Hi there, welcome to Tom’s blog 👨‍💻

A few days ago, I opened the window and heard a familiar sound I have not heard in a while: it was a fieldfare’s call, probably one of the first who migrated back to my town this year. And just today, I saw my first chaffinch of the year perched on top of a branch. These birds are very common where I live, so this is not too surprising, but what struck me is how much I have grown in terms of knowledge of their calls, appearance and behaviour. A few years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to name a single bird by call or name too many of them by looking at them. If you’re curious how I got here or want to build some knowledge and appreciation of birds, read on. ...

I love e-readers. I was an early adopter of the good old dorky-looking Kindle 3 (aka Kindle Keyboard), some 15 years ago, and I read many a book on it or its successors. A few years later, I upgraded to Kindle Paperwhite 3 (a 2015 model), and got stuck with it for a while. I had a phase where I shunned ebooks and started buying everything in paper, and then waffled back and forth a few more times. During one of my ebook-positive phases sometime early this year, a few things coincided: The battery in the Paperwhite was starting to show signs of wear, Amazon started making some anti-consumer moves, and I realized the Kindle was perhaps the only device that was not chargeable via USB-C. Time for an upgrade? ...

In the last few months, various prominent figures in big tech have claimed that voice is the user interface of the future. It’s an interesting revival of voice interaction, which already fell flat on its face in the late 2010s during the era of voice assistants. Despite that failure, the idea is back, and I’m here to tell you why voice is not the user interface of the future. Let’s start with why I’m so peeved about this. I almost wrote this blog post back in October, when David Weston, a VP at Microsoft, claimed that “the world of mousing around and keyboarding around and typing will feel as alien as it does to Gen Z to use DOS.” This was part of the unveiling of the Microsoft Windows 2030 Vision, and he also suggested that we will do “more talking to our computers.” I have some strong feelings about Microsoft, Windows, and their vision for the future, but I won’t go into those to avoid getting derailed. At the time, I shrugged it off as one of those things people just say on the internet or a marketing gimmick. ...

This is going to be a fairly niche post, so I will make it clear right away: If you are not using Hyprland on Fedora 43, you can close this post and move on with your day. Now, those of you who are using Hyprland on Fedora 43 are likely doing so via the widely linked and recommended solopasha/hyprland COPR. However, that COPR is no longer maintained, and when running updates, you might have seen errors like these: ...

It started with a broken hinge in our kitchen cabinet. I am no handyman, but I like to do as much as I can around the house and I dare say I’ve gotten pretty okay at it. The one thing that can set me back, though, is not knowing the correct terminology. What type of hinge do I need? Concealed? Inset? Overlay? Clip-On? Soft-close? Sprung? An avalanche of terms that I only barely understand paralyzes me. Luckily, there’s a new helper in town: AI! ...

The mission is simple: spend less time looking at my phone. I’ve made several adjustments to my information diet and to how I consume content online, but many of these changes made me even more tethered to my phone. So I set out to read more on my e-reader instead of constantly staring at my phone. Put the phone down First, a brief detour into my browsing and reading habits. I subscribe to a lot of feeds (check out my blogroll!) and going through my RSS reader gives me a similar dopamine hit to scrolling on social media - except I’m mostly learning something new rather than just being entertained. But it also means I spend a lot of time staring at my phone and reading articles on it, which is definitely not a good way to read anything, and it does not feel great either. Besides, you’re one notification away from being pulled out of your reading. ...

I spent the majority of this week at a conference and in dinners and networking events, and as a result, I have fallen woefully behind my regular catching up on news and reading. Opening my RSS reader to see 400 unread articles was a little overwhelming, but it gave me an opportunity to reflect on what I do really need to know. I’m insatiably curious, meaning I constantly seek new information and something to learn. Oftentimes, this is to the detriment of my ability to focus or even retain the information I consume. But it is how I am wired and I expect this is not uncommon. How do I strike a healthy balance between feeding this craving for novelty and maintaining sanity? ...

In one of my recent blog posts, I talked at length about the virtues and advantages of building personal information intake system around RSS feeds. You get privacy and ownership over the distribution of information without any black box algorithms deciding what to show you (which inevitably ends up focusing on ads or engagement bait at some point). However, no system is perfect, and building your beautiful garden of RSS feeds is no different. ...

Recently, I have been testing how well the newest generations of large language models (such as GPT-5 or Claude 4.5) handle natural language, specifically counting characters, manipulating characters in a sentences, or solving encoding and ciphers. Surprisingly, the newest models were able to solve these kinds of tasks, unlike previous generations of LLMs. Character manipulation LLMs handle individual characters poorly. This is due to all text being encoded as tokens via the LLM tokenizer and its vocabulary. Individual tokens typically represent clusters of characters, sometimes even full words (especially in English and other common languages in the training dataset). This makes any considerations on a more granular level than tokens fairly difficult, although LLMs have been capable of certain simple tasks (such as spelling out individual characters in a word) for a while. ...

The way we consume content on the internet is increasingly driven by walled-garden platforms and black-box feed algorithms. This shift is making our media diets miserable. Ironically, a solution to the problem predates algorithmic feeds, social media and other forms of informational junk food. It is called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and it is beautiful. What the hell is RSS? RSS is just a format that defines how websites can publish updates (articles, posts, episodes, and so on) in a standard feed that you can subscribe to using an RSS reader (or aggregator). Don’t worry if this sounds extremely uninteresting to you; there aren’t many people that get excited about format specifications; the beauty of RSS is in its simplicity. Any content management system or blog platform supports RSS out of the box, and often enables it by default. As a result, a large portion of the content on the internet is available to you in feeds that you can tap into. But this time, you’re in full control of what you’re receiving, and the feeds are purely reverse chronological bliss. Coincidentally, you might already be using RSS without even knowing, because the whole podcasting world runs on RSS. ...