August 17, 2026

So, now you’re looking at a desktop inside your desktop. Unless, if you’re using your phone, you are looking at a desktop on your phone.

Sorry.

Hey, I heard you like desktops

It started with an idea. I was busy being unhappyish about the design of my site, especially the light grey boxes with rounded corners that contained my posts and other content. They were meant to be modern and inviting and easy on the eyes. But especially the rounded corners I hated.

So a thought spawned in my head, not unlike one of those NPC scientists in Half-Life: their usefulness in perfect balance with their life expectancy. But some of those NPCs follow you around for a bit, and so did this thought. The idea was to replace the boxes with Atari ST GEM-style windows. Wouldn’t that be fun.

They would fit into the rest of the site design like an olive in a bowl of yoghurt.

But my idea wasn’t pulled up into the gaping jaws of a ceiling dweller yet. What if I moved the sidebar to the top, as a pull down menu. The bullets could have their own slashpage.

You can see how it went from there. Scan lines, but not over the pictures, modal dialogues, desktop icons and moving windows with actual scroll bars. I haven’t had so much fun with JavaScript in more than a decade.

It’s not perfect yet. The URL bar at the top of your browser at first didn’t reflect where you navigate, so reload/F5 would reset the desktop and bookmarking was impossible. I’ve solved that by keeping track of window focus and pushing/popping entries in the browser history. It’s not ideal. On phones, for now, all content windows are full screen, which makes entries readable. You can still close them and you can navigate using the menus, even though the icons might be a bit small. I do have huge other plans for smaller form factors but those will take time, if I can even pull it off. On tablets, you can’t drag windows yet, but you can maximise them.'

This site is a blog, like it was before. But it can naturally be more now. When you would land on this site, originally I wanted it to be just an empty canvas, waiting for you to start exploring, not unlike turning on a computer in the eighties. You would have to click a bit to get to the content. But as I said, this site is a blog so by default you will be presented a window with the latest five or so posts, ordered with the last one on top. I have plans for more, like more icons on the desktop, or a terminal to open posts from. I even have ideas for the trash.

Maybe people will finally stop trying to log in here using /login.php That’d be nice.

I’d love to know what you think about it.

August 13, 2026

No, not again, I hear you think. But look at it. It’s a mess and there’s no fixing it. A 2005-style left side column bar. My brother told me it was too distracting, and it has no internal consistency either. And what about those rounded corners? Was I drunk from using Gnome? I should hope so.

That three column text thing from last year was just an attempt at doing something not per se original but at least something of my own. The difference being that I came up with it and created it but didn’t check if other sites also had it. But three columns have the effect of pulling visitors towards the content and pushing them away at the same time. Visitor numbers have gone up considerably since I got rid of those.

Of course, browsing all those marvellous IndieWeb sites that all these JavaScript/Flash wizards create, not to draw you to their content but to let you explore it on your terms (“hey look, a garden with… wait, what is that?”) and in your tempo. Or not.

I’ve been a professional coder so long, I forgot how much fun coding is. And who cares about visitor numbers? It’s not as if I have ads here.

There will still be no cookies, no internal storage, or anything of that sort, so in that sense it will still be a static site. You are not being identified, tracked and sold. JavaScript (no jQuery, I promise) will have me say goodbye to that whole “no frills” statement, though. There will be frills. So be it.

It’s been cooking since April (my employer gave me the entire month off between internally switching jobs), and the site is beginning to get into shape. It’s not ready yet, though. A few things aren’t quite right that I expect to fix over the weekend.

Thefoggiest.dev will still be a blog (as if I could stop writing). So if you don’t care for the new theme, just read the RSS feed. I can’t promise this has never been done before (I won’t check), but it will be mine, it will be lovely (at least I think so), and it will have a massive retro vibe that will make 2005 seem like the far future.

August 10, 2026

While staying in the charming little town of Orte, Viterbo, Lazio, last month, 83 km by car north of Rome, we visited the eternal city three days by train. We had originally intended to get two hotel rooms in the city, but our rental house’s caretaker told us she uses that train for her daily commute, so that wasn’t necessary.

Taking trains in Italy means selecting an operator and buying tickets. We chose Trenitalia, which appeared to have the best connections between Orte and Rome, both in the form of a regional and an intercity service. I bought the tickets online using my phone, which required me to fill out the full names of myself, my wife and my children. There is no anonymous train travelling at Trenitalia, apparently.

Orte station platform 5, with very little room to sit down

After filling out my email address as well, I could select our seats. I found that in the first class there were four seats facing eachother available with a table in between and a fifth seat directly opposite of the aisle.

Children under 18 travel for free, and the total number of two adult first-class seats for a 45-minute connection was €57, so we paid €28.50 per adult. In the Netherlands I would pay around €62 for the same duration in first class, paying €7.50 for each kid, making the adult tickets only €19.75. Dutch Railways (NS) does not ask for full names. Once, on our way back, I didn't pay attention so I bought a five person ticket for the regional train, which, for the same distance, speed and number of stops but a lot less legroom, cost me just €18.

The next morning, with the tickets as QR codes in a single PDF on my phone, we drove the fifteen minutes from our temporary home to the train station in Orte. There, we did not have to pass a check-in point. Some screens in the station hall told us we needed platform 5 and the train was late 5 minutes. The following days we would find it would consistently be late between 5 and 10 minutes on the way to Rome Termini, but leave there on time on the way back.

I seem to remember a quote from the thirties of the last century, from Italy, that stated that when trains consistently run on time, it is time to start worrying about the state of your democracy. Back then, one of the first popular things facist dictator Mussolini fixed for his people, was having trains run on time. Apparently, Meloni must know this quote too, then.

Low platforms seducing people to skip the walking tunnels

One thing that we observed was how low the platforms were. In fact, there were notices everywhere telling travellers not to cross the rails. As a consequence, boarding trains required us to climb three stairs, which was a challenge specifically for our 6-year-old daughter. Equal level boarding is easier for travellers and personnel, and prevents people from crossing rails on stations, apparently.

Another thing that I hadn’t expected was that most notices were in English. Even the station announcer repeated her messages consistently in English, but the audio quality was too bad to even understand what was being said. We did hear the word strike and decided to see if we could find an English newspaper.

No smoking in Italian and English

First class in a Trenitalia intercity is non-smoking and not very crowded, at least not in the second half of July, peak tourist season, on nine in the morning going into Rome. I could take a picture of the cabin without including anything more than someone’s arm. Italians are very fond of their cars. Indeed, when we had dinner on a terrace at a very quiet piazza in Orte itself, we saw Italians arrive, always in cars, parking right at the edges of the piazza and then double-parking when they were full, fully destroying the atmosphere in our view, but of course not in theirs.

Charging my phone while enjoying the view

The train had one stop between Orte and Rome Termini and did catch up on its original timetable, but otherwise the ride was comfortable and uninterrupted. Ticket checking by the conductor meant that I had to show him the tickets in my mail. Termini is a massive station, which is to be expected of the primary station of a city the size of Rome, even if these Italians are so fond of their cars.

On the way back, we had to buy tickets at a ticket machine, which offered the same interface as my phone had earlier, but with a somewhat less responsive virtual keyboard and without offering to select our seats.