Now here’s something pleasantly unexpected: Google Maps 4.1.0, from 2010, still works on Windows Mobile 6! I found this on freewarepocketpc.net, which to my delight still exists (Winmo software is hard to find!) and hosts mirrors of a bunch of software.

I have uploaded it to w2krepo (check out the new changelog). If you have any other useful Windows Mobile applications, drop me a line. I’ll be sifting around that site to find more stuff as well.

(If you’re wondering about the screenshots, they’re taken on the phone with SmartSS, transferred to the Storage Card and converted from bmp to png before uploading.)

Apparently I do, and seeing as WordPress sites still integrate quite a bit with it I decided to set one back up.

Of course, the most popular use of Gravatar was just for having a consistent internet presence across multiple, even independent sites (unfortunately social media won out in that respect), but it also had a pretty competent profile system. You can still see Matt Mullenweg’s here.

I did run into some issues, though. Unfortunately, YouTube linking was broken, Flickr linking was no longer there, and I could only add site domains so adding the Patio itself as a website was a no-go.

AIM was still listed as a contact option but not MSN, and it’s not possible to add your own fields.

Oddly enough they actually do have options for adding Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dogecoin addresses to your account, so someone out there must be updating this site, right..?

Despite the lacking number of services to pair it with now and the weird little quirks I’ve had with it, I still quite like Gravatar’s profiles and if it had some more services to link to (namely GitHub, Flickr, and fixed YouTube, custom fields would be nice as well), I could consider mine complete. With its option for adding photos to your profile, it reminded me of the old MSN contact cards which looked quite comfy as well.

P.S. Hover on my Gravatar below, I got hovercards set up.

Some big news today:

• One of my earliest true projects, PhotoPage is now open-sourced for posterity. http://github.com/dotcomboom/PhotoPage

• I have been making preparations for v4. For the time being, all current site content is going to be at /web/dcb_v4/archives/v3. Here’s a preview of what’s to come:

• The Patio is back on Twenty Ten. Just such a comfy theme.

Since it was surprisingly difficult for me to find, here is LimeChat 2.26 on SourceForge. It’s not the last version that can run on PPC, but it’s what I could find an active download link for. I might sift through the Wayback Machine if need be.

Runs great on my G4 with a quick setup.

Updates to the blog!

First off, a WAP version of the Patio is now accessible here. Put simply, it uses a lightweight variant of XHTML designed for earlier mobile phones and cellular networks. It uses this WordPress plugin.

And also, the Patio itself has gotten a fresh coat of paint with that sweet, sweet Aero flair. I came across the theme on an archived version of the WordPress theme index, though you may still find it here. (Good luck finding it through much other means, as browsing WordPress’s theme index for anything but new, overly modern stuff is rather difficult past Twenty Ten.) I tweaked it just a little bit, and man is it looking spiffy, complete with working Start menu.

I like it. It strikes as just enough to have that early personal weblog feeling to it while being distinct. And really shiny. I’m not sure if I’ll keep this look, in case I come across another theme that matches the general feel I’m trying to accomplish with this blog, but it’s likely going to stick around for a while.

I have now fleshed out the Windows Media Player section, available here.

• 6 additional visualizations (making a total of 16 packs)
• 183 skins (making up a total of ~314mb), including Beck
• 12 plug-ins

I’d also like to note that most of (if not all) the skins do indeed work on WMP 12 and Windows 10, though it’s not immediately apparent. Just go to View > Skin Chooser while in the Library view.

Download and enjoy. Greetz to windows-media-player.com and this archive.org collection for making it happen.

I’ve been working on a revamp of my site! In doing so I’ve been practicing some PHP; one thing I wanted to do was have a randomized image on the homepage that would change every day. Looking around online I didn’t find many drop-in solutions I could just stick on the page, so I pieced together my own; and PHP actually makes it rather simple.

    <?php
        $today = (int)date('Yz');
        srand($today);
    
        $files = glob('photography/*.jpg');
        $file = array_rand($files);
        echo '<a href="[#root#]photography/"><img src="' . $files[$file] . '" alt="Picture of the day" style="border: 3px solid #444"></a>';
    ?>

To explain, $today is set to the current date in the Yz format which is in the form of year and day in the year; for example, if today is 4/6/2020, it would come out to 202097. Tomorrow, it’d be 202098. That is converted from a string into an integer with (int), as it is going to seed PHP’s random number generator with srand(). Otherwise, the output would be random on every refresh.

glob() is then used to get all the jpg files in the photography directory and store that as $files. array_rand() is used to select one item’s index value at random from that array. The filename as $files[$file] is then concatenated and printed into the HTML with echo.

Date Taken/Exif Information

If desired, you can display other information about the image as well later down the page. I’ve done this to show the date the image was taken. This too is fairly simple when you get down to it, provided that your image does have this in its Exif metadata.

<?php
    $exif = exif_read_data($files[$file], 'IFD0');
    $takenDate = strtotime($exif['DateTime']);
    echo date('F j, Y', $takenDate);
?>

exif_read_data() is used to read this information. The DateTime IDF0 attribute is fed into strtotime() so it’s understandable by PHP and then echoed out as a new human-readable format with date(). And that’s about it!

Here’s a place with some more Exif information in case you’re into experimenting. Also check out the PHP documentation.

Photography page has been updated with new shots: new stuff starts on the second row. Here’s a sample:

Did some spring cleaning on the blog, including an upgrade to WordPress 5.4 (featuring a bunch of Gutenberg improvements, bless them), getting rid of some unused themes and a new URL: /web/dcb_v4/patio, as you may have noticed. If you linked to /blog beforehand, no worries as I’ve put a simple redirect in my .htaccess file.

Redirect 301 /blog /patio

Just know that this URL will be used for the foreseeable future, and updating links could be a good idea if I accidentally wipe .htaccess or something.