Welcome to Monica’s 2026 European Trip. As you know, Monica lives in Adelaide, Australia and she and her partner are in Europe to visit family & friends in Germany (Monica) and in Scotland (John). Frankfurt am Main. Germany. We start in Frankfurt. At the ‘Hauptwache.’ The little Baroque building in the photo was built around…
The Human Bit, by Frank Peters It started on Friday with a dragon. For Peeling Potatoes Episode 60, we asked: What if the dragon doesn’t want to breathe fire? A ridiculous question, obviously. Dragons breathe fire. That is what dragons do. Somewhere, presumably, there is a dragon handbook explaining the procedure. But what if this…
A Fruitloop University Story by the Duo (Janita & Frank) At Fruitloop University, the Mayor is handed four mythical clients, several dietary complications and one very human question: who decided we have to keep doing things the old way? Episode 60. Sixty Peeling Potatoes. Who would have thought? The Mayor certainly sounded as though he…
Babette’s family holiday has not started yet, but the adventure already has: expired passports, four-train journeys, three essential blankets and the promise of a piña colada beside the pool. There are 18 days until Babette goes to Egypt. Not approximately 18 days. Babette has done the calculation properly. She knows the days, the hours and…
Sometimes we return because we miss something. Sometimes we return and discover it has changed. And sometimes the past comes looking for us through a volleyball, a bowl of beetroot, a song—or a very suspicious fridge. The question sounded simple enough. “What is something you keep coming back to, even though nobody is making you?”…
AI can make it easier to stop thinking. Bruce and I found ourselves wondering whether its greater possibility is exactly the opposite: giving us the freedom to think much further than we could before. I had been reading three of Bruce’s recent pieces. One was about social care, another asked what might happen if artificial…
There are worlds I know reasonably well, and there are worlds where I am completely lost. Technology belongs firmly in the second category. Put a microcontroller in front of me and I see a small piece of plastic with some metal sticking out of it. An engineer sees processors, interfaces, protocols, functional safety and possibilities….
Orange, lime, garlic, cumin and paprika barbecue chicken Ingredients Chicken Marinade Method Ralf Note This one is more Argentina-style. You stand there like a small soldier of the chicken. Turn it round, turn it round, baste it all the time. Baste: a very important word for civilisation.
This week’s Pineapple Postcard comes from Lyme Regis in Dorset, one of those small English seaside towns that seems to have accumulated far more stories than it has any reasonable right to. It sits on the Jurassic Coast, where the cliffs and beaches expose an extraordinary geological record and the area around Lyme is particularly…
Ralf has bought the mobile home, Manfred has twenty years of camping behind him, and Martin is beginning to wonder whether he should start playing the lottery. Ralf and his wife have bought a mobile home. Not because they want to park it somewhere and create a smaller version of the life they already have,…
