Notes

Called Phoenix Hyperspace, it looked like nothing so much as yet another entry in the the then-popular (and also then-reviled-and-ignored) push to find a way to make computers boot faster. There were several companies trying to do this at the time, and it is a far less interesting subject in general than Hyperspace - or, at least, I thought that when I initially wrote this treatise. Since then, I’ve invested a lot of time into this particular niche of software history.

As part of that investigation, I managed to obtain a machine with Phoenix Hyperspace, and was shocked to discover that, as batshit as the previous statement was, that product (which never really got shipped in anything, AFAIK) doesn’t hold a candle to the weirdness of what actually made it into consumer hands. Phoenix invented a completely novel way to abuse the BIOS, and trust me, this article is worth the read if that intrigues you. The Unholy Saga of Phoenix Hyperspace

Because someone asked me yesterday why I’m not reading 4chan/g/ anymore, I decided to check it out today. Here is the vaunted /g/ quality, everything squared in pink is bait, and 80% of the rest is utter junk. Gee, I wonder why it’s dead.

Warning, huge image (click on it for full catalog):

Yes, you read that right. Without the need for Faraday cages or signal-blocking measures, you can build a legal LTE network at home (in the US) for around $100, capable of transmitting continuously 24/7.

The challenge in building your own LTE network lies not in the technology but in legally acquiring radio spectrum resources. On the software side, as early as 2014, solutions like srsRAN based on SDR (Software Defined Radio) for LTE transmission were available, along with open-source core network software like Magma and Open5GS. Legal LTE Network at Home for $100

Agora Road’s Macintosh Cafe bills itself as “the best kept secret of the internet.” Not much of a secret when you’re indexed on Wikipedia and shilled across YouTube by commentary channels desperate for content. But that’s the least of their problems.

This forum represents everything wrong with modern “old internet revival” - not just aesthetic cargo cult behavior, but active exploitation of people seeking authentic alternatives to corporate surveillance. They’ve turned internet nostalgia into a monthly subscription service while implementing tracking practices that would make Facebook jealous. How Agora Road Turned Internet Nostalgia Into a Subscription Service

It is so hard to not get angry.

Second day of my “development blog” for the Café community (even though I started working on this few weeks ago), finished the profiles part (except sending messages, because I have some ideas in mind) and now one can add a GPG public key to the profile page. The benefits are obvious, when sending messages will be implemented you will be able to send encrypted messages to the other members (with some additional steps, gpg will do the hard work, I don’t intend to implement a JavaScript library for this).

Speaking of JavaScript, I’ve kept it to minimal, only confirmations when editing a reply, deleting stuff, updating profiles, etc. Even with JavaScript disabled everything should still work and the little JavaScript that exists is not ECMAScript 6-only, for the sake of old browsers (no let, const, just plain var only, etc). Obviously, no jQuery!

The topic page is also finished, the presentation is looking great so far (for me as a non-designer) and I wanted to keep everything as simple as possible. One problem I can foresee in using Unicode characters for action buttons might be incompatibility with older web browsers, but i’ll cross that bridge when I get there. Maybe small PNG images since SVGs are not working on old web browsers either and I don’t want to use fonts for them unless I really have to.

The bottom right action buttons are in order, “delete reply”, “edit reply”, “move topic to another category”, “get permalink to this reply”, “stick/unstick topic” and “lock/unlock topic”. Some buttons are visible only to administrators, of course, and normal users cannot delete their replies but they can “empty” its content.

The next few days I’ll pass this through a bunch of testing and see what comes out, by the looks of it I’m (actually The Café is) close to the inauguration.

Builds your roofs of dead wood.
Builds your walls of dead stone.
Builds your dreams of dead thoughts.
Comes crying laughing singing back to life, takes what you steal, and pulls the skins from your dead bones shrieking. Clay tablet in an abandoned Trickster temple

Work continues on the promised new community, here is an image of my profile. The profile bar image is uniquely generated for an account, and its just a way to bring some color into the design while making your account stand out. Some might get the short end of the stick, with bland colors, but that’s life, right? :D Due to the way the CSS hue-rotate filter is implemented in web browsers, the profile image might have a different tint between dark and light theme. At least for now.

Development is pretty fast on my iMac G5 machine since I upgraded its RAM to 2GB (I did start working on this few weeks ago), but the screenshots are taken on a MacBook Pro, for extra resolution and oomph. Categories, topics, replies, profiles, all implemented, sign-in and sign-up finished, the invites part is done too.

Basic Markdown will be supported but image embedding is disabled, and all HTML tags are stripped out.

Dark theme in the above image (click on the image for higher resolution), below is the light theme too:

A BIG THANK YOU to everybody who took their time to write in my guestbook, and also e-mailed me about The Café.

Reason cannot complete its conquest if it denies the esoteric, denies the colorful and weird parts of the human experience.