Notices by Misty (misty@digipres.club)

Every new thing that happens to the "Napster" brand feels like it's weirder than the last https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2026/01/02/napster-music-streaming-shut-down-ai-pivot/

Underappreciated feature of Kagi: it prunes its index far less aggressively than other search engines do. Given the lack of direct full text search on the wayback machine, it's a very effective way for me to still search dead sites or locate individual dead pages to then look up via a web archive.

But it took the rewrite on an AI content farm to make it really start making the rounds, since *that* version was alarmist and specifically structured to get widely shared on social media. The link back to PC World in that article made it *sound* like it was based on an authoritative source, despite being a rewrite of a rewrite of an unsourced article.

Incidentally I do think that Windows 12 situation is interesting as an example of how this stuff gets laundered into social media bait. It was a multi-step process!

The original article in German on PC Welt wouldn't have trended since it was in German. Then it got roughly translated into English for PC World, and *that* version gave it the veneer of respectability despite being conjecture with absolutely no sourcing.

Which btw I think leads into the other bit of advice: if you see a post on "Tech4gamers" or whatever, some site with a nothing name you've never heard of, maybe you shouldn't share that as evidence that something's really happening.

@adr Reminds me I ran into an honest to goodness Ballistic reference in the wild the other day

I'm open for work again! I'm looking for interesting opportunities; want to work with me?

My experience includes web archiving and digital preservation, devops, and internal developer tooling. I'd love to put that experience to work for you and your team.

Experience includes the Internet Archive, GitHub, Shopify, and others alongside a number of open source projects.

I feel like if you have to say "standard features of your browser won't work", you've made a mistake in your design and should go back to the drawing board?

WSL stands for Windows as a second language

Incredible headline and also a ton of great photos here https://defector.com/my-life-among-the-33-pomeranians-and-a-few-thousand-other-dogs?giftLink=30671251a42e36bf9336c4fc919ff508

When Discord shuts down let's all join Ray_and_Beef_Chat or local equivalent thereof

I've seen enough people complain about how bad vinyl prices have gotten I feel like it's my duty to warn you: the new thing is CD collecting. We are, today, where vinyl collecting was in 2009.

CDs are still cheap in a lot of music stores and thrift stores, but expect to see thrift stores get more picked over in the coming years and used prices to start climbing as the revival gets in full swing. If you ever thought there's stuff you'd like to collect yourself, no time like the present.

It really is a little absurd that “I’m considering switching to Linux on my laptop for better availability of games” is a real thought in my head. Valve have made strange things happen

Absolutely brutal headline: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/867874/stripe-visa-mastercard-amex-csam-grok

Floppy disk sweaters! Floppy disk sweaters!! https://digitalpreservation-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/knitting-through-digital-decay-a-collection-of-digital-preservation-jumpers-no-one-asked-for-but-478c48009521

Highly recommend reading this story about a reporter casually finding out his wife is a world Tetris champion: https://archive.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2007/08/19/bizarro_world/

Misinformation thrives in stressful times. I know we all want to share news right now but when you feel the urge to share something on your feed consider asking:

* Who posted this? Are they a reporter, or do they have what looks like a reliable source?
* Have you heard of this news site before?
* Where is this photo from? Did they take it? Could it be something other than what the poster claims? Is there a way you can tell if it is what it says it is?

One of my favourite Wingroove features is that it measures how good your PC is in terms of how many times faster it is than the developer's PC. My Windows 98 VM is 131 times faster, apparently.

Canadians: the CECOT 60 Minutes story is streaming on the Global TV website right now. Looks like no one pulled the episode when it was cancelled in the US? https://watch.globaltv.com/series/2893de5a-f2cc-11ea-9089-0242ac110003/episode/GLOB0057515870000000?action=play

The episode title is the replacement that aired in the US, but the description opens with the CECOT segment, as does the video itself.