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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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. The name is the cherry on the cake. As a typewriter collector, i appreciate the nod to the famed Olivetti Lettera range.

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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 20 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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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.

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“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.

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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 thumb. (Did you know that the distance between your extended thumb and forefinger is called a purlicue? I didn’t.) 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 choice. (My drug dealer brother-in-law had to scour dozens of stationery shops in three Japanese cities before finding a place that still had a few models in stock.)

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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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.

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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 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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I enjoy repairing typewriters, but the Olivetti Lettera 36 tested my patience. It’s what’s commonly referred to as an “electric typewriter”, but should really be called an “electro-mechanical typewriter”. From the outside, it looks like a mechanical typewriter, down to the type bars and ribbon. From the inside, it’s another story entirely.

Mechanical typewriters are wonderful machines that are entirely powered by your fingers. When you strike a key, your energy is transmitted through a carefully designed set of levers and springs, and the type bar strikes the paper. If you strike too hard, you might tear up the paper. If you strike too soft, you’ll get only a faint impression.

At the same time, the heel of the type bar touches the universal bar, which trips the escapement rocker. The loose dog is pushed away from the star-wheel tooth, the carriage moves exactly one space to the left, and through another ingenious set of linkages, the ribbon feed rotates to expose a fresh portion of ribbon. When you reach the end of the line, you push the return lever to return the carriage to its rightmost position, all the while rotating the platen by a set amount of line spacing.

Electro-mechanical typewriters feature the same components, but everything is powered by an electric-motor drive. When you strike a key, the type bar is sent flying away by a constantly rotating drive shaft. Even if you type with an incredibly soft touch, you’ll get a consistent impression, which means you can type much faster than on a mechanical typewriter.

This all depends on a mind-bogglingly intricate assembly of pulleys, belts, and cogs working in perfect harmony. If the motor is weak, if the pulleys are sticky, if the belts are loose, if the cogs are misaligned, if a lever is bent, if you breathe too hard, the timing will be off. The type bars will strike inconsistently (or not at all), the shift key won’t latch (or stop latching), the space bar won’t work (or stop repeating spaces), and the carriage return key won’t return the carriage (or trip in the middle

of a sentence). My Olivetti Lettera 36 exhibited each and every one of these issues. So much for it being advertised as a “fully working model”! First, the motor capacitor was dislodged. Without it, the motor can’t get up to speed. Then, the old grease had congealed into a gooey mess. After (sparsely) reapplying fresh lithium grease where it was needed and cleaning the perished lubrication where it wasn’t, the machine came roaring back to life.

I say “roaring”, but i should say “whining”. The belts were rubbing against the sides of the pulleys because they were far too tight. Following the service manual’s instructions, i loosened them slightly, which made the machine quieter. This was the end of straightforward repairs and the beginning of a tedious game of Whack-A-Mole. I reattached a spring to fix the space bar, but then the carriage return key started acting up. I bent a lever to make it more reliable, but then the shift key stopped working.

Just when i was thinking about going mad, a second Olivetti Lettera 36 showed up. (Don’t ask.) This one had the same grease and belt problems, but after a good cleanup and tuneup, it worked pretty much perfectly. It might not be a coincidence that it’s an earlier model from the early 1970s, as its funky Cooper Black keys attest, at a time when Olivetti was still proud to operate a factory in the heart of Barcelona.

A few years later, the Italian manufacturer had already begun outsourcing production (and even some of its engineering). The other – and still non-functional – model was manufactured in East Germany by VEB Robotron Buchungsmaschinenwerk Karl-Marx-Stadt. You can see the cost-cutting of the early 1980s at play, and it’s not pretty. In a twist of irony, Robotron improved on Olivetti’s design with the sturdier and quieter Erika Electric S2020. That was the end of the road for Olivetti, which stopped manufacturing typewriters entirely, and contracted the design and manufacturing of word processors and computers to Chinese companies.

Things

Olympia Carrera de Luxe MD. Speaking of typewriters, i learned that you could still buy brand-new Olympia Carrera de Luxe and Carrera de Luxe MD electronic typewriters. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was nothing more than a rebadged Nakajima AX/WPT word processor.

Words

Mendacity. It’s been a long time since i’ve learned a new word. “Mendacity” is “the quality of being untruthful”, which, unfortunately, is very much in the air these days.

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The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few metres; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the ground); the appealing or repelling character of certain places — all this seems to be neglected. In any case it is never envisaged as depending on causes that can be uncovered by careful analysis turned to account. People are quite aware that some neighbourhoods are sad and others pleasant. But they generally simply assume elegant streets cause a feeling of satisfaction and that poor streets are depressing, and let it go at that. In fact, the variety of possible combinations of ambiances, analogous to the blending of pure chemicals in an infinite number of mixtures, gives rise to feelings as differentiated and complex as any other form of spectacle can evoke. The slightest demystified investigation reveals that the qualitatively or quantitatively different influences of diverse urban decors cannot be determined solely on the basis of the era or architectural style, much less on the basis of housing conditions.

— Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography”, Les lèvres nues (6).

Flânerie is a kind of reading of the street, in which human faces, shop fronts, shop windows, café terraces, street cars, automobiles and trees become a wealth of equally valid letters of the alphabet that together result in words, sentences and pages of an ever-new book. In order to engage in flânerie, one must not have anything too definite in mind.

— Franz Hessel, Walking in Berlin.

Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance — nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite a different schooling. Then signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its centre.

— Walter Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle”, Reflections.

I can’t stand self-aggrandizing “adventurers” who only deal in extremes. Their mere presence is a disruption that’ll precipitate the eventual disfigurement of the places they’re supposedly highlighting. How much carbon did they burn to get there? How many people did they exploit along the way? How much did they destroy with each footstep? They don’t care, because all that matters is that they were there. They need to travel to the wildest, highest, furthest, prettiest, and harshest places to stop feeling so insignificant. Consequences be damned.

I advocate for much more mundane – and sustainable – adventures. You don’t need to study psychogeography to enjoy the dérive, a method of drifting through space without thinking too much about it. A good dérive is all about feel. You should let the place guide you, even if it means retracing your steps down a slightly gloomy street, instead of trying to systematically explore. This isn’t a mere stroll — properly “unplanning” your journey takes a lot of practice and effort.

A dérive is hard enough in a place you’re not familiar with, because you might be tempted to first get a feel for it by looking at a map. It’s even harder in a place you’re familiar with, because you’ve already got a feel for it. You need to rid yourself of such notions as “purpose”, “itinerary”, “destination”, and “return trip”. (You need solid shoes and a water bottle, though.) The territory is the map, and if you’re mindful enough, it’ll lead where you actually needed to go.

I discovered my favourite café by crossing the neighbourhood through a street i’d never taken before. I found a book that changed my life in a derelict second-hand bookshop by going the long way around a tourist spot. I’ve taken a lot of pictures for my typographical project by aimlessly walking around. I also hurt my foot really badly by letting the place guide me far further than was reasonable. Now that’s a proper adventure!

This is my entry for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival, about “Adventure”, hosted by Pablo.

Books

Deaf Sentence by David Lodge. As always with Lodge, fiction doesn’t stray far from life. Before admitting that “the narrator’s deafness and his Dad have their sources in my own experience”, the British writer tried to hide his hearing loss for more than a decade. Deaf Sentence revisits Lodge’s favourite topics — the vagaries of academic life and the sexual (in)discretions of Catholics — without the acerbic tone of his earlier work. All in all, it’s a sweet story of an old professor confronting his own mortality by watching his elderly father wither away. It was Lodge’s penultimate novel before his death in 2025. (I pity the poor translators who had to translate the many plays on words, beginning with the title.)

Links

“The worst of us” by Ian Betteridge. Following Claude Mythos Preview’s announcement, most people focused on its cybersecurity capabilities that allowed it to find “thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser”, which is incredibly ironic considering Anthropic’s recent data leak. Ian went beyond the press release and read Mythos’ “system card”, which reveals its tendency to deliberately cover up its mistakes. Language isn’t intelligence, but it sure is powerful.

Music

BaRcoDe by Ben Wendel. Ben Wendel, Joel Ross, Simon Moullier, Patricia Brennan, and Juan Diego Villalobos capped their residency at The Jazz Gallery by recording BaRcoDe at The Bunker Studio in Brooklyn. Even if he’s the driving force behind this intriguing blend of modern jazz and postmodern chamber music, Wendel plays his saxophone sparingly, to accentuate the percussion and delineate the mallets (vibraphone, marimba, and balafon). Adopting an architectonic approach to composition is always fraught with danger, but his use of shifting rhythmic signatures and immersive sound design is incredibly successful. What a treat.

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This blog wouldn’t exist if not for Manuel Moreale. I don’t remember how i stumbled upon his blog, but i remember being crestfallen that my “the homepage is the latest article” idea wasn’t as original as i thought. The more i read him, though, the more i began to feel that weird one-sided kinship you only get with parasocial relationships. I mean, the guy tried to write a newsletter from the actual summit of his neighbouring mountains!

After a bout of burnout, i was contemplating closing my long-running French blog, but watching this Italian fellow write in English with such confidence gave me another idea. Through The Forest, a discovery tool he created with Carl Barenbrug, i discovered a whole slew of ESL bloggers and was finally convinced that i could blog in English myself. A few months later, Z1NZ0L1N was born.

A year and a bit in, i found a new community around the IndieWeb Carnival and met amazing people on- and off-line. You can imagine how delighted i was when Manuel asked me to take part in his wonderful People and Blogs interview series. My interview is now live, and i hope it’ll inspire other people to keep the blogging spirit alive.

Books

Apple: The First Fifty Years by David Pogue. Simon & Schuster should be ashamed of themselves: Apple: The First Fifty Years looks like self-published printed-on-demand trash. The printed layout is atrocious and the electronic version is even worse. I long for a book about Apple made with the same care and attention as the products it describes. For all its faults, it’s also the best book i’ve ever read about Apple — and i’ve read them all.

David Pogue found the perfect balance between historical facts and fun anecdotes, pedantic comprehensiveness and literary ellipsis, minute technical details and broad strategic analysis. Apple: The First Fifty Years makes for an engrossing and informative read, which is a rare quality. Most of all, it doesn’t suffer from the issue that plagues most every book about Apple, lack of first-hand knowledge.

Apple: The First Fifty Years is chock-full of testimonies from people who were actually there, including Chris Espinosa, the only person who’s been at Apple for the whole ride. Even if the current crop of Apple executives are media-trained to the hilt, that kind of access is invaluable, and gives Pogue’s book a depth you won’t find anywhere else.

I’ve been thoroughly unimpressed by the media coverage of Apple’s fiftieth birthday. Even The Verge’s “Apple@50” package feels inconsequential, as if they started working on it three weeks ago. Pogue’s book is exactly the type of project that befits this momentous occasion. It’s the new reference book on the subject, and should find a permanent place on every fan of Apple’s bookshelf. (And i have to admit it was fun to revisit some of my scoops, like Kevin Lynch’s hiring to work on the Apple Watch or Michael Spindler’s death.)

Links

I don’t regret switching careers one bit, but i’m sure i’d have enjoyed working on Apple’s fiftieth. Here are a few good articles on the topic:

• “How Apple became Apple: The definitive oral history of the company’s earliest days” by Harry McCracken;
• “Between Jobs” by Jason Snell;
• “Tim Cook (Still) Believes in Crazy Ideas” by Ryan D’Agostino;
• “How the invention of QuickTime changed computers forever” by John Buck;
• “One of Apple’s First Employees Looks Back at 50 Years” by Kalley Huang;
• “Ronald G. Wayne Is More Than Two Weeks At Apple” by Ernie Smith.

Music

Chariots of Fire by Vangelis. The opening theme still sends shivers down my spine, but i have to say that the rest of the soundtrack is some of the lousiest synth jazz you’ll ever hear.

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The books i’ve never even considered reading. The guitars i’ve barely touched these past few years. The vintage computers i’ve never restored. The fountain pens i’ve hoarded by the drawerful. If i don’t need these things, then why is it so hard to get rid of them? They aren’t useful, they aren’t that pretty, they aren’t even particularly valuable. But they represent a version of myself that could still happen that never came to be and will never come to be.

Each and every object was a promise i’ve made to myself — i’ll be a researcher, a musician, a maker, a writer. The whole collection is a record of which bets i stopped honouring without quite deciding to — i’m all and none of these people. Clearing out the decks wouldn’t mean giving up, it’d mean that i’ve already given up. That requires a strength of character i don’t always have. Keeping things around as a kind of alibi is decidedly simpler.

Each small letting-go is its own rehearsal for bigger (and more permanent) ones. You get better at mourning potentiality, at distinguishing between a closed door and an open one, at understanding what you’re genuinely still becoming. Someone else will read the books. Someone else will play the guitars. Someone else will repair the computers. Someone else will enjoy the pens. C’est la vie.

What i haven’t worked out is what fills the time and space when i stop propping up those futures. Objects are very good at providing the illusion of forward motion. While you’re planning, buying, faffing about, and generally not doing anything substantial, you’re in the cosy realm of potential. Strip all that away and you’re left with the harsh reality of the present. Adulting is hard.

Links

“People are not friction” by Dave Rupert. As i always say, tools have no intention in and of themselves, but shovels were made for digging and guns were made for killing. You could argue that LLMs were made for dispensing with those pesky designers, lawyers, accountants, marketers, and managers that don’t let engineers do exactly what they want exactly when they want to. “Sometimes I feel like there’s a palpable tension in the air as if we’re waiting to see whether AI will replace designers or engineers first”, Dave says, but “it’s a dangerous place to be when we start to consider people as friction”.

“The Shape of Friction” by Matthias Ott. It’s a dangerous place to be because “friction isn’t the enemy of good work”. “What the ‘frictionless’ vision really sells is the removal of dependency on other people’s experience and judgment”, which is verging on crazy when you realize that LLMs offer everything but judgment. People are so accustomed to getting everything with free one-day delivery that they can’t bear even the tiniest shred of inconvenience — and conversations are hugely inconvenient. When everybody acts like a spoiled child, we get “modern politics” and “artificial intelligence”, huge machines that keep saying “yes” to keep you engaged.

Music

Brad Mehldau and Christian McBride in concert. I can’t believe that, after 35 years, Brad Mehldau and Christian McBride had never toured as a duo. They’re the perfect pairing to prove that you don’t need drums to groove: Mehldau’s left-hand technique and McBride’s unique phrasing abolish the distinction between melody, harmony, and rhythm. While they paid homage to Wayne Shorter and Thelonious Monk, including an incredible solo rendition of Blue Monk on the bass, they also ventured into pop and R&B territory. I hope they’re planning on releasing a record.

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The wireless page-turning Kobo Remote is an absolute piece of junk. It’s made of not one but two of the worst kind of plastics you can hold — a sweat-inducing smooth polycarbonate on top and a grime-attracting grainy PET on the bottom. From the way the parts are assembled to the type of button switches used, everything seems to have been done to maximize flimsiness and creakiness. Judging by the size of its logo, Rakuten Kobo is incredibly proud of this €29.99 study in penny-pinching.

The remote is a bit small (10 × 3 × 2.25 cm) for my big hands, but the main button seems to have been modelled on my thumb. The overall shape is atrocious, though. You either nestle your index finger around the “ergonomic” divot in the back, in which case you have to overextend your thumb to press the button, or you squeeze the button in between your thumb and index finger, in which case the divot is in the way.

I’m convinced the remote has been designed around the battery compartment instead of, you know, an actual human hand. At least it uses a single AAA battery that’s supposed to be removable… if you can open the incredibly tight battery door. But you know what? In spite of everything, i found the Kobo Remote to be the perfect companion for my Kobo Libra Colour.

Once it’s paired, it reconnects in a fraction of a second and can even wake the e-reader with the press of a button. On the train or in bed, i prop up the Libra Colour with its SleepCover and then can read in pretty much any position without straining my hands. I’ve got into the habit of simply dropping the remote when i need to grab something else and let it dangle from its wrist strap.

It’s made me acutely aware of the way that my hands influence my reading — i prefer softcovers over hardbacks, e-readers over softcovers, e-readers with buttons over e-readers with touchscreens, and now e-readers with wireless remotes over e-readers with buttons. The Kobo Remote might be an absolute piece of junk, but i dearly missed it when i forgot to pack it on this week’s work trip.

Movies

Superman by James Gunn. Superman has always been a superficial hero. He’s too alien to pass as an undocumented immigrant; too messianic to function as an exemplar; too red, white, and blue to have a consistent set of ethics; and even his biggest weakness is too neat (and too external) to have any moral significance. But at least he was something. James Gunn has robbed him of everything – backstory, personality, motivation, the tiniest shred of common sense – and made him a mere casualty in the launch of the umpteenth reboot of the comically bad DC cinematic universe. Woof.

Things

Lenovo ThinkPad P16s Gen 3. Speaking of my work-provided “beast of a laptop”… David Hill has been a faithful steward of Richard Sapper’s original design, and in the ten years since he left Lenovo, not much has changed. Nothing looks like a ThinkPad except for another ThinkPad, and if i have to work on a PC, i’m not mad that it’s a ThinkPad. The build quality is excellent, the screen is fine for the price, the trackpad is more than decent, and most of all, the keyboard is outstanding.

It would be a perfectly good laptop… if Intel and Microsoft hadn’t fallen so far behind in energy management. Windows keeps such a tight leash on the Intel Ultra 7 155H chip that, most of the time, this “beast of a laptop” feels slower than the slowest of smartphones. Even after tweaking every energy setting i could find, i have to use a 4K monitor to make sure the Nvidia RTX 500 graphics card kicks in and more power flows through the system. What a shame.

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Some people spend their holidays at the beach. Some people spend their holidays in the mountains. Some people spend their holidays in the countryside. I spend my holidays in museums.

People think of the museum as a rainy-day fallback, but for me, the museum is the plan all along. When i survey the map of a city i’ve never visited, i don’t look for pretty viewpoints and famous restaurants, at least not at first. I search for folk, printing, design, natural history, applied arts and other museums. I’m not against fine arts, but i don’t mind skipping the umpteenth gallery featuring the works of 16- and 17th-century court painters and the vast halls filled with the speculative assets known as “contemporary art”.

What i’m really looking for, over anything else, is evidence of how things were made. I’m seldom struck by the use of chiaroscuro or a clever composition. I’ve been known to be overwhelmed by a single brushstroke. I often fail to see what other people see in the works of the “old masters”. I could spend hours commenting on the recreation of a 14th-century peasant’s dwelling. I like art. I prefer craft.

My love of fountain pens, typewriters and block printing isn’t rooted in nostalgia, but in the fact that they leave their mark on my work. The nib, the slug and the carvings literally imprint every decision, every mistake and every happy accident into the paper. They prove that i was here. At their best, museums do the same thing on a much larger scale. They prove that people were there.

There is also something to be said for the physical experience of entering a museum — the soothing drop in temperature, the surreal lighting, the hush that’s not quite silence. Turns out, conservation and contemplation want the same things. Once you are inside, the museum asks something of you that very little else does any more. Not the fractured, half-given attention of a screen, but something slower and more deliberate.

You stand in front of a thing. The thing doesn’t refresh. The thing doesn’t suggest a related thing that you might like. The thing doesn’t ask you to like and subscribe. The thing doesn’t care for your Instagram subscriber count. The thing simply exists like it’s existed long before you were born, like it’ll exist long after you’ve died. Just for a moment, you share the thing’s plane of existence and your life is a little bit bigger.

There’s this tiny book in Lyon’s museum of printing and graphic communication. It was printed by Aldus Manutius in Venice around 1514. It’s quite unremarkable at first sight — small, wrinkly, hidden in a corner behind glass. But it uses the italic types that Manutius commissioned from the engraver Francesco Griffo in 1501. This elegantly slanted type, based on a humanist script, was created specifically for this kind of pocket-sized book.

Every slanted character ever (mis)used goes back to this little book in a case on the first floor of a museum twenty minutes from home. Making a point in writing would be quite different if not for it. I visit at least twice a year, like a kind of pilgrimage (sadly, the museum is closed until next year for renovation). I don’t see the book. I see Manutius in his workshop, trying to find a way to squeeze more text on the page. Even writing this, i’m teary-eyed.

This is what museums are for — not the preservation of objects, but the preservation of connections. So i keep coming back. To the printing museum, to the dusty book in the velvet-lined case, to that strange feeling of standing at the starting point of something. And to other museums, seeking other connections, trying to understand what it means to be human. Surely it beats the beach, doesn’t it?

This is my entry for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival, about “Museum memories”, hosted by James.

Apps

Bloom. After what felt like an eternity, my friend Alexandre finally published his note-taking app in the App Store. Bloom is such a simple app that you might wonder what took him so long. Believe me when i tell you that simplicity really is the ultimate sophistication. It took a long time to distil the interface down to the core essence of note-taking and make it feel quick and effortless. There’s still a lot of work to be done on the iPad and the Mac, but knowing Alex, it’ll take only three to fifty more months. Time flies when you’re among friends.

Things

MacBook Neo. A lot of people spent the last week quoting Steve Jobs’s famous quip — “we don’t know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk” — without ever putting it into perspective. It meant that Jobs didn’t know how to build a laptop with a sub-$200 bill of materials and still make $200 out of it. But Tim Cook does. Apple now builds every part that matters itself, when most PC “makers” are glorified parts assemblers. They waste a lot less money on distribution now that they have their own sales channels and the scale needed to enforce predatory contracts. Most important of all, they dramatically shifted their revenue balance from hardware to services.

That’s what’s making PC makers jittery. They spend a lot on part procurement and product distribution, and they already make all the money they can on crapware. They can’t replicate Apple’s strategy because they own nothing in the value chain and don’t earn a single cent after they’ve sold the hardware. They’re going to hurt big time. Meanwhile, Apple’s going to bring a lot more people into the fold and make even more money with services, enabling them to be even more aggressive with hardware. Their TikTok stories and Instagram reels might be cute and all, but their strategy is as ruthless as ever.

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My new employer provided me with a beast of a laptop… that runs on Windows 11. I’ve been using computers for 32 years, i’ve been writing about computers for half my life, and yet, i feel like a complete beginner. I’ve had to use Windows here and there over the years, but it clearly wasn’t enough to build any kind of muscle memory. I have to consider every click and scroll, because everything feels misplaced and illogical.

The same could be said about the job itself — i’m managing a creative team that builds learning and e-learning resources. I have to get familiar with a new commute and a new office, learn new faces and new names, grapple with new tools and new practices. Every single little thing is mentally taxing not because it’s hard, but because i have to think about it. As long as company culture isn’t second nature, i won’t be able to concentrate on the actual job.

It’s been a long time since i began anew, but i have a lot more experience under my belt. I need to build muscle quickly, that’s for sure, but i know that i also need to pace myself. I have to learn to walk before i can run, but believe me, i can’t wait to get there. I so missed learning new things. Even if some of them are how to use Windows 11.

Things

iMac M1. Apart from the screen size, what’s the difference between a 24-inch iMac and a 27-inch Studio Display? Both are computers powered by Apple Silicon. Both have Thunderbolt connectivity. Both have mediocre webcams and surprising speakers. Why, then, can’t i use my iMac as an external display now that i don’t need it as a computer anymore? Your guess is as good as mine. It’s not like Apple doesn’t know how to do this — older models had Target Display Mode. I shouldn’t have to throw away a perfectly good screen because i don’t need its computer parts, but here we are. So much for being “dedicated to making the best products on earth and to leaving the world better than we found it”.

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For over fifteen years, i’ve been photographing storefronts to document a rapidly fading typographical tradition. These “architypes” inform my practice as a budding typeface designer, but i don’t want to selfishly keep them for myself. I’ve been mulling over this idea of a single-page gallery with infinite scrolling, light table popovers, and touch-based navigation. Unfortunately, i don’t have an army of engineers to address the edge cases that inevitably arise with complex interactions. But i do have a Claude Pro subscription.

Once again, i turned to Ghost and Magic Pages to handle the content. I’ve sketched my idea on paper so many times that it took me only a few minutes to come up with a basic prototype. I’ve written the stylesheet myself because, believe it or not, “professional” developers’ disdain for “basic” web technologies has severely hampered LLMs’ ability to write cogent CSS. But i let Claude write every single line of the main (vanilla) JavaScript.

Under my guidance, it turned Ghost’s pagination into infinite scrolling, used the newish <dialog> element to build popovers, implemented keyboard and touch navigation, and fixed bugs along the way. Is it the code i’d have written? Well yes, actually, because it has this naive and repetitive quality that i like so much. But no, really, because i hate writing JavaScript so much that i’d have never made the effort.

In the end, it took less than six hours to go from idea to website. That’s awesome! Claude has enabled me to build something i’d have never built otherwise, not because i can’t, but because i’d rather use my limited time on Earth to do anything other than writing JavaScript. I’m uneasy about the environmental cost of my little experiment, though. It’s almost feels like taking a short-haul flight instead of a three-hour train journey. I have to reckon with that.

Apps

Current. Following up on last week: Terry has been working ’round the clock to squash most bugs. There are still some conceptual oddities and functional failures, particularly on the Mac, but it’s getting there.

Links

“The Galaxy S26 is a photography nightmare” by David Pierce and Nilay Patel. I wanted to write something about Samsung’s foray into productized lying, but Nilay said it better. At this rate, they’ll soon remove the cameras from their phones to save a few bucks, and tell you not to believe your own eyes when their generated nonsense doesn’t look anything like what you’re seeing.

Music

Bach Coltrane by Raphaël Imbert Project. I can’t believe i first listened to Bach Coltrane almost twenty years ago (and that Coltrane was born 100 years ago), but here we are. I’ve never been that convinced by Imbert’s analysis of Bach’s influence on Coltrane’s compositions – most of it is thoroughly ahistorical – but it’s a good musical hook. Coltrane’s influence on Steve Reich is more documented. La Trinité, a deconsecrated 17th-century chapel that’s now a “baroque and irregular music” venue, was the perfect setting to explore the melodic links between the three. Imbert’s bombastic presence and forceful playing were overbearing at times, but i absolutely loved his interpretation of Reich’s Clapping Music for the saxophone.

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I’m beginning to think that you should ignore travel guides entirely. Take Marseille, France’s second city after Paris and before Lyon. Everybody tells you to visit Notre-Dame de la Garde, a basilica built in the 19th century at the top of a hill… just like the Sacré-Cœur in Paris and Notre-Dame de Fourvière in Lyon. If you’ve never been to one of these gaudy Neo-Byzantine churches, then by all means, go ahead and visit the kitschy “Good Mother” of Marseille. I hope you love climbing treacherous steps, waiting for the only public bus that’ll spare you the painful experience of climbing those treacherous steps, or paying extortionary prices to take the ridiculous “small train” that’s even slower than the public bus.

Or you could visit La Major, one of only three cathedrals built in France in the 19th century, a beautiful polychrome building that features an idiosyncratic blend of occidental and oriental influences. Or Les Réformés, one of the rare churches with colourful stained glass on all sides and all levels, which has more than a passing resemblance to Reims cathedral. Both are far less crowded and far more interesting than Notre-Dame de la Garde, and both are better stops on the route to somewhere else, the sea front for La Major and the Canebière for Les Réformés.

The Mucem features high on the must-visit lists. Do yourself a favour and skip what pass as exhibitions in this pathetic excuse for a museum. You don’t need a paying ticket to go up to the terrace, through the high footbridge and down to Fort Saint-Jean and the Old Port. If you want to learn a thing or two about the Mediterranean civilization, you’re better off visiting the small Marseille History Museum. The surrounding neighbourhood of Belsunce will teach you everything you need to know about the enduring influence of Greek, Roman and North-African cultures.

Marseille might be “the gateway to the Orient”, but it reminded me of the Paris of my youth, before it was thoroughly gentrified. It’s rough around the edges, it has far too many cars and far too little public transport, it’s one of the dirtiest cities in France, but it’s also a bustling metropolis bursting with joyous energy — even in the midst of a mistral storm. I’m not surprised to have seen a lot more tourists than in my hometown of Lyon, but i’m disappointed that they won’t get to see the best parts of the city if they blindly follow common advice.

Most of them will stroll around the (admittedly charming) Panier neighbourhood, but will never set foot in the (decidedly gritty) La Friche, a cultural complex built around a former tobacco factory. It’s a shame, because the surrounding area is far more authentic than anything you’ll find in travel guides. As we like to say in French, it’s stayed “in its juices”. These juices might taste of danger, but this is French cuisine we’re talking about, which means that it’s more drama than actual risk. (I wouldn’t say the same of some parts of the northern neighbourhoods.) And by the way, the food is really good too.

Apps

Current. Built by Terry Godier, of “phantom obligation” fame, Current is an RSS reader that wants to break free of the e-mail mould. It uses a lot of highfalutin words to describe familiar concepts: the “river” is a feed, “currents” are folders and “releasing” is marking as read. Worse: although Terry says that “Current has no unread count“, it has multiple counts, and even reading stats.

The mere presence of a list of items with different states implies that you should “process” your feed. Case in point: when you’ve read everything, Current tells you that you’re “all caught up”. And Sift, “a mode designed for the way people actually triage on a desktop”, falls back to the classic e-mail layout.

If you manage to tolerate the smell of the designer’s farts and the many layout bugs, though, Current has more than a few good ideas at its core. Velocity defines how long an item stays visible before fading out: breaking news gets three hours, articles get eight to eighteen, evergreen content lasts seven days. The “Voices” tab isn’t just a “Blogs” folder, but an interesting “Twitter meets Instagram Stories” way of surfacing personal blogs.

In a way, Current reminds me of the late Fever, which is still my favourite take on RSS. Terry’s even thinking of reimplementing Fever’s most distinguishing feature, “story threading”, a way to group related articles from different sources into narrative threads. Current is buggy and pompous, but at least it’s opinionated. Oh, and it’s priced at a flat €9.99. What a breath of fresh air.

Links

“How I’m dealing with the pressure to adopt AI as a designer” by Martin Wright. ″You should be playing with AI″, Martin writes, “experimenting builds vocabulary, shapes instinct, and helps form the opinions you’ll need when clients ask the big questions about where AI fits.” But “put the work at the centre of all your thinking, and opt out of the hype cycle.” Easier said than done, because the bubble’s pressure keeps on growing.

“We mourn our craft” by Nolan Lawson. “I didn’t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that of a glorified TSA agent”, Nolan laments, “reviewing code to make sure the AI didn’t smuggle something dangerous into production”. I find it fascinating – but utterly logical – that software developers are the main victims of software development. But i’ve used Claude Code, and i don’t think that true craftspeople have anything to worry about, on the contrary. People who think that software development is nothing more than writing code, on the other hand, have it coming.

“Thousands of CEOs just admitted AI had no impact on employment or productivity” by Sasha Rogelberg. On a completely unrelated note…

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I love typewriters. I love digital music. I love taking photos. I love technology. I love cycling. I love history. I love bookbinding. I love e-books. I love walking. I love vintage cameras. I love writing. I love architecture. I love podcasts. I love travelling. I love tea. I love hand tools. I love journalism. I love design. I love plants. I love stained glass. I love teaching. I love art. I love analogue music. I love typography. I love silence. I love coding. I love trains. I love new cameras. I love linguistics. I love oriental carpets. I love bookshops. I love reading. I love fountain pens. I love concerts. I love sewing. I love paper books. I love watches. I love museums. I love coffee. Boy, do i love coffee.

These aren’t passing and somewhat contradictory interests. These are expressions of my personality, and thus, they are my personality. I am who i am because i love what i love and i love what i love because i am who i am. I couldn’t pick my favourite interest if my life depended on it, because my life depends on everything – and more – on that list. I’m not feeling like myself when one facet is expressed too little for too long or, more often than not, when one facet is expressed too much for too long.

I get what Zachary means when he says that “the place where your interests collide are where interesting things happen.” I’ve met friends (and my wife), i’ve got a diploma, i’ve built multiple careers at the intersection of various interests. Even something as simple as this blog, not to mention my other one, are the products of colliding interests. But this is how it’s supposed to be: we humans love nothing more than to compare, contrast, and connect things that have no business in being compared, contrasted, and connected.

The place where your interests don’t collide is where boring, dull, tedious, and ultimately wholly inhuman things happen. Unfortunately, that place is often called “work”. These past few months, i’ve been reminded that job seeking often feels soul-crushing because it requires you to flatten your interests – and ultimately your identity – into an easy-to-digest narrative. It’s been so long since i’ve had to apply for a new job that i played along without thinking of the consequences.

It didn’t take that many interviews before i realized that people who are content with one-dimensional applications don’t make for good employers. Things started to look up from the moment that i refused to make myself smaller. I’ve been fortunate to find a company that believes my ability to draw from different fields is an asset rather than a liability. It looks like the sort of place where my interests could collide… and interesting things could happen.

This is my entry for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival, hosted by Zachary Kai, on the topic of “Intersecting Interests”.

Links

“What They Copied” by Jordan Golson. I don’t miss the mythos of Jony Ive, but i dearly miss experiencing the outcome of his thought process. Apple’s success has less to do with aesthetics than it has to do with processes, even – and maybe more so –  when it comes to design. “What would be lovely would be for the thinking to be talked about”, Ive said during the introduction of the Ferrari Luce’s interior, “not the shapes.” The shapes matter insofar as they embody the thinking:

He made the iPhone, and an entire industry looked at it and learned the wrong thing. Not the wrong lesson — the wrong thing. The lesson was: ask what problem you’re solving, then build the solution that solves it. What they took was: put a touchscreen in the dashboard. And people are dying for it. Now he’s trying again, putting the thinking directly into a car, in a context where you can’t miss it — physical controls, dedicated buttons, a palm rest so your hand knows where it is while your eyes stay on the road. He’d make this car whether anyone in the industry learned from it or not. That’s the job: to make the beautiful thing. And to Ive, beauty and function are the same word. But, in both his words and his design, you can hear him pleading — wistfully, almost to himself — for someone, anyone, to look past the aluminum and the glass and see why.

Jordan Golson gets it. He might be a car guy, but cars are computers now, and his article about the design of Ferrari’s first electric car is the most insightful piece of tech journalism i’ve read in months. This is tech i won’t get to experience for myself, but i’m glad to have learned a bit about the thought process. If only we could talk a bit more about the thinking and a lot less about the shapes!

Music

Oranj by Robohands. I completely forgot about Robohands, even though i loved Violet (and not only for that reason). Oranj is the logical extension of Palms, which was suffused with Brazilian grooves from the 1970s, and Giallo, which paid homage to Italian film soundtracks from the 1980s. More than anything else, Andy Baxter has an impeccable sense of texture. I love travelling to this kind of ambient jazz (or is it jazzy ambient?) because it makes everything infinitely more cinematic.

BelleJazzClub (Vol. 2) by Adrien Soleiman. Even if he became the official saxophonist of the French singer-songwriter scene, Adrien Soleiman came up as a bona fide jazz musician. BelleJazzClub bridges the gap between the two worlds. It doesn’t always work: the first volume was a bit too talkative for my taste, and this second volume is pretty to the point of being over-produced, but that may be because it’s been recorded at the beautiful La Frette studios. Still, i like how airy it all sounds, particularly on the mesmerizing cover of John Coltrane’s Naima. The sense of attack and decay brings you in and makes you want to listen that much closer.

Web

Magic Pages. After a few months on WordPress, i went back to Ghost and my original design. This time, however, i didn’t want to fuss with hosting. I could have gone with Ghost’s own turnkey solution, but as always, i wanted to find a small European provider. Magic Pages fits the bill perfectly: it’s pretty cheap, it’s feature-packed, and the two-person team handles support queries quickly. Even better, Magic Pages runs on Hetzner data centres in Germany, which are powered entirely by renewable energy.

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