02 January 2024
===============

A happy new year to everyone!

This was the first new years celebration for us as a real
family... and it was great! We first feared that the fireworks
would scare junior, but - surprisingly - he seemed to 
really enjoy it. Well, all things considered, i am quiet 
happy.

An interesting topic that came up while eating our new years
dinner was the state of the web, brought up by my 83 year 
old dad: He talked to us about how he now has to click away
a dozen (exaggerated...but not too much) advertisments if he
wants to visit the website of his favourite newspaper and how
annoying it is that the articles he read are surrounded and 
infested by adds. Well i haven't used the web for years 
without adblockers so i was a bit curious to let him show me
what he meant... and i was horrified afterwards.

Well... without proper protection the web is truly and 
absolutely unusable. It reminded me of a short story i have
read in a computer magazine in the late 90s where people 
who had somehow lost their premium subscription to the 
TV and were now forced to watch the program with adds like
the "low class" people where getting some sort of brain
cancer... now this somehow looks more like a prediction...
sans the brain cancer, but who knows?

Alas, after installing a few addons to make the web a bit less
appaling he was very gratefull... 

For my personal internet habits i took finally a few steps to
ensure that i stay away from reddit. I have often made 
attempts to curb this literal addiction (reddit is/was the 
only form of traditional social media i still used... and 
this cost me uncountable hours of lifetime), but every attempt
so far failed sooner or later. Well, now i have blocked the 
reddit domain in my personal and work firewalls for the 
machines i use... i hope the additional steps that would now
be needed to mindlessly drift back into this bad habit of 
old will prevent me from doing this.

To close this entry into the phlog i have added an little 
article about my experiments with putting a Raspberry Pi inside 
a C64 carcass into the "Computer Stuff" category.