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
2023
- The Decline of Usability: Revisited - In which we once more delve into the world of user interface design.
- The Wachowskis and the Hacker as a progressive archetype - Hacker culture and politics in postmodern fact and fiction.
- Scene Archetypes - The ones making Amiga 500 fun.
- Nature for Nerds - Hungry hedgerow hacks for city slickers.
- The Future of the Software Industry - On geopolitics, economics, class, looming austerity... and Twitter.
- Why we don't trade with ants ...and why hypothetical AI:s won't, either.
- A Life Less Ads - Angry man yells at late stage capitalism.
- Everyday Carry - Always prepared!
- The Colorful Charm of Amiga Utility Disks - Exploring the customized toolboxes of yore. (Image heavy!)
- A Quarter Century of Web Coding - Tracing the Fractal of Complexity.
2022
- Stranger Things and the Amiga 1000 - Angry nerd yells at TV.
- Computers are for Girls, a deep dive into early home computer ads. (Image heavy!)
- Directory Opus - King of the Dual Panes. - File management done right. (Image heavy!)
- Short Thoughts on Computers and Programming: Not quite aphorisms.
- King Charles III and the Swedish General Election - On metapolitics and impending doom.
- The Stubborn Computing Manifesto - Ars longa, vita brevis.
- The Problem With Computer Analogies - On different kinds of literacy.
- Extremely Online In Real Life - On old friendships and new loneliness.
- Proprietary Art: How Microsoft didn't splinter the Linux desktop.
- The Home Computer Generation - On experiences lost in user-friendliness.
- FVWM: Daily Driver Config - Or: Keyboard Focused Classical Window Management.
- The Amiga Buyer's Guide - A comprehensive guide to buying your first second hand Amiga.
- 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!)
2021
- 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.
2020
- 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.
2019
- 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.
- TTX - Swedish teletext reader - Read Swedish (SVT) teletext from the comfort of your terminal.
- 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.
Misc: Bits, bobs, gizmos and gubbins
- The Datagubbe Survey Response Survey
- 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!
Links
- Links to to other pages used to be at least half the point of the web.
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.