Category: Web

Meta: How this website has evolved. On internet culture.

Unearthing a Time Capsule and Preserving a Fading Cathedral

My first creative endeavors (as an adult) were not drawings or paintings. It was the early web that made me pick colors by hand and stitch together HTML code snippets. The web of the early 2000s was a very different place from the modern social media era, built from many small independent sites and blogs,…
$Hello to the Fediverse :)$

Hello to the Fediverse :)

Hello, people out there on Mastodon, Pixelfed, or whatever platform you use! You might have seen a weird collection of old posts reposted by my account today! Sorry :) This has been just me cleaning up minor stuff – not knowing that I have to turn off federation explicitly to avoid blasting out these old…
Let Them Go

Those hyperlinks did a lot for me, in nearly two decades. But I have let them go. There was a time I had opinions on this blog – about the corporate world, science writing, academia. But I trod carefully (or so I think). But there was one subject I was passionate about: Link rot. I…
Remembering Prof. Wilhelm Macke

A recent migration of (some of my) domains made a link on Wikipedia go into the void of a 404. It was a brief, German article on another – now extinct – German website of mine, linked by the article on Wilhelm Macke. In order to keep it alive though, I am copying the article…
Combining Everything

The site name of this blog once was: Theory and Practice of Trying to Combine Just Anything. Should I bring it back? This website has truly been all over the place. History of heat pumps. Found Poetry from spam comments. Mathematical proofs. Drawings. Thinking about life-changing decisions. The original tagline – created in 2012 –…
“Did you mean element? Or search for elkement?”

This is perhaps the first time I ever want to answer one of WordPress’ Daily writing prompts :-) The title of this blog is what Google says, if I search for my nickname. This has not changed in more than 10 years. So, I have not been a branding genius exactly. Nobody will ever find…
Reverse Turing Test Fail: Kandinsky Saw the Dark Side of the Moon

I saw tweets by desperate students. Professors believed their essays had been written by AI. Because some AI checker software said so. I read heart-breaking stories of artists. Their creations were not accepted for contests because somebody or some software said “This might be an AI image”. You need to monitor yourself and track your…
Lissajous Quadrupole. Joys of the Early Web.

In the old days you did not blog or post but fiddled with HTML tags on the text files making up your weird personal website. You could not fathom that somebody else would enter your personal space on the web and leave a “comment”. Occasionally, you received an e-mail related to your website, or a…
Why Art?

… or: Blogging like its 2012! This website has been (one of) my virtual playground(s). Every time I figured it has found its purpose, I felt the urge to change something yet again. However, the dedication to art seems to be more stable. I felt confident about adding (yet another) domain, and I am happy…
Found Prose: Retrospective 2012-2022

You will not want to read this. Nobody does, me included. But creating it has been an interesting experiment. I have been scouring this blog for sentences, one from each blog post. In chronological order, starting in 2012. I had permitted myself to re-order sentences, but I have rarely used that option. The fountain pen…
Construct the Labyrinth from Which You Plan to Escape

Found Poetry found me. I started this website as a science blog, but then I saw poetry in mundane texts – just as you see faces in things. I created poems from spam comments, from search terms, from physics textbooks, from book spines, from error messages, from Facebooks ads, from any text anywhere in the…
Technology and Technics. Flolloping Floopily.

Once I started to create spam poetry and search term poetry, and I believed it was original. Then I discovered that great poets of the virtual scrapyard had come before me. Finally, I found serious articles about so-called Found Poetry and I found poets publishing their spam poetry in earnest. I learned about the Sokal…
Connectedness and Independence

My websites ebb and flow. After 23 years of writing online, I am recognizing recurring patterns. I am keeping ancient hyperlinks intact. All articles I had published here before 2020 are still available elsewhere, also under the former main domain used at WordPress – elkement . blog. My frustration about other referenced websites’ ever changing and abandoned…
Cyber Something

You know you have become a dinosaur when you keep using outdated terminology. Everybody else uses the new buzz word, but you just find it odd. But someday it will creep also into your active vocabulary. Then I will use the tag cyber something, like stating that I work with cyber-physical systems. But am I…
Let Your Hyperlinks Live Forever!

It is the the duty of a Webmaster to allocate URIs which you will be able to stand by in 2 years, in 20 years, in 200 years. This needs thought, and organization, and commitment. (https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI) Joel Spolsky did it: I’m bending over backwards not to create “linkrot” — all old links to Joel on Software…
Bots, Like This! I am an Ardent Fan of HTTPS and Certificates!

This is an experiment in Machine Learning, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, whatever. But I need proper digression first. Last autumn, I turned my back on social media and went offline for a few days. There, in that magical place, the real world was offline as well. A history of physics museum had to be opened,…
The Orphaned Internet Domain Risk

I have clicked on company websites of social media acquaintances, and something is not right: Slight errors in formatting, encoding errors for special German characters. Then I notice that some of the pages contain links to other websites that advertize products in a spammy way. However, the links to the spammy sites are embedded in…
Computers, Science, and History Thereof

I am reading three online resources in parallel – on the history and the basics of computing, computer science, software engineering, and the related culture and ‘philosophy’. An accidental combination I find most enjoyable. Joel on Software: Joel Spolsky’s blog – a collection of classic essays. What every developer needs to know about Unicode. New terms…