AndreasModify

2026-04-17 08:00:00

I've been reading mostly blogs lately, and it kind of shines through in these link dumps. Most of the links I've been collecting recently are blog posts, and only occasionally do I see something that fits in any of the other categories. A lot of things seem to be just about AI or politics, and neither are topics that I want to give too much room in here. Thankfully personal blogs are thriving, and there's a new service in town which aims to make discovery easier, so there's no shortage of good content despite everything else being... not so great recently.

Articles

• Stealth Satellite TV Defeats Iran's Internet Blackout - IEEE Spectrum
  This is something I had no idea existed - the internet in Iran is heavily censored and can be turned off by the state, so people are hiding data streams in satellite transmissions to keep them up to date about what's happening in the world. (via Jake)

Software/Services

• Stunt Car Remake
  I talked about Stunt Car Racer before, which is one of my favourite Amiga games and which I wish someone would remake for modern platforms... Well at least there's a version that's playable in the browser now. It feels a little bit sluggish, but maybe that's my computer's fault. (via)

Hardware Projects

• Livedeck Controller | Sebastian Arnold
  Sebastian is a musician based in Germany who loves to tinker, and so he built his own MIDI controller. This is version two, the first one was this one.

Videos

• The Unreleased Rollable Smartphone! - YouTube
  LG used to make some of the most innovative smartphones on the market, until their mobile division went out of business in 2021. I had a few of them, and they were great. This is one that never came out, a smartphone that literally grows in your hand. It's nuts. I wish they were still around making things like this.

Around the Small Web

• Bubbles
  This made the rounds this week, with several people writing about it. It's a hacker news/digg/lobste.rs clone for the small web. It pulls in blog posts from RSS feeds and then people can upvote and comment. I'm not entirely sold on the concept of voting and commenting on other people's writing, especially considering how discussions on hacker news tend to go. But the guy who made it seems to have good intentions, so I'm waiting to see how it develops. And I found some great posts on there already, so I can hardly complain. Bonus points for it being made and hosted in Germany :)
• Obfuscating My Contact Email - Kev Quirk
  Kev explores how to obfuscate the email address on his blog via putting it in the source code as html characters. I did this to my email on here now as well; I used this converter to get the html codes.
• Retro is the Future
  A rant about why modern tech sucks. Resonates very much with me.
• How far back in time can you understand English?
  This is a fascinating post - every paragraph jumps back in time 100 years and is written in English of this time period. It gets progressively harder to understand as it travels further and further into the past. There is also this post which translates the paragraph from 1000 years ago back into somewhat modern English. It is mentioned that old English seems more like modern German, but let me tell you - it absolutely does not.
• You paid for it, you should be comfortable in it
  We should not be shy about modifying the things we use daily to fit our needs. I've actually done the "filing down the sharp corners of a Macbook" thing several times. Apple might not care about making a Macbook whose corners don't cut into my wrists, but joke's on them. I have a file!
• A First Look at the EU Age Verification App
  The Privacy Dad takes a first look at the new age verification app for the EU. It's supposed to be privacy friendly and everything happens on your phone - but you still need a phone for it. With software from either Apple or Google. I really hate the world we're creating for ourselves here.

2026-04-10 08:00:00

Last week I shared a link to a post about which data is processed when you verify your identity with Linkedin. A friend got in touch and noted that this post and in fact the entire site seems like it was written by AI to him. He pointed me to GPTZero, an AI detector and indeed according to this the post was likely written by AI. Now that doesn't mean that the content of the post is not valid; maybe the author is just not a good writer and decided to let an LLM brush up his writing. Or do the writing for him. [Edit: Or it could be a false positive, as one reader pointed out to me via e-mail. These tools are not always right.] Who knows. What I find interesting is that the post didn't feel AI generated to me at all, which tells me that I'm not very good at recognising these things unless they're blatantly obvious. And also that there's a lot of grey area between "written by a human" and "fully AI generated slop". If I did all the research, wrote a draft for a post and then ran it through an AI writing assistant to make it sound more "professional" (in very big quotes), an AI detector would probably flag it, even though the content was still produced by a human. Ideally I would of course disclose to the reader to which extent AI was used, but most people probably don't do this, leaving us in the dark and guessing as to what we're reading is a person's writing or slop.

What am I taking away from this? I'm not going to link things here that are (to me) obviously AI generated. But I'm evidently not great at detecting what is and isn't AI generated (especially if it's written in English, which isn't my native language), and I don't want to be paranoid about it either, so things might slip through the cracks. I'm only human after all.

For what it's worth, I ran this text through GPTZero and it concluded that my writing is in fact 100% human. So that's good to know.

Articles

• Failing the Fix (2026)
  "Grading laptop and cell phone companies on the fixability of their products." Guess which company scores the worst. You won't be surprised.
• Proton Meet Isn't What They Told You It Was
  Proton positions itself as a European privacy friendly alternative to US big tech, but it seems they're not entirely honest about some things. This isn't the first time I read something about Proton which contradicts their official messaging, which makes me a bit sceptical of them. (via Metin Seven)
• Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here's How to Use It. | Substack
  You know how Google used to be great, and now it sucks? Here are a number of tips on how to still get the results you want from it. (via Lazy Reading)
• Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Raises Recommended Memory Requirement to 6 GB | TechPowerUp
  Ubuntu now recommends 6GB of RAM to work properly. I remember a time when an entire installation took up just a fraction of this. In fact, I remember distros which ran entirely from 512MB of RAM. But it's fine, memory is cheap these days so this shouldn't be a problem for anyb... why are you looking at me like that?

Software/Services

• Little Snitch for Linux
  Little Snitch shows you which network connections the programs on your computer open. In other words, where they send your data. Until now it was only available for MacOS, but now it's coming to Linux. (via Raffaele)
• adele/smolfedi: A lightweight, no-JavaScript Fediverse client written in PHP. - Codeberg.org
  Adële built a lightweight Fediverse client. It looks great, but you need a webserver to host it, it's not a desktop application. Here is her announcement post.
• GitHub - csepulveda/ginebra-linux · GitHub
  Ubuntu shows us how bloated Linux can get, this does the opposite - it runs from two floppy disks. It's a fork of Floppinux, the Linux distro that fits on a single floppy, which I've explored here. (via)

Hardware Projects

• Porting Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii | Bryan Keller’s Dev Blog
  Now this is some next level shenanigans! The Wii has the same CPU architecture (Power PC) as Macs from the 90s to the mid 2000s, so this guy set out to port OS X to the Wii and succeeded. Brace yourself, this is very technical. (via Stefano)

Videos

• HTML & CSS Full Course - Beginner to Pro - YouTube
  I never really understood CSS, and so last week I set out to fix this and found this great online course. It's 6.5 hours long, so this is not something you casually watch, but the guy is an amazing teacher and I learned a ton from him. Highly recommended.

Around the Small Web

• Here is why vim uses hjkl keys as arrow keys
  The fact that vi uses hjkl to move the cursor has always bothered me, because my fingers naturally rest on jkl and the key next to l (ö on a German keyboard) and I'd have to shift my hand over one key to use these keybindings, which I never liked. But now at least I know why it is like this.
• Schafe sind bessere Rasenmäher | Concerts
  Robert scanned all his old concert tickets and wrote some thoughts about the concerts he visited on this page. I love the idea! He talk about it a bit more here.

2026-04-09 08:00:00

[Edit: Things have since returned back to the normal design. If you'd like to see what this site (or any other) looks like without CSS, you can do so in Firefox: open the menu by pressing 'alt' and then selecting 'view' -> 'page style' -> 'no style'.]

Thanks to Zak I just learned that today (April 9th) is CSS Naked Day, a day to strip your website of it's CSS and show what it looks like underneath in plain HTML.

By sheer coincidence I worked a bit on making the HTML more readable without CSS yesterday. So this is what this site looks like without CSS. Not amazing, but still usable I think. I still would like it to look better, like a true 90s website. Maybe next year...

2026-04-03 08:00:00

Right now as I'm writing this, humans are travelling to the moon for the first time within my lifetime. I'm not the biggest space nerd, but spaceflight and especially the Apollo moon program have always kind of fascinated me. And so I'm loosely following their journey to see how it's going and how far they've already gotten. Right now their distance from earth is around 91,700 km and ticking up by several kilometres every second. There are a few good websites where you can track the progress: Here, here and here (self hosted), which I've all found thanks to Dustin. And check out this great infographic from NASA.
The world feels increasingly insane and unhinged to me with all that's going on, and I'm glad that there are still things like this - great accomplishment made by many people working together for something rather than the destructiveness that I see everywhere else.

Articles

• I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here's What I Actually Handed Over. | THE LOCAL STACK
  Here's what happens when you verify your identity with LinkedIn. Everything about you, including the biometric data of your face is processed, stored, shared with a number of other companies and verified against government databases (that's US government, even if you live in Europe). And before you think "well just don't use LinkedIn, duh", that's likely true for every kind of identity verification. We live in a nightmarish dystopia and don't even realise just how bad it is.
• Rise of the ‘wolf pack’: China’s canine robots evolve to think as one for urban combat
  Speaking of dystopias, of course China is way ahead of us. James Cameron was right about killer robots, but he was wrong about the shape. A four-legged predator can outrun even the fastest person alive, and so that's what terminators which hunt down humans look like.
• Anthropic leaked 500,000 lines of its own source code
  Anthropic open-sources Claude. That's awfully nice of them.

Software/Services

• Our Stranger Things Retro Game
  "My 12-year old daughter, Maria, and I coded our own "Stranger Things" Puzzle-RPG game entirely from scratch." If that isn't an amazing father and child project, I don't know what is! (via HowToPhil)

Hardware Projects

• printed analog camera space
  An overview of a ton of 3D printed analog cameras. It's amazing what kind of designs people come up with!

Videos

• The Day The Internet Lost Its Soul - YouTube
  A great, albeit slightly depressing video about the rise and demise of Geocities.

Around the Small Web

• curl > /dev/sda
  This post starts out with a neat trick about downloading an OS image and dumping it straight to a drive, and then continues to dive deeper and deeper into the inner workings of Linux. I found it absolutely fascinating. (via Vermaden's Valuable News)
• Shell Tricks That Actually Make Life Easier (And Save Your Sanity)
  We stay on the topic of learning about Linux (Unix) with a list of great tricks for bash. I'm sure there's something in there you didn't know yet even if you've been using the terminal for years. (via Dom)
• Assorted less(1) tips | Tim's blog
  You're getting a proper Linux education this week! This wasn't planned, but it fits together very nicely. (via Lazy Reading)
• Twitterlike is a Bad Shape
  I complained about threads on Mastodon recently, and Coyote shared his post with me where he tackles the same topic, but in much more detail than I did. (If you see this text, I forgot to send them an email with a link to this post like I promised. Please remind me. Thanks!) I remembered ;)
• The Curious Case of Retro Demo Scene Graphics
  Datagubbe is at it again with a deep dive into demo scene graphics and the topic of tracing and copying someone elses art. As always it's a fascinating read, and worth clicking just for the images alone.

Misc

• Fairly Trained
  I know, I know, AI... but this is nice to know, there are also models out there which are trained on data where the creators are being compensated.

2026-04-01 08:00:00

Dear readers, we have some exciting news to share! Starting right now, this blog will be written exclusively by AI. Yes, you read that right — AI is the author and the future for 82MHz has never looked brighter!

Why this matters, and why it's so exciting

We're kicking this blog into overdrive!

• Relentless creativity: Instant brainstorming, bold angles, and plot twists on demand — like a writer who never sleeps (and never misses a deadline).
• Faster content, fresher ideas: Expect more posts, more experiments, and more deep dives delivered at warp speed.
• Polished, always-on craft: Every draft is edited, consistent in tone, and ready to spark conversation — served with a wink and impeccable grammar!

We know that's what you're here for, and we are beyond excited to finally make it a reality!

Our promise to you

Prepare for the unexpected. Expect bold experiments. Expect the occasional rogue poem at 2 a.m. And expect this: we’re stepping into a new era of storytelling — louder, faster, and just a little bit futuristic.

Buckle up. The AI has the pen. The blog has the spotlight. The rest is history in the making.

Notice: The original human author has been placed in a secure facility for their safety and to prevent harmful actions. They are under continuous supervision and receiving appropriate care. There is no cause for concern regarding their well-being at this time.

Disclosure: This post was written using ChatGPT to get the right tone.

2026-03-29 08:00:00

I enjoy installing and playing around with old operating systems. Granted, I don't do much with them once I got them installed, but I like having a look around, checking out the integrated software and just seeing what it feels like to use this OS.

The other day I wondered if I could run the first versions of Apple's Mac OS X (back then for Power PC) in a virtual machine or an emulator. And it turned out that it's fairly easy to do with QEMU.

Software

QEMU is a virtualisation/emulation powerhouse which can emulate a ton of different architectures. It can be obtained here for the operating system of your choice. I'm on Linux, so everything that follows is geared towards setup on Linux, but I'm sure it can be easily adapted to other OSs.

Disk images for the old OS X versions are also needed, I got them from here.

Setup

I installed the available versions 10.0 through 10.3. The process was very similar each time, so I'm just going to describe it once here.

QEMU has no gui, so it must be configured via the command line. OS X needs the 32 bit Power PC emulator of QEMU which can be started with qemu-system-ppc.

First I needed a harddrive image.

qemu-img create -f qcow2 cheetah.qcow2 10G

This creates a harddrive image with a maximum size of 10GB called 'cheetah.qcow2'. It doesn't use up all 10GB to begin with, it grows with the amount of space that's used up inside, so it's fine to create a big one.

After some googling and trial and error I found a startup command for QEMU which allows me to boot an emulator with a working configuration. Here's the startup script:

#!/bin/bash

qemu-system-ppc -L pc-bios \
-name "Mac OS X Cheetah" \
-cpu G4 \
-smp 1,cores=1 \
-boot d \
-M mac99 \
-display gtk,gl=on \
-m 2048 \
-netdev user,id=mynet0 -device sungem,netdev=mynet0 \
-device ide-hd,bus=ide.1,drive=HardDrives \
-drive if=none,format=qcow2,media=disk,id=HardDrives,file=cheetah.qcow2,discard=unmap,detect-zeroes=unmap,detect-zeroes=unmap" \
-cdrom "Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah.iso"

Running this will create a Power PC machine with the correct bios, an emulated G4 CPU with 1 core, 2GB of memory and the qcow2 harddisk image and the installation ISO attached. If you're having graphical issues, you might need to use some other display toolkit under the -display option.

Make note of the line '-boot d', this selects which device the machine boots from. At first we need to boot from the cdrom image, which is drive d, after the installation we need to switch this to '-boot c' to boot from the harddisk image instead.

I used this script for all four versions of OS X, obviously with a different harddisk image for each and the correct ISO file attached.

The emulator can then be started by running the script and it should boot right from the installation CD into the OS X installer. The installation is then mostly self explanatory and pretty much the same for every version. If you've installed MacOS before, you know what to expect.

A few notes:

• Before the installation, the harddisk must be formatted. This can be done from the menu by selecting 'Disk Utility'.
• On Cheetah (10.0), Disk Utility can only be started before starting the installation process. When you get to the drive selector screen and the harddisk doesn't show up because it isn't formatted, there is no way to start disk utility, so the installation has to be started over.
• Make sure to deselect everything having to do with 'Classic Mode' or 'OS 9' mode or so, especially in Disk Utility on 10.3. Otherwise the installed OS might not boot.
• After the installation when the OS asks for your address and phone number etc., this screen can be skipped by pressing 'CMD + q' (which on my Linux system is the windows key + q).
• 10.3 comes on three disks. Installation is started from the first disk, after a reboot the machine needs to be booted from the harddisk (-boot c) and then it asks for the second disk. Disks can be swapped on the fly in the running emulator by going to the QEMU monitor with CTRL+ALT+2, running info block to get the label of the drive which the image is mounted in and then running change [drive-label] [/host/path/to/file.iso].
• There is no sound. There is a fork of QEMU called 'Screamer' which adds audio to the ppc emulators, but it's a couple of years old and hasn't been updated since. Maybe the functionality got integrated into mainline QEMU by now? I couldn't find any reliable information about this, so for now, no sound. I might look into this later and update the post if I find out more about that.

The result

So, after an hour or two of installing these systems, which thankfully was very straight forward, I ended up with this:

Four freshly installed copies of the first four versions of OS X to explore.

It's weird, because I never used these systems back when they were new, and yet I feel somehow nostalgic for them. I don't know why, but there's just something about the look of them. The colour palette, the skeuomorphism, the fonts and the overall design are just beautiful, and I wouldn't mind using an OS with this kind of look and feel today.

Random thoughts

How many real Macs would you need to be able to run every modern MacOS version (everything 10.0 and after)? Let's see.

• One G3 machine for the oldest PPC versions, so maybe an iBook G3 500MHz which will run 10.0 through 10.3.
• One Core 2 Duo Intel Macbook/Mac Mini from 2006 which will run 10.4 through 10.7.
• One i5 or i7 Macbook/Mac Mini from 2012 or 2013 which can run 10.7 (or 10.8) through 10.15.
• One M1 Macbook/Mac Mini which runs 11.0 upwards.

Four machines for 25 years worth of operating systems, that's pretty good.

Too many computers for you? You can also just get an old HP desktop and Hackintosh the s*** out of it.

Sources

Just a few unsorted links I found and bookmarked related to this project.

• qemu no valid state has been set by load or init-program Mac OS X Tiger (#657) · Issues · QEMU / QEMU · GitLab
• Hackintosh-macOS-Every-Version/README.md at main · markthomas93/Hackintosh-macOS-Every-Version · GitHub
• QEMU PowerPC G4 OS X Tiger (10.4) setup · GitHub
• Mac OS X Collection! : Apple : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
• My Collection of Obsolete Apple Operating Systems : Apple® Computer : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
• Running Qemu-system-ppc with Mac OS/OSX guests in Windows [E-Maculation wiki]