2025-06-23 08:00:00
For a while I had an account on Instagram and I posted quite a lot of pictures there between 2017 and 2021. The account is still there, but I don't post there anymore because I've kind of fallen out of love with photography and because I disagree with my good friend and frequent guest on the blog Mark who runs Instagram about, you know, everything.
But I still like the pictures I took, and so I decided to host them on my own site instead. It was easier than expected actually because Instagram offers an export of all your data (once you know where to look, because they hide it pretty well) and this contains a html site which presents your pictures rather nicely already.
All I had to do was edit the code for this site a little to make it better fit in, and integrate it into the website. It's not perfect, but it works and it was surprisingly little work.
So now I have a photoblog! Maybe I should take more pictures again. Anyway, here it is, all my old Instagram photos, freed from the clutches of the evil oppressive empire and under my own control.
Feels good.
2025-06-21 08:00:00
I saw a news story yesterday the someone shared on Mastodon. It sounded intriguing, so I clicked it and I read it. I'm going to share the link with you in a moment, and I initially considered just putting it in my next linkdump, but I wanted to write a bit more than just two or three lines about it.
Here's the headline of the news post:
Exclusive / Reddit in talks to embrace Sam Altman’s iris-scanning Orb to verify users
And these are the first two paragraphs:
Reddit is considering using World ID, the verification system based on iris-scanning Orbs whose parent company was co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
According to two people familiar with the matter, World ID could soon become a way for Reddit users to verify that they are unique individuals while remaining anonymous on the platform.
Ok, here is the full post if you want to read it.
I had never heard of an iris scanning orb or a thing called "World ID" before, and I didn't do any research after reading this post. It stands in complete isolation to me, this is the first time that I'm hearing anything about it. I will look it up after I've written this, but right now that post is all I know.
And I realised, I have no idea if this is real or satire.
I used to be able to tell satire from reality pretty easily because satire is always just a bit too much and too over the top to be taken seriously.
This? It sounds absolutely batshit insane to me, and it feels like satire. Or something straight out of Black Mirror.
But we live in an absolutely batshit insane world now, and so it might just as well be real. Sam Altman might just as well have founded a company that is working on developing an orb that soon we all will be required to have next to our computers and let it scan our eyeballs to prove that we are human.
It's weird. The more I think about it the more it seems like this could actually be real. It certainly sounds like something someone like Altman would dream up and be actually convinced that this is a great idea and not a dystopian fever dream.
I'm going to read up on this now and see if this is actually real. But I wanted to share this feeling here before I do. We really live in a fucked up timeline, don't we.
I googled it. It's real.
The orb is used to verify a person’s World ID—a private, secure, digital passport that empowers millions of individuals to prove they’re human online.
It does this by first using highly specialized sensors to ensure the person standing in front of it is a human. It then takes and processes a series of iris images to create an iris code, which is a digital representation of the texture of the iris. The iris code is used to verify that the person is unique and has not verified a World ID before.
It "empowers" me to prove that I'm human. Right. Okay.
Can I please be transferred to a saner timeline?
2025-06-20 08:00:00
Remember when I said that I wanted to keep the number of links down? Well it turns out, I suck at it. There's just too much interesting stuff I want to share (and keep, because this is also my personal bookmarking tool of choice here).
Btw, a friend pointed out that it would be nice if my blog was searchable, and I absolutely agree with him. Zolas search sucks however, so I decided to just dump the full text of all posts onto this page (the one that you reach when you click "blog" in the navigation bar) and you can search through them with the search function of your browser. That's gone because it created a ton of traffic by allowing AI scrapers to just access this one site and conveniently download everything. Whoops. Talk about unintended consequences. Anyway, here are the links.
Articles
Software/Services
Videos
Around the Small Web
2025-06-18 08:00:00
My parents went on vacation for a week, and because of this I'm currently back home at their house, taking care of the cats, watering the plants, making sure nobody does anything sketchy to the house etc. It's not really necessary, the neighbours could do these things just fine, but my parents feel better when someone from the family is here at least part of the time, so why not.
This is the house I grew up in, my parents built it in or around 1980, before I was born. It's in a small town, more like a village of around 1600 inhabitants somewhere in rural South Germany, about two hours from where I live today.
Sometimes when I'm here I take a walk around, and I'm always surprised by the changes that happened since the last time I've been here, but also since I moved away and since my childhood.
When I was a kid here in the 80s and 90s, the town had two bakeries, three small stores that sold groceries, a butcher's shop, a hairdresser, a post office, a shoeshop that would sell and repair shoes, a store that sold newspapers and magazines and stationery, two banks... in other words, pretty much everything you needed except for maybe a pharmacy.
Today, almost all of this is gone. The bank is just a room with an ATM in it, one of the bakeries is still there, but the baker retired long ago and they're getting the goods delivered from somewhere else, and there is one medium sized supermarket on the edge of town that opened something like 15 years ago. All the other places are closed, some of them have been converted to apartments and some seem to be just abandoned.
It's kind of depressing.
This place was never a traditional village with a market square in the middle that all public life revolved around, but there were places where people would meet and socialise. I remember that the old lady in the store "downtown" (we live up on the hill in a then newly constructed area while the old village is in the valley near the river - sounds big, but it's just a five minute walk from here to there) knew my name and knew which family I belonged to. She knew these things for all the kids and sometimes when our parents sent us there to buy groceries we'd get some candy for free. Or we went and bought our own with our pocket money. And I remember my dad used to send me to buy cigarettes and she would happily sell a pack of cigarettes to a 10 year old because that was entirely normal back then. Crazy times...
Anyway, none of this seems to exist anymore. When I walk around town today the streets are empty. Nobody's walking around because there's nowhere to go and nothing to do. There's the supermarket, but people go there by car and for everything else you need to hop in the car and drive to the next bigger town, which is about 10 km away, or to the next city, which is 20 km away. There's 1600 people living here, but everybody's either sitting at home in their own house or in their car going somewhere else.
I've never been a fan of the "small town lifestyle" - there's a reason why I moved away and never came back. But I've often heard and read that in small towns there's a sense of community and belonging while the city is anonymous and impersonal.
I'm sure there is some truth to that, and there's probably a lot more to unpack here - the supermarket that killed the small businesses, the fact that this particular residential area was built in the late 70s/early 80s with a lot of young families moving in, so there were a ton of kids around back then while today all the kids have moved away and only the old generation remains, the fact that there are no jobs here and everybody has to work somewhere else, and on and on.
But when I compare my life in the city to living here - yes it's loud and messy and dirty and there are some strange people around, but at least the city's alive. There are cafés and restaurants, stores and parks, cinemas and libraries and just a lot of places to go and be, while this town feels dead. The only things you can do here is sit at home and watch TV or maybe mow your lawn (the lawns here are flawless!), but if you want to do literally anything else, you have to get in the car and drive into the next city. This morning I drove 10 km one way just to get a cup of coffee, because that's where the nearest café is. I felt like an insane person.
I don't know. There's not really a point to this, but this is what I'm noticing here. The place has changed, and I don't think it has changed for the better.
2025-06-15 08:00:00
I've been a fan of Cal Newport for a long time now. He started out as a blogger in the mid 2000s where as a college student he wrote about advice for his fellow students, how to study more effectively and efficiently. His blog was called "study hacks" back then.
Today he works as a computer science professor and he's written a number of books about how to deal with the overload of the modern work environment and how to live a meaningful life, which he calls The Deep Life. That's also the main topic of his podcast, where he answers questions that listeners send in about how to deal with specific problems they experience (mainly) in their work environment. And occasionally he interviews a fellow podcaster or writer if their work fits into the theme of his show.
A few days ago he posted an interview with author Chris Guillebeau who like Cal himself started out as a blogger and then became an author.
They spend some time at the start of the interview reminiscing about their early days as bloggers in the 2000s and how the blogging world back then was this great community of like-minded people who would comment on each others blogs and follow each other via their RSS feeds and where nothing was algorithmically curated because it was the days before social media. Once Facebook and Twitter appeared on the scene, blogging stopped being a thing and everybody moved to those platforms instead, and then with the advent of algorithmic curation everything (these are my words, not theirs) turned to shit.
It's fascinating and interesting to listen to, and I always enjoy hearing stories about tech or internet history from people who experienced it first hand (coincidentally I recently read the book "Bubble Blog" by Richard MacManus, one of the early Silicon Valley bloggers who talks about his experience during the 2000s as a blogger as well). But all during the interview, they talked about blogging in the past tense, as if it was this thing that happened at some point in the past and which simply doesn't exist anymore today.
Thankfully, that's not the case.
Yes, blogging is not new and hip anymore and there isn't that feeling of "this is something new and exciting and we're changing the world and there is tons of money to be made" that seemed to be around in the 2000s. Nowadays that feeling is probably reserved for the people who are doing something with AI.
But blogging is still very much alive and thriving. It's just not mainstream anymore, which I'd argue is a good thing. If you're reading this of course you already know that everything they described in their conversation is still here. We have our own personal blogs, we communicate through emails or comments (not necessarily on the blogs themselves, but through Mastodon or IRC or other means), we're sharing our RSS feeds around and you often follow a person as much for the topics they write about as for the simple fact that you like the person (at least how they present themselves to you) and their take on different topics and the stories they share about their life with you.
Blogging is a small niche these days. There isn't much hype around it, nor is there any money to be made because the VC firms are all busy chasing the next big thing, whatever that might be once the AI hype dies off in a year or two. But it is still here, and I like it exactly because it's not the hype technology of the day anymore. It isn't commercialised, algorithmically curated and set up to make some other person rich.
In this way, it's actually pretty well aligned with Cal Newports vision of living a deep and meaningful life. Maybe someone should tell him :)
2025-06-13 08:00:00
GIFs! Mini Laptops! Exploding dust clouds! And retro software in places where for once having something a little more modern might actually be a good thing, because people's lifes depend on it. What a mix.
Articles
Software/Services
Videos
Around the Small Web
Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend everybody!
