Fully licensed campus printer

Getting your printer set up for wireless printing is relatively simple on a home network. Most printers can connect to your Wi-Fi network and make themselves discoverable, and we’ve seen units be all in one, neat little packages for about a decade. It’ll be ad-hoc (Wi-Fi Direct or Bluetooth) or infrastructure, usually, and current operating systems are pretty good about finding them. Save for the occasional clogged spooler problems on Windows—I just reinstall the printer when this happens—it isn’t too bad.

But what if you’re trying to print from your printer as just one of thousands of users on a campus network? Continue reading

Posted in Projects | Tagged , | Leave a comment

What Even is Somnolescent?

I’m standing around at work, tidying the shelves, and something pops into my head: no one has ever been able to make heads or tails of what Somnolescent actually is. We’ve been called a tilde, we’ve been described as a community of Windows 2000 users and MSN Messenger reverse engineers, a group of Furcadia friends, people have said we built toyhou.se, all sorts of wild shit. Those Somnolians, they get around!

Some of this was promulgated by me wanting to make Somnolescent sound spooky and cultlike, so I was intentionally vague describing it to people for the first year or two. We’re almost at five now, though, and whenever we’re mentioned online, folks still try to put us in a box–and they keep getting that box weirdly wrong. I didn’t think we were doing anything all that complicated, but apparently, Somnolescent perplexes people.

Continue reading

Posted in Essays | Tagged | 4 Comments

trip photos: toronto!

Hey! I mentioned in my Art Fight post I was in Toronto at the time of posting. Wanna see some photos? Continue reading

Posted in Happenings | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Update Rollup for dcb services

I’m going to keep this post a bit short- I have drafts (and a lab report,,,) in the works, and the nature of this post is partly catch up. I’m gonna cover sites, sites again, and site generator generatoring. So here’s a few updates from my neck of the woods. Continue reading

Posted in Happenings | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Bunch of random scans off the press plus bit of related rambling

As I’m getting rid of some part of my collection, the earliest one because I need money, I ended up scanning some which I’ll compile here. Some favorites from few mid 90s Dazed & Confused issues. It will be probably split in few installments I guess.

Continue reading

Posted in Show-and-Tell | Tagged , | Leave a comment

art fight 2023 (first blood)

Hey! Been a while. Been a weird year.

I participated in Art Fight for the first time last month. Call it part of my “being less of a hermit” arc. Which is funny because I dropped Twitter and barely pay any attention to any other social media. (I did say less of a hermit.)

But enough about the downfall of the modern internet, I’m here to talk about Art Fight. Which also wound up having drama, funnily enough, though I didn’t pay much attention.

Continue reading

Posted in Happenings | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Mac and Cheese disaster

So I saw a video of a guy making some real bomb mac and cheese really easily by cooking the noodles, leaving some of the pasta water in it after draining and adding cheese shredder shredded cheese to the mix. … Continue reading

Posted in Happenings | Tagged | 2 Comments

First Draft: …The Dandy Warhols Come Down

The Black Album and ...The Dandy Warhols Come Down

Rarely do albums come out right on the first shot. Labels reject them, bands disown them, and they get added onto after release. Here on First Draft, we take a look at albums that got cut down or remade and see what difference the changes made.

This first review concerns the first attempt at the second Dandy Warhols album, 1997’s …The Dandy Warhols Come Down, as given to us by the band seven years later.

Continue reading

Posted in First Draft, Show-and-Tell | Tagged , | 2 Comments

A Tale of Two Welsh Record Stores

A plushie badger with my CD haul

If I didn’t tell you about it already, I was in Wales for three weeks last month into this month visiting Caby. It was genuinely life-changing, and even though it wasn’t that long ago, I’m still wishing I was back over there, and her and her family keep telling me how much they miss me too. Life is seriously much easier in person–and it’s a lot more fun when there’s adventure to be had! And what better adventure can you have than foreign record stores?

There’s two in Caby’s immediate area, and I hit up both to great success. It was a lot of fun digging through the bins, picking out CDs, telling stories, trying risks, and even having some encounters with some curious strangers! I even bought some Welsh-language music! While I continue to put off working on the much larger trip diary, let me laser-focus on the days I visited…

Continue reading

Posted in Happenings | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Five Neat Things From the Somnolescent Archives

If you were to ask me my favorite part of the Somnolescent site network, archives would be it. archives started back in 2020 as cold storage for file hoards, but more and more, it’s become my obsession to use it as a living museum of all the websites that the Somnolians have built over the past six years or so. We’ve had so many cool ideas for pages, so many memories around our sites, so many neat looks and layouts for them, that I feel personally responsible to keep it all intact. I want it all as browsable, speedy and functional as the day we unveiled them.

archives has been eating tremendously well this year. All of Caby and dcb’s sites from the Neocities days are finally present on there, patched, restored, and usually fully functional. I just finished restoring dcb_v2, a BeOS-styled site that used an embedded Gopher proxy to display Gopher menus in lieu of pages, last month. Now that’s fully functional again, using locally-stored copies of the proxy’s output back when our Gopher looked like that. I’m supremely proud of it–and just happy to have it to click around again!

Only counting full sites (not components of sites or subsites), we’re up to 54 of them. That’s a lot of sites! And I built half of them, probably! There’s so much on archives, you might not know where to start, and that’s what I wanna spotlight. Here’s five cool, nostalgic (if you’re of a certain age and web background) sights from Somnolescent’s past you can go visit on archives right now, just as if it were still live on our sites today.

Continue reading

Posted in Retrospectives | Tagged , | 2 Comments