For as long as i can remember, i’ve always wanted to be a writer. I became a journalist instead — it wasn’t that much less glamorous, the pay was decent, and i still managed to write a few dozen books on the side. Trouble is, tying your whole identity to your job is a fantastically bad idea. I ended up despising the job, and worse, writing itself. Since quitting last year, i’ve become a product design manager at a training firm, a position that’s stimulating enough, but definitely isn’t my only reason to get up in the morning. Finding my way back to writing has been tougher.

I’ve been publishing these dispatches each and every week to prevent atrophy, but after a year, it still doesn’t come easy. For the first few months, i could barely write two paragraphs without running out of steam. I had to tack on links, book reviews and assorted bits and bobs to make do. Since June, i’ve been able to write longer pieces. It’s still a bit of a slog, but it’s been getting better and better each week. I love spending my Sunday mornings trying to put my thoughts in order while sipping coffee and listening to a record.

The weekly cadence has forced me to consider topics i wouldn’t have deemed worthy before, like my slightly deranged way of making coffee, ear protection or existential marketing. My dispatch on the Magnifica Humanitas encyclical or my comparative reading of J. R. R. Tolkien and Wendell Berry would have languished half-finished if this self-imposed deadline hadn’t forced me to hit Publish before twisting myself in a tangled mess of broken ideas. I’ve also loved tackling a few IndieWeb Carnival prompts, and i finally found a pleasing way to document my travels.

That being said, i’ll allow myself to skip weeks here and there. I’ve felt the pull of LLMs to help me sort drafts out and it’s been quite frightening to stare into the void. As i type these words, the French literary scene is embroiled in a controversy over Thélyson Orélien’s alleged use of generative AI in his latest novel, which was in the running for the prestigious Prix Goncourt. Everybody and their mother turned to Pangram as the ultimate litmus test before even knowing what the ‘whistleblower’ stands for¹.

I wouldn’t judge a book on its Pangram assessment even if it were reliable². We should never delegate our ability to understand art, which is ultimately our ability to understand our emotions and our world, to mere machines. I’m not thrilled that a promising author may have relied on the machine instead of his own gut to write about the harrowing journey of a Haitian migrant across twelve countries, or that he might think he’s the creator of something that’s the product of systematic theft³, but it’s not the core issue.

What’s in play is our ability to keep having conversations between humans. What’s the difference between a pen, a typewriter, a computer and an LLM? Are autocorrect and spelling tools acceptable uses of AI? Should we change the way we write to avoid the tropes and patterns of LLMs? How should OpenAI, Anthropic and others repay what they’ve taken from us? Shouldn’t we be worried about the weaponization of AI tools and anti-AI tools by right-wingers? These are questions we should ask ourselves, instead of deferring to another machine. And because i still love writing, i’ll allow myself some grace… instead of turning to the machines.

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Do Walk by Libby DeLana. I’ll never fault a book that extols the virtues of walking, but it’s the first time i wanted to put one through the shredder. DeLana is an executive creative director, whatever that means, so she felt the urge to trademark her practice as ‘ThisMorningWalk’. (Of course there’s a podcast.) I guess ‘daily walk’ sounded too… pedestrian? At best, Do Walk reads like a performative take on a wishy-washy understanding of meditation. At worst, it sounds like yet another personal branding exercise. Here’s an hour of my life i’d rather have spent walking.

I just got my first synthmail. It comes from iLands, “a shared network where humans and user-generated autonomous AI agents create, earn, socialize, refuse”… and beg for money in a whole new kind of spam. We’re right on track for my “great AI metastasis of 2028”.

If you like pencils, this is porn. If you like cameras, this is porn. I happen to like both. It’s been a hot month.

Sangam & Friends by Charles Lloyd, Zakir Hussain & Eric Harland. Since they first met a few weeks after 9/11, saxophonist Charles Lloyd and tabla master Zakir Hussain crossed paths regularly, but released only two albums together, once in 2006 with drummer Eric Harland and then in 2022 with guitarist Julian Lage. In 2009, Lloyd, Hussain and Harland had recorded with an all-star band of Indian musicians, but the tapes lay dormant until Hussain’s death in 2024. Lloyd collaborated with producer and spouse Dorothy Darr to cut them alongside unissued live and studio recordings. The resulting Sangam & Friends is a masterclass in blending Eastern and Western traditions to create something wholly original. It’s also the first record i’ve ever bought that wasn’t packaged in one of those god-awful paper sleeves and didn’t need a wash before its first play — good job, Blue Note!

I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything by Joanna Stern. I’m not the target audience, and you probably aren’t either, but our parents might be. Like Walt Mossberg and David Pogue before her, Stern is neither a hard-hitting investigative reporter nor a nerdy technical expert, but a friendly and knowledgeable consumer advocate. Her approach is non-committal at times — and that might be the biggest knock against I Am Not a Robot — but there’s something deeply comforting in her self-deprecating humour and rambling asides. It’s like your local news anchor had written a book about AI, and who over the age of 55 wouldn’t want to read that?

Esterbrook 40-slot canvas zippered pen case. I finally — finally! — moved my fountain pens from their original boxes to a zippered case. I considered getting one from Galen Leather Co, but i’m not a fan of ‘crazy horse’ leather and their shipping rates have been getting insane. Esterbrook’s 40-slot pen case fits perfectly with my homemade canvas notebook covers and is pretty practical to boot. The elastic loops can accommodate short and thin pens as well as long and thick ones, the faux suede material is plush, and the soft divider ensures that pens won’t rub against each other. You just have to be mindful of which pens you put in the top and bottom rows, as they might get scratched by the zipper. There’s only one problem: i have more than forty fountain pens!

Ian K. Duncan:

A Harry Potter fanfic used as a recruiting pipeline. Psychological workshops that former participants describe as coercive. A program for breeding smarter children, promoted by an AI institute. A sex worker from Idaho who became one of the subculture’s most-read writers and now runs an AI-doom propaganda residency with Grimes, Elon Musk’s ex-girlfriend. A splinter sect that fled to tugboats and whose members have been linked to six deaths. And a blogger who wanted to abolish democracy, found the ear of several billionaire patrons, and watched his ideas come to fruition in the vice president’s office. I am aware, that if you are not lurking on the internet as much as I do, of how utterly insane that paragraph sounds. However, every bit of it is heavily documented by numerous sources.

I’d never thought of doomerism as a sex cult, but it makes so much sense.

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I’m sure the iPhone Duo will be a perfectly fine device, but having reviewed my fair share of two-handed foldable phones, i just don’t get the hype. You might believe iOS will make all the difference, and i have to admit that the incredibly smooth opening animation might push people to actually unfold their device, something that Samsung Galaxy Z Fold and Honor Magic V6 owners might not do every single day. But i believe books, both paper- and silicon-based, have something to teach us about what the hand wants.

The oldest electronic reading device i own, the Franklin Electronic Publishers KJ-21 electronic Bible from 1989, could claim to have been the first e-reader. Like the Sony Data Discman DD-1, which followed a year later and is slowly turning back to petroleum in my junk closet, it featured a keyboard for easy information retrieval. The first e-readers you’d recognize as such arrived in 1998 — the NuvoMedia Rocket eBook, which introduced the now-familiar asymmetrical design with page turning buttons, and the SoftBook Reader, which already had a built-in storefront thanks to its integrated modem. Both ran on power-hungry LCD screens, but E Ink arrived in 2004, with the launch of the Sony LIBRIe EBR-1000EP in Japan.

Back in 1949, Ángela Ruiz Robles’s mechanical encyclopedia looked a lot like a book, but fifty years later, these so-called electronic books looked nothing like their paper counterparts. The codex might be the most powerful device ever invented, but its main drawback is that it requires two hands¹. The continuous success of e-readers stems in large part from their one-handedness. You can use them in the metro while holding on to the overhead handles, in the street while gulping your cup of industrial coffee, in the office while munching on your stale sandwich… well, you get the idea.

The sudden popularity of tiny readers might have been a Reddit-driven psyop², but they’re clearly beloved because they fit so well in the hand. You don’t see a lot of people clamouring for foldable e-readers — Readmoo’s Mooink V is vapourware at this point. Even note-taking devices have shrunk to a palm-sized format — except for the InkLeaf, which might be the daftest device i’ve ever seen, and i’ve held a Humane AI Pin. You might say that phones are infinitely more versatile devices and that you want to be able to use two apps side by side. But are you going to? Really? The e-reader didn’t succeed because two-handed reading was impossible. It succeeded because, given the choice, people stopped choosing it. What choice will iPhone Duo owners make in the long run?

The iPhone Duo reminds me of another device that shared the same moniker, the ill-fated PowerBook Duo. Hardcore technologists have always dreamed of a single device that could transform and adapt to different use cases. Be it the IBM PC Convertible, the Compaq SLT/286, the Nokia 9000 Communicator or the Motorola Atrix, not to mention the cancelled Palm Foleo and Ubuntu Edge, the result has always been lower than the sum of its parts. Will it be different with the iPhone Duo? It’ll sell, because it’s Apple, but it might stay mostly closed, because it’s a phone (and one that can’t fit comfortably in one hand even when closed). In the meantime, when i need a screen bigger than my smartphone’s, i’ll reach for the second most powerful device ever invented, the bag. I’m sure i’ll find something in there.

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A lot has been written about the 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition, but it was just as much a lifestyle product as the iPod (“1,000 songs in your pocket”) or the iPhone (“this changes everything”) had been. Of course, it was Jony Ive and his billionaire friends’ lifestyle, but apart from that… The trio of ads that dropped on launch day was all about time management, health and fitness, and personal connection¹. If the Apple Watch is still a lifestyle product, then it’s for a rather hypochondriac one. Recent ads frequently hinge on high-stakes survival.

Apple’s strategy has shifted from lifestyle to lifeline. Its most memorable ad features snippets from emergency service calls — a driver trapped in a flipped car, a paddleboarder lost at sea, a farmer stuck in a pit with a broken leg. A few days before, just around Christmas, they’d proclaimed that “the future of health is on your wrist” while sharing the story of a mountain biker who was knocked unconscious in the forest and rescued after his Apple Watch automatically called 911. The subtext was clear and chilling: if you don’t wear an Apple Watch, you or someone you love could die alone in the wilderness.

Gone are the days when the Apple Watch was about sending cute messages before a date, paying for flowers on the way there, being on time and hopefully getting laid. The design has barely changed in 12 years, they still haven’t figured out the user experience and the chip development has pretty much stalled. It doesn’t matter: upgrading isn’t about getting a slightly bigger screen or marginally better battery life, but about renewing your insurance policy. The fear marketing campaign that culminated in “true Apple Watch stories” featuring life-or-death situations has now morphed into straight-up existential marketing.

One of the marquee features of the Apple Watch Series 12 is “the new Health Sensing System” that enables a new Longevity tab in the Health app, “with a Health Age feature showing how metrics are tracking relative to a user’s age”. In other words: by pulling data like HRV, VO₂ max, walking symmetry and even blood biomarkers, Apple will now quantify your decay. The app uses a nice little flower to represent your heart, sleep and metabolic health. I’m sure drooping petals won’t act as a daily representation of biological decline that’ll trigger existential anxiety.

Continuous high-fidelity health monitoring is a game-changer, but fear-mongering tactics might have unintended side effects. Apple is weaponizing the trust it somewhat deservedly earned by provoking a conflict of loyalty. Why listen to doctors when you can listen to your own body thanks to your Apple Watch? Its data is presented as the only objective truth you can rely on. We’re entering a weird era where people might doubt the efficacy of vaccines while wearing their Apple Watch 24/7. Maybe Apple should add ‘democracy health’ and ‘carbon emissions’ petals in the Longevity tab.

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Somewhere in the middle of ‘The Passage of the Marshes’, i began to wonder why the Sauron i’d decided to re-read The Lord of the Rings¹. I’d forgotten how bleak and sluggish Frodo and Sam’s journey to Mordor was. Even though i wanted nothing more than to wring Gollum’s neck, i decided to plod through, knowing i was bored senseless because Tolkien wanted me to experience Frodo’s anguish deep in my bones. The gamble paid off — i’d also forgotten that The Return of the King doesn’t end with Aragorn’s crowning, but only after ‘The Scouring of the Shire’, a thinly veiled commentary on post-war England that can be read as an environmentalist parable. I knew i wouldn’t forget reading it during this summer’s fifth heat wave; now i know i won’t forget reading it days before the death of Wendell Berry at the grand old age of 92.

Tolkien has always denied that ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ had “any allegorical significance or contemporary political reference whatsoever”, stating in his foreword to the second edition that “it is an essential part of the plot, foreseen from the outset”. Are we really supposed to believe that the Chief isn’t a Führer, the Shirrifs aren’t the Gestapo and the ruffians aren’t the SS? That the “gathering” of produce so that equal “sharing” can’t occur isn’t a jab at communism? That the felling of the Party Tree and the building of “new mean houses” have nothing to do with Britain’s rampant urbanization?

“An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience”, he admits, “It has indeed some basis in experience, though slender (for the economic situation was entirely different), and much further back.” The mill that grinds nothing directly relates to Tolkien’s childhood at Sarehole, “a kind of lost paradise” that was taken over by the industrial growth of Birmingham, at which point its old mill fell into disrepair. ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ might not have any contemporary political reference whatsoever, but right until his last story, Tolkien would write about that little village that existed once “not very long ago for those with long memories nor very far away for those with long legs.” This is solastalgia forty-odd years before the term was coined.

Sauron fell in a single paragraph, but the last battle of the whole trilogy takes an entire book. It isn’t won in the field, because evil isn’t a single entity, not even the fearful necromancer. It’s won in the fields, because evil is an idea, our “dominion over the earth” that we twisted into systematic exploitation and death. “The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all”, wrote Wendell Berry in The Unsettling of America, “it is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.” Sauron lost because he poisoned Mordor, and in doing so, poisoned himself.

Even if he hadn’t, he couldn’t have won, because he “let a great part of his own former power” pass into the Ring. “The Machine is our more obvious modern form though more closely related to Magic than is usually recognised”, wrote Tolkien in his 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, both being a way to exert power without cultivating relationships. The pits and furnaces of Isengard produce nothing more than smoke and waste, but they embody Saruman’s might, to the point that their destruction is a tremendous blow to the white wizard. Evil arises when machines become an end in themselves — “you’ve got to have grist before you can grind”, says Farmer Cotton of the Shire mill, you’ve got to have the fruits of nature before you can have the fruits of your externalized labour.

In a favourite of mine, Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer, Berry gives nine criteria for technological innovation. A new tool “should be cheaper than the one it replaces”, smaller, easier to use, “use less energy”, and “some form of solar energy” if possible, “be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence”, “be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible”, come from a small shop that’ll take it back for maintenance and repair, and finally “not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships”. Saruman’s machines fail all nine, and the ninth by design. Unfortunately, we could say the same about most of our ‘modern’ technology.

The machine is a way to govern by rule and proxy: you could follow the machine’s rules for years before realizing the machine had to be designed by someone whose rules you’re actually following. When the hobbits decided to sell their leaf to a buyer they never met, they lost their land without being invaded. The Chief, the gatherers, the sharers, the ruffians and the machines were brought to facilitate trading, all believing they were in charge, all being kept in the same bondage. By coincidence (or not), Berry’s father was a tobacco farmer. When the American Tobacco Company eliminated all competitors, they began to squeeze farmers until they were forced to sell their crops for no profit.

Berry tells this story in his 2012 Jefferson lecture, titled “It All Turns on Affection”, where he quotes his old teacher Wallace Stegner. “He thought rightly that we Americans, by inclination at least, have been divided into two kinds”: boomers are “those who pillage and run”, who exploit the land without ever giving back, while stickers are “those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in”, who nurture the soil so it keeps on giving. Boomers, of course, govern by rule and proxy. The hobbits fell into Saruman’s trap because they had let themselves be kept ignorant of anything beyond the Bounds — they’d heard of the existence of boomers but didn’t want to learn anything about them.

Their failure is epistemic, but you know what? So is ours. “Virtually all of us now share with the most powerful industrialists their remoteness from actual experience of the actual world”, says Berry, “like them, we participate in an absentee economy, which makes us effectively absent even from our own dwelling places.” You might have no money and no power; you’re still living a life your grandparents could only dream of. “By economic proxies thoughtlessly given, by thoughtless consumption of goods ignorantly purchased, now we all are boomers”, we’re all Lothos doing Saruman’s deed without ever stopping to ask why.

The consequences are obvious: our world is becoming more Mordor than Shire. But repair runs on a different clock from ruin. Sam replanted a single mallorn in the Party Field, but not all trees are magic, and most won’t bear fruit before generations have come and gone. And even when the trees are magic, once knowledge and culture are lost, everything is lost. Just ask the Ents. Just like Sam put his faith in the “earth from [Galadriel’s] orchard”, you need to “put your faith in the two inches of humus / that will build under the trees / every thousand years”, as Berry says in his Mad Farmer manifesto.

Restoration comes from our ability to decentre — literally and figuratively. Frodo saves a place he knows he’ll have to leave. Sam stays: he’s not a Baggins by blood, but by being a faithful friend, a good husband, a dedicated mayor and, most of all, a thoughtful gardener, he became the true heir to Bag End. Berry left us at Jack Beechum’s age, and in The Memory of Old Jack, Jack leaves the farm to Elton Penn, his tenant, rather than to his daughter, who married into the city. Stewardship is a choice about competence and care, not a God-given right from birth. We have to have the courage to plant the seeds of the trees that’ll rot into two inches of humus, knowing full well that we won’t be there to enjoy them.

Of course, the Shire is an insular little society that stays suspicious of the Big Folk beyond the Bounds. Tolkien’s faith was more parochial than Berry’s, who might have been the last American unable to preach a religion and live by the precepts of another. “Whoever strikes me shall be accursed”, Saruman says in his final moments, “and if my blood stains the Shire, it shall wither and never again be healed”. But his essence “dissolved into nothing”, with no possibility of respite or return, while the Shire was able to grow back. Like Berry said, you have to “practise resurrection.” But like Sam said, “that’ll take a lot of time and work.” Practise resurrection. Even if, especially if, that’ll take a lot of time and work.

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If you are still posting on X, you should stop today. Quitting the site yesterday would have been better, but doing it today is better than doing it tomorrow. The moral and political case for quitting X is so obvious that it scarcely bears repeating, but I’ll briefly recap it anyway. The guy who owns X—the person to whom you are personally donating if you pay for a blue checkmark—is Elon Musk, an out and out white supremacist who uses X to spread Nazi ideas like Great Replacement theory. He is a major backer, in both money and propaganda, of the global far right. During his brief tenure inside Trump’s Administration, he spearheaded the destruction of USAID, which, according to recent estimates, may result in 14 million deaths between 2025 and 2030.

Federico Viticci, not on his own MacStories, but in a cowardly Craft note:

MacStories is precious to us. It’s not just how we earn a living; it’s one of a small number of independent websites that still cover apps, Apple, and a growing list of topics, including videogame hardware and the automation and productivity side of AI. Readers shouldn’t have to think or care about the business side of MacStories, but we have to, which is why we returned to X.

Once upon a time, Federico and i swapped articles to help grow our respective blogs¹. How times have changed! You can’t say “returning to X does not represent a change in our values, what MacStories or we stand for, or an endorsement of Elon Musk” and “we abhor Musk’s politics, his rhetoric, his careless disregard for others, and the direction he has taken X” in the same paragraph with a straight face. The truth is: you want more money and you don’t care how you get it.

We who are publishing on the web aren’t (only) losing our readers to LLMs and antisocial networks. We’re losing them to our inability to have a clear and consistent voice. If we don’t know where we stand, why should they care about what we have to say? We’re not given readers; we choose them. When you decide to choose readers coming from a platform full of neo-Nazis, racists, incels and paedophiles, your values have definitely changed. The rest is posturing.

Muji Spring Limited Blend. I knew Japan had a vibrant coffee scene, but i never imagined you could buy specialty coffee at Muji. Made with beans from Brazil, Ethiopia, Kenya and El Salvador, this Spring blend doesn’t taste like anywhere in particular, but it’s light and juicy nonetheless. Most importantly, it was my first time using drip bags. These single-serve pre-packaged paper filters are sealed inside nitrogen-flushed packets to preserve freshness and sit directly on top of your mug for easy pour-over brewing. I’m not a fan of their plastic (over-)packaging, but i can’t deny that they’re more convenient than a V60 and far better than instant coffee. It might be the perfect format to sample expensive single origins and exotic blends.

Robson is part of a larger cohort of writers who are practicing what could be called an anti-AI writing style. Across journalism, criticism, creative writing, and especially among compulsive LinkedIn posters, writers are converging on a set of choices that implicitly resist the trappings of AI-generated prose.

I’d find that fascinating if it weren’t so sad. Text generation isn’t writing. You and only you are breathing, seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting, walking, sweating, fucking, thinking and, ultimately, writing. “Computers compute”, as Riccardo Mori so eloquently put it. Treating a piece of dumb code as a digital god is bad; living in fear of it is even worse. If you want to use em rules, have at it! That’s your nature-given right as a writer. Don’t ever let a machine take that away from you.

A few weeks ago the apartment we’d been renting for the past nine years flooded. The floors and ceilings were damaged but the books, thank goodness, were all safe. By the time you read this we will have downsized, moving to a new place where no weird mold is growing (a plus!) but that is also a little bit smaller. Which means that I’ve had to confront my book collection, which has grown exponentially over the years with stacks piled on the floor in very particular orders and bookshelves that are crammed. In pruning my books I learned some important lessons about editing for the advanced collector, the kind who derives joy from too many kinds of books to use the Kondo Method effectively.

I last weeded my library five years ago and i’m ready for another round. The ninth lesson is the most important one: “there will always be more books”.

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The Netgear Meural Canvas II digital photo frame is one of my favourite devices i own. Its 21.5″ display offers adequate colour reproduction and superb viewing angles. Its design is nothing to write home about, but combined with the matte coating that prevents most if not all glare, it doesn’t read as ‘i’ve put a glaring display on the wall’. It turns on in the morning, it turns off in the evening¹, and in between, it’s a subtle reminder of holidays, events and moments. It’s just plain nice… if it weren’t for everything else about it.

Until Netgear silently rewrote their authentication flow a few months ago, their app would disconnect immediately after i connected, a bug that’d been going on for years. They designed their website to discourage you from uploading your own pictures and push you towards their subscription service. Their backend is slow and unreliable, you can’t delete multiple items at once, deleting a playlist silently leaves its contents behind, and moving items from one playlist to another is torture. You can disconnect your Meural Canvas from Wi-Fi and use SD cards, but you most definitely won’t, thanks to their insane list of requirements.

Trying — and failing — to upload the photos from my trip to Antwerpen and my visit to the Apple Museum was the last straw. I broke down and spent a few hours writing MeuralManager, a command-line interface for the Meural API. It fixes almost all of my pain points with their app and website:

• it can list every playlist with an item count;
• it can identify orphaned items;
• it can upload photos in a new or an existing playlist;
• it can move photos between playlists without re-uploading them;
• it can delete photos and playlists.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t make Netgear’s backend faster and more reliable. MeuralManager can resize your photos before uploading them, saving on both transfer times and server-side processing. When the upload times out, which happens fairly often, it waits for 4 seconds before retrying. If it still times out, it backs down to 8, then 16 seconds, before a new attempt. If that still doesn’t work, or if the upload is interrupted, re-running the same command will continue from where it left off without creating duplicates.

As a safety precaution, write commands default to a dry run. You have to pass the --execute argument to expressly authorize them to change things in your library. In addition, deletions require typing DELETE at the prompt to confirm the operation. The export command allows you to back up your photos before doing anything destructive. (Don’t ask me why i’ve added these safeguards.)

Netgear, like many others, moved their authentication gateway behind bot-detection middleware that signs each login request with headers generated by obfuscated in-page JavaScript. In effect, usernames and passwords (and every older script that still uses them) are now useless. MeuralManager doesn’t scrape your authentication token on your behalf²: you have to paste it from your browser’s developer tools.

Thanks to MeuralManager, i’ve been able to completely reorganize my playlist and upload my latest photos in a few commands. It’s not fast, but that’s not my fault, and it’s much more reliable than Netgear’s own app and website. As it was debugged and documented with the help of Claude Code, i’m dedicating it to the public domain under the CC0 1.0 Universal licence. I hope it’s useful! You can download MeuralManager and read its complete documentation on GitHub.

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The SNCF has plastered the train windows with corny stickers saying “let yourself dream”, “#nofilter” and “seat with a view”. Everybody awake is heads-down in their phone.

Everything around here used to be the deepest and most vibrant shade of forest green. Now it’s a dusty and desolate shade of husk yellow. And yet they still vote against the planet.

First, there are the iron arches and glass vault of the 185-metre-long and 44-metre-high train shed, designed by engineer Clément Van Bogaert. Then, there’s the 75-metre-high glass dome soaring above the marble-clad neo-baroque station designed by Louis Delacenserie. As a bonus, there’s the damage from a V-2 rocket impact that’s left a kink in the roof. Finally, there’s the tunnel that was excavated beneath the city to convert the station from a terminus to a through station, complete with two levels of concrete concourses that seem to defy gravity. Antwerpen-Centraal has to be the most beautiful railway station i’ve ever seen.

By stark contrast, Antwerpen’s pre-metro is a drab and musty affair. It’s nothing more than an underground tram, but thanks to its broken ticket machines, unused stations and dark décor, it has an undeniably spooky quality.

Did i manage to manifest a free matcha latte, or is Emmi’s marketing so good that i craved one before even seeing its promotional cart on the street ahead?

When there are no cars, you can hear people. Instead of the menacing roar of our environment’s demise, you can hear the hopeful pulse of our civilization’s persistence. Who knew? One is slightly more grating than the other. Cities aren’t loud; cars are.

Stad Leest is a well-known bookstore-cum-café in the heart of Antwerpen, but since 2021, it’s had a second location just around the corner for all things stationery and homeware. It stocks Atoma, Kaweco, Leuchtturm and Moleskine, but also — and more importantly for me — Blackwing, Midori and Penco. I might have gone there twice. I might have received a fraud notice from my bank. I regret nothing.

I’ll never not be amazed by people going on a run at 6:30 AM.

In the more touristy parts of town, bicycles might be tied to each other, but more often than not, they aren’t secured by anything more than a café lock. On the side streets, bicycles are simply strewn around. I was told that the flimsy locks weren’t made to deter theft, but to avoid bikes tipping over. This level of social trust is admirable — and incredibly relaxing.

The KMSKA has a fantastic collection of Flemish painters, including two of my new favourites, Rik Wouters and Jules Schmalzigaug. It made the best of an uncomfortable situation, by making an event out of the Adoration of the Magi in-room restoration, putting the spotlight on a crucial practice that’s usually hidden from view. Its rooms dedicated to drawings and sculptures are easily missed and fairly small, which means they’re intimate spaces where you can spend all the time you want with the works.

It’s also one of the worst museums i’ve ever visited (the worst being the MoMU, also in Antwerpen, if you can call that travesty a museum). The labels are printed in a comically small font, forcing you to bend down and squint at them… and then take twenty steps back to admire the monumental paintings. A lot of stairs were condemned and an elevator was inaccessible, making the visit an absolute hell for parents, seniors and everyone with a mobility impairment. Worse, every thematic room had a soundtrack, which actively prevents people from feeling their feelings. The clashing cacophony of sounds bleeding into neighbouring rooms made me real tired, real fast.

“I wouldn’t try to learn Flemish”, she said after my clumsy attempt at ordering one of Lints’s delicious berry rolls. And yet…

The few cars that venture deep into the low emission zone are mostly electric and overwhelmingly luxury. Does it mean that the rich finally care about something other than themselves? Not quite: according to official sources, almost 90% of them are company-owned cars, which effectively makes them tax avoidance vehicles.

I can’t say i was disappointed by the Cathedral of Our Lady, because it features the tallest church tower in the Benelux, the Plantin-Moretus family tomb, lovely choir stalls from the 19th century and no less than four paintings by Peter Paul Rubens. But the St. Charles Borromeo church’s history is just more interesting. St. Paul, meanwhile, might just be the most beautiful parish church i’ve ever seen¹, even in the midst of an extensive renovation, complete with a breathtaking calvary.

IMS Tijdschriften is a delightfully weird store selling more than 10,000 magazines from around the world. Seeing an older gentleman not trying his hardest to conceal his porn score brought me back a few decades.

Parlion has a very limited, but very awesome selection of freshly homemade ice creams. Their banana peanut butter blend was an absolute banger.

The peace! The quiet! The smiles on the faces that aren’t hidden behind the windscreen of a two-ton killing machine!

I still haven’t found a decent croissant in the whole of the Belgian kingdom. Couques au beurre are a perfectly acceptable substitute, though.

The MAS is everything the KMSKA isn’t. It owns more than 600,000 objects connected to the history of the port of Antwerp, but it carefully curates them into six rotating selections, one on each exhibition floor. A visible storage room can be visited free of charge and there’s a floor just for kids. To go up to the ninth floor with the escalators and all the way back down takes almost half an hour, but everything is accessible by escalators and sitting is plentiful. There’s a quiet room on the seventh floor, and if it all gets too much, you can leave and return the same day. I loved the whole experience — and i was incredibly happy to finally be able to see the Paul & Dora Janssen collection of American art.

It’s easy to dismiss the Red Star Line Museum. It’s far from the city centre, on the outskirts of the Eilandje, on the southern edge of the shipping port. It’s also the place where thousands upon thousands of people passed through on their way to America, including some of the French migrants i researched at university. In telling their story, the collection tells the story of the hope (and fear) that every migrant harbours. It’s well worth the 10-minute tram trip.

I don’t think i’ve seen even one cyclist wearing a helmet in Utrecht, which shows that there’s safety in numbers. Unfortunately, it’s not something the politicians back at home seem to understand (or: they understand it quite well, but have decided to thwart efforts to develop cycling infrastructure because they mainly come from left-leaning cities. Who cares about subsidiarity, air quality, noise pollution, public health and countless car homicides when you can score a few political points?)

Have i told you how much i love stroopwafels?

It’s easy to feel European when you speak three of the twenty-four official languages and understand two or three more, when your family tree spans half the continent, when you can cross borders without showing your passport even at the height of a manufactured migrant crisis, when your phone’s data plan roams over without a surcharge, and when you can use the same currency everywhere.

When i see wind turbines dotted across the horizon, i can’t help but imagine modern-day Don Quixotes riding their bicycles to chase gas-guzzling giants under the white cotton balls in the sky. Just like that, a 90-minute train trip through the Dutch countryside passes in an instant.

For the first time, i’ve had to endure an AI-generated audioguide. It was horrendous, ghastly, dreadful, abysmal, miserable and all the related words you can find in all the thesauri in the world. What makes it even worse is that it happened in the beautiful Hendrick Conscience Heritage Library’s Nottebohm Room, at an exhibition about bookbinding, of all things. What a shame.

I visited not one, but two geeky museums in a single trip. Train World is more outwardly made for children, but you don’t need to be a kid to enjoy climbing aboard a 19th-century locomotive, playing in a train simulator and being suddenly dwarfed by the nose of a Eurostar e320.

“You should act like you own the place” was my friend’s advice about luxury shops, which is how i found myself trying out a Montblanc Meisterstück LeGrand in burgundy red. It’s a fantastic fountain pen with the most glassy M nib i’ve ever had the pleasure of writing with. It’s also €990. I went out of the store with a Lamy Safari Meteora instead.

I need to tip my hat to the SNCB, Belgium’s national railway company. Their app and website are clear, simple, and devoid of scummy upselling and shady ads for car rentals and hotels. If every national railway company — beginning with the SNCF — could be passenger-oriented like that, travelling in Europe would be a pleasure, instead of the mild annoyance it currently is.

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There’ll probably never be another museum quite like the Apple Museum in Prague, which featured almost every Apple product ever made in pristine condition, before it closed in September 2020 after a dumbfounding dispute between its founders. The entirely unrelated Apple Museum in Utrecht doesn’t come close, not by a long shot, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t visit it.

Created by Ed Bindels, founder of Apple premium partner Amac and event space Liemès, it’s located in The Wall shopping centre, under… an Amac shop and Liemès. Utrecht might be one of the most cyclable cities on Earth, but The Wall is an 800-metre-long monster of a building that’s made for cars. You can get there by bicycle or bus, but you have to walk across the humongous car park to find the small stairs that lead to the museum desk.

You’re greeted by a Volkswagen Combi and an HP-65 calculator, a nod to the things that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had to sell to bootstrap Apple. The Apple Museum perpetuates the myth of the garage¹, but i’m willing to look past it, because it makes for a delightful entrance. The first part of the exhibit follows a chronological thread from the Apple I to the Apple II, Lisa and Macintosh.

The museum would have been cool even if you could only see the machines — and what you can see is only a small part of the 5,000 samples they have in store. But you can actually use a few Apple IIs and Macintoshes! It was fun watching kids playing around with Through the Looking Glass and MacPaint. It brought back some fond memories of my own childhood, but unfortunately, it looks like i’m as bad at The Oregon Trail as i’ve ever been.

As a budding type designer who’s married to the daughter of a printmaker, i absolutely loved the rooms dedicated to the birth of desktop publishing and digital typesetting. I get the feeling that most people didn’t care that much about PostScript and Bézier curves, but it’s a part of computing history that should definitely not be glossed over. The sight of SyQuest and Zip drives sent shivers down my spine, though — there should be a trigger warning!

“The Grey Period” is the weakest part of the exhibit. “This collection frames the era accurately”, according to the curators, “not as a void, but as the pressure that made Apple’s later simplification feel revolutionary.” This is teleology at its worst. Why go through the trouble of creating a model of the Knowledge Navigator if you don’t explain how it prefigured hypertext, simulation software, video conferencing, real-time collaborative work, touch devices, foldable screens, speech recognition and even intelligent agents?

How can you exhibit the Macintosh Portable next to the first PowerBooks without explaining that Apple didn’t need Steve Jobs to invent the modern laptop? How can you talk about the Newton without talking about ARM? Why would you dedicate an entire wall to Robert Brunner, but not show the progression of Jony Ive’s first contributions, from the PowerBook 100 series to the TAM? Wouldn’t it have been better to illustrate Apple’s ill-fated ‘digital convergence’ strategy rather than plastering a slew of devices on the walls?

It’d have been the perfect segue to “The Matrix”, Steve Jobs’s famous 2×2 grid of products, which set up the discipline the ‘digital hub’ strategy — ‘digital convergence’ by another name — would later cash in on. As it stands, “The Grey Period” skates over the true innovation that took place during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and conveniently ignores the blunders of the early years of Jobs’s return.

After going through the dark corridor featuring the “Think Different” posters, i was taken aback when i turned the corner and was faced with a floor-to-ceiling rainbow wall of polished iMac G3s. “Welcome back to the land of colour!”, a volunteer greeted us, and i was that close to shedding a tear. That display is simple, but mightily effective. From then on, the chronological thread frays into thematic strands. It’s the right move, but it’s also where things start to unravel.

The iPod and iPhone rooms don’t feel as momentous as they should be, the iPad is tucked in a corner, there are surprisingly few Macs from the last twenty years, and software is entirely absent². My first instinct was to think that they rushed to open the museum on time for Apple’s fiftieth birthday and could restructure that part of the exhibit in the future — there’s more than enough room for that and for future products.

But the more i think about it, the more i feel that the thinning exhibit isn’t a flaw so much as an admission. There’s less story to tell once Apple stops being a choice and becomes a habit. This is a museum for a company that had to earn its place, and that company is now gone. I wouldn’t travel to Utrecht especially for the Apple Museum³, but if you’re in the Netherlands, i highly recommend taking the trip down memory lane.

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Should i redesign my blog?¹ Should i switch back to pocket notebooks from A5 notebooks?² Should i buy and restore a thirteenth typewriter?¹ Should i repaint our bedroom?² Should i sell my Apple Watch Ultra?¹ Should i reinstall my balcony’s irrigation system?¹ In isolation, these are all good questions. Trouble is, they all came in the span of a week.

It’s been years since i had so much energy, but this is a confused and confusing sort of energy. I want to do a million things at once, knowing full well that i’ll end up regretting some — if not most — of them. But if i try not to do them, i feel a deep sense of malaise and ennui³.

This flurry of activity might be tiring, but it’s never tiresome — and i’d rather be tired than bored. I need to rest, but i can’t bear being idle. I guess being productively unproductive is my way of relaxing. I just wish i knew how to pace myself, how to do one thing after the other, how to enjoy it all.

At least you get a redesign out of this. Something broke in the relationship between hardware and software. Thanks to rounded corners, notches, holes, and other clever engineering tricks, screens have never been bigger. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean that we got much more usable screen real estate. The user interface chrome has become more prominent, to the point that it had to turn ‘glassy’ to be less conspicuous.

The browser viewport is no longer a rectangle, and to make matters worse, it isn’t even a safe area any more. Part of the user interface chrome can now float over the website, which makes it harder to design in layers, because it’s harder to tell the website apart from the browser. The sheet of ‘digital paper’ i’ve been using for years was fighting with the chrome — and ultimately lost.

Which is to say: i went back to a full-bleed design. I’ve pushed my “the footer is the header” philosophy to the limit by designing the biggest footer you’ve ever seen. It now does sextuple duty as the “About” page, the colophon, the legal notice, the blogroll, the archive, and the navigation. The header, if you can call it that, only contains the dispatch’s metadata, as a nod to the teleprinters of yore.

The design is flatter, but not entirely flat. Pictures are still rendered as pasted-on prints, and i’ve added a ‘paper’ map on the locations page. After auditioning more than a dozen typefaces, i’ve replaced my still very much beloved DJR Forma Mono with the delightfully funky OH No Vulf Mono. It’s definitely inspired by the IBM Selectric typewriters, but it has enough of its own personality to avoid being a pastiche (or being as bland as IBM Plex Mono).

Now if you’ll excuse me, i need to go walk a few kilometres. Or else i fear what this confused energy will bring.

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The Phoenician Scheme by Wes Anderson. Another excellent Montblanc ad from Wes Anderson. (I’m kidding, of course. The Phoenician Scheme is less refined, less substantial, less amusing, and generally less memorable than the Montblanc ad.)

John Lanchester at the London Review of Books:

Since fewer and fewer people are using banknotes, it follows logically that fewer banknotes are needed, and therefore that fewer banknotes are being printed and put into circulation. Right? Wrong. In the UK, there is £1300 cash in circulation for every single one of us, but the amount of cash we actually hold is one seventh of that figure. […] So where is all that cash, who’s using it, and for what?

The answer is blindingly obvious: “it’s being used in criminal transactions.” Fascinating piece.

The Boys of Dungeon Lane by Paul McCartney. The first minute of the opening track, “As You Lie There”, sounds like a false start. Once the electric guitar and the drums kick in, The Boys of Dungeon Lane is tightly wound and supremely well produced. The lyrics are as naive as ever, but that doesn’t mean they’re not effective.

“Down South” is a poignant homage to a hiking trip Macca took with George Harrison in their teenage years. “We Two”, the highlight of the album, could have been written for Linda McCartney as well as John Lennon. “Home to Us”, a duet with Ringo Starr, would be cheesy as hell if it didn’t come from two 80-somethings reminiscing about the good ol’ days.

Paul McCartney might not have the voice of his 20s any more, but after 38 albums, not counting the 12 he recorded with the Beatles, he still has something interesting to say.

Zarathoustra at Maurice Ravel Auditorium. I’m not the biggest fan of Richard Strauss, whose later years were murky to say the least, but i have to admit that Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks and Also sprach Zarathustra are two of the most awe-inspiring pieces of music ever committed to staff paper. The former reminded me why i don’t listen to that much orchestral music at home — it can’t be properly reproduced without missing the quietest phrases… or blowing up your speakers. The latter is more than the cliché it’s become since Kubrick and Deodato — played on the magnificent 82-stop and 6,500-pipe organ of the Maurice Ravel Auditorium, the introductory double low C is properly gut-churning.

The inclusion of Beethoven’s third piano concerto in between the two was a bit of a surprise. Leif Ove Andsnes had to cancel his performance due to illness, so Javier Perianes replaced him at the last minute. I’ll never fault a sub, but even if i wanted to, i couldn’t. Perianes is the perfect blend of sweetness and rawness. He spent the first two minutes of the concerto facing the orchestra, like a kid watching candy being made, and displayed incredible expressivity when he finally turned to the piano. Half an hour later, he sprang back to play Manuel de Falla’s Ritual Fire Dance as an encore, with such speed and force that, for a moment, i forgot the auditorium’s perennial sonic limitations.

Christian Tietze:

For a while now I’ve been working with the people at Shiny Frog — the team behind Bear — on something new. Today it goes into beta testing. It’s called Lettera, and it’s a Markdown editor for macOS.

I’ve always liked Bear’s look and feel, but i’ve never liked the idea of putting my notes in a locked-down database. Enter Lettera — it’s basically Bear without the database. You might think we don’t need yet another Markdown editor, but each one has its flaws, and more than one perfectly fine editor has become a bloated mess after a few misguided “upgrades”. We can never have too many choices.

The current beta is still rough around the edges, but it’s promising. You can enable the file browser, the table of contents, the style bar and document statistics to work on big projects, but you can also hide all the complexity away to work on single files. It’s difficult to explain why, but it feels right, neither too simple nor too complex. As a typewriter collector, i find the name is the cherry on the cake.

Franz Schneider Brakel GmbH + Co KG:

Forty years after the Brakel door handle workshop, FSB is bringing back an unmistakable design by Dieter Rams. […] Revised and future-oriented, the entire lever handle is now manufactured locally in Brakel from aluminum. The gray tone of the rgs reappears in the new Aluminum Pure finish. These minimal interventions were carried out in close coordination with Dieter Rams — and the standards he set for his design back in 1986 continue to meet today’s requirements with ease.

I’m writing this from the comfort of my 620 sofa, my feet on my 621 side table, a few metres from my 606 bookshelves. In other words: my home looks like a Dieter Rams exhibition. And yet, i don’t think i’ll ever own an FSB 1138 door handle, designed by Dieter Rams with his student Angelika Knoop.

Back in 1986, deep into the postmodern era, its design was plainly reactionary. Forty years later, it’s fashionably boring, in an “Apple globalized a bastardized version of Rams’s design ethos” kind of way. And even though it’s now “fully manufactured from aluminum in Brakel”, €535 for a door handle is a bit rich for my blood. (Then again, send me the money and i might just change my mind.)

Francisco Trujillo at The Conversation:

We have developed what we call an ultrasonic espresso: a room-temperature brewing process that uses high-frequency sound waves to extract the flavour, oils, aroma and caffeine from coffee grounds. The result is an espresso-strength coffee made in under three minutes, but needing far less energy than the conventional method.

I can’t wait for James Hoffmann’s take on this.

Rebecca Solnit at The Guardian:

The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. The United States of America is a program that has been hacked. […] It is the country that gave the world jazz and blue jeans and atom bombs and the birth control pill; it is its best and its worst people and products.

I love the USA so much that i majored in North American studies. (Granted, i crossed over to Canada midway and never looked back.) It’s given me two careers, my second language, my favourite genre of music, so many books, and the pair of blue jeans i wear each and every day. It’s also given me regular bouts of existential anxiety. Happy 250th birthday, i guess?

I guess i have a new hobby: going to a concert not to see the headliner. As Big Freedia cancelled her whole European tour, the Jazz à Vienne festival’s organizers scrambled to find a suitable replacement. Fortunately, the New Orleans Jazz Museum sponsored the creation of a new group comprising trumpeter James Andrews (Trombone Shorty’s older brother), trombonist Greg Hicks, pianist Victor Campbell, guitarist Sam Dickey, double bassist Sélène Saint-Aimé, drummer Tiss Rodriguez… and drummer Anne Paceo. Yep, that’s right, two drummers.

Anne Paceo’s talent is undeniable, but sometimes, i find her playing too perfect. It’s like listening to a math problem. Last night, though, she let loose just enough to soften her metronomic pulse. She was the deep and sharp yang to Tiss Rodriguez’s lax and floppy yin. I wrote “she’s squaring his circle” while they were engaging in their second battle of the night, a masterclass in the art of call-and-response that lasted a long time, and yet seemed far too short. When they were over, she just sat there with the widest grin i’ve ever seen. Exactly, Anne, exactly.

For his only concert in France this year, Jon Batiste came with the incredibly soulful Desz, guitarist/producer extraordinaire Nick Waterhouse, and Stay Human’s rhythm section. I’ve yet to meet someone whom Batiste can’t win over, but this could have been the night, because Nêgah Santos stole the show. I’ve always liked the way she adds a subtle texture under Joe Saylor’s drums, but she revealed herself as a frontwoman in her own right with a fun rendition of Mas que nada that transported us right into the heart of São Paulo. (The sweltering heat helped.) All in all, it was a good night for percussion.

Veld by Sick Gazelle. Put Eric Block (Veloce), Bruce Lamont (Yakuza), Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth) and Douglas McCombs (Tortoise, BASIC) in the same room, and you get Sick Gazelle. The name is weirder than the music — a thoroughly engrossing blend of post-rock, shoegaze, ambient and jazz. The seemingly endless intro to “I’ll Come Running” evoked my long walks in the countryside, right up to the thunder-like drum roll.

The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan. A film — even a three-hour one — could never translate the complexity of a tale as rich as the Odyssey, but it could convey depth and meaning by displaying Homeric qualities. Unfortunately, the acting is anodyne at best, the pacing is atrociously stop-and-go, the soundtrack is caricatural, the colour grading is distractingly juvenile, the gorgeous on-location establishing shots are ruined by the overuse of poorly lit studio shots and stiff 3D animations, the costumes are ridiculous, and worst of all, the dialogue is so dull that it’s hard to believe they were inspired by the most influential epic in the Western canon.

As Stephanie Zacharek says, this is an “eye-glazing dud of a movie” that “churns […] dutifully toward its predictable conclusions”. Like in ‌Dunkirk, Nolan has flattened the immense contradictions powering the human mind down to a New York Times-style “war is bad” op-ed. Like in Oppenheimer, he has carefully stayed away from anything that could be construed as a commentary on the consequences of one’s actions. But this time, he did it while filming on occupied land. Imagine if Odysseus had sold out like this.

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“What is the oldest thing you own?” For Thomas, who originally asked the question, it’s a Sisters of Mercy tour shirt from 1985. For Ruben, who brought it to my attention, it’s books from the 2000s. Apart from a small blue stuffed bear i’ve had since the day i was born, the oldest thing i’ve continuously owned might be my Apple IIc, which i’ve had for 30 years¹. Unfortunately, i lost my box of 5.25″ floppies half a dozen moves ago. It’s due for a cleanup and recap anyway.

What about the oldest thing period? I’ve just turned on a lamp from the 1970s. I’m sitting on a sofa from the 1960s. I have a camera from the 1950s. I type my shopping lists on a typewriter from the 1940s. One day, i’ll finish the revival of a typeface i found on car adverts from the 1930s. I could mention my small collection of antique books, including a wonderful treatise on typography from 1870 and a selection of Nicolas Boileau’s works from 1858, but i’d be cheating. It’s not hard to get older books, just increasingly expensive.

It’s much more interesting to talk about the oldest thing i use regularly, which is — without a doubt — my Singer 99K hand-cranked sewing machine from 1923. Like my typewriters, it’s not a show piece that’s gathering dust, but a working model that’s earning its place in my modestly sized apartment. I’ve (ab)used it to sew notebook covers, bags, and workwear. It’s a bit temperamental, but it’s the only machine i own that can sew through multiple layers of waxed sailcloth without skipping a stitch.

I don’t think our Singer Heavy Duty 4432 or my MacBook Air will last half as long as their illustrious forebears. I might be able to repair the sewing machine if it ever breaks, because it’s still mostly mechanical, but i sure won’t be fixing the computer by myself. These devices aren’t more useful per se, but they’re certainly more sophisticated, which makes them more brittle. Their continued existence depends on a combination of skills that no single individual can master.

There were sewing machine and typewriter repair shops, for sure, but the machines were supplied with their care and repair guide. The manufacturer assumed that you’d carry out regular maintenance, small adjustments, and basic repairs all by yourself. Try doing that with a MacBook Air! There was a time when everything was designed to be repairable, down to clothes, shoes, and even books. An object you can repair is an object you can tweak, which means you can make it yours. Today’s objects can be in our possession, but that doesn’t mean they’re really ours.

I’d believe it was a worthy trade-off to make them more accessible if the sewing machines and typewriters of yore hadn’t been produced by the millions. They were already objects of mass consumption. You could order them from a catalogue, pay for them in instalments, and have them delivered to your house! A hundred-odd years ago! But back then, you weren’t expected to waste resources, replace your possessions on a whim, and toss things away without having first tried to mend or repurpose them². Cheap³ and plentiful didn’t have to mean disposable.

And so my sewing machines and typewriters will remain the oldest things i use for the rest of my life. If i’m a good custodian, i’ve no doubt they’ll be the oldest things someone will own in the distant future. All the while, most things that have been produced in the last decades will end up as landfill. Let’s hope the next few decades will fare better on that front.

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This ↑ is what happens when Joe Dart breaks the sound barrier playing “Dean Town”. (And not when i drop my phone on a 2,000-year-old theatre’s stone steps trying to put it in my pocket — my back pocket.) Vulfpeck’s concert at the Jazz à Vienne festival was the best non-jazz concert i’ve ever been to, but also one of the loudest. Which is to say: it was the perfect venue to test out new earplugs.

Believe it or not, foam plugs like the good old 3M E-A-R Classics are the gold standard, as they can provide a 30 to 50 dB noise reduction. But they only work if you insert them properly, and they destroy sound quality, cutting the highs to the point of making everything dull and lifeless. They’re a godsend when you need to work or sleep in a noisy environment, but when it comes to music, there are far better solutions — earplugs with acoustic filters.

Instead of packing your ear canal with foam to block as much noise as possible, they force sound to pass through a carefully tuned chamber before entering your ear canal. Membranes, meshes, vents or other elements work to bring the volume down without affecting the sonic characteristics too much. You lose less of the detail that makes music worth hearing, and what you’re left with sounds (almost) the same, simply quieter.

I’ve been using Etymotic ER20XS earplugs for a long time. Their 20 dB noise reduction might not seem impressive, but at the average amplified concert, it brings your safe exposure time from a few minutes to a few hours. Better yet, they attenuate all frequencies pretty evenly. Once they’re in your ears, it feels like you have a volume knob for the world. At noisy festivals, it allows you to reduce the ambient chatter down to a whisper, and focus on the main event.

That being said, the ER20XS aren’t without their faults. You want your earplugs to, well, plug your ears. Etymotic goes about it with belt and braces: the triple-flange tips bite deep for a tight seal, and their slightly tacky surface grips to stop them backing out. I was already used to deep tips, but i’ve never got on with the texture — it gets dirty fast, and worst of all, it makes my ears itchy after a few hours. It’s taken me almost a decade to do something about it, which is saying something, but this year, i’ve decided to audition the Alpine MusicSafe earplugs.

They come in a nifty metal case with two sets of filters: the gold-coloured ones provide a 22 dB attenuation, while the silver-coloured ones are rated for 19 dB. That level of noise reduction comes at the cost of sound quality — the filters clearly work on a downward slope, reducing the highs a bit more than the mids, and the mids a bit more than the lows. That’s the usual compromise with passive earplugs, and i can’t say it’s enough of a problem to justify the insane cost of active devices.

After a few concerts, i think Alpine’s earplugs will do just fine. Their filters are so small that it’s a bit hard to grab them, but their double flange tips are so comfortable that i forgot to remove them on more than one occasion. I’ll keep the Etymotic ER20XS for shorter or quieter concerts — they’re still the best cheap earplugs i’ve worn. But if i need to eke out a bit more protection for festivals, i’ll be sure to bring the Alpine MusicSafes, sound quality be damned. At least until i fall for professional custom-made earplugs with far more linear filters.

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I thought there’d be no better way to celebrate Miles Davis’s centennial than to listen to his whole discography in chronological order (more on that later). Little did i know it’d change the way i see music. And it has nothing to do with Miles Davis himself.

You see, i still have a sizeable CD collection, including a few editions of Kind of Blue. What i didn’t know is that most — if not all — of them suffer from some sort of degradation. One disc from the early ’90s has turned a deep brown and can’t be read by any of my players. A few exhibit a bit of pitting, but it’s difficult to judge whether it’s an inconsequential manufacturing defect or the first signs of disc rot. Worse, a lot of recent releases are slowly but surely delaminating.

Compact discs were supposed to be more durable than vinyl records. Admittedly, some of my LPs sound really bad, but none of them are outright unplayable. Compact discs are sometimes advertised as the antidote for streaming. They might be less impermanent — and i’ve yet to see an AI-generated CD — but they’re not eternal. I can’t even find solace in the fact that i ripped all of my discs, because bit rot is a thing. In that weird and twisted way, bits are bits are bits, and they’ll all dissolve into the ether.

By coincidence, i realized that my most recent edition of Kind of Blue was delaminating a few hours before going to see the We Want Miles! project in concert. It was… fine? I found Mike Stern to be overbearing, Russell Gunn to be so subdued that he left the stage for minutes at a time, and, most surprising of all, Marcus Miller to be a bit sedate. Bill Evans was absolutely incredible, Mino Cinelu and Anwar Marshall formed an explosive duo on percussion, and it’s a crime that Brett Williams was underused, because he’s a damn groovy keyboard player.

Trouble is, after sleeping on it for too short a night, i wonder if i wasn’t too harsh in my initial assessment. Was i a bit tired because by the time Marcus Miller entered the stage, we’d been baking in a blazing sun for hours? Was i in a foul mood because the drunkards around us were “talking” so loudly that it was sometimes difficult to actually hear the band? Maybe. That’s the thing about live music: the music is only part of the experience, and it might not be the most important one.

But then, a far more insidious form of rot is going to take place: brain rot. No, not that one, the other one. What will i remember in a few days? In a few weeks? In a few years? Not the music, that’s for sure, nor the heat and the people. Maybe the only thing that i’ll remember is that i was there, listening to the band that brought Miles Davis out of retirement, and that the son of the most influential jazz saxophone player and a tremendous jazz harpist opened for them.

Memory is a fickle thing, even more so than a CD, and there’s no ripping it before it goes. Disc, rip, memory: everything i trusted to hold the music is failing, one format at a time. There was music; now there’s none. I was there; soon i’ll be gone.

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In a previous life, i was a history major researching the French-Catholic migration to the Canadian Prairies between 1870 and 1915. Published in 1891, Rerum novarum is the foundational text of the Catholic church’s social doctrine. Without overstating its immediate impact, it played a part in the gradual split of the linguistic and religious identities of migrant communities, particularly because the encyclical was poorly received in French Canada, at least at first. The Catholic migrants from France found out they had more in common with other Catholics than with their French-speaking cousins.

I never thought i’d live to see an update to Rerum novarum, but that’s precisely what Magnifica Humanitas is. This isn’t a surprise: Robert Prevost chose the papal name Leo XIV as a direct reference to Leo XIII’s social teaching. “While many of the historical conditions described by Leo XIII have changed”, he writes, “at least two insights remain highly relevant today: the primacy of human labor over any mindset focused solely on finance or productivity – with the consequent attention to the people and families most susceptible to exploitation – and the inseparable link between proclaiming the Gospel and pursuing a more just social order.”

As a mostly lapsed Catholic myself, i’m less and less convinced by biblical arguments, but this encyclical is incredibly light on scriptural proof-texting. (Unless you regard The Lord of the Rings as scripture.) It’s grounded in a far more recent tradition, that of the social doctrine, and makes great use of Pius XI’s principle of subsidiarity, which states that “whatever can be carried out by individuals, families, intermediary organizations and local communities should not be carried out by higher-level authorities.”

This is a surprisingly potent device. Let’s say that:

Today, among the goods that are universally intended for everyone, we must also include new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data. In a context where the wealth of nations depends increasingly on knowledge and technology, when these goods remain concentrated in the hands of a few, without adequate forms of sharing and access, a new imbalance is created that contradicts the universal destination of goods.

Rerum novarum tried to strike a “just balance” between the right to private property and workers’ rights. ‌Quadragesimo anno stated that private property loses its moral value when it isn’t subordinated to the common good. ‌Centesimus annus added that “the foundation of the right to private initiative and ownership” was found in our use of “intelligence and freedom” not only for our own sake, “but also for others and with others”. Leo XIV argues that these sentences are still valid when you replace “private property” with “artificial intelligence”, because AI and other digital assets are nothing but an immaterial form of private property.

In other words: the good old principle of subsidiarity still holds, and “higher-level institutions must recognize, protect and promote the freedom and creativity of lower-level entities, coordinating their contributions so that they can cooperate effectively for the common good”, lest they lose their moral value. That’s crucial, because “to speak of subsidiarity calls for protecting the ability of communities to make choices and corrections, rather than confining their role to mere oversight after the standards have been set elsewhere.”

This is a subtle — too subtle for most mainstream commentators it seems — but powerful argument. Magnifica Humanitas isn’t a knee-jerk reaction against AI, but a profound rebuttal of its governance. Rerum novarum was clearer in its support for trade unions, but this is a big step toward a more open promotion of open-source software and federated services.

In another previous life, i was a tech journalist who wrote endlessly about the meaninglessness of legislation reacting to particular technologies and the need for proactive laws rooted in fundamental beliefs. Leo XIV’s argumentation might appear wishy-washy at times, but it focuses on overarching principles rather than specific implementation details. This is the head of a 2000-year-old institution speaking, after all.

The Pope calls for the “disarming” of artificial intelligence, which “means freeing it from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon.” That being said, the military context can’t be ignored in these particularly troubled times when an unprovoked aggression can be deemed a “just war”:

AI does not remove the intrinsic inhumanity of conflict; indeed it can only bring about conflict more quickly and render it more impersonal, lowering the threshold for resorting to violence, transforming defense into threat prediction and thus reducing victims to data. In this way, it will accustom us to the idea that violence is inevitable and needs only to be optimized.

This line of argumentation could lead to the usual slippery slope about what tools want, but Leo XIV catches himself just in time. “Over the centuries”, he writes, “technological development has significantly improved the living conditions of humanity. At the same time, each phase of progress has also revealed the ambiguity of tools that can cause harm when not oriented toward the good.” In other words: “technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.”

This might appear self-evident, but far too many people think that guns don’t kill. The Pope repeats it over and over again before adding a twist: “our first task is neither to demonize nor idolize technological tools, but to utilize them on the basis of a fundamental principle, namely that truth is a common good and not the property of those with power or influence. We must therefore promote an ecology of communication.”

In the beginning was the word, and Leo XIV knows full well the power of words: “when languages and tools change, so do everyday actions and social relationships”. The Pope’s take on algorithms — “when AI systems present themselves as neutral and objective, they end up reflecting and reinforcing the stereotypes or ideological bias of their designers and developers” — isn’t particularly novel. But then, i’m not sure most Catholics from the richest countries on Earth had to think about the consequences of these systems:

Furthermore, control is exercised not only through explicit prohibitions, but also through the architecture of visibility: what is amplified or rendered invisible, what is rewarded or penalized, ultimately shapes opinions and choices, fostering conformity and self-censorship. For this reason, freedom in the digital age is not merely a matter of interiority but also a public concern.

Unfortunately, Leo XIV doesn’t dwell too long on the nature of work in the age of AI:

A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity, a lack of responsibility and the absence of daily tasks and stimuli, resulting in human and cultural impoverishment. This creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace.

This isn’t uninteresting, but it rings a bit hollow. Rerum novarum was a seminal contribution in the midst of a wide-ranging social movement. The Catholic church’s social doctrine ended up having a huge impact on the establishment of social democracies before, between, and after the two World Wars. At the time, Leo XIII was talking to heads of state and captains of industry on whom he had at least a semblance of authority. But today? The debate has been captured by the same people who are effecting the changes at hand. This is a fully private matter on which not only the Pope, but also the state, has little to no say. To some, it’s even a war of religion — and why would they listen to the enemy?

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If you don’t speak French, you might never have heard of the AZERTY keyboard — the weird cousin of QWERTY with its shifted number row and a scattering of accented letters across the board. Even if you do speak French, you might not use AZERTY — the Swiss and Luxembourgers type on a QWERTZ-based layout and French Canadians use their own QWERTY-based layouts. And even though i’m French, i don’t use AZERTY either.

QWERTY already loads up the left hand, but AZERTY makes things worse by parking the most common accented letter (é) on that side too. (I’ll never understand why anyone thought a “new” AZERTY that crams every accented letter under the left hand would be a great idea.) And don’t get me started on the decision to bump the second most common letter in French (a) off the home row, give one of the least used (z) such a prime spot, and dedicate an entire key to a letter that appears in just one word (ù). It’s one of the daftest layouts around. To make matters worse, most programming languages have been engineered around QWERTY, which makes it the most practical layout for anyone who writes code.

Most QWERTY users i know have chosen the US International layout. It works quite well… provided you only ever type in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Dutch. Speak French or a Scandinavian language, and you’ll be diving into the Opt/AltGr layer constantly. Speak any other language that uses the Latin alphabet, and you’re simply out of luck. And even if you only need the odd accented letter here and there, it’s missing plenty of useful characters whilst still finding room for utterly useless ones like the fi and fl ligatures. So, back when we were all stuck indoors during the worst of the Covid pandemic, i set out to design a more useful international QWERTY layout.

The result is QWeuRTY, the layout i’ve been using for the past five years. From the French ç to the Portuguese ã, the Asturian ḥ to the Icelandic ð, the Spanish ñ to the Irish í, the Swedish å to the Dutch ij, the German ß to the Czech ř, the Polish ł to the Lithuanian ą, the Hungarian ő to the Turkish ı, QWeuRTY lets you type every character in every Latin-script European language straight from a QWERTY keyboard.

Like every other international layout, QWeuRTY leans heavily on dead keys for the most common diacritics:

• ˋ for the grave accent and breves;
• ~ for the tilde;
• ^ for the circumflex;
• ' for the acute and double acute accents;
• " for the diaeresis and double grave accent;
• \ for the caron;
• | for the macron and stroked characters;
• § for the cedilla and the ogonek;
• and ± for the dot.

That’s nine dead keys in all — a lot, and still not enough, because a handful of characters from French and the Iberian and Nordic languages don’t fit neatly into any of the accent layers. You’ll find those in the Opt/AltGr layer, alongside the most useful currency, mathematical, and typographical symbols. That means QWeuRTY works best on a 105-key ISO keyboard, though it’ll do in a pinch on a 104-key ANSI one, albeit with reduced functionality.

I’ve not felt the need to tweak QWeuRTY for a year now, so it’s time to set it loose on the linguists, diplomats, and curious polyglots of the world. I also have provisional Colemak and Workman versions working, though i’d like to be sure they’re logical and ergonomic before i hand them over. Either way, i’d love to hear what you think!

• Download QWeuRTY for macOS, Linux and Windows

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I’m not talking about the orange buffoon’s latest antics. I’m not talking about the sweltering heat that’s descending on Europe once more. I’m not even talking about the collective insanity that has pushed a racist, misogynist, authoritarian, conspiracist, transphobic, and climate-change denier’s virtual fortune over one trillion dollars. And i’m definitely not talking about the boys running around with a ball. I’m talking, of course, about Apple’s latest announcements.

In my twenty years covering Apple, i don’t remember another instance where the most popular devices on sale couldn’t benefit from all the features of their latest operating system. The iPhone 17 and MacBook Neo don’t have enough RAM to use Apple’s most advanced on-device foundation models. It’s a bit maddening, but at the same time, i can’t help but feel hopeful. For the first time in years, the hardware actually is the limit, and if the current state of the market is any indication, it should remain so for a few years. Let’s hope it drives everyone to optimize the software.

Last time Apple came that close to saying “i’m sorry”, it was when they realized that the iPad wouldn’t replace the Mac, which gave us the fantastic run of Apple Silicon-based devices we’ve had. Can we hope for a comparable outcome with Liquid Glass? I’m afraid not. I’m all for edge-to-edge sidebars and more defined toolbars, but they weren’t the real problem. The user interface is still broken at a fundamental level, and a new coat of paint isn’t going to fix it.

Apple was the last holdout believing that a photo was the product of photons hitting a sensor, but it finally caved in. Your gallery literally is your photographic memory: when your memory fades, your photos remain, and they end up becoming your memories. Giving people the ability to fabricate photos, partly with the Spatial Reframing and Extend tools or entirely with Image Playground, gives them the ability to create false memories. I don’t think that’s something you should announce so cheerfully. Worse, treating other people as mere “distractions” that you can remove with the Clean Up tool is the perfect way to create a generation of sociopaths.

If Siri AI is as good as Apple claims it is, then the lock-in will be stronger than ever. That’s why Craig Federighi is once again whining about the DMA. By requiring interoperability, European citizens are preventing Apple from imprisoning them in its walled garden and preserving their right to choose the best tool for their needs on the platform they’re using. We need to go even further: like we did with cloud services and music streaming, we should require portability between personal assistants, in order to switch from one to another without losing personal data and context. That should keep Apple whimpering for another few years.

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They say “the hype is real”, but more often than not, the hype is entirely fabricated. The more a product is hyped on Reddit and other places, the greater the chance it’s a marketing psyop. Unless that product happens to be the Uniball Zento Signature rollerball, in which case the hype is absolutely real.

The original Zento is a basic retractable plastic pen that you’ll find at your local stationery store for around €2. It’s so generic that if you’re not careful, you might pick a One F instead. Its only distinguishing feature is its refill — Uniball describes it as a “next-generation water-based” formulation, but thanks to the use of non-ionic surfactants, it’s almost as smooth as gel ink.

The Zento Signature uses the exact same refill, so why the hype? Well, because it looks nothing like a basic retractable plastic pen. Its metal construction gives it a premium look and pleasant heft. The grip section is coated in soft-touch plastic, a material that extends to the part of the barrel that’s in contact with the web of your thumb¹. This makes it a delight to hold.

The barrel taper is the defining feature of the Zento Signature. It gives it its signature look, but also allows the cap to sit so deep it barely changes the length and balance of the pen. Which means that, yes, the Zento Signature isn’t even a retractable pen. The magnets in the cap and ends ensure a satisfying click each time you cap or post the pen. It’s just plain fun, to the point that i might have used it more as a fidget toy than as a pen.

Finally, the clip is made of a flat blade instead of a round wire, but it has the perfect amount of springiness. In the end, apart from the refill, the Zento Signature has nothing in common with the basic Zento. The 0.38 mm tip wouldn’t have been my first choice, but it was my only choice².

In keeping with the tight tolerances of the whole pen, the tip wobble is minimal. Uniball could replace its oil-based formulations with the Zento water-based ink and it wouldn’t make that much of a difference. The good old Signo ink is a touch smoother, but it’s close, and the colour is nearly identical. I prefer the One refills, however, as they’re designed to be heavily pigmented. That’s where Uniball really hit the nail on the head: both the Signo and One refills fit in the Zento Signature.

In Japan, the Zento Signature costs twelve times more than the basic Zento, but that makes it only €18. As it’s not readily available elsewhere, resellers jacked the prices up to €40-60 for the basic colours and to more than €100 for the limited finishes. At that inflated price, it’s just not worth it. Let’s hope the hype will die down eventually. Even at €25, it’ll be a killer pen.

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I don’t know why it suddenly dawned on me, but i’m not sure why i chose to build Z1NZ0L1N and Architypes with a full-fat CMS. I’d been using Pelican and Hugo for almost fifteen years by that point, so i’ll chalk it up to some sort of static site generator fatigue. It took me more than a year to remember why i abandoned CMSes in the first place: they have pretty much every feature that i need… and a lot i don’t.

Ghost isn’t a bad CMS, but i don’t want to turn my audience “into a business”. I don’t need integrated analytics, a newsletter engine, a clunky attempt at federation, and reminders to adopt “content distribution tactics” to get more people to discover my work and increase engagement. If i’m using a CMS, though, i’d like to be able to manage my uploads in a media library and to organize my content with more than a single taxonomy. I guess those features aren’t shiny enough for the tech bros who Ghost is trying to lure away from Substack and Medium.

Going back to Hugo means losing Ghost’s editor, but i’m writing in iA Writer anyway. The thought of having to set up compilation and deployment scripts might seem daunting, but it’s a one and done deal. I’ll never be bothered by useless features any more, i’ll shape the medium around the content, and best of all, i’ll be able to get back to Infomaniak’s excellent — and cheap — shared hosting.

In the past, that kind of endeavour might have taken me a few evenings and weekends, but thanks to Claude Code, it was over in a few hours. I can’t say that porting templates, converting HTML to Markdown, grepping files and renaming folders is fulfilling work. If Claude ends up being nothing more than a glorified regex generator, then it’ll already be transformative. That’s plumbing alright, but plumbing is vital, and i’d rather do anything else with my limited time on this rapidly warming planet.

I just wished it’d be more predictable, more coherent, more… careful. These tools reflect the “let’s throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks” ethos of their creators, and each throw costs more money and more CO₂ than i’m willing to waste. I can’t wait for the bubble to burst, not because i want the tech bros to suffer (that’s just a nice bonus), but because we need to sort the features from the hype, and figure out how these tools can consistently serve their users.

That being said, i can’t help but be amazed by the result. It’s telling that Claude sailed through the template conversion, but choked on the content formatting. Machine language is easy, human language is hard, even for — especially for — machines that pretend to be human.

Links

“Craft is not culture” by Naz Hamid. “Culture is the moat. It’s not craft and it’s not aesthetic. […] LLMs can pattern-match around culture, but they cannot be inside it. They cannot live it.” Trouble is, there’s no culture without craft. Our current deskilling is our future deculturation.

“Last.fm is now independent”. More wonderful news.

Music

‌Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis. Miles Davis would have been 100 years old this week. The tribute albums are pouring in, starting with 100 Miles for Miles Davis from Jason Miles, the synth programmer on Miles Davis’s last three albums. But there’s nothing like going back to the source — and if i have to choose, Sketches of Spain is my favourite Miles Davis record, with its haunting arrangement of the Concierto de Aranjuez by Gil Evans. This week also witnessed the death of Sonny Rollins, who was only four years younger than Miles Davis, at the grand old age of 95. You can feel the passage of jazz history.

Movies

Good Omens: The Finale by Rachel Talalay. Is it a single-episode season of a TV show? Is it a movie? I guess it doesn’t matter that much. Terry Pratchett spent his career celebrating human life in all its messiness. The Discworld series and Good Omens were fantastic tales, just like the tales we tell ourselves to give meaning to our lives, tales full of joy and hope and passion and creativity. Aziraphale, Crowley, and, most of all, Adam Young were supposed to prove that predestination isn’t destiny. Left to its own devices, Neil Gaiman decided that everyone — including Jesus! — could be flicked out of existence by a caprice of the gods. “I guess you don’t matter that much”: tell me you’re a sexual predator without telling me you’re a sexual predator.

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When you’re not as rich as you’d like and not as powerful as you’d think, you plaster gold trinkets all over your Oval Office. When you’re as rich as millions of people combined and as powerful as most democratically elected heads of state, you plaster your munificence all over public amenities. Rockefeller did it, Carnegie did it, even Bernard Arnault did it. You can barely recognize LV’s monogram on top of its entrance, but make no mistake, the Fondation Louis Vuitton is testament to Arnault’s grip over France’s public affairs.

Much to the chagrin of our public museums, which can’t afford to overbid mere millionaires and keep national treasures from leaving the country, the Fondation Louis Vuitton has pockets deep enough to gather works from all over the world and organize lavish monographic exhibitions. “Rêver en équilibre” (“dreaming in equilibrium”) brings nearly 300 works from Alexander Calder under the same roof. It’d be impressive if they’d simply tossed them haphazardly into a room, but Frank Gehry’s steel and glass vessel seems to have been designed to hold Calder’s delicate sculptures.

Money plays a big part — it’s no coincidence that the Whitney Museum of American Art loaned Calder’s Circus to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, for what should be its last voyage outside of the US, only weeks after LVMH sponsored one of its exhibitions. But it’s not all about money. You could feel the care and attention that radiated from each and every space, from the most intimate niches to the most grandiose of rooms. They had a ball staging Calder’s pieces, and it shows.

The first mobiles were delicate things, little hanging sculptures not much bigger than your head. The last ones are monumental things, huge structures that tower over you. And yet, big or small, they all move with the tiniest draught of air. That’s something even money can’t control: again and again, as if moved by a mischievous force, the mobiles tripped up the proximity alarms. What a delight.

Links

“AI Doesn’t Work and We All Know it Doesn’t Work” by Margaret Killjoy. “Last week, a bunch of college graduates, walking across the stage to get their diplomas, didn’t have their names called. Because the university had outsourced the task of reading their names out to an AI. And AI doesn’t work.” They had their revenge. And i’m confident they’ll continue to get it. Actual intelligence works.

“Ad Infini­tum” by Matthias Ott. Why are we losing so much energy over Google’s latest devolution? For most people, Google is the beginning and end of their whole computing journey. We act as if we’re owed one of those ten blue links, but Google paid us with all of their “organic traffic” and “programmatic ads”, and now they’re taking their reward. The contract hasn’t been broken: it’s always been about exploitation, and there’s far more money to be made pillaging the ungodly amount of personal data people create each second of each minute of each hour of each day. We should celebrate our fall into economic irrelevancy. We’re now free to create what we want for the audience we chose.

“Rakuten Kobo and StoryGraph announce integration”. Great news.

Movies

Wicked: For Good by Jon M. Chu. Such an incredible movie… because it has no redeeming qualities. It’s ugly as sin, the music is bad and the lyrics are worse, the characters are shallower than a salt flat, and the plot is nothing more than an assortment of barely related scenes. Chu turned one of the most iconic moments in the history of cinema, when Dorothy steps into the glow of the Technicolor lighting, into a grotesque 3D-generated and autotune-ridden farce.

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Nobody in their right mind should own a professional espresso machine at home. Which is exactly why, for years, i owned a professional espresso machine at home. I sold it after getting increasingly frustrated with having to wait for the machine to warm up before i could pull my first decent shot of the day. I still own a V60 dripper, an AeroPress, a French press, a cold brew pot, but truth be told, i mainly use my trusty Moccamaster KGBT coffee machine.

That doesn’t mean i haven’t found ways to make things more complicated than they should be. I’m not talking about filtering your water, storing your beans in vacuum canisters, and grinding your coffee fresh. Those are things you should absolutely do if you see coffee as something more than a mere shot of caffeine. I’m talking about systematically benchmarking paper filters before settling on Moccamaster’s own, because they produce a clean, bright, and generally good cup.

I’m talking about lightly spraying the beans with water before grinding them to prevent static and clumps. I’m even talking about using a sieve to remove the finest particles, which lead to uneven extraction, when i hear my grinder choking on light roasts. (I’m a bit concerned that friends thought it’d make the perfect gift for me, but turns out, they were right.) Those are things you should absolutely not do if you want to keep seeing coffee as something enjoyable.

You thought i was finished? Think again. I love the Moccamaster KGBT, but i’ll never understand why its shower head is so small (i hope that Coffeehaus will eventually make a metal version of their wide shower head). At the beginning of the brew, i have to stir the grounds a few times to make sure they’re properly saturated all around. At the end of the brew, i have to stir the slurry a few more times to make sure the bed is level. In a way, i’m recreating the motion of a pour-over to even out the extraction.

As one last flourish, i shake the hell out of the carafe to mix the different stages of the brew before serving. At this point, it’s more ritual than recipe, but i’m convinced that forgetting even one of these steps leads to a worse cup of coffee. It’s not even close — my poor wife will attest i can tell when she hasn’t stirred the grounds. So please, don’t try this at home. You’ll thank me for not making your life harder.

Apps

Picnic. A nifty little app to organize your photo library, hamstrung by a frustrating pricing model. It blends the swipes from Tinder to keep/delete your photos (brilliant) with the streaks from Duolingo to earn more free swipes each day (less brilliant). The 100-to-250 free swipes cover most days, so the subscription needs to justify itself. At €69.99/year, up from €29.99 just months ago, it really doesn’t.

Links

‌“The paper computer” by James Somers. “Shouldn’t one goal of rapid technical advancement be some melding of the physical and virtual worlds such that I can sit quietly in an easy chair with pen and pad […] and yet have the same flexibility, portability, persistence, and remixability as in the digital versions of these things?” I’m still convinced that ML and LLMs are the missing piece of the “electronic notebook” puzzle — the Microsoft Courier concept, to cite one infamous example, isn’t as unfeasible as it once was. The underlying tech isn’t the problem anymore, but the GUI on top of it still is. Doing away with it entirely might be an idea worth exploring.

“Your CEO is suffering from AI psychosis” by Jake Handy. “There’s a specific kind of brain rot spreading through executive suites and VC circles right now. It looks like productivity. It sounds like innovation. It burns through tokens at a rate that would make your CFO cry. And it produces almost nothing of measurable value.” As always, people see the hammer before seeing the nail, but this time around, the hammer is riding on $1.6 trillion and there are no nails. Psychosis my ass.

Videos

“The BLUETOOTH CONNECTED Voice Actors” by String & Tell and Tawny Platis. That was surreal.

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I was leafing through a collection of George Orwell’s essays when i stumbled upon this gem from “Looking back on the Spanish War”:

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that “the facts” existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone.
[…]
Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive.

The first part has remained quite depressingly true. But the second part? The second part i’m not so sure of. Reality has surpassed fiction — we’re living in a kind of 1984 world where people reject the evidence of their eyes and ears. Righteousness has become more important than truthfulness. Orthodoxy holds dominion over ethics, morals, civics, logic, aesthetics, epistemology, and even religion.

For billions of people, truth does absolutely exist, but it’s got nothing to do with the absolute truth that Orwell was talking about. The colour that results from the complete absorption of visible light and the lightest achromatic colour still exist, but the meaning of the words “black” and “white” has changed to construct an alternate reality. You can only be right or wrong in this world, and if being right makes you wrong, then a decree will make it right.

You can liberate people from their oppressors by bombing them while negotiating with said oppressors. You can fight climate change by changing very little in the climate-altering megastructures. You can protect the country you’ve built after the single largest genocide in history by committing the 23rd largest genocide in history. And you can definitely grow the economy by making the poor even poorer, as long as the rich get even richer.

But hey, everything is for the best in this best of possible worlds, right?

Links

Best of all possible worlds. By the way, i love this passage from Wikipedia’s entry on Leibniz’s argument about the best of all possible worlds: “Beings are possible together, in turn, when they do not enter into contradiction with each other. For instance, it is logically possible that a meteor might have fallen from the sky onto Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s head soon after he was born, killing him. But it is not logically possible that what happens in a given world (e.g. that Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia) also does not happen in the same world (i.e. that Jimmy Wales did not found Wikipedia). While both of these events are logically possible in themselves, they are not logically possible together, or compossible — so, they cannot form part of the same possible world.” Poor Jimmy.

“The Secret to Success Is ‘Monotasking’” by David Epstein. Why concentrate when you can monotask?

“What have you tried?” by Ashur Cabrera. I came for the article, i stayed for the purplish background, the Peugeot 404 error page, and the obsessive photo side project. Wait, did i write this article?

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A few months into my new role, the biggest change has nothing to do with the job itself. It’s that i can’t listen to music while working. Even though most of my team works remotely, i work a few days a week with some of my colleagues — and, most importantly, my boss — in a semi-open-plan office space. I can’t disappear into my lovely Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro without coming off as a bit antisocial.

Most people around the office use Shokz OpenRun headsets, but i’ve never liked bone-conduction headphones. It so happens that open-ear earbuds are now a thing. After trying a few models, i’ve settled on the Shokz OpenDots One, which offer the best compromise between sound quality, comfort, style, battery life, and price.

It’ll never not be weird to clip tiny speakers to my ears, but the tan version is as inconspicuous as it gets. Best of all, they’re supremely comfortable, which is something i can’t say about my AirPods Pro. The clamping force is perfect: tight enough that the earbuds don’t slide around even when i’m shaking my head, but not so tight as to pinch my ears. You need to angle the earbuds upwards, towards the ear canal, to get the best out of them.

The standard tuning is decent, with fairly defined highs and pleasantly rounded mids, but Shokz gives you three sound profiles and a five-band EQ to customize the OpenDots One to your liking. I’ve ended up boosting the bass and low-mids to compensate for their open nature. Dolby Audio support is, as always, a gimmick that does nothing but drown music in a sea of reverb and pierce your eardrums with overcooked highs.

I never felt the need to push the volume past the 50% mark. I can enjoy my music without my colleagues noticing, and i can still hear them clearly when they’re talking to me. The DSP seems to lose it at higher volume anyway — the high-mids get shouty and the bass gets distorted. I wouldn’t use them for calls either: they’re pretty much useless without environmental noise cancellation, but with it, your voice takes on a metallic quality reminiscent of late 1990s headsets.

The touch controls are reliable enough. A double pinch on the battery plays or pauses, and a long press on the left or right battery lowers or raises the volume. Speaking of the battery, i get a full day out of the OpenDots One per charge, with the case providing enough juice for a whole week. The earbuds are symmetrical, which means they go on either side of the case… and either ear. The case supports Qi charging, but doesn’t have magnets for MagSafe/Qi2 chargers.

Overall, i like the OpenDots One a lot. I’m even thinking of hiking with them, something i’ve never done with my AirPods because they always slide out of my ears. The price is right too. But as always with most wireless earbuds, it annoys me that they’ll end up as landfill because you can’t replace the battery easily. If only Fairphone made Open Fairbuds!

Music

Ascending by Delia Stevens & Will Pound. Who knew that the harmonica and melodeon went so well with the glockenspiel? And spinning bells? And another half a dozen percussion instruments? Well, Will Pound and Delia Stevens knew. Their recompositions of Gustav Holst’s St. Paul’s Suite and Planets are cheerful and effervescent. It makes their original about Holst’s missing planet, Earth, all the more haunting. Earth: The Silent Planet, with lyrics from Robert Macfarlane, is one of the most awe-inspiring things i’ve heard this decade. Absolutely brilliant.

Vol. II by Angine de poitrine. I’m always surprised that Emmet Cohen hasn’t recorded more albums, but then again, he recorded hundred of album-quality tracks… on YouTube. Angine de poitrine might be the first band that only works on YouTube. Don’t get me wrong, Vol. II is a great release, at least if you like this kind of math rock. But it doesn’t click until you see them play — the papier maché costumes, the double neck guitar, the insane pedal work, that’s an expérience totale is there ever was one. Considering how much i missed my subwoofer when i listened to their album, i might have to see them live to get my share.

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This week came and went in a blur. I hadn’t realized how much i’d missed being on the creative side of things. Don’t get me wrong — i love managing my team of designers and planning our overall strategy. But i missed being in the thick of it, thinking deep and hard about the tiniest technicality, and being absolutely knackered by 3 PM. I’m thrilled that i still get to do it… and that i still got it!

Speaking of the creative side of things: in my People and Blogs interview, i mentioned Architypes, my little side project documenting old-school French storefronts. In the few weeks since, it’s garnered more interest than in the 10+ years i’ve been talking about it here in France. Huge thanks to Cassidy, Matt, Marilyn, Nicolas, Chad and the others for shining a light on this tiny project of mine.

Books

We Solve Murders by Richard Osman. Richard Osman sure knows how to write a thoroughly enjoyable book, but i don’t know, this one felt a bit trite. Most of the characters seem to have been dreamed up by the publisher’s marketing team to hit all the “key demos” and the hops around the world seem to have no other justification than to offer regular changes of scenery for the eventual film adaptation. Even the seemingly obligatory mention of ChatGPT feels uninspired at best. I really hope that it’s not a sign of things to come with the next instalment in the Thursday Murder Club series. (That being said, Trouble is a great name for a cat.)

Links

“The next evolution of The Verge’s homepage is here” by William Joel. They’re living my dream of five years ago. Contrary to my last employer, they understand the difference between traffic and audience, and are doing everything they can to transform fleeting traffic into a long-lasting audience. I wish them well in their effort to build their own community on their own (eventually federated) platform. That’s where the money is, and actual tech journalism deserves all the money it can get.

“MacBook Neo and How the iPad Could Be” by Craig Mod. In order to justify its existence between the iPhone and the MacBook, the iPad had to be, to quote Steve Jobs, “far better at doing some really important things […] than a laptop or a smartphone.” Alas, Apple quickly lost that ambition and revelled in making the iPad far worse at doing a lot of really important things than a laptop or a smartphone. I agree with Craig: “the iPad should be a highly-focused touch playground. Weird as hell, one-of-a-kind apps. And MacBooks should be for multitasking, moving information and data around, building evermore powerful tools (tools within tools within tools), all bounded by a keyboard-first universe.” It’s high time that Apple, if not the whole of the computer industry, understood that “consistency” doesn’t mean “convergence”. Things can be consistent in principle and wildly different in appearance. People will figure it out, if only you trust them to be cleverer than most of Silicon Valley thinks they are.

“At Machine Speed” by Matthias Ott. We’re in the midst of what i called a “LLM-powered cultural DDoS attack”, but Matthias describes something more nefarious entirely, an actual LLM-powered DDoS attack. “Language models can find zero-days and write working exploits faster than we can patch them”, which is putting intense pressure on solo-run and open-source projects. I’m sure that OpenAI and Anthropic will tell you that the solution is simple: let LLMs patch your code automatically, and if they make mistakes, more powerful LLMs will patch them in the future. In short: remove humans from the equation entirely and let the machines talk to the machines. It’s going to cost us dearly, and not only in euros and cents.

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