Opinions

Pinout Leaf Generator If you're working with modern electronics, may it be a Raspberry Pi, an ESP32 microcontroller or any of the myriad of available development boards, you are aware of pinout diagrams. They are helpful graphics quickly showing you the capabilities of each connector pin. However comparing the graphic with the real thing and counting pins is error prone. Many years ago Simon Monk came up with the Raspberry Leaf and I published my own version for the then new RPi B+. The idea is simple: you print a pinout diagram in exactly the right size to stick... Read more

Bricolage.... Read more

And a new object project... Read more

I wouldn't say I'm annoyed by my collaboration with chatGPT. I pay for it to help me with tedious tasks, like writing PHP code for Kirby functions without syntax errors or querying APIs and displaying the results in an orderly and attractive manner. It does that quite well sometimes, but you have to be on your guard and call it back when it gets bogged down in complexity. Sometimes the solution is quicker to Google. Today I made (for the umpteenth time) a short video under the Hinckeldey Bridge because I found the reflections so beautiful. If you loop it,... Read more

It's actually quite good news that more and more people in this country oppose the reintroduction of conscription. Because more and more people are asking: Who or what would I actually be fighting for? What do I get in return for making the greatest possible sacrifice, namely giving my life, in an emergency? Such sober thinking is fundamentally a testament to social progress and democratization. Democracies, especially those organized under capitalism, have traditionally had problems with the (forced) recruitment of mass armies. This is because their citizens have a more businesslike relationship with the state and tend to make decisions based on sober cost-benefit analyses. Just look at... Read more

Instead of two long weeks, which were rather short, this short week is rather long. Short, also thanks to the (Western) Christian holiday, which is also gladly celebrated by those of other faiths or non-believers. So much for the separation of church and state. That's not a topic for the long world. First thing on Tuesday was coffee with Heinrich Kümmerle. A brief discussion about the sensitivities of the other long world. The long conversation will be at length on the bridge day. A little surprise is planned for next week—no risk, no fun. Afterwards, a project study. Review. We're all still practicing. Whether in the seventh or the thirty-fifth semester. Anyone who thinks they know everything has learned it wrong... Read more

Social Media Escapism: You're Not the Center of the World - Image by Mohamed Hassan on Pixabay. It's that time again when platforms are forcing their users into social media escapism. And I don't mean Facebook or anything like that. It's all the platforms known as Fediverse and Bluesky. It hasn't affected me that much yet. But I've had my fair share of acquaintances. For better or for worse, we have to... Read more... Read more

The Laws of Goodhart, Parkinson and Creation... Read more

Just when you think nothing can surprise you anymore, the U.S. Attorney General comes along... The people who are most annoyed about tourists are other tourists. The 70s were truly wild. Especially in Czechoslovakia. The clear-sighted analysis... Continue reading →... Read more

While X and his ilk are undermining our democracy, a 16-year-old named Max is showing more backbone than many adults. His courageous counter-speech at a Querdenker demonstration went viral – and rightly so! While right-wing extremist crimes in schools are exploding, social media is creating parallel worlds in which facts are merely opinions. We need a decentralized internet where facts are facts again and respect forms the foundation.... Read more

This Five-Hundred-Word Bumper Sticker on My Tesla Explains Why I'm Not a Bad Person. "Trust me, I feel the sting of every single disapproving glare like a thousand needles. My soul trembles and withers. It is an unbearable burden."... Read more

In his book, 📖 Writing Tools, veteran journalist Roy Peter Clark teaches that writers should break long projects into parts. In fact, that's how he wrote his book. It started life as a year-long series of online posts, one per week, until finally he'd written fifty of them (I guess he took a couple of weeks off 😁). It's an obvious piece of advice that's surprisingly hard to remember. Conversely it's easy to feel daunted by big projects, forgetting that they are always made out of smaller pieces. My working philosophy of creativity is that from fragments you can... Read more

This morning I thought I'd go a bit more visual with the v/blog since I bathed in some beauty yesterday.... Read more

I'm continuing to work on my back page and the new article inserts (this is the insert for this note) and am therefore looking for ways to collect and display metadata. Unfortunately, I'm a reaction junkie, so I keep an overly close eye on who and what notices my posts. Along the way, I came across Florian Ziegler's kirby.plugin photo stats. Florian built the thing himself to display this statistics overview on his photo blog, florian.photo: In his photo blog, he sets his own rules, and the first rule is: 1. Post daily. That's why his photo stats also displays the longest streaks, in which he posts daily... Read more

The painful and wrenching demise of entire academic departments opens up opportunities for a more radical understanding and practice of higher education, beyond and despite the confines of university funding. In France, for example, there's Le Collège international de philosophie, co-founded by philosopher Jacques Derrida, and Le Université populaire de Caen, founded by Michel Onfray, another maverick philosopher. In the US, meanwhile, there's Vital Thought, and The Reading Room, sponsored by Pluto Press, in the UK. I've suggested the future of the humanities is wide open. But in these times it's much more political than that: Now Karen Attiah... Read more

Hamburg: Smiles for all. If you haven't noticed, I've been quiet for a few days. We needed our break. It happened in Hamburg. That was great. No, this isn't going to be a travel guide to the best places to stay in the metropolis. I'm also not going to write a travel report like the one I wrote back then. You can imagine that the... Read more... Read more

Earlier this week, I briefly mentioned Kevin Anderson's lecture on the new form of climate denial. Afterward, I considered why I consider Anderson's positions particularly important—even beyond this lecture—and wondered how I could explain this to people who don't even know him. Here's a first […]... Read more

"To keep myself inspired, I surround myself with things that make me happy" — JP Koudstaal shared this thought along with a snapshot of the shelves in his space. I replied in kind. + some rambling on nostalgia and collecting... Read more

The Courage to Be Decent. “What matters is that acts we once took for granted as virtuous, routine, and safe — telling the truth, representing those oppressed by the state, … basic journalism — now carry some risk. They now require some courage.”... Read more

The $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen. “It's a machine designed to be extremely basic, extremely customizable, and extremely affordable.” It's also designed to patina (ie age gracefully). 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →... Read more

Let's take a meme's eye view of MAGA fashion. The hypothesis of the green beard (Wikipedia) is that there's a way for some individual genes to signal their presence, which allows for selective social cooperation favoring that particular replicator – and the targets of this cooperation might be different to the usual blood-relationship cooperation that governs the (higher level) realm of individuals, and perhaps not even beneficial to the individuals themselves. Richard Dawkins came up with this particular example of gene signaling in The Selfish Gene (1976): "I have a green beard and I will be altruistic to anyone... Read more

There's another part to the 4-hour sleeper puzzle I've come across over the years: overfunctioning.... Read more

Cluelessly... Read more

Abbot: Grandpa tells me about the past. If someone asks me the crucial question, I usually answer: I'm a Catholic-raised agnostic with occasional remnants of faith in God. And I have an altar boy background. The extent to which this influences me became clear to me in 2005, when Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka John Paul II, was ordered upstairs. While casually watching the televised funeral service in Rome, where the Catholic Church, in keeping with tradition, made a big fuss, I thought at some point, even though I've been out of the business for a long time: They could hand you a caftan, give you a brief introduction, and you'd essentially know what... Read more

It's the same procedure as every year, and yet this time it's special: 25 years ago today, it was unbearably hot in Berlin (28°C), but instead of sitting on our roof terrace (which I only link to once a year 🤓 – since we moved to Britz XNUMX years ago, it's no longer "our" roof terrace) and letting the sun shine on my stomach, I sat in the shady study in front of the computer, poring through the Frontier and Manila documentation, and launching this weblog, digital scribble notebook. For a full... Read more

Today's links Every complex ecosystem has parasites: The only way to eliminate fraud and waste is to become a trivial walled garden. Hey look at this: Delights to delight. Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writein' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writing 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Every complex ecosystem has parasites (permalink) Patrick "patio11" McKenzie is a fantastic explainer, the kind of person who breaks topics down in ways that stay with you, and creep... Read more

Anyone who visited the Kaffeebucht or the boat rental on the banks of the Neckar in recent years only had to squeeze a few rims to lock up their bike. The operators of these two amusements never felt compelled to offer decent bicycle parking for their customers... For a few years now,... Continue reading →... Read more