Notices by vga256 (vga256@dialup.cafe), page 2

i have no idea
what possessed
the producers of
this documentary
to release a
teaser in 9:16
aspect ratio,
but we're here for
the content right

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDtowjlV0uU

#reboot #cartoons #tv

🧵
hiked the "big lake" prairie pothole biome today, near lois hole provincial park.

one of the best hidden secrets are the wild trails hidden in the forest once you get off the gravel/paved pathways.

first: some adorable young mallards enjoying duckweed on one of the ponds

#yeg #canada #alberta #wildlife

one of the nice surprises along the trail was this tiny muddy creek, making its way down from the prairie far above the forest

hoof prints - likely deer - and coyote tracks were all alongside the mud banks

#yeg #canada #alberta #wildlife

twelve years ago, a painter by the name of anders ramsell painted 12,597 aquarelle paintings of blade runner, shot by shot, of the entire film edited down to ~35 minutes. it took two years of painstaking work, all done in his spare time after work each night.

the video circled around the web for a few years, and quietly disappeared from every single site it was hosted at.

a few months ago i spent a few hours digging for it, and finally found a copy of the original file.

i'm not sure how long it will last over at IA, so enjoy it while you can. it is a true achievement. 🙏

#filmPreservation #art #painting

https://archive.org/details/blade-runner-aquarelle-edition

buried in my 30 year old copy of NSCA Mosaic alpha was a bookmarked hyperlink to a university of cambridge (uk) live webcam of a coffee pot, brewing in the Trojan Room computing lab

while live coffee/lab cams were not uncommon in the mid 90s, this one is fascinating for a few reasons:

- it was up and running in 1991, predating the graphical world wide web by a few years
- it ran over the MSNL protocol using a telecom network standard called ATM, which was a competitor to ethernet
- an entire machine was dedicated to grabbing a frame from the camera, compressing it, and uploading to the web server: an Acorn Archimedes 🔥
- the exact URL stored in Mosaic still resolves today, and the web page hasn't changed in 30 years

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html

more history of the setup here:
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/qsf/coffee.html

more images of the sacred pot by @quentinsf here:
https://statusq.org/archives/2024/07/11/12127/

#retroComputing #worldWideWeb #webPreservation

time for a desert roadtrip

a local drumheller tourist trap: rock shop still here after 40 years

#canada #dinosaurs #alberta

badland gully formed from thunderstorm runoff

@tomjennings PabloDraw?

https://github.com/cwensley/pablodraw/releases

Chexder

🤣

#retrogaming

my compaq 524 CDS came with the best modem suite of all time 😅

thank you Gekk for preserving this old software
#retrocomputing #windows95

okay so this is badass

one of my most cherished and irreplaceable retrocomputing devices is my peerless Roland SC-55.

while the MT-32 has been emulated quite well, the SC-55 always lagged behind in emulation - most attempts at it sounded pretty terrible, even using good soundfonts.

(and hauling around my SC-55 + midi & 3.5mm & usb cables just to play games in dosbox was painful)

in comes Nuked-SC55: it is a chip-level emulation project that just *nails* it.

it took about 30 seconds to build with cmake. i'm now going to try integrating it with dosbox, so i can finally play 90s DOS general midi games! (ultima viii pagan, here i come)

demo songs with the LCD screen (which is also accurately emulated!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4Z5y2otJqY

nuked-sc55 source:
https://github.com/nukeykt/Nuked-SC55

fwiw to compile (requires cmake):
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

#RetroGaming #retrocomputing #midi #roland

i'm finally opening up boxes of software from my archive that haven't seen the light of day in 15-20 years. today, i found a program that has never been archived or probably seen in over 40 years.

i absolutely adore this dungeon mastering program for the TRS-80 that was distributed in ziplock bags in 1982

i can find only one mention of it on the web - the august 1982 issue of TRS-80 Rainbow magazine that advertises it for $19.95 + S&H

happily, i found the cassette, which has never been archived anywhere AFAIK. i am scanning in the printed documentation, along with making a recording of the tape.

#gamePreservation #trs80 #tandy #retroComputing #retroGaming

@ThreeOhFour this is far less engimatic than the hive, but this location in ultima viii captured my imagination for a decade

in a cave near mythran's home, there is a set of massive, locked, double doors. i searched under every skeleton and behind every chest for months, trying to find a way to unlock them. my buddy at school and i talked for months about what we thought might be behind them.

we graduated, and never figured it out.

15 years later i found out that the doors could only be opened by summoning a golem, using a single pixel of dirt in the area. the golem pries the doors apart and it leads to....

... a big empty room 😆

this was supposed to be a teleport/transition area to the Lost Vale expansion, that never got used in the final game.

some things are best left to the imagination i guess.

what the hell is *that* Safari?

that's the most netscape 1.0 modal dialog i've seen in 15 years of using this browser

#macOS

so for the past month i've been leaving old vhs movies on in the background while i work

i noticed that several tapes had faded audio that got worse over the course of the film, with a lot of humming in the background, to the point of being inaudible after a while. a few web searches suggested either a worn out vhs tape (which I feared), or a poorly tracked vcr (I adjusted the tracking, which didn't improve anything)

i did notice that my older JVC vcr never had the "stereo" light on when playing back movies, and had a suspicion:

so holy crap, til: most VHS tapes past a certain age have two audio tracks: an analog mono track, and a stereo hi-fi track

when the vcr can't track the stereo hi-fi track properly, it switches to the analog mono track on the edge of the tape.

my vcr was always downgrading to the analog track, which on several (ex-rental) tapes had degraded due to mishandling and abuse (being at the edge of the tape path)

i picked up a Sony SLV-778HF today for $20 just to see if switching VCRs would make a difference.

holy COW is this a huge improvement over my old 80s JVC vcr! not only did it pick up the stereo hi-fi track on all of the "bad" tapes perfectly, but it improved the video so much that it looks like a dvd.

#vhs #tv #movies

@ramon_wilhelm that's a great point - i hadn't even considered that aspect. I have a bunch of VHS tapes that I should re-digitize! :)

@ramon_wilhelm 😆 i have a bunch from the 90s that we taped tv programs with, so there are some hilarious 1990s commercials on them.

edit: i can't believe i have to write this, but - i am not your technical support representative, and i'm not going to reply to your support requests 😖

so this is a bit wild

i've got an oldie iPad 2 running iOS 9.3.5. this has some expired root certificates which results in several apps not working properly. Plex will load, but it won't be able to negotiate with your plex server, for instance.

since apple doesn't offer new iOS updates for it (with refreshed certificates).. it seemed like i was kinda stuck.

as it turns out, and is documented nowhere aside from a post on reddit, you can manually download your own root certificate - and iOS lets you install it without complaint.

if you're on an ancient iOS device, just point its Safari browser to this url: https://letsencrypt.org/certs/isrgrootx1.der

tap Install when prompted - and you've got working certificates again!

this just breathed new life into a 10+ year old iPad, which will become a bedtime plex viewer.

#apple #vintageApple #iOS

this 200 gram bag of stamps from the 1960s was lovingly collected and curated by someone who loved international stamp art. i found it at a thrift store today, and will be turning it into physical pixel art in the coming weeks

#stamps

little story for tonight.

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.

read the rest of this diary entry here: https://www.dialup.cafe/~vga256/diary.htm

#smallWeb #homepage #worldwideweb #marchintosh #macintosh