2026-09-11 08:00:00
25 years ago today was the first day of my 13th and final year in school. I don't remember the school day at all; maybe I went there by bus, maybe I drove myself in my dad's old Ford Fiesta. What I remember is being back home after school, having lunch with my family and then, instead of sitting down to do schoolwork, I decided to turn on the tiny TV in my bedroom to see what was on. What I saw on a number of channels were news reports with live video from New York City about a plane having just hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center. The footage looked unreal, showing a gaping hole near the top of the tower with black smoke coming out on all sides. I switched on the big living room TV and we watched the report for a couple of minutes, with a constant feed of the burning hole in the tower being shown, when out of nowhere a second plane appeared and struck the other tower, throwing a huge fireball and a ton of debris out the other side. I could not believe what I had just seen. We kept watching in horror and disbelief as we saw desperate people jumping out of the burning towers to their death, until first one and then the other tower collapsed in a gigantic cloud of smoke and dust and people on the streets ran to seek cover.
I have never experienced anything like this before or since. Witnessing these events unfold live on TV, it felt like being there, in New York City, watching helplessly as the towers burned and collapsed and thousands died.
The attacks of 9/11 changed the course of history, and not for the better. That's a story for another day though. Today I want to remember the people on those four kidnapped airplanes, in the towers of the World Trade Center and in the Pentagon where another plane crashed, who lost their lives on that day in a cruel act of violence.
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2026-09-04 08:00:00
A few days ago Ruben wrote a quick post about finding a FIGlet in the Internet Archive's HTML code. What's a FIGlet? "FIGlet is a program for making large letters out of ordinary text". ASCII-art, in other words. Curiously, I can't find this in the Internet Archive's sources, I don't know where he saw it... But either way, I think that's a cute idea, so I also put this in my site's sources now. It's a silly little thing, but I like it :)
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2026-09-01 08:00:00
August is over, and that means Blaugust 2026 has ended. This was my first time participating, and I set myself the goal of writing 15 posts this month (the silver tier), which I'm happy to say I managed! Two of them ("tech sucks" and "I used to be excited about tech", links below) went kind of viral and made the rounds on Bubbles and Hacker News, which is always a bit scary. But I got a number of really nice and thoughtful responses, and the "tech sucks" posts also generated a number of blog posts in response, which I've linked at the bottom of that post.
Overall it was a nice challenge. I was surprised that I always managed to find topics to talk about without running out of ideas or writing about things that didn't really interest me just for the sake of getting a post out.
The only thing that's a bit of a shame is that I wasn't involved in the community too much because their platform of choice is Discord which I'm not a fan of, so I unfortunately missed that part. It was still great reading the posts from others that showed up in my feed, and there were so many participants that I couldn't possibly follow them all. I linked the posts that resonated with me in my weekly linkdumps.
A big thank you goes out to Krikket and the others for organizing! I'm looking forward to participating again next year.
For completeness' sake here's a list of all my posts from this month. Thanks everyone for reading and following and getting in touch with me!
2026-08-31 08:00:00
A couple of weeks ago I bought an old Walkman, because I felt like listening to some tapes again; something that I hadn't done in at least 25 years. This set me on a path to look a bit more into old Hi-Fi equipment. Not old as in from the 70s and 80s, but older than what we have today, which is essentially just Bluetooth or Wifi speakers and not much else (unless you want to go high end). Something that can still play tapes and CDs (I haven't owned a proper CD player in probably two decades, either), doesn't take up too much space, looks nice and isn't too expensive. And so I bought this.
This is the JVC UX-P3R from 2001. I wish I could find the original product page from the JVC homepage from back then, but I've had no luck. It seems to be gone forever.
I bought this because I like the early 2000s design, it has a CD player and a tape deck, and it's small and light. Exactly what I was looking for.
I got it from eBay for 27 Euros including shipping, and it was described as fully tested and working. Which turned out to be a very optimistic description of the actual condition.
The belt in the tape drive had disintegrated, but that was something I had expected from a 25 year old drive and I was pretty sure that the seller hadn't tested this, because who still plays tapes these days. You know, apart from some weird people who also still write blogs... What I didn't expect though was what I saw after I opened the device. First, it was incredibly dusty. But then there was this:
There was a huge crack in the board near the speaker terminals. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this device was maybe not very thoroughly tested, because that should have been noticed. Though to be fair, this could have also happened in transit. The remote was also missing, even though it was included in the eBay auction.
The seller was very nice though when I got in touch with him. He gave me a 50% discount on the price, and he also sent me the remote in the post. Which turned out to be just as dirty, full of crusty battery acid from a leaked battery, and before handing it over the postman charged me three Euros because the guy had bought the wrong postage stamp... the usual eBay madness.
The stereo cleaned up well though, and after a disassembly and a good clean the remote worked, too, and had not taken any damage from the leaked battery. I put a new belt into the tape drive and stabilized the crack in the board with some super glue and patched the broken solder traces with wires and a few solder bridges. Thankfully the crack was in the corner and there were just a handful of broken traces, so that was an easy fix.
My biggest worry was that the CD player would refuse to play any CDs, because that's hard to fix if it can be fixed at all, but it turned out to be working fine.
Overall, after cleaning and repairing it, the stereo turned out really nice. It didn't come with any speakers, which is fine because I already have a good pair of living room speakers which I could connect it to. It was also really easy to open and take apart and get to all the components. Techmoan recently made a video in which he tried to repair a Sony micro Hi-Fi from the same era, which turned out to be a complete disaster. But this one was well put together and great to work on. I don't know if this is true for all JVC devices, but it is for this.
One thing I want to mention if you're thinking about buying some vintage (or just older) Hi-Fi gear: Do some research before you buy and check if you can find not only the user manual available online, but also the service manual. For this device I found both, and the service manual is really detailed and comprehensive and was really helpful for the repair. It contains parts lists, schematics, block diagrams, board layouts and even diagrams about what the output of the CD player's laser unit should look like on an oscilloscope. So when the CD player inevitably fails at some point (hopefully not soon), I can go in and see what's wrong and maybe even adjust some things to get it working again.
And now, with the stereo fully working, I can finally do what someone on Mastodon suggested in a response to my Walkman post: Record some mixtapes to listen to on the go.
2026-08-28 08:00:00
Last week I posted a link to a news aggregator website, which collects links to all different kinds of news articles and blog posts. It was brought to my attention that one of the links on this site pointed to a post titled "Stop Making TUIs", which advocates for abandoning text-based user interfaces in favour of vibe-coded GUIs.
Needless to say, I am deeply horrified by this inexcusable oversight of mine, and I owe a massive apology to anybody who was rightfully offended by me linking to a site linking to such obscene content. In no way do the ideas expressed in this article represent my own views, and I want to make it very clear that I fully understand the impact of what I've done here and how wrong it was. I make no excuses for this type of carelessness and I take full responsibility for the consequences of my actions. Most of all I want to apologise to everyone using text-based interfaces to do their daily work. I understand how hurtful this has been to you and I need to take accountability for my actions. The only way for me to regain your trust is through action, and I promise to choose my links more carefully in the future. I know better now, and you have my word that this kind of thing will never, ever happen again. 1
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Thanks to this guy for providing some inspiration for this nonsense :) Obviously this is a joke and I'm just having some fun at my own expense here. I do think the post is crap though, because TUIs are awesome.
2026-08-26 08:00:00
A few weeks ago, Noisy Deadlines posted a list of 5 albums that shaped her taste in music. I was going to write a post like this too, but it completely slipped my mind. Today she published another post about 5 books that shaped her, which reminded me of the 5 albums. So here's my list, these are 5 albums that had a huge influence on me.
This one I'm pretty sure is the first "heavy" album I bought. Before this I listened to mostly pop music from the 60s, 70s and 80s, or stuff that was on the radio. Then in my late teens I discovered this album and it was my gateway drug into the world of Hard Rock and Heavy Metal, music generes I still love and listen to to this day. I already wrote a review of this album (and all other AC/DC albums), so I'm not going to repeat myself here too much. It's a fantastic album and I love it.
This album, particularly the live video version of it, shows Priest at their absolute peak. Halford had quit drinking and smoking and his voice was at it's absolute best during this era. Tipton and Downing's dual guitar attack is legendary, and just look at the clothes and the hair! It's peak 80s Priest. They're one of my favourite bands ever, and this album was on heavy rotation for a long time after I discovered it.
This one is a masterpiece. Candlemass is a Swedish Doom Metal band which plays music very much inspired by 70s Black Sabbath, with heavy riffs and dark lyrics, but more melodic and operatic vocals than what Sabbath did at the time. This is their debut album, and they were only in their early 20s when they recorded this, which makes it even more impressive that it's so good. If you look up any list of "The X best Heavy Metal Albums of All Time", this album is almost always included, and usually at least in the top 20. And for good reason, because it's just perfect. I listened to it countless times and I know pretty much every lyric, guitar part and drum fill by heart. I even know where all the little mistakes are, of which there are a few because they recorded on a tight budget. And I even have the album cover tattooed on my arm. That's how much I love this album.
Any number of the old Black Sabbath albums could be in this spot, but this one has Paranoid on it, and Paranoid is amazing. Full review is here in my Black Sabbath post. I play electric guitar and Tony Iommi's riffs are a huge influence on my; so much so that I own his signature Epiphone SG guitar which I've had for I guess 15 years or so, and I played it every single time I've played live with my band. And it's still my main guitar that I play almost every day.
Again, I could put any number of the old Uriah Heep albums from the 70s here, but I think the first one I heard was the Best of, the European edition which was released in 1975. Lady in Black is on there, which is incredible and I've loved this song ever since I first heard it as a child. It's just so good. What I love about Uriah Heep is the blend of Hard Rock music and operatic vocals with intricate multi part harmonies. This was later picked up and refined by many other bands, most notably of course Queen. They perfected it, but Uriah Heep came before and their music was hugely influential for me when I was young. I've also seen them live numerous times and they are still a force to be reckoned with.
And there we go. I could add another 10, but these are the first that came to mind; and of course it's not just these particular albums but the bands in general that had a huge influence on me. I've seen all of them live at least once; some have since retired and/or lost key members, others are still out on the road and I hope to catch them again when I have the chance.