The new front door is so me! Look, I’ve got a peephole.

Samsung Star S5230 Summary: could have used a little more testing As I wrote earlier, I bought me a Samsung s5230 Star mobile phone. My needs were extremely modest: A long standby time A built-in camera of at least 1 megapixel The Star’s aspirations are far from modest: it tries to emulate far more expensive … Read More

It was time to get a new phone. Since I only make 40 euros worth of mobile phone calls each year (and not much more over the landline), getting a 240+ euro minimum plan made no sense. And the way mobile phones are financed (get a phone free with a plan) meant that I had … Read More

Braille is not necessarily dying. But if you take the threats to print books and you sort of make a caricature of them, those are the threats to Braille books. Creating Braille books is extremely labor-intensive. They’re incredibly bulky. For instance, the Harry Potter series comes in 59 volumes, and they’re all almost a foot … Read More

I have seen the future, and it’s bloody confusing. The photo shows a (my) traditional wallet to the right, and three additional ones I acquired in the past 12 months or so. The top two are transport cards. I had to buy the first one because it was the only one way at the time … Read More

Close on the heels of last month I made a couple of more improvements that you probably wouldn’t even have noticed had I not told you about them in the following.

The pirate ship Azalea drifted steadily under an already burning sun towards the Azores. On board it was quiet. The deck was almost completely void of personnel, a common occurrence on this ship. The rules stated that the crew had to take a nap between 10 and 11 in the morning if heavy drinking had … Read More

In the free market of news, news tends to gravitate to bad news. There is nothing inherently evil about that. People just like bad news better than good news. Every now and again, somebody will start a news outlet that focuses on good news, and every time these initiatives peter out quietly after the money … Read More

I moved this blog between systems at the end of 2005, and in the process commenting was switched off for old posts. Being unfamiliar with Wordpress at the time I decided to switch comments back on by hand, something that proved to be rather a cumbersome task. The task subsequently ended up on the back-burner, … Read More

Six years ago I blogged that open source CMSes tended to be too difficult to set up and use to be usable for small business and non-profits. I suggested that a number of blog systems and nukes could step forward and supplant them, and that is exactly what has happened. In 2008, Joomla!, Wordpress and … Read More