ICQ in 2025, on OS X and PowerPC

August 9, 2025192 words1 min read

ICQ

Running an ICQ client on your PowerPC machine (and OS X 10.1+), in 2025, is not really that hard considering the ICQ network has been shut down since 2024. Download the last version (3.4.23) of ICQ available for OS X and PowerPC architecture, and install it. The nina.chat people are nice enough to provide access to an ICQ service that will allow you to use the old clients. Problem is that you need to patch the server address inside your ICQ client, basically, all occurences of .icq.com will need to be changed into .nina.bz.

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Workspace: Leopard

August 1, 2025    Workspace

Workspace: Leopard

OS: Apple OS X LeopardHardware: Apple iMac G5Architecture: PowerPCMemory: 1GB
Building and debugging XRG.app on Xcode 3.1.4, while compiling Nicotine++ and dependencies on Macports using gcc14, pegging the G5 PowerPC CPU to 100%. The usual Reddit terminal setup: iTerm2, zsh, oh-my-zsh, powerlevel10k.

Anniversary - 10 years of website

July 28, 20251669 words8 mins read

This website logo

December 6th, 2025 is the anniversary of 10 years since the first article was published on my website, and I think a little bit of “history” is welcomed, to pinpoint the major website redesigns that this website went through with during those 10 years. This is a long-ish article with personal info, some stories, bits and pieces of the “legacy” around my website. If you’re not interested in that, you can definitely skip it because you’re not losing much. Near the end of the article you’ll be able to feast on some charts generated from the visitor data of one randomly-selected month.

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Retrobook

July 18, 202521 words1 min read

Apple iBook G4 retrobook

*Apple iBook G4 12" retrobook, iPod Classic 4th generation, wireless Mighty Mouse, photo taken with a Nokia 808 PureView camera phone.

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My Apple iBook G4 - hardware upgrades

July 8, 20251450 words7 mins readPart of Apple iBook G4 series
My Apple iBook G4 - hardware upgrades

This is the sixth part of the “My Apple iBook G4” series of articles, and it’s all about the hardware upgrades you can do to your iBook G4 12".

As you probably know by now, I bought myself an Apple iBook G4 12" laptop (1.2GHz/256/30G/Combo/APX) at the beginning of the year, with the idea of transforming it into a retrobook and replace my trusty Nokia Booklet 3G. The device I have is A1054 from late 2004 (actually launched October 2004), and I’ve always wanted to replace the logic board with the one from the A1133 model number (launched in July 2005), which is powered by a 1.33GHz CPU, has 512MB of RAM built-in and a better GPU (ATI Radeon 9550 instead of ATI Radeon 9200). It’s the most powerful iBook except for the 14" 2005 model, which has a 1.42GHz CPU, but I’m not keen on lugging 2.7kg around, as opposed to 2.2kg for the 12" one.

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Captain Blackbeard Radio #23

July 6, 2025494 words3 mins read

Captain Blackbeard Radio #23

#23 | CaptainBlackbeard Radio | DreamWorld

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!

Slap yer knees along with number twenty three!

What is a third of yer life worth? We spend more time sleeping than any other activity. What happens when our sleeping life becomes better than our waking life? Who owns our dreams?

What would yer life be if ye were God of a third of it?

In this one of a kind psychedelic audio epic we follow the story of a young man at a dead end, struggling to find purpose and reason in their life. When they stumble into a new sleep invention, which allows the user to program their dreams…

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Website updates

July 3, 2025693 words4 mins read

I know I specified in my last “website updates” article that I didn’t want a dark theme for the new website layout, but it occured to me “in a dream” (just kidding) that a dark color scheme can be easily implemented using a CSS invert filter, some hue rotation and localStorage to save the user preference for the color scheme.

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Getting old

June 27, 2025320 words2 mins readPart of Life and death series

People like to make it out that the West has done away with rites of adulthood and all that, but they are still there, just tweaked for the always-connected world.

This is how it is, you get to an age where youthful recklessness and idealisation can no longer carry you through life, you can continue with your half-assed childish ideals and live a miserable life, or you become an adult. You either throw yourself entirely into your ideals and give up the reckless way of your past or, do like most people and just focus on you and those people that are important to you; you spend a few hours every other year to cast your vote for a better world (and fail at it), you watch the 6 o’clock news, but your dedication is friends, family, and community.

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StarFive VisionFive 2 with Debian 13 on NVME

June 25, 2025468 words3 mins read
StarFive VisionFive 2 with Debian 13 on NVME

Since StarFive hasn’t released a new Debian image for its VisionFive 2 SBC in a while, and the snapshot repo key expired, some people have picked up the pace and provided newer images with Debian 13 Trixie, as well as GPU driver support and bits of the StarFive’s custom kernel. Getting Debian 13 (Trixie) to work on a StarFive VisionFive 2 SBC can be a bit tricky, especially if you’re trying to boot it from a NVME drive.

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Playing Blu-Ray movies on PowerPC G4/G5

June 24, 2025182 words1 min read

Well, this is more like a “How to play Blue-Ray movies on your iBook G4 notebook in theory”, because the G4 CPU is not suited for this kind of workload and a dual G5 machine will probably definitely do better. You will need OS X 10.5 Leopard (the UDF 2.5 driver was introduced in this version of OS X) and Macports installed.

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