The truth, as so often, lies somewhere in the middle, and I generally tune out the extreme positions just mentioned, because they surprisingly often come from people who’ve never seriously engaged with it. Regardless of which position they hold.

The problem with total rejection is often the doom-mongering of the critics. But there’s rarely a deep black or a pure white. It’s usually one of a thousand shades of grey.

1000 shades of grey, or what?

Years ago, I picked up front-end fundamentals, can write a bit of HTML and CSS, and understand a little about how JavaScript works. When I see website code, I don’t necessarily see whether it’s good, but what it’s trying to achieve.

I reckon that’s a difference when I tackle something and vibe code, compared to someone who hasn’t got a clue about front-end development. And there we are in a grey spectrum!

Enough justification!

My old website at wirsindfein.de served me for a very long time as a business card for my freelance work, which I no longer pursue since the end of 2022. The site had perhaps got a bit tired, or rather like an old, albeit quality, jumper. Still looks good, still fits, no holes… but worn a thousand times!

It was time for something new!

My first vibe-coding test run was this small site: eichhof.co

A placeholder page that I use for domains that I only have for email addresses, for example. Doesn’t need to do anything, but perhaps someone might stumble upon it.

At some point, I had the idea for the particle smiley and gave it a go with Claude, and it was surprisingly quick to make initial ideas immediately visible and functional.

Got a taste for it!

After that, the door was wide open. I wanted to tackle wirsindfein.de, but also shed more than just the old jumper. I don’t need a site that showcases my skills for potential clients, I just need something I can use on my profiles across the web that briefly shows who I am.

An about-me page with a new URL

I started with the circular photo, the text, and the buttons. Then it became – completely without reason – multilingual. Then came more buttons, which also change their order depending on the language version. The email addresses needed to be as unrecognisable to bots as possible. The first Easter egg was built in, an imprint in a pop-up had to be added too. Why not a dark mode as well? Oh, another Easter egg, please. Shall we cram the thing with structured data as well? And the text links need a preview with self-updating screenshots of the pages.

There’s a disproportionate amount of functionality in this small site, and that’s precisely what made it fun. Quickly visualising an idea and potentially developing it further, adjusting it, scrapping it. Just doing it!

Last week, I then turned the site into a GitHub repo. Also from within Claude, with direct integration, so that what I tell the machine gets pushed straight away and through another connection goes live immediately. In between, I had Claude run code and SEO audits itself. Because redundancies often creep into the code when making ad-hoc changes.

That’s where we get to the difference it can make when you consciously engage with such a tool. Vibe coding initially means: I chuck my ideas into an AI and take what comes out. That needn’t be, and probably won’t be, good yet. But it doesn’t have to stop there.

I had the code checked by other AIs as well. Simply to get a feel for how they react. Often superficial rubbish came out that you first have to recognise as such. Ultimately, though, the “audits” in Claude itself worked best.

If you critically examine the output to the best of your understanding, and you can weigh up a good overall picture, it’s quite possible to produce optimal quality in extremely short time with vibe-coding.

I’m really pleased with my result, and you can certainly argue about why inline CSS and JS (because of the number of requests) and (now completely refactored) which function is implemented how well. Does it even need JS and so on? I reckon that’ll largely just be down to individual taste.

https://eichhof.me

The goal was simple: capture Laurent Garnier’s career in a documentary. They were looking for backers, and even though I’m not the biggest Laurent Garnier fan, I found it fascinating to be part of it. Just like with Lucas Levitan or Thimbleweed Park.

Laurent Garnier was one of the pioneers from France in the early 90s, when techno and house were blowing up. To me, he’s defined by tracks like Feelin’ Good and of course The Man With The Red Face. But also by the panel I attended with him at ADE 2016.

As far as I could remember, some of the footage was already in the can, with a few selected “Off The Records” events still to come in early 2020. One of them fell on my birthday. With the benefit of hindsight – knowing what the following years had in store – I should have gone. But I didn’t.

The pandemic naturally delayed the production as well. As tends to happen with crowdfunding campaigns, communication and the shipping of perks slowed down a bit. But given the circumstances, understanding was more than warranted. In the end, the team was determined to see the project through properly, and I did receive the digital downloads and the Blu-ray.

After a while, the documentary made it onto Arte and was freely available to everyone. Unfortunately, it’s no longer on Arte. It can still be found on Vimeo On Demand and Apple TV.

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Photo: Featuristic Film via Kickstarter campaign page

This post is part of my Kickstarter page.

Colin has been digging a tunnel for three years. Apart from the fact that his channel is well worth a subscribe, the tunnel content is what gets me most. Probably, like Binky, it’s the sheer nonsense of it all.

For example, Colin not only connects his house to his shed, but also to his bunker, which he installed in his garden a few years ago.

The attention to detail in some places is staggering. Even more remarkable is the perseverance to push an idea this far.

Over the last three years, there have been about 10 videos with tunnel content. As of yesterday, a 2.5-hour compilation is available. Perfect for a lazy Sunday, enjoy!

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The poster shown in the thumbnail is available for purchase here.

By the way, the “real” blogs I read the most are testspiel.de and djtechtools.com.

This post is part of my All Things British page.

In 2022, the BBC migrated its radio stations from Shoutcast to HLS. In the process, the old streams were replaced by a continuous announcement vaguely indicating this.

The usual services such as TuneIn, SonosRadio or myTuner were initially unable to offer all or any of the new BBC streams.

A relatively simple solution is to set up the appropriate HLS URL as a manual radio station in Sonos (or the web radio player of your choice).

The current URLs are maintained by bpsib in this Gist on GitHub. For listening outside the UK, you need to replace /uk/ with /nonuk/ in the URL. The Gist already includes ready-made non-UK variants.

With the right URL, you can manually add the station in the Sonos app via TuneIn. On desktop, go to Manage – Add Radio Station. On your phone, go to Browse – TuneIn – My Radio Stations, tap the three dots in the top right corner, then select Add New Radio Station.

This post is part of my All Things British page and my tutorials.

I’m older now and my car has matured with me, at least a little. It’s still a Brit and the nonsense I started with the Mini I’m continuing with an MG B GT.

It’s fair to call it nonsense, really. It just doesn’t make sense to buy a car that rusts quickly, is relatively impractical and you don’t fancy driving long distances in. But it’s fun!

You’d have to call it even greater nonsense when you look at the two Brits from Bad Obsession Motorsport who have been fitting a 4WD Toyota engine into a Mini for over six years.

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I partially restored my GT from 2016 to 2018 (see here), and my patience quickly ran out. The angelic patience Nik and Richard show when going back to panels they’ve only just welded, or building the necessary parts themselves in painstaking detail… is remarkable!

Over six years and 24 episodes, they’ve got the car to the point where it looks almost finished. But from episode to episode, posted monthly on YouTube, it is often surprising what else they come up with to turn the old Mini into a car with all the trimmings. From a homemade air conditioning system to a complete rewiring of the car. Practically everything is custom-made so that in the end the Mini looks like a standard Mini, but is possibly the fastest Mini in the world. Which is the stated aim.

The lads can now do this full time through Patreon, merch sales and sponsorship and have recently revealed their plans for the time after Binky. As well as a trailer for Binky, an old Peugeot is being restored before one of the very last MGs is brought back to life.

For the full madness, check out this YouTube playlist. It’s perfect for a hungover Sunday, and even if you have little interest in British cars, it’s pretty brilliant for anyone with a general fondness for motors: badobsessionmotorsport.co.uk

This post is part of my All Things British page.

It’s not just Zuckerberg¹ and the odd IT nerd taping over their camera, paranoia has gone mainstream and the misappropriated Post-it is everywhere. In addition to the sticky note, there are now elegant solutions. Elegant here means practical, comfortable and built to last.

Spy-Fy is perhaps one of the first to cater to the average paranoid with Spyslide. But before Spy-Fy got its production chain together after successful Kickstarter funding, there were already knock-offs in the usual Far Eastern shops. The idea itself isn’t so new that you’d call the Spyslide the ultimate innovation, but it has been implemented brilliantly! Spy-Fy’s demand for quality also forced a delayed delivery, as the desired result could only be achieved with a new manufacturer.

The small sliders have been shipping since mid-June and make a good impression on the device.

If you want to take your privacy even more seriously, you can dig deeper into your bag of tricks. On a PC, the webcam and microphone can be disabled via the BIOS/UEFI settings. For Macs, a former NSA employee has developed software² that monitors access to the camera and microphone and lets you know when Skype, for example, is trying to access them.

For smartphones, there are limited solutions of this kind. Either you know your way around Android custom ROMs or you root your Android smartphone and use Xposed and the XPrivacy plugin³ to protect yourself. Or you can go all the way with the Librem 5 from Purism⁴, which will be available in January 2019. This device lives privacy down to the last detail. The camera, microphone and modem can be completely deactivated by means of hardware switches, and the Linux-based operating system developed by Purism is also designed with privacy in mind.

The ultimate way is to switch off! You can find the Spyslide at the Spy-Fy shop from €10.

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¹ zeit.de “Kleb’s ab” (German article)
² OverSight by Objective-See
³ XPrivacyLua
⁴ Purism Librem 5

This post is part of my Kickstarter page.

Boom is a slightly overblown equaliser app that really does improve the sound coming out of your Mac, taking the agony out of the thin default sound. Once installed, Boom will tell you that the preset that has been automatically selected is probably the best setting for your particular device. You can also try a few genre-specific settings, but the default setting is usually the best.

However, those five controls above the presets are too tempting (see image above), and you can actually make good use of one or two of them. Fidelity in particular squeezes out the last 5% of depth and balance.

The system tray icon shows some of the settings in a small window, but after the initial installation and a quick look, you can safely ignore them. It really is that simple!

A definite buy, but before you spend money on the app, use the trial version to make sure everything written here holds true. Head over to Boom 3D at the Global Delight Store.

Addendum: Now also available for PC.

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For those who are interested, this is the wallpaper.

I still remember well playing the Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken point-and-click adventures in the early 90s. I never finished any of them, and that didn’t change later with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or Secret of Monkey Island either. With which I have just listed practically all the successful games by and/or with Ron Gilbert.

Other sentences from old people can also begin with “If someone had told me back then…”.

If someone had told me back then that I would be doing my bit to see another game by Ron Gilbert and company produced, and that I would even be featured in the game, I would have looked more than incredulous and confused. But thanks to the crowdfunding campaign for Thimbleweed Park on Kickstarter, it has come true!

Though I need to take it down a notch here. I have nothing to do with the plot of the game and could “only” buy my way into two in-game accessories. First, the phone book, and with it an answering machine message that you can call in the game. My number there is 7709!

The second accessory is even more mundane and refers to the evil clown’s swear jar. It’s so mundane that I couldn’t even remember it when I was at that point in the game. Maybe I’ll go back to it.

It was also very liberating to be able to clear my conscience, if not my karma. Having illegally acquired all the games mentioned above during my youth, my conscience is now clear… well, a little clearer. This does not cover Indiana Jones and Zak McKracken:

Now that I’ve spent ages describing how brilliantly I’ve supported this game, let’s get to the point: It was worth the effort!

I got what I expected. A classic point-and-click adventure, just like in the good old days. Another thing old people like to say.
The typical jokes and lots of references to the old games mentioned above, and endless hours of searching until you finally get a little bit further. In the old days you had expensive walkthrough books, most of which were copied. Now there is a HintTron 3000 in Thimbleweed Park, which can be reached by dialling 4468 (HINT).

Before we get to the trailer, I would like to strongly recommend that you buy it (karma!). The game is available for almost all platforms, including smartphones, and can be found on Steam among other places: thimbleweedpark.com

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This post is part of my Kickstarter page.