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Tag Archives: retrocomputing
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.
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.
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
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
Revisiting the Official MP3.com Guide to MP3s
I don’t think it’s a stretch to call myself an MP3.com historian at this point. From my initial essay two-and-a-half years ago, to digging deep into how the service worked, to previewing some of the music that MP3.com were promoting their service with, I’m part of that small group who have been trying to keep the memory of one of the most forward-thinking dot-com startups alive after it was all but forgotten post-closure in 2004.
I was effectively honor-bound to pick up the last copy of The Official MP3.com Guide to MP3s from Amazon after all that work, and I was not disappointed for my $6.29! We’ve got late 90s MP3 hype, forgotten MP3 and MP3.com competitors, and even some screenshots of the backend of MP3.com, far away from where any Web spider could’ve gone. It’s a trip.
Exploring somnol.net’s Old Banners
We like to redesign our sites from time to time, and earlier this year, the top-level domain got its turn. The previous design came in the spring of 2020 and featured a rotating crop of big, toony banners at the top of each page that would show up either year-round or seasonally.
While we gave up on that site design, we’re still very fond of the banners. Obviously, they’re no longer featured on the top-level site. That’s a lot of art and a lot of work going to waste! While we’d like to reuse them in another design, for now, this post will have to do.
Being a longtime reader of the Video Game Critic, I decided to take a page out of his book (or off his site, maybe?) and not just write up a bit on my thoughts on each banner, but get the people who made them to tell their stories about each one.
Posted in Retrospectives
Tagged art, Pennyverse, photography, Quake, retrocomputing, Somnolescent, web design, Wyn's World
3 Comments
Welcoming the eMachines Netbook
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.
How Do the Somnolians Organize Their Desktops?
We at Somnolescent love old desktops. Not the fresh, factory Windows installs all the retrocomputing channels show off, but lived-in little portraits of someone else’s workspace from long, long ago. Whether it be DeviantART submissions showing off someone’s new, custom wallpaper or classic speedpaints with desktops and MSN Messenger windows incidentally in the background, we love seeing them and we post them in our Discords all the time.
The gradual move back to our chunky old PCs got us thinking about our own desktops and how they stack up to the workspaces of old, and honestly, to each other’s. As such, have a compilation of screenshots and a whole bunch of rambles about how we get around our machines and how we keep things organized (or not). Click the images for full-sized, lossless screenshots if you wanna peek at all our icons. Continue reading
Zip Drives!
It’s time for a pretty short blog post from me, mon! Made from an outline that I’ve had sitting around since almost a YEAR ago.
It’s well-known that I own a good bit of old Apple computers at this point. But along with the large-ish collection that I own, I also own a small collection of peripherals and accessories. I think the most notable out of these would be my two Zip Drives… Continue reading