Thomil's Random Ramblings

Recently, I needed to go to Dublin again, for the first time in two years. The reason? Well, my German ID card had expired all the way back in 2019 and after a succession of bereavement, job changes, hospitalisation and, you know, a pandemic, I finally got around to fixing it. I’ll spare you the details as the admin work in question is just a rehash of what I went through when I applied for my new German passport, something I already wrote a blog post on . Instead, what I want to focus on this time is the experience of shlepping all the way up from Cork to Dublin and back without a car. I’ve never had a driver’s license and, given how little money I have left over at the end of the month as it is, I have no desire to change that anytime soon. This leaves me at the mercy of public transport in Ireland, in particular Bus Éireann, something that is a frequent source of frustration. Having said that, my recent business in Dublin gave me the perfect opportunity to test how public transport ...

I’m a nerd. Yep, I know that’s a shocker. And, in retrospect, I’ve been one for as long as I can remember. I got my first laptop in 1998, my first PDA in 2001, and so on, in a nearly unbroken line up to the present day. Throughout my time, I’ve seen many changes in the mobile space. Brands had their rise and fall, trends came and went, but throughout it all, one thing remained constant. For as long as I can remember, every single device I had, with the exception of my two Palm PDAs, had its own proprietary charger. If you haven’t lived through it, you’ve probably never known that very special type of panic that springs from your phone running on fumes and that one very specific cable that you need being nowhere to be found. I’ve gotten more than one grey hair thanks to this very special type of panic. Thankfully, as time moved on into the early and then mid 2010s, most manufacturers seemed to somewhat come to their senses, and slowly, first micro-USB and then USB-C emerged as quasi cha...

Well, this ought to be different. And ironic. For well over two years, I've kept an outline in my Notion about the ongoing retro trend that seems to be, well, everywhere. As someone who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, I’ve never really understood this ongoing fascination with pixel art games, grainy pseudo-VHS video effects, polaroid cameras and similar throwbacks although I am quite partial to synth-wave music. This outline originally never led to a fully-fledged blog post, and in the two years since I started making  my notes for that post, so many other things came up that I was only able to finish it two months ago . Here's where things start to take a bit of a turn. A few months ago, while gathering together images for a blog post outlining the differences between Android and iOS, I got out my old Asus EeePad Slider for a few shots, and just out of sheer curiosity, I decided to plug it in to see if it still charges. Turns out it does, and what’s more, it turned on instan...