Hey everyone, it's Halloween! Except it's not, because I live in Germany and we don't have Halloween, even though the media has relentlessly and with some success tried to introduce it over here as well in recent years. When I was a kid, Halloween wasn't a thing at all. We had a different tradition though in the...

You might think that that's a really weird headline, and you would not be wrong. Let me explain. In the 1960s the Atomic Age arrived in rural South Germany with the construction of the Gundremmingen Nuclear Power Plant at the Danube River, near the village of Gundremmingen, Bavaria. The power plant started producing...

This week I tried an experiment. I booked a small apartment somewhere in the countryside and went there for three days without bringing any devices with me that could go online. The only things I brought were a dumb phone, formerly known as, you know, a phone (so I could be reached in case of an emergency), an iPod...

I hope this week you all did The Right Thing™ and threw away your old Windows 10 computers. If you haven't yet, what are you waiting for? These things are now a hazard to your and everybody's health and safety! If your computer is not on The List then I'm sorry, but it has to go. Bring it in for recycling, send it...

It's Friday again! Which means tomorrow is Saturday, and tomorrow is Retro Computer Festival at HNF in Paderborn, Germany. HNF is an amazing computer museum which alone is worth a visit, but RCF makes it all the more interesting because it's an exhibition of all kinds of retro computers by hobbyists who present...

Back in July I tried a service called NINA that aimed to bring back ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, AOL and a few other internet services from the 90s and 2000s. I registered an ICQ number and chatted with a few people and it was fun. Now it's gone. The last time I logged into the ICQ number I had registered there was a...

Today is a public holiday in Germany, as we celebrate the reunification of East and West Germany that was finalized 35 years ago today. It's kind of unbelievable to think that when I was a child, Germany was divided into two very different countries separated by an impenetrable border on which hundreds were killed...

I don't know why, but I just realised I haven't talked about music here in a while. Guess it's time to talk about music again! I'm just going to roll two completely unrelated things into one post, because well, that's what I feel like doing. Priest and Ozzy In July, Ozzy played his last ever show as a final goodbye...

I'm sitting next to a group of teenagers right now, maybe 17 or 18 years old, still in school... and I realise, I'm old. Not only am I 43 and I could literally be their dad, but I also have no damn clue what they're talking about. They're discussing music, and I love music, but the bands and artists they're...

Did you know that the melting point of glass is somewhere above 600°C? Glass doesn't have a clearly defined melting point like water does, but at this temperature it becomes somewhat soft and gooey. The hotter it gets the more fluid it becomes. You really have to heat it up a lot to turn glass into a liquid. (And...

I work in the field of software development. Recently I helped a colleague with a problem that he's been trying to solve all day but he couldn't really seem make progress. No big deal, it happens. Sometimes you need a second pair of eyes to look over what's going on, because they might see something you've missed...

There was some great news about Apple this week! What? No, not the iPhone thing. They made a phone that's only 5,5mm thin! Well except for the part of the phone which isn't 5,5mm thin of course. Let's not look at that part. But no, I'm talking about another device. Apparently there were games made and sold for the...