101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

~ Brin ~ 4 Comments

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brin-bellway:

(Note: I do not do pranks. In any case, I encourage you to check this thing out for yourself.)

Today I learned that you can download the entirety of Wiktionary onto your smartphone. Speaking as someone without a cellular data connection who likes her apps to be as self-sufficient as possible, this is so cool.

(The downloadable Wiktionary is about a month out of date at the moment, but Wiktionary-as-it-was-one-month-ago is a lot better than nothing, and quite a bit better than an offline dictionary that only defines English and can’t be stored on the SD card.)

If I had a larger SD card, I could even get Wikipedia! (Or rather, Wikipedia as it was ~3 months ago, but still.) (~18 GB for an imageless version, 50-something GB for the full copy.) So, while I currently still don’t get to have Wikipedia at my beck and call at all times, the problem is now merely “too little storage space”, which is much easier to fix than “how the fuck do you even download Wikipedia”.

I haven’t played around with it that much yet, but initial tests are promising. (I tried using my local copy of Wiktionary just now to double-check my usage of “self-sufficient”, and it worked fine.)

(A while ago I was reading the Eclipse Phase RPG sourcebooks, and at one point they mention a device characters can get that stores a local copy of space-Wikipedia, automatically updating itself whenever you have space-Internet access and providing you with Wikipedia-as-of-the-last-time-you-had-Internet when you don’t have Internet access. And I was like “Damn, *I* want one of those”. Turns out, you can pretty much have one of those.)

Update: my uncle gave me a 64GB microSD card for Christmas. I now have an imageless copy of Wikipedia! (The card can technically fit a full copy, but then it wouldn’t have enough space left for everything else I want to put on it.)

You never know when you might want to look something up, and now I can! (as long as it’s not something where it matters that the offline version hasn’t been updated since September; I read some of their help forum, and apparently compiling a copy of a site that huge is difficult enough that they can only manage updates once or twice a year)

Tags:

#now if only I could find the time to finish my archiving #guess I’d better go tackle my to-do list if I’m ever to reach that point #oh look an update #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #(if not clear the prank thing is because I wrote the OP on April 1st) #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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While I’m talking about this sort of thing:

Does anyone happen to know of a way I can still play either of the pair of Wild Thornberrys animal-rescue games the Nickelodeon website used to have in their browser-games section back in the early-mid 00′s?

I don’t expect to be able to archive them locally (though that would certainly be nice), but I would like to play them again and I can‘t find either of them anywhere. I’d probably even be willing to pay a few dollars, if they’re available for sale.

Tags:

#oh look an original post #Wild Thornberrys #my childhood #games #(that Internet Archive copy of M&Ms: The Lost Formulas was great) #(but I can’t find anything like that for these)

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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Also, I have acquired a new appreciation for AO3’s download function, which is great at facilitating archiving.

And I have acquired a new opposite-of-appreciation for fanfiction.net, which goes so far the other direction that you are *not allowed to copy text from a fic*. I did a couple of small fics by *going into the page source*, finding the fic *there*, pasting it into a LibreOffice document, and *manually replacing the br tags with line breaks* (there was probably some way to automate that last bit). Then I hit upon the solution of simply saving the entire page as an HTML file, which seems to have worked. Good: I was not looking forward to manually inserting line breaks in Chanson de Geste.

Tags:

#oh look an original post #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been doing archiving again today, downloading local copies of things that previously existed (in versions accessible to me) only on the Internet.

The thing about archiving is that it *hurts*. Not having done it–the moment when you want to remind yourself how something went and find it isn’t there to tell you, will never be there again–hurts a lot more, so I keep doing this. My past is valuable to me and I want to keep hold of it, have it available, and yet it always hurts to immerse myself in it.

(Today I’m saving works of fiction, works I think I would miss if their links rotted. (Some of them have already rotted. Most were salvageable through the Internet Archive. But only most.) I didn’t think that would hurt, but it turns out that it does, that they evoke the time periods I read them in.)

I know a lot of people hate their past selves, for their ignorance and foolishness. I think this is another version of that impulse, but I don’t hate past-me.

I don’t hate *her*. I hate the people who did this to her.

I think that’s a lot of the problem. I think maybe a lot of the pain of archiving isn’t inherent to the task in general, but because most of the stuff I’m archiving–this project and previous projects–is from around my late teens, give or take, and I was in a lot of pain then. A lot of it I hardly acknowledged at the time, or if I acknowledged it I shrugged and figured that was just how things were.

Maybe it’s good for me to immerse myself in the past, sometimes, if only to show myself how far I’ve come.

Tags:

#our roads may be golden or broken or lost #oh look an original post #amnesia cw #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #((and can’t be added at the end because there are more than 20 tags so category tags won’t register there)) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #I’m not even sure how long it’s been since the last time I cried #months and months I think #I’m not crying now I’m just saying I cry a *lot* less than I did then #(crying frequency is often a helpful guide to my current sanity levels if I find I’m having trouble telling from the inside) #((bear in mind I don’t experience estrogen’s effects on crying)) #((it’s not cathartic it’s not helpful and if things are going at all well it’s *not* frequent)) #I should probably stop for the day #I hate to leave tasks like these half-completed #but I’ve been neglecting my other daily tasks today and they need tending to as well #(I wonder whether I still have further to go) #(if late-twenties!me will look back at some background pain I’m so accustomed to as to hardly notice) #(and flinch) #(and pity me) #(and be grateful not to suffer like that anymore) #((my bet is on something finance-related)) #((I am aware of certain echoes between this post and two posts ago)) #((I maintain that accepting my lot is better than impotent anger at it)) #((but I acknowledge that having a lot that does not tempt anyone towards impotent anger at it would be better still)) #(((though I would like to point out that a lot of past-me’s pain was caused by feeling obligated to cultivate anger)))

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Poor Detroit neighborhoods, abandoned by telcos and the FCC, are rolling out homebrew, community mesh broadband

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

mostlysignssomeportents:

tumblr_inline_ozkov4c1pq1rkw4x1_540

40% of Detroiters have no internet access. The Detroit Community Technology Project and similar projects across the city are skipping over the telcos altogether and wiring up their own mesh broadband networks, where gigabit connections are transmitted by line-of-site wireless across neighborhoods from the tops of tall buildings; it’s called the Equitable Internet Initiative.

This is possible in part because of the ubiquitous abandoned dark fiber, which runs under the streets of Detroit, as it does across many US cities, unused and dormant. The project relies on “digital stewards” who undergo a 20-week training program that teaches them to pull fiber, configure routers, and install and service microwave antennas, as well as teaching their communities to use the services delivered over the internet.

Each local mesh is designed to wire together a neighborhood on an intranet that would continue to function even in the event of internet outages, providing a resilient hub for organizing responses to extreme weather, natural disasters, and other crises.

https://boingboing.net/2017/11/17/equitable-internet-initiative.html

@justice-turtle

Tags:

#I feel like this is relevant #the resiliency of the Internet #the more you know #there is probably some warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #(it seemed fitting)

Video ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

God, the Internet is amazing.

I was thinking fondly of a song from a childhood video game, but I could not recall how the song went or the exact name of the game. And I thought “Maybe I can fix that.”

Armed only with the information “there was this M&M-themed game on CD-ROM, and the song was the background music for level 5″, it took me all of a couple of minutes to track this down. (If you would like to skip to the best part, that is at 1:03. I tried linking to that timestamp, but it looks like you can’t do that with video posts.)

Bonus: apparently the game disc’s ISO is available from the Internet Archive.

(I wonder if Windows 7 is backwards-compatible with Windows 95 games, or if I would have to take stronger measures?)

Update:

I downloaded the ISO, installed some software that lets me run the ISO in a virtual CD-ROM drive*, and tried the game.

It works! Windows 7 had no problem (nor even complaint) installing and running this Windows 95 software. I played through level 1 and most of level 2 (out of, I think, 10). When I ran out of lives, I decided to stop for the moment rather than restarting the section.

*I do have a real CD-ROM drive, but I didn’t want to bother obtaining a blank disc to burn the file onto.

Tags:

#games #my childhood #food mention #oh look an update #Windows versions 8 and newer have virtual CD-ROM drives built in #so if I had one of those it would have been even easier than it already was #(assuming they didn’t break backwards compatibility with the game in those versions)

Video ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

God, the Internet is amazing.

I was thinking fondly of a song from a childhood video game, but I could not recall how the song went or the exact name of the game. And I thought “Maybe I can fix that.”

Armed only with the information “there was this M&M-themed game on CD-ROM, and the song was the background music for level 5″, it took me all of a couple of minutes to track this down. (If you would like to skip to the best part, that is at 1:03. I tried linking to that timestamp, but it looks like you can’t do that with video posts.)

Bonus: apparently the game disc’s ISO is available from the Internet Archive.

(I wonder if Windows 7 is backwards-compatible with Windows 95 games, or if I would have to take stronger measures?)

Tags:

#games #my childhood #music #oh look an original post #food mention #proud citizen of The Future

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

slythernim:

shedoesnotcomprehend:

earlgraytay:

nyarlathotwink:

has anyone on earth ever actually paid money for an app?

I have, but it was Choice of Games so it was more like paying money for an ebook that happened to be on sale as an app.

I had a class once that required me to pay (an offensively large amount of) money for an app.

I have, like actually on purpose and not just technically or under duress, paid for an app! I paid for Wolfram|Alpha ($3 I think, totally worth it for how much I used it in college) and an offline Wikipedia-clone (limited free version exists but it was $10 to download their whole article library, good for my anxiety even though I have never actually needed it). 

I have, for an app that synchronizes a Yahoo Calendar account with the Google Calendar app. (Yahoo Calendar itself does not have a proper app, or didn’t last I checked.)

It was $3, and I don’t regret it. (It’s a shame I can no longer use the app and have to resort to manual imports, but that’s not the app’s fault: there were some issues with Yahoo and the account owner (not sure about the details), and now the account that technically owns the Yahoo calendar in question can’t log into any new computers (such as the new smartphone I got in January).)

Also, I sometimes buy the ad-free versions of apps I like after I’ve used them for a while. But SmoothSync is the only one I’ve ever paid upfront for.

—

an offline Wikipedia-clone (limited free version exists but it was $10 to download their whole article library, good for my anxiety even though I have never actually needed it)

Which app was that? I have Kiwix*, which is nice, but they don’t actually update monthly like they say they do: in fact, my Wiktionary copy actually ended up downgraded from March 2017 to December 2016 when I had to re download after a factory reset. (The option to download the March 2017 version wasn’t there anymore. I don’t know what happened to it.)

*Well, I have their Wiktionary copy. Wikipedia is too big for my current amount of storage space. (Someday!)

Tags:

#I was going to reblog from shedoesnotcomprehend #but then I saw this one in the notes and wanted to ask about the wiki clone #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #reply via reblog

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

(Note: I do not do pranks. In any case, I encourage you to check this thing out for yourself.)

Today I learned that you can download the entirety of Wiktionary onto your smartphone. Speaking as someone without a cellular data connection who likes her apps to be as self-sufficient as possible, this is so cool.

(The downloadable Wiktionary is about a month out of date at the moment, but Wiktionary-as-it-was-one-month-ago is a lot better than nothing, and quite a bit better than an offline dictionary that only defines English and can’t be stored on the SD card.)

If I had a larger SD card, I could even get Wikipedia! (Or rather, Wikipedia as it was ~3 months ago, but still.) (~18 GB for an imageless version, 50-something GB for the full copy.) So, while I currently still don’t get to have Wikipedia at my beck and call at all times, the problem is now merely “too little storage space”, which is much easier to fix than “how the fuck do you even download Wikipedia”.

I haven’t played around with it that much yet, but initial tests are promising. (I tried using my local copy of Wiktionary just now to double-check my usage of “self-sufficient”, and it worked fine.)

(A while ago I was reading the Eclipse Phase RPG sourcebooks, and at one point they mention a device characters can get that stores a local copy of space-Wikipedia, automatically updating itself whenever you have space-Internet access and providing you with Wikipedia-as-of-the-last-time-you-had-Internet when you don’t have Internet access. And I was like “Damn, *I* want one of those”. Turns out, you can pretty much have one of those.)

Tags:

#I mean there’s a lot of tech in Eclipse Phase that’s like ”damn I want one of those” #but that one stuck out because it seemed like it might actually be feasible at our current tech level #and indeed it is #give or take a live-update mechanism #(which might very well be the hard part) #oh look an original post #proud citizen of The Future #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #the more you know #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

somnilogical:

somnilogical:

Whenever I post something with p values, tumblr deletes the part after the less than sign. This is very frustrating!

I had commentary on that article tumblr! And you deleted it! I just got to the point that stopped copying everything before posting it because I trusted you. Arggggh!

Textarea Cache? (That way you never have to decide whether you trust a text field enough to not copy it.) I don’t know if there’s a Chrome equivalent, and unfortunately I’m pretty sure there isn’t an Android Firefox equivalent.

Tags:

#Textarea Cache saved me this very afternoon #from having to rewrite a complaint I filed with Canadian Blood Services #(they used to test you for anemia as the *first* part of the screening) #(but the higher-up rearranged things and now it’s *last*) #(so I had to wait *40 minutes* to learn my iron hadn’t recovered from my previous donation) #(when previously I would only have wasted 5 minutes) #((it really ought to have recovered by now though)) #((it’s been four months)) #((going to talk to my doctor about iron supplements)) #anyway #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #reply via reblog #tangents