Notices by vga256 (vga256@dialup.cafe)

back when i first joined mastodon, one of the many surprising things i learned was that gopher had made a return to the public sphere after decades of obscurity.

i grew up with gopher and archie and veronica and many other www-alt protocols before getting hooked on the world wide web. they taught me how to hunt for things, in a time when web search didn't exist yet.

i've spent every day of the past week adding a new feature to kiki that i'm incredibly proud of, after hearing from several folks - namely @tomjennings and @scott, who (like me) are hungry for an information-dense and cruft-free internet

this works by turning your kiki pages into gopherspace pages through some formatting magic and textmunging. so now, you can host your kiki instance on both the www and in gopherspace, simultaneously.

it will be released in an upcoming version of kiki, available soon here: https://tomo-dashi.itch.io/kiki

#kiki #worldWideWeb #GopherProtocol #gopherspace #indieWeb #smolWeb

there are a pair of neighborhood crows nesting in my back yard. today, one of them found a dry old piece of bread somewhere down the alley and flew over to my lawn with it.

she looked around carefully and dropped it into the eavestrough drain, where some water pooled from an overnight shower.

she flew away for 5 minutes and just came back to eat once it was well soaked 😆

#urbanAnimals #birds #yeg

so after repairing that ps2 fat yesterday, i noticed that it wasn't playing back Ico properly. the disc would attempt to spin up for a half second, retry several times, then give up for good.

the disc was in perfect shape.

i noticed that it was a blue/purple bottomed disc, which made me curious. as it turns out, the blue discs are CD-ROMs. there are very few of them for the PS2, and then almost always cause read problems.

in the 00's teenagers figured out that if you put two pieces of masking tape on opposite sides of the spindle hole of a CD, the PS2 would read the game properly. i was perplexed by this, because i couldn't find any explanation of why the "tape trick" worked. was it shimming a gap between the disc and the tray?

as it turns out, a very young kid named Denzel explained it perfectly in his 16 year old 3gp cell phone video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaaRs_H5Fjc

the problem is caused by a weak magnet used in the tray that hovers over the spindle. seen below, this white piece of plastic clamps down on top of the CD's "clamping area" (the perimeter of the donut hole). it is meant to both hold the disc level, *and* prevent the disc from slipping on the spindle.

since putting downforce weight/pressure on the spindle is a Bad Idea (motors don't love this), engineers embedded a magnet in the white plastic: when the plastic came close to the metal spindle, the magnetic forces sandwich CD between the spindle and white plastic. with enough magnetic grip, the CD wouldn't slip at all.

it works great for DVDs that spin at 4x.

unfortunately the PS2 engineers did not consider at least two things:
- the CD-ROM in the ps2 spins at 24x. the motor goes into jet engine mode when it detects a CD. it needs *much* more sticky friction to keep that CD from slipping when the motor is sending your disc off into orbit.
- the cheapass fridge magnet inside of the plastic disc would lose their magnetism over time - due to various factors (EM fields, shock, heat). even a tiny percent change was enough to let a CD disc slip.

the solution? i stole a tiny strong button magnet from one of my fridge magnet toys. it very easily centered on the existing magnet, without needing glue.

this is information now buried in hundreds of shitty youtube videos and reddidiots *still* telling people to stick tape on their CDs.

#repair #playstation #retroGaming

some folks get really excited the more difficult the electronics repair is.

i am not one of them. if a game has an easy mode, i’m there 😅

this ps2 turned out to be ridiculously straightforward to fix. the drive wasn’t ejecting at all - not even showing a sign of wanting to eject.

the eject belt was good - a tad loose but certainly serviceable. i let it sit in hot water for 5 minutes.

the real cause of the non ejection was dried lubrication on the worm gear and sliders. a cleaning with IPA and polish with white lithium grease is all it took!

so for $30 CAD this little beast lives again 25 years after its inception.

#playstation #retrogaming #repair

today’s fun pickup was a $30 PS2 chubbo. the previous owner had given up on it because of a non-ejecting disc drive. i suspect a snapped drive belt, or perhaps a broken gear.

the seller also gave me a memory card, all of the cables, a controller and copy of Ico with it.

i’ll always be excited about getting a new console, young or old. there’s something very stylish about this unassuming design.

it’ll be fun to breathe some life into this old bitty and put it back to work for another couple decades.

#playstation #retrogaming

it has been one week since #kiki was released, and i just want to thank everyone for being such good sports with reporting bugs and asking great questions and requesting features.

this past week has been the most fun i've had in 25 years of software development. i can't wait to show you all what's coming up in the next major kiki update. 😻

new features, and new community oriented goofing off!

@captainarcee that's awesome - i hope you have some fun with it, even if it's only to unzip and tinker with the defaults/settings. :)

my #1 goal was to make building a little website more of a joy in experimenting with toggle switches than a chore.

please excuse the preceding reboost. lots of folks were away for the easter long weekend :)

i found this buried in the dvd section at a thrift shop today and i am so excited to read it. published almost 140 years ago, the book is an extremely detailed account of the interiors and exteriors of japanese homes of the 19th century.

every aspect of craftsmanship is covered - from ceiling and roof wood braces, to the proper folding of sheets, lunch bentos, and sitting za-zen. the woodcut-style line art is to die for.

i'm glad to see IA has a scanned copy of the book too https://archive.org/details/japanesehomesthe00morsuoft/

#books #bookstodon #japan

for the past few years, i'm sure many of you have read my many lamentations about the death of the old, small web many of us grew up with.

there are tons of static site generators out there, but none of them did what i wanted: something that could build an entire site without futzing with javascript and library dependencies. i wanted something that we would have had in 2005, but didn't have in 2025.

in january, i decided to do something about it instead of whining. i started gluing together a few php scripts i had been using to build blogs, rss feeds and mini homepages. i even wrote a new mini markup language.

i thought it would take me a week. it took >3 months. 😅

it ran for the past month as globaltalk.network's interactive site, and many of you asked if i'd ever let other people spin up an instance. i can finally say: yes!

today, kiki is officially finished and released for public use. named after my little black house demon, it's small, fast, and sometimes well behaved. and, it's all written in php without a single external dependency. just unzip and go.

it's released as shareware - in the oldest, finest, jankiest meaning of the word: you're free to goof around with and share the unregistered version. build your own little kiki instance, and customize the heck out of it until it feels like your own little home in the world wide web:

http://tomodashi.com/kiki

#kiki #homepage #worldWideWeb #smolWeb #smallWeb #php

haha so

back in 2013, blizzard re-released Blackthorne as freeware using dosbox on battle.net

it.... was strange. if you hadn't played the game before then, you might not have noticed a bunch of glaring bugs, like missing sound effects and missing music in several places, including the intro. over the years, no one was able to figure out the cause, and the standard reply became "just download the original from a dos gaming site and play that instead"

it always kind of pissed me off that blizzard released a truly *great* game in this state, so tonight i decided to figure out what was causing the missing audio.

the first step was ruling out some audio configuration problems - except, blizzard stripped out the dos installer program from their release. no prob - I'll just grab a copy from an abandonware site. and so, I downloaded a fresh preinstalled copy of blackthorne from myabandonware.com and made sure the audio was configured properly.

... and surprisingly, the game still played with missing music in the intro and on the first level, just like the blizzard version.

on a hunch, i grabbed two original diskette images, and installed the game from scratch. i ran the audio configuration, ran the game, and - lo and behold - the music all worked fine.

.. which made me realize: blizzard's team so was fucking lazy that they copied the buggy pre-installed version of the game from an abandonware site, and rebadged it with a blizzard logo. apparently no one on the team was familiar enough with the game to realize that the audio didn't work at all. 🙄 a multi-billion dollar company.

so folks, if you want to play Blackthorne and enjoy the gorgeous music - grab the *disk images* here instead: https://archive.org/details/003030-Blackthorne

#dosGaming

@ve3qbz we ran our isp's web services box (ftp/telnet/www/etc) on freebsd in the late 90s, and then i ran my home server on freebsd in the early 2000s, after fighting with slack and a few other linux distros for months

i honestly loved how rigid and organized it was. the only real nightmares i remember were make buildworld, and that was because it took 16 hours on my poor pentium 133

🤔

kiki is watching the heavy march snow fall

#catstodon

happy to report that after some nginx configuration url rewrite magic the globaltalk kiki now uses easy permalinks!

say goodbye to https://globaltalk.network/index.php?page=history
say hello to https://globaltalk.network/history
:D

#globaltalk #marchintosh

back in the early and mid-90s, getting on the net meant you were a university student, or had corporate access through a big company. getting online wasn't easy.

worse, even if you had a dialup number and login, there was no such thing as a tcp/ip stack built-in to Windows 3.1.

even if you *did* have a winsock stack, you'd still need a file downloading protocol, gopher client, world wide web client, ftp client, email client. just getting your machine off the ground was nearly impossible unless you could grab these from a local BBS

to make things simpler, universities began offering dial-up internet software packages to their students and staff.

in 1994, my mom was an undergrad student at the University of Alberta. our family had just bought an IBM PS/1 with a 2400 baud modem, and i was abusing the hell out of our single phone line at night visiting local BBSes.

she somehow found out that the university was selling internet dial-up software for $10 to students, and brought home the diskette pack with her. along with a USR Sportster 14.4k modem, she gave me the install diskettes as a valentine's day gift.

it had a slick setup program that enabled SLIP using Trumpet Winsock, and provided a local (free!) dial-up number for access.

after 25 years, i finally tracked down a few versions of those diskettes. i've imaged them and uploaded them all to IA.

the first version of the dial-up package in 1994 was called WinSLIP. it had no PPP support yet, but contained some really cool shareware internet utilities like HGopher and NCSA Mosaic. this would have been the earliest programs offered for Windows 3.1

WinSLIP/MSKermit 1994/95:
https://archive.org/details/ua_winslip

The second version of the software was renamed to NetSurf. It stripped out most of the obscure shareware sadly, and replaced them with Netscape 2 and Eudora Light. The new version of Trumpet Winsock offered PPP which was a huge improvement:

NetSurf 1996/97:
https://archive.org/details/ua_netsurf_96

Now well into the Windows 95 era, the 1997/98 software was shipped on a CD with a hilarious "multimedia" installer/help program designed in Macromedia Director:

NetSurf 1997/98:
https://archive.org/details/netsurf-97-starter-kit

I hope this brings back some memories for fellow U of A alumni :)

#softwarePreservation #webPreservation #win31 #worldWideWeb #yeg #bbs #alberta

😆

#bbs

and of course, the renowned Software Creations BBS, home of many shareware game publishers like 3d realms, apogee and id software

#doom #dosgaming

just found a treasure trove of extremely obscure BBS history stashed away on IA

thank you hard-working book scanners for preserving this rarity.

if you're familiar with BBSing in the 90s, you'll remember just how fast the vast majority of boards disappeared in 1995. it went from multinode 24/7 bbses to disconnected phone numbers in just a few months

this book accounts for the very small number of BBSes that made the transition from telco-only to "telBBS" or telnettable/web-accessible boards

3/4 of the book is a carefully curated list of 500 boards with screenshots of their homepages and bbs login/title screens. most importantly, the URLs of these boards is preserved so we have a chance to look them up on WBM some day.

#bbs #webHistory #smallweb #books

13 years ago, my wife at the time and i were going through a rough period. we decided to hit the reset button on our marriage by driving south with no particular plan or destination. just two weeks away from home to get our bearings, and spend some time with each other.

along that two week drive, we stopped at every used bookstore we stumbled upon along our route through montana, idaho, washington, and arizona.

we ended up getting as far as Nogales, Mexico before turning around at the border crossing and heading home.

the best of the bookstores was found on our very last stop before crossing the US-Can border, in Butte, Montana.

Second Edition Books didn't look like much from the outside - a long brick and stucco building, painted over with a vile shade of pepto bismol. a little crate of old books propping open the door promised a treasure trove inside.

a treasure trove it was. you always know a bookstore is going to be great when they've run out of books on the shelves, and start piling them on the floors in the aisles.

it was the end of the trip - my wife was sick of me, she was eager to get home, anticipating the divorce that would come two weeks later

i spent two hours walking every aisle and shelf in that store, looking for the perfect memento mori.

i found it crammed in a barely-visited corner of the room, devoted to the history of California: a 1929 edition of The Gold Hunters by J.D. Borthwick.

a recounting of his years trying to pan for gold in the 1849 california gold rush, borthwick's memoir is part solo adventure, part cultural ethnography of the SF bay area.

i was overjoyed to find this book today, double-stacked behind a dozen others in my shelf. i hadn't read it since i bought it 13 years ago to the day.

if you ever find yourself in Montana, make the drive to Butte's uptown core to visit Second Edition Books. it won't disappoint you.

https://secondeditionbooksbutte.com

#books #bookstodon