Notices by Tim 🎮 (timixretroplays@digipres.club)

Retro PC games:

✅ Download quickly
✅ Can be played with a D-pad or a joystick and a couple of buttons
✅ Are incredibly well-documented now
✅ Had their DRM stripped out decades ago, or... see point above
✅ Will run on 0.03% of your PC's capabilities
✅ Are cheap to acquire in digital form
✅ Are interesting historical artefacts
✅ Are celebrated by inclusive and collaborative online communities

Save a classic gamepad from ewaste and start playing retro games today! 🎮

#retrogaming #retrocomputing

The back of the box has some specific claims. The "product inerface" [sic] is "USB 3.0Micro B/USB 3.1 Type C (Gen1)". Compatible with desktop and laptop computers and smart TVs. The bit about smartphones being supported if "cable purchased" is interesting - that probably means the cable this comes with is not actually USB 3, so I might have to try it with a different cable.

The 2230/2242/2260/2280 bit is to be expected, that's different lengths of M.2 SSDs, which this thing certainly resembles.

Tonight's actual micro project: checking out the USB SSD my partner bought off Temu, which claims to have *thirty terabytes* of space, maybe a year ago.

I can't remember what she said she spent on it, but it wasn't in the same ballpark as a house deposit, so I warned her not to put any data she actually cared about on it. It's sat unused at her place until I spotted it and decided to check it out, as fairly as I could. 🧵

Now, I don't believe that 30 terabyte claim for even a second. The very cheapest *eight* terabyte M.2 SSD that PC Case Gear currently list is $2299, and they don't currently go bigger than that, so I don't think a solid state disk that big exists yet.

More likely, it's made up of a stack of much smaller microSD cards. The very largest microSDXC card I'm seeing at JB Hifi is 1 terabyte, so theoretically this thing has thirty of those inside. But I doubt that, too.

One meta-thing to come over is the realisation I had that paying a regular subscription to use a service is actually the right thing to do. If your Mastodon server admin has a link somewhere to throw them a few bucks a month in return for being there, please do it.

"If the service is free, you're the product" works both ways - if you directly support the things you use, they are less likely to resort to extracting value from you as a means to survive.

Today's gentle side project, because I'm at home sick, is finally killing off my Twitter account. Not because I've remained active over there all this time - god no, I functionally bailed on that dumpster fire years ago - but because that task is so relatively unimportant it's been waiting for a low-energy, low-stakes day like today to happen.

There's a few threads to come over, a few dangling anchors around the internet to update. Some fun stuff will get posted in the coming few days.

Have you ever walked around your home town, early in the morning on new year's day? You might see one or two cars on the road, you might pass a sweaty jogger thumping by, but by and large it's an eerie ghost town sort of experience.

That's Twitter, today, looking through my post history for nuggets to bring across. Half the accounts I've interacted with or boosted are long gone. My last post was quoting someone else posting about Twitter's anti-trans stance; that account is now suspended.

Nothing on the internet is forever.

Oh sure, you might toot something funny that gets pasted all over Reddit and Threads and achieves some level of semi-permanence. But Reddit is well into the private equity value extraction phase, and I don't actually know anyone who even uses Threads.

Like Twitter, every website you use today was made by somebody, and like Twitter, every website will go functionally extinct some day. It's transient data on computers made by people, and those fail, in time.

So: I don't concern myself anymore with the task of preserving my work for future generations. I'm not playing old games and analysing old gamepads for people born next decade - I'm doing it for me, in the here and now, because making stuff about stuff I like makes me happy. If Gravis or their digital protocols or whatever become particularly interesting in future, I hope my work survives to inform that research; but it's not up to me to decide what stuff makes it into the future or not.

Putting my stuff on more decentralised networks, owned by people like me, seems like the better bet. I doubt digipres.club will hit the PEVE phase any time soon, so it's pretty safe. But it's still run by (lovely) humans, and the fact I moved here after initially landing on Fosstodon says something about the transient nature of websites and people.

I still stand by my strategy for picking a Mastodon server - find one aligned with your interests that has a long-term financial plan.

There's other lessons to be learned, basic traps to avoid in order to prevent huge swathes of your stuff becoming suddenly and unexpectedly unavailable or offline.

Don't fall into the engagement trap of posting in one place, but linking to another you hope people visit more. One of my tasks today is to more verbosely explain something I uploaded to the Internet Archive, *on* its page on IA, rather than linking to a Twitter post I thought would stand the test of time.

⚠️ Heads up - there's a #Mastodon #scam bot doing the rounds. Mastodon does not "temporarily restrict your visibility" - that is simply not a thing here.

If you see a DM or post to that effect begging you to click a link to restore anything, do not click it - report it instead.

My #tangara arrived! It's a completely open-source portable media player designed and built right here in #Australia (you don't see that as a country of origin often!).

I've been keenly awaiting this thing's arrival - it's a key step in my plan to unplug from commercial streaming systems and to get back control of my own music collection again.

#OSHW

This will be the longest of long shots, but: a decade ago, I backed the #Coostr on Kickstarter - it's a funny little drink coaster in the shape of a turtle and you can pop the shell up when it's not got a drink on it.

If you did the same, and still have them collecting dust somewhere - could I have them? I bought a bunch but have lost most of them through multiple house moves and a breakup, and it looks like the website went down permanently in late 2024.

Today in "things that make me grin like an idiot": finally getting around to trying out the beautiful old Apple Extended II that I bought from @projectgus back in July.

It came with the Griffin iMate USB adapter he rescued from unplanned obsolescence by modding it to work without a coin cell battery: https://www.projectgus.com/2023/04/griffin-imate/

Mine was never an Apple household, so this feels like an alien technology rather than nostalgia to me, but I still have a deep appreciation for this beast. #retrocomputing

Since the Windows 11 upgrade on my work PC, I feel more disconnected and disengaged. I click on buttons and sometimes nothing happens, sometimes something happens seconds later. Everything is slow to open or load on the fastest laptop I've ever been given. It feels like I'm standing at a control panel of switches, buttons and lights, but none of them are actually hooked up to anything underneath. Or swimming through molasses. I can actually feel a layer of interference between me and my work.

Woolies: The PDF does give me a sum of data in the summary I downloaded, but to look at my data usage over a long period of time I'd have to set up a query per month, download a PDF, and copy that info into a spreadsheet.

Their website could run a single query to pull out gb/month and give it to me in seconds. That's not technically difficult, it's a simpler query than everything else they're throwing at me.

It should be mandatory to sum usage over at least 12 months on their website.

It's 100% intentional that mobile providers don't give you an easy way to see your overall data usage, right?

Like, Telstra gives you a bar chart of up to the last 3 months (not 90 days - if you were halfway through a month, you'd get 2.5 calendar months of data), but nothing more granular.

Woolies lets me view seven days of usage, or download a PDF of up to 90 days, all with mixed units and poor enough formatting I can't easily get it into a spreadsheet.

This is anticompetitive bullshit.

Hey #Australia #AskFedi. How easy/hard does your mobile phone provider make it to see your historical data usage? Do they give you a nice webpage with a chart, do they give you a couple of months and that's it, do they make you download multiple PDF files and do maths from there?

I want to find out how widespread this actually is, and maybe make some noise about it.

Also interested in hearing what it's like for you not in Australia, for comparison.

Boosts for visibility would be very welcome.

Abby is just the happiest catto in the world when she's getting brushy-brushy. #Cat #CatsOfMastodon