I collect a lot of links to great articles and software projects, and this is my attempt to sort through them and share them with the rest of you.
Articles
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Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule
A long form article about the power and influence in US and even international politics Elon Musk has amassed, and how unsuited he of all people is to hold this kind of power. I recommend reading this on a sunny day outside in the park, so you have something to balance out the feelings of hopelessness and despair that this will cause.
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No, you don’t need a ‘very bespoke AOSP’ to turn your phone into a Rabbit R1 — here’s proof
Turns out the new hip AI assistant Rabbit R1 that came out a week or so ago is really exactly what it should have been from the start: an app. Oops…
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The Xbox 360 Blades Dashboard Has One Foot in the Grave
The iconic first version of the Xbox 360s dashboard called Blades might go “extinct”, because the original consoles are dying, and consoles that have been updated to a newer firmware got a new dashboard and can never be downgraded again.
Videos
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Everything is a Remix (Complete Updated 2023 Edition)
One of my alltime favourite Video essays on Youtube, about how virtually every piece of art, whether it’s movies, music, software, is base on some prior piece of art. Grab a cup of coffee, lean back and enjoy!
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MKBHD - Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable
I mentioned the Rabbit R1 above, and here’s MKBHD’s review of it, with a really interesting reflection on the state of tech these days in the second half.
Personal Homepages
I found two new personal homepages this week that I really like, both in terms of design and content, so if you like people’s personal homepages as much as I do, pay them a visit!
I just had a quick look at the Apple event from earlier today, where they introduced the latest incredibly expensive exciting iPads. And boy… each of these events seems to be more stilted, more overproduced, more plastic and unreal looking than the last.
Which somehow reminded me of Agent Smith from the Matrix, when he describes the first version of the Matrix to Morpheus in this scene:
“Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world world where none suffered, where everyone would be happy?
It was a disaster! No one would accept the program…”
These presentations feel to me like that first iteration of the Matrix. Everything is perfect, everyone is constantly happy and smiling, everything is clean and polished and beautiful and perfectly produced, lit and set in scene… but it doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t feel human. In fact, it feels like a grotesque nightmare to me.
Anyone else get that feeling?
I collect a ton of links to great articles and software projects, and this is my attempt to sort through them and share them with the rest of you.
Articles
- Miniature Macintosh Plus Build
A great post by Codingcipher about how he built a miniature version of a 1980s Macintosh Plus. He goes into a lot of detail, and the end result looks pheonomenal! One day, I’ll build something like this too.
- Pluralistic: Boeing’s deliberately defective fleet of flying sky-wreckage (01 May 2024)
Cory Doctorow is at it again and rips into the messed up work culture at Boeing. More relevant than ever now that the second whistleblower has mysteriously died… if you haven’t already voved to never set foot on a Boeing airplane again, you will after reading this. Truly horrfying…
- Heat Death of the Internet
A satirical and yet completely accurate description of what using the modern web/tech world feels like. Will leave you in tears, but you won’t be sure if they’re tears of laughter or tears of sadness.
- Google Search results polluted by buggy AI-written code frustrate coders
The headline says it all… enshittification marches on. Pretty soon all we’ll be able to find through Google is AI generated nonsense. Which makes it more relevant than ever to build up a personal archive of good content on the web, because we might not be able to find it again in the future. So let’s get some software for that:
Software/Services
- SingleFile, Web Extension for saving a faithful copy of a complete web page in a single HTML file
A great browser plugin to save a copy of the currently loaded webpage as a single HTML file. Can also be run from the command line.
- yt-dlp, a feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader with support for thousands of sites
A commandline downloader for video/audio content from the internet, can download pretty much everything out there it seems.
- VideoGist - Delightful AI Video Summaries
I know, I know, it’s AI… but I used it this week to get a text summary of a lengthy Youtube video, and it actually did a pretty good job with it. I would only use it with videos I’ve already watched though, so I can verify it isn’t spitting out bullshit.
- myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox: Push-button installer of macOS Catalina, Mojave, and High Sierra guests in Virtualbox on x86 CPUs for Windows, Linux, and macOS
Have you ever tried installing MacOS in a virtual machine? No? Just me? Well… here’s a project that helps with it anyway.
Here are some interesting things I came across this week. I might make this into a regular series, if for nobody else than me so I can look back a year from now at the things that fascinated and interested me right now.
Articles
Software/Services
I constantly collect links and dump them into my bookmarking system, so I thought I’d share some of the more interesting ones I came across in the last couple of weeks.
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Debugging Python code from the command line via Python debugger ‘pdb’.
I recently needed to debug some Python code and had no idea how (I rarely write anything in Python), but a short search away I found this question on StackOverflow, and the first answer provided everything I needed to know.
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Send RSS/Atom feeds to Mastodon
A pretty simple Python script that can consume an RSS feed and post new feed items to Mastodon. Simple, easy to understand and debug, and does exactly what I need. I’m using it now to automatically post links to new blog posts on this site on my Mastodon profile.
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Google search is becoming worse
Google is sending more and more traffic towards places like Reddit and Quora, and honestly I’m not sure if that’s a loss or a win for the small web and people with personal homepages…
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Ever wanted to install Windows 2000 on an old Core2Duo Macbook?
The Windows 2000 installation disk doesn’t boot on these types of Macbooks, but by exchanging a file on the disc with the equivalent from a Windows XP installation disk, you can make it work. If you want to is an entirely different question of course.
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A CLI note taking and bookmarking system.
I’ve been using this for the past few weeks to store bookmarks, and I really like the simplicity of it. You just call nb <URL> and it stores the site as a bookmark and downloads a (text only) snapshot of it too, if possible.
This is a test entry to see if automatically reposting new posts on Mastodon works. If it does, I’ll write a longer post about it. If not, there might be more tests, but hopefully not.
The city I live in is going to invest about a billion (1.000.000.000) Euros into building an Autobahn through the middle of the city. The Autobahn (highway, motorway…) already exists, but inside the city it’s a normal street with crossings etc., and now it’s supposed to become a proper Autobahn where you can speed right through the city without any traffic lights or crossings.
Just a reminder, this is a current thing from the 2020s, not the 1960s.
And what do you get if you build more and better roads into the city? More cars inside the city of course. In a city that’s already suffocating under the current amount of traffic.
I think I need a better place to live in. This is just too depressing.
I didn’t really know what to title this post, and I think the title doesn’t really capture what I’m trying to say, but I couldn’t think of anything better either, so please bear with me.
A few days ago Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) posted a not very flattering review of an AI controlled gadget on Youtube which apparently created a controversy online where several people accused him of bankrupting the company by giving their product a negative review.
That’s complete and utter bullshit of course, and he posted a response video where he defended his review and also stated the more than obvious fact “bad reviews don’t kill companies, bad products kill companies”. Duh.
This reminded me of a post on Mastodon from Youtuber Not Just Bikes from a few weeks ago, where he mentioned that he released a video about a bridge in Amsterdam and people demanded that he take the video down because it was “inappropriate” since a few days prior a bridge in Baltimore had collapsed.
And I can’t help but wonder, what the hell is going on in these peoples minds? A tech reviewer isn’t allowed to state that a product is bad anymore? Somewhere a bridge collapses and now the entire world isn’t supposed to talk about bridges anymore because it’s “inappropriate”? What’s going on here? What kind of world do these people want to live in?
Yesterday I found out by chance that Youtuber Dianna Cowern aka PhysicsGirl is suffering from the most severe case of Long COVID… she’s bedridden 24/7 and incapable of doing even the most basic things like reading or even just having a conversation as that immediately worsens her symptoms.
There’s many more like her, millions probably, who are suffering from Long COVID or ME/CFS and who are pretty much forgotten by society because the disease renders them all but invisible to the public.
And yet they’re still there, and they’re quietly suffering at home. The acute pandemic may be over, but the long term consequences that some of the afflicted are suffering are still very real and substantial.
On the positive side, scientists are working hard at figuring out the cause of the illness and are working on potential treatments, and slowly but steadily progress is being made. So there is hope that these people may some day, hopefully soon, be able to live their lives again.
Not time for summer, but switching the clock from winter time to summer time, or daylight saving time.
We had this switch yesterday, and I hate this time shift with a passion. It’s just so unneccessary. And apparently completely impossible now to get rid of, even though it was totally possible to introduce it 45 years ago.
Anyway, this year I noticed something… I seem to live my life by the clock. And not my internal clock, the external one. I get up when it’s time to get up, I have lunch when it’s lunchtime, I go to bed when it’s bedtime. And for all these things I use the actual time as a reference, and not my internal clock or how I’m actually feeling.
I was kind of aware of this, but not really, but this year I really noticed it. Having a consistent daily rhythm is a good thing I think, at least for me, but being a slave to the clock definitely is not.
So this is something to be more aware of… how am I feeling, am I actually ready to get up, or tired, or hungry, or do I just do something because it’s time for it.
Dustin notified me that my thoughts posts also showed up in the RSS feed for the posts posts (okay, I need better names for this), so I had a look and fixed it.
So now this should only show up once in your feed reader if you are subscribed to both my feeds. Thanks Dustin!
I’m sitting in a café right now, just watching the people around me… and three tables from me is a guy constantly on his phone, the other side on speakerphone at full volume, “entertaining” the entire place with his private conversations. Now he’s talking in a foreign language I don’t understand, but it’s distracting and annoying nevertheless.
Then I look outside the window at a busy street, and another guy just casually parks his car in the second lane (in the middle of the street in other words), gets out and calmly walks away. A minute later an entire bus full of people has to stop behind this car and wait until it can pass by, making everybody on the bus late because one person can’t be bothered to find a suitable parking spot and walk a few meters.
It’s little behaviours like these that the people doing them don’t think twice about, but that make life for other people just a little more unpleasant or annoying. And I’m taking it as a reminder for myself to consider the impact of my behaviour on other people.
Most people are at least somewhat familiar with Black Sabbath because of the popularity of Ozzy Osbourne, but fewer people know that they had a decades long career with about a million lineup changes and a lot of different singers in the 80s and 90s.
The most famous one is of course Ronnie James Dio, but one singer hardly anyone is familiar with is Tony Martin, who recorded a few albums with Sabbath in the late 80s/early 90s, which are in my opinion incredibly overlooked and underrated. The albums were The Eternal Idol, Headless Cross, Tyr, Cross Purposes and Forbidden, and especially Headless Cross and Tyr are two of my favourite Sabbath albums, if not some my favourite metal albums of all time, period.
They haven’t been available on Spotify or on CD for a long time, but now finally they’re being reissued in form of a remastered box set, and I couldn’t be happier to finally see these albums being given the respect and love they deserve.
If you are a Sabbath fan, but don’t know this era of the band, I highly recommend checking it out. It’s completely different from the Ozzy material, more similar to the Ronnie James Dio albums with a heavy 80s touch (with lots and lots of reverb!), which means great epic songs and simply fantastic vocals. I can’t recommend these albums enough, I hope you’ll give them a listen!
https://blabbermouth.net/news/black-sabbath-box-set-of-tony-martin-era-recordings-anno-domini-1989-1995-to-arrive-in-may
Inspired by a post by Simone on his Minutes to Midnight blog, which to my horror I discovered is already three months old (it felt more like three weeks to me), I decided to add a few words of description to the blogs I have linked on my links page. It’s a work in progress, and I’m not entirely happy yet with all the descriptions I wrote, but it’s a start.
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:
I implemented a (pretty rudimentary) dark mode for the website. It’s set to follow the operating system preferences for light or dark mode. I considered adding a switch to the website to toggle between light and dark, but I don’t know if this is really necessary…
Feedback is of course welcome, as well as bug reports if something isn’t working right.
Hier kommen Gedanken rein.