Letters from Somnolescent

 

May 27, 2022

Welcoming the eMachines Netbook

mariteaux

eMachines EM250

For approaching two years now, I’ve had a big ol’ XP tower sitting under my desk. I call it the eMachines Box, a low-end eMachines W3507 from at least 2006, if not 2007. It needs a good cleaning and a ton of upgrades (RAM and a dedicated GPU being the big two), but even if it’s not ideal right now, it’s still a lot of fun to use on the occasion I bust it out.

Of course, you can’t just stop at one XP computer, can you? Suddenly having a job and seeing some numbers pile up in my bank account made me want to indulge a little. Through the lockdowns, I bought nearly nothing and asked for nearly nothing. I’m allowed a cool purchase or two, and a bit of longing got me thinking back to the netbooks of my (younger) youth.

I’ve now acquired one of them. Here’s my deep dive into the eMachines Netbook.

Tags: technology,

April 20, 2022

The Great Somnolescent Time Machine

mariteaux

As I mentioned in the final recap, one thing occupying me over the past few months has been the pursuit of classic website restoration. We already have car restoration and computer restoration, but despite websites being similarly satisfying and full of moving parts, I don’t see anyone trying to rebuild old websites and return them to their original browsable condition. With the Somnolescent Archives, I have the perfect reason to do just that.

I wanna ramble about that for a bit, tell you my working methods for getting assets (from the Wayback Machine or otherwise), reassembling them, cleaning things up, and why I find it so enjoyable. Hopefully, you do as well!


April 17, 2022

Cool folder organization stuff

dotcomboom

Traditionally, my files for school have been stored in OneDrive by (academic year)\(class)\(semester, if applicable). Whenever I made a new document, I would file it in that format immediately. This worked okay, but there was a bit of extra time spent finding the file I needed when I set to work. I also wanted to […]

Tags: technology,

April 4, 2022

Winter 2022 – The Final Recap

bulb

What’s this? What’s going on? Why the sudden change? Is Somnolescent falling apart? I bet it is–look, people’s sites are disappearing! Something big is happening. We said it wouldn’t last four months, and hey, three years isn’t too far off–

Grab some wood there, bub. The blog is not going anywhere, nor is the group. This is the final recap in its current form. There’s a very good reason for it, and I think the new arrangement will make my friends in the group, as well as myself (having to write all this…), happier as a result. It’s a good recap though! Lots good happening. Let’s revisit the last three months one last time.


April 3, 2022

The Somnolescent Manifesto, Second Edition

bulb

Today, the new somnolescent.net launches! It’s taken us a couple months, but we all love it here. Far livelier, far cuter, far better matching how we truly are as a group, and far simpler to boot.

With it comes a new manifesto, something I felt everyone should be able to weigh in on rather than the one I wrote in a few evenings back in 2018. While we elected to go with a simpler about page for the moment, I still think the new manifesto deserves a place in the spotlight alongside it. I’ll be looking for a place to link it on the site itself, no worries.

Tags: Somnolescent,

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