2025-10-04 08:00:00
Back in July I tried a service called NINA that aimed to bring back ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, AOL and a few other internet services from the 90s and 2000s. I registered an ICQ number and chatted with a few people and it was fun.
Now it's gone.
The last time I logged into the ICQ number I had registered there was a few weeks ago and it worked fine. Today I tried logging in again and it failed, so I went to the homepage to check whether the service was down, and all that's left is this message:
Due to reasons beyond our control, that we wish weren't the case... all web, social, promotional, etc. services have been shutdown.
MSN is still available at Escargot, but you won't find anything here anymore.
It's been fun.
Well that sucks. Apparently everything is gone.
I have no idea what happened there. I saw some speculation online that they might have received a cease and desist letter... maybe. All I know is, this was a fantastic thing they were doing and I was hoping they would continue, and now they apparently nuked everything. Had to, maybe. Either way, all the services they were running are gone.
The Internet Archive still has a capture of what the homepage used to look like at least.
Speaking of things that are gone, Mike Grindle's homepage has also vanished. Again, I don't know why, but it makes me sad to see it gone, because his blog was one of my favourites and I enjoyed reading it and occasionally chatting with him on Mastodon or via E-Mail. So Mike, if you're reading this, thank you for having shared your thoughts with us and I hope you're doing well!
Sigh... it's a sad internet day today.
2025-10-03 08:00:00
Today is a public holiday in Germany, as we celebrate the reunification of East and West Germany that was finalized 35 years ago today. It's kind of unbelievable to think that when I was a child, Germany was divided into two very different countries separated by an impenetrable border on which hundreds were killed in an attempt to cross it. The Wall didn't just cut through Berlin btw, it was nearly 1400 km long and ran through the entire country. I remember when I started school in 1989, the first map of Germany that we got still showed East Germany 'greyed out' with just a tiny coloured spec somewhere in the middle of it, which was West Berlin. Interestingly I don't remember the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 89 at all, even though I was 7 and in first grade at the time and I'm sure someone must have explained it to me. I've seen the videos of people climbing the wall and driving through the Brandenburg Gate with their little East German plastic cars nicknamed Trabbi of course, but I don't remember any of that from back then.
Anyway, I have many friends from the former East who I would have never met if the two parts of Germany hadn't been reunited. I know a few 'international' couples, too. I'm glad the era of dictatorship on German ground has ended and that the Wall was torn down, and I hope it will never return.
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2025-09-27 08:00:00
I don't know why, but I just realised I haven't talked about music here in a while. Guess it's time to talk about music again! I'm just going to roll two completely unrelated things into one post, because well, that's what I feel like doing.
In July, Ozzy played his last ever show as a final goodbye to his fans. Two weeks later he boarded a crazy train and went on his journey to the centre of eternity... Judas Priest couldn't be there on the day because they had already committed to playing a show with Scorpions in Germany on that very same night, but a few days before the concert, they released an amazing cover version of Black Sabbath's War Pigs.
Well, yesterday they released it again, but this time with vocals from the man Ozzy himself! When I first heard about this I thought they probably dug out an old vocal track of his from the archives and put it on there... but the way Halford talks about how this came to be sounds like they actually went into the studio and recorded it together, which would be just incredible. Hope they didn't forget to take pictures. Either way, we're now blessed with a version of War Pigs played by Judas Priest with vocals by both Rob Halford and Ozzy Osbourne, and I absolutely love it!
Scrolling through YouTube searching for these videos I also came across a video of Halford laying down his vocals for War Pigs... no idea where that's coming from, but it seems genuine and it's fascinating to see and hear the Metal God at work.
Candlemass is one of my favourite bands of all time. I don't really know why, but their music just seems to resonate with my soul. They play Sabbath-influenced doom metal with slow and ultra-heavy riffs that flow out of your speakers like lava, but being an 80s band they paired this up with big operatic vocals à la Iron Maiden, Manowar, Merciful Fate and, of course, Dio.
Their first album, Epicus Doomicus Metallicus is an absolute classic. It's dark, it's heavy, it's melodic and the vocals by a guy named Johan Längquist are just amazing. They were really young when they wrote and recorded this, just in their early 20s... and they repeated what Sabbath did, they came out of nowhere and dropped one of the best albums of all time in this genre. It's not often that this happens; we just talked about Priest who are one of the biggest metal bands of all time, but it took them a few albums to define their sound and style. These guys? Nailed it, first try. Absolutely incredible. They parted ways with Johan after this album, but they always kept in touch and he's actually been the lead vocalist again since 2018.
Their most famous (and infamous) singer though is the man who came after him, Messiah Marcolin. This guy is a madman. Everything about him is huge. The voice, the hair, the stage presence (he wears a black monk's robe on stage) and apparently also his ego. This is Candlemass, guess which one Messiah is:
He sang on the subsequent Candlemass albums Nightfall, Ancient Dreams and Tales Of Creation until they had a falling out with him and he was kicked out of the band. They reunited with him in the 2000s for one album, then had another falling out and threw him out for good (I read a lot of interviews with the band at that time, they did not part ways on good terms).
After Messiah's second time in the band they recruited Robert Lowe from Solitude Aeturnus as their new singer. The guy has an amazing voice, but he seems to be quite the character, and not in a good way. I saw them live twice with this lineup, and both times he couldn't get through a single song without messing up the lyrics. It was so bad that at the second gig a guy in the audience started screaming "LEARN THE FUCKING LYRICS" at him... I've never seen a band look so utterly embarrassed on stage. They showed him the door soon after.
Anyway, back to Messiah. They seem to have reconciled since their last falling out and they recently played a one-off show together with him in their 80s/2000s lineup in Athens, Greece. There's a good recording of the gig on YouTube, and it's absolutely fantastic. He sounds just like he did 20 years ago, and the band plays as amazing as ever. I watched it, and I re-watched it, and man do I wish I was there! I never saw Candlemass live with this lineup, with the mad monk on vocals.
I hope they'll do another show with him at some point, a little closer to home. For now though, even though I usually hate it when people film everything at concerts, sometimes I'm still glad we live in the age of bootleg recordings on YouTube.
Here's the show. Feel free to drop me a line if this is your kind of music :)
2025-09-26 08:00:00
I'm sitting next to a group of teenagers right now, maybe 17 or 18 years old, still in school... and I realise, I'm old. Not only am I 43 and I could literally be their dad, but I also have no damn clue what they're talking about. They're discussing music, and I love music, but the bands and artists they're listening to? Never heard of any of them in my entire life. They also speak differently than my generation does... they have this weird mix of ghetto slang and influencer speak going on. Ghetto slang is the diction that the Turkish immigrants brought, and influencer speak means there's lots of English words mixed into almost every sentence. If you're not German, this means nothing to you, but they talk like Rezo with a bit of Erkan und Stefan mixed in. It's very weird.
And now I'm wondering - did we have that effect on older people too, when we were young? Certainly not, right? ...right?
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2025-09-19 08:00:00
Did you know that the melting point of glass is somewhere above 600°C? Glass doesn't have a clearly defined melting point like water does, but at this temperature it becomes somewhat soft and gooey. The hotter it gets the more fluid it becomes. You really have to heat it up a lot to turn glass into a liquid. (And no, it isn't liquid at room temperature.) Interestingly, around 600°C is also the temperature at which materials start to glow and emit visible light. Initially, they glow dark red, and as they get hotter, the light becomes increasingly yellow and white.
What I'm trying to say is, liquid glass is so hot that it glows red, and because of this, it isn't transparent at all. So.... who wants to tell Tim?
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2025-09-16 08:00:00
I work in the field of software development. Recently I helped a colleague with a problem that he's been trying to solve all day but he couldn't really seem make progress. No big deal, it happens. Sometimes you need a second pair of eyes to look over what's going on, because they might see something you've missed and that's why you're stuck. Happens to me too.
This particular colleague is very fond of using ChatGPT for basically everything, and watching him work is nothing short of horrifying. I've seen code that he produced and often I could refactor it to be about half the number of lines of code within a couple of minutes, because he just copy/pastes whatever ChatGPT produces into his IDE and if it works, then that's it, nothing more to do here.
This time it turned out that he hadn't even understood the problem in the first place. He just helplessly pasted error messages into ChatGPT and then tried implementing whatever "solution" it spit back at him, also without trying to understand what was suggested and if that was even the right thing to do or not. Unsurprisingly, he failed to make progress with this approach. He also had about 100 tabs open in his browser and frequently got lost in them, which didn't help.
It took me about 15 minutes of listening to him and reading the code and looking at what he's been doing to figure out where the problem was. Mind you, I didn't have a solution right of the top off my head ready either, but at least I understood what was happening. So I explained to him what was wrong in my opinion, which took a while because I needed to break through several layers of "but ChatGPT said this" first, but eventually he got it. Then however he immediately turned back to ChatGPT, essentially typed my explanation into it in the form of a question, looked over the answer and said to me "yeah, he's saying the same thing, so this means we're on the right track now at least".
I went home very frustrated that day.
I'm not saying this to dump on my colleague. But I read a number of stories like these over the past couple of months over on Mastodon and in other blog posts. I also see more and more articles and studies like this one recently: MIT Study Finds Artificial Intelligence Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline.
So there's a lot of anecdotal evidence floating around that using ChatGPT essentially trains people out of thinking for themselves, and now there's more and more scientific evidence coming in that says the same thing. If you turn to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and so on every time you run into a problem that you can't immediately solve by yourself, pretty soon you will have lost the ability to do so in the first place.
Think of it this way: The brain is like a muscle, it needs constant exercise in order to stay strong and healthy. If you've ever broken your leg and you weren't able to walk for a few weeks, you'll remember that by the time the cast came off, your leg muscles had atrophied to the point of being almost non-existent and you essentially had to re-learn how to walk. And you'll remember what a painful and tedious process that was.
If you use ChatGPT for everything, the same thing happens to your brain. And once you lost the ability to focus and think hard about a problem, it will be very difficult to get it back.
If we fast forward a few years from now, I'm very worried about where this will lead, especially in fields like engineering which is essentially about thinking hard and solving problem after problem, day after day.
But I'm also wondering if there's an opportunity in there for people who keep their minds sharp to become really valuable on the job market in the not-too-distant future when everybody else has turned their brain into the equivalent of an atrophied and useless leg due to solving every single problem they encountered by immediately turning to AI to provide an answer.
I guess time will tell. But just in case, I'll keep my use of AI tools to a minimum and continue using my brain as much as possible. At the end of the day every problem solved, every post written, every book read is a workout for the mind.