Notices by vga256 (vga256@dialup.cafe)

in case anyone is curious about the underlying cause of it being impossible to migrate a mastodon server from one domain to another, this limitation is due to the activitypub protocol itself, which (simplifying for brevity) uses the equivalent of absolute/hardcoded URLs for posts

@silverpill wrote this fediverse enhancement proposal that would allow for relative domain names. given that it was written a year ago, and with the molasses-like development the protocol has, i sadly suspect it's unlikely to be integrated any time soon.

more here:
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/e3e9/fep-e3e9.md

#mastoAdmin #fediverse #activityPub

@hoolis hoping everyone finds good new homes. thanks for being along for the trip!

Due to technical limitations with mastodon's architecture - which does not support domain name changes or data migration - dialup.cafe will be closing permanently in one month.

Dialup.cafe instance users: please see the server announcement and get thine affairs in order. 💀

holy crap: mastodon server does not support domain name changes. 😆

i now have to give some serious thought to migrating dialup.cafe -> dialup.party

it would mean setting up a new server from scratch, migrating users to the new server, and losing all of their post history in the process. i am truly dumbfounded at how bad this architecture is.

#mastoAdmin

@captainarcee i don’t drink, so they won’t be used for beer. my wife is making autumn wreathes from the plants, and gave them to florist friends for flower arrangements

on the prairies of western canada it is harvest time for hops and apples

with the hot and dry autumn, we got a surprisingly bountiful harvest of both

#gardening #bloomscrolling #autumn #fruit #canada

@captainarcee iirc, the underlying issue with these is the nonstandard/incomplete EFI spec used on these older MBPs. that might be part of the problem you're facing with grub.

i had success running mac/win/linux on my 2010 machines using http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

@captainarcee these are great little drives. i use them for cold storage backups and toss em in the safe

today's retro rescue is a palm tungsten T5 - the late flagship model in the tungsten line of PDAs

ten years ago i had nothing but a tungsten for all of my computing needs - i wrote emails and letters on it, and played a lot of Infocom text adventures at night

the T5 is just the right balance of features and performance - it has the fastest intel XScale processor @ 416 mhz, built-in bluetooth, and a beefy 320x480 lcd.

the previous owner appeared to have turned this into his mp3 player.

#retroComputing #palmPilot

i absolutely admire @beatscribe's attention to detail in their gameboy color BBS hacking game

that 2400 baud dialup handshaking sound is 👌

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuFL29vgNeE

play here:
https://beatscribe.itch.io/gbbbs95

#bbs #retroGaming #gameboy

bbs enthusiasts might remember the name Telegard - a bbs server written based on wwiv's source code and hugely popular with the ibm pc/ms-dos crowd

telegard had a long and tumultuous history by its authors, and its own source was eventually leaked and was modded into many more popular (pirate-friendly) ms-dos boards like Renegade, Oblivion and Iniquity.

while i was doing research a few months ago on the history of those systems, i found out that telegard.net - the original home of tg - was taken over by a domain squatter in 2010, populated with ads for the past 15 years.

two months ago, i noticed that the squatter had not renewed the domain, and it went into the long grace/redemption/auction/expiry cycle. i checked on it every single morning, and to my absolute delight, it was released this morning for purchase. 💸

the domain will be used purely for historical preservation of telegard and its many descendants

#bbs #warez #softwarePreservation

TIL a toy company released a line of Independence Day toys in the late 90s; each toy included a different "mission disk" floppy with a multimedia program on it for windows 3.1

toy collector @eisnerguy1 managed to collect all 11 of the toys and uploaded disk images to IA 🙏

https://archive.org/details/iD4_Independence_Day_Mission_Disks

#retroComputing #softwarePreservation #win31 #toys

my gods. i had no idea this existed. after dark 10th anniversary edition came with a special module called Hall of Fame that had manga re-imaginings of the most popular AD characters.

Boris begs to have its own sega branded anime game. fish also gets a top dog award.

video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36Agdjw3x5U

#macintosh #vintageApple #win95

til about japan's Nifty-Serve online service, which was designed to be japan's answer to CompuServe.

while renown for its online forums, i was impressed to see that it was also a shareware distribution service. you could pay for and download registered versions of utilities and games, and the creators were paid directly by nifty.

while the service shut down in 2006, it was revived for one year as a museum of sorts for people to login and poke around. there was even an iOS app.

did anyone happen to archive a copy of the app?
https://web.archive.org/web/20110721053135/http://www.appbank.net/2011/07/20/iphone-application/278566.php

it originally was downloadable here - if that helps to track it down:
http://itunes.apple.com/jp/app/id447556735?mt=8

#japan #retroComputing #softwarePreservation #shareware

real pirates

http://textfiles.com/humor/REAL/realpira.hum

#bbs #warez

@captainarcee i’m fascinated by this project. it looks like it’s really geared towards backward compatibility with VB. i can’t say that I ever want to make actual VB apps anymore - but the interface/building model was wonderful

for the next couple hours will be sending live toots from the Royal Tyrrell dinosaur museum. if you’re here right now, come say hi!

#dinosaurs #alberta #canada

a massive 25 ft xiphactinus who had eaten a gillicus (look inside the stomach!)

#dinosaurs

@captainarcee i can only imagine the feelings this brings back.

one of the greatest feelings of my life is stumbling upon an old childhood toy/book/game that was lost in my mom's house, and bringing it back home to enjoy again.

i just ftp'd into a public ftp server running in Ecuador, and discovered an absolutely critical piece of US Robotics ISP modem pool software that has been missing for 20 years

thank you from the bottom of my heart, rolando felix of Educational Unit 10 De Agosto, for leaving your departmental computer ftp wide open ❤️ you just preserved some insanely useful and important dial-up ISP history. (don't worry rolando - i didn't peek too deeply into your ms-dos games and music folders)

the story:
in the mid-90s i was a teenager who had a summer job at a dial-up isp. we had 32 incoming lines which were handled by 32 external USR Courier modems, which were fed into a super chonky Livingston Portmaster terminal server. all of the support hardware took up an entire rack - just to let 32 people call in for internet service at 28.8kbaud. it ate a ton of power, and made a lot of heat.

then, in 95-96, US Robotics delivered two insane appliances: the Total Control Modem Pool. these were *tiny* devices that offered 16 dial-up modems at 33.6kbaud. if you paid a bit more, you could buy the NetServer version, which gave you a terminal server too. an entire isp in a box the size of a network switch.

the modems had buggy firmware. so USR offered firmware updates via their ftp site. you could even upgrade some of the modems to "x2" 56k service with a firmware patch. they supported it for years, and when 3com bought USR, they kept the ftp site running for years. and then, 3com shut down their ftp site. and no one thought to mirror it.

after 3 hours of searching, i was able to track down a single filename thanks to WBM: mpv90an.zip. not a single site on the web had it - not even IA or discmaster. on a hunch, i plugged it into the Napalm FTP Indexer (https://www.searchftps.net) and... unbelievably, there it was, sitting on an ancient box in someone's university office in Quito, Ecuador.

the most amazing part was how slow the server was. at 250 ms pings, it was like digging through a public ftp on a 14.4k modem in 1994.

tomorrow i'll be uploading these files to IA. for now, sleep.

#digiPres #softwarePreservation #ISP