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Tag Archives: technology
Five Things I Learned from “Hacking Windows XP”
We had our annual local library sale earlier this month! If you’re curious what all I got (it was an especially good haul for weird alternative CDs), you can go read the journal post I wrote on cammy.somnol about it. One of the books everyone, including myself, was most interested in though was a book called Hacking Windows XP, written by Steve Sinchak, the maintainer of tweaks.com to this day, and published by Wiley in their ExtremeTech range. (Wiley, if you don’t know, are the folks that publish those For Dummies books that were the main way I got into retrocomputing as a very small child. I had another of their ExtremeTech books on building an arcade cabinet as well.) What’s especially fun about my copy is the CompUSA price tag on the front that says it was marked down to half off in December of 2004. History!
I’m a long-time XP power user. I had my own XP computer from about when I was 7. I used it every day at school. I now have an XP box on my floor to my left as I write this! (I mostly use it to chat on Aftersleep.) I like to think I know a lot about it, so I was curious how much this book could teach me. Indeed, a lot of especially the early part of the book is about stuff like customizing the Start Menu, changing system icons, and dinking with msconfig. Useful information, but stuff I’ve already got filed away in the brain box and mostly don’t bother with.
That said, I didn’t walk away completely unenlightened! Here’s a handful of stuff from this book that even a grizzled, old-school, daily XP user walked away having learned–either from it just somehow getting by me or because it’s properly nerdy. Also, there’s a CD. I’ll unseal it and we’ll get to that after the main course.
The Majestic Serenity of Late 1990s Network TV Ads
You know, in the past, I never liked to let people know about my birthday, but this year, I’ve had a change of heart. Yesterday, I turned 26! Pretty sweet. Was a pretty damn good day, I streamed, got some money, Caby and Savannah drew me some really adorable drawings, I got a buzz going, kino. Despite my newfound eagerness in letting people know, that alone wouldn’t be Letters worthy, but I have something special to mark the occasion: retro commercials.
I’m subscribed to a channel on YouTube called OptimumPx. He’s one of those VHS digitization archive channels that uploads commercial breaks and stuff. I don’t catch every single video, but they’re comfy when I’m in the mood. I like his in particular because of the variety (80s up through the 2020s) and because he’s not egotistical enough to watermark his videos like he himself made the commercials or something. You know who you are.
About two months ago, he uploaded a commercial break that aired on CBS during a showing of JAG, which was a 90s legal procedural that I’d never heard of until right now. Turns out, it spawned NCIS, so if you know what that is (and if you’re American, you probably do), there you go. What makes this upload special though is that it aired two days before I was born, on June 1, 1999. That makes this block of ads also freshly 26 years old!
So come with me. Let’s check out what prime time network ads were like 26 years ago.
ChromeOS To Go: Thoughts on ChromeOS Flex
You might have used a Chromebook, Google’s funky, moderately dystopian cloud-centered take on the netbook formula. If you owned one, you likely needed a lightweight, cheap little laptop (with pretty solid battery life) for school, light office work or entertainment. As most of these things are done reasonably enough in a plain old web browser, pitching a lightweight operating system specifically for that purpose isn’t too farfetched.
As the Gentoo-based operating system that runs the Chromebook, ChromeOS, is quite lightweight, it should be able to run well on anything that could run Chrome. It shouldn’t be too bad for an older computer, either: although aging, even a sufficiently specced 15 year old machine – 2010 as of writing – can totally run Chrome just fine.
There’s also a whole niche of Chromebook-inspired Windows laptops that came out in the mid-2010s, immediately stifled by stiff storage requirements and an operating system not designed for them. Out of the box, they’re effectively ewaste. But they have modern guts! They’re rocking UEFI, some Celeron with a generic Intel case badge, and typically fanless, with some amount of power efficiency! This makes them an excellent candidate for the ChromeOS experience.
I’ve used ChromeOS Flex on and off on secondary machines of mine, and I think it is pretty neat! I think it fits these cases pretty well, especially for users who aren’t as technologically savvy and just want to extend the life of their computer hardware. I’ll discuss this a little more later, but I think it’s worth some history first – because despite the somewhat recent arrival of ChromeOS Flex in 2022, this is not the the operating system’s first rodeo on non-Google licensed hardware.
The New HTTP Order
Happy new year to all our faithful blog readers! January is always the time for reflection and looking forward to the future, and while I do the personal talk on my personal site, I want to discuss the future of you connecting to this here site network here today. I’ve beaten this drum before, but I’m about ready to puncture a hole in it today, because I’m pretty sure there’s not going to be a drum to beat in the next few years.
I am seeing the death of the HTTP-only connection coming in the next year or two, and I am pissed. I will have to force HTTPS on somnolescent.net, something I have resisted at every turn so far, if we want to remain accessible to the wider Web. Think this is hyperbole? Here’s a nice throwback to ring in 2025—have a steaming hot marf rant to keep you warm in these winter months.
The Number of the Bulb: Cammy’s Greatest Hits
It’s almost midnight here, but that doesn’t mean I can’t still say it: happy Thanksgiving to all our American readers. I had a quick check of what I’d posted on my cammy.somnol journal this time last year, and evidently, I wasn’t a happy camper, but this year, I’m feeling significantly more content. Actually, this might be the most comfortable and pleased I’ve ever been during the holiday season. 2018 and 2022 were ruined by, ahem, suboptimal family situations, 2019, I was in Ohio getting shoved into closet doors, and 2020 and 2021 were stressful for the reasons it was stressful for everyone, but 2024? This year is ending quite nicely.
As I get older, I realize that I’ve largely left behind a pretty angsty, negative legacy as mariteaux, full of “people aren’t doing [x] correctly” and “[x] sucks” and “I’m working on this deficit in my personality”—at some point, a boy’s gotta be a little happier, and I’ve got a lot to be thankful for. I’m gonna ramble about all the things that have gone well for me and all I accomplished this year and am proud of, while it’s late and I’m feeling good and full of alcohol.
How to Host a Site Network for All Your Friends
So about a week ago, I got a very nice email from a Somnolescent reader named Cyrano. I don’t normally post reader mail–for starters, I don’t get enough of it to make mailbag posts a thing–but this time, I got a mailer daemon every time I tried to reply. There’s nothing personal in it, so I’m gonna take the risk and post things on the blog. Hopefully you see this, Cyrano, and you don’t think I simply ignored you. Your reply address isn’t working is all.
Somnolescent has a pretty unique setup as far as little amateur indie Web stuff goes. Everyone on somnolescent.net has their own account where only they can access their subdomains’ files, and potentially the files of domains outside somnolescent.net. Because I know Somnolescent attracts people who are in little online art collectives and Web groups and sometimes would like to know how to start their own site like ours, I’ve elected to lightly edit the book I wrote for Cyrano and post it here to Letters instead. Hopefully, someone finds the information useful.
3-9-7-1-5: Exploring the Expanded Conet Project Boxset
Spring is here, my friends, and that means you’re all probably starting to leave your houses for sunny pastures. I have a bit of paranoia for you to take out there–obscured messages also sent out into the world, ones no one but the people they were meant for have been able to or will ever be able to crack. Who are those people? What do the numbers mean? Who are the Russian Man, the Spanish Lady, the Lincolnshire Poacher, Bulgarian Betty? What is Ciocirlia, the Buzzer, the Tyrolean Music Station? What the fuck does “snudering” mean?
Let me take you on a journey of circumstantial government intrigue. I’ll let the boxset explain before I do, run-ons preserved:
Almost every other piece of information on who is responsible for Numbers Stations comes from the part-time investigations of dedicated listeners. No government or person will admit to transmitting them, and only recently, due to the release of this CD set has GCHQ in the UK made its first ever public station on Numbers Station, saying that, “GCHQ are aware of the existence of Numbers Stations but cannot comment on operational matters”. Do “operational matters” include the ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ which is believed to be of British origin? With direction finding equipment it is possible to track down the location of transmitting antennas, and in the case of Numbers Stations which uses extremely powerful transmitters ‘Dfing’ [sic] the more powerful stations has proved an easy task for investigators but what exactly does it mean when you find an antenna farm on US government property blasting numbers in Spanish? Where and who are the recipients?
Join the Somnolescent IRC!
Long, long ago, in a timeline that seems completely absurd now, Somnolescent was merely an IRC room on Foonetic hosting four lonely people who didn’t like each other much. That was 2014. I still have the logs. (Please don’t ask to see them.)
Over time, lurkers and friends outside the group have asked us where they can chat with us, and the choice has either been to say “sorry, we don’t have a place you can chat with us”, or to start up a Discord we’ll wind up hating and shuttering in a few months. The answer always lay in IRC, of course, given that’s where Somnol started–but it never occurred to us. Except for that time in 2020 when it occurred to us.
Now that we’ve gotten the fuzzies for it again, we’ve once again established an official IRC room (on Rizon, given that Foonetic is sadly defunct). Join #somnolescent at irc.rizon.net, 6697 for secure connections and 6667 for insecure connections (among other ports). If that’s gibberish to you, you can click this Kiwi IRC link to join the server in your browser, no setup required. Hope to see you there!
SomnolCCSO and Reviving an Old, Dead Database Lookup Protocol
On a whim about two weeks ago, I decided to finally start redoing the Somnolescent Gopher server. Gopher is such a throwback, nostalgic thing for me–it was one of the first things we got set up for Somnol right when we first got hosting all the way back in December 2018. Alas, the Gopher had not been touched since 2021, outdated and rather embarrassing for me, so I ripped it all out and got it reassembled. Still working on it, but I think it’s coming out absolutely killer. You can visit it at gopher://gopher.somnolescent.net if you have a capable client, or you can use this HTTP proxy link if you’re just looking at it in your browser.
While Gopher is highly neat, among the culty hipster retro tech geeks, it’s a known quantity. There’s new Gopher clients every year, and Gemini clients oftentimes double as Gopher clients thanks to the similarities of their protocols. Not so with the true subject of today’s post. Today’s topic has no modern server software support (before us, anyway), and accessing it is even tougher, practically requiring Windows 3.1 or a *nix box with Docker and the whole setup around that. I’ve spent the last week doing a deep, deep dive into a protocol so obscure, there’s less than ten servers for it still in existence. And we’re one of them now.
Say hello to SomnolCCSO, my friends. I’ll tell you how we made it happen and how you can try it out for yourself.
Promptly Forgotten: Remembering MyGameBuilder.com
“Hi! Welcome to this quick demonstration of My Game Builder, a new tool to allow you to build games for yourself and for your friends, online, using just a web browser. The tool is free to use, and free to share with your friends.” Continue reading