I’ve long been wondering what’s going on with all these new browsers, and whether we’ll need to install a new browser for each search app or chatbot that we want to use. Already I have apps on my phone for Quant, Kagi and Mistral, as well as Firefox and Chrome browsers (it’s an Android) - and these browsers, like those from Ecosia, Duck Duck Go, Ad Block Plus and all - don’t feel like browsers at all: to me, it’s all going against the grain of the original web. Casey Newton (@caseynewton@mastodon.social) just dropped a post, full of great links to explore further - The AI browser wars are about to begin - on this very topic.

On a minor note, first; I do take issue with Newton’s oversimple assertion that Opera is a Norwegian browser - it was bought out in 2016 by a Chinese tech consortium including, according to the Battle of the Browsers website

… gaming firm Beijing Kunlun Tech, cybersecurity specialist Qihoo 360 Technology, Golden Brick Silk Road Equity Investment Fund, and Yonglian Investment.

Indeed, I swiftly stopped using Opera due to my concerns with the Chinese takeover and eventually ended up bouncing between Vivaldi and Firefox, all the while remaining (too) open to trying other browsers like Arc (for a while), Zen and now Kagi’s Orion, which is of the class of browser that I’m now concerned with here.

There are browsers of all styles available on Android, but the main theme here is that they aren’t browsers in the traditional sense, but portals to the companies' own AI systems, ready to search, browse and act for you. As Newton implies, it still feels rather unsettling:

The entire structure of the web — from journalism to e-commerce and beyond — is built on the idea that webpages are being viewed by people. When it’s mostly code that is doing the looking, a lot of basic assumptions are going to get broken. … To the browser warriors suiting up for battle, that looks like an exciting opportunity. To everyone else, though, it still feels mostly like a problem.

I’ve yet to really dive deep into AI tools (I still prefer to write my own text) beyond DeepL’s translation assistant, but it feels as if we’re in a strange moment, where I’ll be part of the previous generation and the next or next-but-one will be acting upon acts performed on their behalves - if it all pans out as these companies imagine.

Today, on the Ascension bank holiday, we visited the Cleopatra and Ceasar exhibition in the Kurpfalzmuseum in Speyer. It was an impressive and informative display, spoiled just a touch by the pretty bad air in the understandably dark rooms, with artefacts borrowed from Hamburg, Berlin, the Louvre, from around Italy… but nowhere in Egypt that I noticed.

It was refreshing to see the museum point out how the somehow insecure male victors' view of this femme fatale permeated culture, belittling Cleopatra’s richness and mastery of manipulative politics.

I just about managed to keep up my goal of cycling to work (around 24 km each way) at least once a month, after finding a nice route back along the bicycle “Autobahn” through the ex Spinelli barracks in Mannheim, adding a few more photos to my commute collection on the way.

It’s not all idyllic, but I can ride pretty much the whole way on cycle paths with this route, though on the final stretch, I made a detour away from a cycle route running along a loud main road. It’s great to have the option of doing this, along with the tram, or the folding bike and train… though they all take significantly longer than the car, or - naturally - working from home…

Back from a memorable couple of days in Hamburg and Lübeck with my uncle from New Zealand, and my brother-in-law, who stepped in for my Dad who couldn’t come at short notice. We were helping my uncle retrace his roots as a post-war Brit born in occupied Hamburg, christened in Lübeck.

Both are fantastic cities of the old Hanseatic League, of different sizes, clearly, but also of different - yet equally impressive - qualities. From the Hafencity and Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, to Lübeck’s Rathaus, Marienkirche (where we experienced a beautiful midday peace service accompanied by a brilliant young choir) and Niederegger café, and of course to my uncle’s places of birth and christening, it was a meaningful city tour, well worth taking a few days off for!

I’m such a sucker for the analogue that this article on The Verge on Lo-fi journalling overnight inspired me to crack open the Leuchtturm1917 Bullet Journal again this morning, and get my fingers all inky cleaning out a dried up fountain pen.

Bonus: they also introduced this retro cassette boombox from We are Rewind, too.

Evil stuff! But it all gets me thinking back to Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants, where he describes how he can still buy modern iterations (not versions, as such, not developments) of things he found in adverts in an 1800s newspaper. Technology survives, even as it evolves and some keystone technologies like pens and paper, and tactile audio like vinyl and cassettes, refuse to go away.

I’ve long had troubles with my digestive tract and focussed mostly on FODMAPs as the key driver for them, with varying degrees of success. The worst “delivery units” of oligo-fructans for me are onions and garlic, which poses limits on our cooking at home, and makes eating out a real minefield.

Yesterday we attended a German-Sri Lankan wedding, which was a lot of fun. Some Sri Lankan cousins of the groom provided the meal, and it was time for me to simply say “right, that’s it” and simply eat the food, which was delicious.

I suffered in the night, but not all that much more than I have been recently whilst trying to be careful and it made me think: alcohol is also bad for us, but drinking together has real social benefits that shouldn’t be underplayed. It was the same for me yesterday with the curries: I enjoyed them so much, and we all suffered the spiciness (the Sri Lankans primarily because it was all so mild for them) together that I realised:

Some “enjoyable sacrifices” are worth making.

The dear old Deutsche Bahn does provide for more than its fair share of frustrations, including this morning when the “right” train with the right number arrived on time on the right platform - and then set off in the opposite direction, back to where I had just come from. But, once I got nearer to my destination, I couldn’t help but smile at the relaxed little stations out in the Pfalz - even though I was now late for our off-site meetings.

Following my previous, football-inspired post on team and tribe, I plucked up the courage to read a distantly related Guardian article entitled Now comes the ‘womanosphere’: the anti-feminist media telling women to be thin, fertile and Republican which sent me back to my own very conservative, Catholic (pretty tribal!) upbringing, with all the pre-marital sexual guardrails and constraints that came along with that. There, too, the default expectation was that mothers would be housewives, to manage the large family* and support the breadwinner. That sense was bolstered by a feeling of us being an embattled, absolutely correct minority, cast unwillingly but cohesively into the wild and sinful wider world. That feeling accompanied me through university and my earliest working days, to thankfully be sloughed off over decades of ‘normal’ life, helped I think by a slow-to-awaken core of suspicion that “all of” right wasn’t necessarily on our side, that helped loosen that armour from the inside.

Yet another related Guardian article cropped up on the American (where elsican?) natalist movement What is America’s pro-natalism movement really about? m highlighting a (for now) relatively small, embattled, inherently correct minority turning inwards to battle and protect itself against a wrong-headed wider world.

Then, finally, there was another article, entitled Please, yell at my kids! Five lessons I’ve learned about good parenting from around the world (I have to say, though: ‘five or ten things’ are the worst articles, but still…) about ways of raising families around the world, with the common, positive thread being that of community. The author also points out that

parenting is hard everywhere, but nowhere is it as lonely as it is in the US

The message for me from all of these links has to be that of plurality as a good. Communities can be too closed and insular, becoming cells focussed on their own people and messages: with the availability of self-reinforcing but unreflective, non-selfcritical media (print media does the job well enough, too), these cells can grow to become a danger to society - from thread to theat, as it were. Communities can also potentially become too loose and incoherent to retain that identity.

If we can gain a plural sense of community, that is, openness to the idea of interwoven groups and communities, then we have a stronger society. For societies are interwoven, interlocking communities. If too many communities cut the threads and build walls rather than bridges, convince themselves that everybody else is the enemy, then societies suffer. Communities need to be challenged with the fundamental questions: who is this good for, and where do our goods come from?

And society needs to monitor and promote the health of its communities. We don’t need to convert everybody from Catholicism; housewives make a valuable (if undervalued) contribution to society; football fans bring cohesion and dynamism to a town; positive birth rates can be a sign of healthy communities. “Just” keep everybody respectful, and things will be better for all.

No doubt that’s a rich Western point of view - but even here, in strong Europe, we need that reinforcement. But before things become too earnest…

*: an early draft had me writing

… housewives being there to cook and manage the family

which, thanks to English grammar, came across as rather gruesomely funny when I mentally parsed it in that way…)

I was surprised at how Jonathan Liew’s article in the Guardian Pundits’ showy partisanship reflects football’s embrace of fan-centric populism resonated with me and caused the notion of an “anti-identity” to bubble up in my mind, reinforced by the thought, kindly provided by Brexit Prime Minister Theresa May, of me as a “citizen of footballing nowhere.”

Throughout my football-formative years, as we moved house and as I later continued my own arc around the UK and abroad, I have supported home teams in Liverpool, Manchester, Ipswich, Bologna, Shrewsbury and Mainz. Through friendships and admiration of certain teams, I have also supported Sampdoria (Vialli, Platt), Bayer Leverkusen (Ballack, Babic, Berbatov), Tottenham (Hoddle, Waddle, Mabbutt) and Arsenal (Overmars, Petit, Henry…). Now, with a German wife and family, I can’t feel too bad if they play well and win (though it’s agonising watching England play badly and lose, especially to Germany). I’ve been astounded and confounded at matches, in pubs or at home, so - I think it’s important to emphasise this - I don’t consider myself to be emotionally stunted when it comes to football.

Yet I find myself asking now: what does it mean to support a team? Is an appreciation of who they are at the time and of their vicissitudes sufficient? Am I OK to reset so quickly after fleeting elation or disappointment, and appreciate their struggles after going down, or do I have to feel things more viscerally, for longer?

Liew’s article also highlighted my innate reluctance – quiet, usually unaware – to despise opponents (provided they’re not simply being despicable) in any field: sport, religion, politics, work. This can put me at odds with the heartfelt supporters, those who have maybe never known anything else, who are all-in, who would consider themselves the ‘true’ supporters. It makes me wonder: is my perspective shallower, somehow weaker, more diluted than theirs? And does it reflect the problem in the populist slide, that full-throated, roaring fanaticism trumps broad appreciation?

Football is often used as an analogy or metaphor for much else in life - team and tifo, as it were: If society can find the balance between passion and respect, my team, my tribe distinctly with all the others, not against, then I think we’d all be better off.

I finally completed a long-held goal: not a huge one, by any stretch of the imagination, but one that had been on the back of my mind for a while: take the S-Bahn to Neckargemünd and hike through the hills along the Neckar back to Heidelberg. It was lovely, and really did get me as mentally relaxed and “aware” of myself again as I’d hoped. The fact that it was 12.5 km long and included a total of 900 m of climbing (and descent) meant that I really felt the legs again. Mens sana in corpore sano, as they say!

Oh, and I found the OsmAnd mapping app really good - felt good about supporting them with the subscription.

We decided to accompany my in-laws part way on their trip back home and to discover Bruchsal Castle (Barockschloss Bruchsal) as part of our outing. It turned out to be a real jewel in what I had always assumed to be an unassuming industrial town “en route” to elsewhere (sorry for these presumptions, which I really should try harder to resist!).

Indeed, the castle is initially a disappointment, looking a bit tatty and clearly restored with limited resources, paint replacing actual decoration for most of the building. It turns out that the castle was destroyed during WWII and painstakingly rebuilt in the 1970s, with whatever they had to hand. The jewels are the retained artefacts, which had been removed from the castle in around 1942, before the destruction in 1945. These artefacts include tapestries (Parisian and Belgian, in the main), and secretaries (in the sense of writing desks!) with fantastic inlays.

The building houses two further museums: a history of Bruchsal and the region on the top floor, in a setting that retains much of its 1970s “charm”; and a museum of musical automata, which fit very well the overarching theme that I picked out, of intricacy and patience.

Here’s a selection of photos from the house, which I would recommend as a place to visit - an not just en route…

FaNatiCS could be an acronym for Fascist Nationalist Conservative Sovereigntists, that power-hungry breed of sociopaths and their cronies that have gained power in the US using newish but also very old methods, steeped in uncaring. Simon Tisdall in his article in the Guardian on the greedy power grab by Trumb and co links to an article on the Boston Rare Maps site about the Technocracy Inc movement formed in the 1930s and still apparently going today. That article links to a Substack post by Manolo Quezon summarising the “intellectual” links between then and now as Everything Old is New Again.

The trouble with these is always the same: the mismatch between the visions of power and might, and anything considering basic human lives. It’s easy enough for these miserable people to make us miserable too: our challenge is not to let them. Stay nice, stay considerate and friendly - and lend your voice to those who give voice to the calm majority, when you can.

When the train line through Mannheim up to Frankfurt was closed for repairs, I started taking the tram to work. It takes longer, but I do appreciate the opportunity to read for longer stretches than with the train. I have to change trams, and now get out a stop earlier to walk across a bridge over the Neckar by the Collini Center, and enjoy both the views from it, and the bridge itself, worthy of a few photos in my view!

The video I made to show the basics of our Ultimate Extraction, or UX, coffee brewing method is now live on YouTube. It’s just a simple cut to give an impression into how it works - but the technique itself, requiring just one key piece of equipment, produces lovely coffee: it’s well worth diving into!

A small correction to yesterday’s post in which I summarised Dave Winer as a Mets fan (that’s his bio from Micro.blog) and as an “http-not-secure rebel”. This is ultimately a misrepresentation stemming from my misreading of his posts on the topic over the years. In a passage in his post from Saturday, March 15th, he writes clearly that he’s not pro-http and anti-https per se, but has long been irked that the likes of Google and Mozilla label his site as “not secure” because it’s still an http site… from the 1990s

The technicalities of swapping that site over to https would break so much on his site, and the “risks” of remaining on http so minimal that he keeps it running as is, and just wishes that browsers wouldn’t be so rude as to label his site as not-secure.

Sorry, Dave.

Had a wonderfully satisfying time playing in a trombone quartet in Mannheim this afternoon. It was the first time that we had played together as a group, and it worked very well indeed. The first of Beethoven’s 3 Equali is a beautiful piece, which we played three times through, although in the final run my chops gave out - but R. was able to take over first trombone, just about. Time for me to start getting back into trombone shape!

A “call-to-posts” by Ur-Blogger Dave Winer (http-not-secure rebel* Mets fan) in his daily post of Friday 14th of March, on the topic of why we believe in the Writer’s Web, got me reflecting on my own long, winding and intermittent journey into blogging.

And that’s precisely the thing: it got me reflecting: thinking nebulous thoughts about why I blog, where I do it, what I’ve posted and also how easy it is not to write and post.

I’m an inveterate tool-excuser: I’m not writing much because there’s some niggle about Blogger, or Typepad, or Byword, or iA Writer, or Wordpress, or even my computer of the time, that gets in the way of true “flow”: there genuinely have been things that have irked me about them all - but they’re all excuses that run along the grain of procrastination. And what do we procrastinate against? Hard mental work, which is what writing and - especially, for me - editing is.

Getting from a nebulous idea to a cogent narrative that somebody might read is a challenge that, after my day job in engineering, raising the family, keeping up with the hobbies in music and occasional sport, and all, I’m often not quite up to. If I end up writing at all, it’s dabbling and drafting more than publishing. News and streaming sites provide the easy outs, the opium for the masses that I all too readily slide into.

Form and function

I was attracted by the idea of the short-form posting of then Twitter, now Mastodon and Bluesky. But I found that I had nothing to say of sufficient expertise (I can’t easily talk about what I develop at work, for example), or pithily humorous to match the big posters - and I also discovered an internal dread of going viral. It turns out that I don’t really want any of my posts to “blow up”.

Equally, I dislike the idea of newsletters, since I don’t want to push my ideas on anybody else, taking up their valuable time with things that don’t really grab them.

Blogging, then, is perfect for me, since I can imagine my readers, without needing to know that they exist or will read anything. Those that do want to get in touch regarding a particular post know how to, and anything that somebody that might have linked to is happily free in the wild without needing further care or attention on my part.

The idea of form is linked to what our tools can provide (see below), but the writer needs to know that form, length and complexity are all up to them.

Sometimes just a thousand words

Being part of the “background noise” of blogging, nestled in the Writer’s Web, is liberating on the visuals side, too. There’s just sufficient additional hassle associated with adding pictures to posts that I really need to know that they are relevant, or are perhaps the focus of a short post, rather than being a tactic to garner attention (and distract at the same time), for me to add them to a post.

This means that I can focus more on my writing then, when I feel that the content is there, on finding relevant titles and headers to collate ideas together, confirming the structure that evolved out of that flurry of ideas and typing.

Tools and flow

I mentioned at the outset my perennial dissatisfaction with my blogging toolsets: I’m happy to report that I feel settled using the Micro.blog platform, posting to my own site. The topic of where I draft still crops up (I’m actually writing this directly in the Micro.blog web interface), but I’ve whittled things down to a few tools, depending mostly on whether I’m just “splashing” (as here) or if I’m composing and researching, as with many of my engineering posts, for which I’ll typically use an offline editor linked to a cloud sync service.

Of course, the best tool is inside us first of all: the motivation and concentration to compose. The actual hammers and chisels should, as it were, get out of the way… which is, perhaps counterintuitively, where their design is important. They should be (for me!) simple (Markdown, for example), reactive and reliable. Not every tool matches every person, which is perhaps why I spent so long in my unsettled state, but with those questions now largely out of the way, and Dave’s clarion call acting as a focal point for me, I can perhaps get back to writing more.

But now - it’s time to pack up and head off to a trombone quartet rehearsal. See you in the next post.

*edit: linked to a post clarifying Dave’s stance on http(s), and apologising for misrepresenting him

Does God give, or grant, peace? Both ideas were in force this Saturday just gone, when we gave our Bachchor Heidelberg concert Dona Nobis Pacem in the Peterskirche. It was a wonderful, powerful and delicate programme that at times had me struggling to retain control whilst singing. We sang well, the string ensemble was fantastic and the soloists, soprano Johanna Greulich especially, were great, too. When I think back from the first to the last rehearsals and to the concert itself, it was for me a valuable endeavour, which, going from the first emails the choir received, was a meaningful, emotional as well as “enjoyable” event for the audience, too.

Here’s the programme:

• Da pacem (male choir singing the Latin prayer with harp and organ accompaniment, arranged by our conductor Christian Kabitz)
• Da Pacem, Domine by Peteris Vasks
• V_erleih uns Frieden gnädiglich_, by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy
• Pie Jesu by Lili Boulanger
• Psalm 22 by Cyrillus Kreek
• Vesper by Ester Mägi
• Gib Frieden, Herr, gib Frieden by Johann Sebastian Bach
• Da Pacem, Domine by Arvo Pärt
• Sanctus & Agnus Dei by Ola Gjeilo
• Prayer to the Mother of God by Hanna Havrylets
• Adonai elohim from the Chichester Psalms by Leonard Bernstein

It had everything I love in music - gritty chords, interesting ideas, shifting tone and strong ideas along with strong ideals and regular resolution into the calm, tranquil, harmonious, and hopeful. I’ll want to remember this concert for a long time to come.

Alas, there are idiots out there who have “fun” dangerously manipulating parked bikes at school. My daughter had already had her front quick release axle loosened last year (we replaced it with a fixed one), and just on Friday the brake cables had been slipped out of their housings:

The way some peoples' brains work, how they are hooked up to pursue “tee-hee-giggle” nastiness is quite sad. Maybe they get a thrill, maybe they feel some kind of peer pressure towards and acceptance from the deed, but they really don’t think things through for the risks they are generating for other individuals and - by extension, in the worst case - their families.

There’s something of that in the Trump movement - some just don’t care any more and get that “tee-hee” thrill when it goes worse for others.

Societal norms are important, as are support structures for all, including those - hopefully just temporarily - teenagers seeking dumb-ass thrills.

Every so often, an internal unease about my blogging pace bubbles up inside me and I need to “do something” about it. That something usually manifests as an incessant thinking and testing and tweaking and resetting of my writing tools and environments, which, as an effective, comfortable and seemingly “proactive” form of procrastination, has so often taken priority over expending my energies on the actual content, on what I want to say. At least here, finally, I actually acted on that need, and ended up both writing and posting about that need. So, congrats to me….

Just write, right?

There are so, so many options - too many! And I’ve tried many, too many of them! I can boil the overall situation down to two key perspectives:

• the writing tool
• saving and sychronisation

These are joined (in both senses) by a third point

• the availability and accessibility of my writing data

Let’s start with this third one, whilst acknowledging that I didn’t mention the final step - publishing - since that’s another topic altogether (with too many options).

Where I write

I write in many locations on many clients, but this topic I can also condense down to two “locations”:

• on my PCs, and
• on mobile.

My PCs are:

• a Windows workstation
• an Apple laptop
• a Linux laptop that I occasionally dabble with (but which rarely strays from home)

Offline tools?

Yes, I’ve tried Word (which is now more onliney than ever) and LibreOffice - but I prefer the simplicity of those minimal writing editors, and not having to worry if my format will work OK in another app. I have opened Pages on my Apple laptop, but mostly, in the past, to let my then young youngest daughter type away without doing any damage to anything else I might have had open.

On the go?

So, what do I do when I’m not at my desk, or propped up by multiple layers of pillows on my bed with a laptop on my knees?

I long harboured the dream of being able to continue writing and editing when on my phone, or syncing at home and then continuing offline on the tablet - but, really, I write best, most fluently, with a physical keyboard. And the Windows tablet’s virtual keyboard is so truly terrible at this that it’s actually a clarifying attribute.

My solution here, which I still need to formalise, will be to read on the smaller, keyboardless machines, and to limit myself to jotting down notes in another app to apply later, when I’m back on a real screen and have a real editor in front of me. Working in this way is often better for the time to reflect and reassess those jotted ideas.

On the go can also mean having a web interface. Whilst I have for now rejected the online tools, I remain open to again trying out browser-based Markdown editors with access to Dropbox. This sounds pretty hairy when written out like this, but it’s true - sometimes I have the urge to edit a piece or write something new during a lunchtime break at work, and a quick switch to a web interface is the best way of doing that. I’m open to giving Stack Edit or Dillinger another go. Proton doesn’t offer any of these integrations, to my knowledge, as yet. That’s perhaps to its privacy and security advantage - I’ll have to research that a little more.

Where does that leave me?

It leaves me with my current setup:

• Dropbox having the edge over Proton for its integrations and availability on Linux
• Markdown being the perfect editing tool for me, with enough options out there for me to work on any platform
• On mobile, just reading and jotting notes for editing into the main draft later

It also now leaves me without an excuse for researching tools over writing (§).

Can I survive without that? We’ll have to see!

(§) No, it doesn’t