datagubbe.se

Welcome to the Internet, content lovers! This is what's currently available: Visual Art, Musings, Software, Misc, Links, About, Contact.

Visual Art

My pixel art made for (and on) Amiga and Commodore 64.
humans.txt - I too wanted to jump on the bandwagon with this exciting new standard... or something.

Musings

The Future of Open Source - On imperialism and idealism.
Tables and Strings in COBOL - Big Data like it's 1985.
Romancing the Thinkpad 365 - Two morons and a Compact Flash Card. (Image heavy!)
For Whom the Whistle Blows: On polarization online and elsewhere.
Decades of Fun: Computers Built to Last - The Amiga as "a computer built to last 50 years". (Image heavy!)
Stems as mock data structures in REXX - an experimental "tutorial as code".
Fonts, a Fuzzy Fringefest - On raster fonts, vector typefaces, smoothing and legibility. (Image heavy!)
So long and thanks for all the disks! - Fred Fish and floppies filled with freedom.
Sage advice for a calmer, more fulfilling digital life.
Fleeting Memories of Youth and the Increasing Impermanence of Culture - How will we remember our personal past in the future?
A Lasting Legacy: Thoughts on COBOL.
The Joy Of Limitations: Writing an ARexx REPL in ARexx - Making things while making do.
Not as famous as they should be - Pioneers that shaped computing as I know it.
Using an Amiga in 2021: Making an intro - Pixel art animations ahoy! (Image heavy!)
Elite gatekeeping in the age of surveillance capitalism - General purpose computing for the classes, not the masses
The State Of The Unions - can workers unite to improve online privacy? Another title so long it needs no explanation.
Voynich, Hill, Crumb: A Hitherto Vexing Codex - Amateur armchair theories about the Voynich manuscript. (Image heavy!)
The Amazing Workflow of Datagubbe - Meta shitposting about lo-fi web publishing for lazy gits.
The End of Ownership - On rent-seeking as a service.
Pondering the Scene: Why are Demos European? - A semi-initiated comparison of US and European hacker cultures.
On Attributing a Quote - Who said "Computer science is not about computers, any more than astronomy is about telescopes"?
Controlled By a Cabal of its Enemies - On online freedom and politicking the source.
The Cults of Ken and Kay - Can - and should - everyone learn to program?
Unconvincing Conveniences, Elite Overproduction and Sweden's Single Point of Failure - A title so long, no explanation is needed.
Peak Web Has Passed - On user experience vs. user exploitation.
Art Will Not Disappear - Ramblings on piracy, culture, manufacturing, profit, and the demo scene.
Is Software Abstraction Killing Civilization? - Or: Jonathan Blow is wrong but also right and we still need to prevent the collapse of civilization.
Nothing is New - On inventions, improvements and stagnation in the software world.
A Hope For Reliving 1994 - The repeating history of platform diversity and dreams of reviving the home computer.
Explaining the Internet in 2020 - a succinct summary for anyone who's spent the last 20 years in suspended animation.
Little Things That Made Amiga Great - a deep dive into a selection of ingenious AmigaOS features.
No Config for Old Men - or anyone else, for that matter: The curious disappearance of configuration.
Website Colophon and a sort of Mission Statement for a Better Web.
Subversive Computing: Better digital living by making things harder for yourself.
cut vs. awk: Thinking about the UNIX philosophy and the speed of scripts.
The Decline of Usability, in which we delve into the world of steadily degenerating user interface design.
Small and Efficient, a lengthy rambling on why Andrew S. Tanenbaum and a lot of other people are wrong in calling modern computer systems bloated.
When computers were cool and why they're not, anymore: a lamentation over the disappearance of Unix Workstations.

Software

Hack, n. (dict.org)
A quick and inelegant, though functional solution to a programming problem.

RxEnv - Tools for your ARexx development environment: a REPL and a preprocessor that enables file inclusion in ARexx scripts.
[Tiler] Durden - A program that identifies, counts and, optionally, marks and/or cuts out and saves unique tiles in a given image file.
tube - Youtube CLI - Tube is a CLI program for launching a video player of choice to watch Youtube videos. A rudimentary and experimental function for searching Youtube is also provided. Since version 1.1.4, piping the output from yt-dlp to the configured video player is also possible.
igdl - Instagram Image Downloader - A Python script to download an image from a given Instagram URL.
mincss - CSS Minifier - A CSS minifier in POSIX sh.
shpell - Spell Checker - A spell checker in POSIX sh.
xvol - X11 Volume Indicator - A bash script to raise/lower audio volume and display an xmessage with the new volume level.
colshift - X11 Color Tool - Create, manipulate and preview colors using standard POSIX tools.

The software below is discontinued or at least in a state of deep hibernation.

ttx - Swedish teletext reader - Read Swedish (SVT) teletext from the comfort of your terminal.

Misc: Bits, bobs, gizmos and gubbins

ctwm configs - Configurations for ctwm, my current window manager of choice. I've also kept my older configs for twm on this page.
fvwm configs - Configurations for fvwm, long-time favourite and still a great window manager for X11.
The IBM PC XT Desk Caddy - A cute little promo toy from 1983.
Running Linux on the Acer Swift 1 - A few general observations about the Acer Swift 1, and a few tips on running Linux on it.
Best of .bashrc - Some of my niftier quick contraptions for bash.
Touchpad Toggler - a quick'n'dirty bash script for toggling a laptop's touchpad on or off.
CGTerm on Linux - how to build and configure CGTerm on Linux.
How to boot a NeXT cube into single user mode - Forgot the password? Reset it like this.
Amiga stuff - Still a fun computer.
Amiga Minix Demo 1.5 - Goofing around with Minix on my Amiga (image heavy).
Advent of Code Three Ways - Advent of Code 2021, day 1, solved in Python, COBOL and ARexx.
Advent of Shell - Advent of Code 2020, day 1, part 1 solved in pure AmigaShell.
Advent of Code 2020 - Recreational programming.
Obfuscated JavaScript - Reinterpreted classics.
Sane Visual Studio Code - How to disable all the annoying pop-ups, tooltips, auto suggestions and other distractions in VS Code.
No blinking in Linux TTY:s - How to disable cursor blinking in Linux TTY:s - once and for all!

About me

There's not much to say. My name is Carl Svensson, I'm a computer nerd and this is a place for collecting my creative output and forcing it onto the world. For the really curious among you, I have compiled a small page of personal information.

Contact

If you concatenate my first name and the first letter of my last name, you can send mail to me at this domain.