Notices by vga256 (vga256@dialup.cafe)

thank you once again @sharewarewolf for your generosity in the vintage mac community

your PhoneNet five pack of adapters has arrived and will no doubt become part of some horrendous localtalk network in march

#marchintosh #vintageapple #macintosh

many of us are already into repairing what we have, not only to save money, but because we care about what we own.

many more people are interested in repairing what they have, but don't really know where to start.

i really enjoyed this mini-doc on repair in japan. it highlights many different kinds of tinkerers and artisans, from electronics to umbrellas to kintsugi:
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/2032329/

if you're new to repairing things, there are an overwhelming number of places to start, and it will appear impossible on your first go. i've been taking apart things since i was 3 years old, and can safely say: you will break more than you fix, and eventually learn how to fix what you break! but the real joy is in the learning process of understanding how it all works.

#japan #nhk #repair #solarpunk

as a teenager in the 90s, i spent half of those years on irc. the server network i spent almost all of my time on was EFnet, short for "Eris FreeNet"... or so I've thought for the past 30 years

as it turns out, EFnet in fact stands for "Eris-Free Net" which has an entirely different meaning:

"Initially, most IRC servers formed a single IRC network, to which new servers could join without restriction, but this was soon abused by people who set up servers to sabotage other users, channels, or servers. Restriction grew and, in August 1990, eris.Berkeley.EDU was the last server indiscriminately allowing other servers to join it, Eris being the Greek goddess of strife and discord.

A group of operators, with the support of Jarkko Oikarinen, introduced a new "Q-line" into their server configurations, to "quarantine" themselves away from eris by disconnecting from any subset of the IRC network as soon as they saw eris there.

For a few days, the entire IRC network suffered frequent netsplits, but eventually the majority of servers added the Q-line and effectively created a new separate IRC net called EFnet (Eris-Free Network); the remaining servers which stayed connected to eris (and thus were no longer able to connect to EFnet servers) were called A-net (Anarchy Network). A-net soon vanished, leaving EFnet as the only IRC network."

🤣

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFnet

#irc

til the DEC VT100, VT220 and VT320 terminals all had built-in pixel doubling circuitry that stretched compressed fonts into their proper size in realtime. this exceptionally well written post describes the mechanism and shows the various forms of output:

https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/2019/dec-crt-typography

#retroComputing #dec

@prettygood similar, definitely not the same thing

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2025/01/16/hershey-canada-stopping-production-of-cherry-blossom-candy/

😭

you bastards. way to ruin 2025 for everyone

#canada

til almost all of the most beautiful artwork attached to the nine inch nails album covers, dvd menus and website images were the creation of visual designer david carson

downloaded at 56k back in 99, this 5.5mb video @320x200 somehow captures the hopeful exhilaration of the millennium.

https://www.davidcarsondesign.com/t/clients/nine-inch-nails/

@Infoseepage wow, not many people built VRML models in those days! cool :D

urgh. after a week of very interesting research and digging, i've located the source code for a very popular 3d rendering/modelling program from the 90s and 2000s: Caligari trueSpace

does anyone in the digital preservation world know someone at the Microsoft Open Source Programs (OSPO) office?
i'd love for this to be officially sanctioned as an OSS project.

#digitpres #softwarePreservation #windows98

someone local to me is selling this 5-foot tall 700 CD-ROM scsi pioneer disc changer

with storage like this i could finally have the --=490GB 24/7 oNLiNe 14.4/28.8/33.6k=-- bbs i've been dreaming about for 30 years 😎
#bbs #retroComputing

macOS users who have large photo libraries: do you have a recommendation for a photo deduplication program that will run on Monterey/12.x? i've got a collection of 40k+ photos that needs massive deduplication, and I cannot upgrade this production machine to a newer version of macos (which has dedupe built-in to Photos)

#macos

merry christmas to all of us surviving a night with the inlaws 😅

insanely deep and scientifically rational explanation for the decline in flavour of exported Kenyan coffee beans.

i've never learned so much about coffee production in a single, well-written and researched article

https://christopherferan.com/2021/12/25/kenya-and-the-decline-of-the-worlds-greatest-coffee/

#coffee

@ThreeOhFour 😭 i know what a terrible mistake

when life calls you to drive 3 hours to pick up 50 computing newspapers from the 90s you do not question

when i was a kid, you could build a simple game or application by dragging and dropping a few UI controls, and gluing them together with a few dozen lines of BASIC or Pascal. it might take 15 minutes, at most, to get your little character walking around on the screen. this is how we ended up with a lot of hilariously good and cheap shareware you could share on BBSes in the 90s.

for the past year i've been quietly working on building a software thingie that doesn't exist anymore. i've been building a software toolkit that's kinda like Visual Basic and Borland Delphi, designed for making tile-based 2d games.

i've been using it to build my own little goofy games, and improving on the drag'n'drop IDE as i figuring things out. it's not done yet, and has a long ways to go before it's ready for other people to start making their own little applications and games. think PICO-8 or ZZT if they had grown up on a steady diet of Windows 3.1 and GeoWorks Ensemble instead.

i'm really, really bad about polishing turds to infinity and never releasing them. to break that habit, i've built a mini-website for the IDE/Shareware Creation Kit. it's called Exigy, named like a bad 80s metal hair band or richard garriott game.

https://exigy.org

i'll be posting weekly blog/devlog updates there, so i don't irritate anyone with them on this account. there is an rss feed button at the top right if you hate my demonic php and css.

#shareware #ultima #php #blog #smolweb #zzt #indiedev

@tomjennings i still remember the IMG tag as being one of the most hotly debated HTML spec additions in the early 90s

xmas protip: if you string your lights on the ground, future snowfalls -> procedural volumetric lighting shader for free

#canada #christmas

huge thanks to @talin for uploading his Faery Tale Adventure (amiga) source to github

several users are already hard at work digesting the source tree and getting things working. one of the best is Xarklabs' ongoing SDL2 port, located here:

https://github.com/XarkLabs/faery-tale-amiga/tree/macos

talin's original source here:
https://github.com/viridia/faery-tale-amiga

#gamePreservation #retroGaming #amiga

filmmakers/vfx coders - i came across a *very* subtle dissolve effect in a game that i've very rarely seen used in games, and i can't figure out what it is, and how it's done.

the first 5 seconds show the game's dissolve effect.

the second 5 seconds shows a dissolve to black using a standard cross-dissolve algorithm that any film editing program would use

look at them very closely, frame by frame. they dissolve *very* differently. the game seems to dissolve the thinnest parts of the font first, and dissolves only the thickest parts toward the end.

the standard cross-dissolve dissolves all pixels simultaneously, which doesn't look very interesting.

update: thank you demosceners and film nerds! you nailed it - it's a "film dissolve" - and it is produced by dissolving in linear RGB color space with gamma 1.0

can anyone recognize the algorithm or industry name for the effect used in the first one?