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:
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 :)
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2025-08-16 08:00:00
[Update] The site is back! Sizeof(cat) just sent me a message saying that the domain was reinstated, and sure enough I checked and it's working again! I think we all know what happened - the TLD registrar read my post, realised their mistake and immediately reactivated the domain. I take full credit, and you're welcome ;)
Just kidding, I'm happy the domain is back! Of course that makes this post now obsolete, but I'm glad it does. I'm going to leave it up, but you can skip it now as it's no longer relevant. Well, except for the bit where I said that sizeof.cat is one of my favourite personal homepages, that part is still very much true :) [\Update]
One of my favourite personal homepages ever since I discovered it is sizeof(cat). There's a lot of amazing content on there about restoring old Mac and Windows laptops and keeping them alive with contemporary (and modern) software. Chances are you've seen this site, because I mentioned it numerous times in my weekly linkdumps.
I went back and checked, and I've linked to this site in linkdumps number 14 (where I said "Be careful with [the] links page, you will be sucked into it for hours!"), 16, 18, 39, 40, 41 and 51. It must be one of the websites I've linked to the most. None of these links work anymore however, because the site is gone, and the reason is pretty ugly: The domain sizeof.cat was suspended by the domain registrar.
I heard about this first from Matto who noticed that the website didn't load anymore, he then spoke to sizeof(cat) and they (I don't know their identity, so I'm going to use they) told him that the domain was suspended. I emailed them as well and they told me the same thing. The domain is just gone, end of story.
That's some major bullshit from the TLD owner to just suspend a domain without warning, reason or apparently any kind of way to appeal the decision, and it's also quite uncomfortable to know that this could happen to me too, at any time, for my own domain and if you have your own domain it could of course also happen to you.
Thankfully the website itself isn't gone, only the domain... but without the domain which was well known and linked everywhere, the website is pretty much impossible to find now, which is one of the reasons why I'm writing this post. (The other reason is to vent about how shitty the whole thing is and how angry it makes me.)
Anyway, the author decided to keep the site online, but it's only accessible through the TOR network now. I personally would love it if it was also accessible on the clear web, but after having gone through the experience of having your domain suspended out of the blue I can hardly blame them for not wanting to deal with this crap anymore.
So here is how to still access the site.
Get the TOR browser. It's really easy to use, just download it for your OS of choice, run it, click "connect" and that's it, you're connected to the TOR network.
Inside this browser you can then find sizeof(cat) under this URL:
http://sizeofaex6zgovemvemn2g3jfmgujievmxxxbcgnbrnmgcjcjpiiprqd.onion/
Here is their post about what happened to the domain, obviously also only accessible through TOR. Their conclusion is
"Lesson learned, on the Internet you really don’t own anything."
So true.
And that's it, that's all I know. It's equally sad and infuriating that this can just happen and there's nothing that you can do about it unless you want to get a lawyer involved. Life is really unfair sometimes.
I'm glad the site is still alive, even though it's less accessible now than it used to be. Sizeof(cat), I hope this doesn't discourage you from continuing to post! I really enjoy your content and your writing, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Just for completeness' sake, here are all the posts I've linked to over the last year (the first mention was in linkdump 14 on July 19th, 2024).
Enjoy browsing through the site, but beware of the links page! It's still dangerous :)
2025-08-15 08:00:00
Last week's linkdump was apparently very polarising, because it triggered some serious HATEMAIL. Yeah. I mentioned in my intro that nobody would even notice if I skipped posting for a week, and someone sent me an e-mail saying that they came here "very angry" and that I shouldn't dare think that nobody would notice if I stopped posting because they loved my linkdumps and absolutely people would care and notice. And that I shouldn't allow myself to think that nobody cared about my writing. Then to top it off they wished me a nice day, like an absolute fucking psychopath. Awful, right? I can't say it enough, and I hope one day people will listen: The small web is a terrible place and we should all go back to Facebook and Twitter to be safe from such horrible online abuse!
To recover from the trauma, I decided it was best to continue forward on my path and bring you another weekly linkdump. The identity of the online abuser shall remain unknown, because privacy matters and because it definitely wasn't Joel ;) Thanks for the nice message :)
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2025-08-10 08:00:00
My laptop of choice is a 2014 13'' MacBook Air. I've had it for years, I love the design, it's thin and light, the battery still lasts for hours despite being 10 years old and it runs Linux, which at least for me is its most important feature. I use this laptop daily and most of the posts on this website were written on this - in fact pretty much the entire website was coded on it. It's the perfect computer for me, and I hope it will continue to run for many more years to come.
A few months ago however it started acting up. Some of they keys didn't register the keypresses anymore, some of the time. The affected keys were mostly ctrl, shift, space, backspace and some of the arrow keys. Sometimes they would require multiple keypresses until one was registered, other times they worked fine without any issues for days or weeks at a time. At first I thought it was a software issue, but after trying all kinds of nvram/pram reset rain dances and booting a different OS from USB altogether (I even tried an original MacOS!) only to find the same fault happening there as well, everything pointed to a hardware issue.
Apparently that's a known fault that these machines develop sometimes, and annoyingly the problem can either be with the keyboard or with the logic board itself. Meaning, you can replace one and there's a fifty-fifty chance that it will either fix the problem, or you will have wasted your money. So we're dealing with an intermittent fault here that can have multiple different causes. The best kind of fault!
Replacing the logic board doesn't make a lot of sense; there are replacements available on Ebay, but the ones with the same specs as my laptop are quite expensive and at that point I might as well just buy a new computer instead. It's not like ten year old MacBooks are very expensive anymore anyway, but I'm cheap and I hate replacing entire devices just because one component failed, so I decided to try replacing the keyboard to see if that fixed the problem.
And that's where the nightmare begins. Because this is an Apple device, and what does Apple hate? Customers wanting to repair their devices.
You can't just replace the keyboard on a MacBook. No no no. You have to replace the entire topcase, because the keyboard is literally riveted in with dozens of tiny rivets. This is a topcase btw:
It's half the laptop.
I think in the first generation of these Unibody MacBooks (the Aluminium ones) they still used screws to mount the keyboard, but then some genius at Apple figured out that you could use rivets instead, probably because rivets are a tiny bit cheaper and faster to put in than screws which means you save money in manufacturing, and because you don't care about passing these savings on to your customers you can pocket them and make more money which is always a good thing if you're Apple and of course using rivets instead of screws has the additional benefit of making the device less repairable which creates more e-waste incentive for the customer to buy a new device which also means more MONEY for Apple and there's nothing that Tim Apple likes more than making EVEN MORE FUCKING MONEY to roll around in and I should probably stop now.
Ok. So I bought a new topcase and got to work replacing the old one.
I didn't take any photos during the process, but iFixit has a great guide on how to remove the topcase from a MacBook in 41 easy steps. Which will get you halfway through the repair, because that's just how to take the laptop apart. You then have to follow the guide in reverse to put everything back together. Here's a summary of how to get to the keyboard:
Battery, logic board, speakers, microphone array, touch pad, display... everything needs to come out. There's lots of tiny screws of different lengths that you have to keep track of, some things are glued in, and some things are connected with the most delicate flat flex cables that you have to be incredibly careful with when you disconnect them. You can easily break the connector or rip it off the logic board entirely, and then it's game over unless you have a microsoldering workstation, which I don't.
Anyway, after you've taken everything out, this is what you're left with:
I regret not taking a picture of my whole desk at this point, because it was a mess. That's the inside of the topcase and the back of the keyboard that you can't realistically take out, though you're welcome to try. I didn't want to do this which is why I just bought a replacement topcase from Ebay for 20 Euros. It probably came out of a MacBook that was sent to recycling and it had a Swedish keyboard layout, but the keycaps are easily removable so I could just swap the ones from my German keyboard in.
So I got to work putting everything back together, made sure there were no screws left and all cables were properly connected, turned the computer back on and - it still worked. What a relief! The whole process took me well over an hour and I would have hated having to take it apart again to figure out what I did wrong.
So, 50/50 chance that the keyboard was the issue. Was it?
Thankfully, yes. I did this a few days ago, I used the laptop normally ever since and I'm typing this right now on it, and so far everything is working perfectly. All in all I'm pretty happy with the repair, 20 Euros for a used replacement part is fair and if that gets a few more years out of this laptop, it's well worth the price and even the effort.
But Apple... this really shouldn't be so difficult. If you're not experienced in working with modern electronics, then this whole process is definitely not for you and the fact that the keyboard is riveted in place and you have to disassemble the entire laptop and replace half of it for a few broken keys is insane, as is the fact that the only reason I could even do this repair is because of third parties selling (used) replacement parts and providing detailed guides on how to do it, because Apple does neither.
I really like this laptop and I hope I'll get a few more years out of it now... but the next one will be a Framework or something similar that's designed by people who value my right to repair my own stuff. Apple clearly does not.
2025-08-08 08:00:00
I go through the same cycle every week. Throughout the week I collect interesting links that I come across, and then on Friday I sit down, go through the list and put together this linkdump. I don't specifically go looking for things to put in here, I just bookmark whatever I come across via Mastodon or RSS or randomly browsing the web, and I always have enough links. More than enough usually. And yet I'm always, always anxious that I might not have enough. You'd think that after doing this for over a year I would develop some trust in my process, but apparently not. What makes this extra crazy is that even if I only had two or three interesting things to share, that would be fine. This isn't my job, I don't get paid to do it, nobody expects anything and in fact even if I skipped a week entirely, nobody would even notice. Still I'm anxious that I might not do a good job. The mind does weird things, and mine is wired for anxiety it seems. I still love doing this though, and I'm always happy when I've finished and published a post.
Anyway, just thought I'd share. This post is brought to you by anxiety. Still better than a hairy buttcrack I suppose ;)
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2025-08-01 08:00:00
Here's how you get some focused writing done. You go to a cozy café, find a nice table, you sit down with your laptop, order your coffee and then you discover that, right across the room from you and with his back to you sits a guy who doesn't understand why belts exist or why shirts should be tucked into pants... and so every time you look up from your computer you're staring right into his buttcrack. Amazing! Nothing will make you want to stay on task more than the prospect of looking at that.
So here's this week's linkdump, brought to you with the help of some random dude's hairy ass. Hope you enjoy :)
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