2025-08-15 08:00:00
Last week's linkdump was apparently very polarising, because it triggered some serious HATEMAIL. Yeah. I mentioned in my intro that nobody would even notice if I skipped posting for a week, and someone sent me an e-mail saying that they came here "very angry" and that I shouldn't dare think that nobody would notice if I stopped posting because they loved my linkdumps and absolutely people would care and notice. And that I shouldn't allow myself to think that nobody cared about my writing. Then to top it off they wished me a nice day, like an absolute fucking psychopath. Awful, right? I can't say it enough, and I hope one day people will listen: The small web is a terrible place and we should all go back to Facebook and Twitter to be safe from such horrible online abuse!
To recover from the trauma, I decided it was best to continue forward on my path and bring you another weekly linkdump. The identity of the online abuser shall remain unknown, because privacy matters and because it definitely wasn't Joel ;) Thanks for the nice message :)
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Hardware Projects
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Around the Small Web
Misc
2025-08-10 08:00:00
My laptop of choice is a 2014 13'' MacBook Air. I've had it for years, I love the design, it's thin and light, the battery still lasts for hours despite being 10 years old and it runs Linux, which at least for me is its most important feature. I use this laptop daily and most of the posts on this website were written on this - in fact pretty much the entire website was coded on it. It's the perfect computer for me, and I hope it will continue to run for many more years to come.
A few months ago however it started acting up. Some of they keys didn't register the keypresses anymore, some of the time. The affected keys were mostly ctrl, shift, space, backspace and some of the arrow keys. Sometimes they would require multiple keypresses until one was registered, other times they worked fine without any issues for days or weeks at a time. At first I thought it was a software issue, but after trying all kinds of nvram/pram reset rain dances and booting a different OS from USB altogether (I even tried an original MacOS!) only to find the same fault happening there as well, everything pointed to a hardware issue.
Apparently that's a known fault that these machines develop sometimes, and annoyingly the problem can either be with the keyboard or with the logic board itself. Meaning, you can replace one and there's a fifty-fifty chance that it will either fix the problem, or you will have wasted your money. So we're dealing with an intermittent fault here that can have multiple different causes. The best kind of fault!
Replacing the logic board doesn't make a lot of sense; there are replacements available on Ebay, but the ones with the same specs as my laptop are quite expensive and at that point I might as well just buy a new computer instead. It's not like ten year old MacBooks are very expensive anymore anyway, but I'm cheap and I hate replacing entire devices just because one component failed, so I decided to try replacing the keyboard to see if that fixed the problem.
And that's where the nightmare begins. Because this is an Apple device, and what does Apple hate? Customers wanting to repair their devices.
You can't just replace the keyboard on a MacBook. No no no. You have to replace the entire topcase, because the keyboard is literally riveted in with dozens of tiny rivets. This is a topcase btw:
It's half the laptop.
I think in the first generation of these Unibody MacBooks (the Aluminium ones) they still used screws to mount the keyboard, but then some genius at Apple figured out that you could use rivets instead, probably because rivets are a tiny bit cheaper and faster to put in than screws which means you save money in manufacturing, and because you don't care about passing these savings on to your customers you can pocket them and make more money which is always a good thing if you're Apple and of course using rivets instead of screws has the additional benefit of making the device less repairable which creates more e-waste incentive for the customer to buy a new device which also means more MONEY for Apple and there's nothing that Tim Apple likes more than making EVEN MORE FUCKING MONEY to roll around in and I should probably stop now.
Ok. So I bought a new topcase and got to work replacing the old one.
I didn't take any photos during the process, but iFixit has a great guide on how to remove the topcase from a MacBook in 41 easy steps. Which will get you halfway through the repair, because that's just how to take the laptop apart. You then have to follow the guide in reverse to put everything back together. Here's a summary of how to get to the keyboard:
Battery, logic board, speakers, microphone array, touch pad, display... everything needs to come out. There's lots of tiny screws of different lengths that you have to keep track of, some things are glued in, and some things are connected with the most delicate flat flex cables that you have to be incredibly careful with when you disconnect them. You can easily break the connector or rip it off the logic board entirely, and then it's game over unless you have a microsoldering workstation, which I don't.
Anyway, after you've taken everything out, this is what you're left with:
I regret not taking a picture of my whole desk at this point, because it was a mess. That's the inside of the topcase and the back of the keyboard that you can't realistically take out, though you're welcome to try. I didn't want to do this which is why I just bought a replacement topcase from Ebay for 20 Euros. It probably came out of a MacBook that was sent to recycling and it had a Swedish keyboard layout, but the keycaps are easily removable so I could just swap the ones from my German keyboard in.
So I got to work putting everything back together, made sure there were no screws left and all cables were properly connected, turned the computer back on and - it still worked. What a relief! The whole process took me well over an hour and I would have hated having to take it apart again to figure out what I did wrong.
So, 50/50 chance that the keyboard was the issue. Was it?
Thankfully, yes. I did this a few days ago, I used the laptop normally ever since and I'm typing this right now on it, and so far everything is working perfectly. All in all I'm pretty happy with the repair, 20 Euros for a used replacement part is fair and if that gets a few more years out of this laptop, it's well worth the price and even the effort.
But Apple... this really shouldn't be so difficult. If you're not experienced in working with modern electronics, then this whole process is definitely not for you and the fact that the keyboard is riveted in place and you have to disassemble the entire laptop and replace half of it for a few broken keys is insane, as is the fact that the only reason I could even do this repair is because of third parties selling (used) replacement parts and providing detailed guides on how to do it, because Apple does neither.
I really like this laptop and I hope I'll get a few more years out of it now... but the next one will be a Framework or something similar that's designed by people who value my right to repair my own stuff. Apple clearly does not.
2025-08-08 08:00:00
I go through the same cycle every week. Throughout the week I collect interesting links that I come across, and then on Friday I sit down, go through the list and put together this linkdump. I don't specifically go looking for things to put in here, I just bookmark whatever I come across via Mastodon or RSS or randomly browsing the web, and I always have enough links. More than enough usually. And yet I'm always, always anxious that I might not have enough. You'd think that after doing this for over a year I would develop some trust in my process, but apparently not. What makes this extra crazy is that even if I only had two or three interesting things to share, that would be fine. This isn't my job, I don't get paid to do it, nobody expects anything and in fact even if I skipped a week entirely, nobody would even notice. Still I'm anxious that I might not do a good job. The mind does weird things, and mine is wired for anxiety it seems. I still love doing this though, and I'm always happy when I've finished and published a post.
Anyway, just thought I'd share. This post is brought to you by anxiety. Still better than a hairy buttcrack I suppose ;)
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Around the Small Web
Misc
2025-08-01 08:00:00
Here's how you get some focused writing done. You go to a cozy café, find a nice table, you sit down with your laptop, order your coffee and then you discover that, right across the room from you and with his back to you sits a guy who doesn't understand why belts exist or why shirts should be tucked into pants... and so every time you look up from your computer you're staring right into his buttcrack. Amazing! Nothing will make you want to stay on task more than the prospect of looking at that.
So here's this week's linkdump, brought to you with the help of some random dude's hairy ass. Hope you enjoy :)
Articles
Software/Services
Around the Small Web
2025-07-25 08:00:00
This week we lost Ozzy, less than three weeks after he was on stage for his farewell concert. That was quite a shock, because while he definitely looked frail due to his illness, he didn't look like a man who was going to die two weeks later. The outpouring of love and appreciation for him throughout the music world these last couple of days was quite moving to read though, I don't think I've seen anything like it since Lemmy died 10 years ago. Farewell Prince of Darkness, and thank you for co-inventing Heavy Metal for us!
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Software/Services
Hardware Projects
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Around the Small Web
2025-07-20 08:00:00
And that's it. The website design is back to normal, the OCC 2025 is over. How was it?
I would say I achieved what I set out to do. I wanted to set up a Windows 98 machine and see if I could recreate the feeling of going online in the late 90s. And I feel I was successful in that. I listened to internet radio in Winamp, chatted with people over IRC and ICQ (a big one!) and I surfed the information superhighway thanks to Protoweb. None of this is groundbreaking, but all of it is hugely nostalgic for me and I loved revisiting it.
It's also a little bittersweet. As much as I'd love to convince myself otherwise sometimes, the world has moved on and it isn't as simple as it used to be (or as it exists in my memories) anymore. This post will be gobbled up by countless AI bots as soon as it goes live, I'm being tracked 24/7 through the internet and in fact through almost my entire life by companies all across the world who make a fortune out of storing and selling my personal data to the highest paying bidder with complete and utter disregard for my privacy.
Playing around with old hardware and software and services provides some nice escapism, but it also serves as a reminder to me that things aren't like this anymore. Many things are better now of course, it isn't all doom and gloom, and not everything was great back then, either. I remember that ICQs terms of services back in the day stated that everything everyone sent via ICQ became their intellectual property. And that was before the days of encryption, when everything was transmitted and stored as plain text. We read it, we were outraged, and we kept using ICQ all the same. Now that I think about it, this hasn't changed at all. We still put up with highly intrusive terms and services because we shrug and think "what can you do".
Got a little off topic there I think...
Anyway, about the OCC - the last two years were also different in that by coincidence both times I had the week off and could dedicate more time to reading blogs, interacting with people etc. while this year it was a normal workweek for me and so I only dabbled in this stuff a bit in the evenings and on the weekends.
There was also some drama on IRC which left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, because none of it was necessary.
So overall, mixed feelings, but it was still fun playing around with all of this stuff and now that it's set up, I will keep this computer around and fire it up from time to time. It's a mini PC after all and it doesn't take up a ton of space.
Lastly, thanks to all the people who made it worthwile, who commented on my posts and especially those who hit me up on ICQ! That was pretty cool, even though it was a bit buggy. But I'm sure it'll improve over time, and now that I have an ICQ number again, I'm not letting it go :)