Posts from September 2023

4PM — All of my visits to Heidelberg are the same. I arrive, see friends, hang around their houses, we go for dinner, have drinks. Wake up a little hung over. Repeat until I make my way to catch train to go somewhere else.

I lived in Heidelberg for three years until I left for London ten years ago. This was my first visit since where I actually spent time in Heidelberg, walking around, visiting familiar places, taking in the place.

The university campus where I used to work has, in its centre, a group of connected, concrete office blocks that were build in the 1960s. They look like the perfect set for Netflix production about soviet scientists from the 1980s. Great for taking photos but an eyesore for many and one local pointed out.

The architect’s brief must have been to build a dystopian answer to Heidelberg’s picturesque old town; sandwiched between the river and green, steep hills, the castle throning over the town as a constant reminder not to mess with the French.

Visiting Heidelberg evokes similar contradicting feelings. I liked living here, I made good friends, many of which I still speak to regularly. But I never arrived, I never considered it my home.

6PM — Kagi’s Smallweb shuffles posts from independent websites, mostly blogs. It’s a nice idea, I love this way of discovering new authors and content.

Kagi also announced that the search engine will prioritise independent content in their search results. It sounds great in principle. I want a Web that consists of more independent and experimental sites, one that is less commercialised. One way to build this is to highlight content independently published content. But it feels wrong. A search engine should provides the most relevant results first, not the ones from writers we likes most because of how they publish.

7AM

Lisbon is a strange place. Tourists love its picturesque hills and the cobblestoned alleyways meandering in-between old, beautifully tiled buildings. It’s the perfect Instagram holiday destination. But Lisbon is too small for all those people coming off the cruise ships. It’s narrow roads are too crowded, people everywhere trying to avoid stepping in dog shit and dodging the rumbling trams and cars. So many cars on so little space. Lisbon could be the perfect walkable city if only it was pedestrianised beyond the innermost parts of the city. Still, it’s worth visiting—only to enjoy octopus for dinner, Ginjinha for desert and overdose on pastel de natas during the day.

2PM — I needed to replace the carriage wheels of a sliding door in my house. There were no labels or any other information that would give away what make and model of door hinges I’m looking at. Using the Web, however, I could still find what I needed:

1. I took a photo of the part that needed replacing and uploaded in to Google’s image search.
2. In-between a million similar results, none of them quite matched my sliding door wheels, I found a nine-month old reddit thread from a user looking for exactly the same part. Another user posted the make and model name as a response to the thread.
3. Another Google search, and lo and behold, a kitchen warehouse sells that part just 10 minutes down the road from me.

The Web is still the most efficient and convenient research tool we have. There’s always someone out there who faces the same problem you’re facing, and another person has the solution. Despite all the SEO rubbish, AI content and social-media arguments, the Web still connects people.