2026-08-18 08:00:00
I recently started thinking about VCRs, as you do. I'll spare you the train of thought that led me to this, but it started with a conversation about worsening eyesight and then it escalated from there.
Anyway, VCRs. I still remember the first VCR my dad bought when I was a kid. And in fact, I remember many times when my dad (and later me, once I had some money of my own) bought a brand new tech device that was state of the art at the time and that we'd never seen or used before.
I remember the first VCR entering our home. And the first microwave oven. The first cordless phone. The first PC (running Windows 95) and a few years later, the Internet. My first CD player. The first time I saw a video being played back from a DVD and how much better it looked than one on VHS. I remember when we had a satellite dish installed on our roof and all of a sudden we had something like 30 TV stations to choose from instead of the five or six we received before that via terrestrial broadcast, and the quality was better, too.
I remember the first wide screen TV my dad bought, and later the first flat screen TV. I remember my first laptop and my first mobile phone. The first mp3 player.
In the first 20 or so years of my life, dozens of new technologies and tech devices entered my life, and I was incredibly excited by all of them, because they all represented progress and they all were an improvement over what we had before.
The cordless phone was better than the one wired into the wall, because now you could go to your room or sit down on the couch and have a phone call there, instead of having to stand in the hallway where the phone was.
DVD was better than VHS. Better quality, no rewinding, the discs didn't wear out and you got tons of extra features on each disc.
CD sounded better than Cassette and Vinyl records. No rewinding, no pops and scratches, no tangled-up tape.
An mp3 player was better than a discman. Smaller, lighter, holds more music. Doesn't require lugging around a bunch of discs.
But in the following 20 years of my life up until today, these instances of discovering some brand new tech that was better than what came before became rarer and rarer. In fact, I only remember two things from the past 10+ years that I started using that were really a brand new product category for me: Smartphones and noise canceling headphones.
Using a smartphone for the first time was pretty amazing, with it's touch screen and the responsive and modern user interface. And it had GPS integrated and a lot of memory so you could store music on it and didn't need to carry a separate mp3 player, you could read your emails and chat with people and take pictures and videos... that was pretty revolutionary. Of course nowadays days I see the downsides of these devices and we're getting to a point where the cons outweigh the pros, but back when I bought the first smart phone (I guess in 2012 or so, I was relatively late to the party) it felt like a leap into the future compared to what I had before.
Noise canceling headphones still blow me away to this day. You put them on in a noisy environment like on a train, turn them on and all of a sudden it's quiet, despite the fact that there's a 750-horsepower diesel engine working at full power right underneath your seat.
But besides that, there isn't a lot of tech in recent years that has fascinated me as much as what became available during the 80s, 90s and 2000s. Everything back then felt like progress, and like moving towards a better future. Nowadays it feels like we're moving towards a worse future and where we were 15 or 20 years ago was perfectly fine and we should have stayed there.
But I wonder if that's just part of me getting older and turning into a grumpy old fart, or if that's a universal feeling. I'm especially curious to know if people who are younger than me, in their 20s today have had the same feelings of wonder and awe when new technology was introduced into their life as I had, or if they feel the same feelings of stagnation and things getting worse that I feel today.
I have a feeling that I know the answer already, because I read a lot of articles about young people rediscovering music cassettes and vinyl records and DVDs and whatnot, and I think if there was new tech to be excited about, they wouldn't get excited about the old stuff. In the 90s, tech from the 60s was dated and boring, while today tech from the 90s seems to see a revival.
But maybe I'm wrong? If you are in your 20s now and feel like writing down your thoughts about this topic, consider yourself challenged! I'd love to read them.
2026-08-15 08:00:00
This week, something happened in the world of rock music that nobody thought was ever going to happen again - Ritchie Blackmore rejoined Deep Purple live on stage for the first time in decades.
Blackmore is one of my favourite guitar players and easily one of the greates guitarists of all time. Along with late keyboard player Jon Lord and drummer Ian Paice he is one of the founding members of Deep Purple. Deep Purple's band history is long and messy; Blackmore left in 1975 to found Rainbow with Ronnie James Dio on vocals which was hugely successful, then he rejoined Purple from 1984 until 1993 when he left for good and went on to briefly reform Rainbow before he founded the medieval folk band Blackmore's Night together with his now wife Candice Night.
I always liked Deep Purple, but I absolutely love Rainbow, especially the Dio era. With Rising they recorded on of the best albums of all time, which also contains one of the best songs ever written, Stargazer. Blackmore's guitar solos on Stargazer and on Deep Purple's Highway Star are among my all time favourites, and I never get tired of listening to them. I'm not too much into the medieval stuff in Blackmore's Night, but in their live shows they always play some old Rainbow and Deep Purple songs, and those are fantastic. Just listen to this rendition of Soldier of Fortune. There's no doubt that Candice is an amazing singer, and Ritchie's guitar work, particularly the intro is out of this world. His fingers just fly across the fretboard and he makes even the fastest and most difficult melody lines look as if they're the easiest thing in the world to play. Incredible.
By all accounts Blackmore is a pretty difficult person to deal with (even his wife calls him "moody and difficult" in the clip above) and the final split with Deep Purple was not the most amicable one, and so they never played together again. Even in 2016 when the band was inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame they couldn't get their act together, with either the band not wanting Blackmore to be there or him not wanting to perform with them, depending on whose version you choose to believe.
So the fact that they managed to put whatever issues they had with each other aside to appear together on stage for what will probably be the final time is almost a miracle, and it's even wilder that it was Blackmore who got in touch with the band and asked to play a song with them. But the stars aligned; the band played in Long Island where he lives and he was well enough to do it (he's been battling a number of health issues in recent years, and he also had to cut short a mini tour with Blackmore's Night last year because he fell ill). So he knows that it's now or never, an opportunity like this might not present itself again.
And so this brings us back to last Wednesday, when Ritchie Blackmore appeared live on stage with Deep Purple, the band he founded in 1968, once again after a 33 year hiatus. And it was great seeing them play together again after this length of time. If we're being pedantic, his playing isn't as fast and technical as it once was, but the man is 81 and is suffering from arthritis and god knows what else, and he still plays better than I ever will, so that's that. It was great seeing him on stage with the band, and they all seemed to have a blast, as did the audience. And that's all anyone can really ask for.
Who knows what the future will hold. I hope he'll be around and well enough to make music for many more years, but he isn't getting any younger and if this turns out to be his final public appearance playing guitar, I can't think of a better way to conclude his incredible career than this.
Being on stage with Deep Purple and playing, of course, Smoke on the Water.
Legendary. Thanks, Ritchie.
2026-08-14 08:00:00
This week Ruben wrote about Feeling blue after the end of Heartstopper, his favourite series. I've never heard of this series before and I'm also not the target audience for it, but he said something in his review that got to me: "It’s the series I wish young me would have been able to watch, at a time when gay people like myself were only portrayed as stereotypes in mainstream media: one-dimensional props for comic relief." I have to admit I felt a twinge of shame reading this, because growing up in the 80s and 90s I know exactly which type of movies and shows he's talking about. And I'm also guilty of laughing at these stereotypical depictions of gay people without ever considering how seeing this must have felt to a young person who was just discovering that their sexual orientation was different from what was considered normal by society at this time. I absolutely believe Ruben when he says that he still carries around memories of pain and fear from his younger days, and it's awful to think about how insensitive we were about this kind of thing back then, without considering the emotional impact this can and does have on people like him. I think we've gotten better in recent times as a society in this regard, but... we should have done better then, too.
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2026-08-13 08:00:00
A few days ago I wrote a post titled "Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change". I don't write posts with the intention of getting lots of clicks, but this one seems to have struck a nerve (or the headline was clickbaity enough) because it went kind of viral (at least in small web terms). It bubbled to the top at Bubbles and someone also posted it on Hacker News. I don't check these places regularly, but I notice when an unusual number of comments roll in and suddenly a number of new followers appear on Mastodon.
This is not a new phenomenon to me, it has happened a few times before with other posts. But it's always a really weird and kind of scary feeling. Normally a blog post of mine gets maybe a few hundred visitors (according to my web server's logs), which is already a massive number as far as I'm concerned, but this one got over 20.000. The last post that was this popular was "I will never need to buy a new computer again", which got over 40.000 views in a week, which blew my mind then and still does.
Why is this scary? Because it triggers all kinds of insecurities in me. What if I got something wrong? What if people tell me my post is crap? What if I get yelled at? What if I find myself in the middle of a shitstorm? I think many people who put their writing/videos/art out into the world have similar fears.
Thankfully so far nothing even remotely like this has ever happened. I've been writing this blog for three years and so far people have been overwhelmingly kind and positive in their replies. The worst I ever got was maybe a snarky or slightly unfriendly reply on Mastodon here and there, and if I check the comments on Hacker News (which I probably shouldn't) there's the occasional a-hole in there, but even there the majority of comments is civil and respectful, which is positively surprising. This is the internet after all.
Still - it's kind of wild knowing that the post made the rounds and was seen by so many people. It makes me realise that I'm definitely not cut out to be famous. If I had a YouTube channel with a million subscribers, I think I would be perpetually on the verge of having a heart attack. It's a good thing then that I have a blog that despite the occasional (slightly) viral post is still pretty small (smol), and that's also how I like it.
2026-08-09 08:00:00
Recently, someone on Mastodon shared this video titled "Apple Changed..." by a guy named Theo who I'd never heard of, but according to his website he's a guy who "builds things". Apps, presumably. I had nothing better to do (sleepless night...) and I enjoy a good Apple bashing, so I watched the video. In it, Theo spends an hour ranting about how terrible the experience of developing apps for the iPhone/iPad is, how Apple takes 30% of all app store and in app purchases, how awful Xcode is as a development environment and how even as a developer you have to get Apple's approval to run your own app on your own device. And how you need a second device (MacBook) to build an app for your target device (iPad) because Apple won't allow you to build the app straight on the iPad itself. And a lot more.
I'm not an iOS developer (thank god), but I'm of course aware of Apple's restrictive policies when it comes to approving and running apps on their devices, and I have no doubt that everything he says in the video is true, and that it's really an abysmal experience developing for iOS, and that as a developer (and I'd argue as an Apple user, too) you're essentially trapped in an abusive relationship from which there seems to be no escape.
But as I watched this video I kept thinking, this guy is so rightfully angry and pissed off at Apple... and yet he's sitting in front of a brand new MacBook, a brand new iPhone and a brand new iPad.
He correctly points out towards the end of the video that the only thing that matters to Tim Cook is making more money for Apple. There's literally nothing else he cares about. Not your user experience, not the environment, and also not the mental health of children and teenagers using these devices, as much as he tries to pretend that he does. The only metric that matters to Apple is "number on spreadsheet go up". And so yes, Theo might make an hour long video about everything that he thinks sucks at Apple, and he may be right about all of it.
But he still gave them thousands of Dollars.
Apple wants his money, and he gave them exactly what they wanted. The fact that he's making angry videos is simply irrelevant to Apple, because they know that when the next iPhone or MacBook is released, he'll buy that too. So why would they change anything? Because he made an angry video? They might watch it some time when they're bored and need a good laugh, but then they'll go right back to making their devices even shittier for the end user and developer. Because they can. Because people keep buying them.
Like it or not, but if being the customer of a company starts to feel more like being in an abusive relationship rather than a mutually beneficial one, it's time to think about leaving. Yes, this is scary. It's painful. It requires sacrifice. And yes I know, the ecosystem. They lure you in with the promise of "everything just works", and once you're in, you can't leave, at least not without a great deal of pain. You know what that's called btw? A trap.
Leaving sucks. But there's no other way. As long as you keep throwing money at the corporations who treat you badly, why would they change?
This train of thought is heavily influenced by a post by Dave Rupert called "Double your business with companies you like" in which he argues that even though it might not feel like it, we as consumers do have an influence over which company thrives and which doesn't, because where we spend our money influences whose sales numbers go up and whose go down. In the world of tech this is not easy of course because there are a lot of huge and shady corporations out there, and they have an enormous amount of power. But there are still alternatives.
Apple might still try to present themselves as the underdog whose products are for the people who "think different", but they're not anymore, and they haven't been for a long time. They're the evil megacorporation now, and it's time to leave them behind and go to find the real underdogs to support.
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My apologies for accidentally starting a flamewar...
2026-08-07 08:00:00
It's currently Blaugust, and so I'm counting all my blog posts this month as Blaugust posts, including the Linkdumps. I told a friend about it and she laughed, because "blau" in German means "blue", like the colour, but it can also mean being drunk. And I had this thought too... Blaugust sounds a bit like I'm planning to spend the month getting hammered. Sometimes a totally innocent or meaningless word in one language can mean something entirely different in another language. I'm always reminded of this when I see a website hosted on wix.com. Wix is an Israeli company, and I have no idea if it means something in Hebrew... But I know the Germans in the room are already chuckling, because in German that's a slang expression for masturbation. So when I see the word "wixsite" show up in my URL bar, the image that pops into my mind is for sure not what they had intended...
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