Electrical engineer, musician, out and about on two wheels, read a lot of books, coffee-addict.
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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.
2024-05-12 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.
2024-05-09 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!
2024-05-02 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.
2024-04-25 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!
2024-04-12 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.
2024-04-06 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).
2024-03-15 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:
2024-03-13 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!