-
Somnolians
-
Categories
-
Archives
- December 2025 (2)
- October 2025 (1)
- September 2025 (1)
- August 2025 (1)
- July 2025 (2)
- June 2025 (4)
- April 2025 (1)
- February 2025 (1)
- January 2025 (4)
- December 2024 (2)
- November 2024 (1)
- September 2024 (2)
- August 2024 (1)
- July 2024 (1)
- June 2024 (1)
- April 2024 (1)
- February 2024 (4)
- December 2023 (7)
- November 2023 (3)
- October 2023 (3)
- September 2023 (6)
- August 2023 (6)
- July 2023 (2)
- June 2023 (1)
- May 2023 (1)
- April 2023 (1)
- February 2023 (2)
- December 2022 (5)
- November 2022 (4)
- October 2022 (2)
- September 2022 (4)
- August 2022 (5)
- July 2022 (1)
- June 2022 (2)
- May 2022 (2)
- April 2022 (6)
- March 2022 (1)
- February 2022 (1)
- December 2021 (4)
- November 2021 (1)
- October 2021 (1)
- July 2021 (1)
- June 2021 (5)
- May 2021 (1)
- April 2021 (3)
- February 2021 (2)
- January 2021 (3)
- December 2020 (3)
- November 2020 (2)
- October 2020 (3)
- September 2020 (2)
- August 2020 (3)
- July 2020 (3)
- June 2020 (1)
- May 2020 (4)
- April 2020 (6)
- February 2020 (1)
- January 2020 (4)
- December 2019 (9)
- November 2019 (3)
- October 2019 (2)
- September 2019 (4)
- August 2019 (1)
- July 2019 (3)
- June 2019 (1)
- May 2019 (3)
- April 2019 (5)
- March 2019 (1)
-
Meta
Tag Archives: technology
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 Alas, the Gopher had not been touched since 2021, outdated and rather embarrassing for me, so I ripped it all out and got it reassembled.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
Happy Five Years: AutoSite Legacy returns! And dcb’s 2024 goals..
Merry Christmas! Happy holidays! Warm wishes however you might be celebrating. I bring good tidings for any of you who use AutoSite and find yourself jumping across Windows or Mac or Linux often. If you stick around to the end, I have some thoughts on the year and my current plans as well. Continue reading
tech bro (derogatory)
This week I attended a work conference. The coffee was too hot and the cookies were stale (still ate ‘em), but the real stand-outs were the speakers. 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
working to take a break from work
Went on a vacation, learned HTML and built a site. Continue reading
Cammy Revisits the PhotoCam
Longtime blog readers will remember a post I did in July 2019 called “Cammy vs. the PhotoCam”. It was a cute little lark into trying to score some retro tech on eBay and failing miserably. I didn’t have a job or a lot of money to spend on impractical hobby stuff back then, and the entire thing left a sour enough taste in my mouth that I didn’t bother looking for a working unit.
We’re in September 2022 now, I have a job now, and I figured it was time to go hunting again. I got a lot more than I bargained for. On offer today: storytelling! Burning hot batteries! A showdown between three similarly-spec’ed cameras! But first, we start with…
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.
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.
Cool folder organization stuff
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 … Continue reading