The web is getting worse, search engines are becoming more and more useless and AI crawlers are so greedy that by now they're almost indistinguishable from a DDoS attack. I had a few interesting discussions about this on Mastodon this week, and everybody is exhausted, frustrated and angry. What do we do about it? I...

I remember when I was a kid my dad told me that he watched the first moon landing in 1969 live on TV, which blew my mind because the moon landing did (and does) seem like ancient history to me, like something that happened in the distant past. I mean, TV was still (mostly) in black and white! But of course it was...

Oh nice, a blogging challenge, sort of. I saw this post on David's blog titled "What is the oldest thing you own", which is a reply to someone else's post, and I thought I'd write a reply to that, too. Looking around, I realise I don't have many really old things in my possession. I have a lot of old things because...

Man, following the news this week was exhausting. Everything has kind of this ugly orange tint... I think it might be time for another news diet. There are still interesting things happening though, they just kind of disappear under all the awfulness. Did you know that next month a crew is scheduled to fly to the...

Over the last few weeks and months I read a few books about the history of the early internet, so I thought why not talk about them here a bit. I haven't written a book review in ages, so maybe it's time to start doing that again. This is for Everyone by Tim Berners-Lee Of course this book has to be on the list....

This week I was a guest over on Hyde's blog. He has a series called "Over/Under" where he gives his guests a handful of topics and lets them riff on whether they think the topic is over- or underrated. The topics he picked for me were Italy, Asahi Linux, Dark Mode, Printers and Turkish Coffee. It was quite an...

I started writing an intro about current world events, but you know what? I don't want to talk about it. It only puts me (and probably you too) in a bad mood, and I'd rather be in a good mood. So instead, here's a picture from a few days ago when it had just snowed for the first time, and snow always makes...

So here's a story I just thought about because I saw a link to the Italian post on Mastodon which triggered a memory in me. During my last year of University, in the winter of 2008/2009, I spent a few months in Italy, where I did an internship in an Italian tech company in a small town in the region of Veneto, not...

The other day I took apart an old smoke detector. I looked at it for a bit until I thought I'd figured out how it works, and then I thought, hey, why not write a quick blog post about it, maybe someone else will find it interesting, too. And so I did and I put the post online. Small problem though: I completely...

Last month I've lived in my current apartment for exactly 10 years, which means it's now time to replace the smoke alarms, which you're supposed to do after 10 years. When I was a kid, I always took everything I could get my hands on apart to see what it looked like on the inside, much to the dismay of my parents at...

Over the last few days I read a lot of end-of-year blog posts around the small web, and I noticed that by reading personal blogs you get the full range of human experiences. Some people are doing really well and are in a good place, and some are unfortunately struggling due to health issues, financial uncertainty or...

Last Linkdump of 2025! And maybe last post of this year too, I don't know yet. I just checked, and this is the 108th blog post I'm writing this year. I'm too lazy to do it now, but if I stitched them all together I would get at least a small book out of it. Which means I've written a book this year! Granted, a very...