2026-02-01 08:00:00
Nowadays when you turn on the radio in Germany, you'll hear mostly songs which are currently in the charts or hits from past decades, which are almost all in English. Occasionally you'll get a song in German like "99 Luftballons", but most pop music these days is sung in English and that's what's on the radio (there are of course stations which only play German music, or classical music, or things that make you spiral into depression, aka the news). But it wasn't always like this; in the 50s and 60s German music was still really popular. So popular in fact that many artists at that time re-recorded their hits in German, even if they didn't speak the language. I recently fell into a hole of music by English-speaking artists who sang in German, and I thought I'd share some of it with you. Maybe it'll make you smile for a minute.
I'm going to link the songs on YouTube which is the easiest way; I'd love to be able to just put some MP3s up, but I would be sued into oblivion before the end of the day. If you know a better way of linking to music online, let me know!
With this song Abba won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974 and became world famous, so it made sense for them to record it in other languages, too. The song is timeless, the lyrics make no sense but the costumes are fantastic and the Swedish accents are kinda cute. And if you watch their lips, you can see that they forget the words a couple of times :)
This one is kind of weird - an Australian singer singing an American folk song in German. Why? No idea. Her mother was German which explains the language, but why this particular song I don't know. I really like it though, and her pronunciation is great.
As a GI, Elvis was stationed in Germany, where he got in touch with German culture. Wooden Heart is a cover of the traditional folk song Muss i denn which is sung in the dialect I grew up with. Most of the song is in English, but he sings one verse in the original language and it's absolutely surreal hearing Elvis singing in Swabian.
Apparently the Beatles were less than enthusiastic about singing in German, but they did it anyway and so now we know what it would have sounded like if the Beatles had been German. I think this works very well! They also recorded a German version of She loves you, but I like this one a little better.
Kind a cool to hear the Man in Black singing in German. He doesn't sound like he speaks the language, more like somebody wrote the lyrics out for him phonetically and then he did his best, but Cash in heavily American-accented German is still Cash, and Cash is great.
Why did David Bowie sing in German? I have no idea. He lived in Berlin for a while, maybe that's why. He sings with his usual passion, but his pronunciation is... challenging, and for most of the song I have no idea what he's saying. Still sounds great though.
This one doesn't exactly fit in here because it isn't sung by the original artist, but it is so bizarre that I just have to share it. Cindy und Bert are usually known for making the cheesiest of cheesy German pop music called Schlager, like this song, but for whatever reason here they recorded a Cover of Black Sabbath's Paranoid, and it actually works. They kept the dark sound of the song intact and added a Hammond organ which gives it a bit of a Deep Purple/Uriah Heep vibe, and the singing is strange, but kind of hypnotic. They also look like they're stoned off their asses. This might actually be my favourite Sabbath cover!
While writing this I noticed that three of the artists in this post (Abba, Olivia Newton-John and Cindy und Bert) participated in the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest. Just thought I'd mention it.
2026-01-31 08:00:00
My friend Dom wrote a long post yesterday about his feelings around coding with AI over on his blog titled "Vibe coding a Gemini Capsule and learning a life lesson in the process", which I highly recommend reading. As it happens, I needed to solve a problem a few days ago and decided to give vibe coding a try, and I have some thoughts about it, too.
Here's just a very quick description of my problem, in case you'd like to play along at home. I have a number of text files which look like this:
Section A:
- content
- content
- content
Section B:
- content
- content
- content
...
Each file has different sections with different content underneath. What I want to do is grab each Section A from every file and write the contents to a new file titled SectionA.txt, then do the same for Section B and so on. The files are also timestamped and I want to put everything in chronological order in the resulting textfile.
It's not the most difficult problem out there, but it's not something that you can just solve with one quick line of bash code. Ok, I'm sure there's someone out there who could whip up one line of code which does this, but it's definitely not me. So I thought I'd see how ChatGPT deals with a task like this.
So I punched my problem and the solution I expected as a prompt into ChatGPT (selecting the model GPT-5 mini from DuckDuckGo) and let it do it's thing. After a few seconds it produced a bash script which looked fine, so I copied it into a file, ran it and it worked flawlessly on the first try and did exactly what I wanted. It took less than a minute from starting to write the prompt to running the script and verifying the output, which I have to say is impressive and is way faster than if I had done it myself.
Roaring success, right? AI is amazing and it made my life easier. What's not to love?
Well, after I'd run the script, I sat with this thought for a while and realised that I didn't like at all how it made me feel. Yes, I got the result I wanted, but I didn't do anything for it, I didn't learn anything from it, I didn't understand how and why the script I got back worked. I just told a machine what I wanted, and the machine did it without any effort from my side at all. I felt like an impostor, like a hack, like someone who had just cheated on a test. I felt like one of those people in the movie WALL·E who are just sitting in their automated chairs with screens in front of their faces, too fat and lazy and stupid to do anything useful. And I hated that feeling.
So I deleted the script, closed the browser tab and decided to write the script myself.
I switched to Python because I'm more familiar with it than bash. This is not a complex problem to solve, but I still had to start thinking about what I wanted to achieve and how to best approach it. Then I had to work in small increments, first reading out one section from one file, then all sections from one file, then all sections from all files, then make sure everything was processed in the right order, make sure the output was formatted correctly, and so on.
I made mistakes which I had to fix, and I had to look up a bunch of things that I had forgotten or wasn't sure how to do anymore. It was't hard, but it was still way harder than just typing a prompt into an AI, and it took a lot longer, too. I didn't look at the clock, but I guess I spent 20 to 30 minutes with it until I was happy with my script.
But afterwards I felt good! I had accomplished something. I came up with a solution to my problem, and then I implemented the solution and learned a few things and improved my coding skills in the process. I got frustrated when I ran into an issue but then got a small dopamine hit when I resolved it, and when I was done I walked away from the computer feeling good about myself because I had actually done and produced something and not just whipped a slave into doing the thing for me while I sat around lazily on my butt. Metaphorically speaking of course.
So here's the very predictable conclusion: Using AI can lead to impressive results in no time at all, but it leaves me feeling hollow and discontent. Satisfaction and happiness comes from doing something myself, even if it may be difficult and uncomfortable in the moment. But if I avoid doing everything that's hard and outsource all the thinking to AI, then I will pretty soon turn into a lazy and stupid blob who isn't capable of thinking for himself anymore, and that's a fate I want to avoid at all cost.
Dom summarises the feeling of using AI very well:
Yes, I published a project. But I didn’t become a better person doing it.
And that's a damn shame.
2026-01-30 08:00:00
The web is getting worse, search engines are becoming more and more useless and AI crawlers are so greedy that by now they're almost indistinguishable from a DDoS attack. I had a few interesting discussions about this on Mastodon this week, and everybody is exhausted, frustrated and angry. What do we do about it? I have no idea... Michal advocates for switching to a different protocol like Gemini, and maybe that's not a bad idea if more people did it. I might look into this at some point. I'd love to have a space free of ads, tracking, slop, privacy invasions and corporate garbage. You know, a place which is still human.
In some other threads we talked about the importance of sharing links now that Google etc. are practically useless and have deteriorated to being little more than advertising frontends and slop dispensers. Since my linkdumps seem to be quite popular, I decided to create a dedicated RSS feed only for those, which you can find here. The regular feed which you're probably reading right now will stay as it is and contain all blog posts and linkdumps, so there is no need to subscribe to both. This is purely for the people who are mainly interested in the links and not so much in my other ramblings. You'll still have to deal with my random nonsense in the intro though, I'm not letting you off that easily :)
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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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