Letters from Somnolescent

 

Tag: technology

General posts and rants about technology, usually hardware.


September 6, 2020

The Raven LTE flies again

dotcomboom

A couple of years ago, I used an Alcatel Raven LTE as my main phone. It was a very cheap phone ($30 new, albeit locked to my carrier TracFone), ran Android 7 Nougat, and had an impressive 16 gigabytes of storage and 2 gigabytes of RAM; it was no slouch for the price. One day, the hard classroom floor almost got the best of it.

Even after the screen got cracked, it still worked, even touch; the trouble only came from what in the world to do with a cracked $30 Android phone. It was way too cheap for a trade-in, and I don’t think many charities or repair shops would bother with it either. And so, it sat on my shelf for several months gathering dust, because I didn’t know what to do with it. Surely, it wasn’t destined for a landfill?

Tags: technology,

August 17, 2020

Vaders and Venetian Blinds: A Review of “Racing the Beam”

mariteaux

Racing the Beam cover art

I’ve said before that I don’t read a whole lot of books. Not to say I don’t have a few on my radar, it just takes me a while. Same goes for video games; I have plenty to play, but I’m usually too busy off in my own world to try them out. Given that it looks like the US will open back up some time after the heat death of the universe (read: plenty of time to myself), I’ve been trying to rectify that.

Today’s topic is one that combines both these worlds in a really curious way: meet Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost’s Racing the Beam.

Tags: 70s, technology,

August 8, 2020

More old Macs!

mon

Old Macs. Also known as Old Macintoshes, Vintage Macintosh Computers, et cetera. Machines of which were made in simpler times, when Apple wasn’t as much of a shitshow of a company as they are today. Compact, distinctive from PCs of the time, maybe a tad yellowed – but that’s fine. Sometimes that’s what makes them beautiful.

Alright, here I am, at it again. I didn’t think I’d be able to make another one until after summer was over, but in surprising turn of events I got three new (old) machines up-and-running!


July 29, 2020

7/29 – Giving Up the Gun

bulb

Last month’s recap was a bit of a laugh and an admission that we just didn’t have too much desire to interact with the outside world. The world of MSN Messenger and IRC and chunky CRTs and old websites was more appealing to us, and I was on a self-imposed tech timeout after spending much of May fighting with Linux. (It still fucking sucks as a desktop OS and you know it.)

Not that we weren’t active, of course; things were drawn, sites were built, I write once more–all the good stuff you expect from us. I’ll try not to ramble, there’s much to get through.


May 9, 2020

Tools, Toys, and You and I

mariteaux

Been thinking a lot about simplicity, entropy, and how we’ve come to rely on computers in the past few decades. Here’s an essay about how technology should augment us in being people and nothing more.

Tags: technology,

July 13, 2019

Cammy vs. the PhotoCam

mariteaux

The AOL PhotoCam

I’ve long liked early digital cameras. There’s a really specific era of 95-98 or so where digital cameras were, by some measures, atrocious, and by others, absolutely fantastic. Their bad CCDs, chunky design, and inconsistent featureset makes them fascinating and a topic of my obsession for a few months now. I would absolutely take pictures […]


June 27, 2019

Gopher is Not the Web

dotcomboom

Every now and then, I see new Gopher clients and sites popping up. And that’s great—we’re keeping this protocol alive for the next generation. However, I can’t help but think some of the methods of doing so is restrictive, only getting the “Gopher is a list of links” part. Back when NCSA Mosaic came out, […]


May 9, 2019

The Web is a Shitty App Platform

mariteaux

I’m a big believer in implementing as little as possible to get the task at hand done. I’m as minimalist as it gets. Proprietary, open source—ultimately doesn’t matter to me so long as it gets the job done as simply as it can.

So why in fuck’s name did we give everything away to the web?


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