2026-05-01 08:00:00
It's time somebody invented beaming. And it doesn't have to be beaming a person at first, though that would be ideal... but maybe we could start with small objects. For example, I usually write these posts at my favourite café downtown. But I haven't been feeling too well the last couple of days, so I have to stay home. And now it would be awesome to have a small beaming device, maybe the size of a microwave, where I can put in an empty coffee mug and beam it down to the café where they fill it up and send me back a nice hot cup of coffee. Why has nobody invented this yet?
And yes, I know I can just buy a good coffee machine and get the same result, but you know... it would be so much cooler if they could beam a cup of coffee straight to my kitchen. A man can dream.
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2026-04-29 08:00:00
Yesterday the new Commodore, run by YouTuber Perifractic (Christian Simpson) announced their new product, a faithful recreation of the C64C, the second revision of the Commodore 64. Essentially it's the same as the first one they released, but it uses the case of the old C64C which has the same design language as the later Amiga machines.
To produce the cases they're using the original case molds which had a small design flaw:
“The C64C molding was created using a 2-point flow pattern that resulted in the plastic cooling unevenly in the original production run, creating feint, semi-circular, flow marks that have largely gone unnoticed. By using the original tooling, we’re even bringing these back. [...]”
The quote is taken from this article, which has more details and also a picture showing the defects:
My dad had this exact model of C64 when I was a kid, and I remember playing Pitstop II with him on it. We had the game on tape, and it often wouldn't load correctly, so when we got it to load we left the computer running the whole day so we could come back to it later. And because we didn't have a monitor, we connected the computer to the living room TV, which meant we had to set it up on the living room table, run all the cables and then put everything away later once we were done. We used computers like this until 1996 or 1997 when we got our first PC, which came with a monitor...
Anyway, I still have this old C64C. My dad was never going to use it again, so I just brought it home with me a couple of years ago. I haven't used it in a long time either, but my dad has this habit of sometimes just throwing stuff out when it bothers him, so I thought I'd better keep some things I remember from my childhood from ending up in e-waste or landfill.
I just pulled the computer out again and had a good look at the case, and it does indeed have these flow marks, just like they said it does. They're hard to photograph, but under the right light they're clearly visible. Some are even in the exact same spot as shown in the picture above:
That's kind of cool. And it's exactly like they said: None of us ever noticed.
I don't know if it's possible to find out exactly which mold my C64 came from, but hypothetically if the new C64 came from the exact same mold as the one I have, I might just be tempted to buy one...
2026-04-24 08:00:00
Life, uh, finds a way. That's what the internet recently feels like to me. Tech bros and corporations are doing their best to fuck things up and make everything AI generated and agentic and an absolute nightmare to use, and yet the indie web is thriving. People are blogging and writing newsletters and sharing their diy projects, and new services like Bubbles are popping up which make discovering new human created content easier. It feels like in recent years more and more blogs are turning up, which is amazing to see and I hope the trend continues.
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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.
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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.
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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...