Tag: technology
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How an RM Nimbus Taught Me a Hacker Mentality
Thirty to thirty-five years ago, as a young and curious hacker, I broke out of the restrictions on my secondary school's computer lab and briefly achieved rockstar popularity amongst peers who, through my tools, could now play videogames instead of doing their coursework. But their interest in the results of my exploits were incompatible with my interest in the sheet joy of discovery... and, inevitably, this meant trouble.
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PHP 8.4 on Caddy on Debian 13... in Three Minutes
I just needed to spin up a new PHP webserver and I was amazed how fast and easy it was, nowadays. Just the stock package repositories and around five commands and my fresh box and it was serving PHP applications over HTTPS.
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As part of my efforts to reclaim the living room from the children, I'm building a new gaming PC for the playroom. She's called Bee, and - thanks to the absolute insanity that is The Tower 300 case from Thermaltake - she's one of the most bonkers PC cases I've ever worked in.
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On a desk cluttered with computer parts, a partially-built PC stands in an irregular-hexagonal prism shaped case with vented yellow sides and a three-pane angled glass front.
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A small collection of text-only websites
Terence Eden's maintaining a list of websites that are presented as, or are wholly or partially available via, plain text. Obviously my own text/plain blog is among them, and is as far as I'm aware the only one to be entirely presented as text/plain.
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Roomscale VR Still Rocks
I'd promised the kids I'd dig up my (ten-year-old!) original HTC Vive VR gear and hook it up in the living room over Christmas. Roomscale VR, even running on decade-old kit, still rocks and is as immersive as ever!
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HTTP is not simple
After discovering it through a Gemini newsgroup, I very much enjoyed Daniel Stenberg's (of cURL fame) explanation that contrary to what you might think, HTTP (even version 1) is not a 'simple' protocol, and is full of weird and knotty underspecified loose ends.
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Tom Forsyth recollects a bug that made Half-Life 2 unwinnable when built using a compiler to that supported SSE. A reminder of how weird the edge-cases in tech can be!
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SVGs that feel like GIFs
Back in July Vincent D. Warmerdam shared a great tip on screen-recording terminals into small, scalable animated SVG files, and I only just got around to reading it. Amazing stuff!
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A chat with 19-year-old me
Giles Turnbull's written a wonderful piece, imagining a conversation with his 19-year-old self. I wonder what I'd say to myself at 19 if I bumped into him?
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Best Viewed at: Your Resolution!
As the latest in a series of stupid things I've done on or for the Web, I've made a website that dynamically generates 'best viewed at' buttons... for exactly the Web visitor's current screen resolution...
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The rise of Whatever
A freaking excellent longread by Eevee (Evelyn Woods), lamenting the direction of popular technological progress and general enshittification of creator culture. It's ultimately uplifting, I feel, but it's full of bitterness until it gets there.
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Internet Services^H Provider
When you signed up with an ISP, you used to get Web space, email, shared FTP access, a nearby IRC node, newsgroups, and a software bundle. Nowadays you get a shit router, a voucher for a free month of a streaming service you didn't want, and crap customer service. Where did we go wrong?
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Some time in the last 25 years, ISPs stopped saying they made you "part of" the Internet, just that they'd help you "connect to" the Internet.
Most people don't need a static IP, sure. But when ISPs stopped offering FTP and WWW hosting as a standard feature (shit though it often was), they became part of the tragic process by which the Internet became centralised, and commoditised, and corporate, and just generally watered-down.
The amount of effort to "put something online" didn't increase by a lot, but it increased by enough that millions probably missed-out on the opportunity to create their first homepage.
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Lock All The Computers
I wanted a button on my desk that, when I pressed it, would simultaneously lock every computer connected to my KVM system. Here's what I came up with.
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Zip It - Finding File Similarity Using Compression Utilities
I really enjoyed Computerphile's video about how ZIP tools can be used for abstract tasks that you might initially think were way outside their scope... like working out how close the genetic relationship between two species is, or which human languages are most similar to one another!