while i was goofing around with #globalTalk, I ended up searching for some old Simpsons icons for my classic Macintosh (an LC 475), and stumbled upon an entry on the garden called Banned Simpsons Icons. (Who could resist downloading something with a title like that?)
They were called the "Banned Simpsons Icons" because Fox once sent the artist - Jeanette Foshee - a cease & desist letter for her uncannily perfect renderings of the copyrighted characters. they planned on suing her for every penny she made ($0.00) on them. this was back in 1995.
i thought - hell, what a wild story. why don't I get a hold of the artist - jeanette - and find out more about her banned icon set?
what i stumbled upon broke my heart, and i ended up spending a week digitally preserving what i could find.
if you had a #macintosh in the early 90s, you probably played the multiplayer tank battle game, Bolo.
and if you played Bolo, you probably visited jolo's Bolo Home Page. it was the bolo resource on the web, and it began its life on the authors' Duke University Med School web space, before it moved to lgm.com where it lived for ten years.
lgm.com was cybersquatted in the late 2000s, and the bolo home page disappeared from the public consciousness.
the site has hundreds of individual pages, and exploring its pages truly feels like an exercise in hyperlinking.
i spent the last few days recovering the site from IA and rebuilt its absolute link structure. please enjoy the Bolo Home Page for the first time in 15 years :)
Mastodon becoming a US entity with a neoliberal board of directors and the goal of growth über alles is the issue here folks, not whether Eugen and company are compensated for their work. Of course they should be and well too. Or is that a privilege reserved only for the mediocre yes-people at the Googles and the Facebooks of the world?
If, on the other hand, maybe we’d like more folks to contribute to the commons and maybe not even be captured by Silicon Valley how about this radical idea: Fund them so they can live (at least as well) as any mediocre yes-person at a mainstream tech company.
i've been sitting on this gem for 25 years. i think it's time.
so back in 1997, i was a first-year undergrad and dial-up was finally rolling out to the general public in most of canada.
with every new welcome package, u of a students received a 25 page manual on setting up smtp/pop for eudora lite, and a copy of netscape navigator.
the Computing and Network Services department decided that the best way to onramp students to the world wide web was via an interactive multimedia tutorial for win95 and macOS that they built themselves with macromedia director
last year an old buddy was cleaning out his basement, and he found his NetSurf '97 CD. couldn't resist capturing some of the 👌 performance by virtual paul
after watching doug block's Home Page (1999) documentary a half-dozen times over the past year, i realized how much i missed having a personal home page.
not an itch.io page. not a github repo. not an imgur album.
an actual personal home page full of links to interesting places and people, and a little blog area to write personal stuff in. i haven't had a personal blog since the early 2000s.
i wanted to have some fun, so I hauled my dusty ol' iMac G5 out of storage and installed Macromedia Dreamweaver and Fireworks. i hadn't used any of them in almost 20 years.
i thought it might take me a week to build a home page...
... it took me a year 😅
so this is my little attempt at rebuilding what we lost in the 90s. let me know if you've got a little homepage i can link back to in my hyperlinks area.
it took me two years to remember the name of this palm pilot/pda piracy website that was wildly popular in the early #2000s
MrTAXI was the grand central station of palm pilot #warez in the day. like Home of the Underdogs, it also acted as a kind of repository for obscure pda software that was difficult to find, nevermind purchase.
some of you know that i've been working on a decentralized reddit-like that uses an ancient ambrosian protocol called nntp, minus #usenet, called #tomo
after several requests for a project status page, and lacking the courage to build a fancy web portal that is 190mb and 20,000 javascript calls, i did the exact opposite:
i stayed up until 2am and wrote a #homepage is absolute raw satan-approved php. it generates the webpages from text files with a tiny markup language i wrote at the same time
for now, the tomo homepage is a plain old .plan file (when's the last time we heard that word, since the carmack vs romero wars?), and you can have any colour you want as long as it's amber and looks like wordperfect 5.1 running on some godforsaken library terminal on the #worldwideweb
is it like a blog? kinda. i'll set up some more static pages for project-related stuff in the coming days
if people really, really want to, and someone asks nicely, i'll even run a fingerd server so you can finger me and pull down the .plans down yourself 😅
ever since the demise of #macromedia director and flash, the web became a far less interactive place.
html5/js were supposed to be their edgy replacements, and instead became delivery methods for the same old static text we've seen since the early days.
before the graphical #worldwideweb was even around, the Mackerel Stack was a popular hypercard (supercard) stack released on floppy in the early 90s. it provided the kinds of interactivity that flash and director popularized online several years later.
i love dave groff's reflections on the creation of the stack, along with a short non-interactive recording of him goofing around with it
Ideally, I usually prefer to promote good news, as opposed to bad news, especially when I am passionate about a project or development. I am a firm believer in both herd mentality and self-fulfilling prophecies.
I want to make it clear, my primary web browser of choice is still Firefox and I still regularly contribute to Mozilla.
But as I said, and I hate to write this, Mozilla Firefox is in trouble.
Personally, I am a T-Mobile Home Internet subscriber.
When using T-Mobile Home Internet, I noticed upon a fresh installation of Firefox, my browser (Firefox) would not download and install the non-free media plug-in Wide Vine (spelled as one word, WideVine)
I had performed multiple fresh OS and browser installs. I had switched DNS and changed IP addresses, regularly.
The only solution was to use a VPN or otherwise circumvent my ISP.
I have been using a program known as, "PortMaster" to track all my incoming and outgoing connection.
As one of the unlucky people experiencing the "WideVine Issue" among T-Mobile Home Internet and Comcast Xfinity customers, I noticed WideVine is downloaded from a few sources (server locations).
One of those locations, Firefox does not check, but all the Chromium-type browser pull from when they have exhausted the other locations, which time out.
I should mention, I reached out with other T-Mobile Home Internet users, and not just locally.
At first, I assumed it was exclusive to T-Mobile. But in my effort to network with people and track down the cause, I learned there are a fair share of Comcast Xfinity customers who have the same issue. But I should add, Comcast Xfinity is not available in my area, so I cannot further explore that myself.
The IRS (Internal Revenue Service) website is meant to be easily accessible to everyone.
For the first time, ever, Mozilla Firefox experienced an issue with a government website. It gave me a bad member of another web browser which also experienced an issue, many years ago: Netscape
Vivaldi Browser is what I used to overcome the technical issue. It is a Chromium-based browser. It made me think
Well, I tried to accept #AI and view it as simply a new tool in the #artist arsenal. It's not. It's t̶e̶c̶h̶n̶o̶l̶o̶g̶y̶ #capitalists exploiting technology to turn us into drones with no creative outlet. AI will break #society. It will be worse than the #WorldWideWeb. Despite sci-fi literature and movies speculating on how AI might affect the world, it will be far more catastrophic than anyone could imagine. #Capitalism assures the worst possible outcome. The #singularity is supercharged capitalism.
while doing some hypercard research, i stumbled upon jim stephenson's classic Hypercard Heaven site, which used to be found at members.aol.com/HCHeaven/ back in the 90s and early 2000s. thankfully WBM kept a copy mostly intact.
it is a treasure trove of old hypercard articles and news. i've archived a copy here. hopefully jim won't mind:
#Throwback to when #Yahoo! didn’t have an exclamation point, wasn’t financially tossed around by telecom companies and investment firms, and was just Stanford grad students Jerry and David’s guide to the #WorldWideWeb
jeff vogel's Spiderweb Software website, in march 2000. creator of the Exile and Avernum series, jeff previously took mail orders and telephone orders. the web site introduced the concept of ordering shareware games over the internet to his fanbase.
5 years after its disappearance from general use in HTML, it is surprising still using a server-side imagemap to handle navigation clicks on the menu 😆
little story about when you get to see films that make you glad film exists
when i was first dating my wife over a decade ago, i was teaching and used a lot of documentary films in my classes. students had to learn how to observe and interpret people in a safe space.
it was getting late in the year, and i was running out of footage. so my wife and i would stay up until 2am some nights, trying to find enough footage that i could screen the next morning. she'd dig through my old film studies textbook ("A History of Narrative Film"), websites and old forums and imdb, calling out names, and i'd dig them out and watch a minute or two to see if they'd be good candidates.
most of the newer docs were plain bad - more shiny editorials than anything else. people acting instead of being. totally useless for students whose job was to interpret real human behaviour. so i tried to rely on older, more cinéma vérité -style docs.
it was hard to find old docs though - not only because many weren't digitized, but also because young people weren't aware of them, which meant that the web wasn't yet aware of them. imdb might have an entry for it, but only a few thousand people in the world might know the name of the movie.
my wife's secret weapon was a site called jinni. it had some truly solid algorithmic fundamentals that produced high quality recommendations based on what you watched. these weren't the google/amazon garbage recommends you have now: these were based on film qualities, and could produce pretty novel results.
one night it was beyond late, and i was shooting down every movie she recommended. she was getting pissed, and i was getting even more neurotic about finding the right one. she started randomly clicking around jinni in frustration, and came up with a black and white doc from the late 90s with a graffiti title. it looked bad, but i pulled up a low res mpeg someone had stashed on IA
we watched about 3 minutes together and forgot about finding anything else. we watched the entire thing that night, neither of us went to sleep, and i couldn't think about anything else before i taught a few hours later.
it was a movie called Dark Days, about the people living underground in the tunnels beneath NYC: https://vimeo.com/66989517
a decade later jinni's gone, we're married, and no one makes documentaries like this anymore.
FCC chair: Speed standard of 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up isn’t good enough anymore (arstechnica.com)
Chair proposes 100Mbps national standard and an evaluation of broadband prices.