Re: How I use AI (and it me)
August 27, 2026
Mere days ago, 82Mhz wrote how he uses AI. It sounded pretty much just like what I do. Privately, I don’t use it to do my thinking, but I will use it for help and correcting. I use LanguageTool to correct my English and even my Dutch spelling and keep me from using Americanisms when writing English. It is good, but it claims to be a “Free AI Grammar Checker”. It isn’t free, though, so perhaps it also doesn’t use AI.
Anyway, when DuckDuckGo’ing, I use the presented AI answers if they are what I was looking for. I often use DuckDuckGo Translate as well. People have tried to automate translation since the 1940s, but it simply can’t be done without a large body of examples put in a vector space.
What, after all, is AI but a fully intentionless general use of statistics from a massive collection of training data? I was reading about the dot com boom of the early 2000s. Apparently that is a bit of a mis-nomer and it should have been called the ISP bubble. When that popped, these ISPs left behind a high quality broadband network. If the AI bubble pops on April 14 next year, we'll have all these data centres that can be used for hospitals, schools and local governments to finally stop depending on American tech companies.
I also use AI on my phone. Not voluntarily, but for instance when selecting a word from the word predictor in my on-screen virtual keyboard. Text editing on phones is a horrible experience. Anything to make that more smooth is welcome. It’s also a small dedicated locally run AI, so the water and electricity usage won’t deprive entire cities of that.
I take personal notes, in my wiki, without the use of AI. Whenever I look up something online, I archive the answer on my Wiki. When I use it in my code, I add a comment in a way close to my original search, so I know I can find a working example next time I look for it. This not only causes me to use AI less, it also does wonders for my memory.
At work, I use AI when I’m told/expected to.
Coffee (2)
August 24, 2026
The device below is our coffee maker. It is mundane, ugly, practical, doesn’t get in my way, does its job (make coffee from electricity, a paper filter, water, and ground beans) and keeps the coffee warm when it’s done without using electricity because the pot is a thermos. It has a switch at the back to turn it on or off, and a button at the front to have it start making coffee. While it is doing that, the button is illuminated until it’s done.
A Philips coffee maker hard at work
In other words, it is perfect.
Did I mention how it hasn’t WiFi and I don’t need an app on my phone and a cloud subscribtion (AI tokens for a year included!) in China to see how long the coffee will still be warm enough to consume and how close we are to 1.000 cups after which mandatory maintenance is needed?
Again, perfection.
I’m not going to bore you with how to make coffee using one of these. It’s just that I seem to have promised a second part of last time's post about coffee, and for once, I wanted to actually follow up on that promise.
The coffee maker is obviously embedded in our morning routine, normally at the end of breakfast. When we have people over, we postpone until they arrive and use civilized cups with saucers and spoons as grown-ups are supposed to do, but when we are on our own, we use mugs because they can contain twice as much coffee. Our eldest has recently started drinking coffee too. He has a Harry Potter mug.
Making coffee by hand
Many don't like the coffee that comes from devices like the one above. I get it, but the taste is not the only important thing about coffee. To me, it is at least as much about the social aspect of it, at home, at a Mediterranean coffee bar, or at the office. Most of all, it is a moment of rest, of clarity, of zen. The problem with the taste, though, is mainly that in the machine the water goes through the filter a bit too quickly. As a result, it does not get enough flavour. It is better to boil the water first and patiently pour it on the coffee by hand. There are metal filters for that, so you don't even have to throw away paper filters that way.
In the weekends at home, our fondness of Italian coffee tradition has secured its decaffeinated position just after dinner, just before one of us puts our youngest to bed. During the working week, we don’t even always have dinner together, with all the music and sports activities in the late afternoon and early evenings going on, let alone coffee.
Zen is for the weekends, I suppose. And for crowded Italian coffee bars.
Updates
August 22, 2026
Since putting my new blog theme online last weekend, I’ve had some time to do a few updates.
- I’ve found a purpose for the trash icon! When I stop using or doing something that I was enthusiastic about on this blog, I have to bin it there.
- I’ve changed the retro computer page into a window with icons, one for each computer. Clicking them will get you to a page about that computer only.
- Since that gave me a naturally flowing icon window system, the list of slash pages and the trash are now also icon windows. The slash pages page, to be navigated to from the slash pages menu, is not very useful, but it seems to part of the standard, so that’s why it’s there.
- Internally, I’ve made the way windows receive their names more consistent. I use HTML article tags for all pages and posts. When such a tag has an aria-label attribute, its value will become the window title. If it doesn’t, the code will look for an aria-labelledby attribute and will use the title of the element from its value as window title. This way I don’t have to put an HTML heading in windows with icons only and I don’t have to type the title two times on pages with text.
- Since the hello page gets more views than the button page, I’ve put the green hosting button on the hello page. Research shows that propagating sustainable behaviour encourages people to do the same.
- Because the entire site already uses a monospace font, <tt> had no apparent effect. I’ve given it some subtle shading and borders while keeping it inline and wrap-friendly for long paths and URLs.
About streaming UIs
August 20, 2026
I’ve been using Jellyfin since… let’s look at my wiki, yes, found it: August 18, 2021. Two days ago, that was five years!
Anyway, I’m using it, because:
- it is open source
- it has no pro/full/paid version
- it has no proprietary backend that handles accounts
If there’s one thing that people don’t seem to like about Jellyfin, it’s the UI. People complain it’s dated and has rough edges. There are even enhancements that make it look more modern and/or intuitive. Indeed, I don’t find that Jellyfin’s standard UI has really changed since 2021. Should it, though?
What I need from any UI, is to quickly find what I need, get the information that I need and then be able to select/use that. Most streaming UIs don’t do that very well. Netflix goes out of its way not to do that at all. After selecting my personal profile, the screen and my ears are filled with a trailer of a show I have no interest in. To silence it, I have to scroll way down, but I have to do that anyway to find what I actually wanted to watch. Still, everywhere around it there are shows Netflix wants me to watch, some of which I already have, and none of which I have ever indicated as much.
Netflix’ landing page
“Let’s say you’ve settled into your couch for the night and want to find a new show to get you hooked. When you turn on Netflix, head to the navigation bar (now located at the top of your screen) and explore My Netflix as a starting point.”
-- A User Guide to Netflix’s New TV Experience
Thanks Netflix! An even better way to hide what I already decided I planned to watch before I even turned on my tv. Which is how I watch tv.
We don’t use many streaming services here, but our internet subscription includes Canal+, which lets me select my profile when entering their app. Somehow, it is worse than Netflix. There are some shows that I don’t know and scrolling right or down shows more of them, and some are repeated. Rows of “Best watched shows” try to make me watch them for the sole reason that others do so too. It feels like I’m browsing advertisements, instead of properly categorised collections. Some clickable pictures are bigger than others. It just looks like one endless mess of uninteresting crap. I know there are good shows there, they’re just impossible to find.
A Dutch Canal+ landing page I found online
I haven’t given the official YouTube UI any love lately, but it too seems to find suggesting new videos and channels more important than letting me focus on what I want to watch. This is one of the reasons that I use FreeTube. Nebula is different, and better. Its landing page too promotes new and Nebula-original videos in a large banner, but directly below are new videos of channels I subscribe to and below that there are videos I haven’t finished watching.
Access to entertainment should be that, access, not a barrier. I pay for this. Netflix and Canal+ know perfectly well what I’m following. Give me your suggestions after I finished that, or when I indicate I want something new, like by scrolling all the way past my shows. Or using a button.
Jellyfin’s landing page
Jellyfin’s UI may be outdated, at least it doesn’t get in my way. Finding what I want to watch is easy and quick. None of the interfaces above has me watching what I planned as fast as Jellyfin can do that. I can even customise what I need on the landing page and in what order. Why can’t I do that with Netflix or Canal+? Or YouTube? Perhaps Disney and Amazon let you do that, I wouldn’t know, but if they don’t, Jellyfin’s UI, in my view, is way ahead of any competition.
Right
August 17, 2026
So, now you’re looking at a desktop inside your desktop. Unless, if you’re using your phone, you are looking at a desktop on your phone.
Sorry.
Hey, I heard you like desktops
It started with an idea. I was busy being unhappyish about the design of my site, especially the light grey boxes with rounded corners that contained my posts and other content. They were meant to be modern and inviting and easy on the eyes. But especially the rounded corners I hated.
So a thought spawned in my head, not unlike one of those NPC scientists in Half-Life: their usefulness in perfect balance with their life expectancy. Some of those NPCs follow you around for a bit, and so did this thought. The idea was to replace the boxes with Atari ST GEM-style windows. Wouldn’t that be fun.
They would fit into the rest of the site design like an olive in a bowl of yoghurt.
My idea wasn’t pulled up into the gaping jaws of a ceiling dweller yet. What if I moved the sidebar to the top, as a pull down menu. The buttons could have their own slashpage.
You can see how it went from there. Scan lines, but not over the pictures, modal dialogues, desktop icons and moving windows with actual scroll bars. I haven’t had so much fun with JavaScript in more than a decade.
It’s not perfect yet. The URL bar at the top of your browser at first didn’t reflect where you navigate, so reload/F5 would reset the desktop and bookmarking was impossible. I’ve solved that by keeping track of window focus and pushing/popping entries in the browser history. It’s not ideal. On phones, for now, all content windows are full screen, which makes entries readable. You can still close them and you can navigate using the menus, even though the icons might be a bit small. I do have huge other plans for smaller form factors but those will take time, if I can even pull it off. On tablets, you can’t drag windows yet, but you can maximise them.
This site is a blog, like it was before. But it can naturally be more now. When you would land on this site, originally I wanted it to be just an empty canvas, waiting for you to start exploring, not unlike turning on a computer in the eighties. You would have to click a bit to get to the content. But as I said, this site is a blog so by default you will be presented a window with the latest five or so posts, ordered with the last one on top. I have plans for more, like more icons on the desktop, or a terminal to open posts from. I even have ideas for the trash.
Maybe people will finally stop trying to log in here using /login.php That’d be nice.
I’d love to know what you think about it.
