Artifacts of the Internet
I learned things from this! I did not know about the first spam email, I found that very interesting.
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Ezee Fiber coming to Washington
I did not have getting fiber in my area on my 2025 bingo card. Hopeful that this happens quick and we can get on it and away from Xfinity.
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Digital Archiving
Even before this election I had been thinking about digital archiving. Decades ago I had an idea for a tool that would download my web history and maintain a local archive for me to easily recover and find things I had come across. I am very prone to the "I know I saw something about this recently..." and having to google and search my history to figure out where I had seen it.
I never followed through on that project myself, for a few reasons. The primary reason was that the search tools we had were strong enough the majority of the time.
Now, I'm thinking about digital archiving again for the same reason I have most recently - the threat of the content going away and also just as an ongoing resource in case of not having Internet access. I started playing around with Archivebox yesterday. Archivebox is very close to what I envisioned with Datacomb, short of the automation process. It seems very interesting and robust, I just need to figure out how I would use it. Whether it would build off of my self-hosted Wallabag (a selfhosted Pocket-like reader app, which grabs articles for offline reading.)
I also have a homebrew Python app I created that I called 'Wikindle.' It downloads articles from Wikipedia and converts them into Markdown, though it doesn't download any images. The idea I have for that is to eventually get an E-reader device which can store the entirety of what it downloads (which isn't the entirety of Wikipedia.) As of last night's run, it was roughly 300 megs of text, though there are a lot of articles I want to filter out still.
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"Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record"
In today's digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history.
- The rise of streaming platforms and temporary licensing agreements means that sound recordings, books, films, and other cultural artifacts that used to be owned in physical form, are now at risk—in digital form—of disappearing from public view without ever being archived.
- Cyber attacks, like those against the Internet Archive, British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library and Calgary Public Library, are a new threat to digital culture, disrupting the infrastructure that secures our digital heritage and impeding access to information at community scale.
When digital materials are vulnerable to sudden removal—whether by design or by attack—our collective memory is compromised, and the public's ability to access its own history is at risk.
Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (download) aims to raise awareness of these growing issues. The report details recent instances of cultural loss, highlights the underlying causes, and emphasizes the critical role that public-serving libraries and archives must play in preserving these materials for future generations. By empowering libraries and archives legally, culturally, and financially, we can safeguard the public's ability to maintain access to our cultural history and our digital future.
Directly download the PDF of the report
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Older millenials nostalgic for the good ole' days
From Redditor The_Law_of_Pizza in the "older millennials of reddit: what was life like in the 2000s?" thread:
The 90s and 2000s were a perfect blend of comfortable analog life and the tantalizing promise of a digital future.
It was a time when you could go to the mall and literally be disconnected from everyone but the friends you met there. Your parents couldn't call you. Your work couldn't call you. None of you were staring at a screen texting people who weren't there. It was just you mall rats, your shopping, and the food court.
But it was also a period when you might have a beeper, or an early cell phone, or a palm pilot - things that were amazing at the time, and made you feel like you were living in the future. It's hard to convey that feeling to somebody who has grown up in the digital era; but try to imagine living in a world where getting separated from your friends at the mall meant an hour of searching for them store by store - and then suddenly having a small flip phone you call them on.
The technology was just advanced enough to be incredibly useful without being advanced enough yet to consume you.
It was a time when every year brought insane leaps in technology - jumping from 2D graphics to fully 3D Voodoo-powered wonder.
Think about it. This period literally went from Super Mario World to Batman Arkham Asylum.
These were real, genuine and exciting things to look forward to rather than just the year's new iPhone with a slightly enhanced camera that you only pretend to see the difference in.
The internet itself was still a new, wild frontier. It hadn't been captured by huge corporate interests yet, and wasn't overrun by the lowest common denominators spamming social media for clicks and dollars. There simply wasn't a big financial incentive yet, so everybody who was surfing those digital waves was just there to have fun.
It's a time that will probably never come again.
Millenials have officially reached the age of nostalgia for our childhood. This rings very true to my feelings of that era, but also I'm keenly aware of the overlooking of the problematic portions (anti-LGBTQ masked in the most measly of willingness to acknowledge gay people, as just one example.)
Regarding the framing for technology of the era, it's 100% true. I had a pager in high school, then a cell phone, and a palm pilot. I yearned for more and more technology in my life. I learned HTML as I became addicted to the Internet and its possibilities. I started blogging in this time. I was on IRC more than I am on Twitter these days.
Wild stuff to think back on. And oh god I feel older and older every day.
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14 hours without internet
Yesterday was an interesting day. My first hint it would be interesting was the moment I woke up. As I woke up, laying on my side in bed. There was a blue flashing light from my bedstand. I instantly knew what the light was, but I hadn't processed why it was blinking.
My bedside lamp is connected to a smart switch so it can automatically turn on in the evenings as our bedroom is quite dark. So the blue blinking was a sign the network was having issues.
As it turns out, we were without home internet for over 14 hours. More than that, the issue appeared to also be affecting our home cell data connections. We could still call and text, but internet at home was abysmal even on our phones.
Thankfully for my wife, we have a home media box with plenty of TV and movies to watch, from when we digitized our DVDs years ago. That proved the life saver.
I got home from work and it was still offline. Only coming online about an hour before I went to bed. And even though I could still largely function, I write offline, I can even play Minecraft offline, and yet it still weighed heavy on my mind when I know I'm disconnected.
When the multitude of information online is out of reach, it bothers me. I need my cat memes.
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"archive.today: On the trail of the mysterious guerrilla archivist of the Internet"
Archive.today is an interesting site and one I do fall back on from time to time. Most use it for archiving, or for sharing paygated news articles, etc. I have shared those links here from time to time, but normally I don't as I do want to try and support the news sites making revenue.
This was an interesting journey down the rabbit hole trying to figure out who runs or owns this website. There aren't any massive revelations though there is a likely identity uncovered for the site's owner.
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An ode and history of internet cafes
When the world's first internet cafe, Cafe Cyberia, first opened its doors in London's West End in September 1994, its founders could never have imagined what they'd unleashed.
Internet cafes — cheap, accessible venues where just about anyone could explore cyberspace in its infancy — spread slowly across the world at first, and then snowballed in popularity. In the spring of 1996, Sri Lanka got its first two internet cafes: the Cyber Cafe, and the Surf Board. A few months later, Kuwait's first internet cafe launched with 16 PCs. In 1999, a travel guide promised readers a list of 2,000 cafes in 113 countries.
Within a couple years, it was estimated that there were more than 100 internet cafes in Ghana alone. BusyInternet opened the largest internet cafe in Accra, boasting 100 screens. By 2002, there were more than 200,000 licensed internet cafes in China, and still more operating under the table.
The article goes on to discuss what role they played in various countries to the technology that led to their decline (3G and cheapening technology.) Most interesting to me though is the very personal look at specific cafes in countries like Nepal and Lagos.
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"The ‘90s Internet: When 20 hours online triggered an email from my ISP’s president"
Oh memories. And god it makes me feel old to start this post that way.
But I too remember these old days. I didn't get an email from an ISP president, instead when I first pushed our household internet connection to 100 hours in a month it caused my mom and dad to lose their minds, ground me, and fear I had become addicted to the Internet.
As it turns out, their fear was not unfounded. I love the Internet and have since I was a tween. But goodness, in a world with Wi-Fi and phones more powerful than early computers, etc... it is a very different world.
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Reddit Blackout - Day 1
The Reddit blackout is upon us... what do we do?
Reddit had truly become the frontpage of the Internet and I am certain if I looked through access logs, I regularly visit it double-digit times daily.
Thankfully, for me, I have a robust RSS feed which feeds me hundreds of articles each day. It's not the same as Reddit, but it wasn't curated to be.
I'll be turning more to Mastodon to see what gets shared on my feed, and perhaps I'll just log off a bit more.
I am about to start tackling my collection management project, so that will take up a fair bit of time as well.
Edit: According to The Verge, over 6,000 subreddits have joined the protest.
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Neal.fun - An excellent source of distraction
I stumbled across this site for the Wonders of Street View which collects random fascinating and weird things to be found on Google Street View. But when I clicked back to the domain root I was met with dozens of random projects by, presumable, Neal. From a "Days since" which is both soothing and anxiety inducing as it counts days since things like "solar flare" or "volcanic eruption" or "lost nuclear device" (12,346 as of this posting.)
Lots of things to fall into and waste a few minutes... or an hour. Enjoy!
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Cuba and the Internet, Geopolitics at work
An interesting article diving into the ALBA-1 cable which finally allowed Cuba direct Internet access and for them to stop relying solely on geostationary satellites for national access.
I find this image particularly fascinating to show just how isolated Cuba is when there is a literal cable ring around it. One which they are still be denied access to due to the isolation they are held to.
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"The Sum of All Knowledge"
A story looking back at a man's father's striving for education out of nothing as a child coal miner, to the age of the Internet and how it shaped the son's life, but then it continues and criticizes the current state of the Internet - equating much of it to a burning library.
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Streaming killed the TV star, as viewership share surpasses television for first time ever
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Man refused to give Comcast $50k for service, so he built his own ISP instead. And he just got federal funds to expand it.
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Your internet life needs a Feeds Reboot — here’s how to do it
Seems like this should be part of our New Years Celebrations, welcoming in the new year, doing some digital maintenance to clean up the algorithms as we start the new calendar.
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The Internet Archive opens headquarters, meeting space for tech world
Excited to know it's that nearby. Definitely would love to check out their space.
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Two Important Tools with the Waning Days of RSS
Kill the Newsletter - Create a one-use email inbox where every email it receives is turned into an RSS feed.
FetchRSS - A website which allows you to create an RSS for a blog-esque website including a very easy to use picker to identify the different elements on the page that can build the RSS feed.
With these tools, I can turn so much more of the information I consume online into an RSS feed to be imported into my RSS reader.
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Paul Miller: Offline
Through a rabbit hole of looking at blogs, I came across a link to this archive of articles from 2012 on The Verge. Nearing 10 years old, it's an interesting look at one guy's attempt to live without the Internet for a year, back in the early days of smart phones. I'm about 1/3rd of the way into the archive and enjoying the reading.
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I have been using a FreshRSS install for a few months now, allowing myself to return to the realm of RSS feeds. And after those past few months I've dealt with a number of websites using truncated bodies of posts in the RSS feed, and occasionally clicking through to the full article on the website.
Well, last night I discovered a feature of FreshRSS that I had not known - and that is the ability to actually have it pull the full post body from the website through defining of the post body's CSS container. It's technically somewhat simple (I understand how to implement it, conceptually) but still having that function is amazing and has already made my RSS feed so much better.
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Home Network Survey
I did some snooping on my home network, partially because I was trying to see if my wifi camera really required the app or if I could find another way to access it, but on the way to exploring that question I took stock of my home network:
- 3 PCs (home desktop, work laptop, linux laptop)
- 1 iPad (Wife's daily driver)
- 3 phones (wife's iPhone, my work iPhone and my personal Android phone)
- 2 Raspberry Pis
- 4 Streaming devices (2 Rokus, 1 Chromecast, 1 Fire stick)
- 1 Gaming system (Nintendo Switch)
- 1 WiFi Printer
- 1 Smart speaker (Google Nest)
- 1 Wifi camera
- 5 Smart switches & outlets
Fascinating at how the world has changed. To move from a dial up internet connection for one computer, to this era of always-on Internet for a nearly unlimited number of household devices. As I continue down the road of the smart home and internet of things, that number will continue to grow. I have one more smart switch to install, not sure where as it's original location is no longer viable. And I am also curious to look into things like a wifi garage controller, etc.
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Internet Archive launches Scholar search
The Internet Archive is an amazing thing, I rank it up there with Wikipedia, though obviously it has less day to day usage. This new feature though is an exciting step for them. They have launched a search engine that features academic papers in their archive, to try and make them more accessible to people looking for them.
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EFF Transition Memo to Incoming Biden Administration
The Electronic Frontier Foundation puts together a memo for each new President about the issues they perceive as needing to be addressed. The one for Biden is excellent and provides also a good primer for most people about digital issues to consider their stance on.
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Retiring Tucows Downloads
This is some serious nostalgia. I remember eagerly looking for new freeware and shareware to try on Tucows.com when I was younger. I knew the site was still around, and today learned the news that that would soon not be the case.
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