Weeknotes 2026 W16: Aced it

Quick bits

• Congratulations to Hungary for kicking out Orbán!

• There is a massive egg shortage in Berlin.¹¹1 A massive shortage of regular eggs, I mean. Not a shortage of massive eggs. Obviously.  My sudden craving for eggs will have to remain unsatisfied.

• Speaking of food: cooking brings me joy, and I often forget that.

• A replacement for my wonky Kensington Orbit trackball with scroll ring is on its way. I’m glad I didn’t try to tough it out but rather get it replaced. That is what warranty is for! Hopefully, the replacement does not have the same lacking build quality.

• As of recently, my bank is clearing transactions much more quickly. Some transactions even clear on the same day.

  The rollout of this change clearly came with some teething problems, as my bank accidentally showed a few transactions twice. Fortunately, no real money was lost.

• I find Berlin’s Linienstraße such a bad cycling street: it has car parking all along its length, on both sides, and that brings quite some car traffic through it. No proper cycling street should have that much car parking, or cars going through it.

Relocation prep

More decluttering! While cleaning up I found a USB stick that has my master dissertation on it, untouched for 16 years — not that it takes up a lot of space, mind you, but it shows how much stuff I don’t even remember owning.

For no clear reason except for “I can,” I’ve reorganized my pantry, and now my kitchen is far tidier. I might not have gotten around to doing that if I hadn’t been decluttering.

I did the English language exam earlier this week. It was intense. I was stressed out.²²2 I switched from Colemak back to QWERTY this week to familiarize myself with the keyboard layout that the test uses. That was rough, and returning to Colemak also was — and still is — rough.  But I needn’t have worried: on all four topics (listening, reading, speaking, and writing), I got the maximum score. I aced the damn thing.

With that out of the way, I’ve submitted my visa application. Now I wait.

I’ve started looking for a new tenant (Nachmieter) for my apartment. 65m², rent €1500 (incl. heating etc), a ten-minute walk from the main station (Berlin Hbf). The building was constructed in 2019. Availability date is unclear still, but in the next few months. If you are interested, or know anyone who is, get in touch.

Entertainment

• My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow³³3 My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow, written and directed by Julia Loktev (Marminchilla, 2026).  is astounding and harrowing. Part 2 is equally good. Select quote: “I baked a baguette out of rage.”

Toots and skeets

I could not agree more with Miriam Suzanne’s take here:

the more we're all encouraged to optimize our time and deliver more output, the more i want to never hit a single metric again in my life.

i want to commit on a project and never launch it. i want to code slower, spend more time choosing colors, re-invent wheels that will never get used - not better, just different - taking as long as possible.

i want to spend my time imagining different ways to say a thing, just to enjoy saying it differently.

zero output, always only process forever

Links

• Slides (Posy): I remember that tech from my early childhood!

• The disappearing and unappreciated art of audible alerts (Technology Connections): BING BONG!

• the biggest myth in toothpaste (Answer in Progress): Sensodyne is magical, and I will not use any other brand.

• Countdown Standard (xkcd)

• How Secure Is Tap To Pay? (Veritasium): Yikes!

• weird spots in half-life 2 (Pretzel): Love this video and the rest of the ongoing series.

Music links:

• playing cds i've never heard, sitting on the floor between two big speakers idm/uk bass/experimental (Nicholas Shackleton): Some delightful stuff in here.

• Tape 05 (Boards of Canada): New BoC just dropped!!!

• The Death of the Music Video-to-Cinema Pipeline (Season Premiere) (Patrick (H) Willems)

AI links:

• After sale of its shoe business, Allbirds pivots to AI (TechCrunch): This somehow isn’t satire.

• This is actually terrifying (struthless): It is terrifying, but I’m hoping that it’ll just go away because it’s ludicrous and very few people will take this seriously.

• The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess: Where Do We Go From Here? (Kyle Kingsbury a.k.a. Aphyr)

• Microsoft exec suggests AI agents will need to buy software licenses, just like employees (Alistair Barr for Business Insider): Obviously that is what they want.

Tech links:

• Zig 0.16.0 Release Notes: Exciting stuff! I upgraded my web site’s TomatenMark implementation to Zig 0.16 already.

• Paperless-ngx: Interesting software! This is a “document management system that transforms your physical documents into a searchable online archive” which sounds like something I’d want. I’ve not tried it out myself yet.

• Things you didn't know about indexes (Jon Charter): A good read, and I unexpectedly learnt some new things about database indexes.

• A New Chapter for Ruby Central: Ugh. I really do not like the pivot to AI.

• Deleteduser.com — a $15 PII Magnet (Mike Sheward)

• Optimizing Ruby Path Methods (Jean Boussier) Quote: “I tend to treat performance gains like mushroom hunting. When you find a mushroom, it usually means that it’s an area where they grow well, and that no other mushroom hunter has passed by recently.” Yes!