December 12, 2025 Categories Reading time: 4 minutes

Sometimes, the intros to these linkdumps almost write themselves; there is something in the links that gives me an idea or just a random thought that comes into my head and that I feel is worth writing down. Other times, nothing comes to my mind, no matter how hard I try. Today is one of those times. And you know what? Rather than waste more time trying to come up with something witty, I think it’s okay if we go straight to the links today.

Articles

• Germany’s possible ad blocker ban could threaten user freedom and privacy, says Mozilla | TechRadar First chat control, now this - my country seems hellbent on fucking things up as thoroughly as possible for everyone who isn’t a government agency or a huge corporation. It’s depressing. And of course, Axel Springer, the publisher of a disgusting tabloid called "Bild" is behind this. Figures.

Software/Services

• FLOPPINUX - An Embedded 🐧Linux on a Single 💾Floppy Can you build a Linux that fits and runs off of a single floppy disk? The answer surprisingly is yes, even in 2025. This is a great tutorial on how to compile a Linux that fits on a floppy. Youtuber Action Retro made a video about it, which is how I found this. There’s a problem though - it doesn’t work correctly. I went through the tutorial and I ran into the same issues he does in the video. Something with the mount command goes wrong. I haven’t figured out what yet. Nevertheless, if you’re interested in learning how to build a minimal working Linux system, it doesn’t get simpler than this. Edit: I figured out what the issues were and wrote a bug report on the project’s Github page. Hopefully these changes will be included in the tutorial in the future.

Hardware Projects

• Diapasonix, a bass-like synth and MIDI controller Really cool project from Turi who created a Raspberry Pi-powered handheld synthesizer. Check out the video behind the link!

Videos

• What Happened to Gopher? The Internet We Lost - YouTube Great video about the history of the gopher protocol and how the world wide web ultimately won over it - but also how it keeps refusing to die thanks to some of you who keep their gopherholes up and running to this day. (via)

Around the Small Web

• From Apple Photos to Immich This might be interesting for those who are attempting to escape the Apple prison leave the Apple ecosystem.
• Personal Curriculums - The Wallflower Digest This is an idea that resonates a lot with me - create your own personal curriculum to keep learning and advancing not necessarily your career, but your life in general.
• I got hacked, and that has uncovered all the things I’ve been doing wrong STFN had an unpleasant encounter with some malware on his server, and he shares how he discovered what was wrong, what he did about it and what he learned from the experience. Which is a great practice - when something goes wrong, write it up and share it so others can learn from it, too!

Misc

• Vobis Denkzettel – Florians Retrokiste This is for the Germans (or German speakers) in the audience. Vobis was a computer retail chain which was huge in the 80s and 90s, and here’s an extensive collection of their advertising flyers from those decades. If you want to know how much your parents paid for that shiny new Pentium 100 with 8 megs of RAM in 1996, you can look it up here. Remember - prices are in DM, not Euro. Here’s an inflation calculator.

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