the debian installation with scp as well)

Then I could go back into the Themes tab, select the Human theme and I had the old icons back.

Result

And that's it. Here's the final result:

Compared to the original Ubuntu 7.04 from above:

It's not a perfect recreation of the original, because (cue existential crisis) nothing ever is, but it's close. My biggest gripe is that the orange of the title bar is a bit too bright, but you only really notice in a direct comparison. Aside from that, it actually feels like a slightly updated and modernised variation of the old theme, because well, that's exactly what it is. In any case, it succeeds in satisfying my nostalgia, and I prefer it over the modern look, at least for a while.

But now, to answer the most important question: Isn't this completely pointless?

Why yes, it is! But it's fun, and that's why I did it :)

Linkdump No 69

2025-08-22 08:00:00

Today things are a bit different. Today I have an assistant who's helping me write this post. This is Lou:

A picture of a dalmatian lying next to me on the couch

Ok, he's more an assistant in spirit than an actual help. He's probably drafting his own post in his head right now. He's a friends' dog, but my friend is away on a business trip for a few days, so I'm taking care of him. Which is interesting because I'm not at all a dog person and I have no experience with dogs, but I've known him since he was a puppy and I think we're doing alright. He used to curl up in my lap and fall asleep when he was little. He still likes to do that, only now he weighs 32kg, so it's a bit of a different experience... Expect my 50 minute YouTube video "What taking care of a dog for 48 hours taught me about the meaning of life" soon, but for now, here are some links :)


Articles

  • Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
    Here's the clearest indicator yet that the current AI hype is completely overblown: Mark Zuckerberg stops throwing money at it because he realised it's a bubble that's about to burst. Let's see who follows suit. Microsoft will probably continue burning billions of dollars for a few more years before they notice that they won't get it back.
  • Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed - Ars Technica
    Social media seems to be inherently flawed and bring out the worst in people, at least according to this study. It should be taken with a grain of salt because they didn't use real people as participants, but rather AI agents to simulate people (less ethical concerns I suppose), but it's an interesting data point nevertheless.

Software/Services

  • RetroSix Wiki
    A huge wiki all about repairing/modding retro computers and consoles. Found it because I thought about updating my original Xbox with an SSD, and there's some great info on there.
  • Smolweb Validator
    Adële (I always have to copy/past her name because my keyboard has äöü, but no ë and I have no idea how to make it) has built a validator for smol websites that conform to the smolweb HTML specification she has on her site. I ran it on my site and guess what? ✅ VALID! (after Adële integrated the <time> element that I am using) :)

Hardware Projects

Around the Small Web

  • You're sleeping on ChromeOS - Dom Corriveau
    I never considered ChromeOS a "real" OS, but rather just barely enough OS to run Chrome and then you're supposed to do everything else in the browser through the Google apps, and that never appealed to me. But according to Dom, I'm completely wrong about that!
  • Week in Review #1 || iyer.ru
    Ivan shamelessly stole my completely original and never seen before idea of the weekly linkpost. Outrageous! But I know how to fight back. Because...
  • I styled my RSS feed with XSLT || iyer.ru
    ... he wrote a great post about styling your RSS feed, and I like the idea so I stole it from him. Ha! In all seriousness, his blog is very new but there's some great stuff on there already, so have a look! In completely unrelated news, my RSS feed looks fancy now ;)
  • On changing blogging platforms and tools
    Joel tells us that we shouldn't constantly switch tools in search of the perfect one but rather stick with what we have and what works.

Misc

  • Faroe Islands
    A photo blog about the Faroe Islands. If you like nature photography, you have to see this. The pictures are stunning!