It is amazing how many people I see claiming that AI has one good use. No one seems to agree on what that one good use is, and there's always a hell of a lot of goalpost shifting and special pleading involved. For some reason a lot of folks quite …

When I joined GitHub in 2012, it was for developers, made by developers. It felt good, and it felt like an open community. That ship has long sailed. Rats fleeing the GitHub ship - yes, generated by AI, as I thought that would be funny You probably know why people are …

It's that time of the year again: short days, long dark nights that magically bleed into working days, the Steam Wintersale to get more material for your game backlog that you will Really Eventually Play (somewhere after 2042), and the anniversary of this weblog. Quite amazing that I have been …

I like to tinker with user interfaces and especially typefaces (fonts) have fascinated me for a long time. Not long ago, I rolled out Literata on this weblog and a lot of other places where I read long-form texts (wait, it has been over a year already?!). Late 2023 I …

I am disappointed. One could even say I am peeved. Sad and slightly angry. Not very surprised though. Card holder on top of keyboard For several very convenient years I have been using my phone for contactless payments, to the point that I was frequently unsure of the exact whereabouts …

Recently I came across an article I couldn't stop nodding along with while reading. 'Enshittification' is a term we have learned the last years about platform decay and things in general just become worse (hopefully after having peeked at all). The level of quality in software development is degenerating too …

Remember when I wrote I was going to the WHY2025 hacker camp? Because I totally went there and it was great! I totally missed out on the opportunity to post on my weblog from there, but at least I shared a few pics on Mastodon when camping - did I mention …

Google AI Overview Sales tool, image by HouseFresh But are AI Overviews leading you to the best results on the web? Or is this just a new prime spot for selling you products you will regret buying? And how does this change affect the websites that made Google’s AI …

I have been running a Git server for over a decade now (before that it was mercurial and before that versioning system I rocked SVN, dating back at least twenty years). It has hosted my private repositories and served as a mirror for my GitHub projects. More recently though I …

Did I mention that I'm going to a hackercon? Because I'm going. To a hacker conference. It's going to be rad. If you are also visiting WHY2025 in August this year, it might be interesting meeting up! Feel free to drop me a line or mention the village you're going …

Last week I had a revelation. I had been having odd issues with my workstation for years, which I wrote down to storage being iffy. It ranged from games complaining about corrupt files (of course while trying to play them online, together with friends) to Firefox or Electron apps suddenly …

This is going to be brief, because it has been a long week and this has been a tiring day with some unplanned setbacks which in the end thankfully were undone, throwing away the work done with it. But hey, we're still here! What also is still here is my …

Sorry for using some French here, but FUCK this. I have been using Omnivore since June this year as alternative for Pocket and have been loving it. I normally don't love (web)applications, but this one ticked a lot of boxes: it looked good while keeping out of the way …

At the start of this year I bought this cute little bugger: It replaced an ancient Netgear WNDR 3700v2 WiFi router running DD-WRT that had been serving our home internet for ages, but was showing fraying around the edges by not being able to fullfill QoS, for example when Steam …

If you - like me - regularly check out sourcecode (read: Git) repositories of projects that you stumble across or use in a hobby project/product or at work, you will now and then find one or more issues in their tracker with a title similar to the above, often with remarks …

Housefresh - an independent publisher and reviewer of air purifiers for your home - recently published a well-researched and damning article about how big media companies game the system by flooding Google with useless listicles of 'best product for X' without actually testing and reviewing them; 'content' is mostly based on Amazon …

Twenty years ago - not long after the turn of the century - I was tinkering with some PHP code to replace a static HTML page I had been experimenting with. It was becoming my private website, in the classic sense of the word: where I put stuff I am interested in …

Internet 'fundamentalist' Louis Rossmann on YouTube, adblocking and the state of the ad-supported internet that's currently our reality. There are some good points made about how the internet turned to shit, basically because the race to the bottom we made with for example jumping on Gmail in 2004 with its …

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a …

Recently, I wanted to split off a few files from a Git repository in which I keep notes to a repository of their own. Reason was that they served an entirely different purpose than the rest, so it made more sense to separate the two sets. However, they had quite …