Electrical engineer, musician, out and about on two wheels, read a lot of books, coffee-addict.
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2024-11-19 08:00:00
I keep up with Youtube via my RSS feed reader, where I subscribed to the channels I like through the RSS option from Invidious (yewtu.be in this case). Basically I go to https://yewtu.be, find the channel I like, get the RSS feed from there and add it to my feed reader. Last week though this mechanism broke, and so I needed to figure out a new way. Here’s how this went.
This is basically a retelling of a conversation over on Mastodon, but it was so cool that I wanted to mention it here.
I described my problem here and asked if anyone knew of a good way to subscribe to Youtube channels via RSS feeds. Many years ago you could do that right on Youtube, I remember channels had an RSS button on their site. But that went away long ago because people are supposed to use the app goddammit!
Anyway, I still like RSS the best, so I wanted to keep it this way. A few people chimed in, Dom mentioned that it’s still possible to get RSS from Youtube if you know the channel ID which is somewhat hidden. Jon mentioned that FreeTube can do export RSS feeds, which I tried and was actually happy with.
But then PeskyPotato, who I’ve never interacted with before got in touch and mentioned that it should be possible to subscribe to RSS feeds from Youtube with the channel name in the URL as well. Turns out that this is not the case, it was a feature of their RSS reader instead.
But here comes the amazing part. Apparently this annoyed them enough so they figured out that you could get the channel ID from yt-dlp, and then they coded a webtool that does it for you!
Have a look, here’s the explanation how it works and here’s the webtool. Just enter the URL of the Youtube channel and you get the RSS feed URL back.
And I can’t get over how freaking cool this is! I posted a minor annoyance online and a complete stranger sat down and actually coded a solution for my problem that went way beyond what I would have done myself to solve this problem. Sometimes people do amazing things.
So PeskyPotato, thank you very much for this! You have my respect, this is just beyond amazing to me.
2024-11-15 08:00:00
I can’t believe another week has passed, time moves so fast… but this also means it’s time for another linkdump. I actually find myself referring back to my old linkdumps quite regularly, they have become a kind of bookmarking system for me and a way of keeping track of what I was interested in in the past, so I think it’ll be a lot of fun to look back on them a few years from now.
Articles
Software/Services
Hardware Projects
Around the Small Web
2024-11-10 08:00:00
Since I wrote about losing my job in June, I figure it’s also fitting to write about starting a new job last week. So here we go.
I found the job through a recommendation by a former colleague from my last company (the one that fired me), because he had the good sense to leave there before everything turned to complete crap. In his new company they were looking for embedded developers with a focus on embedded Linux, which is exactly what I’ve been doing in the last job as well and which I enjoy doing anyway, so that worked out perfectly. So now we’re colleagues once again, for the third time actually, because we also went to university together.
So how is it? It’s only one week in of course, so it’s too early to tell for sure, but I have a few initial thoughts and feelings about it.
The work is good. It’s exactly what I expected, putting Linux on embedded devices, and even though the devices are different than the ones in the last company, the process is pretty much exactly the same. So I felt comfortable right away.
The colleagues are great as well. Nerds of course and pretty much only men, which is standard in this profession unfortunately, but all very nice and welcoming and helpful.
The IT equipment is top notch, coffee and drinks are free, the coffee is terrible because that’s just how office coffee is, but it does the job of keeping you awake and focused.
There are a few downsides however.
The biggest one without a doubt is having to go back to using Windows and Teams and Outlook and all the other Microsoft crapware that comes with it. This is my first time using Windows 11, and I hated it right away. My computer is a laptop with the latest-gen i7 8 core CPU, 32GB RAM, NVMe SSD… it’s a fast machine. Yet Windows 11 makes it feel like a 15 year old Core2Duo with barely enough RAM to make it run at all. Everything is so sluggish! I could write a whole article about how terrible it is, and maybe I will at some point, but for now let’s move on.
The building is your standard Ugly Office Building from the 90s, which is better than Ugly Office Building from the 70s for sure, but still not a place that feels like it was made for humans to feel comfortable in. Long narrow windowless corridors, ugly and slightly worn down furniture, carpeted floors, dimly lit bathrooms and coffee kitchens… it’s a far cry from the open spaces with large windows and lots of natural light that modern buildings have. On the plus side, the offices are not too big but with huge windows, and there is no open-plan office, it’s just two or three people per office so the offices are reasonably quiet and you can actually focus on your work.
The company is a big corporation, but the division I’m working for is in the process of being sold to a different company, and it isn’t public yet who the new owners are going to be, so change is on the horizon. This can be both a positive or a negative, but for now I’m keeping an open mind and just wait for what’s to come.
There is one thing though that I absolutely love about working there and that I was very excited about: the office is just about a kilometre away from where I live, so after years of commuting for 30-60 minutes or more each day my commute is now a quick 5 minute bike ride or a less than 15 minute walk. And for this, I’m absolutely willing to put up with ugly office furniture and bad coffee. At least for a while.
2024-11-08 08:00:00
It’s Friday again, and what a week it has been. There’s political turmoil in the US, there’s political turmoil at home in Germany. I started a new job this week and am very exhausted as a result, but thankfully I work a four day week, so I can start to unwind.
I haven’t been online too much this week and I definitely tried to avoid the news, so I thought today I’d just post a few of my favourite posts from blogs I follow from the past week, and maybe there’s a few blogs or posts in there that you didn’t know yet.
Some of the people in this list I interact with online quite regularly, so this is actually starting to feel like a list of “this is what my (online) friends have been up to this week”, which is quite nice.
Around the Small Web
2024-11-01 08:00:00
It’s Friday once again, and actually a public holiday where I live, so let’s have a lazy long weekend linkdump that’s slightly retro gaming themed, as that’s what I was into this week.
Articles
Software/Services
Misc
2024-10-27 08:00:00
For a while I thought it would be great to be able to print interesting articles from the web in a two column layout like they would appear in a magazine. Today I set out to figure out how to do it, and I succeded.
This is just a quick post more for myself than for anyone else, so I don’t forget how I did it. For starters, everything I’m doing is in Firefox.
Here’s the problem. Say I find an interesting article online that I would like to read or archive on paper for whatever reason. Let’s take this article by Dom Corriveau as an example. If I simply hit “print” inside Firefox, that’s what Firefox produces:
That’s okay, but the text runs all the way across the page from left to right, which makes it hard to read on an A4 page.
Here’s what I want:
That’s much better for reading (in my opinion).
There’s two ways I figured out how to do it:
I found the extension Stylus for Firefox that allows for overwriting the CSS of any website with custom CSS code. I installed it in Firefox and created a new Style inside the extension under “Actions”, called it “print 2 columns” and added the following CSS code:
@media print {
body {
column-count: 2;
column-fill: auto; /* Vertical use of space, default: balance the creation of columns is symmetrical. Auto with width: 100%, First complete the first column vertically, then the next column until the end of the content. */
column-gap: 2em; /* Distance between columns */
column-rule: 2px solid black; /* Lines between columns */
column-span: all; /* Another method to create heading, can be 2 of 3 columns */
column-width: auto; /* Width of all columns */
text-align: justify;
}
}
Save, and I was done. Now this CSS code will be inserted into the page and when I click on “print”, it will create a two column layout like the one in the screenshot above.
There is also a way to customise reader mode inside Firefox to print to two columns. Here’s how, taken from here:
- Enter in your Firefox URL-search-bar:
about:support- Open your Profile Folder by selecting
Show Folder- Create a new folder inside your profile folder called
chrome- Navigate into
chromeand create a new plain-text file calleduserContent.css- Edit
userContent.cssaccording to your CSS preferences- In new Firefox profiles, starting from Firefox 69, you additionally have to enable
toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheetsinabout:config
I then edited the newly created “userContent.css” file and added this:
@-moz-document url-prefix("about:reader") {
@media print {
body {
column-count: 2;
column-fill: auto; /* Vertical use of space, default: balance the creation of columns is symmetrical. Auto with width: 100%, First complete the first column vertically, then the next column until the end of the content. */
column-gap: 2em; /* Distance between columns */
column-rule: 2px solid black; /* Lines between columns */
column-span: all; /* Another method to create heading, can be 2 of 3 columns */
column-width: auto; /* Width of all columns */
}
}
}
@-moz-document url-prefix("about:reader") {
.moz-reader-content {
text-align: justify;
}
}
Save, restart Firefox and that’s it. The print output from reader mode looks like this:
You might notice that I also added the option to justify the text, which I personally prefer. If you don’t simply delete the line text-align: justify
If this works on all the websites out there remains to be seen, probably not… but it’s a good starting point I feel.
Sources:
2024-10-25 08:00:00
It’s Friday again, time for another Linkdump. I was sick with covid the last two weeks which is why there wasn’t any activity around here, but now it’s time to start again.
Articles
Software/Services
Hardware Projects
Videos
2024-10-11 08:00:00
It’s Friday again, and so here we are with another linkdump. Number 26, so I’ve been doing these consistently for half a year now!
Software/Services
Hardware Projects
Misc
2024-10-06 08:00:00
I am a fan of the type of music that’s called “Classic Rock” today, meaning old rock and metal bands from the 70s and 80s. Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, Uriah Heep, Deep Purple, The Sweet, Ozzy, Metallica, AC/DC, Blue Öyster Cult, Motörhead, Judas Priest, Pink Floyd, Queen… the list goes on and on. And I love going to concerts to see these bands play live. Here’s my problem though: All these people are getting old, and they won’t be around forever.
The Sweet are coming to town later this month on their farewell tour because the sole surviving member of the band, Andy Scott, is pretty old by now, was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago and is openly talking about that he doesn’t know how much more time he’s got left.
Uriah Heep announced a few weeks ago that they will go on one last global tour and then wind down touring, because just like with The Sweet, there’s only one member of the original lineup remaining (Mick Box), and he’s in his late 70s. All the other original members are gone, with both Ken Hensley and Lee Kerslake having died in 2020 within a few weeks of each other.
Ozzy is old and sick, which is why Black Sabbath called it quits almost ten years ago. Lemmy died so Motörhead is over. Same with Dio. In AC/DC, Angus is the only original guy left. Deep Purple are getting on in age…
All of this means for me that the days of seeing my favourite bands, the bands that I’ve loved since I was a teenager are coming to an end. There are some bands that I’ve never seen, like Pink Floyd, Queen obviously because I was too young to go to live shows when Freddy Mercury was still alive, Blue Öyster Cult because they rarely play in Europe…
And so I made it a point in the last decade or so to see as many of these bands live whenever possible, because who knows how long they’ll be around. I’m glad I saw Motörhead before Lemmy’s death, I’m glad I saw Ozzy live and Black Sabbath twice, once with Dio and once with Ozzy, and I went to see Alice Cooper, Judas Priest, Saxon and Uriah Heep this year and I will for sure go to see The Sweet in two weeks. Uriah Heep is my all time favourite band, and the thought that I might only see them live one last time and then never again actually makes me tear up.
It took longer than I expected, but now it’s inevitably arriving: The era of my life where I can no longer see my favourite bands live because they stopped touring, have disbanded because of health issues or the death of key members or in some cases stopped being good long ago and are only a shadow of their former selves.
Some things about getting older are not fun at all.
But just so we’re not ending on a completely depressing note: I went to the Planetarium yesterday and saw Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon Planetarium Show, and it was quite good. I’d seen this before in 2016 or so, but back then the visuals looked more like a 90s winamp visualization which wasn’t all that impressive anymore. But now they recreated it with new visuals, and it was actually a pretty nice experience. So if you’re into Pink Floyd and have a Planetarium near you, I can recommend this.
2024-10-04 08:00:00
TGIF, and of course this means it’s time for another linkdump!
Articles
Software/Services
Videos
Around the Small Web
Misc
2024-09-27 08:00:00
TGIF, and this means it’s time for another linkdump!
Articles
Software/Services
Videos
Around the small web
2024-09-25 08:00:00
Recently Apple announced the launch of the new iPhone 16 with a keynote that promised a ton of new AI features that this phone will have. Small problem: It doesn’t have any of these features when you go out to buy it today. They will be delivered as an update at some (to you) unknown point in the future, probably. Maybe. But you have to pay full price today of course.
By now this seems to be pretty much the accepted industry standard to announce products with a number of features that are “coming soon”. In some cases one of those “coming soon” features seems to be “is actually usable at all”.
Some of the more recent examples include the Humane AI pin and the Rabbit R1, both (according to reviews) hilariously bad products that barely functioned at all and had a number of issues like being incredibly slow at the one thing they were supposed to be quick at or overheating batteries, which is something that should be caught during the testing phase of the product and that a product should never be shipped with to begin with.
There are many other examples, like Elon Musk perpetually announcing that next year will be the year of the full self driving car, a promise he still hasn’t fulfilled yet but that made a number of people buy Teslas based on his announcements, not on the actual implemented functionality of the car. Or video games that are released in a very unfinished and near unplayable state. Or video game consoles that require a day 1 patch right after being turned on for the first time to even function properly, because they were produced with a yet unfinished firmware.
And now Apple is joining the party by announcing an iPhone with a host of new AI enabled features, of which zero are present in the phone that people can actually buy on launch day.
And I can’t help but wonder, what the hell are we doing here? Why are we as consumers accepting this kind of behaviour?
Imagine you bought a car with 200 horsepower, but it only came with 110 with the other 90 being delivered in a future update. Imagine you bought a cook top with only two out of four hotplates working, with the other two being enabled next year in an update. Imagine you bought a power strip with 6 outlets, but only 4 were working… you get the idea. We would never buy these products. But in the software world we just came to accept that this is the reality.
This is dangerous though, because the message it sends to the manufacturers is that it’s okay to bring half finished products to market (at full price of course) and then deliver the functionality that was promised right from the start over the course of the coming months or years. Which might be fine for phones or games consoles, but it isn’t fine for cars that can (and sometimes do) kill people if they malfunction because of poorly implemented or tested software.
In an ideal world consumers would refuse to buy unfinished products, but unfortunately that’s not the world we live in, and the current social and economic conditions create an incentive for manufacturers to act in this way because everyone wants to be first to market, even if that means throwing a product out into the world that would have needed another 6 or 12 months of development to be ready.
I have personally worked on a product like this in my professional career that was rushed to market before being fully ready, because management made the borderline suicidal decision to announce the product to the world (including the release date six months after the announcement) before development was finished. Not even the production line was set up at this point. All we had were prototypes. Then we had to scramble for the next 6 months to get the thing production ready in the first place and then for another year to fix bugs and deliver functionality updates that the product was supposed to be shipped with from the start. It felt awful. I hope I’ll never be in this position again, because this goes very much against my value of wanting to deliver good work.
But I fear that unless there is a big mindset shift in society, we will continue seeing this behaviour going forward, and we will be bombarded with more and more unfinished products that may or may not turn into the thing that was actually promised weeks or months, if not years after they first went on sale. And maybe never, if the company runs out of money first.
2024-09-22 08:00:00
I start a lot of projects with great motivation, but often when I run into the first problem (which is inevitable, it always happens), I very quickly lose the motivation to push through and consequently lose interest in the project and move on to something else. Which means there’s a lot of unfinished stuff lying around my apartment. And it’s weighing me down. So I have to do something about it.
There’s of course two things I can do about unfinished projects: Abandon them and be okay with it, or finish them and then be happy and celebrate that I did it. There’s something to be said for abandoning things you’re no longer into, but most of the things I have started and have lying around I actually do want to finish, so let’s work on that.
First, why don’t I finish things I start? I already mentioned the main reason for it: I run into an issue that I can’t resolve easily, and I lose interest. Sometimes the issue is that I would need to buy something and I shy away from spending any more money on it. Sometimes I don’t know how to do something and that kills my motivation. Sometimes I notice I don’t have the right tools for the job at hand. And sometimes I make a mistake which can’t be easily fixed and I feel like a failure as a result.
Here’s a few project that so far have remained unfinished and why:
And there are many more things like these projects I started but never finished over the years.
Losing interest and deciding that continuing a project is not worth it or is no longer the right thing for me is one thing, and this I’m actually fine with. But all these projects above are things I genuinely want to do and want to finish, and I feel like a failure for getting stuck or abandoning them because things got difficult.
So what do I do? I think I have to pick one project and work on it consistently until it’s done or until I decide to leave it be and am fine with that. But jumping from project to project as soon as something isn’t working right is not the right solution for me. I don’t want to stress myself out of course, these are my hobbies that I do for fun after all, but I think treating them a bit more seriously and a bit more like the things I do at work, where I also can’t just abandon something if I can’t get it working right away is not a bad idea.
So that’s it, pick one project, work on it until it’s finished, then move on to the next. I’ll try that and see how I get on. I think I’ll start with the CD player first, as that’s already well under way. I’ll report back here when it’s done.
And here, fellow bloggers and readers is a challenge: Write about how you manage to do your personal projects. How do you organize yourself, how do you manage to finish things and when do you decide it’s time to stop working on something for good? I’m really curious to know, maybe I can learn something.
2024-09-20 08:00:00
TGIF, so let’s have another linkdump!
Articles
Software/Services
Hardware Projects
2024-09-18 08:00:00
A few months ago I bought a 3D printer. I had wanted one for ages, but I was always unsure if I really needed one, and they weren’t exactly cheap either… but when I lost my job a while ago I thought what the hell, I’ll just give it a try. Worst thing that can happen is I don’t like it and sell it again and lose a bit of money in the process. No big deal. But it turns out I absolutely love it.
I got the Anycubic Kobra 2 Pro, which received good reviews and was also recommended by a friend who is familiar with 3D printing. I found a used one locally from a guy who called himself a 3D printing enthusiast, and the printer turned out to be basically new, only lightly used and very well taken care of, but I got it for 190€ instead of the 270€ it would have cost new. Not a bad deal.
At first I did what probably anyone who is new to 3D printing would do: I scoured the internet for things that I could print. There’s sites like Thingiverse and Printables and probably many more that offer tons and tons of 3D models designed by users for download, many of them free and only asking for a small donation in case you like it. And so I printed out a bunch of things, some useless like a low polygon model of a skull or a fidgeting toy, but also a few surprisingly useful things like a funnel to aid in refilling my nespresso coffee capsules, a guitar pick holder in the form of a skull or a vertical laptop stand.
I also found and printed a model of the Zeppelin Hindenburg which I gave to my dad for his birthday because he loves model airplanes and things like that and he loved it. That’s the topic of future birthday gifts taken care of.
And then I started dipping my toes into designing my own things. I have absolutely no experience with 3D design and CAD, but I had played around with Blender before almost a decade ago, so I started creating some stuff in Blender. Now to say that my models are basic would be an understatement… pretty much everything I’ve done so far is made from the simplest of shapes, blocks and cylinders. I should mention I’m not doing anything crazy like dragons or stuff like that, just functional things like replacement parts or things I would ordinarily have to buy.
I made stands for my old cellphones that I like to keep around for nostalgic reasons, some mounting parts for a pane of plexiglass I needed to fit somewhere, a bunch of washers that I would have had to buy otherwise and a couple of other small bits and pieces I needed.
And I cannot overstate how cool it is to design something on your computer, a digital 3D model that only exists as an image on your screen, and then send it to the printer and see it take shape and turn into a real physical object that you can touch and use. Of course you can build stuff out of wood or acrylic or even metal if you have the right tools, and I enjoy doing that too, but designing a thing entirely from scratch on the computer and then seeing the printer build it up layer by layer is just a whole new experience and something that until very recently was simply not possible to do in your own home.
But now it is, and having experienced it myself it truly feels like a revolution. If you need a specific part for a project that you can’t buy somewhere, you can just make it yourself. If a part of a tool or a device you have breaks, you can make a replacement. Need a hook that fits on top of your door and is a certain length and width? Just design it in Blender and print it, or maybe there’s even a piece like this already available on Thingiverse.
The limit is your imagination! …okay, and the size of your print bed. And the material properties of the filament you’re using. And the resolution of your printer, at least with mine I can’t really print miniature parts… But you get the idea. There’s a lot that you can do with a 3D printer, and so far I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible.
2024-09-16 08:00:00
I missed yesterday’s post, but for a good reason: I went home to my parents’ for a family birthday. They live about 200km away from me (or I do from them, depending on the point of view), and since I don’t have a car and the weather was too bad to take the Vespa, I took the train.
I originally moved to the region that I still live in for university, 21 years ago. Which means I’ve taken the train back home literally hundreds of times during the past 21 years, and to be honest, I’m pretty sick of it. But I don’t go home as often as I used to anymore, and whenever possible I find different means of transportation, so I take the train maybe a handful of times a year at most, which is manageable.
Anyway, the trip back in the evening yesterday reminded me of the many times I took the same train back when I was a university student. I used to go home (to my parents) every two weeks or so on Friday after the last lecture and then take the train back on Sunday evening at 6.
During the autumn and winter it was dark outside, so I sat on the train, stared out into the darkness and listened to music on my discman, which is like listening to music on Spotify, except not at all like it. I had to think before the trip which music I wanted to listen to and pack the appropriate CDs, and I could only listen to the music I had with me.
For a while I was absolutely in love with a best of CD by Blue Öyster Cult, a band I still love to this day. Their music for me often has a bit of an otherworldly, melancholic quality to it with songs like Flaming Telepaths, Astronomy, Shooting Shark, I Love The Night and (Don’t Fear) The Reaper. So I would sit on the train after a weekend back home with my family and old friends from school (which was my old life), going back to university to my new life. And for a while during those early years, Blue Öyster Cult was my soundtrack for this train ride and this transition between different eras of my life.
And so yesterday, as I was on that same train staring out into the darkness, I remembered this and pulled up the same album on my phone and listened to Blue Öyster Cult once again feeling like that young guy half a lifetime ago going from his old and familiar past life into an exciting and unknown future.
2024-09-13 08:00:00
TGIF, and this means it’s time for another Linkdump!
Articles
Hardware Projects
Personal Homepages
Here’s two pages of people who got in touch with me via Email recently with very nice and thoughtful messages. The small web is alive and well!
Misc
2024-09-11 08:00:00
Being in my 40s and meeting all different kinds people, I started to realise a long time ago - everyone is carrying some sort of emotional baggage around. In fact, I’m very suspicious when somebody tells me that everything is great, life is fantastic and they’re happy and positive all the time because I often noticed that these kinds of people are the most troubled but don’t want to admit it to others and themselves. But I’ve heard and seen all kinds of crazy stories over the years.
There’s the person whose spouse died unexpectedly at the age of 40, leaving them behind with two small kids.
There’s the person who suffered sexual abuse by their spouse of more than a decade.
There’s the person in their early 50s who suffers from depression because of a lack of friends, their spouse being far away taking care of a family member and who never had kids.
There’s the person whose sibling died unexpectedly in their early thirties.
There’s the person whose kids are slowly growing up and starting to move out of the house which is really hard on them.
There’s the person who is suffering from a psychosis and cut themselves off from all social activities and spends their life alone in their apartment rather than getting the help they would need.
There’s the person who was dumped by their spouse literally 6 weeks after getting married because they “fell in love with somebody else” (they’ve been together for 14 years at this point).
There’s the person whose father was an alcoholic and drank himself to death when they were still a kid.
There’s the person whose mother was abusive and angry and bitter and blamed her only child for everything that was wrong with her life, for years and years without end.
There’s the person whose parents are suffering from their children living far away, but the only way they are able to express their feelings is through anger and accusations and passive aggressiveness.
And there’s countless people who suffered emotional neglect and abuse as children, sometimes even sexual abuse, found themselves in toxic and abusive relationships… the list goes on and on and on.
I often start writing these posts without really knowing where I want to take them or where I’ll end up, and this one definitely falls into this category. But I think there are a few takaways from this that I want to note down.
For one, everyone has suffered or is suffering in one way or another. The people who say that they aren’t are either the very rare exception or they do not want to admit it to themselves or to the world. Which is everyone’s personal decision of course, but usually ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away, and problems that impact your mental health definitely don’t go away on their own, no matter how hard you try to ignore them.
It also means that if you’re suffering, you’re absolutely not alone. Most other people are suffering too in different ways, even if they seem to be fine on the surface. But you never know what kind of demons a person is carrying around with them.
Being aware of this is also a good exercise to practice some compassion towards other people. You never know what kind of hardship a person is facing, so rather than getting angry when someone is kind of rude to me I try to remember that I don’t know the person and that they might just be going through some difficult times right now. I don’t know if they are of course, maybe they’re just an asshole, but I still have the choice of how to react, and I prefer to react with compassion instead of anger (at least that’s what I aspire to, to varying degrees of success I have to admit).
And lastly, life goes on. Bad things happen to good people, but all (well, most of) the people I talked about above are dealing with the cards they have been dealt with and are living their life the best they can despite all the hardships they are facing. And the ones who don’t, who would rather ignore their problems than face them or who choose to see themselves as a helpless victim of an unfair world… well that’s their choice, and that’s fine, too.
2024-09-08 08:00:00
And here we are in September. For the last few months I neglected my reading habit a bit, and my plan for August was to reignite my passion for reading by picking up a few books I love and knew I’d enjoy re-reading. So how did I do?
Well I read two books, both of them I’d read before, both some of my favourites of the SciFi genre. I’m still struggling to sit down consistently every night to read for half an hour or so before bedtime, but I’m getting better, so things are moving in the right direction. So let’s have a look at the books.
I read this one when it was still pretty new, more than ten years ago at this point, and I also saw the film, which I think is a pretty good adaptation of the book.
In case you don’t know what it’s about, astronaut Mark Watney gets stranded alone on Mars after the mission he’s on has to be aborted prematurely because of a sandstorm that threatens to damage the return vehicle that the astronauts rely on in order to get back to Earth. So they all make their way back from the habitat to the rocket, but Watney is hit by a flying piece of debris and is presumed dead by the rest of the crew, so they leave his body behind. Only he didn’t die, and now he finds himself stranded alone on Mars without a way to communicate with Earth or get back home and has to essentially problem-solve his way out of this dire situation.
Andy Weirs characters are pretty much all stereotypes without much depth or personality to begin with, because for him it’s all about solving complex puzzles and problems using a mix of science, physics, engineering etc. Watney is probably the most developed, but that isn’t saying much. The star of the show are the problems Watney has to solve in order to survive on Mars and eventually make his way back home. Weir throws pretty much everything he can think of at Watney, from having to come up with a way to produce his own food so he doesn’t starve to establishing contact with Earth again to technical malfunctions that threaten his survival… and he enjoys having Watney come up with solutions to these problems.
There’s an XKCD comic that sums it up perfectly:
Needless to say, I enjoyed the book very much, which is why I decided to give it another read.
This is a great one that I only read last year, but it’s so good that I was actually excited to pick it up again.
Humans have figured out a way of interstellar travel by accelerating to near light speed and navigating straight into a collapsar (a neutron start or a black hole) which then causes the spaceship to be sort of teleported to a different collapsar in another part of the universe. On one of these expeditions a spaceship is attacked by a spaceship from an alien race called the Taurans. This causes an interstellar war between the humans and the Taurans.
The story is told from the perspective of a young man named William Mandella who signs up for the military, goes through a grueling training regimen and is eventually deployed on a mission to take out a Tauran base on an alien planet.
The most fascinating aspect of the war is that because of the huge speed (close to light speed) required to make the collapsar jump, the soldiers experience severe time dilation. For them their mission lasts only a few months, but during that time back home on Earth many years if not decades pass. So every time they come back from one of their missions, they find themselves thrown several decades into the future in a society they barely recognise anymore and that doesn’t really care about them or the war in the first place. Everything is completely different, they don’t fit in and the only option they see is to sign up for the military again to go back on another mission because that’s the only thing they know.
Haldeman is a Vietnam war veteran, and it’s not hard to see his own experiences as a soldier returning back home from the war reflected in his writing. I love the idea of the soldiers returning home after several decades in Earth’s time have passed only to find a planet and a society they barely recognise anymore and where they don’t really fit in. His language and his writing style is also very unique and really pulled me in to the story, so if you’re a fan of SciFi, give this one a read.
2024-09-06 08:00:00
It’s Friday (at least where I live), and this means it’s time for our weekly linkdump! So grab a cup of coffee and see if there’s anything in here that catches your interest.
Articles
Software/Services
Hardware Projects
2024-09-04 08:00:00
… or you live long enough to end up with Tim Cook as your CEO and a product lineup that’s predominantly slabs or blocks made from glass and aluminium in various different shapes and sizes. But no matter if you prefer your slab of glass to be 6 inches, 10 inches, 15 inches (this one comes with a keyboard) or 24 inches (this one has a stand!), they all share the same core design philosophy: Fuck you if you try to do anything with them that Apple doesn’t want you to do. Like expand or repair them.
I read a post by Ruben Schade the other day in which he describes picking up and exploring his new 22 year old Powermac G4, and in it he wrote a sentence that really got to me:
This era of Apple wanted you to tinker, upgrade, and grow into your computer.
This is something that for sure will never be written about the current era of Apple. This era of Apple wants you to stay the hell out of your device and just throw it away and replace it with a new one every other year.
I was never a particularly big fan of Apple, not even during the Steve Jobs era, and that had mostly to do with the man himself. Steve Jobs always struck me as brash, arrogant, abrasive… kind of an asshole. And after reading his biography by Walter Isaacson and the memoir of his daughter Lisa (which I can highly recommend if you’re a new parent and you want a manual in how mess up your kid for life) I know why: because he was.
But I can’t deny that he had an eye and a vision for great products, and at least during the first couple of years after his return to Apple their professional devices were engineered with serviceability and expandability in mind, and even the consumer devices like the white Macbooks were easy enough to repair and upgrade. I mean you could take out the battery without any tools and without opening the computer. And the RAM and harddrive were behind a bracket that you could just take out with a normal phillips head screw driver. When was the last time you saw something like this on an Apple device?
The trend to make devices smaller, more integrated and less and less serviceable and repairable already started in the 2000s though. The iPods were famously difficult to open, with each generation being worse than the previous one, and the iPod Nanos were impressively slim, but catastrophically difficult to take apart. The iPhones never had user serviceable parts, though at least the first few generations weren’t glued shut yet and the screen and the front glass weren’t bonded together, so if you broke the glass it could be replaced without throwing away the entire screen.
And this trend of making devices ever thinner, more and more tightly integrated with soldered down RAM and batteries (connectors take up space and are expensive) and glued rather than screwed or clipped together cases to make them waterproof continued until we arrive at the current era where almost all of their products are essentially monoliths that are put together at the factory to never be opened again, certainly not by the end user and often not at all, like the AirPods. By now it feels like if they could get away with putting non-rechargeable batteries into their products so you’d have to buy a new one every time the battery died, they would do that.
Now from a purely economic point of view it’s hard to argue against their success. Their approach is obviously working, they didn’t become the most valuable company in history for nothing. Whenever a new iPhone is announced (in other words, every single year), millions of people immediately toss their old device into the nearest available trash compactor and rush out to buy the new one. It’s new, so it must be better! It can do all the same things the old phone could, but it can do them in 4.3ms instead of 5.7ms like that old piece of trash, and the corners are slightly more rounded and the screen bezel is 0.45mm thinner which bumps the screen-to-body ratio from 93.4% to 93.78% and that makes all the difference in finally, finally getting a usable iPhone experience! (And no, I didn’t bother looking any of these numbers up)
Ok, taking a step back I think you can tell I’m not a big fan of what Apple’s been doing in the last two decades. Like I said, I was never a big fan of the company, but I love the design of the devices from the Steve Jobs era, which is why by now I own a few old Macbooks and iPods from the 2000s and even an old iMac G3 because it’s just such a damn good looking thing!
But I can’t get excited about anything Apple is putting out today because everything kind of looks the same, the front is a big screen and the back is metal with an Apple logo. The hardware is fantastic, the M1, M2 etc. were revolutionary when they came out and even four years on, Qualcomm etc. are struggling to catch up to them.
But for someone who loves to tinker with electronics, a glued together slab of glass and metal is just not very exciting. Not to mention everything is locked down and made to be as inaccessible as possible from a software perspective as well.
So just like Ruben, I get way more excited about a 20 year old machine than any of Apples current offerings, no matter how thin and shiny they are and how impressive the specs might be.
Ruben has since published another article sharing his view of current day Apple, which is not too dissimilar to mine.
2024-09-01 08:00:00
Last year in September I started the “100 days to offload” challenge, where the goal is to write 100 blog posts within the span of one year. In February I abandoned it because I realised it was stressing me out. But now that it’s one year later, I’m curious - how did I do?
I’ve been itching to find out for weeks, but I deliberately held back on counting until today (okay, yesterday). I counted the number of blog posts I’ve written for the one year anniversary for this blog though, and it came out to I think 75 posts. So if I would guess, I would say I didn’t hit the 100 blog posts, but I came out somewhere between 80 and 90 since last September. Let’s count and see:
| Month | Posts |
|---|---|
| September 2023 | 7 |
| October 2023 | 3 |
| November 2023 | 4 |
| December 2023 | 0 |
| January 2024 | 4 |
| February 2024 | 1 |
| March 2024 | 8 |
| April 2024 | 12 |
| May 2024 | 14 |
| June 2024 | 13 |
| July 2024 | 14 |
| August 2024 | 13 |
| Total | 93 |
93 posts in a year! I think that’s pretty good, and actually more than I thought. I only missed the original goal of 100 posts by 7. So I can officially declare the challenge 93% complete, despite not even trying :)
It’s interesting looking at the numbers above, because I can see I started this blog really motivated and then hit a slump during the winter (I was also sick a lot during this time, so it isn’t surprising to me that there wasn’t much creativity happening). In the spring I introduced the “thoughts” section, which really freed me to write more without worrying too much about quality or the selection of topics. A few months later I merged this section back into the main blog and I decided to try posting regularly twice a week and also introduced the weekly linkdumps which seem to be received very well (and I write them as much for you as for myself, because I also look back through them quite regularly).
So there we are, 93 posts within the last 12 months, and I don’t feel like I’m going to run out of ideas for new posts any time soon (in fact I sometimes have to deliberately limit myself to “only” two posts a week because I have so many ideas… and I have a looong drafts document that seems to keep growing all the time).
I guess all that’s left to say is thank you all so much for reading and for your nice responses and messages you’ve sent me in the past, they really motivated me to keep blogging despite some crippling self doubts that kept and keep popping up from time to time. But the fact that people are reading and enjoying my posts does a lot to keep these negative voices quiet, so thank you again!
Out of curiosity, how many posts have I written in total now? Let’s add July 2023 (7 posts) and August 2023 (4 posts), and we get a total of 104 posts since the inception of this blog. That’s amazing and way more than I would have thought I would be able to write!
2024-08-30 08:00:00
I collect a lot of links to great articles and software projects, and this is my attempt to sort through them and share them with the rest of you.
Articles
Software/Services
Hardware Projects
Videos
Misc
2024-08-28 08:00:00
I’m currently out of a job, and that often leads to friends and family (and new people I meet) asking me the same question: So what are you doing? It’s an interesting question, and one that’s been rolling around in my head recently anyway: What is it that I do? How would I describe myself?
The simple answer of course to the question “what do you do” is “I’m looking for a new job”. Which is true, but it’s also just part of what I do, and I actually don’t spend very much time on that at all, because there’s only so many new job openings being posted each week that are interesting to me, and once I’ve sent my resume around, all I can do is wait for a response.
The thing that I do most consistently right now actually is write. I write posts for this blog, I write stuff in my personal journal, and I do that pretty much every single day.
And this leads to a more interesting question for myself: What am I? I wouldn’t hesitate for a second to say “I’m an engineer”. That’s what I’ve studied at University, that’s what I’ve been doing professionally for the last 15 years. No doubt in my mind, I’m an engineer.
But I don’t currently work as one. Instead what I currently do the most is to write.
So, am I a writer? Am I a blogger?
Even just writing this down feels weird. I’ve never been paid for any writing I did, and I also never went to “writing/blogging school”, so I don’t have a certificate that says yes, this man is a writer the way I have a certificate that allows me to call myself an engineer.
Does it matter? For being an engineer actually yes, I wouldn’t be allowed to call myself an engineer without that university diploma, but about writing? Do I need a certificate from someone in order to call myself a blogger? Does something like that even exist? Does anyone who blogs have one?
I’ve been playing musical instruments and making music for most of my life, and so I would definitely call myself a musician, even though I don’t have a degree from a musical college and I don’t play music professionally. But I play music, so I am a musician, and I am not afraid to call myself a musician.
So maybe yes, I think I can call myself a blogger. Maybe I’ll make it a smallweb amateur blogger to begin with to feel a little less awkward about it at first ;)
2024-08-25 08:00:00
The older I get, the more I’m fascinated by the passage of time and by how different events in history (and in my personal life) relate to one another. So I thought I’d just write down some of the things I find fascinating or interesting, and maybe you do too, or maybe you think I’m a huge nerd. Either way, here it goes.
When I was a kid, my dad told me that he watched the moon landing live on TV. To me, the moon landing feels like ancient history, but it actually happened only 13 year before I was born. 13 years is nothing. 13 years ago was 2011, and I remember it vividly.
I was born in 1982. More time has passed between today and my birth than between my birth and the end of WWII.
“Back to the Future” is seen as one of the quintessential 1980s nostalgia movies nowadays, but when it came out it was actually a nostalgia movie for the 1950s. Marty spends a good portion of the movie in 1955 for which the people were nostalgic back then. “Grease” falls in this category too (s/80s/70s).
In our minds, Mammoths are creatures that were around during the stone age, when humans still lived in caves. But the last Mammoths died out only about 4000 years ago, maybe even later than that. The Egyptian Pyramids were built 4500 years ago. So when the Pyramids were built, there were still Mammoths alive (not in Egypt though, obviously).
The Colosseum in Rome is about 2000 years old. The Pyramids are 4500 years old. So when the Colosseum was built, the Pyramids were already older then than the Colosseum is now.
The first motorized flight by the Brothers Wright happened in 1903. In 1969 humans landed on the Moon. Meaning, there were people watching the Moon landing on TV who were born in a time when airplanes didn’t exist. The time between humans flying an airplane for the first time in history (something they’d attempted for thousands of years without success) and humans walking on the moon was only the span of a single human lifetime.
My grandfather died in 2020 at the age of 90. He was born in 1930. In 2020 we all owned smartphones. In 1930 computers hadn’t yet been invented. Again, the span between “computers don’t exist” and “everyone is carrying an always connected supercomputer around in their pocket” is only a single human lifetime.
At least some of the elderly people I’ve known as a child were born before 1914 and so they survived both world wars. Some might even have been born before the year 1900, in a different century.
The year 2100 feels like an incredibly distant future, but kids who are born today have a good chance of living until 2100 and beyond.
Combining the two facts above, I have (probably, I don’t know for sure) met people born before 1900 and if I live long enough, I will meet people who will live until 2150 and beyond. Mathematically it’s even possible that if I lived to be 100 years or older (until 2082 or beyond) and met a newborn child at that age who will live to be 120 (past the year 2200), I will have met people from both the 19th and the 23rd century in my lifetime.
2024-08-23 08:00:00
I collect a lot of links to great articles and software projects, and this is my attempt to sort through them and share them with the rest of you.
Articles
Hardware Projects
2024-08-21 08:00:00
I work as an embedded developer, which means I write software for microcontrollers for a living (and also sometimes for fun at home). I first learned about micrcontrollers during University in the mid 2000s, about 20 years ago. However, technology has improved considerably and things are much different now than they were back then.
Nowadays if you want to get started with microcontroller programming for the first time, it’s easier than ever. There’s a wide variety of ready made microcontroller boards available, from genuine Arduinos to Arduino clones, ESP32 boards that have Wifi, Bluetooth, USB, and even a display on board all the way to more powerful options like Rasperry Pis and its various clones and competitors.
There’s even kits available on Amazon and other places that contain everything that’s needed to get going, starting with the microcontroller board itself and a ton of peripherals that can be connected to it like displays, LEDs, input devices, motors, temperature sensors, motion sensors, ultrasonic sensors and on and on and on.
There’s programming languages like the C dialect that the Arduino people came up with and MicroPython that are geared towards making programming microcontrollers as quick and easy as possible, and there’s a ton of ready-made libraries available to access and communicate with all kinds of different peripherals. And of course there’s tons of tutorials on Youtube, on various websites and even in the form of books available.
In short, even though programming a microcontroller is not as easy and accessible as something like web development, simply because you’re working with hardware and you have to make wired connections and set the right pins to do the right things etc, it’s easier than ever to get started and get to a result relatively quickly. Just download the Arduino IDE, get an ESP32/Arduino Nano/Raspberry Pi Pico board or something similar from Amazon or Ebay for a few Euros, connect it to your PC via USB, and start hacking.
Here’s a few modern boards I just pulled out of a drawer. The Raspberry Pi Zero is the most expensive one at around 20 Euros I think, but it’s also very powerful. The others are both based on the ESP32 microcontroller and were around 10 Euros each. The white one has an OLED display and LoRa communication, the other is an ESP32 cam module (the camera is on the other side).
20 years ago, things were a lot different. There was no Aliexpress, no cheap electronics from China, and no pre-made boards readily available (at least none that were affordable - there were of course development boards from the manufacturers, but they cost a fortune. The first ready-made and cheap microcontroller board I came across was the STM32F4 Discovery Board which was around 12 Euros I think, and that was in 2011 or 2012).
Back then, the options were limited and so the only option that was available to us as students with limited resources (read: money) was to make everything ourselves. So we did.
Here’s a picture of a board (top and bottom) that a friend of mine designed as a test board for dipping our toes into working with microcontrollers for the first time.
As you can probably see, this is all hand made. There was no PCBWay or any of the other services that can produce professionally made boards for very little money around, so we made the PCB (Printed Circuit Board) entirely ourselves. The friend I mentioned designed the schematic and the PCB layout (probably using some cracked professional software), and then we printed the layout out on a laser printer, imaged it on the PCB with UV light, etched away the superfluous copper which is a nasty process as you’re dealing with potentially harmful chemicals, and drilled all the holes by hand. And then we soldered all the components to it and hoped that everything worked.
The board contains an Atmel AVR Atmega8 8-bit microcontroller, a few LEDs connected straight to the GPIOs of the AVR, a few buttons for input, two potentiometers, probably one to control the display brightness and the other connected to the ADC of the AVR, and the highlight, an LCD display that from the looks of it can display 2 lines of text. The board was connected to the computer via parallel port (remember those?) and programmed with AVRDUDE, a software I was surprised to see is actually still around and under active development to this day. I remember it was a huge pain to set the software up and get the drivers working and all the parameters right so the program that was supposed to run on the board would be written to the microcontroller correctly (or at all).
The whole process was as you can imagine quite tedious, especially compared to nowadays where you get a factory made board for way cheaper than this hand made thing was, connect it via USB and off you go. But it was also a lot of fun and a great learning experience, because we had to develop everything from scratch and debug our own mistakes, and we learned a lot along the way. I also always used to have the datasheet for the microcontroller I was working with printed out and spiral bound on my desk so I could flip through and make notes in the different sections. These days at least for my hobby projects with Arduino or ESP32 I often don’t bother with the datasheet, I just google stuff or look at the available libraries and figure things out from there.
Does this board still work? It probably does, but I have absolutely no clue how to program it anymore, and I’d have to dig out an old computer that still has a parallel port. I’m sure the software and all the documentation for it is sleeping in some long forgotten ZIP file somewhere on my NAS, so I could probably dust it off if I wanted to… but I think I’d rather not revisit all the pain points I described above and stick to modern day microcontroller boards and occasionally pull out the old stuff just for the sake of nostalgia, as a memory of days long past and as a reminder of how much simpler and more accessible things have become since.
Oh, and just as for the sake of comparison, here is our old board next to the infinitely more powerful Raspberry Pi Zero which probably cost less. And yes I know the pin headers aren’t on straight. I suck at soldering. Now you know why I went into software development.
Two bits of trivia came to my mind while writing this post…
2024-08-18 08:00:00
I read quite a few blog posts or messages on Mastodon recently from people who are struggling in one way or another with their mental health. I’m no stranger to feelings of depression, loneliness and anxiety myself, and I spent a lot of time researching and reading up on the subject and I thought I’d share some of the resources that resonated the most with me.
Now I know that reading a book can only do so much. If you’re suffering from severe depression, anxiety or any other mental health issue, reading a book is probably not going to cure you of that. In this case I can only encourage you to seek out professional help, talk to your doctor, try to find a therapist (I know it’s difficult, but trust me it is worth it!) or join a support group if one is available near you. But I have still gained a lot of insight and understanding from reading books over the years, and I’d like to share a few of those that had the biggest impact on me with you, and also links to a few Youtube videos that I found interesting or inspiring.
I am definitely more on the introverted side of the spectrum of personalities that is out there, and especially as a teenager and a young man I always felt like I didn’t really belong anywhere and that there was something not quite right with me. Everybody else had an easy time going out and meeting new people and having a good time, while I was struggling to meet new people (especially girls) and was often hanging around off to the side at a party or a club, clinging to my drink and getting drunk to drown my insecurities while (seemingly) everyone else was dancing and having a great time. I often felt like an alien who was dropped off on the wrong planet.
But after reading this book I realised there’s a lot more people who are the same as me; you just don’t usually see them because they’re more quiet than others and probably prefer to stay at home with their nose in a book rather than going out. If you are an introvert, if you need a lot of quiet and alone time and your social battery drains easily, check out this book.
Jonathan Haidt - The Happiness Hypothesis
Jonathan Haidt is a researcher and author whose body of work I cannot recommend highly enough if you’re interested in the psychological aspects of our modern society at all.
In this book he takes at look at the wisdom from ancient philosophies and religions about what coustitutes a life well lived and filters it through the lens of modern scientific research to get to the bottom of which things truly make us happier in the long term.
There’s a pretty good summary of the book on Wikipedia, and a great infographic that summarizes the main points in a single chart, which you can check out here.
Steve Peters - The Chimp Paradox
This one I came across only quite recently after I saw an interview with Steve Peters on Ali Abdaal’s podcast (see below), and I liked it so much that I immediately went out and got the book. He models the way the mind works as three different entities - the chimp, the human and the computer.
The chimp is the emotional, impulsive, irrational side of us, the human is the logical, rational, analytical side and the computer is the data storage that stores our memories and experiences that we draw from. And based on this model he walks through a lot of our behaviours and feelings we might have and traces them back to which state our mind is in at different times according to this model.
I don’t think I’m explaining this very well here, but I linked an interview with Steve Peters down below, so if this sounds intriguing, give it a listen.
Cal Newport - Slow Productivity
I’ve been a fan of Cal Newport’s approach to productivity for a few years now, and this is his latest book in which he lays out his approach to being productive and successful at your job (and your life in general) without burning out and working yourself to death in the process.
His three ideas that make up the core of the book and that he describes in a lot of detail are
If you feel like your work is making you miserable and you can’t seem to take a breath because you’re constantly running from meeting to meeting while being engaged in a dozen different conversations on Slack and Teams and Email at the same time, this is a book you should definitely check out.
Victor Frankl - Trotzdem ja zum Leben sagen (Man’s search for meaning)
Victor Frankl was an Austrian Psychologist who was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp during the second world war by the German Nazi regime. He survived and wrote down his experiences in the concentration camps through his psychologist lens. He spends a great deal of time analyzing how different people responded to this situation of complete powerlessness and the reality that they live under constant threat of being killed, and how different mindsets aided (or hindered) the people’s ability to survive under these conditions.
Not an easy read given the subject matter, but it is equally fascinating, horrifying and encouraging.
Kurt Krömer - Du darfst nicht alles glauben, was du denkst. Meine Depression
This is available in German only, but I still feel it belongs in this list. Kurt Krömer is a German comedian who suffered a period of severe depression and went to a mental health clinic for treatment. I like this book because he writes in a very honest and down to earth style about how he was feeling during the depression, about his family and his upbringing and what an effect his relationship with his father (a stereotypical tough guy) had on him, how his depression affected his family (he has four kids) and how therapy helped him get better. This is not a psychology book obviously but rather a story about his personal experience, and it shows that no matter how famous/rich/successful anyone might be, they can still be affected by mental health issues all the same. If you understand German, this is an easy enough read and it might make you feel better just because you see, you’re not alone in this.
Steve Peters on Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
I talked about Steve Peters in the books section above, and this interview is where I first encountered him. I listened to the whole thing multiple times and then went out and bought the book because I’d never before come across a model of how our mind works that was as clear and accessible to me than the one he came up with. Before you get the book, start with the interview and see if this resonates with you. I also find his voice and his accent really pleasant to listen to.
Jordan Peterson on Diary of a CEO
I know, Jordan Peterson is a very polarising and controversial figure and there are a lot of people who would rather walk barefoot and blindfolded over a floor littered with legos than to listen to him, and that’s fair enough. If you listen to the interview with Steve Peters I linked above, or any interview with Jonathan Haidt or Cal Newport, these people are soft spoken and calm and really pleasant to listen to.
Peterson is pretty much the opposite. I don’t agree with a lot of things he says, he often seems bitter and angry and I find him difficult to listen to at the best of times because he has this habit of going on tangent after tangent and rambling on and on and on… but for me personally there’s still enough valuable things coming from him that I’m willing to listen to him (in moderation) and take the things that resonate with me and leave the rest.
This I feel is one of the best interviews with him where he’s pretty focused and says a lot of things that I find truly helpful and inspiring, so if you’re not complete put off by him, give this one a chance.
So that’s my list, I hope there’s something in there that resonates with you and helps you a bit with your struggles. If there is, I’d love to hear from you and if there’s anything you can recommend, feel free to send me a message.
2024-08-16 08:00:00
I collect a lot of links to great articles and software projects, and this is my attempt to sort through them and share them with the rest of you.
Articles
Software/Services
Hardware Projects
Music
2024-08-14 08:00:00
The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit has this to say about the Anthropocene: “The Anthropocene is the name for a proposed geological epoch, dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth up to the present day.” It’s the age in which humans have had an impact on pretty much the entire planet. This is not an officially recognized geological epoch (yet), but I still think it’s more than fitting.
Now this is going to be another one of those “grumpy old man” posts, so before things get too negative I want to start by saying that I truly wouldn’t want to live in a different age than the one I currently live in. I’d love to visit other epochs if time travel was a thing (how amazing would it be to see real Dinosaurs, or Mammoths, or ancient cities in their prime). Go there, look around for a few days and come back home, that would be amazing.
But I’m very happy to live in an age (and a place) where I have access to fresh water, food, electricity, medical care, and where I don’t have to roam the forests in search of food while being in danger of being attacked by a bear or a saber-toothed tiger at literally any moment. Where I can just pick up the phone and talk to friends who live far away, can form friendships with people on a different continent and where I can just get on a train or an airplane and travel to pretty much any place on the planet, something that would have been virtually impossible to do even just a hundred years ago.
But whenever I do travel across the country, I can’t help but notice just how much we’ve altered the face of the planet in the relatively short time we’ve been around. We built cities, canalized rivers, sometimes even put them underground, we built roads and railway tracks and powerlines that zigzag across the country, we flattened hills, drained swamps, dug up holes the size of entire cities in search of coal, we poisoned rivers, lakes and entire stretches of land, we cut down ancient forests to get firewood and farmland, we created lakes that were not there before, filled up entire lakes that were in our way, lit up the night, dumped our trash in gigantic landfills or straight into the ocean, and on and on an on.
I live in central Europe, which is very densely populated, so almost every available square kilometre is used or altered by people in some form or another. Do you know how much real wilderness is left in Germany? I couldn’t believe it when I first read it.
0.6 percent. That’s how much area of Germany is still left alone to to develop by itself. The remaining 99.4 percent are cities, towns, roads, farmland, managed forests etc. That’s insane. The government has the goal to get the area of true wilderness back up to 2 percent, but so far this has failed and even two percent is a tiny tiny number.
There’s always an outrage (and rightfully so!) when huge areas of the Brazilian rainforest are burned down in order to gain more farmland… but whenever I read an article about this in the news, I can’t help but wonder what would happen if a Brazilian delegation ever came here and asked to see our ancient forests, since we seem to be in love with preserving them so much. What would we say? “Well sorry, there aren’t any left. We cut them down centuries ago. We needed farmland, you see.” Not a very strong position to argue from, is it.
I don’t know. I don’t want to be too negative here, but the older I get the more upset and depressed I get when I see rivers flowing in perfectly straight concrete channels for dozens of kilometres, or gigantic construction projects that flatten and pave huge areas of land or cut through the middle of a forest to build a new highway so we can zoom from city to city even faster and pollute the environment with noise and exhaust fumes even more in the process.
This isn’t going to change in my lifetime, so I should probably practice some acceptance for it if I don’t want to make myself too unhappy… but I find the negative impact we have on nature harder and harder to ignore and come to terms with in recent years.
Sidenote, I went out to see the shooting stars a few days ago. Inside the city it’s of course impossible to see anything in the sky because of light pollution, so I went out of the city and lay down in a field to look up at the stars. And I saw a handful of shooting stars, which was really amazing. But I also saw at least an order of magnitude more satellites and planes moving across the sky. There’s constantly stuff moving and blinking up in the sky, but almost all of it is man-made. I’m going to add this to my list of things I’d like to see if time travel was possible: A night sky that’s unaffected by light pollution and constant satellite and air plane traffic.
2024-08-11 08:00:00
On a whim, I recently bought a book about HTML from 1996. It was cheap, I enjoy flicking through old books and magazines about computers and tech in general, and I had recently dipped my toes into setting up a 90s looking website, so I thought why not get a book on the subject. But this one actually offers a lot more than just documentation of an outdated version of a programming language.
The German title of the book translates to “HTML 3.2, new opportunities for web publishing” by Dave Raggett, Jenny Lam and Ian Alexander, but I like the original title much better. Let me present it to you in true 90s HTML fashion:
You know a book has to be good if it has the words “World Wide Web” in the title! It was written right around the time HTML 3 was standardised and actually Dave Raggett is one of the creators of this standard, so this is coming straight from the source.
The mid 90s was the time of the “first browser war”, where Microsoft and Netscape were fighting over dominance in the web browser market (a fight that Microsoft ultimately would decide for themselves by doing what they do best: being gigantic a-holes). This war between Microsoft and Netscape is reflected in the state of HTML at the time because both companies were cooking up their own unique subset of HTML tags that were compatible only with their own browser and not with that of the competition.
Even just by casually flipping through the book you get a good sense for how much HTML, which was only about 5 years old at the time, was still changing and developing. Many sections are preface with “this is still in active development” or “this is still under discussion”, and there’s a whole chapter about CSS which was then in its infancy and only beginning to be standardised, so the book is indeed bleeding edge for the state of HTML at the time.
What I find the most interesting about the book though are the first two chapters, because they offer an introduction into what the web and the internet was back then (remember, the web was only about 5 years old and many people had never even used the internet at that time) and most interestingly an outlook into how it might develop in the future. Have a look at the index of the first two chapters:
1. What is the Web?
Introduction
Why has the Web become so popular?
Other services on the Internet
Basic components of the Web
A universally understood publishing language: HTML
HTML and HTTP as open standards
How does the Web fit in with dial-up ‘bulletin boards’?2. From CERN to Cyberspace
Introduction
How the Web began
The Web takes off
More variety on the Web
Virtual reality
Is the Web a good thing?
The Web — another perspective
There’s a chapter on Web vs Bulletin Boards, which was one of the technologies that was superseded by the web, and a chapter about Virtual Reality, which was thought to be the next big thing and right around the corner. Ah, the techno-optimism of the mid-90s! Almost 30 years later, we’re still waiting for the VR revolution to happen. It will be any day now I’m sure.
My absolute favourite is the last chapter “The Web - another perspective”, in which the authors offer a glimpse into a potential future of the internet. Predictions about the future from the past are endlessly fascinating to me, sometimes they are almost comically wrong (like the thing about VR), but sometimes they’re eerily accurate. Here’s my favourite quote from the book from the end of chapter two, where the authors make this prediction:
“The rise and rise of the PC, with ever more functionality, leads to the prediction that with even higher chip integration, thin screens and lighter power supplies (not yet invented) people will be able to carry pocket-calculator-size machines with which they can access information sources and draw on unlimited computing power, using digital radio links, supported by satellite if necessary, from anywhere in the world. At the other end of the scale it is argued, with equal logic, that if computing power, decentralized to nodes and servers, becomes plentiful and cheap, then the terminal carried or used by an individual can be as dumb as they used to make them. If so, it is argued in return, then there will be the problem of safeguarding the personal information and the programs stored outside the individual’s control.”
So they predict one of two outcomes: We will either carry pocket sized, always connected supercomputers around with us at all times, or we’ll carry dumb terminals and all the computing happens somewhere else. And fascinatingly, not just one of these predictions came true, but they are actually both pretty exact descriptions of our current reality. We carry smartphones everywhere, which through the lens of a computer user from 1996 with his 200MHz Pentium MMX really are supercomputers. And we offload a lot of computation and storage tasks to “decentralized nodes and servers”, for which we invented the fancy term The Cloud.
Even the bit about communication via satellites is becoming a reality now with Starlink being widely available and Apple starting to integrate satellite communications into their iPhones.
And what about the problem with safeguarding user’s personal information and giving up control? Well, we found a solution to that too. We simply don’t care about it at all.
I bet they wouldn’t have predicted this to be the case though.
2024-08-09 08:00:00
I collect a lot of links to great articles and software projects, and this is my attempt to sort through them and share them with the rest of you.
Articles
Software/Services
Hardware Projects
Videos
Misc
2024-08-07 08:00:00
I recently visited a website that greeted me with a banner stating “We and our 885 partners process your personal data, e.g. your IP-number, using technology such as cookies to store and access information on your device in order to serve personalized ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience research and services development.”
The “885 partners” is a link, and clicking it opens a box with a list of (I assume) 885 different companies, and I can pick and choose which one gets to process my data and which one doesn’t.
This sounds like a parody, and yet these people are completely serious. What could be wrong with having 885 external companies accessing and processing our visitor’s personal data?
This to me feels like everything that’s wrong with the current internet, distilled into one banner that you are casually served on some random website and are expected to just click “accept” on without thinking twice about it.
I run several layers of adblocking, one network-wide pihole, adbocker and scriptblockers in the browser, I don’t accept third party cookies and regularly delete all cookies, I block access to external domains on websites by default… but no matter how much digital self-defense I deploy, I don’t think it’s possible to escape this amount of online privacy violation. And of course it’s not just this one website doing this, it’s pretty much every (corporate) website out there.
Online advertising started out with one banner at the top of a website. Then it was a banner at the top and one on the side. Then it was pop ups. Then it was animated ads. Then it was automatically playing videos, complete with sound, then full sized overlays over the content of the website… and now we have pretty much all of that at the same time and on top of that we’re sharing our information with 885 fucking companies all over the planet.
I understand that running a website costs money, and that offering a service or information for free means you either pay for it yourself or you have to find some other source of income to finance it. And if we could go back to having one or two (STATIC!!) banners of advertising on each website without all this tracking and data collecting nonsense that’s going on now, I would be perfectly okay with that and I would happily disable my adblocker and just live with the ads the same way I live with ads in newspapers or magazines. Then that’s just part of the deal, I get something for free and they get to make money by showing me advertisements, and I’m totally fine with that.
But the way things are right now? It doesn’t feel like I’m paying for the services I’m using with my attention, it feels like I’m paying for them with my soul. They want to know who I am, which interests I have, my age, my gender, my relationship status, my sexual orientation, where I live, where I work, which websites I visit, what things I buy, which places I frequent, when and where I travel… all in the interest of “targeted advertising”. And I refuse to be a target for this kind of intrusion into my private life.
I’d love to offer some solutions or suggestions on how to deal with this, but to be honest I don’t have any. I don’t think this can easily be fixed or changed. This probably needs a longer process of transformation and a lot of political pressure, otherwise as long as the big corporations are calling the shots, nothing is going to change. The only thing we as customers can do is to block tracking and advertising as much as we can, and avoid the corporate web as much as possible.
By the way, while we’re on the subject of “things that are broken about the internet”… Apparently my website was recently classified as pornography by some strange “cybersecurity company”. Which… sure. How could you not come to this conclusion by looking at my site! And I had no idea this has happened because they didn’t contact me about it of course. One person noticed though and complained to them on my behalf, so thanks Dave!
But I mean… old computers… they do have a certain sex appeal, don’t they :)
2024-08-04 08:00:00
At the end of each month I (usually) post a summary of the books I read that month. For the last two months I haven’t done this, and there’s a very simple reason for it: I haven’t read any books. But now it’s time to get back into it.
My reading journey
As a child and a teenager I read a lot, I constantly had my nose in a book. Then computers came along, and I had a TV set in my bedroom, and that pretty much killed my reading habit. During University and the first few years afterwards I read the books I needed to read for my studies and my jobs, but I didn’t really read a lot for fun, just the occasional book here and there. During that time, partying and drinking were more interesting and more fun than sitting at home alone with a book…
In my early thirties I developed severe insomnia. I was never a particularly good sleeper to begin with, but during this time my sleep deteriorated more and more until I got maybe two or three hours of sleep at night for days and weeks in a row, and the rest of the night I would lay awake and my thoughts would just run wild, I couldn’t turn them off no matter what I tried. Sometimes, and I’m not exaggerating here, I was lying awake in the middle of the night solving mathematical problems in my head because I just couldn’t get my brain to stop and calm down. It wasn’t fun, and during these times I felt like hell and probably looked like it too. I was so tired and sleep deprived all the time, and yet I couldn’t sleep.
Looking back now I know that during this time I was stressed out of my mind from work and a few personal things and on the verge of a burnout, but I had no idea back then. I was so out of touch with myself that I didn’t even feel how stressed I was.
Anyway, one day in early 2016 I went to the sleep lab of the local hospital. I had to be there early in the afternoon and I didn’t have access to a computer or wifi in my room (and no data plan on my phone), so I expected to be bored in the evening, which is why I brought a book and started reading before I went to bed, something I hadn’t done in probably 15 years or so at that point. The results from the sleep lab were inconclusive, but the book was pretty exciting, so I kept coming back to it every night before bed, and after a few days (or weeks?) I noticed that my sleep started to improve. Apparently reading did what all other things I had tried (including going to the sleep lab) failed to do: It focused my brain on one thing and calmed down my spiraling thoughts enough so I could fall (and stay) asleep. Ironically enough, the visit to the sleep lab did help, even though they’d sent me home without a diagnosis or treatment.
A few weeks later I quit the stressful job I had back then too, and that was another major factor in getting my insomnia under control and improving my mental health.
Ever since then on most days I’ve kept the ritual of going to bed around 10 and then reading for half an hour or so before turning off the lights, and it had an incredibly positive impact on my overall health. I still had bouts of insomnia every now and then, but never again as bad as it was back in 2015 before I started reading regularly at night. Reading really was and is a miracle drug for me.
And now?
So why did I stop? Well two months ago I lost my job, and that kind of threw me off of a lot of good habits I had and some bad habits crept in, like mindless web surfing until late at night. I think I fell into a kind of small depression that I now slowly have to dig myself out of. I just didn’t have the energy to focus on a book for a while, and it probably didn’t help that when I sat down to try and read, I was trying to read books that were maybe not the easiest to understand and get into, and so I stopped pretty quickly every time.
So how do I get back into reading now?
I think the key is to make reading fun again. So I put aside my reading list and the difficult books about psychology or tech that I was originally going to read and decided to pick up some of my favourite books again to re-read, because I know I’ll enjoy them and look forward to getting back into them.
Te first book I picked up to read again is The Martian by Andy Weir. A guy who is an engineer with a snarky sense of humour is stranded on Mars and has to problem-solve his way out of a seemingly hopeless situation. What’s not to love about that! (Sidenote, has anyone ever noticed that the title doesn’t make any sense? He isn’t a martian, he is an earthling stranded on Mars trying to get back home. If I were stranded in America and had to find my way back home to Germany, I wouldn’t be The American, I would be The German…)
Anyway, so the plan for the next couple of weeks is this:
Will I succeed? Well if I have a post titled “the books I read in August” next month, then you know I have ;)
2024-08-02 08:00:00
Today I thought I’d do something a bit different from what I normally do in these linkposts, and share some of my favourite blog posts from other bloggers of the last week or two with you. Maybe there’s something in there for you too, and maybe you’ll discover a blog you like along the way.
2024-07-31 08:00:00
I recently spoke with a friend about her experience with therapy, and I also had my own experience with therapy over the years. This got me thinking about the effects therapy has on a person.
I’ve known quite a few different people over the years who are all roughly around my age (mid thirties to early forties by now) and who all share one thing, they didn’t have the best childhoods. There was emotional and in some cases physical abuse, parents who were alcoholics, parents with maybe some undiagnosed mental issues themselves, or parents who were none of the above but were simply emotionally not very present and available for whatever reasons. All of these things of course lead to a less than stellar childhood. And this upbringing left its scars for all of them, which isn’t immediately obvious when you just interact with them on a superficial level, but becomes very apparent when you get to know them better.
But I can sort these people into two different categories very easily: Those who went to therapy and worked through and processed their issues, and those who didn’t.
The people who didn’t go to therapy are essentially slaves to their emotions. When things go well they are over the moon with joy and excitement, but as soon as some tiny little thing goes wrong they completely fly off the handle. They become angry, lash out, accuse, scream and become verbally and even physically abusive sometimes. Or their emotions swing all the way in the other direction and they cry, run away, withdraw and only see the world in the darkest of colors for hours or days at a time. They might even talk about not wanting to live anymore or hurt themselves. Just to be clear, I’m not saying they’re terrible people. They are often deeply insecure and full of fear and anxiety. In emotional situations they essentially revert back to their childhood selves and quite literally turn back into a frightened or angry child. Still, dealing with a person like this is exhausting to say the least because you’re always walking on eggshells, you never know what might trigger the next outburst.
The people who went to therapy on the other hand are usually completely drama free. They are reflected and understand and are able to process their emotions. That doesn’t mean they never gets upset or angry or sad - of course they do. But despite their rough upbringing and having never learned it as a child, they learned in therapy how to control and regulate their emotions, and how not to be controlled by them. They don’t get aggressive or defensive when you approach them with a difficult to talk about topic, rather they listen and processe what you are saying and are able to respond in a rational and mature manner. They still feel the anger, sadness, disappointment or whatever else comes up, but they’re able to recognize and understand their emotions, listen to what they have to tell them and then file them away and remain mentally in “grown up mode”, in contrast to the others who fall back to “childhood mode”. They are a pleasure to be around and you can relax and feel safe around them because you know they’re not going to claw your eyes out without warning if you say the wrong thing.
My generation here in Germany and more broadly in most of Europe was raised by parents who were born in or around the 1950s, who were themselves raised by parents who experienced the second world war during their childhood or adolescence. And they were in turn raised by parents who experienced the first world war during the same period of their lives. So we had two whole generations of people traumatized by major wars during their formative years, then our parents’ generation who grew up during a time where the motto of the day more often than not was “the past is the past, we don’t talk about it, life goes on” and going to therapy was often not possible, not available, and on top of that hugely stigmatized and frowned upon.
And now there’s us. We are the first generation that is actively looking after their mental health and actually working on processing the often generations’ worth of trauma we inherited from our parents and grandparents. And I realise this might sound a bit overly dramatic and out there to some people, but I really believe in therapy we’re not only processing our own issues but also those of our parents who inadvertently passed theirs on to us. And this means that we’re not only doing it for us, but for our children as well, so they might have an easier start into their life that we might have had.
2024-07-28 08:00:00
There was one project I started during last week’s Old Computer Challenge that I didn’t quite get to finish: I wanted to create a terrible looking 90s website. I remember even back then I thought it would be cool to have a website, but I never knew what to put on it. But now I already have one, so I can just take this and make it look 90s.
I approached this idea the same way I would have approached it as a teenager (and I still seem to approach most of my personal projects): With absolutely no idea how to do it properly and complete ignorance for established rules and procedures. I just started hacking away at it until the end result kind of resembled what I had in mind. Which, judging by the state of the current internet, seems how most web designers approach their work anyway, so I seem to be in good company there.
Anyway, I spent some time browsing through old GeoCities websites that were archived and playing around with old versions of Microsoft Frontpage, and ultimately decided to settle on a structure with three frames which I stole took some inspiration from Headcrash.
Great. I wanted a list of my posts to be displayed in the navigation frame on the left and the post itself in the main frame. My “regular” site is created with Hugo, which means I write the posts in Markdown with a bit of additional metadata at the top of each Markdown file that contains things like the title, date, link to the Mastodon post etc.
I didn’t want to create the 90s website with Hugo though, so I hacked together a bunch of python code that takes the markdown files of the blog articles, parses the relevant metadata out, removes the metadata section, converts the rest to html, creates the navigation frame and puts everything in the 90s website structure. Essentially I wrote my own very basic static site generator that only works for my particular setup and will probably fall over as soon as I make the tiniest of changes. But hey, it works for now.
Then I added a starry tiled background, because you gotta have a tiling background image on your site (I got that from Cameron’s World), a garish color scheme that I lifted from some Frontpage website template and of course, and I feel that this is the thing that ties this whole experience together, an under construction gif. Which is obligatory, but also true because this site is and will forever be under construction.
One thing that’s definitely broken and won’t be fixed are internal links. They are written in Hugo shortcode and I can’t be bothered to write a parser to convert them to regular links, so they will remain broken. #wontfix
Images are also hit and miss, and I should probably for extra authenticity convert them to 320x240 in 256 colors or something… maybe I’ll do that before posting this, or not. You’ll see :)
Anyway here it is in all it’s glory and 90s ugliness!
So if you feel like this site right here looks somehow too clean, too modern, you know where to go to fix this.
Oh, one more thing. Why does the headline say “kind of”? Well I tested the site in an old version of Netscape, and it didn’t actually load. So something about it is not 90s compatible… but I have no clue what it is, see the second paragraph of this post. So if anyone is well versed in HTML 4.0 and has any ideas what’s wrong, let me know.
2024-07-26 08:00:00
I collect a lot of links to great articles and software projects, and this is my attempt to sort through them and share them with the rest of you.
Articles
Software/Services
Videos
Misc
2024-07-24 08:00:00
Well the OCC this year ended early for me because I caught a stomach virus and spent the last few days in bed. So that was fun… Still, I wanted to write down some thoughts about it, so here we go.
Computing
I pretty much used the 2009 Core2Duo Macbook with Debian-based Crunchbang++-Linux for everything, and there’s actually not much to report about. Despite being 15 years old, it felt like a modern computer, albeit one that’s on the slower side, which was of course most noticeable when browsing the web, but that’s nothing new and we’ve all written extensively about this again and again. But apart from some websites being slow to load and sluggish to use, everything else was fine. It took a few more seconds to boot and start programs but then it ran flawlessly.
And I think that’s great actually. 20 years ago (in 2004) a 15 year old computer (from 1989) would have been an ancient relic and completely unusable for anything that was current then. I mean, good luck trying to play an mp3 file on a 386 or an Amiga 500. But this is no longer the case. If you’re not planning to play AAA games or view or edit 4K videos, then even a 15 year old Laptop with a Core2Duo is still a usable computer, provided it has enough RAM and an SSD.
But that also means that for something called the Old Computer Challenge this machine was actually too modern, and i have to pick something older and more limited for next year. For some nostalgic flair I booted it into Windows XP or OSX 10.6 from time to time, and with a modern(ish) browser even these old operating systems were still surprisingly usable, though not very secure anymore (particularly XP) and thus not recommended for every day use.
My relationship with tech
The other part of the challenge I set for myself was to reduce my addiction to tech and to try and reduce my phone and computer usage.
And that went well…. until I got sick. Then all the good intentions went out the window. When all you can do is lie in bed or on the couch all day, you get bored as hell, and so of course I fell back into my old routine, grabbed my laptop and passed the time mindlessly browsing the web or watching Youtube videos. Which I’m okay with actually, I was sick any my brain wasn’t working right anyway, so it was totally fine to keep myself occupied with “easily digestable” entertainment. But it also means, put in gaming terms, that my progress that I had made during the week was lost and I have to start again from the beginning.
I still learned a few things along the way. Whenever I went out I left my smartphone at home, sometimes I brought the feature phone with me, but often I would just go out without a phone at all if I knew that I wasn’t expecting to hear from anyone or meet anyone… and when I came back home I often found that I hadn’t missed anything, there were no new messages on the phone. Or maybe one or two new ones, but they weren’t urgent and I could just answer them after I had come back and that was fine.
And I think that’s an important experience. It sounds obvious and maybe a bit dumb, but the world doesn’t end and nothing terrible happens if you don’t have your phone with you for an hour or two. But if you’re used to having your phone with you at all times, it might not feel like this anymore, and you might get anxious and uneasy if you can’t look at the phone every two minutes. But if you make the experience a few times that leaving the phone at home is okay, nothing bad happens, you’re fine and everyone around you is fine too, then your brain starts to calm down and the anxiety goes away.
So I will definitely keep doing this and leave my phone at home more often when I’m out and about, but I have to think a bit more about the “at home” situation.
The community
The best thing about the challenge, just like last year, was of course the community. There were so many blogs to read, so many great ideas people had, so much chatter on IRC at all times of the day (and night), I could barely keep up! And there’s still blog posts about the OCC appearing in my feed reader, so a few people are still old computing, which is fantastic and I love reading about it.
So all in all it was a great challenge again, and I look forward to the next one and to talk to you all again!
2024-07-19 08:00:00
I collect a lot of links to great articles and software projects, and this is my attempt to sort through them and share them with the rest of you.
Articles
Software/Services
Personal Homepages
2024-07-17 08:00:00
I wrote a lot about mental health and trying to beat my addiction to modern technology that is designed to be as addictive as possible lately, so today let’s switch gears a bit and talk Linux and bash scripting :) Here’s what I’ve been up to recently on the tech front.
The computer
I’m using a 2009 15’’ Macbook Pro with a Core2Duo CPU, Nvidia graphics, 8GB RAM and an SSD.
Despite being 15 years old, the computer actually doesn’t really feel old; it’s a bit slower and clunkier than modern machines, sure (and it has an optical drive, which is probably the most obviously dated thing about it), but it’s still perfectly usable.
I installed Crunchbang++ as my distro of choice on it, which is based on current Debian 12, but is the spiritual successor of CrunchBang Linux which was around in the late 2000s. The look and feel is virtually unchanged, it’s a very minimalist Openbox desktop with no bells and whistles, just pure functionality. I used to run it on my Eee PC 4G I had in 2008 and it seems fitting for the OCC.
Listening to podcasts
Usually I listen to podcasts through the AntennaPod app on my phone, which is very convenient because I just open the app, it has the latest episodes already synced and I just tap play.
On my quest to go back to single purpose devices I decided to use my iPod 7th gen as my mp3/podcast player. I installed the Rockbox firmware on it (together with the fantastic Adwaitapod theme by Dook) which means I can just connect the iPod to the computer via USB and move music to and from it without having to go through iTunes or any other 3rd party software.
To download podcasts I found poddl which is a command line utility that can download podcast episodes from the podcasts RSS feed. I’m getting the feed URLs for the podcasts from castos, but there are probably a thousand different ways to get them. This seemed to be the most convenient one to me.
Then I wrote a small script that runs poddl on every podcast I want to have on the iPod, downloads the latest episode through a few command line switches and saves them in the right folder. I stored the script and the poddl binary right in the podcasts folder on the iPod, so it’s available on every (Linux) computer I connect the iPod to.
Here’s the script with a few examples:
ak@MacPro15:/media/ak/IPOD/Podcast$ cat fetch.sh
#!/bin/sh
./poddl https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/1121972.rss -r -t 1 -o ./Deep\ Questions\ with\ Cal\ Newport
./poddl https://feed.podbean.com/TWIR/feed.xml -r -t 1 -o ./This\ Week\ in\ Retro
So now all I have to do is connect the iPod to the PC and run the script, and it fetches the latest episodes and stores them right on the iPod in the podcasts folder, and off I go. I think that’s about as simple and convenient as I can get it, and I love this solution.
Reading blogs on my e-reader
I already have my self hosted RSS feed reader solution which uses sfeed to fetch the RSS feeds and then a custom script that creates a website with all links to the latest posts on it. But accessing that on my reader, which is old and slow and has a pretty basic web browser always felt clunky and unpleasant to use.
My idea was to download all the latest articles, print them to a PDF and then store that on the reader so I have a digest of new articles from the last X days that I can read page by page on the reader.
So I set out to do just that. I extended my custom script (which I can’t show you because it’s a complete mess and desperately needs a rewrite) to output a text file with all the URLs of the new articles. The file looks like this:
https://rubenerd.com/the-new-silverstone-cs382-homelab-case/
https://haewyr.mataroa.blog/blog/tending-to-my-digital-music-hoard/
https://coleb.blog/posts/get-back-to-work
https://noisydeadlines.net/week-notes-july-09-to-july-15-2024?pk_campaign=rss-feed
https://moddedbear.com/how-im-syncing-my-podcasts/
https://mikegrindle.com/posts/rik-little
https://thedorkweb.bearblog.dev/old-computer-challenge-day-1-proper/
https://ddlyh.smol.pub/2024-day-3
You get the idea, just a bunch of links to blog posts, one link per line. I’m sure other feed readers can export something like this too.
I found the tool wkhtmltopdf which can download a website and print it to a pdf, and again wrote a small script which reads the urls file, downloads every webpage in it and stores it as a pdf, and in the end rolls all the individual pdfs into one and stores it in a folder on my home server:
#!/bin/sh
#
rm pdfs/tmp/*
CURRENTDATE=`date +"%Y-%m-%d"`
i=1
while read p; do
wkhtmltopdf --page-size a6 --header-font-size 5 --header-right $p $p pdfs/tmp/$i.pdf
((i=i+1))
done < urls.txt
cd pdfs/tmp
pdfunite *.pdf ../$CURRENTDATE.pdf
cd ..
rsync *.pdf /srv/http/archive/
Now all I have to do is run this once a day through a cron job and it will fetch all the latest articles and store them as a single pdf in the archive folder of my web server. I can then open this folder in my reader’s web browser and just open the pdf from there. I chose A6 as the page size because my reader’s screen is tiny and if I had used the standard page size A4, the font would be too small to read.
It took a bit of work to figure this out and get it set up and running, but now that it’s working I don’t have to do anything, I just open my reader, get the latest pdf and start reading. Here’s a sample of what a pdf like this looks like with a few of my articles.
Youtube
I haven’t implemented anything yet, but the solution I have up there for podcasts could be used for Youtube videos as well. Via Invidious it’s possible to get RSS feeds for individual Youtube channels, so it would be easy to write a script that fetches the latest videos of my favorite channels via yt-dlp and stores them in a folder on my server.
Then I could just sit down in front of the TV in the evening, watch the latest handful of videos from the channels I follow, and then (and this is the most important step!) turn the TV off again and go do something else, rather than keep watching video after video for the next three hours.
Maybe I’ll set this up next.
But - why?
Well, because I can :)
I considered writing a couple of paragraphs here discussing why I’m doing this and explaining and justifying my motivation… but at the end of the day, I do it because I enjoy it. I like cooking up my own solutions to things, even if there are already a million apps out there that do the same thing and probably do it better than my half-baked scripts that will break if I breathe at them wrong. These are solutions that are very bare-bones, but they are tailored to do exactly what I want them to do. And I had fun implementing them and I also learned a few things along the way, and for me these are more than enough reasons to do stuff like this.
2024-07-16 08:00:00
This challenge is an interesting one so far. There isn’t too much old computing going on, but a lot of introspection and thinking about my relationship with technology.
My aim was to go back to a simpler setup like the one I had as a student. I originally intended this to be a simple nostalgia trip, but now I’m realizing more benefits than I had initially anticipated.
Back then, 20+ years ago we had computers that could do a lot, but outside of that our devices were mostly single purpose ones. A phone could do phone calls and text messages. A CD player could play CDs. An mp3 player could play mp3s. A DVD player could play DVDs. A games console could play games. A camera could take pictures. You get the idea.
Nowadays we have smartphones, and they can do everything. You can use your smartphone to watch videos, browse the internet, receive emails, doomscroll social media, listen to podcasts, stream music, take pictures, record videos, send text messages, play games, search for dating partners… and apparently some people have even been observed to use them to make phone calls. Weirdos.
All of this is great technical progress of course… but it isn’t necessarily good for us. We have the tendency to then also do everything that’s possible on these devices, preferably all day long and often multiple things at the same time. We listen to a podcast and have multiple text conversations at the same time. We watch TV while scrolling social media. We flip back and forth between reading the news, scrolling through social media, texting people and watching videos on Youtube. I often see young parents walking their kids with their faces buried in their phones. Worse, sometimes I see the kids themselves with their faces buried in a phone or tablet.
I’m not nearly as bad as I just described with my phone, but I still notice the tendency to spend way too much time with the phone in my hand for way too many hours a day.
So these past few days I’ve experimented with leaving my phone in the foyer of my apartment, having the computer on the desk where it belongs and using a dumb phone and an iPod and my e-reader.
And it’s weird. I constantly find myself walking to my phone and checking for new messages. I like listening to podcasts, and I had to figure out how to get podcasts on my iPod. I would like to read blog articles on my e-reader, and I’m currently trying to figure out how to best get them on there (it has a browser, but it’s awful and borderline unusable). It definitely takes time adjusting to the lifestyle without a phone, and breaking this habit is harder than I expected. And I realize that I also have to replace the phone habit (and laptop habit) with something else, otherwise I often find myself sitting there in silence and not knowing what to do with myself. Which is uncomfortable. But discomfort also creates the urge to change, so maybe it’s not so bad after all…
I’m currently sitting in a coffee shop with my old 2009 Macbook that I’m using for the challenge (it isn’t connected to wifi, so it’s essentially a typewriter right now) and my dumb phone, and I would like to take a picture of this setup and share it here, but I can’t. I don’t have a camera with me. It feels weird. I’ve gotten so used to just being able to snap a picture with my smartphone at any given moment that now I feel like something’s missing…
Anyway, I think that’s enough philosophical and mental health stuff for now. Tomorrow we’ll talk a bit about the technical challenges and how to overcome them, because I have some observations and ideas I want to share :)
2024-07-13 08:00:00
The Old Computer Challenge 2024 begins today, and despite being excited about it for months, I feel kind of ill prepared. So let’s see what I’m going to do this week.
My setup
I hinted at it before in a recent post, I kind of want to go back about 20 years or so to when I was in University and I didn’t have as much stuff as I have now, and I still miraculously survived.
When I first started University in 2003, I arrived at my 12 square meter dorm room with a discman, an old 400MHz Pentium II computer with a CRT monitor and an MP3 Player with maybe 128MB or so of storage. Plus two old PC speakers that didn’t even match. Soon after I bought a Laptop with a 1,4GHz Pentium M, 512MB RAM, 60GB Harddisk. It cost an insane 1300 Euros back then, which was the single largest purchase of my life at that point.
I also got my first mobile phone, a Siemens C55 which could do calls and SMS, and nothing else. A few years later I bought a used original Xbox, put a modchip and a bigger harddisk in, installed XBMC, copied all my, ahem, completely legally acquired MP3s and AVI movie files across and that was my media center for the next probably 7 or 8 years.
Partly out of nostalgia and partly for my own mental wellbeing I want to go back to a setup similar to this. So here’s what I’m going to use for this week:
I didn’t bother connecting the Macbook to WiFi, if I’m online the Macbook needs to sit on my desk and be tethered to an ethernet cable.
The challenge
The main topic for me this week I think will be to just slow down. I wrote about it before, I fell into a bit of a slump a few weeks ago after losing my job where I would just sit on the couch or in bed and aimlessly browse the web for hours on my phone or my laptop. I still haven’t really gotten out of it, so I’m using this challenge to try again.
So here are my rules:
Come to think of it, this is as much a mental health challenge as it is an old computer challenge for me, which I think is exactly what I need right now. I’m not going to completely eliminate modern tech from my life, but I’ll try and limit my exposure to it and the (negative) impact it has.
The fun aspect
I also have an old Macbook from 2006 and a Pentium 3 Laptop from 2001, and I’ll probably play around a bit with those and explore some old operating systems and programs I’ve used in the past (or I never used and want to check out). Maybe I’ll create a terrible looking website with Frontpage or iWeb…
2024-07-12 08:00:00
Lucky number 13! This time, as the Old Computer Challenge is upon us once more with a bunch of links related to retrocomputing in the broadest sense.
Software/Services
Videos
And since we are in the land of retrocomputing, here are some of my favorite retro-related Youtube-Channels:
2024-07-10 08:00:00
Can’t believe it’s already been an entire year since I started this blog! Time moves so fast, it’s insane. So let’s have a look at one year of blogging for me. A more serious one this time :)
I hope everyone is still here after yesterday’s shitpost; I was actually a bit scared to put it up because what if people think I’m serious? What if everyone abandons me because they think I’ve sold out? …I really shouldn’t, but I’m always second guessing myself with stuff like this.
That piece btw was largely written by ChatGPT; I just told it to write an announcement post for my blog and make it sound as exciting as possible, and boy did it deliver! Right out of the gate the bullshit meter was off the charts and way better than what I could have come up with myself… And then I just went over it and poured as much snark and sarcasm into it as I possibly could, while chuckling like a maniac the whole time. (I’m putting the original ChatGPT output at the bottom of this post in case anyone wants to know what the AI considers a usable blog post)
Anyway, of course nothing is going to change. No ads, no monetization, no scammy affiliate links, no SEO. Very sorry to disappoint, I know this is hard to hear (For some people it actually is, I have a friend who works in online marketing and she’s constantly berating me for having “bad SEO” on the site… it’s interesting that despite having known me for over half a decade and knowing my stance regarding all these things, she still can’t put herself into my shoes when it comes to this).
So what kind of lunatic starts a website without the intention of monetizing it? Well this particular middle-aged idiot still remembers the internet of the late 90s/early 2000s and in recent years has become more and more frustrated and disillusioned with the corporatization and enshittification of the web that has taken place since then, especially in the last 10 years or so. Combine that with the dread of realizing that I’m getting older and the longing and nostalgia for the “good old days” that comes with this and you’ve got the perfect storm…
And so right around this time last year I discovered this smol web movement and the old computer challenge, and that gave me the motivation to start my own website. I had always wanted to, but I never really knew what to write about, so I never did… Until I figured that I could just post about the old computer stuff everyone else doing the challenge was writing about, and see how it went from there.
Now I definitely struggled to find my voice and topics I wanted to write about for a while during the winter… last September I started the 100 days to offload challenge (write 100 posts within a year), but I abandoned that after a few months because I noticed I was falling more and more behind and as a consequence started putting pressure on myself which killed my creativity. I think stopping this challenge and then introducing the “thoughts” section finally took enough (perceived) pressure off to free me to write more and about different topics.
I also quietly gave myself a release schedule about two months ago; I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but since May I’ve been pretty consistently putting out a post every Wednesday and Sunday, and one linkdump on the weekend (I’m still not sure if Friday or Saturday is the better day for that, but it probably doesn’t matter at all anyway). And curiously, even though that isn’t much different than taking part in a blogging challenge, this didn’t feel overwhelming. Quite the opposite actually, I find it very motivating to think “what am I going to write for next Sunday’s post”.
And so over the course of a year this website has evolved into something I’m actually quite proud of and happy with. And judging by the feedback I’ve gotten from some of you on Mastodon or via Email, my writing seems to resonate with quite a few people, which is of course both motivating and humbling.
So in constrast to yesterday’s post, I actually do not have any grand plans for this website. I think I’ve found my stride and I really enjoy writing these posts, so I’ll keep doing that for as long as it’s fun and I can think of new things to write about. And currently I don’t feel like I’m going to run out of ideas any time soon.
And last but not least, I want to thank you very much for reading, subscribing, and interacting with me! Every time I post something there’s a little voice in the back of my head going “who would want to read this anyway”, but the feedback you are giving me silences this voice more and more. And of course reading other people’s blogs and seeing how their websites and their opinions and personalities develop and evolve over time is just as much part of the fun as running my own site!
So, friends, grab your favorite beverage (mine’s coffee, and I’m actually posting this from my favorite coffee shop) and here’s to another year of oldschool blogging without any corporate modern web bullshit.
Cheers!
Andreas (Chief Visionary etc…)
Here’s what ChatGPT wrote for me:
Welcome to the Thrilling New Era of [Your Blog Name]!
Hey there, amazing readers!
I am bursting with excitement to share some colossal updates that will skyrocket your experience on [Your Blog Name] to new heights! We’ve been working feverishly behind the scenes, and today, the wait is finally over. Get ready to embark on an exhilarating journey with us as we unveil some groundbreaking initiatives that are set to redefine our community.
Hold onto your hats because we’ve teamed up with some absolutely fantastic brands that you’re going to love! These sponsorships are not just collaborations; they’re dynamic partnerships with companies that echo our passion for quality, innovation, and sheer awesomeness. Here’s a tantalizing glimpse of what’s in store:
These partnerships are designed to bring you thrilling benefits through incredible discounts, exciting giveaways, and premium content that you won’t find anywhere else.
We’re supercharging our blog with handpicked affiliate links that will enhance your shopping experience! Every time you make a purchase through these links, you’re not just getting great products—you’re also supporting our blog at no extra cost to you. It’s a win-win! We’re committed to recommending only the best products and services that we absolutely adore and know you will too.
Check out some of our awesome affiliates:
To celebrate our dedicated readers, we’re launching an exclusive Premium Content section that’s packed with extraordinary benefits! As a subscriber, you’ll gain access to:
Subscriptions start at just [price], and the value is off the charts! Click [here] to join our inner circle and unlock these incredible perks!
And now, drumroll please… I’m ecstatic to unveil our brand new look! [Your Blog Name] has undergone a sensational makeover, bringing you a more modern, ultra-chic experience. Our new logo, vibrant color scheme, and sleek website layout are designed with you in mind. We’ve poured our hearts into making navigation a breeze, content more accessible, and the overall vibe simply irresistible.
This rebranding is not just about aesthetics; it signifies our growth, our evolution, and our unwavering commitment to delivering the best content and community experience possible.
Your support and enthusiasm have been the lifeblood of [Your Blog Name], and these exciting developments are our way of giving back to you. Whether you’re a casual visitor or a devoted subscriber, there’s something thrilling waiting for everyone.
Thank you for being the heart and soul of our community. Here’s to a dazzling new chapter of [Your Blog Name] – more exciting, more inspiring, and more engaging than ever before!
Stay tuned, stay excited, and let’s make this journey legendary!
With boundless excitement,
[Your Name]
Founder of [Your Blog Name]
2024-07-09 08:00:00
Hey there, amazing readers!
Today this blog turns one year old, and to celebrate this incredible milestone I am bursting with excitement to share some colossal updates that will skyrocket your experience on 82MHz to new heights! We’ve been working feverishly behind the scenes, and today, the wait is finally over. Get ready to embark on an exhilarating journey with us as we unveil some groundbreaking initiatives that are set to make us tons of money redefine our community.
Hold onto your hats because we’ve teamed up with some absolutely fantastic brands that you’re going to love! These sponsorships are not just collaborations; they’re dynamic partnerships with companies that echo our passion for quality, innovation, and sheer disdain for our users awesomeness. Here’s a tantalizing glimpse of what’s in store:
These partnerships are designed to bring you thrilling benefits through incredible discounts, exciting giveaways, and premium content that you will find literally everywhere else too, because we’re too lazy to come up with our own stuff and so we’re just copying whatever’s popular elsewhere right now.
We’re supercharging our blog with handpicked affiliate links that will enhance your shopping experience! Every time you make a purchase through these links, you’re not just getting great products—you’re also supporting billionaires who are ruining society for their own personal gain our blog at no extra cost to you. It’s a win-win! For us and our partners. Not for you. Definitely not for you.We’re committed to recommending only the best products and services that we absolutely adore and know you will too.
Check out some of our awesome affiliates:
To celebrate our dedicated readers, we’re launching an exclusive Premium Content section that’s packed with extraordinary benefits! As a subscriber, you’ll gain access to:
Subscriptions start at just [outrageous price goes here], and the value is off the charts! Click [scammy looking bright red button at the bottom of the page] to join our inner circle and unlock these incredible perks!
And now, drumroll please… I’m ecstatic to unveil our brand new look! 82MHz will undergo a sensational makeover, bringing you a more modern, ultra-chic experience with tons of Javascript, tracking cookies and inclusion of external domains that serve you ads and give zero fucks about your privacy. Our new logo, vibrant color scheme, and sleek website layout are designed to look exactly like every other corporate website on the internet. We’ve thrown money at the sleaziest online marketing agency we were able to find to make navigation a nightmare breeze, content less accessible, and the overall vibe of the website as bland and impersonal as humanly possible.
This rebranding is not just about aesthetics; it signifies our growth, our evolution, and our absolute contempt for our readers.
Your support and enthusiasm have been the lifeblood of 82MHz, and these exciting developments are our way of alienating you giving back to you. Whether you’re a casual visitor or a devoted subscriber, there’s something thrilling waiting for everyone.
Stay tuned, stay excited, and let’s run this site into the ground make this journey legendary!
With boundless excitement,
Andreas
Founder, CEO and Chief Visionary Officer at 82mhz.net Inc.
2024-07-07 08:00:00
I live in the middle of a big city next to a busy street, and especially during rush hour the traffic is relentless and constant there, and with constant traffic comes constant noise. But for a brief period in recent history, there was no traffic, and there was no noise. Everything was quiet. It was odd and beautiful and relaxing and frightening all at once.
I’m of course talking about the covid pandemic, especially the first lockdown that happened here in the spring of 2020. Don’t worry, I’m not going to talk about politics, loss of life etc. here. There were undoubtedly a lot of awful things that came with the covid pandemic, like, you know, a global pandemic. But there was one unexpected side effect: The frantic pace of the world stopped, and things went quiet.
I noticed it after a while, nobody was driving to or from work anymore (or anywhere for that matter), and so there was no car traffic in the streets. I would open the window and it was just quiet outside. All the usual traffic noise I had become so used to that I didn’t even notice it anymore had vanished. Same thing with walking around the city. There was almost no car traffic, and there was barely any noise. The city went quiet, the way it usually only is in the middle of the night. But back then it was like this all the time, even during what is usually rush hour. You could cross the street without having to wait for a gap in traffic and then having to sprint to the other side. You could even walk in the middle of the street, it didn’t matter.
It was only after that noise had suddenly vanished that I noticed how permanent and omnipresent it used to be. Constant background noise is something you normally tune out after a while and don’t even notice anymore… but you notice when it’s gone. And only when the noise was gone did I notice how much of an impact it had on me, without me even realizing. I could feel my body relax because the stress of the constant noise was gone. Of course there were other stressors, like reading the news… but I noticed that the constant traffic noise seems to be a pretty big stress factor for me, bigger than I had realized.
And the quietness wasn’t just here. It was everywhere. Looking up at the sky at any given point in time you can usually see at least one or two airplanes leaving contrails behind, often times many more. During lockdown there was no air traffic, and so there were no contrails. The sky was blue without any white streaks.
The waters in Venice, Italy cleared up because there were no big ships stirring up the dirt from the bottom anymore, and as a result, dolphins returned to the lagoon and actually into the canals in the city. Many smog-plagued metropoles experienced a significant increase in air quality because of the reduction in car traffic and the temporary shutdown of many polluting factories.
We stopped polluting the environment with noise and dirt and traffic and heavy machinery, and almost immediately nature started to recover. The effect that I noticed on a small scale in myself could also be seen on a much larger scale in the world.
Unfortunately, it didn’t last. Once the lockdowns were over and the pandemic was under control, we went right back to our usual ways. Now a few years later car traffic and noise is as bad as it ever was, pollution has gone up again and we seem to have largely put the pandemic behind us and filed it away as some sort of nightmare that is best left forgotten. And don’t get me wrong, in many ways it was a nightmare and I wouldn’t for a second want the pandemic to flare up again.
But we also caught a glimpse of how a world without constant traffic, noise, air pollution etc. could look like. And I wish we had learned something from it.
Sidenote, on the weekend I’m writing this there’s a big car racing event in my city. I live about 5km away from the racetrack, but I hear these cars as if they were racing a few hundred meters away at best. It’s so loud! And they also start racing in the morning, so these last two days I woke up to the glorious sound of insanely overpowered cars driving around in circles. Stuff like this is fun to watch on a Sunday afternoon on TV for an hour or two, but if you live close to a racetrack and you hear that all day for three days straight, it’s decidedly less fun.
2024-07-05 08:00:00
I collect a lot of links to great articles and software projects, and this is my attempt to sort through them and share them with the rest of you. Today I thought we’d have a look at the software I’m currently running on my home server.
Software/Services
And then there’s also a few ugly-ass hacked together custom scripts that do various little tasks, like updating the RSS feeds and taking care of backups etc.
This is very much a work in progress though and I’m constantly trying out new tools, so in a couple of months this will probably look very different and we can have another look at what’s changed then.
2024-07-03 08:00:00
Losing my job recently really threw me off balance; more so than I initially realised. The first few days weren’t great obviously because I was angry and frustrated, but even after the situation was done and all the papers were signed and filed away I found myself in a weird mental state where all of a sudden I had a lot of free time and didn’t really know what to do with myself.
And so I fell into the habit of just doing nothing at all. I sat around on my couch most of the day mindlessly watching Youtube videos or aimlessly surfing the web, doomscrolling through newssites until my laptop battery ran out and my back hurt. At which point I moved to a different spot, sat down there, picked up my phone and continued surfing, without even realizing that I had switched from staring at a screen for hours to staring at another screen for more hours. One of my golden rules is to have no screens in the bedroom, no TV, no phone, no laptop, nothing (well, the e-reader is allowed). That went out the window too, when I couldn’t fall asleep I just brought my laptop into bed and continued surfing until I fell asleep and put it on the nightstand next to me. As soon as I woke up I picked it up and continued where I left off.
I also stopped cooking and ate more and more junk food and chocolate/cookies/ice cream, which was not great for my health and also not the best for my wallet. I spent so much money this month on takeout food and eating out!
Now if this sounds like I completely lost control over my life, don’t worry, I didn’t. I still regularly met with friends, went for walks, cycled around the city, wrote blog posts, even started looking at job ads and sent a few job applications away.
But I definitely found myself slipping into a bunch of bad habits that are not good for me if I kept them up long term. Now I’m trying to get rid of them, and i’m realising that as easy as it is to slip into habits that are bad for you, it is pretty difficult to establish and keep up good and healthy habits.
Now I’m not beating myself up over it; after an upsetting event, it’s okay to mope around for a little bit and process it and do what you need to do to recover, and if that means lying on the couch for a week or two and not getting much done, than that’s completely fine in my opinion. In fact, kicking and berating myself for being “lazy” or “useless” or whatever would have been the absolute worst thing to do in this situation. It’s what I would have done a couple of years ago, but thankfully I’ve learned to treat myself better since.
But now it is definitely time to get back on track with my life, and start replacing the bad habits that have crept in with good ones again. I think I’ll start by cleaning my apartment. Get my place in order, ban the screens from the bedroom and read books again instead of doomscrolling the web in the evening. And then take it one day at a time and be mindful of which things I let back into my life and which have no place there, and I’m sure I’ll be on a good path again in no time.
2024-06-30 08:00:00
Last year I took part in the Old Computer Challenge, which was in fact the event that kick started this website, and my gateway drug into this whole blogging/smolnet community. The organizer Solene just announced a date and a theme for this year’s challenge, so let’s go for another round.
History of the Challenge
So first of all, what is the OCC?
In Solene’s own words from her introduction post in 2021 “The point of the challenge is to replace your daily computer by a very old computer and share your feelings for the week.”
I first came across the challenge last year, which was year 3, and decided to jump on board and blog about my experiences. You can read up on how it went here.
Over the years a nice little community has formed around the challenge, which for me was hands down the best part of the whole thing. Talking to people on IRC and Mastodon, discovering their blogs and reading about what they were up to… it felt very oldschool internet and came just at the right time for me, because I had become more and more disillusioned with the current internet and tech world, and discovering that there was a growing community of people who were feeling the same way and actively did something about it felt a bit like Dorothy discovering that this wasn’t Kansas anymore.
The rules for the OCC varied from year to year, and this year there was a bit of a discussion among the community about what kind of rules should be set for this year. One proposal by Solene was to limit time online to one hour a day, to emulate the feeling of having a dial-up connection that you had to pay for by the minute. There were some concerns though (also from me) that this would hurt the community aspect of the challenge since we probably wouldn’t meet very much on IRC then, if everybody is online at different times.
This year
The date for the OCC 2004 is July 13th to 20th.
This year Solene decided to relax the rules and let everyone decide their own rules for the challenge. Which I like very much, because after all the main idea is to have fun and not take things too seriously. Here are a few suggestions from her for what to do:
My challenge
So what am I going to do in this week?
Well I haven’t fully decided yet, but I’m thinking about doing something like a “back to the 2000s” challenge. I started University in 2003, and the first year or two all the tech I had were a laptop, a mobile phone that could do calls and SMS, a discman and an mp3 player. The laptop was also tethered to the desk with an ethernet cable, because there was no Wifi in my place.
So I’m thinking about going back to a simple setup like this. No mobile internet, and being more mindful and intentional with my use of technology, and not just run around 24/7 with my smartphone in my pocket and look at it every two minutes. Or sit on the couch with my laptop for hours mindlessly watching Youtube.
But I will have to think a bit more about the details and the exact setup. There’s still a bit of time left, so there is no hurry.
Resources
Here’s a few resources to check out if you’re interested in participating, and it would be great to see some of you who haven’t been around last year to take part in the OCC, too!
2024-06-28 08:00:00
I collect a lot of links to great articles and software projects, and this is my attempt to sort through them and share them with the rest of you.
Articles
Software/Services
Hardware-Projects
Personal Homepages
2024-06-26 08:00:00
Maybe it’s just because I’m moving around in these smaller blogging circles now, but it feels to me like lately more and more articles are popping up by people who are bemoaning the current state of the web.
The article I saw quoted and reposted the most was “Heat Death of the Internet”, but there were many others, I’ll link some of them at the bottom.
Of course, complaining that things are crap now and that everything used to be better in the “good old days”™ is something humans have been doing since the dawn of time. But the internet is pretty objectively getting worse:
And on and on and on.
In climate science there is the concept of “tipping points”, where once a certain point has been surpassed, it’s very hard to reverse course because the effects keep multiplying. And I’m starting to wonder if we are at, or have already surpassed such a tipping point for the state of the internet. Will we look back in a decade or so at 2024 and say “yes, that was the year when AI was integrated into everything and when everything truly went to shit”? Or will things get better and we’ll say “yes, those were pretty bleak times, but we’ve learned our lesson and changed for the better since”?
I truly have no idea. I’m hoping for things to get better of course, but I have my doubts… governments are doing very little to reign in anything but the very worst excesses and privacy violations, but at the same time they’re working tirelessly themselves to undermine people’s privacy wherever they can. And let’s be honest… by now, the show isn’t run by any elected governing bodies anymore, but by greedy billionaires who are self appointed dictators for life over their empires and who can’t be fired or voted out of office. And who have no inhibitions to advance their own interests with absolute unscrupulousness.
I want to be optimistic, but I fear that things are going to get worse first before they’ll eventually hopefully get better. And maybe the smolweb, indieweb, whatever you want to call it, will play a role in it.
Here’s a few of the articles I came across recently, in no particular order. Some I’ve shared before, some I haven’t:
2024-06-23 08:00:00
Two weeks ago without any prior warning the company I work for told me that they would part ways with me and that they would terminate my employment contract. Then they asked me to leave my phone and laptop with them and walked me to the exit. Here’s how it came to this, and what I’m taking away from it.
This is of course a very personal story, and I pondered for quite a while if I should even publish it here, but in the end this is a personal blog and I feel like telling this story, so why not.
Now the headline is actually a little exaggerated because I wasn’t “fired” in the true sense of the word; I live in Germany where we have very strong laws for worker protection, so truly firing someone, meaning immediately terminating an employment contract, is pretty much only possible if the employee has done something that violates their contract or the law and which makes further employment of that person impossible. I have done no such thing, and at least on paper I’m still employed for a few more months, but what happened certainly felt like being fired to me, which is why I think putting it like this is appropriate.
Background
I started working for this particular company in the beginning of last year (2023) as a senior software developer. At first I was really happy there, things were going well, the team was great, the work was interesting, the atmosphere in the company was good and the cafeteria they had on site was amazing. I thought I had found a company where I would stay for a long time.
Then out of the blue last summer the company announced that they had to file for bankruptcy. We already knew that the financial situation wasn’t that good, but it was always communicated as a temporary thing by management, something we would get over without any problems. Nobody was expecting the company to go bankrupt, so this came as a complete shock to all of us.
With this announcement everything changed. The cafeteria closed right away, a lot of small things that made working there really pleasant (free fruit, free coffee, snacks) disappeared literally overnight, all the external contractors that were working with us at that point pretty much immediately left because they couldn’t be paid anymore (and in fact some lost huge sums of money because the company couldn’t pay their outstanding invoices), and the mood among the staff changed dramatically for the worse.
What followed was a long period of uncertainty over what was going to happen next, and over the following weeks and months management did their absolute best to communicate as little as possible with the employees, which of course caused a lot of anger and frustration among the staff to build up. They hired a law firm to help with the legal side of things, and at one of the rare information meetings for the staff one of these attourneys gave a glowing presentation about how great his law firm is and how many companies they had already saved, even though most of these companies had to fire a significant number of employees in order to survive. They made absolutely no effort to disguise the fact that their job was to save the company and that they didn’t give a rat’s ass about the employees. It was such a stellar example of completely tone-deaf communication to a workforce scared of losing their jobs that it left us all virtually speechless.
Eventually the company announced that they would lay off around 150 people, and another 100 or so decided on their own to leave. For a while pretty much every week one or more colleagues said their goodbyes and left, which after a while got pretty tough to stomach. Later in the fall it was announced that we would “partner with” (read: be bought by) a former competitor, and this at least saved the company from completely going out of business. There was definitely a sense of relief and the hope that maybe things would turn around and improve with the new owners in charge. However our sales never improved as much as they should have, and every month the new owners had to put money into the company just to keep us afloat. And you don’t need a degree in economics to know that they would not keep doing this forever. It was only a matter of time before they took measures to limit their expenses, and apparently that time had come this month.
My story
In the first week of June there was a company-wide meeting where it was announced that another dozen or so jobs would be lost, but I was on vacation that week, so I was blissfully unaware of this.
I came back from vacation the following Monday. I used to work from home on Mondays, so I sat down at my desk at home, turned on my computer and found that I couldn’t log in to the company network anymore. VPN didn’t work, Teams, Outlook, nothing was working. Same thing on my company phone.
At this point I thought that maybe my password had expired or IT had misconfigured something (it wouldn’t have been the first time), so I texted my supervisor and asked if he could get me in touch with IT.
15 minutes later the company’s CTO called and asked me to come into the office. He refused to say why exactly, but it wasn’t hard to put two and two together at this point.
So I drove to the office, where I was greeted right at the door by my supervisor who just said “hi Andreas, let’s go straight to the CTO, sorry” and walked me to the CTOs office. Then he left, a woman from HR was called in and they told me that the company needed to downsize and that the R&D department had to let go of two people, with me being one of them. We went over the legal stuff, like I said they couldn’t just fire me right away (I was offered a termination agreement to terminate my contract by the end of September and a small severancy pay), but they did the next best thing and immediately released me from my work duties, they asked me to leave my laptop and phone with them and then the CTO actually personally walked me all the way to the gate to make sure I really left the premises. When I asked if I could go in the office to collect my personal belongings and say goodbye to my colleagues he said he would prefer I didn’t because they were not informed yet.
My supervisor once told me the story that he had to fire a guy who was using the company’s server to download and store a bunch of porn, and that guy had to leave his computer and phone on his desk and was shown the door right away.
I did no such thing, in fact I would say I was a loyal (though admittedly disgruntled) employee through this whole bankruptcy situation and beyond, and yet I was treated exactly the same way, as if I had stolen and sold some company secrets and couldn’t be trusted anymore. I wasn’t even allowed to go back into the office to say goodbye to my colleagues who I had worked with for almost a year and a half at this point. So while I wasn’t actually fired in a legal sense, I certainly was treated as if I was.
The most disappointing thing though was that in the aftermath of this, nobody even got in touch with me anymore. Not my colleagues, not my supervisor or the head of the department I worked in, nobody. Now I don’t blame my colleagues at all, they were probably as shocked as I was, and in fact I met some of them for a beer last week and they pretty much confirmed this. But I would have expected more from my direct superiors. I had to go back to the company twice more to deal with some legal paperwork (and collect my personal belongings), and both times no-one from management showed up at all, I just met with two young women from HR who I had never spoken to before and who were clearly very uncomfortable with the task they’d been given. To be fair though, they were very nice and they also admitted that they didn’t agree with the way that whole situation was handled at all. In fact, these two were the only ones who showed some humanity and didn’t just deliver empty corporate bullshit blabla.
Lessons learned
I’ve worked in many different companies since I was a teenager, sometimes just for a couple of weeks during an internship or a summer job, sometimes for years as a professional. Some of these companies were great, some were not so great… but without a doubt this one was the most disappointing of all of them by far.
But now to get away from the negativity, what do I take away from this experience?
The most important thing I think is how to not behave as a manager with personnel responsibility towards your employees. I don’t know if I will ever be in a leadership position or not, but if I am, I have a pretty good idea of how not to treat my subordinates. Compassion, appreciation, honesty and openness were all things that were sorely missing from management these last few months, which greatly contributed to an ever growing frustration among the workforce. And of course this style of firing people is an absolute no-go.
I also know that losing my job is not the end of the world. It sucks, and it is a blow to the ego if it is done in such a way, but in the grand scheme of things it’s not so bad. A colleague who is in his early 30s recently lost his father to cancer. A few weeks ago I met a woman in her mid 40s who became a widow (with two small children) two or three years ago because her husband unexpectedly died of a heart attack at the age of 40. I know a person who was emotionally and physically abused by their parents. These are personal tragedies that are infinitely more difficult to deal with than the loss of a job.
On the other hand I also had to remind myself that it’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to be disappointed. We often tell ourselves that we don’t have a right to feel how we are feeling because other people have it way harder than we do, see above. But it’s okay to feel these feelings, and when stuff like this happens it’s okay be be angry, sad, frustrated, whatever about it. Feelings like these tell us something, and we should allow them to be there and listen to what they have to say rather than push them away and maybe even beat ourselves up for feeling bad. It was definitely an opportunity for me to practice acceptance and compassion, and to allow myself to be sad and angry and disappointed without beating myself up for it.
Conclusion
And lastly, why did I even write all this in the first place? It is not my intention to get pity or sympathy. In fact I’m in a very fortunate situation here because I live in a country with strong worker protection rights and a fairly good social security system, so the company could only let me go with three months notice (I am still employed and paid until the end of September) and should I not find a job after that, I will be eligible for unemployment benefits for up to a year. So from a financial point of view this is far from a thread to my existence, which I realise is a very privileged position to be in and which I’m very grateful for.
The emotional issues, the frustration, anger, disappointment and uncertainty this whole situation has caused are very real of course and I felt the impact they had on me especially in the first week, but these are wounds that will be healed with time and distance from the company.
So for now I’ll take a bit of time to breathe, recharge and then figure out the next steps. I’m of course going to apply for similar positions, but in the back of my mind I’m also thinking about maybe going into freelance work, either as a software developer or a technical writer… but these are all very early ideas so far that I will have to roll around in my head for a longer time before they turn into anything concrete.
2024-06-22 08:00:00
I collect a lot of links to great articles and software projects, and this is my attempt to sort through them and share them with the rest of you.
Articles
Software/Services
Personal Homepages
I’m putting the following three pages together, because they’re all run by the same person, Adële. She is an advocate for the small web of personal homepages without the negative impact of big corporations. Which of course I’m also a huge fan of. These are her personal blog, her site about the smolweb and her hosting service for your very own small personal blog, should you not already have one.
2024-06-19 08:00:00
A little while ago I bought one of those CD players that can be mounted vertically on the wall and have a CD play in the open. I stuck it to the wall behind my HiFi system, and was really happy with the way it looks, it’s a very decorative item. Unfortunately that’s all the good I can say about it.
The first thing I noticed after I connected it to the amp and started playing a CD through it was that everything sounded pretty flat and lifeless. I fiddled a bit with the equalizer of my amplifier, but it made no difference… until I realized the reason for it. The CD player only outputs audio in mono. Mono!
I couldn’t believe it at first, so I double checked all the connections, connected headphones to it and listened through those, I even burned a CD with a stereo test file… but every time the sound was coming out the same of both channels. Even through the two built in speakers (which sound absolutely terrible), the sound is only coming out in mono. Which would be fine, they’re very close together and of really low quality anyway, so it wouldn’t matter much. But that the audio output isn’t stereo? I would have never expected this. This is the first CD player I’ve ever come across that doesn’t play back in stereo.
But I didn’t study Electrical Engineering for nothing, right? I figured that the CD has to be read out in stereo, after all both channels are present, and so I theorized that at some point inside the device the two channels get mixed together into one. So if I could find the point before they got mixed together, maybe I could tap into that and get the stereo signal out before it is mixed down.
So I opened up the player, which revealed a surprisingly neat looking board, and started looking at the circuit and poking around inside with an oscilloscope.
The first thing I noticed was that there are actually two identical but separate circuits to process the audio signal before they go out to the line/headphone output, so there isn’t just one channel processed and then sent to both outputs, there are two channels being processed separately. But no matter where I tapped into the signal with the oscilloscope, I always found the two channels already mixed together.
I couldn’t find a datasheet for the decoder chip, but after a while I started suspecting that the decoder chip itself is configured to mix the two channels together and output the already mixed signal to both the left and right audio output. If that’s the case, there’s nothing I can do to change this.
I didn’t try and confirm this though, because I had noticed something else pretty much right away - the player is incredibly noisy. I didn’t notice it at first when I was listening to music through my living room speakers, but it became very evident as soon as I connected headphones. There’s a ton of background noise and hiss, you can hear the CD spinning, you can hear the motors that are moving the lens… everything. Pretty much every cheap-o discman from the 90s sounds way, WAY better than this!
And so with that, I decided to give up on this player. It was only 25 Euros, so not a big financial loss, but still a huge disappointment. It looks good, but unfortunately that’s about it. It sounds terrible, it’s noisy and it sucks every last bit of fun out of listening to music.
So the only thing I can recommend is to avoid these things like the plague. If you want to listen to your old CDs again but don’t have a CD player anymore, get an old Discman off of Ebay for a few bucks and listen to your music this way and you will have an infinitely better time, and probably some nostalgia on top of it, too.
Oh, and one last thing. This device has bluetooth, so you can pair it with your phone and send music to it and essentially use it as a (terrible) bluetooth speaker or a bluetooth adapter for your HiFi. I don’t know why you would, but you could. And guess what? The music that you send to it via bluetooth is played back in stereo! So it can do stereo, but for whatever inconceivable reason the designers of this thing decided that playing back CDs in mono is fine.
I will never know who designed this and if they have a degree in Electrical Engineering or not, but if they do, they should give it back. This device is essentially e-waste straight out of the factory, which is both very infuriating and disappointing.
…but now that I already have it, I wonder if I could put the guts of an old discman inside it and make it into a usable CD player after all? I couldn’t possible make it any worse. Maybe there will be a part 2 to this post at some point :)
Here’s a few more detailed pics of the board for those who are interested:
2024-06-16 08:00:00
Up until very recently this website was hosted on Github Pages. Which is something I’ve always felt a bit uncomfortable with, but when I created the website last year I wasn’t sure where it was going to go and what I would do with it, and as I already had a Github account, putting it on Github was the easiest solution.
Now that the site is about to turn one year old, I thought it was time to move to a hosting provider that was maybe a bit less… Microsoft. So a few weeks ago I got a small webspace from a provider here in Germany and started looking into how to move my website and domain over to them, which is something I had absolutely zero experience with, but thankfully was fairly straight forward.
Only when this setup was complete did I notice that there was a great avantage that came from having hosted the site on Gitlab, which we’ll get to in a moment, but first I wanted to briefly talk about how I build and deploy the site. Feel free to skip the next section if you’re not interested in the technical aspect of this.
Small technical interlude
Now with the website being hosted on Github, all I had to do was to commit the whole site to a git repo, push it to Github and then Github would do its thing in the background and deploy everything to the appropriate webspace. I created a deploy bash script for this which builds the site (with hugo), creates a new git commit and pushes to Github. If you’re interested, it looks like this:
#!/bin/sh
cd 82mhz
hugo # build the site in the folder public
cd public
git add -A
git commit -m "site update"
git push origin main
Very simple.
With the new webspace I thought I would have to rewrite it to use FTP or some other solution, but it turned out that my hosting provider trusts me enough to give me SSH access to the machine the site is hosted on, and they have git installed on the server as well.
This means I could keep this exact workflow, all I had to do was create a git repo on the new provider’s server, add that as origin in my local website git repo (instead of Github) and push to the new provider instead of Github. The only thing that was new was that I had to add a small post-receive hook in the remote git repo that checks out the latest version to the directory that the website is hosted from on every push it receives.
This hook is just a bash script in the hooks folder of the remote git repository named ‘post-receive’ and it looks like this:
#!/bin/bash
while read oldrev newrev ref
do
if [[ $ref =~ .*/main$ ]];
then
echo "Master ref received. Deploying master branch to production..."
git --work-tree=<websiteDir>/82mhz.net --git-dir=$HOME/git82 checkout -f
else
echo "Ref $ref successfully received. Doing nothing: only the main branch may be deployed on this server."
fi
done
This is executed on the website providers server, and it checks out the current HEAD of the main branch (=latest version) of the site and copies it to the folder the site is served from. And with that my deploy script works exactly like before, and I didn’t have to change a single line of it. Pretty neat!
Back on topic
But now here’s the reason why I started writing this post in the first place: I realized that by committing every change on my website to a git repo I have, and will continue to have, a complete archive of how the website looked at any given point in time. A few years from now if I want to know what the website looked like today, all I have to do is check out the git commit that was created on today’s date, and the site is exactly how it looks right now as this post goes live.
I think that is really nice, and it’s just an unintended side effect of my initial decision to host the site on Github, which I didn’t even think about at the time.
I wish I had an archive like this for more things of my “digital life” of the past almost three decades, but at least I have it now for my website.
2024-06-15 08:00:00
I collect a lot of links to great articles and software projects, and this is my attempt to sort through them and share them with the rest of you.
Articles
The Internet is a Series of Webs
Great reflection on the current state of the internet and where to take it if we want to keep it a network made for humans and not soulless megacorporations, which it has turned into in recent years.
Silicon Valley's False Prophet
Interesting article that shines a very critical light on Sam Altman’s current status as the smartest man in Silicon Valley and self appointed Savior of Humanity.
Software/Services
Sfeed: simple RSS and Atom parser - Codemadness
A command line parser for RSS feeds that admittedly has a bit of a learning curve, but I came to really love it. I use this as my daily RSS feed reader and also create my blogroll with it, though my local one updates a little more frequently than the one on here ;)
GitHub - vimpostor/blobdrop: Drag and drop files directly out of the terminal
Neat little program that allows you to drag and drop files straight from the terminal. I came across it on Dom Corriveau’s blog blog, who has a great tutorial on how to use it.
GitHub - shazow/ssh-chat: Chat over SSH.
This essentially creates a group chat (not unlike IRC) that’s accessible from SSH. So you connect to the machine that this is running on via SSH and are immediately in a chat room with other connected users.
GitHub - atauenis/webone: HTTP 1.x proxy that makes old web browsers usable again in the Web 2.0 world.
A web proxy to remove modern SSL encryption from websites so you can access them from older browsers. I haven’t personally tried it yet, but it sounds very useful for those of us who like to play around with old hardware and still would like to access the modern web.
2024-06-12 08:00:00
A few months ago I introduced the thoughts section to my website. My original idea for introducing this section was to make it into a microblog and to have a place to get out short posts without much editing or feeling the pressure of “having to make it into a proper blog post”. I write this in quotation marks because of course this pressure is something that I completely create myself, nobody is forcing me to make every post into a masterpiece here. Still that’s how I felt, and the thoughts section was my way to try and combat this feeling.
Did it work?
Yes. It did free me from the self-imposed pressure, and since I introduced that section I actually found myself blogging more and more consistently, and I got some very nice and encouraging feedback on some of my recent posts, so people seem to get some enjoyment and value out of my writing, and that is of course very motivating and encouraging. Thank you all so much for your feedback and your support!
But also no, it didn’t work. Because I never used the section the way I intended it to, as a microblog. My posts on here turned out to be just as long as my “regular” blog posts. For just getting a quick thought out I kept using Mastodon, just like I did before.
I think the overhead for posting to the blog is to blame for this… in Mastodon the input field is right there, so I just have to start typing into it. It’s also tiny, which helps keep the post size down.
For blogging on the other hand I have to create a new file, think of a title, open a text editor, type the post, start a hugo test server to check if it looks right on the page, proof read, and then upload. I have automated most of this process with scripts of course, and I could no doubt automate it down to a single command if I wanted, but posting to my website just feels different to posting on Mastodon. Which is why when I sit down to write something for the site I always end up writing more than just a few lines.
A few weeks ago I started thinking about this, and I decided to try and distinguish “thoughts” from “posts” by making the posts a bit longer and more “well rounded”, if that makes any sense, while keeping the thoughts more informal and casual.
Even so, the more I thought about it the more this distinction felt artificial and ultimately unneccessary to me.
So I decided to retire this section, at least for now. This will be the last post in thoughts, and everything else from now on will just appear under posts again, and I should probably take some time to clean up the tags/categories and a few other bits and pieces on the website at some point.
I’ll probably merge the thoughts back into the posts, but keep them also up under thoughts so the URLs don’t return a 404 in case someone has something bookmarked. But then everything will be “under one roof” again, so to speak.
So was the thoughts section a failure then? Absolutely not! It turned out differently than I had intended, but it did free me from my self created anxiety about blogging, so I think I’ll call it a successful failure :)
2024-06-09 08:00:00
Recently I came across a video on Youtube titled “The end of the good guy tech company” (via lazybear.io).
In it, the author argues that by now tech companies have screwed over their customers so often and so consistently that people simply stopped trusting them altogether, even if these companies start out genuinely having the interests of their customers in mind.
But there have been so many cases in the past where a company was sold to a venture capitalist firm or a big corporation like Adobe, Microsoft, Facebook etc. and then the product was cancelled altogether or moved to a subscription model or integrated into a larger software package that costs a fortune… it’s not hard to see why consumers feel this way.
It keeps happening over and over again
Just this week there was a new outcry as Adobe changed their terms of use to allow them access to the user’s images, likely to be used to train their AI models. And in true Adobe fashion, either you agree or you can’t continue using the software anymore. Which is just splendid if you are a professional who relies on using their programs for your daily work.
And that’s far from the only example of course. A few weeks ago Spotify announced that they would end support for a product they brought out just two years ago and told their paying customers to throw it away safely dispose of it. After an outcry they’re now offering refunds at least, but still. The people who bought it probably didn’t expect the device to become e-waste within two years of buying it.
Two years ago Adobe made the pantone color palette only available through an additional subscription fee, so all of a sudden users who were using that particular color palette had very little choice but to pay or not be able to use their old photoshop files anymore.
But we can go back further in time.
Remember when Whatsapp sold itself to Facebook for an absolutely perverse sum of money? Here’s one of the founders of Whatsapp whining about it a few years later because he “sold [his] users’ privacy to a larger benefit”. Here’s the same man right after the acquisition surprisingly less sad about the fact that Facebook just dumped 19 billion dollars in front of his feet.
Or do you remember that the first version of Sony’s Playstation 3 came with full Linux support, and then they disabled it through an update a few years later even though customers had paid for that feature and in some cases bought the console solely because it supported Linux in the first place?
Remember when the music industry slapped DRM on the CDs they produced because they were scared of people ripping them to MP3s and pirating them, causing the CDs that people bought to not play in many players? Even better, remember when Sony BMG installed a rootkit on people’s PCs through DRM’d CDs?
Remember the Ouya?
These are just a few examples I remember off the top of my head, but if I spent even just a few minutes researching the topic, I could surely fill another couple dozen lines with stories like these. I’m sure many of you have had personal experiences with paying for a product only to have it turned into a subscription service later on or crippled with an update that disabled precisely the feature you bought it for in the first place. I know I have.
By now many of us have literally decades worth of experience of tech companies screwing us over, lying to us, selling our personal data for profit, and making their products worse instead of better because it “was good for the bottom line”, so it’s no wonder we stopped trusting them.
So what can we do as consumers?
I think it depends heavily on the individual usecase, but reducing our dependence on the products of a single vendor is always a good idea of course. And we should try our absolut best to avoid services or products that come as a subscription or that need to be constantly connected to the internet, because we don’t own these things. Period. We might pay money for them, but as we’ve seen with Adobe this week, the manufacturer can just kill access to these products any time they want. We might pay, but we don’t own anything.
Personally, I stopped using software by big quasi monopolistic companies years ago, and instead tend to focus on using open source software wherever possible and if I have to use proprietary software, I try to use a product that I can buy and that I then own, even if the company decides to switch to a subscription model in the future. At least then I will be able to continue using the old version I paid for.
Of course open source projects can change their licensing terms to a more restrictive license too, but here again, the old versions will still be available and can be forked and continued to develop, like it happened recently with the Redis database.
As always, the power is in the consumer’s hands. If we stopped paying companies for shitty products or terrible service, they would have to stop these business practices. Adobe can do what they’re doing because they locked people into their ecosystem (oh how I hate that word!) and people keep paying. I realize this is a rather simplistic and maybe even naive way of looking at this issue and that the reality is far more complex, but it is also not entirely wrong. For nearly every software product out there there are alternatives by other developers available - yes, you might have to change your workflow or give up on some features, not to mention the inconvenience of switching to a different software platform, but you should still consider if that isn’t worth it.
In the end, to me being a customer of Adobe or Microsoft etc. is like being in a toxic and abusive relationship. It might be good sometimes, but you can never feel totally safe because you have no idea when the next blow will come. But you know that it will come. So do yourself a favour and get out before you get hurt.
2024-06-08 08:00:00
I collect a lot of links to great articles and software projects, and this is my attempt to sort through them and share them with the rest of you.
Articles
I spent a sleepless night recently surfing the web and reading articles, and these ones stuck with me. They paint a pretty depressing picture of the current state of the internet, so if you’re in a bad mood already, maybe give them a miss. Still, I wanted to share them with you as I find them important.
Software/Services
Since AI and Algorithms are out to ruin the internet, it’s more important than ever to build up a personal archive of great content you encounter online, because you never know when it will disappear or if you’ll be able to find it again. So here’s a few solutions to store websites offline.
Personal Blogs
2024-06-05 08:00:00
That Windows is getting more and more bloated with every new release and runs sluggish even on high end hardware has been pretty much an accepted truth since the Windows Vista days. But even Linux, while undeniably much slimmer and snappier, isn’t safe from getting bigger and bigger as the years move on.
Let’s take Ubuntu as an example. The first version of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 4.10 from 2004 came in at a size of 643MB for the live CD, and even less for the installation CD. Which was pretty standard at the time, because back in 2004 ISOs were usually still burned to CDs as not all computers supported booting from USB yet, and CD-Rs could only hold 650MB or 700MB, so for maximum compatibility the ISO had to stay below 650MB. The current Ubuntu 24.04 ISO image by comparison weighs in at a total of 5.7GB. Yikes! This doesn’t even fit on a standard single layer DVD. Of course these days nobody burns ISOs anymore, and flash drives are cheap and offer tons of space, but still. That’s a pretty hefty increase in size over the last 20 years.
But what prompted this train of thought for me was the announcement that Damn Small Linux (DSL) is getting a new release after years of no activity at all.
Damn Small Linux came out in the early 2000s, roughly around the same time Ubuntu first appeared on the scene, and its claim to fame was that it was a fully featured Linux distro including desktop environment and even Firefox that was only 50MB in size. Even back then that was really impressive. Today, Firefox alone is way bigger than that.
Development slowed down and eventually stopped in the late 2000s/early 2010s and the project seemed abandoned until recently when the developer announced a new release for 2024.
He notes though that he had to make some adjustments to the size of the distro, because while according to him it would be possible to create a 50MB distro today, it would have barely any software on board and so it would be virtually unusable. Therefore Damn Small Linux, 2024 edition, will be 700MB in size.
And to me this signifies more than anything else I’ve mentioned how much bigger software projects, even on Linux, have become. What was once considered a full size distro is now called “damn small”, while what used to be “damn small” 20 years ago is pretty much too small to be of any use nowadays.
2024-06-02 08:00:00
May was a slow reading month for me again, nevertheless I read three books (two and a half, really), so let’s have a look at them.
Every once in a while I’m in the mood to read a children’s book, either one that I’ve read back when I was a kid, or one that is a classic but somehow passed me by.
Ronja is one of those books I never read as a child. I remember my parents dragged me to a screening of the movie once, and it scared the absolute crap out of me! Those harpies, man… I had nightmares for weeks. After this I was done with that story and never read the book or watched the movie again. Maybe I should watch it now to get over that trauma…
Anyway, it’s a great story! There’s a Romeo and Juliet theme throughout (without the sad ending thankfully), with the two kids from two feuding families becoming friends and overcoming the hatred that defines their father’s relationship, but it’s also a great coming of age story with Ronja slowly discovering that her father’s life is not the right one for her and her finding her own way. And of course it’s very well written with some fantastical elements strewn in (harpies!!!), so it was well worth the read and I really loved it.
Kids movies in the 80s though… what the hell.
A science fiction book by a british author about the colonization of a foreign planet simply called Planet 86. I found this book at a second hand store and picked it out because the story sounded really interesting. The blurb at the back of the book reads:
“Journalist Lex Falk would do anything for a good story. When he is given the opportunity to connect to the brain of a frontline soldier via a computer chip, he is sure he has landed a major coup. But then the soldier is killed and Lex has to flee to safety…”
Sounds interesting enough, but I couldn’t get into the story at all. So after a hundred pages or so I stopped reading and put the book on my “to donate” pile.
Joe Navarro is a former FBI investigator who specialized in reading people’s body language and personalities. I remember reading his book “What Every Body is Saying” years ago and really liking it, though I don’t remember much from it, so it might be worth rereading it at some point.
This one I came across while browsing through my local library and took it home because the title sounded interesting, and it didn’t disappoint.
He describes a few different types of personalities (narcissists, emotionally unstable people, paranoids and people with an antisocial personality) and how they can be dangerous to you or society as a whole in the worst cases.
It’s pop science for sure, and filtered through his lens of an FBI agent, but it’s a fascinating dive into the personality structures of people with these kinds of disorders, and having encontered a few difficult, even toxic people myself over the course of my life, I can say that there is some good info in there.
2024-05-31 08:00:00
I collect a lot of links to great articles and software projects, and this is my attempt to sort through them and share them with the rest of you.
Articles
Surfing the (Human-Made) Internet
Mike Grindle wrote a very nice article about the small, more personal internet that still exists outside of the usual places that are considered “the internet” these days. If you’re here, you know that already of course, but it’s still a great read and maybe something to forward along to people who are disillusioned with the current state of the net.
Uh-oh - Messenger pioneer ICQ will be shut down at the end of June
The end of an era, though of course ICQ hasn’t been what it once was for at least 15 years by now. Still, as the first instant messenger I ever used it has a special place in my heart and I’m a little sad to see it go.
Software/Services
GitHub - k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball: Decompilation of 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet
Someone decompiled and reimplemented the pinball game that was included in old versions of Windows up to Windows XP I think. I came across this on fabulous.systems, who wrote a great tutorial on how to get it running.
== ICQ Special ==
ICQ may officially be dead soon, but there are still projects out there that try to keep it and other old messengers (AIM, MSN) alive. I’m just going to dump some links here without much comment, but if you’re as nostalgic about ICQ as I am and want to get it up and running again, get in touch with me and maybe we can figure something out together :)
2024-05-29 08:00:00
This is a bit of a nerdy technobubble thing, and you might not know the people involved or care about them, but please bear with me, there’s a point I want to make.
So last week a Youtuber named Chris Titus, who makes mostly videos about all things related to Linux, posted a video in which he criticised Bryan Lunduke. Bryan Lunduke is a tech journalist I guess, he used to work for Suse and is quite well known in Linux circles, though apparently also very controversial because his political content has drifted to the right in recent of years. I was aware of him a couple of years ago, but he dropped off my radar long ago, so I had no idea what he was doing or that he became controversial.
Anyway, so Titus made a video where he voiced some criticism about Lunduke’s political content, but also spoke very favorably about his more tech related content.
As a response, Lunduke invited him onto his channel to have a conversation about the video.
And this is the thing I want to highlight. Titus made a critical video about Lunduke, but rather than now Lunduke making a video response directed at Titus and the whole thing blowing up and getting out of control and turning into a huge shit show where everyone is just throwing shit at the other person, they sat down together, had a conversation and talked about their disagreements. And they agreed on some things, disgreed on other things, but they also clearly respect each other and at no point did the conversation devolve into name-calling, shouting the other person down, threatening them or any of the other things we see so often in online discussions nowadays.
It was just a conversation between two people with different politics, discussing their differences of opinion, sometimes reaching common ground, sometimes not, all while being civil and respectful towards one another and parting amicably with the promise to “grab a cheeseburger together” the next time their paths cross.
And that’s how I feel disagreements between grown up people should be handled. Talk it out, if you find common ground that’s great, if you don’t it’s still fine, you can agree to disagree and still not spew virtriol and hate at the other person.
2024-05-26 08:00:00
AI is all the rage now, but like most people in my tiny little tech-bubble on the internet, I’m fairly critical of it. And the recent onslaught of news doesn’t really help to change this, there’s everything from hilariously terrible products, totally not using Scarlett Johanssons voice to telling you to put glue on your pizza. At least they’re doing their best to keep us entertained.
Still, I’m a software developer in my day job, so I am curious about how that’s going to affect my work and my profession in the future.
So reluctantly this week I created an account for ChatGPT, to see for myself what all the fuss was about.
And then I sat in front of that white website and thought “now what”?
A simple script
Well I wanted to see how I could use it as a software developer. One thing I do is occasionally write scripts in bash or python to do some simple tasks for me.
I started writing these linkdump posts a few weeks ago, and a recurring thing I do for these is to format the links (in markdown) like this:
**[Example Domain](https://www.example.com)**
This produces a link that looks like this: Example Domain. It’s a bit tedious creating this, because I have to open the website, copy the title, paste it to my document, paste the URL, add the asterisks and the brackets… So I asked ChatGPT to create a bash script that takes a URL as a parameter, calls the website, downloads the title, formats it like I want it and copies everything to the clipboard.
And it came back with a script that does exactly this. Even has a little help text that tells me how to use the script if I call it without a parameter… It’s impressive. And it worked first try, no bug fixing necessary.
Now I could have written this script myself, but I’m not a bash wizard, so I would have had to google a few things (how to get the title of a website, how to paste from bash to the clipboard) and probably fix a few bugs I made along the way, so it would have taken me maybe 10 or 15 minutes to write this. ChatGPT did it in a few seconds. The longest bit was actually writing the prompt.
Explain like I’m five
I came across a particularly convoluted and complicated call to ‘sed’ in a script this week, and I thought I’d see what ChatGPT had to say about it, so I just pasted the call into ChatGPT and asked it to explain it to me, and it did a great job explaining every part of the call, even mentioned that that was a bit of an unusual syntax for sed but why it might have been done this way. This really helped me to understand the call a lot quicker than I would have otherwise.
A simple note taking/diary website written in Go
For my own personal thoughts, kind of like an online diary, I tried creating a website a while ago that kind of looks and functions like Memos, but way simpler and reduced to the bare minimum of features I need.
I had the idea a while ago of writing it in either PHP or Go, but I don’t know either programming language very well, so after a while I gave up and decided to come back to the project at a later date, which I then never did. So I wanted to see how ChatGPT dealt with this.
This was not done with one single prompt thought, but many different iterations of me saying “add a CSS to make it prettier”, “sort the entries in reverse chronological order” etc.
But every time ChatGPT came back with changes to the program, told me how to compile it and where to store the files and how to run it. I didn’t write a single line of code and in about half an hour had a program that did pretty much exactly what I wanted, and was written in a language I don’t even know. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good starting point to refine it further, with or without the help of AI.
Pong
For fun I just told it to write me a simple Pong game in C with the SDL library. Again, it came out with C code that is working perfectly fine and can be played by two players who control both the paddles. Maybe that code is 100% copied from somewhere, I don’t know, but it works out of the box, and came with instructions on how to compile it and which libraries to install, which is impressive.
Conclusion
So, am I converted? Am I an AI fanboy now? Is Sam Altman my new idol?
No.
But I recognize that AI is a tool that can be helpful, if you know how to use it correctly and you are aware of its dangers and limitations. Then it can actually be a great help and a time saver, with some caveats I’ll get to.
As an example, I could imagine a (local and offline) installation of a LLM (large language model) at work that has access to the entire codebase and all the existing documentation of a project could be tremendously useful, especially for new hires. Wrapping your head around an existing codebase is always very difficult, as often things have grown for a number of years and aren’t always implemented/connected in the most logical way possible, and documentation is also often outdated or even non-existent. So new hires always have to ask a ton of questions, and even I after working in the same company for 1,5 years find myself regularly asking colleagues to explain parts of the system to me that I have not had to deal with previously.
An AI that has the overview and the knowledge of the entire system could be very helpful in cases like these. It would be one more tool of many, and if you know what to expect from it, what the limitations are and that you always have to cross check the output it gives you because it might not be correct, it could be a great help.
The problem is that most people will not use AI like this. They will ask it things and then run off with whatever the AI gives them as an answer. And that is highly dangerous. We’ve seen how terrible and dangerous social media is for society, and we have no idea what AI is going to do when it will be integrated in every browser and every OS and every new smartphone in a few years (or months).
Zuckerberg still thinks Facebook is a great system and a benefit for society, despite a growing mountain of evidence to the contrary. And I see the same thing in Sam Altman. I don’t believe a word when he says he’s worried about the impact his product could have on society or humanity. The only thing he’s worried about is losing out to the competition and the money of the investors going to some other company instead of his. Everything else is taking a back seat behind this.
AI is a tool, and a powerful and dangerous one at that. And just like we wouldn’t hand a chainsaw to a child or a person not fit for and trained in handling it, we shouldn’t just make such tools available to anyone without the proper training and qualification to handle them in a responsible and safe way.
Oh, and one more thing about creating these code examples with ChatGPT: It was interesting, fascinating even to watch as the code appeard on screen, and it was fast and the output worked exactly as expected, at least for my admittedly very simple usecases.
But I didn’t learn anything. I didn’t have to use my brain and think about how I would have solved the problem at hand. I just typed the problem into a website, got some code back, ran it and was happy when it did what I wanted it to do. It felt a bit like taking an elevator instead of walking a few flights of stairs, or driving somewhere instead of walking or cycling. Yes it was fast, yes it was convenient… but it didn’t exercise my mental muscles at all.
I’m sure this is a topic I will pick up again in the future, but I think for now that post is long enough.
So what are your thoughts on AI? Does it have its uses like it does for me, or does the bad outweigh the good? To be honest I’m still not sure, so I’d love to hear your opinion!
2024-05-25 08:00:00
I collect a lot of links to great articles and software projects, and this is my attempt to sort through them and share them with the rest of you.
Articles
Apple geofences third-party browser engine work for EU devices
Apple is doing its absolute best to work against the interests of their customers by only allowing third-party browsers to be developed and used in the EU.
Is Winter Coming? Thoughts on articifial intelligence and lofty expectations
Very interesting reflection about the current AI hype.
Winamp has announced that it is opening up its source code to enable collaborative development of its legendary player for Windows
Winamp was my favourite music player back in the Windows 98/XP days, so the announcement that the source code will be open sourced is admittedly a little exciting to me, even though I’m more than a bit sceptical that this is really going to happen.
Software/Services
Free Online Analog Film Emulator - 29a.ch
A nice little website that gives your digital photos the look of a classic analog photograph with a ton of different film types to select. Works right in the browser, the images aren’t uploaded anywhere.
GitHub - atc1441/ATC_MiThermometer: Custom firmware for the Xiaomi Thermometer LYWSD03MMC and Telink Flasher via USB to Serial converter
Xiaomi makes tiny digital thermometers that are only a few Euros/Dollars a piece, and this is a custom firmware for them that can be flashed via bluetooth right from a smartphone, no soldering or anything else required.
Personal Homepages
James’ Coffee Blog
He went a bit viral lately with his post about the Windows 98 manual which was very nice, and I really like the rest of his website, too!
Jet Beetle
A guy built a jet engine into a Volkswagen New Beetle. If you click only one link from this post, make it this one. It’s insane.
2024-05-22 08:00:00
A while ago jhx and I hijacked a mastodon post by Solene (sorry ;) ) and started talking about Video CDs. Because, you know, why not. And I was wondering, if I compressed a movie from 4K down to Video CD resolution and burned it on a CD, would my DVD player be able to play it? And how would it look?
Do you ever find yourself thinking “that would be a pretty useless and stupid thing to do”, and then you go and do it?
Well… to answer my initial questions right away: Yes, it works. And yes, it looks terrible :)
I’m not going to write up a detailed tutorial on how to do this, because I don’t think anyone would actually try for real, but here’s the steps I took (and I’ll put links to some resources at the bottom):
Actually, you probably will, because I already told you. It worked, just like that. The player recognized the CD as a Video CD and started playing it without a hitch. I was actually really surprised, I hadn’t expected it to just work first try! But I guess sometimes you’re lucky and things just work.
So how does it look? Well, not great of course. It’s blocky, it’s blurry, there’s lots of color banding going on, and I set the wrong aspect ratio somewhere along the way, so the image is squashed together and distorted… In short, it looks as if it was downloaded from the internet in the late 90s. Glorious!
Here it is playing on my TV:
I must say though that the quality is not as bad as I had anticipated, given the resolution and the file size (and the codec!). On my tiny 14’’ CRT TV I had in my bedroom back in the day it would have probably been fine and not looked much different in terms of quality than a VHS tape.
But just to get a sense of the difference in terms of quality, here is the VCD version next to the Full HD (1080p) version:
And here at roughly the same size:
4k of course is even bigger, but my screen isn’t big enough to show a full 4k window ;)
As a sidenote, one of the first movies I got as a pirated digital copy before the official DVD release from a friend in school was The Matrix, so as a flashback to this, that’s the movie I chose to burn on the VCD. The quality of that copy back then was even worse than what I created here, because if I recall correctly it was filmed off a cinema screen…
So would I recommend you do this? Absolutely not of course! But it was fun figuring this out, and seeing that my DVD player actually played the CD was still very satisfying.
Ressoures
2024-05-19 08:00:00
I recently got an old Compaq Evo 410c Laptop from 2001, which is actually a very nice laptop for the time, but it is suffering from the same problem all old laptops are suffering from: its battery died a long time ago. So I started thinking about what to do about this.
My first thought was to crack open the battery case and replace the cells inside. Judging form the shape, size and voltage of the battery it most likely has four standard 18650 lithium cells inside, which are easy and cheap to find. But there are a few problems I could see with this approach:
So then I thought about powering the laptop from a USB-C battery bank. But USB-C does not output the 18.5V the laptop needs. The closest would be 20V, which I suspect would be fine, but I didn’t want to risk overvolting the laptop and potentially damaging it. But then during a conversation online Headcrash mentioned that usually these old laptops can run on a lower voltage just fine, as the voltage is regulated down inside anyway and by undervolting it there is no risk of blowing up any components inside. Worst case it just doesn’t work.
Hardware setup
I thought it was worth giving this a shot, so I went on Ebay and got a few tiny USB-C power converter boards for a few Euros.
USB-C power supplies can usually output a number of different voltages, and the way these boards work is they talk to the power supply they’re connected to and tell it which voltage it should output. You can set the desired voltage with a small solder bridge on the board to 9V, 12V, 15V or 20V.
They came preconfigured to 12V, as you can see from the solder blob in the picture next to the writing “12V”, but I reconfigured one to 15V which I hoped that laptop would run on. I dug out an old cable with the correct barrel plug from my parts bin, cobbled together a quick and dirty test setup on my desk with a few crocodile clamps, connected everything together, crossed my fingers and plugged the power supply in - and the laptop powered up just fine, as if it was connected to its original power supply. Success!
So I soldered the wires to the board, sealed it with a nice thick piece of heat shrink tubing (I would have preferred to put the board inside a case, but I don’t have one that fits and I don’t have a 3D printer to create one), and I was done.
Conclusion
I’m really surprised to see that this just works. This was definitely one of the easiest hacks (if you can even call it that) that I ever did… it took about 20 minutes to do, the price for the USB-C board was 3 Euros, the cable was free as I already had it (and would have cost only a few Euros too, had I had to buy one) and now I have an adapter cable to power this more than 20 year old laptop from a modern USB-C power supply.
Of course it would be even nicer to build the USB-C board right into the laptop so the USB cable can be plugged straight into the laptop without the need for my janky adapter cable, and I might look into doing this at a later time, but for now I’m happy to use the cable.
So now if I want to have a portable setup, I can get a USB-C powerbank and then this laptop is truly mobile again. With the caveat of course that it still needs to be tethered to the power bank, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay, considering how easy this mod was to implement.
2024-05-18 08:00:00
I collect a lot of links to great articles and software projects, and this is my attempt to sort through them and share them with the rest of you.
Software/Services
nchat: a terminal-based chat client for Linux and macOS with support for Telegram and WhatsApp
A great terminal-based client for Whatsapp. I’ve been using it for a few months and I absolutely love it. The key bindings take some getting used to, but it’s lightweight and rock solid.
MagicMirror²: The open source modular smart mirror platform
A software platform to create a “smart mirror” (mirror that shows time/date/appointments etc.). I’m using this as a dashboard to view my calendar etc. in my kitchen
Oldschool screensavers right in your browser
I recently went on a nostalgia trip about screensavers (because why not) and found a few of the old Windows/Mac screensavers reimplemented to run straight in the browser via webgl. Check them out:
Hardware-Projects
Videos
And that’s all for this week’s linkdump! If you have any cool links you’d like to share, feel free to send them my way via e-mail or hit me up on Mastodon! My contact details are in the footer of this page.
2024-05-15 08:00:00
Adamsdesk posted an article yesterday titled “Living Life Without Owning A Car”. And my immediate thought was “yes - because cars are insane!”
Why do I think that? Well first of all, if you’re using a car because you have to move heavy construction equipment around or you take your whole family to visit Grandma on a Sunday afternoon, that’s fine. I have no issue with that.
But most people use their cars primarily to drive themselves around, and nothing else. Maybe their purse.
A typical car that someone like me without a family might buy would be a Volkswagen Golf or something similiar (of course I had to pick a German brand, and Golf has been one of the most popular cars for literally decades at this point in Germany).
A quick look at Wikipedia tells me that this car in its bare minimum base configuration weighs 1255kg. My current weight is around 80kg.
So let’s do a bit of math here. If we take the numbers above, we can calculate that my weight is around 6,4% of the weight of the car (80kg/1255kg * 100), or put the other way round, this (small) car weighs almost 16 times as much as I do (1255kg/80kg).
In other words, If I get in this car to drive somewhere, more than 93% of the total mass that gets moved around is the car! And of course 93% of the energy that gets used for this (in the form of gasoline) is used to move the car around, not me. It’s not me who’s moving from place A to B and back, it’s a gigantic pile of glass and plastic and metal, and I’m just kind of along for the ride.
And keep in mind, these are calculations for a small car. If we get into the territory of sports cars, SUVs or Pickup Trucks, which are easily twice as heavy as a Golf, the numbers get even crazier. And we could do the same calculation for how much room a car takes up vs. how much room a person takes up and arrive at similar results.
And I haven’t even started talking about the fact that almost all public space available outside (in the city at least) is reserved for cars of course, and cars everywhere are parked on the sidewalk of course, because where else would you park your car? On the street? Don’t be ridiculous, that would block the way for other cars. Can’t have that!
Thinking about it, maybe my headline is not entirely correct. Maybe it’s not the cars that are insane. Maybe it’s our relationship with them.
2024-05-12 08:00:00
It’s time again to take a quick look at the books I read in April 2024.
A book with a very clickbaity title, but actually a message that resonates a lot with me. Their general idea is to “redefine” a year as having only 12 weeks, and then only planning out this 12 week year instead of the whole calendar year. The reason behind this is that a year is a long time and planning a full year in advance is very difficult (in January you have no idea what how December will look like) and it also leads to procrastination (a year is long, I have enough time to get started).
If you make your plans (both personal and professional) only for the next 12 weeks, that’s a much shorter timeframe to oversee, so you can plan more precisely, and there’s also some urgency involved (I only have 12 weeks), so that hopefully reduces some of the procrastination.
And then there’s a lot of guidance in the book about developing your vision for your life, and how to devise your long term and short term plans from this.
I personally found this very useful advice and will incorporate this 12 week planning into my life (I won’t call it a 12 week “year” though ;) ).
Another title that sounds like pure clickbait, but I enjoyed reading a lot. Noah Kagan walks thorugh his method of creating a business from the ground up without bankrupting yourself or sinking endless amounts of time and money into creating a product that after completion turns out nobody actually wants.
I don’t plan on creating my own business any time soon (if ever), but reading this takes away at least some of the anxiety I feet when I even just think about selling a product or service or marketing myself. And for that alone, this is well worth the read.
This was a good one! Kara Swisher is a tech journalist with decades worth of experience in the industry at this point, and these are her memoires where she looks back on her life, especially her professional life of course and her encounters with the big names in the tech world (Jobs, Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos etc.).
The core of the book is a chapter on each of those people, how their relationship or lack thereof developed and changed over time, and her feelings towards them, be it admiration (Jobs), disappointment (Musk) or almost horror (Zuckerberg).
My favourite quote from the book is about Mark Zuckerberg:
No, Zuckerberg wasn’t an asshole. He was worse. He was one of the most carelessly dangerous men in the history of technology who didn’t even know it.
This is a collection of essays that the late Aaron Swartz published on his blog during his years as an activist.
Aaron Swartz, if you don’t know him, came of age during the 90s when the internet was still in its infancy and quickly developed a reputation as a hacker and web activist (he was involved in the development of the RSS standard, among other things). He was very active as an activist for free speech and open access to information, working for Wikipedia and also being involved in Wikileaks, which (among other things) put him at odds with the US authorities.
The book categorizes his writings by different topics. I must admit I didn’t read every word, but I skipped around and read a few of his articles in every chapter, and it gave me a good sense of who he was and what his philosophy and his political attitude was.
I talk about him in the past because in the early 2010s he came under a lot of legal pressure and was facing a prison sentence, and the prospect of this caused him to end his life in 2013 at the age of 26.
This is more of a novella or a short story than a full sized novel, but it was a great read nonetheless. It’s over a hundred years old at this point, but it feels surprisingly modern. It’s set in a dystopian future where every person’s life is controlled by “The Machine”.
I could write more about it, but I discovered it over on Joel’s site, who wrote a very good review about it, so I would invite you to go over there and read his review instead because he gives a pretty nice summary of it and also talks about how modern and relevant the story feels today.
2024-05-11 08:00:00
I collect a lot of links to great articles and software projects, and this is my attempt to sort through them and share them with the rest of you.
Articles
Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule
A long form article about the power and influence in US and even international politics Elon Musk has amassed, and how unsuited he of all people is to hold this kind of power. I recommend reading this on a sunny day outside in the park, so you have something to balance out the feelings of hopelessness and despair that this will cause.
No, you don’t need a ‘very bespoke AOSP’ to turn your phone into a Rabbit R1 — here’s proof
Turns out the new hip AI assistant Rabbit R1 that came out a week or so ago is really exactly what it should have been from the start: an app. Oops…
The Xbox 360 Blades Dashboard Has One Foot in the Grave
The iconic first version of the Xbox 360s dashboard called Blades might go “extinct”, because the original consoles are dying, and consoles that have been updated to a newer firmware got a new dashboard and can never be downgraded again.
Videos
Everything is a Remix (Complete Updated 2023 Edition)
One of my alltime favourite Video essays on Youtube, about how virtually every piece of art, whether it’s movies, music, software, is base on some prior piece of art. Grab a cup of coffee, lean back and enjoy!
MKBHD - Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable
I mentioned the Rabbit R1 above, and here’s MKBHD’s review of it, with a really interesting reflection on the state of tech these days in the second half.
Personal Homepages
I found two new personal homepages this week that I really like, both in terms of design and content, so if you like people’s personal homepages as much as I do, pay them a visit!
2024-05-09 08:00:00
I think we’re fast approaching a world where it doesn’t matter in what language you post your content (blog posts, Youtube videos etc.) in, because everything can just be translated on the fly into every other (major) language in reasonable quality.
I started this website last year, and I initially started posting only in English, because my first posts were about the Old Computer Challenge, and there it’s an international group of people participating, so posting in English made sense.
Still, I felt a bit weird writing in a foreign language, like I was pretending to be someone or something I wasn’t… so I duplicated the website in my native language German with the intention of writing posts in German and then translating them (with the help of online translation services) into English. I did that for a while, but it was pretty tedious because I was always going over the English translation and rewriting it so it would sound a bit more like me, so after a while I abandoned this approach and went back to posting only in English.
But recently I came across a video on Youtube by Ali Abdaal that not only had subtitles in different languages, but also had the audio track dubbed by what’s most likely an AI-generated voice with an automatic translation (you can find the different audio tracks under the settings icon on the bottom right). Honestly, at least the German translation sounds like the worst fandub ever made, but of course this will only get better with time.
Browsers have had the option to translate web pages into different languages for a while now, and they’re also doing a pretty good job at it.
Which makes me wonder, is it even relevant anymore whether I post in English or German? Can’t I just post in German and everyone can translate my posts into their native language via browser extensions or whatnot, and I save myself the added mental load of thinking and writing in a foreign language, looking up words, worrying about grammar and KNOWING that I’m making mistakes I’m not even aware of?
So I thought I’d do a little experiment, I’ll take a few paragraphs from a post I wrote in German, and then translate them myself and also have them translated by an AI to see which produces better sounding English.
So here’s the paragraph in question from the post “Mein Verhältnis zu digitaler Kommunikation - Die Anfänge”:
Das erste digitale Kommunikationsmedium, das ich genutzt habe, war die gute alte E-Mail. Zuerst noch über das E-Mail-Postfach, das uns unser Provider zur Verfügung gestellt hat, bis ich mir dann meine erste E-Mail-Adresse zugelegt habe, die ich auch immer noch habe und nutze.
Etwas später kam dann, von Schulfreunden empfohlen, ICQ dazu. Und damit eine ganz neue Welt! Plötzlich konnte man einfach online gehen, und die Leute, die man in der Schule eh schon den ganzen Tag gesehen hat, waren auch online, und man konnte einfach miteinander chatten, stundenlang! Es war grandios. Auch wenn es mir an Nostalgie für Modemgeräusche fehlt, das “oh-OH” von ICQ wenn eine neue Nachricht ankommt, löst bei mir dafür massenhaft nostalgische Gefühle aus.
Here is how I would write this in English:
The first digital communication medium I ever used was the good old e-mail. At first I used the e-mail address given to us by our internet provider, but pretty soon I created my first own e-mail address, which I still have and use to this day.
A bit later, recommended by a friend from school, I installed ICQ. And that opened up a whole new world for me! Now I could go online, my friends from school that I’ve seen all day in school anyway were online as well, and we would chat away four hours! It was absolutely fantastic. We never actually used an analog modem, so I don’t have any nostalgia for the sounds of a modem, but hearing that “uh-OH” notification sound that ICQ used to make whenever a new message arrive still gives me massive feelings of nostalgia.
And here is how deepl.com would translate this, if I just paste the German text from above into the translator on the website and do nothing else with it:
The first digital communication medium I used was good old e-mail. At first it was via the e-mail inbox that our provider gave us, until I got my first e-mail address, which I still have and use.
A little later, ICQ came along, recommended by school friends. And with it a whole new world! Suddenly you could just go online, and the people you saw all day at school were online too, and you could just chat with each other for hours! It was great. Even if I lack nostalgia for modem noises, the “oh-OH” of ICQ when a new message arrives triggers nostalgic feelings galore for me.
So how does it sound? To me as a non-native-speaker the automatically translated version sounds perfectly fine, a bit more compact and less verbose than my own writing, but I can’t spot any glaring mistakes. It definitely sounds more polished than my own writing, but maybe a bit more impersonal as a result as well? I’m not sure.
So I would like to pose a question to the English native speakers reading this: Which sounds better to you? What do you think of the translation, and of my own writing style? If I wrote posts in German and then posted the deepl translation here instead of writing the English posts myself, would you still read it? Would you even notice? I’m really curious to hear what you think!
Send me an e-mail (link at the bottom of the page) or comment on Mastodon here!
2024-05-07 08:00:00
I just had a quick look at the Apple event from earlier today, where they introduced the latest incredibly expensive exciting iPads. And boy… each of these events seems to be more stilted, more overproduced, more plastic and unreal looking than the last.
Which somehow reminded me of Agent Smith from the Matrix, when he describes the first version of the Matrix to Morpheus in this scene:
“Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world world where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster! No one would accept the program…”
These presentations feel to me like that first iteration of the Matrix. Everything is perfect, everyone is constantly happy and smiling, everything is clean and polished and beautiful and perfectly produced, lit and set in scene… but it doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t feel human. In fact, it feels like a grotesque nightmare to me.
Anyone else get that feeling?
2024-05-05 08:00:00
I collect a ton of links to great articles and software projects, and this is my attempt to sort through them and share them with the rest of you.
Articles
Software/Services
2024-05-02 08:00:00
Last year I wrote an article titled “Living in the (technological) past”, in which I talked about my approach to buying, or rather refusing to buy, new electronic devices. If you haven’t read it or don’t remember it, don’t worry - I asked an AI to summarize it, so you can get up to speed quickly:
"The author has never been an early adopter of technology and prefers using older devices over newer ones. They attribute this behavior to growing up in a working-class family where they had to be frugal with their money, which carried into their adult life. Despite knowing about the latest tech trends, they choose not to purchase them due to cost and finding no need for the new technology. This mindset has provided peace of mind, saved money, mental space, and potentially helped the environment by reducing electronic waste."
That’s pretty spot on actually. Thanks, openchat-3.5-0106-GGUF!
Anyway, in this article I was mainly talking about my preference for using older hardware rather than buying new, but lately I have found myself feeling more and more the same way about software.
Over the last few years, more and more software has moved to a subscription model, where you don’t buy the program for a few tens or hundreds of Euros, you license it for a monthly fee. And look, these monthly fees are so low, it’s much cheaper to license Lightroom or Photoshop than to spend hundreds of Euros buying it, and that way you always have the latest version, isn’t that great?
Well, of course it’s great, even fantastic - for Adobe. They can lure you in with low prices, then gradually make the subscription more expensive, and then move the features you use to the “premium” tier where you have to pay even more. Not to mention that they can remove features on a whim if they feel like it, or charge you even more if you want to keep them. And if you want to keep access to your files, you have to be subscribed until the end of time - “nice pictures you have there! It’d be a shame if you couldn’t open them because you decided to opt out of our subscription model, wouldn’t it?”
And now things are about to get even worse, because now AI is being shoehorned into absolutely everything, whether we like it or not. This week I noticed a new AI assistant on Gitlab, which we use at work. Github has AI assistants, Windows is getting them, search engines have them of course, and there are even hilariously terrible AI assistant devices on the market now that do a fraction of what your phone can do anyway, but for a ridiculous amount of money and terrible usability. MKBHD has some good videos about them.
And I better not even start talking about all the crappy software that’s running in modern cars. I don’t own a car and instead rent one when I need one, which isn’t too often, so I get a different car every time… and it feels like the manufacturers are competing who can make the most annoying infotainment system possible. As soon as you get in the car everything lights up, dings, chimes, a boot animation shows up on the display… I’m just driving down to the hardware store for god’s sake, I don’t need to be infotained all the way there!
I recently came across a statistic that most Windows users are still using Windows 10, which is now almost 9 years old, rather than switching to Windows 11, which is already 2.5 years old. And why should they? Windows 11 essentially feels like a reskin of Windows 10, but with outlandish hardware requirements, sluggish performance even on ridiculously overpowered high-end hardware, and of course a new AI-powered digital assistant called clippy cortana copilot. So why upgrade if your installation of Windows 10 is working fine for you?
Add to that the usual privacy concerns, the enshittification and the insane (and still growing!) amount of bloat that has plagued software for many, many years, if not decades, and to which we all seem to have become so accustomed that we just accept it as inevitable, and I’ve just about had it with modern software.
I recently installed Windows XP on a 2009 Core2Duo Macbook Pro and the thing flies! I know this is no longer a secure operating system, and browsing the modern web is all but impossible, but this system feels a lot snappier than my modern Core i7 ThinkPad with 16GB of RAM running Windows 10. I mean, what the hell.
I realise this is a bit of a rant, and hopefully it’s not too incoherent… but I’m just so tired of all the bloat, subscription models, cookie banners, cloud services, AI assistants, resource consumption, forced obsolescence etc that plague the modern software world. Of course, these trends have been around for decades, but I wonder where it will end… when you need the equivalent of a 2000s supercomputer just to type a text document or open an internet browser, something is seriously wrong.
2024-04-28 20:00:00
Here are some interesting things I came across this week. I might make this into a regular series, if for nobody else than me so I can look back a year from now at the things that fascinated and interested me right now.
2024-04-25 08:00:00
Recently I came across a Post by Kev Quirk where he talks about how he uses a service called “Echo Feed” to cross post his blog posts to Mastodon. I had thought about implementing something like this too for a while, and this gave me the motivation to look into it again.
But I didn’t want to subscribe to a service, and I also didn’t want to self host this, because it sounded a bit complicated, so I went looking for a simpler solution.
After a bit of googling I found “feediverse”, which does exactly what I want: It consumes the RSS feed of my site and posts new posts to Mastodon. And it’s just a python script that I can run locally. Perfect.
So I installed it on my server (using pipx, which is awesome as it takes care of dependencies and creates a virtual Python environment).
On first run it asks for your Mastodon credentials, registers to Mastodon, asks for the URL to your feed and that’s it. It creates a config file in the home directory called .feediverse where all relevant info is stored. No on every run it parses the RSS feed and posts new items to Mastodon.
The only thing I adapted slightly was the “template” line in the config file, so I could get line breaks and a hashtag in the Mastodon post. The line in question is:
- template: "New blog post: \n\n{title} \n{url} \n\n#phloggersgarage"
Feediverse can also add hashtags from the blog post to the Mastodon post automatically, but I haven’t looked into that any further.
But that’s it already. I put a line in my crontab to run the program once every hour like so:
@hourly /home/ak/.local/bin/feediverse
And now with any luck a post about this post will appear on Mastodon without me having to do anything at the next full hour. Let’s see!
2024-04-20 08:00:00
I constantly collect links and dump them into my bookmarking system, so I thought I’d share some of the more interesting ones I came across in the last couple of weeks.
Debugging Python code from the command line via Python debugger ‘pdb’.
I recently needed to debug some Python code and had no idea how (I rarely write anything in Python), but a short search away I found this question on StackOverflow, and the first answer provided everything I needed to know.
Send RSS/Atom feeds to Mastodon
A pretty simple Python script that can consume an RSS feed and post new feed items to Mastodon. Simple, easy to understand and debug, and does exactly what I need. I’m using it now to automatically post links to new blog posts on this site on my Mastodon profile.
Google search is becoming worse
Google is sending more and more traffic towards places like Reddit and Quora, and honestly I’m not sure if that’s a loss or a win for the small web and people with personal homepages…
Ever wanted to install Windows 2000 on an old Core2Duo Macbook?
The Windows 2000 installation disk doesn’t boot on these types of Macbooks, but by exchanging a file on the disc with the equivalent from a Windows XP installation disk, you can make it work. If you want to is an entirely different question of course.
A CLI note taking and bookmarking system.
nb <URL> and it stores the site as a bookmark and downloads a (text only) snapshot of it too, if possible.
2024-04-20 02:02:00
This is a test entry to see if automatically reposting new posts on Mastodon works. If it does, I’ll write a longer post about it. If not, there might be more tests, but hopefully not.
2024-04-19 08:00:00
The city I live in is going to invest about a billion (1.000.000.000) Euros into building an Autobahn through the middle of the city. The Autobahn (highway, motorway…) already exists, but inside the city it’s a normal street with crossings etc., and now it’s supposed to become a proper Autobahn where you can speed right through the city without any traffic lights or crossings.
Just a reminder, this is a current thing from the 2020s, not the 1960s.
And what do you get if you build more and better roads into the city? More cars inside the city of course. In a city that’s already suffocating under the current amount of traffic.
I think I need a better place to live in. This is just too depressing.
2024-04-17 08:00:00
I didn’t really know what to title this post, and I think the title doesn’t really capture what I’m trying to say, but I couldn’t think of anything better either, so please bear with me.
A few days ago Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) posted a not very flattering review of an AI controlled gadget on Youtube which apparently created a controversy online where several people accused him of bankrupting the company by giving their product a negative review.
That’s complete and utter bullshit of course, and he posted a response video where he defended his review and also stated the more than obvious fact “bad reviews don’t kill companies, bad products kill companies”. Duh.
This reminded me of a post on Mastodon from Youtuber Not Just Bikes from a few weeks ago, where he mentioned that he released a video about a bridge in Amsterdam and people demanded that he take the video down because it was “inappropriate” since a few days prior a bridge in Baltimore had collapsed.
And I can’t help but wonder, what the hell is going on in these peoples minds? A tech reviewer isn’t allowed to state that a product is bad anymore? Somewhere a bridge collapses and now the entire world isn’t supposed to talk about bridges anymore because it’s “inappropriate”? What’s going on here? What kind of world do these people want to live in?
2024-04-12 08:00:00
That is not a typo in the headline, I really bought a watch for 46 (Euro)cents recently from Aliexpress. How come?
I am following some members of the #CasioCult on Mastodon (fans of Casio watches for the uninitiated). They’re regularly posting pictures of their latest acquisitions… and I got to talking to Ruari who posted a picture of a Casio knockoff from the Chinese brand Skmei. Never heard of them before, but I checked out the watch on Aliexpress, and it was listed for 0,46 Euro. Including shipping.
So I bought it. It was a total impulse purchase, but 46 Cents is literally 1/8 the price of the cup of coffee that’s on my table right now.
I honestly wasn’t even expecting to get anything, but a week and a half later it actually arrived. And I am still baffled with the economics of this whole situation… You can’t manufacture a watch and then ship it halfway around the world for 46 cents. Somebody definitely lost money sending this thing to me. I don’t get it.
In short: It’s fine for what it cost.
The viewing angle of the LCD is pretty bad, but overall the watch looks nice, and it shows the time, which is what a watch is supposed to do. It feels like nothing though, it’s incredibly light and feels more like a child’s toy than an actual watch. I actually laughed out loud when I first unboxed it (I say unboxed, but it arrived in a plastic bag, so… unbagged it?) because it felt so light and cheap and unsubstantial.
But it works, it looks nice, it cost basically nothing, so I have nothing to complain about.
Except…
I’ve been thinking about this a lot pretty much since the moment I clicked the order button on Aliexpress… did I really need to buy this?
Yes, it was only a fraction of the price of a cup of coffee, and yes, it works and it tells the time and I like how it looks. There’s nothing wrong with it from this point of view.
Still, I didn’t need another watch. I have one that I’m very happy with and that works perfectly fine. And a few things about this new one just rub me the wrong way. I don’t know where it was manufactured, I don’t know under which working conditions, to which environmental standards (if any), it was flown here from China (judging by how fast it arrived)…
At the end of the day, I bought it because it was cheap. I saw that it was only a few cents, and that price short circuited my rational thinking and I just clicked “buy now”. And I feel a bit of shame at the thought that I am this easily manipulated into buying a thing I didn’t actually need, just because it was cheap. My monkey brain saw a shiny thing that was basically free and just grabbed it, and my human brain didn’t have any say in the matter.
So now I have it, I will wear it occasionally and I’m also kind of happy with it. I don’t necessarily regret buying it, but I think I will keep it as a reminder to be a bit more mindful about my purchasing decisions in the future. Even if it’s about something as small and ultimately insignificant as a watch.
2024-04-07 08:00:00
Yesterday I found out by chance that Youtuber Dianna Cowern aka PhysicsGirl is suffering from the most severe case of Long COVID… she’s bedridden 24/7 and incapable of doing even the most basic things like reading or even just having a conversation as that immediately worsens her symptoms.
There’s many more like her, millions probably, who are suffering from Long COVID or ME/CFS and who are pretty much forgotten by society because the disease renders them all but invisible to the public.
And yet they’re still there, and they’re quietly suffering at home. The acute pandemic may be over, but the long term consequences that some of the afflicted are suffering are still very real and substantial.
On the positive side, scientists are working hard at figuring out the cause of the illness and are working on potential treatments, and slowly but steadily progress is being made. So there is hope that these people may some day, hopefully soon, be able to live their lives again.
2024-04-06 08:00:00
I realize I haven’t written any book reviews this year so far, even though I’ve been reading constantly, but more slowly than in the past. So in order to catch up I’ll just summarize the books I read so far this year here, and I’ll try my best to be brief and not ramble on forever like I normally do.
A German book, written by an investigative Journalist about the Cum Ex scandal, one of the biggest tax evasion scandals in German history. Even our current chancellor Olaf Scholz seems to have been involved to some degree, though he did (and does) his best to dodge all questions about it.
Very interesting read, and as it always seems to be the case with these kind of things, alarming how easy it was for corrupt bankers to fill their pockets with taxpayers money, and how little the authorities in charge did to stop it.
A book about the story of the first filesharing network of the young internet, Napster. Loved it! I always love reading stories about hackers and the history of the internet, and this one was one of the best, very well researched, thorough and gripping.
This is one of the best popular science books about human psychology I’ve read in a long time. Steve Peters is a British psychologist, and his model of the human brain is that we have actually three brains in our head: The human brain, the chimp brain and the computer.
The human brain is our rational, logical side. The chimp brain is our impulsive, emotional, irrational side and the computer is the storage for our memories, experiences etc.
This is probably not for everyone, but for me this model and this way of thinking about my brain any my psyche resonated a lot, and I think I learned more about myself from this book than from any other I’ve read in the past.
This one I read because Joel wrote an enthusiastic review on his blog, and I thought that sounded like a fascinating story, so I got it too.
And fascinating it was. One day, spaceships start appearing over every major city on the planet (sounds familiar? Now we know where Roland Emmerich got the inspiration for Independence Day from). They are controlled by all-powerful beings that start to govern the fate of humanity.
i thought it was interesting and thought provoking, with a few nice unexpected twists. Everything good SciFi should be.
I felt like reading a classic, and since I had never read Frankenstein, it was time to fill this gap in my knowledge.
It obviously reads very, very different from modern novels given the time period it was written in, but I can see why it’s a timeless classic. And the story is way more complex and profound than what is remembered in pop culture (mad scientist creates monster, monster kills people). Well worth the read.
Stephen Elop was the last CEO of Nokia, it was under his direction that Nokia went from the biggest mobile phone manufacturer in the world to irrelevant and was eventually sold off to Microsoft.
This book describes the situation at Nokia during its final years. Nokia was already in trouble before Elop took the helm because they had neglected to keep up with the development in the industry, namely the introduction of smartphones and so their revenue was steadily declining in the mobile phone market while Apple and Samsung ran away with the profits.
Former Microsoft executive Stephen Elop was hired as CEO to get Nokia back on track… and through a series of terrible business decisions ran it into the ground instead.
The book came out in Finnish only, but the English translation is available for free under the CC license. The translation isn’t always the best, but the story is fascinating nevertheless, so I highly recommend checking it out.
I’ve been a fan of Cal Newport for a few years now, I read most of his books and have been listening to his podcast almost since the beginning, so of course I had to get his latest book as well.
In it he expands on the ideas he developed on his podcast over the past couple of years, that the modern knowledge work environment isn’t very conducive to the worker’s mental health, and not even to pruducing actually great work.
He advocates to abandon what he calles the hyperactive hive mind style of work (constantly online! constantly available! always sending emails, slack messages, having zoom calls etc.) and instead focus on a more natural pace of working. His three core principles he proposes in the book are:
I’ll definitely take insiration from this and try to restructure my work according to these principles, while trying to reduce the hyperactive work mode as much as possible.
Boy that book was a wild ride! I can’t talk about it too much without spoiling the story… but I went into it totally blind, I had no idea what it was about and I could not stop reading it. It is a deep dive into the mind of a narcissistic psychopath and something I will keep thinking about for a long time.
2024-04-03 08:00:00
Yesterday I wrote about using an image from Playboy as a test image for testing image compression algorithms, and that reminded me of another anecdote from university where a piece of popular media was used in the development of a new technology.
I studied at the University Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany, which is closely connected to the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen, where the mp3 file format was developed in the 80s and 90s. I also used to work there during and after University for a while, but not at the Audio department.
Anyway, many of the mp3 developers were still working at Fraunhofer when I studied there, and I had a few classes about audio signal processing with them. And they used to tell the story where they would test the quality of the compression by listening to the song “Toms Diner” by Suzanne Vega over and over again, because the original version of the song (not the DNA remix) is purely a capella, vocals only and nothing else.
Because our ears are very finely tuned to recognizing human voices and spotting even the tiniest nuances and fluctuations in the sound of a voice, this song was the perfect candidate to test the compression algorithm on, since every tiny bit of distortion or compression artifact would stand out and be immediately noticeable.
And so, just like Lena Forsén was instrumental in developing the jpeg image format, Suzanne Vega was instrumental in developing the mp3 audio format.
Unfortunately, there is no such story about the development of video compression algorithms, at least not that I remember, so there won’t be a part three in this mini series.
This anecdote is also well documented online, but I’m pretty sure I heard about it first in a university lecture about mp3.
2024-04-02 08:00:00
The IEEE Computer Society announced a few days ago that they will no longer accept publications about image processing research containing the “Lenna” image.
The “Lenna” image is a photograph from the 1972 issue of Playboy, that somebody at a research lab scanned (in 1973!) and that’s been used to test the quality of image processing algorithms ever since.
I remember the image from back when I was in University. We had a few classes on image signal processing, and this image was indeed frequently used in the lecture slides and our own experiments to demonstrate the effects of different processing and compression methods.
So why is it being retired now? Well firstly, it was never used with permission of either the model herself or the publication (Playboy). Secondly, maybe having an image of a naked woman (even though it was cropped to just the face) out of Playboy magazine spread across decades of scientific research literature was never the best idea in the first place…
But most importantly in my opinion, the woman depicted in the picture herself asked for the image to be retired. And even if all the other factors didn’t exist, that alone is more than enough reason to stop use of the image.
I don’t work in the field of image signal processing, so I had not seen or thought about the image since I left university. But it was kind of nostalgic seeing it again, and now it’s officially time to say “Goodbye, Lenna”.
Here is the wikipedia article with some more information about the image.
And here is an article that also goes into more detail about the history and use of the image, and there’s also a print of the full image at the bottom of the page (NSFW).
2024-04-01 08:00:00
Not time for summer, but switching the clock from winter time to summer time, or daylight saving time.
We had this switch yesterday, and I hate this time shift with a passion. It’s just so unneccessary. And apparently completely impossible now to get rid of, even though it was totally possible to introduce it 45 years ago.
Anyway, this year I noticed something… I seem to live my life by the clock. And not my internal clock, the external one. I get up when it’s time to get up, I have lunch when it’s lunchtime, I go to bed when it’s bedtime. And for all these things I use the actual time as a reference, and not my internal clock or how I’m actually feeling.
I was kind of aware of this, but not really, but this year I really noticed it. Having a consistent daily rhythm is a good thing I think, at least for me, but being a slave to the clock definitely is not.
So this is something to be more aware of… how am I feeling, am I actually ready to get up, or tired, or hungry, or do I just do something because it’s time for it.
2024-03-28 08:00:00
Dustin notified me that my thoughts posts also showed up in the RSS feed for the posts posts (okay, I need better names for this), so I had a look and fixed it. So now this should only show up once in your feed reader if you are subscribed to both my feeds. Thanks Dustin!
2024-03-27 08:00:00
I’m sitting in a café right now, just watching the people around me… and three tables from me is a guy constantly on his phone, the other side on speakerphone at full volume, “entertaining” the entire place with his private conversations. Now he’s talking in a foreign language I don’t understand, but it’s distracting and annoying nevertheless.
Then I look outside the window at a busy street, and another guy just casually parks his car in the second lane (in the middle of the street in other words), gets out and calmly walks away. A minute later an entire bus full of people has to stop behind this car and wait until it can pass by, making everybody on the bus late because one person can’t be bothered to find a suitable parking spot and walk a few meters.
It’s little behaviours like these that the people doing them don’t think twice about, but that make life for other people just a little more unpleasant or annoying. And I’m taking it as a reminder for myself to consider the impact of my behaviour on other people.
2024-03-22 08:00:00
Most people are at least somewhat familiar with Black Sabbath because of the popularity of Ozzy Osbourne, but fewer people know that they had a decades long career with about a million lineup changes and a lot of different singers in the 80s and 90s.
The most famous one is of course Ronnie James Dio, but one singer hardly anyone is familiar with is Tony Martin, who recorded a few albums with Sabbath in the late 80s/early 90s, which are in my opinion incredibly overlooked and underrated. The albums were The Eternal Idol, Headless Cross, Tyr, Cross Purposes and Forbidden, and especially Headless Cross and Tyr are two of my favourite Sabbath albums, if not some my favourite metal albums of all time, period.
They haven’t been available on Spotify or on CD for a long time, but now finally they’re being reissued in form of a remastered box set, and I couldn’t be happier to finally see these albums being given the respect and love they deserve.
If you are a Sabbath fan, but don’t know this era of the band, I highly recommend checking it out. It’s completely different from the Ozzy material, more similar to the Ronnie James Dio albums with a heavy 80s touch (with lots and lots of reverb!), which means great epic songs and simply fantastic vocals. I can’t recommend these albums enough, I hope you’ll give them a listen!
2024-03-17 08:00:00
Inspired by a post by Simone on his Minutes to Midnight blog, which to my horror I discovered is already three months old (it felt more like three weeks to me), I decided to add a few words of description to the blogs I have linked on my links page. It’s a work in progress, and I’m not entirely happy yet with all the descriptions I wrote, but it’s a start.
2024-03-15 08:00:00
I thought about whether I should have one RSS feed for everything on the site or separate feeds for posts (longer articles) and thoughts (shorter ones). After getting some feedback and also thinking about it for a bit, I decided to have separate RSS feeds.
So now there’s two feeds for the site:
2024-03-14 08:00:00
I implemented a (pretty rudimentary) dark mode for the website. It’s set to follow the operating system preferences for light or dark mode. I considered adding a switch to the website to toggle between light and dark, but I don’t know if this is really necessary…
Feedback is of course welcome, as well as bug reports if something isn’t working right.
2024-03-13 08:00:00
I added a new microblogging section called “thoughts” to this site.
Why?
Well, I’ve noticed that I don’t blog as much as I’d like to, and the reason I belive is that I think of blog posts as a kind of long-form article with a clear message and structure. Something that could be published in a magazine or on a news website (although I’m not nearly good enough at writing for that).
But that keeps me from blogging, because I often just have a half structured thought in my head that I want to get out without spending an hour or more shaping it into a full article.
I realise that’s a bit irrational and a problem I’m creating for myself - after all, this is my site and I can do whatever I want on it. But still, that’s the way my brain works, and rather than try to fight it, I’m going to go with it and have different sections for quick posts and longer articles from now on.
One thing I’m not quite sure about is how to handle the RSS feed. Have everything in one feed, or separate feeds for blog posts and microblogs? For now I’ve got them both in one feed and I guess I’ll see how it goes and if I want to change it. Any thoughts or feedback is of course welcome!
I hope this makes it easier for me to get more stuff out without worrying so much about the quality of the posts.
2024-02-03 08:00:00
In September I started the 100 days to offload challenge, in which I decided to write 100 blog posts over the course of a year. Today I’m ending the challenge.
So why am I doing this? Well, to put it simply, 100 posts in a year is about two blog posts a week, and if I’m counting correctly, I’m now 17 posts in, so to get to 100 posts by the end of August I’d have to write 3 or 4 posts a week consistently for months. That’s doable, of course, if I stick to shorter posts and write consistently, but the thing is, I don’t.
I have discovered that I write blog posts when I have something to say, when I have something I want to share with a wider audience, and when I want to engage in a discussion with people. And I don’t think I have enough interesting things to say to fill 3 or 4 posts a week, and I don’t want to write posts just for the sake of having written something. I’d rather focus on writing fewer posts with more interesting topics (interesting to me anyway) than writing about mundane things just for the sake of having written something. Quality over quantity.
So do I feel bad about “failing” the challenge? Not really, no. I gave it a go and discovered that it wasn’t for me, and rather than grit my teeth and try to force myself to do it, I’m content to realise that blogging a lot isn’t for me, and I’d rather take it easy than push myself to do something I’m not fully committed to.
2024-01-26 08:00:00
The world seems to be going mad recently, with wars breaking out left and right, so for the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about my long held pacifist beliefs and if they’re still applicable in 2024. Content warning obviously, this is political.
I’ve always been a pacifist, all my life. I don’t even know where these beliefs really come from, but I was never into weapons, fighting, war, aggression etc. and I consider them one of my fundamental beliefs in my life.
I was born in what was then West Germany in the early 80s, which was a politially fairly turbulent time, but by the time I became a teenager it was the mid 90s, the Berlin wall had fallen, Germany was reunited, the Soviet Union had collapsed and the tension between East and West had eased considerably. Things were peaceful in western Europe, and being pacifist and against war and aggression is always easy when all of this is far away from you.
But now it’s not so far away anymore. Now we’re faced with one of our neighbours a few countries over attacking the biggest country in Europe with the intention of occupying at least parts of it, possibly more. And if they succeed, well Mr. Putin is pretty openly talking about his future plans to “make Russia great again”, so to speak.
Combine that with the prospect of a second Trump presidency in the US, and Europe will be faced with dealing with an aggressor in the East while not being able to rely as much on support from the political ally in the West as it used to be in the past. So Europe and especially Germany will have to considerably increase its spending on its military and the production of weapons, not for attacking anyone, but to be able to defend ourselves and our neighbours in the case of an attack, and of course also as a deterrent to prevent such an attack in the first place.
And now here I am. I formed my anti-war and anti-military beliefs in times of peace, and I largely stand by them (my country is after all responsible for one of the worst wars in human history, and I never want this to happen again), but I also have to face the reality that we need to be able to defend ourselves against a potential aggressor, and that means having a strong military to begin with. In fact, this need was always there, we just outsourced it to the US (mostly), but that might not be possible for much longer.
I listened to an interview with a high ranking German military officer recently, and he said in order to be able to successfully defend ourselves, we have to be able to fight a war, and this also means we have to able to win a war, otherwise there’s no point to it. And as much as I hate to admit it, but I can’t argue with this. So I will have to inject some more realism into my core beliefs in the future.
Post 018/100 of the 100DaysToOffload-Challenge
2024-01-12 08:00:00
Here’s a quick summary of the two books I read in December 2023.
A book about the Apple iPod, which Steven Levy calls “the perfect thing”, even though he acknowledges that there is no such thing as a “perfect” thing, but he justifies it by saying that it was perfect for the time it appeared in and for what it was.
He goes over the inception of the iPod, the situation of the internet in the late 90s/early 2000s with Napster and the illegal filesharing networks, how the music industry completely screwed up recognizing the potential of the internet for digital music distribution and clung to sueing each and everyone who dared to threaten their established business model until Steve Jobs came along and basically forced them to license their catalogue for the iTunes store, and the cultural significance of the iPod and how it propelled Apple into the pantheon of the most valuable companies on the planet.
It was an interesting read, a bit too uncritical at times for my taste (personally, I loved the idea of the iPod back then, but hated the fact that it could only be used in conjunction with iTunes), but a nice throwback into the internet culture of the early 2000s nonetheless.
While I was on Christmas Vacation at my parent’s house, I found this book by chance on my brother’s bookshelf and I thought, hey, why not have something easy and entertaining to read over the holidays.
A group of scientists is brought to a secret military operation somewhere in the middle of the pacific ocean, where an object is discovered under water that is initially thought to be an alien spaceship and then turns out (mild spoiler here) that it’s actually a crashed US spaceship from a few dacades in the future. Inside they find a mysterious black sphere, and then (of course) strange and inexplicable things start happening and (of course) people start dying.
It was exactly what I expected, entertaining, decently suspenseful and with an interesting (though not totally satisfying) twist and ending. Not the best book I’ve ever read, but it was fine and it kept me entertained over the holidays.
Post 017/100 of the 100DaysToOffload-Challenge
2024-01-05 08:00:00
I read only two books in November, and I’m a bit late with this post, nevertheless I want to quickly summarize my thoughts about them here.
Cory Doctorow’s latest book (at least I believe it is his latest, he releases half a dozen books a year it seems) is right up my alley, which is why I bought it immediately when it came out (and straight from his website as an ebook without any encryption or DRM, the way it should be!).
He laments the current state of the internet, which is largely owned and run by a handful of soulless megacorporations whose singular goal is to make as much money for themselves as possible without giving a *** about things like people’s privacy, ethics, morals etc.
They do this largely by locking people into their ecosystem and once they’re in, making it pretty much impossible to leave because the cost of switching is simply too high since for example leaving Facebook would mean losing a way to get in touch with all your contacts there. So you’re stuck on the platform, Facebook is holding you hostage but more importantly, the users are holding themselves hostage, because you can’t leave until everybody else leaves, so you would have to collectively agree on where to go instead, and good luck with that.
The solution he proposes, and the EU is actually starting to implement this this year, is interoperability: forcing the platforms to open their services to third party apps, so you can still talk to your contacts on Facebook messenger without having a Facebook account because the messenger you’re using is interoperable with Facebook’s messenger.
I am a bit sceptical that this will really end the monopolies of the big corporations, but because the EU has legislation for precisely this under way, I guess we will see what happens and if it works soon enough.
Regarding the book, it was well written and had a lot of great examples in it, but if you want a tl;dr of the whole topic you could just watch one of his recent conference talks instead and get a good summary of his ideas this way.
The first book by Jonathan Haidt, an American Social Psychologist, that I read was “The Righteous Mind: Why good People are divided by Politics and Religion”, and it was truly excellent. Still one of the best books I’ve ever read, it explains the difference in thinking between progressive and liberal people very well.
This book goes in a different direction; in it he explores the question “what makes people truly happy” from different angles, both from a historic perspective (what does ancient wisdom and religion tell us) and from a modern scientific one (what do studies on happiness find).
My brain was a bit foggy when I read it, so I will definitely have to reread it at some point, but rather unsurprisingly, the things that consistently make people the most happy aren’t “worldly” pleasures like money, cars, fame etc., but rather forming strong relationships with other people (both romantic relationships and family/friendships) and feeling a sense of purpose by doing something for others like volunteering in your community, teaching, helping people etc.
In the end, the wisdom in the book isn’t groundbreaking, but it is very well written and gives a very concise and positive answer to the question “what will make me truly happy”. Highly recommended.
Post 016/100 of the 100DaysToOffload-Challenge
2024-01-03 08:00:00
First blogpost of the year, happy new Year everybody!
I was sick a lot in November and December and that’s one of the reasons why I completely fell off of everything I actually want to do regularly: no yoga, no meditation, no journaling, no blog posts, just mindless internet surfing, hanging around at home and consuming videos on YouTube.
And I feel pretty bad about it, but at the same time I’m also finding it incredibly difficult to start doing anything again because I’m constantly proving to myself that I’m not sticking with it.
So what does James Clear say about this in Atomic Habits? Reduce everything to tiny steps small enough that the effort to do them is minimal, and then slowly build up once the habit is established.
And Jordan Peterson says it’s humiliating to admit to yourself that you’re such a wasteman that you can only take tiny steps at first. But he also says that once you start, the steps grow exponentially. But first you have to start, and you have to start small. Tiny even, if necessary…
Establish the process and then trust the process. And then put the goal out of your mind and just keep going.
So let’s do that. Baby steps.
Post 015/100 of the 100DaysToOffload-Challenge
2023-11-14 08:00:00
Using Whatsapp and other similar messengers on my phone has been making me anxious for a long time now, but I could never quite figure out exactly what the problem was. Until now.
Due to being sick, I had a lot of free time these past few days, and out of nostalgia I started playing around with setting up an ICQ server, so I could use the old ICQ clients of my youth again (only to find out that nobody I know cares about using ICQ anymore, and so the only person I can connect with is myself… but that’s maybe a story for another day).
Anyway, that got me thinking about messengers in general, both then and now, on desktop and mobile, and how they have changed over the years. And there’s one key difference between the messengers on desktop vs the ones on mobile.
In the desktop messengers you can be offline.
All the messengers I’ve used (and still use) on the PC, whether it’s the old ones from the past like ICQ or MSN, but also Skype and even the equally terrible and ubiquitous Microsoft Teams allow the user to set their status to one of a few predetermined statuses (available, away, busy…) that is visible to their contact list. And all these programs naturally have the option to just be offline, either by disconnecting from the server or simply closing the application. And that’s visible to everyone else of course, so people know that texting someone won’t produce an immediate response, because that person is currently offline. Obviously.
But their mobile counterparts, the Whatsapps, Signals, Threemas, Telegrams etc. of the world don’t have this feature.
They are always connected, always online, always ready to receive messages. And there is no way to let the people in your contact list know that you are currently not available or that the app isn’t even online. There is simply no option for this. They are not designed to work in this way.
And that’s what’s causing me anxiety.
The fact that whether or not I’m currently using my phone, whether or not I have the phone with me, whether or not it is even turned on, my Whatsapp account always looks exactly the same to the people who have me in their contact list. There is simply no way to tell my contacts that I’m currently not available, that I’m busy, or that I’m disconnected. This functionality is not available, it’s not implemented and these messengers are not intended to be used in this way. They’re supposed to be always connected, always available and always listening for incoming messages.
And by implication, I am expected to always be available to read messages whenever they arrive, and to respond as soon as possible.
I would love to say that this is all in my head, that nobody expects me to immediatly respond to each and every message, but people do. Not out of malice of course, but I often get messages like “hey, I’m going for a walk right now, want to join me?” of “hey, you alright?” if I haven’t responded within a few hours, which shows me that the person on the other end does indeed expect an immediate response or at least would like to have one (and actually gets anxious and worried if they don’t receive one!). And subcousciously, this is having an effect on me because I feel obligated to constantly watch the phone for incoming messages and to respond as soon as I can.
A lot, if not all, of this anxiety would disappear or at least significantly diminish if Whatsapp gave me the option to let my contacts know that I’m not availably right now and that they shouldn’t expect an immediate response. Of course I can turn the phone off and then messages don’t get delivered, but that’s only evident to the other person after they texted me, because only one of the check marks shows up for the message, not two. But that would require people to actively monitor the state of the message they sent me, and at that point they already sent the message.
So what to do about this? I truly don’t know at this point. I wish I could just stop using Whatsapp, but I’m kind of trapped in there because a lot of people I know are on Whatsapp and just disappearing from there isn’t as easy as I would like it to be.
But at least now I know exactly where the problem lies, so I can start thinking about how to deal with it.
Post 014/100 of the 100DaysToOffload-Challenge
2023-11-08 08:00:00
I saw a post from Dustin, who saw a post from someone else, who probably saw a post from someone else about writing up which apps and services you are currently using. So let’s jump on the hype train while it is rolling and see which apps I am using!
Remember when apps used to be called programs? And phones were used to talk to people? Anyway, here’s my list:
And I believe that’s it, that is most of the stuff I use on a regular basis.
I try to stick to open source software and privacy friendly services wherever possible (unfortunately, there is just no escaping WhatsApp…) as well as keeping my data and files mostly local. I might miss out on some integration features by not using the Google/Apple/Microsoft/Amazon digital prisons ecosystems, but that is okay. I have survived 41 years on this planet without them, and I’m sure I will do fine in the future, too.
The thorn in my side here is of course WhatApp, where I’m firmly locked in without much chance of escaping. I’m hoping for the Digital Markets Act of the EU enforcing some interoperability, maybe then Meta will be forced to open the service up at least a little.
But that’s a topic for another day.
Post 013/100 of the 100DaysToOffload-Challenge
2023-11-06 08:00:00
In October I read two non-fiction books I only recently came across, and one novel that I’ve had for quite a while and which I wanted to read to relax, but it didn’t turn out to be so relaxing in the end…
Cult of the Dead Cow is a loosely organized hacker collective originally from Texas that has been around since the late 70s and is still active.
I’d never heard of them until recently, when they announced the development of Veilid, an encrypted P2P network, so I wanted to know who and what they were about.
The book goes through the history of the collective from its beginnings to the present. They started out, like so many hackers of the time, as teenagers who tricked the American phone system to make free phone calls or access BBS systems.
I always find it exciting to read stories about the early days of computers and hacking, but for me they are mainly historical stories, as I am too young to have experienced it all myself.
Therefore the book became really interesting for me in the second half, from the late 90s onwards, where it covers events that I can actually remember from being online myself. Events and names like George W. Bush as US president, 9/11, Wikileaks, Assange, Snowden, the drama surrounding Jacob Applebaum etc.
All in all, an exciting and entertaining read if you’re interested in underground hacker culture.
Chris Voss was the FBI’s chief negotiator for hostage-taking and kidnappings for years. He was the guy who was sent in when Al-Qaeda or some other fundamentalists kidnapped US-Americans and threatened to kill them if their demands were not met.
In the book, he summarizes his knowledge and presents his method for keeping a cool head in negotiations and getting the best out of the negotiation for yourself (in the case of hostage takings, of course, the release of the hostage with as little or no ransom money paid as possible).
The core of his methodology is what he calls “tactical empathy”, which is ultimately just empathy, seeing the world from the other person’s perspective and understanding where they’re coming from and what drives them. Because you can only negotiate successfully once you have understood your negotiating partner’s motivation and have recognized what they are really concerned about.
The title “Never split the Difference” sounds crass at first, but it also makes sense, as by his definition splitting the difference is something that both sides are dissatisfied with, whereas the result of a successful negotiation should be that both sides are satisfied with the outcome and no one feels that they have been taken advantage of or have allowed themselves to be manipulated into doing things that they didn’t actually want to do.
A very good book and, unlike many other non fiction books, it is really packed with information and does have a lot to offer.
Thomas Harris is the author of the novels “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Hannibal”, both of which I read many years ago, and I also saw the movies.
The Silence of the Lambs was fantastic, both the book and the movie, Hannibal I found both rather disappointing, and after Hannibal there was also a movie adaptation of Red Dragon (a remake to be precise, because the book had already been adapted into a movie called “Manhunter”), which I think I might have seen in the cinema at the time, but of which I only remember that Anthony Hopkins looks much older than in Silence of the Lambs, although the story takes place before that.
However, I had never read the book “Red Dragon”, so now was the time to catch up. After all the non-fiction books I’ve read recently, I felt like reading a novel again to relax.
But it didn’t turn out to be very relaxing because the story is extremely thrilling and atmospherically dense, so much so that I had to read the second half of the book outside my normal reading time (in bed at night) because I couldn’t put it down and my sleep suffered as a result.
A psychopathic murderer is on the loose, wiping out entire families and leaving his trademark teeth marks on the victims, which is why the media call him “Tooth Fairy”, which has unfortunately and disastrously been translated as “Tooth Faggot” into German - and it is mentioned A LOT. Makes reading it a bit challenging…
Anyway, FBI investigator Will Graham is put on the case, who (before the events in the book) had already arrested Hannibal Lecter, which almost cost him his life and after which he had retired with his family. However, as he has the ability to empathize with psychopaths and understand their motives better than anyone else, he is reactivated by FBI agent Jack Crawford. So he begins to delve into the case and soon realizes that he needs Dr. Lecter’s help to get into the head of the Tooth Fairy…
I was struck by the book’s clear parallels with “Silence of the Lambs”, which was published a few years later. In both books, a psychopathic killer is leaving a trail of bodies behind, and the FBI has to put a stop to him under enormous time pressure before he strikes again, which is why the imprisoned Dr. Lecter, equal parts psychopath and brilliant analyst, is asked for help.
Still, the stories and characters are different enough to stand on their own. Will Graham and the Tooth Fairy are great antagonists, even if the book spends a little too much time with the killer in its second half for my taste.
Post 012/100 of the 100DaysToOffload-Challenge
2023-11-03 08:00:00
I’ve been using a Raspberry Pi 4 as my homeserver, it’s running off an SD card. Or it was, because the SD card died recently, and I don’t know why.
One day I woke up to the server not responding, and a reboot didn’t help either. So I attached a monitor and found that the Pi was stuck in the “bios”, telling me that it couldn’t find the SD card, even though it was plugged in.
So I looked at the card on my normal PC and found that it was recognized as a drive with 0 bytes. Not great.
I googled for a while to see if there was a way to revive the card, and I also asked on mastodon if anyone had an idea, but the responses were… not encouraging. Seems like the card is dead and at least with normal methods there is no way to restore it.
Since I can’t look at any logs anymore, figuring out what happened is pure speculation. Someone on mastodon suggested that it might be excessive writes to the card due to the USB-stick RAID array I set up. Maybe that was the case, I don’t know. I wasn’t aware that a RAID can cause excessive writes to the system disk, but it could have been. Could have also been a power loss during a write and that corrupted the card…
Unfortunately, this is not the first time that’s happened. I have a Raspi 4 at work that already killed two cards during normal operation, and there I was also not able to determine what had happened.
Could have been a problem with the cards, or with the Raspi, or a power failure, or a fault with the hardware that was plugged into it…
The problem is that I’m starting to lose trust in Rasperry Pis, especially since there are a ton of posts online about Raspis killing SD cards… and of course I have backups and everything, so no data was lost, but setting it all up again is still a pain.
I was a bit annoyed with the Raspi anyway, because I use docker a lot for the services I’m running, and I often found that docker images weren’t available for ARM at all or not for the specific ARM version the Pi is using, so I was already thinking about switching to x86, and this event finalized the decision.
My idea was to get either a SFF machine or an old laptop, so I can set up a server that consumes as little power as possible. I looked around on classified ads and found an old Dell Latitude E7440 with an i5 4200U mobile processor, 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD from a local guy, which is just about perfect for my usecase, so I bought it straight away.
And so here we are, an old business laptop is my new server!
Now I’m in the process of setting it back up and (a first for me, but essential) documenting every step of the way in the form of a bash script that I can just run if I want to install a new server, and everything will be set up the way it was in no time. At least that’s my goal, we’ll see if I achieve it.
Post 011/100 of the 100DaysToOffload-Challenge
2023-10-21 08:00:00
The other day I mentioned in passing on Mastodon that I am using two USB-Sticks as a RAID array on my homeserver, which is a Raspberry Pi 4. Much to my surprise, two people actually asked how this was done, so I promised I would write it up as a blog post. And so here we are. Let’s have a look at how it works.
Disclaimer: I’m not an IT expert, some things in this tutorial could be wrong or even lead to data loss, so use the information here at your own risk. At the bottom of this post are links to more in-depth articles and tutorials, I highly recommend giving those a read as they contain much more information than this.
First, what is a RAID? RAID stands for “redundant array of independent disks”, which simply means that more than one physical drive are connected together to form one logical drive.
There’s a variety of different ways to set this up, called RAID levels, which I won’t get into here, but wikipedia and many other pages have you covered.
I set up my USB sticks as a RAID 1 array, which means the data is mirrored across two (could also be more than two for extra redundancy) drives and they all contain the exact same information. This way, if one drive fails, the other still has everything saved and no data is lost. Of course when this happens, the faulty drive needs to be replaced as soon as possible before the other one fails as well.
I got two inexpensive Sandisk 64GB USB drives from Amazon that I connected to my Raspi and set up as a RAID 1 array. This is not a buying recommendation by the way, but I never had a problem with Sandisk drives in the past and these were reasonably cheap, so I went with them.
I plugged them into my Raspi, and that’s the hardware setup taken care of.
I’ll walk through the installation here, for reference a list of all the commands is at the bottom of the post.
The raid is configured through a utility called ‘mdadm’, which you can install through the packet manager of your distro or compile from scratch if you’re hardcore. I’m not hardcore, so I simply installed it.
$ sudo apt install mdadm
Next, I checked if the USB drives are available.
$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 1 57,3G 0 disk
sdb 8:16 1 57,3G 0 disk
mmcblk0 179:0 0 29,1G 0 disk
├─mmcblk0p1 179:1 0 256M 0 part /boot
└─mmcblk0p2 179:2 0 28,9G 0 part /
I can see they’re connected as drives sda and sdb, so I’m good to continue.
The next command creates the RAID array, level 1 (mirrored) from the two USB devices. Make sure you use the correct device names!
$ sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda /dev/sdb
Here’s the output from the command, it tells me that the drives already have a partition table, which doesn’t matter because they will be reformatted, and asks me to confirm. Then it returns to the console and the array is created in the background:
$ sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda /dev/sdb
mdadm: partition table exists on /dev/sda
mdadm: partition table exists on /dev/sda but will be lost or
meaningless after creating array
mdadm: Note: this array has metadata at the start and
may not be suitable as a boot device. If you plan to
store '/boot' on this device please ensure that
your boot-loader understands md/v1.x metadata, or use
--metadata=0.90
mdadm: partition table exists on /dev/sdb
mdadm: partition table exists on /dev/sdb but will be lost or
meaningless after creating array
mdadm: size set to 60029952K
Continue creating array? (y/n) y
mdadm: Defaulting to version 1.2 metadata
mdadm: array /dev/md0 started.
Reading the file ‘/proc/mdstat’ shows the progress of this operation, depending on the size and speed of the drives this can take a long time, for my two 64GB USB sticks it took about an hour.
$ cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
md0 : active raid1 sdb[1] sda[0]
60029952 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU]
[>....................] resync = 0.5% (336448/60029952) finish=62.0min speed=16021K/sec
unused devices: <none>
I followed the process with the ‘watch’ command:
$ watch 'cat /proc/mdstat'
According to the tutorial I followed, I can start using the array even before it is fully assembled, so the next thing I needed to do was to format the new file system:
$ sudo mkfs.ext4 -F /dev/md0
mke2fs 1.46.2 (28-Feb-2021)
/dev/md0 contains a ext4 file system
last mounted on Fri Oct 20 11:48:52 2023
Creating filesystem with 15007488 4k blocks and 3751936 inodes
Filesystem UUID: 2361e08e-3703-46f5-b425-ad4d519b555c
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
4096000, 7962624, 11239424
Allocating group tables: done
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (65536 blocks):
done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done
I then created a mount point and mounted the new drive:
$ sudo mkdir -p /mnt/md0
$ sudo mount /dev/md0 /mnt/md0
And looking at my drives with ‘df’, I can see that the array is mounted and ready to use (shortened for readability):
$ df -h
Dateisystem Typ Größe Benutzt Verf. Verw% Eingehängt auf
...
/dev/md0 ext4 57G 24K 54G 1% /mnt/md0
That’s almost all, just a few small things need to be done.
First, save the array configuration:
$ sudo mdadm --detail --scan | sudo tee -a /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf
ARRAY /dev/md0 metadata=1.2 name=pi4srv:0 UUID=402c7741:7e70698e:b2ed9be5:c6e3531e
Add the array to fstab so it is automatically mounted at startup:
$ echo '/dev/md0 /mnt/md0 ext4 rw,user,exec,defaults,nofail,discard 0 0' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab
And change the access rights of the mount folder so a regular user can write to it:
$ sudo chmod 777 /mnt/md0/
And with that, I have a working RAID 1 array consisting of two cheap USB drives running on my Raspberry Pi homeserver, which I can use for backup.
How reliable these drives are and how long they last I have no idea, time will tell. But that’s why I got two, if one fails I’ll hopefully have time to replace it before the other fails as well.
I’m planning to mirror my server config files and docker setup from the internal SD card to this external storage, and also use it to backup and distribute important files across my home network.
Before I do this though, I want to test what happens if one of the drives ‘fails’ and how the data can be accessed/restored in this case. A backup is only a backup if it can be restored after all.
But I’m still in the process of setting this all up, so that might be a topic for another day.
In all of this, ‘mdadm’ is functioning as the RAID controller, and the data on the drives is only available going through mdadm. Simply plugging in one of the drives into a computer and expecting to see all the data that is stored on the RAID doesn’t work, it needs to be opened through mdadm first and only then is the data visible.
The links at the bottom of this post give more information about setting up and using RAIDs in this way.
Here’s the list of commands I ran for future reference.
sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda /dev/sdb #make sure you have the correct devices selected
cat /proc/mdstat
sudo mkfs.ext4 -F /dev/md0
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/md0
sudo mount /dev/md0 /mnt/md0
sudo mdadm --detail --scan | sudo tee -a /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf
echo '/dev/md0 /mnt/md0 ext4 rw,user,exec,defaults,nofail,discard 0 0' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab
sudo chmod 777 /mnt/md0/
Post 010/100 of the 100DaysToOffload-Challenge
2023-10-16 08:00:00
I’ve been thinking about it for a while now, and a conversation yesterday with Rogue over on Mastodon brought it to my attention again: I’ve never been an early adopter of anything tech related. I live in the technological past. Let’s explore if this is a good or a bad thing.
When I look around my apartment, most of the electronic devices that I own are far from new, and were not even new when I bought them, because I got them used when they were already several years old.
My TV is a used 46’’ plasma that I got from my uncle around 2014 or so. My smartphone is a used Samsung Galaxy S10e from 2019 that I got off Ebay. My laptop is a 2014 Macbook Air running linux, again used from Ebay. My headphones are Bose Quietcomfort 35 and Bose Quietcomfort Earbuds, used, Ebay. My desktop PC was used off of Ebay years ago, but I replaced the mainboard, CPU and RAM with new components 4 years ago. Graphics card was used.
My washing machine must be at least 20 years old by now, I’ve had it for about 15 years, and even my kitchen appliances (in fact my entire kitchen) came used from a young woman a few blocks away who was moving in with her boyfriend and didn’t need it anymore.
So there are a few new things here and there, but most of the devices I have are years old and I didn’t buy them new in the first place. Why is that?
I think it started because back when I was in school and later on in university, I simply never had too much money. I come from a working class family, and we were far from poor, but also far from rich, so I learned to be frugal and save money early on. As a child and teenager it annoyed me of course because friends from wealthier households had a lot more toys and gadgets to play with, while my allowance was a lot smaller and I had to be mindful of what I bought and what I didn’t.
The same was true in my 20s in university, I could get by with the money I had, but there was never too much left over to constantly buy new computers, phones, consoles etc. But by that time I had realized that I don’t need to be at the leading edge of technology, as a lot of my fellow students were, and I was okay with it.
After I finished university and started working in the industry, for the first time in my life I was earning significantly more money than I was spending. But still I carried this mindset of frugality and asking myself “do I really need this” through my late 20s and 30s all the way into my early 40s, which is where I am now.
As a result, most new trends enter my life years after everyone else has already gotten on board. I was among the last in my group of friends to get a cellphone, the last to have a smartphone, I was watching movies on a CRT when everybody already had HD flatscreen TVs, and I still don’t have a smart watch, fitness tracker, 4k TV, current gen games console or whatever else is trending right now.
My smartphone and my desktop PC are the newest devices I own, and they’re both about 4 years old and I see no need to replace them anytime soon because they still work perfectly and do everything I need them to do.
Of course I keep reading tech news and watching Youtube channels like MKBHD, so I know what’s current and I catch myself thinking “oh, I want to have that!” at times, but then I also remember that I just don’t need the thing and it’s way too expensive anyway, and then I move on with my life and keep using my old crap until it breaks.
And there’s a certain peace of mind that goes along with this mindset that I don’t want to give up anymore. I save a lot of money, a lot of mental space and maybe a bit of the environment as well. And I like it that way.
Post 009/100 of the 100DaysToOffload-Challenge
2023-10-02 08:00:00
September was not a great reading month for me. The month started with a week of being sick, during which I couldn’t do much at all, and even after that I found it difficult to concentrate on reading. Nevertheless, I read three books (more or less), which I’ll summarise here.
Quite unusual for me, this is not a “normal” book, but a graphic novel instead.
The idea to read this book came from a blog post by Mike Grindle, who was in turn inspired by an interview with Neil Gaiman, to talk about how in certain conservative areas in the US the banning of books from schools seems to be becoming more and more widespread. Quite unsurprisingly, it often affects books that teach about the Holocaust, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus or the diary of Anne Frank - always under the pretext, of course, of having to protect the wellbeing of the children. You can’t expose the poor children to such horrifying stories, the narrative goes, and even worse, some of these books have the audacity to mention the existence of a thing called the female body - and we can’t teach that in our schools!
Of course I would like nothing more than to laugh at the bigotry of these Americans with their ridiculous and antiquated ideas of morality, but these kinds of ideas have a tendency to spread to other parts of the world as well, even here in Europe the argument “we need to protect our children” is used quite frequently to justify legislation that limits civil rights.
Back to the book, the author Art Spiegelman is the son of two Polish Jews, Vladek and Anja, who survived the Holocaust and emigrated to the USA after the war in Europe ended. He himself was born after the war, his mother committed suicide when he was a young man and he didn’t get along too well with his father. However, he was interested in learning about his father’s experiences during the holocaust and preserving them in the form of a graphic novel, so he often went to visit his father (long after his mother’s death), asking him about his life and recording the conversations on tape.
These recordings then became the foundation of the graphic novel. The title stems from the fact that he draws people of different nationalities as different kinds of animals. Jews are depicted as mice, Germans, fittingly, as cats (in an early version, the mice were also much smaller than the cats to make the aggressiveness of the Germans even more obvious, in the final version they are the same size). Other nationalities are also depicted as animals, for example the French are frogs and the Poles are pigs (and I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a deeper meaning to this, because most of the Poles in the novel also treat the Jews pretty badly).
The novel has two narrative levels, the framework is how the author, Art, keeps visiting his father to get his experiences about the holocaust on tape, the second level is the story Vladek is telling him.
The story of Art talking to his father is already fascinating, because it gives a good insight into Arts complicated relationship with his father Vladek, who isn’t the most enjoyable person to be around (at one point Art struggles with the depiction of his dad, because he wants to show him how he really is, but realizes that Vladek is pretty much exactly the Jewish cliché of being cheap and thrifty). And one can’t help but wonder if he was always like this or if his experiences have made him into the character he is.
But of course the look into the past is what really makes the book unique. We learn (always from Vladek’s point of view, of course) what the situation was like in Poland before the war began, how conditions for the Jews deteriorated further and further after the German attack on Poland, and how rumours about deportations and concentration camps started to spread, but often weren’t taken seriously because it was simply inconceivable that something like that was really happening. We learn how Vladek and Anja had to give their first son away to keep him safe, and he how he didn’t survive the war regardless. And how Vladek and Anja were eventually deported by the Germans and put on trains to Auschwitz, where they were separated and each had to fight for survival in the face of the absolut horror in the camps.
And no matter how many books about the holocaust I’ve read or movies I’ve watched, reading about individual people’s experiences is always terrifying. About one to 1.5 million people perished in Auschwitz, but it’s a number one can’t really grasp. Reading about what it was like from one persons point of view gives it so much more weight and realism. And a graphic novel acutally works pretty well as a medium, because you don’t just hear Vladek’s story, you can also see it in Art’s black and white images.
Highly recommended reading, and already a contender for best book of the year for me.
And shame on the people who want to restrict access to these kinds of stories for whatever twisted ideological reasons they might have. We teach the history of the Holocaust not to traumatise or terrify our children or to keep us Germans locked in a state of perpetual guilt, as some right-wing blockheads here keep repeating, but to remember what happened. To make us aware of the atrocities humans are capable of and to remind us that it is the duty of us all to prevent such things from ever happening again.
Voyage is a science fiction novel of the “what if” category. In this case, what if, after the Apollo moon landings, the USA had not focused on the space shuttle program, but had set its sights on Mars as the next goal and launched a manned mission to Mars instead.
Sounds exciting? I thought so too. But it wasn’t.
The book has about 900 pages (in the German edition), and I really tried to push through, but failed at around page 400 and put it aside.
I have to give Stephen Baxter credit for having really thoroughly researched the subject, and he says himself in the foreword that his aim was to stay as close to reality as possible and to describe the Mars mission and the way to get there as realistically as possible. As far as I have read the book, he has succeeded in doing so. The only problem: I found it really boring.
The characters seem clichéd and flat and uninteresting, more like archetypes than real people, and the situations and events are close to reality and could have really happened that way, but unfortunately they are also not exciting at all. I think I spent about 14 days reading the book, but I never managed more than a dozen or so pages at a time, because it just didn’t grab me.
And instead of sinking more time into it, I decided to put it aside. Maybe the second half will be better and more exciting, but the first half didn’t captivate me at all, so I won’t find out.
I don’t think there’s much that I can write about Getting Things Done that hasn’t already been written a thousand times somewhere else or described in countless YouTube videos.
By now, the book has become a classic of productivity literature, and for good reason, but also (for me) with a huge catch: it is complex. Just reading through the 300-plus pages takes quite some time, and really understanding the system (let alone actually implementing it!) takes even longer.
I wanted to read the book mainly because I’ve never read it and I wanted to know what the system was really about. Until now I only knew articles and videos about it, but that’s not the same as reading the book itself.
The basic idea is to get everything that requires planning or any kind of action out of your head and into a system that you trust and that you know won’t lose any important information, so you can relax and feel less stressed about trying to remember a thousand different things at any one time. And I have to say, yes, it does seem like a well thought out and complete system for organising and taking control of your work and life, as the title promises. But no, I’m not going to implement it.
At least not in its full form, because it’s just too complex for me and there are some things I probably didn’t understand too well either.
But what I will take away from the book and what I will try to implement is this:
Conclusion: For me personally, I think the system has some interesting approaches, but as a whole it is too complex for me. Nevertheless, it was good to have read the book to get an overview of how David Allen himself describes his system.
Post 008/100 of the 100DaysToOffload-Challenge
2023-09-27 08:00:00
A few days ago Whatsapp renamed the status page to “Updates” and introduced the “Channels” feature. And suddenly, the messenger I use to communicate with friends and family shows me recommendations for profiles of people and corporations I don’t know and don’t want to hear from. I don’t like it.
We already know the channels feature from Telegram, where they are used by conspiracy theorists, covid deniers and straight up right-wing extremists to reach their followers. And probably by some normal people who just want to connect with other people as well, the world isn’t just black and white, good and evil after all.
And of course Meta thought, we need to have this feature as well! Even if it has the potential to be just as problematic as the channels on Telegram (and maybe even more so, because Whatsapp has a much broader user base, at least here in Germany). But Facebook is no stranger to their plattform causing social unrest, to put it mildly, and what’s the worst that could happen?
Anyway, for a few days now I’ve been finding recommendations in my Whatsapp app (yes) to follow the channels of various football clubs, influencers and corporations.
Do I want this? No.
Can I turn it off? No.
Is this going to get more intrusive and aggressive as time moves on? You bet!
And with that, the enshittification of Whatsapp is in full swing.
What is enshittification? The term was coined by Cory Doctorow, he uses it to describe the seemingly inevitable decline of well-liked platforms:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification […]
The latest victim of this process (from my own personal point of view) is Whatsapp, but for me, they were already on my “shitlist” anyway, on the one hand because of the unbearable behavior of Facebook, which by now fills entire books, and on the other hand because they have been announcing for years now that ads will be shown in Whatsapp at some point. So it was only a matter of time before it happened.
But this made me think about the past… in my last post I wrote a bit about my favorite messenger from the old days, ICQ.
ICQ was great, had a simple interface, you could use it to chat with your friends and that was it.
Really?
In the beginning yes, the interfaces of the early ICQ versions were simple and functional. Contact list, chat window for each contact, that’s it.
ICQ started in 1996 as a product of a small Israeli startup called Mirabilis, but already in 1998 it was acquired by one of the largest corporations at the time, AOL. At first, the messenger remained simple and limited to its core functionality, but since the early 2000s, the interface became increasingly (and annoyingly) colorful with more and more unnccessary bling and useless features, ads, online games, etc., until the app was virtually unusable and users migrated to other platforms. I remember using third-party apps for a while to retain the simple and unintrusive interface of the past. ICQ was eventually sold on to a Russian company and continues to exist in Russia to this day.
And somehow the story of Whatsapp looks very similar. It was founded by a small startup and then taken over by a huge tech company for an insane amount of money. At first, the app remained pretty much as it was and even got some useful features (end-to-end encryption, for instance), but for some time now Meta has been dedicating more resources to “developing” the platform, and the user experience has been getting worse and worse (again, in my personal opinion).
And that leaves me wondering, is this process inevitable? Does this happen to all popular platforms at some point? And what can we, the users, do about it?
Of course I can now leave Whatsapp and migrate to Signal or Threema, both of which I already use and both of which are still quite “simple” and focus on their core functionalities, but will it stay that way? Who can guarantee that the companies running these platforms won’t decide tomorrow or next week or next year to serve me ads or to push some profiles in my face that I don’t want to see? And then, what’s next?
Are we doomed to migrate from platform to platform for the rest of our lives because everything will eventually go to the shit and become an unusable mess because of feature creep and enshittification?
At the moment, I don’t have an answer to these questions.
Post 007/100 of the 100DaysToOffload Challenge
This is a translation of the original German post made by DeepL and then manually adapted to (hopefully) sound a bit more human
2023-09-24 08:00:00
Around 1999, the future arrived in our home: From then on, we had internet access, and quite unusual for the time, not via modem, but via ISDN with a terrific speed of 64kBit/s! While the others were still using their ancient 56k modems, we were already surfing the information superhighway with the speed of tomorrow!
… ok, to be honest it wasn’t that much better, but an interesting long-term effect is that the typical modem noises don’t trigger any nostalgia in me because I never even got to hear them.
The first digital communication medium I used was the good old e-mail. At first, I used the e-mail account we got from our provider until I registered my first e-mail address, which I still have and use to this day.
A little later, ICQ came along, because a few school friends were using it. And what a fascinating thing it was, a whole new world! Suddenly you could just go online, and the people you saw all day at school were also online, and you could just chat with each other, for hours! It was terrific. Even though I lack nostalgia for modem sounds, the “uh-OH” ICQ notification sound triggers heaps of nostalgic feelings for me.
MSN was also there somehow, because a few people had it, but I can hardly remember it at all. There’s only one thing I still remember: you could make phone calls via MSN, even videocalls if you had a webcam. The quality was awful of course, but it was still cool and somehow futuristic, suddenly you could see the person you were talking to!
At that time, mobile phones were not yet very widespread, and as a high school student I had no money for one and no need for one anyway, so sending text messages and e-mails was only possible on the computer at home, which was in my room.
In 2003, at the age of 21, I moved out into the world, i.e. from my tiny village to the city, to start university. Up until then, I didn’t have a mobile phone, nor did most of my friends. There was simply no reason for me to get one.
That changed quickly at university, where you meet lots of new people all the time and they all have their mobile phones and exchange numbers and form networks this way. So I got one, too, and for the first time I could be reached outside of home too, both by phone and by text message.
As a side note, in the early days you could also send a limited number of SMS messages via ICQ (for free!), which I used a few times in my school days to arrange things with friends who already had a mobile phone.
At that time, mobile phone calls were still quite expensive and each text message cost 19 cents if I remember correctly, if not 39 cents - usually you got a few free text messages from your provider and then you had to pay.
And so I always had my mobile phone with me, but I used it very little (compared to today), maybe a few dozen text messages and a handful of calls a month. Mainly just to quickly agree on a time and place to meet up with people, but not to have longer conversations.
For more extensive text communication, I still used ICQ at that time, and a little later also the chat feature of Skype, and of course e-mail was still the medium of choice for longer letters and I used it to keep in touch with old friends who had moved to other cities or stayed at home.
So my digital communication slowly intensified, but it still mainly took place on the PC, which was now a laptop, but (as laptops of the 2000s were) it was big and heavy and bulky and therefore it mostly lived on the desk in my tiny little students apartment.
And that’s how it was pretty much through my entire time at university and into the 2010s. The laptop and mobile phone were replaced by more modern models at some point, but mobile internet was insanely expensive in Germany in the 2000s, and text messages and phone calls weren’t exactly cheap either, so I stuck with what I knew: ICQ, Skype, e-mails from home, SMS and the occasional quick call on the go.
Sometime in 2006, “StudiVZ” arrived in my life, a German 1:1 clone of Facebook (and consequently there were sued by Facebook for it).
And we all went completely nuts. It was the first “real” social network to appear on my radar, and also the first (and only) really usable one for me, because for a short while virtually everyone I knew was on there.
But StudiVZ went down the drain relatively quickly, partly because of Facebook’s lawsuit, and Facebook also took over and started to dominate the market here in Germany. I also made an account there, but I never felt particularly comfortable on the platform, and when they made the switch to an algorithmically sorted timeline, I had enough and I left the network.
Also, beginning with StudiVZ and even more so with Facebook, I started to be more and more concerned with online privacy and I became much more sensitive to what I was actually revealing about myself to the world and to the owners of the platforms I was on, and in whose hands these data would end up. So even back then I was careful not to share too much of my life online.
And then smartphones came along and changed everything. But this article is at a 1000 words already, so that will be a story for another day.
Post 006/100 of the 100DaysToOffload Challenge
This is a translation of the original German post made by DeepL and then manually adapted to (hopefully) sound a bit more human
2023-09-21 08:00:00
In the last post I introduced Cal Newport’s “Deep Life Stack”, his program to put your life on a more solid foundation. Today I want to expand on this and have a look at the fist layer, “discipline”.
If we want to start some meaningful changes in our lives, the first step, according to Cal, is to change our peception of ourselves.
Our thinking and our behaviour are deeply linked together. If I am well organised, have everything under control and can stay calm even when faced with difficult situations, I also have the mental image of being well organised with a decent amount of self-discipline. But if I have been living my life without much of a plan and maybe have a few skeletons in the closet, like unfinished projects, or 20 failed attempts at dieting, or attempting to overhaul my life again and again without success, then the mental image I have of myself is probably not the best.
And that’s where the discipline layer can help. If (I’m exaggerating here) I think of myself as a loser who can’t get anything done anyway because that’s the way it has always been (doesn’t matter if this is actually the case or if this is only in my mind), then it will be almost impossible for me to change because my attitude will be “I will fail anyway”.
So first we have to change our image of ourselves. And since we can not really change our thoughts, the way to get there is to change our behaviour first, and the thoughts and our self-perception will follow. This is classic behavioural psychology and the same basic idea behavioural therapy is based on. Body and mind are one and influence each other, changes in behaviour are followed by changes in the mind.
So what do we do?
Cal suggests creating three keystone habits.
The exact nature of these three habits is less important, the goal is to convince yourself that you are able to set your mind on something and then follow through, even if it is not always easy or pleasant. In other words, you should start thinking of yourself as a disciplined person.
The habits should therefore require a certain investment of time and energy, but they should still be managebale on a daily basis. If you want to improve your fitness, “I look at my dumbbells once a day” is probaly not enough, as it will hardly have any impact, but “I do a hardcore 90 minutes Crossfit workout every day” is way too much, you will not be able to keep this up for long. It should be something in between.
Ideally, the habits are spread across different areas of your life, for example one habit could be about health/spirituality, one about work/profession and one about your hobbies/personal development.
After thinking about this for a while (in other words, totally overthinking it), I’ve settled on these three keystone habits:
In order to to track these habits, I just downloaded a habit tracker template from some random website and printed it out so that I can record and check off every day that I have my habits.
And now let’s do this for a few weeks, and then we’ll talk about the next layer, where we’ll look at our values and bring them up to date.
Post 005/100 of the 100DaysToOffload Challenge
This is a translation of the original German post made by DeepL and then manually adapted to (hopefully) sound a bit more human
2023-09-19 08:00:00
I usually stay away from the “productivity” genre on YouTube as far as possible, because there are just too many influencers on there who boast about how great they are at being productive, how super sophisticated their productivity system or bullet journal is, or who produce these quite frankly ridiculous “study with me for 13 hours” videos.
A very pleasant exception to this is Cal Newport’s podcast.
Cal Newport has been blogging about productivity since around 2007, has by now published 7 books (including “Deep Work” and “Digital Minimalism”), has been running a weekly podcast for a few years now (early on he posted several times a week) and regularly publishes long form articles in magazines such as “The New Yorker”. And these are all just things he does on the side; his day job is being a professor of computer science at Georgetown University in Washington DC. So I don’t think it’s wrong to assume he knows a thing or two about productivity.
Oh, and he’s also my exact age, which may or may not trigger a bit of anxiety and feeling of inadequacy in me…
Anyway, his approach is not “I’m going to get a new bullet journal”, but more general and holistic, he’s all about how to set up your life in such a way that you get the things you want to do done and still have free time and energy left so you’re not constantly stressed out of your mind.
One thing I like a lot about his podcast is that he often presents ideas that are still in the making and then picks them up again in later episodes and develops them further. In one of his latest podcast episodes he presented a 4-month plan to put your life on a new, hopefully more stable ground. This is based on an earlier idea that he continues to develop and refine.
He suggests to divide the procedure into four successive layers which he calls the “deep life stack”. Here it is as a picture, with an explanation afterwards:
The four layers that build on each other are:
To give just a very rough summary, the individual layers are about the following:
I am going to discuss the individual levels, how Cal defines them and my thoughts on them in more detail in later posts.
This approach makes a lot of sense to me, and since I am currently thinking a lot about where I want my life to be headed, I think this a good way for me to deal with it in a more structured manner.
Cal suggests to set apart two weeks for the first layer (discipline), 4 weeks for the next two and 6 weeks for the last (vision). That makes the whole process last about four months. He recommends starting at the beginning of September, because then you end up exactly at the end of December after four months and start the new year with a structured plan.
I’m starting this week, in mid-September instead of early September, but that’s okay. I’m off work for three weeks now and so I have enough time to start thinking about this, and also my birthday is coming up, which is generally a good time to reflect on my life and plan where to go next.
Post 004/100 of the 100DaysToOffload Challenge
This is a translation of the original German post made by DeepL and then manually adapted to (hopefully) sound a bit more human
2023-09-11 08:00:00
This is the first post of what I hope will be a monthly series in which I take a look back at the books I read the past month.
In August, I didn’t really reach my goal of one book a week, which was partly due to the fact that I started some books and put them down again after two or three days, because I realised that they just weren’t right for me.
Still, I managed to read three books, which I want to briefly summarise here.
I saw this book somewhere online on a list of the best sci-fi novels of the 80s when I was looking for new reading material, and since the title looked vaguely familiar (there is an adaptation of the material as a TV series, but I’ve never seen it), I decided to give it a read.
I wouldn’t necessarily call the book science fiction though, it’s more of an alternate reality, what-if scenario.
Specifically, what if the radical evangelical Christians rose to power in the US and turned the country into a theocracy?
The outcome is pretty much what you’d expect: A Christian version of the current Islamic theocracies, coupled with the cold inhumane atmosphere of Catholic schools and orphanages of (hopefully) days gone by, and with a bit of Nazi Germany sprinkled on top. Women have no rights, have to be subservient to men at all times and are pretty much only there to have children (if they can, because many people became sterile in the preceding war, especially the men). The men are in charge, and anyone who is even remotely suspected of not being completely in line with the ideology is hanged or shot on sight. Love thy neighbour, you know.
The main character is the maid Offred, who is one of the few remaining fertile women and therefore lives in the house of the Commander and his wife Serena Joy, where she is subjected once a month to a bizarre impregnation ritual by the Commander and his wife and treated like dirt the rest of the time.
The book starts on a random day in Offred’s life with Offred just talking about her everyday life, and so a picture of the world she lives in, how it came about, and what kind of life she had before only emerges very slowly. This makes it a bit hard at first to get into the story, but once you’re in, you can’t put the book down and just shiver again and again at how strange and insane and yet absolutely within the realm of possibility the world described here is.
With this book, I had the weird feeling that I might have read it before, but I couldn’t really remember much, so I just read it again.
Steve Wozniak is the co-founder of Apple (together with the other, more famous Steve) and the one who designed the first Apple computers completely by himself.
In this autobiography he goes over his life, from his childhood, where his father, also an engineer, introduced him to the world of electronics, to his first computer designs, to his first real job at HP, his first encounter with Steve Jobs, the founding of Apple Computers and beyond.
Definitely exciting to read and you get a good look into the history of the micro computer from a very unique perspective.
But. The book reads as if he just spent a few hours recording everything he could think of into a voice recording app and then someone typed it all up, put it in the right order and called it a book. His style of speaking is very redundant and verbose (not to say rambling), and a little more care in editing to make it more concise and to the point would have helped the reading flow a lot.
If The InternetTM is to be believed, “Writing down the Bones” or as it is called in German “writing in cafés” (why translate a title when you can just make up a completely different one?) is one of THE books about creative writing, and what better reading is there at the beginning of a blogging challenge than such a book?
So I went for it and was not disappointed! The book is divided into many small, unconnected chapters, each of which is self-contained and they cover a range of topics, from philosophical reflections about writing to concrete tips or simply observations of the author about herself and her relationship to writing. So you can just pick it up again and again and look through it and read a chapter or two for inspiration, whatever you feel like in the moment.
Highly recommended, The Internet didn’t promise too much! I think if I come across a cheap copy of the book (I borrowed it from the library), I’ll definitely get it just to have it on the table and flip through it every now and then.
Post 003/100 of the 100DaysToOffload Challenge
This is a translation of the original German post made by DeepL and then manually adapted to (hopefully) sound a bit more human
2023-09-03 08:00:00
Inspired by Noisy Deadline’s post “Bringing back the Blogroll” and by the blogrolls I’ve already seen on some other sites, I wanted to set one up for myself too.
I like the concept of a blogroll, which as far as I understand is a list of blogs I like and follow (which I already have on my links page), but I thought I could do one better and create a list of all the latest posts from these blogs as well, ordered by date.
I first saw this concept on Bongusta!, which is a gopher phlog aggregator, and matto has the same thing on his gophersite as well, so I stole the idea from them (without feeling even a trace of guilt or remorse!) and created my own version.
After some failed attempts, I decided to use the tool sfeed, which fetches the latest posts from a list of rss feeds and writes them to a tab-delimited text file for each feed. There is also an option to output the list of new posts directly as html, but I didn’t really like the formatting, I really wanted to sort according to the latest posts of all feeds sorted by date.
So I built my own parser in Python.
Now this sounds like “just quickly whipped something up”, but since I’m not a Python expert and had to google every single command, it took me a few hours.
But now it works, sfeed fetches the latest articles from a list of RSS feeds, my Python script parses them out as Markdown in the right format and Hugo then integrates it into the website.
The result can be admired here and can be accessed via the menu option “links”. Maybe I’ll add a separate menu entry, I’m not quite sure yet.
Either way, I’m happy with it for now. So far I’m still updating manually, so the list might be a few days behind. If I find the time and feel like it, I’ll switch to automated updates.
Post 002/100 of the 100DaysToOffload-Challenge
This is a translation of the original German post made by DeepL and then manually adapted to (hopefully) sound a bit more human
2023-09-01 08:00:00
Sometimes there are things that you read or just see somewhere and you immediately think “that’s cool, I’ll do that”. Some time ago I came across the 100 Days to offload challenge, and this was one of those things.
What is it about?
The challenge is to write 100 blogposts within one year. Of course, I mentioned it right away on Mastodon that I was doing the challenge, so now I have the self-imposed task of writing 100 blogposts within one year, i.e. from today until the end of August 2024.
The rules are simple, to quote from the website:
There are some simple and reasonable guidelines if you want to take part in #100DaysToOffload:
- This needs to be done on a personal blog, not a corporate blog. If you don’t have a personal blog, you can sign up for a free one at Bear Blog.
- There is no specific start date. Your 100 posts can start or end whenever you want them to, they just need to be completed within 365 days.
- Publish 100 new posts in the space of a year.
- There are no limits to what you can post about – write about whatever interests you.
- Once you have published an article, don’t forget to post a link on your social media with the hashtag
#100DaysToOffload.- Get your friends involved!
What topics should I write about? No idea! Whatever comes to mind, probably a lot of stuff about tech, tutorials, some hobby projects I’m doing, rants about cars and lousy city design… I think there are enough things to get off my chest.
After I posted on Mastodon that I’m doing the challenge and was looking for fellow participants, a few people actually came forward, so here are some of my fellow participants in random order 1:
You might now be wondering, what the … is a phlog?
Well, some people have normal http websites, but there are also the purists who use text-based protocols, either Gopher or Gemini, and depending on the protocol, the pages are then called blogs (http), phlogs (gopher) or gemlogs (gemini). What do you know! I had no idea…
I’ll limit myself to this website here for now, but maybe I’ll add a gopher or gemini site in the future, we’ll see.
And now to complete the confusion about all the outdated retro protocols:
Matto has set up a channel on IRC at libera.chat called #phloggersgarage, where a nice little community around blogging (phlogging…) is already slowly developing.
So it’s going to be exciting, interesting, challenging and I’m sure also frustrating at times over the next few months, but that’s all part of a challenge, otherwise it wouldn’t be a challenge!
This is a translation of the original German post made by DeepL and then manually adapted to (hopefully) sound a bit more human
I post the gopher pages here via http proxy. I hope the purists will forgive me, but this is the way I access the pages so I don’t have to leave the comfort of my web browser…. ↩︎
2023-08-27 08:00:00
Who doesn’t know it: You only want to change a minor thing on the theme of the website, but you can’t seem to get it right and in the end escalate completely and rewrite the whole website from scratch.
This website was created with Hugo and originally had the theme “Papermod”, then “Hugo Blog Awesome” and finally “Console”.
But I wasn’t really happy with any of these themes, so I had already modified the Console theme quite a bit to be more like what I wanted it to be.
Unfortunately, some things in the CSS were quite weirdly implemented, and no matter what I tried, some things just didn’t work out the way I wanted them to.
Sometime during the past week I had enough and just started to rewrite the whole site from scratch. The structure of course stays as it was before, but without all the things in the code I don’t need anyway and with a CSS that does exactly what (and only what!) I want. And with a little help from a good friend, who happens to be a web designer, I think I did a pretty good job!
Some things are still a bit rough and in need of improvement of course, and I’m sure there will be the occasional change here and there, but I think for now I have the site the way I like it and the way I imagined it.
So now the blogging can really start. More about that at the end of next week.
Oh, and a big sorry to those who have subscribed to my RSS feed, I’m afraid I’ve caused a bit of a mess there. I hope the time of big changes is over now and the site can stay the way it is for some time to come!
This is a translation of the original German post made by DeepL and then manually adapted to (hopefully) sound a bit more human
2023-08-20 08:00:00
Just a little announcement today, I have added two new sections to the website: Links and Bookclub.
Links should be pretty self-explanatory, on this page I collect links to interesting blogs, articles, documents…. everything I find interesting or worth knowing and want to share or remember for later.
Under bookclub I collect the list of books I’ve read, maybe a book review here and there and generally everything that somehow has to do with books and reading.
I mainly read either SciFi or non-fiction about psychology, society, technology and everything in between.
Suggestions and recommendations for good books that don’t yet appear here are always welcome!
2023-08-09 08:00:00
The site is barely two months old and already the first redesign is coming.
I didn’t really warm up to the old theme, but luckily Hugo makes it really easy to change the theme. Of course, you’re still going to spend days tinkering to get everything exactly the way you want it, and it’s still not exactly the way I want it, but that will come in time.
Anyway, the site is now based on a modified Hugo Console Theme and, big news, it’s bilingual!
Hugo makes it incredibly easy to create a bilingual site and switch back and forth between languages. This wasn’t a thing I was even considering when I decided to use Hugo, but it’s a happy coincidence now after all.
My plan is to write the posts in German, because I’ve always felt a bit weird writing everything in English (a foreign language for me) and then translating the German posts into English with DeepL. Maybe go over it again so that it sounds like me and not like an AI.
Let’s see how I get on with it. I won’t translate the older posts into German for now, but I think we can live with that.
This is a translation of the original German post made by DeepL and then manually adapted to (hopefully) sound a bit more human
2023-08-06 08:00:00
So the OCC 2023 ended almost three weeks ago and everyone went back to the year 2023 and to using their modern computers. At least I did. But let’s explore what remaind for me.
I want to take a moment to look back and examine what was good, which tools and workflows stuck with me and what is better left back on the old computer (which was really just a VM in my case).
On both my Desktop and Laptop Computers I’m using Endeavouros, which is pretty much a preconfigured and nice looking Arch Linux with a few extras here and there. And because I am already familiar with it, I decided to just use this as the basis for my OCC computer as well, though with a much slimmer graphical interface (no KDE, just a minimal tiling window manager).
The main things I do on my private computer on a daily basis are communicating with friends, browse the web, watch videos on Youtube, listen to music, do some occasional coding and try my best not to spend too much time on social media (these days mostly Mastodon).
I lived (out of necessity of course) much more in the terminal than I usually do. I still, unfortunately communicate with friends and family via WhatsApp a lot, which I normally have open in a browser window because I hate typing on a touchscreen (if any manufacturer wants to bring back haptic keys with T9 support, I’m ready!). Like pretty much everything related to the modern web, this was more an exercise in frustration than anything else.
Since just opening a browser window filled up about half my RAM before I even opened a single website, having a bunch of tabs open at all times and flipping between them quickly turned out to be impossible. So I needed to find ways to use WhatsApp, IRC, Mastodon, Youtube, VS Code, Obsidian and a few other programs and services on a computer with limited resources.
And there’s a surprising number of very lightweight terminal apps around for pretty much every usecase, I was surprised!
The ones that stuck with me were
Initially I considered watching Youtube just impossible, but a few days into the OCC someone pointed me to https://yewtu.be, where I could search for a video, get the URL, copy it to yt-dlp and just download the video in a resolution low enough to be watchable on my system. Neat!
For listening to music I used my old iPod or just turned the radio on (yes, FM radio still exists! I was surprised, too).
A lot of these apps I actually still keep using, like nchat, tut, bombadillo and irssi, because they’re just so lightweight and easily started with a few keystrokes.
I have to say though, the most difficult thing about learning all these terminal apps was to memorize all the different key combinations! What’s just a click on the right button in a GUI turns into hunting around for which key combination does what you want to do, and it doesn’t help that every single piece of software seems to invent its own shortcuts! Want to look at an attached media file? in tut it’s ’m’, but in nchat it’s ‘ctrl+v’. And it’s like that for everything… it’s maddening! Once you’ve gotten used to it though, everything flies and is much simpler to use than clicking around in bloated graphical UIs.
So everything is great, right?
In short: The web. Just everything about it. I already mentioned that just firing up Firefox or Vivaldi (my browser of choice for most things) uses a good chunk of RAM, and opening pretty much any website quickly fills up the rest. My system was constantly swapping, which of course slows everything down even further, and I was really glad I had an SSD, otherwise I would have had to live with the sound of a constantly whirring mechanical harddrive in my ears while slowly going insane.
Using text based browsers is possible, but by far not all websites load or are usable, so you often have to switch to a gui based browser and suffer. And that’s with all adblockers turned to maximum and JS disabled where possible.
I could write a whole article about this, and maybe one day I will, but the modern web is just becoming more and more awful to use with every passing year. We’re burning gigawatthours worth of energy and are producing tons and tons of CO2 in the process just to transmit ads and self playing videos and all kinds of other crap that nobody even wants through the net! And for what? So big corporations can get richer and richer, while the rest of us are being stripped of our privacy and the global climate is going to hell along the way.
It’s never been more apparent to me than in the last few weeks: The modern web (and by extension a lot of the rest of the modern world) is a mistake. We should just hit reset, go back to 1995 or so and start over, and do it better. What we’re doing right now is clearly not sustainable, nor is it healthy (not for the environment and not for our minds).
But I don’t want to end on this sour note, because there was also
The community! Without a doubt, that was the best part of it! People were blogging about it, talking on Mastodon and IRC exchanging ideas and frustrations, giving each other support and tips… it was great. That’s how being social online is supposed to work!
So thank you Solene for coming up with the OCC, thank you to all the participants who shared their experiences and thank you to everyone who read my posts and helped me out where necessary!
I’m looking forward to doing this again next year :)
2023-07-17 13:29:48
So the last two days of the Old Computer Challenge went by in the blink of an eye, and not a lot has happened, so I’m putting them together in one post. But I still wanted to note a few things down, and I might also a wrap-up some time next week.
It was boiling hot outside (35°C) and I am just completely useless in these kinds of temperatures (in Germany we also don’t tend to have AC, so no way to cool my apartment down). So I was just lying around most of the day, trying to move as little as possible.
But in the evening it cooled down and I thought I’d explore the “old” site of the internet some more, this time in the form of looking at Bulletin Board Systems (BBS).
Now these are definitely a product and technology of the 80s, and I am too young to have experienced them in their time (in the 80s I was busy learning to walk, talk and digest solid food), so I don’t have any nostalgia for them, but some are still around and some are around again, so I thought I’d have a look.
My first thought was, I want the authentic experience, so I’ll try it on real hardware! I still have my dads old C64 here, but I don’t have a modem for it, so that idea was scrapped immediately.
Ok, how about BMC64 on a Raspberry Pi? I tried it before and it felt like a pretty authentic C64 experience (esp. on a Raspi 400), but it doesn’t have network drivers, so no luck there.
C64 mini maybe? But again, it can’t access the net. Next.
Raspberry Pi with an emulator? I didn’t feel like going thorugh the trouble of downloading an image and setting everything up, so nope.
Okay, Vice emulator on my PC. Here I cheated because I used my regular computer, not the slow one, because running emulation on it might have been too much to ask of it. But after downloading the emulator and googling around for a suitable terminal software I realized that the process of getting it running might be a bit more involved than I anticipated, and I really didn’t have the patience, so I abandoned that too.
So eventually I settled on downloading syncterm, which can emulate all kinds of old terminals, including the C64s, and finally I could google the addresses of some BBSs and see what it was like back 40 years ago.
And I realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t my cup of tea. While it was interesting to see how much love went into some of these boards, I just couldn’t really get into them. Maybe on authentic hardware and an old CRT it will be a better experience, but looking at huge ugly fonts on a modern laptop display just didn’t feel good.
The BBC from The Old Net even has the capability to open modern websites on it, so I tried a few, but again, the font is huge and ugly and it wasn’t easy to read… I think for me this is missing the nostalgia factor that makes the experience special. But without the rose-tinted glasses on it felt a bit too old-school for my taste. My nostalgia for C64 and Amiga lies in the games, and my experiences with the online world began towards the end of the 90s, so that’s what feels nostalgic for me and what I enjoy revisiting.
Still, it was an interesting experience and I learned something in the process, if only about myself ;)
And this day is even shorter to wrap up, because I was at a family gathering all day and didn’t use my computer much at all. I only had my phone with my and did my best to stick to my rules of only using it for communication, but I may have accidentally opened the browser once or twice…
And with that the Old Computer Challenge is coming to an end!
It was fun, frustrating and enlightening at various times! The best thing was by far the community on the fediverse, IRC and reading all the blog entries and experiences of the other participants! I can’t wait what @solene has in store for us next year and I will definitely participate again and try to keep in touch with some of the people I met along the way. And for that alone the experience was worth it!
I will summarize my thoughts in a few days, so there will be one more post, but for now I’m relieved to have a computer that feels fast again to work with ;)
2023-07-15 21:11:27
This is only semi-related to the OldComputerChallenge, but I revisited the idea of downloading videos from Youtube and putting them on an old iPod. I had already figured out the commands a while ago, but I had to refresh my memory from my bash history and because I figure this might actually be of interest to some people, I wrote it as a tutorial.
Again, this is about downloading videos from Youtube and putting them on the iPod, not about accessing Youtube straight from the iPod. That’s not possible because iPods (apart from the iPod touch, which is basically an iPhone) don’t have wifi.
A while ago I got into old iPods (of course like so many people thanks to a certain easily excitable australian youtuber) and got myself an old iPod Classic with a 160GB harddisk.
I remember thinking back then that they looked really amazing and that 160GB was just a phenomenal amount of storage, enough for my entire music collection at the time, but of course being a university student who was just barely getting by financially there was no way I could afford one.
Fast forward a decade and a half later, thankfully I have an income now and old iPods have come down in price as well (double win!), so the time had come to get one.
Of course the first thing I did was to put Rockbox on it, and here it is running the fantastic Adawaitapod theme by D00k!
So then putting music and podcasts and audiobooks on it is pretty straightforward, just copy your MP3s, OGGs, FLACs etc. over and you’re good to go! No iTunes, no messing around trying to get libgtkpod working, it just works like any other MP3-Player, you mount it as a USB-storage device on your computer, copy the files over and that’s it. The way it’s supposed to be.
But wait, this thing can play videos too, right? Could it be possible to rip videos from youtube and put them on the iPod so I can strain my eyes watching them on a way too tiny screen like it’s 2005?1
Of course it is, I wouldn’t have wasted your time with this introduction if it wasn’t.
You need two pieces of software:
Where to get them and how to install them depends on your OS and distro of choice of course, so I’m not going to write up a tutorial about that, I’m going to assume you can figure it out and have it installed.
First, get the URL of the youtube-video you would like to rip. Just open the video in your browser and copy it from your browsers address bar.
Then, run yt-dlp with the URL as parameter, and I like to tell it to rip the 480p version of the video to save bandwidth. We need to make the video even smaller for the iPod, so there is no point in downloading the full 1080p or 4k file.
$ yt-dlp -S "res:480" 'https://www.youtube.com/XXXXX'
Note the quotation marks (’), they are necessary in case the youtube link contains characters that the shell would interpret as special characters.
This works on playlists too btw! Just get the URL of the playlist instead and run yt-dlp like so:
$ yt-dlp -S "res:480" --yes-playlist 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXXXX'
Now we will most likely end up with a video (or videos) in the webm file format. That’s nice, but way too modern and high-res for our tiny little iPod. So let’s make it smaller and crappier!
And here we come across an unfortunate issue. The iPod is modern enough to be able to decode h.264 videos in hardware, but Rockbox has no support for it and can only decode the older (and worse) mpeg2 standard. What this means in practice is that we need to convert the videos to mpeg2 which creates bigger files than h.264 at a comparable quality or worse looking video at the same filesize. Quality is of less concern in my opinion, because the iPods screen is tiny and a few compression artefacts here and there only add to the retro experience, but filesize might be important if you don’t have a lot of space available on the iPod.
Either way, we now need to fire up ffmpeg to convert the video to a format the iPod (and Rockbox) understands. The command is pretty straightforward, the for loop is only necessary if you have downloaded multiple videos, but it also works if you have only one video, so I only ever use this line:
$ for i in *.webm; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -c:v mpeg2video -b:v 4000k -acodec libmp3lame -ab 192k -vf scale=320:-1 "${i%.*}.mpg"; done
In order to change the filesize (and quality), you can play around with the video bitrate (the number after -b:v) and the audio bitrate (the number after -ab) until you have the right values dialed in for your usecase. The bitrates above work well for me, so I’m happy with them.
Now if everything went well, you have a bunch of video files in your folder with the extension *mpg, and you can just copy them over to your iPod, open them in Rockbox like any other file and enjoy your favorite 80s music videos on the go! (I know that’s what you came here for ;) )
(It looks better in person btw., my camera is not the greatest. But the iPods screen is actually pretty nice for its age!)
Like I mentioned, the iPod is capable of playing h.264 videos, so if you’re still rocking the original Apple software, you can also convert you videos to a higher quality (and smaller filesize) codec like this:
for i in *.webm; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -vf scale=-2:320 -maxrate 1536k -b:v 768k -qmin 3 -qmax 5 -bufsize 4096k -g 300 -c:a aac -b:a 192k -ar 44100 -ac 2 "${i%.*}.mp4"; done
The iPod Classic which I have came out in 2007 but the first iPod to allow video playback, the iPod Video, was released in 2005. They are technically very similar and have the same screen. ↩︎
2023-07-14 14:50:48
I want to take this post to get out some thoughts about the internet, social media and mental health.
How is this related to the OldComputerChallenge?
Let’s take a look.
For the longest time now I didn’t have a facebook profile, and I never had a twitter profile or a tiktok account or a profile on any of the new social media platforms that are en vogue these days. The only social media I had left was Instagram, but I stopped using it a few months ago because I realized I was just mindlessly scrolling through posts for hours on end without getting much value or enjoyment out of it at all. Which is exactly what the platform wants me to do of course, but it’s also the exact opposite of what I want to do. So I ditched it.
And I was better off for it.
But because I still keep an eye out on what’s new and exciting in internetland (Neuland, as our head of state famously called it a few years ago), I was intrigued by mastodon and the fediverse and the idea of having my own blog and not being at the mercy of an eccentric billionaire who could turn my profile off at any moment with no way for me to ever get it back.
So I got an account on mastodon. And started following a few people, and a few hashtags, and discovered the OldComputerChallenge. And that there was a whole community of people hosting their own blogs on simple webservers, using gopher or gemini, chatting on IRC and basically using the internet like it was 1999 (or so). So that intrigued me, and I decided to do the OldComputerChallenge as well, and blog about it and be in touch with the other participants.
But then something interesting happened. The first few days I tried to keep up with all the blogs, keep up with IRC, follow all the retrocomputing-related tags on mastodon, write my own posts and do all that while working in a slow OS with unfamiliar tools and workflows… and I got stressed. A lot. I tried to do too many things, keep up with too many posts, flip back and forth between different tools and programs and communication channels, write my own stuff and do it all at the same time. Bad idea.
It took me two days to realize that this is really stressful, unhealthy and (most embarrassing to admit) completely unnecessary. Nobody cares if I don’t show up on IRC. Nobody cares if I read their post a day later, or not at all because I missed it. I don’t have to be omnipresent and get all the information as quickly as possible, read all the articles, follow all the hashtags, answer all the posts etc.
It’s okay to disconnect. It’s okay to only show up on IRC occasionally. It’s okay to only scroll through mastodon once or twice a day. It’s okay to not read people’s posts if I don’t have the time or the energy. It’s okay to miss out on some conversations, posts, articles, videos, podcasts and whatever else is out there. And it’s also okay to post my own stuff not when I think I have to, but when it’s ready.
It’s ironic that by slowing down my computer I sped up my brain to the point where it wasn’t good for me anymore, before I realized that the slow approach also works (and works well) in other areas of life.
And finally, of course I went through this cycle many, many times before, and the solution is always the same: notice it, take a deep breath, then change it. But occasionally a reminder to slow down and take a step back is needed, and this challenge certainly served as one :)
2023-07-13 19:50:48
On this day I was sick, so not a lot has happened, but I would like to still briefly share a few thoughts.
I’m spending far less time aimlessly surfing the web or watching youtube-videos for hours on end, simply because it’s not very much fun. Surfing works, but most sites are not very pleasant to look at or don’t work at all in a minimalist browser (think lynx, links2, luakit) or they slow the computer down to a crawl when using vivaldi (which is already slow thanks to its significant memory footprint). Important lesson: don’t have more than one or two tabs open at once. Just don’t.
And watching youtube is pretty much impossible. Even just loading the start page takes forever, and trying to load a video… just no. I had downloaded yt-dlp beforehand to be able to download yt-videos at a lower resolution, but I would still have to get the url from somewhere and honestly, I don’t even miss it. I’m sure I’ll eventually catch up on a few interesting videos that I missed during the week, but right now I’m completely fine without spending the evening on my couch aimlessly browsing youtube.
A win in my opinion!
For fun I fired up a VM (one core slowed down, 512mb RAM of course) with Windows XP and browsed some old sites via the old net using Retrozilla, and that turned out to be a surprising amount of fun! Retrozilla is also able to access gopher sites, and since most of the OCC-participants who run blogs keep them very minimal, starting at occ.deadnet.se and looking through the blog entries listed there was no problem at all. And way faster than doing the same thing on a modern linux, despite a minimalist window manager and a lightweight browser (Midori). I even managed to install an old version of mIRC and join #oldcomputerchallenge on libera.chat, which was very surprising but pretty awesome and gave me a huge nostalgia hit :)
Putty still works on XP as well, so I can ssh into my “server” (a raspberry pi really) and do linux-y stuff on there. All in all a surprisingly nice and nostalgic experience!
Oh, I also switched my window manager from i3 to herbstluftwm. Why? First, I had already used herbstluftwm before and am familiar with how it works, and second, I like the name :) (for the non-German speaking world, “Herbstluft” means “autumn air”, which I think is just beautiful. Once I figure out how to post audio on here, I’ll put a file online with the correct pronounciation ;) )
2023-07-12 00:00:48
Day 2 is coming to a close. Today I was at work all day and so didn’t spend a whole lot of time on my slow computer.
However, A thought occurred to me recently, because since I subscribed to mastodon a couple of weeks ago and especially since I started following some retro computing related postings (where I discoved the OCC in the first place), I discovered that there’s a thing called
So what is it? Well, according to the link above
The “smol” net is the “small” net. It’s small because it is build for friends and friends of friends. It doesn’t have to scale to millions of people because those millions should build their own local small nets.
Does this help explaining it? No?
Well, if you’re in or approaching middle age right now, you probably remember the internet of the 90s.
If you’re too young for that, this might sound like grandpa telling stories about the war, but there was a time when the internet was young and it wasn’t yet entirely run by a handful of gigantic evil megacorporations (Amazon, Google, Facebook…). Back then, people used to meet and chat on forums or IRC or BBSes (bulletin boards, but that was even before my time), and they would code their own personal websites and build communities and exchange their thoughts and ideas in this way.
Then came the web 2.0 with Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram etc., which opened the web up to the masses, but it also ushered in an era where everyone was on the same few platforms and where everyone’s profile looks like everyone elses because that was what the platform dictated.
And then The Algorithm was introduced and turned the internet into a miserable and dystopian hellscape filled with online bullying and hatred and outrage because that’s what gets peoples attention and is good for the bank accounts of the Zuckerbergs and Dorseys and Musks of the world, but bad for essentially the rest of us.
And that’s where we’re still at today.
But!
In between the cracks of this modern, corporatized, enshittified internet where everything looks the same and everyone is out to get your data and track you and bombard you with ads there is a small world where the internet of old still (or again?) exists. Where people build small websites, talk on IRC or BBSes, and use old protocols like gopher (or modernized versions like gemini) and exchange information in this way, far away from the walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter and such.
Just like it was when the internet was new.
The internet of old is still alive today. You just have to look in the right places.
And I think this is beautiful, and it makes me happy, and I’m glad I discovered it.
Let’s explore it some more on day 3 :)
2023-07-10 15:46:48
Okay, Day 1 is almost over, what have we learned?
Modern software sucks!!
I mean, it doesn’t really, a lot of it is quite beautiful and easy to use, but boy, everything consumes so many resources! Just starting up a web browser (firefox or chrome doesn’t really matter) takes a good ten seconds or more, and then we haven’t even loaded a single page yet.
And webpages are also so slow and bloated these days! I haven’t limited my bandwidth thankfully (otherwise I’d go completely crazy), but just trying to open any normal page I can watch the CPU hang at 100% load for 10, 20, 30 seconds even, and the memory consumption goes up and up and up…. For comparison I installed Windows XP in a VM with the exact same settings as my modern linux (1 core, limited to 50%, 512mb RAM) and it runs! Installed retrozilla browser, and that is lightning fast as well (though not terribly useful any more because it doesn’t render modern sites very well…. and let’s not even think about security). This just shows how much more resource-hungry everything has become.
Oh, sidenote: I noticed that this site here doesn’t render very well on old browsers either, and on links2 (console-based browser) it isn’t useable at all because the links to the posts are not accessible. Ups… I don’t know enough HTML to fix this though, so this is a problem for future me. Maybe I’ll have it sorted for the next OCC in a year ;)
About sites like YouTube… yeah, best not to talk about it.
Listening to a podcast was fine though, I downloaded it through gpodder, copied it to my iPod and enjoyed it free of distraction on my couch :)
Plans for the upcoming days:
2023-07-09 15:46:48
This year I learned about Solene’s Old Computer Challenge, and I thought hey, I might give it a go!
So this year the rules for the challenge are as follows:
Let’s use a SLOW computer for 7 days. This will be achieved by various means with any hardware:
- Limit your computer’s CPU to use only 1 core. This can be set in the BIOS most of the time, and on Linux you can use
maxcores=1in the boot command line, on OpenBSD you can usebsd.spkernel for the duration of the challenge.- Limit your computer’s memory to 512 MB of memory (no swap limit). This can be set on Linux using the boot command line
mem=512MB. On OpenBSD, this can be achieved a bit similarly by usingdatasize-max=512Min login.conf for your user’s login class.- Set your CPU frequency to the lowest minimum (which is pretty low on modern hardware!). On Linux, use the “powersave” frequency governor, in modern desktop environments the battery widget should offer an easy way to set the governor. On OpenBSD, run
apm -L(while apmd service is running). On Windows, in the power settings, set the frequency to minimum.
Okay, easy enough, right? Well, of course my natural tendency to overthink everything kicked in.
First I thought, I’d fire up my (almost) 20 year old laptop from back when I was in university. Turns out, the thing is really on its last legs, the battery has died long ago, the display hinges are barely holding together, the backlight (CFL, no LEDs) could give up at any moment… not a pleasant experience.
Next, I thought I’d just slow down my normal desktop PC to one core, 512mb RAM and limit the cpu frequency… but that didn’t really feel old, it was just my normal computer a bit slower.
So after a lot of thinking what I ended up with is this:
So this is the setup for now, we’ll see how the week goes.
Let the fun begin!