microblog.
No relation to the microplastics you've probably read about (one is on the internet, one is in your balls).
19/09/26
Mood: Nostalgic 
I’ll confess, my lived experience of Apple had a rocky start. My earliest clear memory of their products is a clear image of the neighbour’s kid annihilating his parents’ iMac G3 by unsuccessfully balancing a glass of diet coke on top while we played some kind of Simpsons movie maker game, then proceeding to lie to his family and claim I’d broken it. Even before this, the translucent body and weird coffee-coaster mouse wasn’t doing anything for me. I had the family computer - an absolute beast running Windows 98, and capable of playing Age of Empires II or Dungeon Keeper on impressively mediocre settings, and at that point blissfully unaware of the leperous fate which would befall it once I discovered torrenting.
It would be around a decade later that my younger brother - simultaneously much cooler than me, and something of a tech prodigy - would snag that late-00s combination so beloved of hipsters and tech alternative types. The MacBook Air and the iPhone. I would sometimes stick my head into our shared room and jokingly ask if he was playing whatever the latest FPS game was, knowing full well it probably didn’t have a Mac release, but long after his snarky retort had died, I’d sometimes find myself hanging-around. It’s hard to say why. I certainly couldn’t have explained it then, but it felt like I was hypnotised. The frutiger aero liquid look, the smooth flow of windows in and out of the dock, the translucent buttons shimmering like drops of water. A style fittingly called ‘Aqua’.
Skipping ahead again, and I’m in the midst of what might simplistically be called a ‘social media detox’, but is really more of a ‘reassessment of my time’. I don’t hate technology - clearly - but I have the feeling that somewhere along the line, we went wrong. We gaze into our glowing hate-rectangles for 5-8 hours a day, let shortform content turn our kids into the most illiterate generation in recent memory, and sell every facet of our souls to objectively evil people who fully expect our civilisation to fall apart (at which point, they presumably expect to hop off the desiccated corpse of our civilisation like fattened ticks). I don’t have the answers but I have joined the growing ranks of the “hold on, something’s not right here,” crowd.
I am watching an OnionBoots video. ‘Cosy Old Machines for Surfing the Personal Web’ when he says something that has me flashing back to my childhood like the food critic from Ratatouille. He describes the “medium” - that is, the machine you interact with the internet with - as being just as much a part of the experience as the ‘content’ you’re viewing. That in our efforts to recreate the small, more personal web of the 90s and 00s, viewing them on soulless, hyper-optimised modern machines cheapens that aim. That when we use these small, slow, old machines, the indie web seems to reach our through the screen into the real world and “the computer becomes a place again”. Because it was. You often hear Millennials and Gen X-ers wax poetic about how good the internet was and how shit it has become. Webrings and net neighbours and all that. But when I was a kid, into my teens, the internet really was a place you explored. My phone is like a waterslide - it carries me through a series of spectacles over which I have very little control unless I (jarringly) interrupt the ride and suspend the dopamine to block, unfollow, like, fact-check and so forth. Browsing the indieweb (in the same vein as the old web it tries to recreate) feels like walking through an unfamiliar town. Peering into shop windows, exploring art galleries, and later on, telling your friends about the fun arcade (in this analogy, the ‘arcade’ was a flash game where you beat the shit out of Justin Bieber or something) at school the next day.
The medium shapes the experience. While he does use a polycarbonate MacBook as an example in his video, the actual incentive to buy one came instead from a post on a forum called Melonland. User Melooon describes a near-apocalyptic wasteland of sub-thirty-euro auction listings for MacBooks hailing from 2006-2010, along with a detailed guide on how to upgrade them, fit SSDs, and so forth. Overcome by curiosity, I strayed onto ebay and punched in “polycarbonate unibody macbook” (for, as Melooon states, alluminium is less hip). There, amidst the coal, a “spares and repairs” listing for £12. “condition unknown, no charger.” I have a feeling. I click the button.
A few days and a confused “did you finish the other laptop, you were working on?” from my family later, and I have it. Filthy, scratched, dead, perfect. This isn’t my ‘Projects’ page, so I’ll spare you a long, detailed writeup of the process, but after a long night of tinkering, I’d not only got it working, but installed the most up-to-date compatible OS it would take (High Sierra). A few days down the line, and I’m using it routinely to write for my website, and browse all of yours. Is there a difference in browsing the small-web with this machine? In short - yes. There’s something about the slightly lower-res LCD screen which adds a warmth to whatever I see on it - a kind of nostalgic filter not present on my actual personal laptop. Yes, I also have an old X230 which sometimes serves a similar purpose, but the X230 has a businesslike “washed out” look - a tone of 00s industrial grunge, when compared to the sleeker, artsier world presented by the MacBook. It’s hard to use this machine to explore an internet ecosystem seeking to create a better online world - the literal manifestation of hope - and not appreciate the ‘rose tinted goggles’ it provides you with.
So why, in the Year of Our Lord, 2026, did I purchase a 2009 polycarbonate unibody MacBook? Was it because it cost £12 on eBay? Was it boredom with waiting for the AliExpress-special replacement keyboard for my X230, and a yearning to be productive in the meantime? Was it a lingering, subconscious attempt to grasp hold of some tangible manifestation of my teenage years as even my memories of what life was like in that pre-social-media world bob and drift towards the roaring waterfall of entropy? There is certainly a feeling that if I can somehow save obsolete things from becoming e-waste, I can not only stroll the cobbled streets of these scraps of a vanished neon Belle Epoque, and also somehow justify my very place in a world where the alternative to OnionBoots’ friendly living past is the digital world reaching into the real world and swallowing us with its macerating obsolescence.
...but all that sounds very scary, so it’s actually because it cost £12.
15/09/26
Mood: Beep Boop 
There’s a video that was doing the rounds a couple years ago. The cameraman is on an escalator, recording an elderly janitor who beholds an automated cleaning robot in bewilderment as it buzzes-along the lobby of a shopping mall. The caption accompanying the video is invariably along the lines of “bro’s meeting his own upgrade”. I wanted to snap a screenshot to use as the header of this blog post, but my google-fu returned only a flood of flashy AI-generated imagery, and the odd similar situation posted to Reddit by an actual human being. AI isn’t just stealing your job, it’s going to be used to generate fun Pixar-style marketing videos celebrating the fact.
For some time, the company in which I am employed has told us it doesn’t have the money to hire staff to fill the multiple empty positions on my team. Cue many sleepless nights, overtime shifts, cancelled plans and grumbling appeals to the company to just bring us back to the staffing levels we had six months ago!
Today, I found out through a colleague that the company does, apparently, have the substantial cash required to contract an AI firm. This firm’s website declares its partnership with my employer, and that it intends to build a “toolset” to “help” my department to fulfil our responsibilities. They boast that the AI assistant will be able to take over nearly half of the responsibilities of the role as soon as it enters testing, and that it can do a week’s worth of a human employee’s work in ten minutes. Sounds like a no-brainer to me! Roll that puppy out! The human beings with a whole career’s worth of specialised knowledge, mortgages to pay, and nowhere else to go? Look, why complicate an otherwise joyous occasion with trivialities? We can analyse safety and performance slightly faster (and with less nuance) now!
“But what’s the problem?” You ask. “It’s just a tool to help you do your job more efficiently. You just spent a paragraph complaining about the effect this job is having on your life!”
It could be that the multi billion pound company does have my best interests in mind, but somehow I doubt it. If you think I’m being blindly cynical, ask any of the workers who have been asked to train their replacements. Sometimes, they’re not even asked. In fact, sometimes, they’re not even told they’re being observed, their keystrokes reduced to data and fed into a machine that never complains, never asks for annual leave to attend its brother’s wedding, never gets sick, never finally has the joy of starting a family, safe in the knowledge that it can afford to put food in its child’s mouth.
It’s never just a tool. It’s a toolset, which develops mission creep and redefines how you do your job. Then, before you know it, your job has been reduced to clicking a button. Then you blink and you’re standing in line for the food bank, wondering why the fuck you gave more than a decade of your life to a huddle of suits who gladly hurled you out onto the street the second they had the chance.
Anyway. Just wanted to vent. More hopium and tinkering coming soon.
04/09/26
Mood: Smoothbrained 
AAAAAA.
It's been a few weeks since I updated here.
Today was "keyboard swap" day for the X230. Two Rest-Days, a week apart, I've gotten all the kit out to try, and two rest days I've ended up doing nothing.
Last week, I realised I didn't have any tape to protect the connector pins on the X220 keyboard when I fit it (apparently it can get a bit smoky if you try to bodge them together). So, this was duly ordered and I waited.
Today, I've hauled all the bits and bobs out again, only to find I need to either clip and sand off a plastic tab, or replace the palm rest. I have no replacement palm-rest, can't find my other toolkit with the bits required to clip the tab, and just feel like I've wasted my time again.
Always read the instructions, kids.
18/08/26
Mood: Tired 
Does anyone else have recurring places in their dreams? Not a single dream on repeat, but a stage or set that serves as the backdrop for whatever the subconscious conjures up?
One that pops up time and again for me is a place I call "the Underground". The only way I can describe it is some kind of urban metro station that goes on apparently forever, with no real link to the surface, most of the time. Within the Underground, there are shops, rows of hotel rooms, and even staff who give you pitying looks and contradictory answers. The Underground is dirty - the food courts and shops make an effort to hide it, but every metal surface is crusted brown with rust, thickets of cotton-tandy cobwebs crowd the shadows above support beams, and walls are littered with peeling posters. Unlike most liminal spaces, the Underground is busy, but everyone is wrapped-up in their own world, their own struggles. As I write this, last night's specific dream is fading, but it got me thinking - I am 100% certain I've been there before.
01/08/26
Mood: Thankful 
Partway through sorting through my old junk, I took a break to affix the wonderful gar-orobous sticker I bought from Garfriend to my ThinkPad. The post-retirement enhippyfication of an honourable 2000s/2010s business machine is almost complete.
Garfriend is a wonderful creative from Minnesota. Creative in that old school sense where a person writes, makes art, works on tech stuff, works on their car, and still manages to know a lot of facts about fish. I want to call them a polymath but I don't think that's right? Anyway, their website is fantastic (I don't want to spoil the experience but it's an interactive visual adventure). If you visit one site today, make it theirs! Especially as I sorta lifted their whole microblog format for my own use, which I don't feel bad enough about to regret, but certainly am guilty enough to recommend you vist their site!
31/07/26
Mood: Listless 
Discovered this hyper-advanced microblogging service called "doing it yourself in HTML".
It occurs to me that I'm a little unfair on my car. Despite referring to it as a "shoebox", a "piece of shit", and other, even crueller names, it just got us to and from Cornwall, and helped us move an entire house's worth of junk (more or less - it took two trips). Not bad for a Corsa. I think perhaps part of my previously cited opinions on it were formed before I discovered I could fold the rear seats flat and turn the back into one large (well, larger than one suitcase) contiguous space.
So, kids, buy a Corsa. More specifically, buy my Corsa. Please. So I can buy a Suzuki Jimny instead.