a delicate blend of thoughts and feelings
I use computers in very particular ways. I don't mean to paint a picture of myself as some stalwart oddball who uses unfathomable software that you, the confounded fool reading this, could never understand - it's just that I use some not-quite-mainstream tools like surfraw and newsboat and I have generally hacked-to-hell operating systems running on my PCs and smartphone. By no means do I use…
Here's an enduring mystery, a song I've been listening to since I discovered it in 2018: 
 
 
 
 MP3, 03:14, 7.8 MB 
 
 A catchy tune, one I find myself singing at times, and one that's in the regular rotation here at Baccyflap Manor, even though it's obviously not the world's best recording. After all, I found it on a cassette tape from 1987. Though it may be a different…
Here's an addendum to yesterday's post : I was chatting with a friend about various mundane aspects of Dutch cultures and Dutch music came up - including this classic song. 
 
 
 
 OGG, 03:54, 5.1 MB 
 
 The song is called 15 Miljoen Mensen (15 million people) and was written in 1996, intended for a bank commercial but it ended up becoming a nationwide hit song. It's…
Indulge me while I present you with a recording from 1964. It won't do you much good if you don't speak Dutch so feel free to skip it if you're not too bothered - it's a song sung by Toon Hermans, who in the Netherlands we called a 'cabaretier'. Cabaret in this part of the world does not signify dancing ladies and red windmills, but "one man shows" (women also welcome) which often include singing,…
Kagi is a paid search engine, and it's well-loved among nerds who are particular about how they search the Web. Their big selling point is that not only does it not have ads (we all have ad blockers, so who cares) but that it ranks pages better than other search engines, there are no promoted results, and crucially to me, you can prioritise and deprioritise certain sites in your searches. At long…
If you run a webring, sooner or later you'll have to deal with decay - sites disappear, and in doing so, break the ring. They have to be removed or have a status set so that they are skipped; the latter is what I do for the no ai webring and as such the ring, beside being a community of like-minded individuals, is a catalogue of decay. Scrolling from bottom to top, more and more dead websites show…
I teach in an anthropological museum for a living and hardly a day goes by that I do not talk to my students about colonialism - most simply put, the process by which one human population of this planet occupies and controls another. My native Netherlands is a colonial force: it colonised current-day Indonesia, Suriname, and several Caribbean islands, many of which are colonies to this day, though…
My life is blessed, because I do not have to work with computers. 
 
 That may sound like an odd thing to say for someone who likes computers, as I do - so allow me to explain. I teach, and outside of reading and writing emails and keeping up with some teaching programmes in a shared digital environment, all of my work is practical and whatever computing that needs to be done, I do as I…
Webrings are alliances of websites. They are clubs of a sort where each member links to two other members to either side of them and so a long chain of websites is formed, each linking to the next and previous site. The first and last websites on the list link to each other and so a ring is formed. If you want a more complete description (and history) of webrings, click the link above. 
 
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 Everyone ought to have a favourite shell. Foregoing the usual jokes about the Linux shell and the Royal Dutch Shell (which is, at most, proof that everyone also ought to have a least favourite shell), mine is Venerupis senescens . 
 
 This small bivalve's calciferous remains wash up on this nation's sandy shores so regularly that finding one is usually a case of "oh, hey, it's…
Here's a log of three messages I sent to my partner a few days ago. 
 
 3:15 PM: a small memorial by the bridge 
 3:15 PM: crying students 
 3:15 PM: poor kid 
 
 We live in a small city and small cities tend to behave like big villages: when something of enough importance take place, the whole town's talking about it. We live in fast times so this kind of shared…
Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are sometimes referred to as 'walled gardens' - they require an account to use and don't share any data with unsanctioned third parties (including anyone without an account). Once you're in, you're stuck using it and its approved services. This happens for reasons of data scraping, getting return customers, and a misplaced sense of importance (we're so important…
When I was a kid in the Netherlands, my four-years-older teen sister lived in a separate universe. This universe had its own rules and balances which I could never hope to understand. There was chaos and order, there were forces that pushed and pulled, there were live concerts and Breakout magazines - there was an eternal exchange of energy occurring in a cosmos that existed somewhere within the…
After adding this banner to my homepage , I got a message from someone asking how I did this without JavaScript, when the one on the Keep Android Open homepage, which is the one they provide code for, is JS-based. Mine is a bit simpler and it doesn't show an active countdown; to refresh, you must refresh the page. I opted for a day counter, without hours, minutes or seconds, for this reason.…

 
 I own a Tamagotchi and I apologise to no one. I won't lay out the history of these virtual pets here (you can read the Wikipedia page if you like), but suffice it to say there have been many models since 1996 and the current flagship is the Tamagotchi Paradise . My partner wanted one for a while and in the end I saw the fun of it, so we both got one. 
 
 There are echoes of…
I was surprised to find that this blog, so briefly after its reopening, has already found a few readers - or at least a few people who picked up on a post or two. How they found it, I'm sure I don't know. 
 
 I received a few comments over email and Mastodon, two of which contained a suggestion: a title for the blog that isn't just 'blog'. So after thinking about it for a bit, after…
I've added a banner to the home page: 
 
 Android will become a locked-down platform in 178 days 
 
 If you click the one above, it will take you to the Keep Android Open website. Google has decided to finally administer the final blow to Android, that wonderful once-open operating system they bought years ago. 
 
 What it means is that starting September 2026, you can no…
My partner and I traveled to Singapore to celebrate the lunar new year with her family. This was a frantic two week trip during which we traveled to Malaysia and back in a bid to meet up with as significant a chunk of family as could be managed for meals and the general joy of togetherness. 
 
 It was a travail that began full of anticipation, took place at an all too rapid pace, and ended…
There's this pernicious 2022 article from the execrable Futurism magazine, gleeful reprinters of conspiracy nonsense and even more gleeful court stenographers to Big Tech firms, stating that AI (meaning Large Language Models) will "be" 90% of the Internet by 2026. This, so the article describes, is claimed by "experts". It links to a 2022 report by a Europol committee , which is said to contain…

 
 Having just come back from hot, humid, rainy Singapore, I have some thoughts on umbrellas. I saw many, used one, and they seem to have evoked some genetic memory in me. 
 
 It took me over thirty years to buy my first umbrella. I had umbrellas before that time, but they were all found in the streets - slightly broken in a storm, blown out of someone's hand, dumped in a bin by…
As time has gone on, I've been keeping a log of the goings-on of the no ai webring - just as a matter of record, realising that as it's been growing, I've been forgetting the decisions I've made and the things I've run into, and also the way I've felt about the ring. The no ai webring has literally and figuratively grown on me - not a day goes by that I don't spend a little time with it. Checking…
There's been some mild hubbub of late in personal Web and webring spheres around some websites run by someone who, according to the creator of the hubbub, made some problematic artwork a number of years ago. That's as specific as I'll get as I know the artist in question has been quite disturbed by this whole thing. 
 
 This little moral crusader has been emailing me and other ringmasters…
All hobbies seem to work roughly the same, in my experience: you get into something, you go at it for whatever amount of time, and then lose interest for a while. You get back into it at some point and it's only after some time that you either get into a steady rhythm - or abandon it completely. You figure out after months or maybe even years if this new thing will become a part of your life, or…