2025-07-04 08:00:00
This week we had the first (but probably not the last) heatwave here in Germany with temperatures reaching 38°C on Wednesday. Thankfully we have AC at the office so being at work was okay, but getting on the bike and riding home in the afternoon was - an experience. It felt like pointing a hair dryer at my face the whole time. Not fun. And summer is only just beginning... Anyway, this has nothing to do with anything else in this post. Just thought I'd share ;)
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2025-06-29 08:00:00
I love Calvin and Hobbes, and so pretty much every day I go to GoComics to see the day's new comic strip. Of course Bill Watterson stopped drawing Calvin and Hobbes in 1995, so today's strip is really from 1995 as the copyright notice in the image shows, but let's not be pedantic here. I still love it.
In today's strip Calvin draws a flip book animation (I hope that's the right term) in one of his dad's books, much to the chagrin of his dad of course.
I wanted to see what this sequence of images looked like as an animation, so I downloaded the image, cut it up and turned it into a GIF with the help of two web tools (this and this).
And here's what it looks like:
No idea why Dad got angry about that ;)
2025-06-28 08:00:00
It's that time of the year again! The Old Computer Challenge 2025 was just announced to take place from July 13th to July 19th, and I'm really looking forward to joining once again. If you've been following me for a while or maybe all the way from the beginning, you know that the OCC was my gateway drug into the small web that I'm now a part of where people still write blogs and communicate via email or the fediverse and where nothing is owned and controlled by evil billionaires, and as such it has a bit of a special place in my heart.
This year's challenge has evolved into not being a themed challenge at all anymore (like it used to be) but rather a week dedicated to having fun with old or low powered hardware and software, and I think that's a good development. Everybody has their own definition of what an "old" system is, and so everyone can decide for themselves what they want to focus on and play around with for the week. That's how it was last year too, and people did a lot of cool stuff like making zines, using old netbooks, using an OS with no GUI etc. And I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone will come up with this year.
What am I going to do this year? I don't have a clue yet! But right now I'm most nostalgic for the late 90s/early 2000s era of computing and the web, so I will probably do something that lives in this time period. Maybe dust off an old laptop running Win2K, maybe use the white Macbook for a week (even though that's more mid 2000s), maybe set up a mini PC with Windows 98. Maybe all of it. Maybe something completely different. I don't know yet, but there's still time to figure it out.
So, if you like playing around with old systems, old software, old consoles, old typewriters or whatever else you might feel nostalgic about (or you never got to use back when it was new and want to try out for the first time), feel free to join the OCC this year. Have a look at the website, register your blog there, join the IRC channel (#oldcomputerchallenge on irc.libera.chat), join the forum, let us know what you're going to do and then have fun doing it and writing about it! The more people are involved, the more fun and interesting it gets.
2025-06-27 08:00:00
Last week I mentioned that in order to make my blog searchable, I created a page that has the full text of all articles online. Well it turns out that that made the AI scrapers really happy because I saw a gigantic spike in traffic the next day, as they were hammering the page over and over again. Talk about unintended consequences... I complained about it on Mastodon and there were some great responses about how to keep the scrapers away. Have a look here if you're interested, and thanks everyone for your suggestions! On to the links.
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2025-06-23 08:00:00
For a while I had an account on Instagram and I posted quite a lot of pictures there between 2017 and 2021. The account is still there, but I don't post there anymore because I've kind of fallen out of love with photography and because I disagree with my good friend and frequent guest on the blog Mark who runs Instagram about, you know, everything.
But I still like the pictures I took, and so I decided to host them on my own site instead. It was easier than expected actually because Instagram offers an export of all your data (once you know where to look, because they hide it pretty well) and this contains a html site which presents your pictures rather nicely already.
All I had to do was edit the code for this site a little to make it better fit in, and integrate it into the website. It's not perfect, but it works and it was surprisingly little work.
So now I have a photoblog! Maybe I should take more pictures again. Anyway, here it is, all my old Instagram photos, freed from the clutches of the evil oppressive empire and under my own control.
Feels good.
2025-06-21 08:00:00
I saw a news story yesterday the someone shared on Mastodon. It sounded intriguing, so I clicked it and I read it. I'm going to share the link with you in a moment, and I initially considered just putting it in my next linkdump, but I wanted to write a bit more than just two or three lines about it.
Here's the headline of the news post:
Exclusive / Reddit in talks to embrace Sam Altman’s iris-scanning Orb to verify users
And these are the first two paragraphs:
Reddit is considering using World ID, the verification system based on iris-scanning Orbs whose parent company was co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
According to two people familiar with the matter, World ID could soon become a way for Reddit users to verify that they are unique individuals while remaining anonymous on the platform.
Ok, here is the full post if you want to read it.
I had never heard of an iris scanning orb or a thing called "World ID" before, and I didn't do any research after reading this post. It stands in complete isolation to me, this is the first time that I'm hearing anything about it. I will look it up after I've written this, but right now that post is all I know.
And I realised, I have no idea if this is real or satire.
I used to be able to tell satire from reality pretty easily because satire is always just a bit too much and too over the top to be taken seriously.
This? It sounds absolutely batshit insane to me, and it feels like satire. Or something straight out of Black Mirror.
But we live in an absolutely batshit insane world now, and so it might just as well be real. Sam Altman might just as well have founded a company that is working on developing an orb that soon we all will be required to have next to our computers and let it scan our eyeballs to prove that we are human.
It's weird. The more I think about it the more it seems like this could actually be real. It certainly sounds like something someone like Altman would dream up and be actually convinced that this is a great idea and not a dystopian fever dream.
I'm going to read up on this now and see if this is actually real. But I wanted to share this feeling here before I do. We really live in a fucked up timeline, don't we.
I googled it. It's real.
The orb is used to verify a person’s World ID—a private, secure, digital passport that empowers millions of individuals to prove they’re human online.
It does this by first using highly specialized sensors to ensure the person standing in front of it is a human. It then takes and processes a series of iris images to create an iris code, which is a digital representation of the texture of the iris. The iris code is used to verify that the person is unique and has not verified a World ID before.
It "empowers" me to prove that I'm human. Right. Okay.
Can I please be transferred to a saner timeline?