Tom Burkert
Tom Burkert
Tom Burkert’s personal blog focused on technology, privacy, AI and other nerdy stuff.
August 2026
All posts (19)
Several months ago, a good friend of mine, who knows I’m into birdwatching, suggested I watch a YouTube documentary called LISTERS: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching. Little did I know at the time that it would consume much of my free time and prevent me from blogging with my usual cadence! I’ll say it right away:...
I remember back in November 2022, when ChatGPT was released and everyone was going crazy about how smart and humanlike it was. I sat down and started talking to it in Czech. After reading so many raving reviews and hyperbolic predictions, I was shocked by how quickly I ran into the model’s limits in Czech. Now don’t...
A few days ago, I opened the window and heard a familiar sound I have not heard in a while: it was a fieldfare’s call, probably one of the first who migrated back to my town this year. And just today, I saw my first chaffinch of the year perched on top of a branch. These birds are very common where I live, so this...
I love e-readers. I was an early adopter of the good old dorky-looking Kindle 3 (aka Kindle Keyboard), some 15 years ago, and I read many a book on it or its successors. A few years later, I upgraded to Kindle Paperwhite 3 (a 2015 model), and got stuck with it for a while. I had a phase where I shunned ebooks and...
In the last few months, various prominent figures in big tech have claimed that voice is the user interface of the future. It’s an interesting revival of voice interaction, which already fell flat on its face in the late 2010s during the era of voice assistants. Despite that failure, the idea is back, and I’m here...
This is going to be a fairly niche post, so I will make it clear right away: If you are not using Hyprland on Fedora 43, you can close this post and move on with your day. Now, those of you who are using Hyprland on Fedora 43 are likely doing so via the widely linked and recommended solopasha/hyprland COPR. However,...
It started with a broken hinge in our kitchen cabinet. I am no handyman, but I like to do as much as I can around the house and I dare say I’ve gotten pretty okay at it. The one thing that can set me back, though, is not knowing the correct terminology. What type of hinge do I need? Concealed? Inset? Overlay?...
The mission is simple: spend less time looking at my phone. I’ve made several adjustments to my information diet and to how I consume content online, but many of these changes made me even more tethered to my phone. So I set out to read more on my e-reader instead of constantly staring at my phone. Put the phone...
I spent the majority of this week at a conference and in dinners and networking events, and as a result, I have fallen woefully behind my regular catching up on news and reading. Opening my RSS reader to see 400 unread articles was a little overwhelming, but it gave me an opportunity to reflect on what I do really...
In one of my recent blog posts, I talked at length about the virtues and advantages of building personal information intake system around RSS feeds. You get privacy and ownership over the distribution of information without any black box algorithms deciding what to show you (which inevitably ends up focusing on ads...
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