11/22/2019; Friday, 7:46 PM

Happy weekend, fellas. Past week could probably be best described as reflective. The finals-bug isn’t biting me quite yet, still have a week or two before I’ll start worrying about that, but otherwise school does tend to leave a bite. Focusing more is something I’m still working on (evident by the Algebra 2 assignment I still need to finish to the right of me). I did fiddle with this thing called Notion a bit which is kinda like OneNote on steroids, and that’s what I’ll be using to plan assignments out. Works well, but I still get funny looks from time to time for using it.

I did learn some neat things about Vansire this week: their name actually came from an RNG that spat out an obscure name for a type of mongoose.

Speaking of Josh Augustin, one of the duo, I’ve discovered he does some of his own stuff too. Some beats, some vibes. It’s pretty good. Four Portraits, Force Majeure, and Josh’s cover of Susie May (embedded) have been frequent listens as of late. Been poking at the idea of grabbing some albums on CD or cassette, since Spotify ads are distracting and kinda creepy and the artists and bands I listen to absolutely deserve more than what they get from streams.

After a code sprint last weekend and some work in-between, AutoSite (formerly AutoSite XL) 1.0 RC1 is nearing closer and closer to being ready. Know that likely its release will be through Github, and I’ll post here when it’s ready. When 1.0 does eventually go gold (frankly, could be in 1998+2), it’ll end up on this site with hopefully a much more fleshed out page. As for what’ll happen to the original Python 3 AutoSite, I’ve renamed its repo to AutoSite-Legacy. If you want to keep track of my progress, here’s your place. (Or check back here!) Remind me to add some easter eggs.

I’ve still been taking my Motorola Q9h around as a digital detox. Sometimes I miss the ability to pull out my phone and talk a bit on Discord still (some days, I do use my Android just for that, but the past couple days, I haven’t been carrying either around), but I generally use my laptop for that anyway. The new Moto Razr was officially announced earlier in the week, and while all I could stare at was the price tag (I remember making fun of the iPhone X being $1000, but this is ridiculous), thinking about it a little more I’d kinda dig it if it wasn’t $1500. Here’s for waiting on AliExpress to catch up.

I did do recent site updates last week, and I still have some Astraware stuff to upload to w2krepo. I should mention that if anyone has especially Windows Mobile and Pocket PC software send me an email and I can get it in, maybe use it for myself. Software’s getting really hard to find for especially non-touchscreen devices. Additionally, I did do a photography walk maybe a month ago(?) and I’ve recently remembered that I do have some stuff yet to cherry-pick and upload. Will be uploaded in time.

Tomorrow’s an FTC qualifier my school robotics team is going to. Our robot’s a rectangular (with corners cut off) wooden thing with omniwheels on each corner. Teleop seems to be working great outside of not having limits on how high the linear slide can go or how far open the grabber can go. Autonomous is going forward for a second. I think, haven’t been able to test it. Wish us luck, we’ll need it. :blobokhand:

Also tomorrow: mariteaux‘s going to stream, so catch that if you can. I hear he’s digging through Steam for something…

In other bulb happenings: the switch of the group blog to WordPress is gonna become a thing, so here’s looking forward to that. Nucleus was– is, a neat setup, but things such as botted comments, odd previews and other quirks have made another option more appealing. mari’s also been using it for his project on the band Failure, Otherwhere, adding to the appeal. Before then, a recap is due soon and we’ve all been getting stuff prepared for the anniversary of the group’s first official year online come December.

Not everything I throw up here’s going to be this long of a ramble, but that’s what’s been going on and what’s coming.

Life’s a force majeure
When you feel unsure
Of the path you’ll take

Vansire – Force Majeure

You may have noticed my absence from the Escargot community starting around late 2017. I’ve looked a little more into Escargot again (instead of actually doing work) and noticed the lovely new theme.

I’ve noticed some cool people celebrated my anniversary last June, and I thought that was pretty cool to be remembered like that.

Above all, I noticed Escargot Spaces has risen from its grave, and now people get to see 2017 me again. It has also changed hands from Michael to 45gratest (OhHelloThereImTheGuy on the MessengerGeek forums), and while I’m a little sad about the discontinuation of Groups (it could’ve been used in a pretty interesting fashion to chain together blogs) overall he’s a great guy and is doing an excellent job with the site. I’m very much looking forward to a new theme; Emesen looks and feels slapped together by someone with no WordPress development experience. And it was! Notice how I just burned myself?

How have I been doing since my hiatus? Well, I’ve been focusing on other projects and stuff on my Neocities website, dotcomboom. Of course, also, schoolwork has been keeping me pretty busy. I don’t tend to go by Nintel anymore. I’ve been listening to a lot of chiptunes, linked is a nice one I’ve been putting on repeat recently.

I can’t guarantee I’ll be nearly as active in the Escargot community as a year ago, but I am here to pop in and say hi. Thank you for the support when I worked on Emesen, and especially thank you to the people who made all this happen. I owe you one.

I’m happy to be able to announce that Emesen (0.2.2) is now the default theme for Escargot Spaces! And as such if you notice something wrong with the theme by all means yell at me or make a new issue on GitLab. :)

If you have an existing blog you can set the theme manually in Appearance > Themes.

When you sign up for a new blog, I believe it’ll give you the new theme automatically.

And as always, you can find the source code on the GitLab repo. Thank you for all your support!

The new version of Emesen has better comments from Near Nothing, styled block quotes, more spaced out margins and it loads faster directly from the php/css file because everything’s embedded into Base64!

Grab it here. If you want to use the MSN logo as a custom logo use this:

To keep it transparent skip cropping. It’s already sized correctly.

Two things on my checklist last time were completed: Custom logo support + text fallback, and removing those stubborn bullets from the sidebar. As it seems, like magic, BuddyPress looks just like it’s supposed to now, which wasn’t the case before:

I haven’t done anything with the comments section at this point, yet:

Another thing to look into is to make the theme 100% standalone. Right now it hotlinks a bunch of files from Archive.org which definitely isn’t a good way to do things.

And I didn’t think I’d continue working on it. Crazy, now it’s actually shaping up to be a “real theme!”

Now the header (replacing the search bar due to it hanging out and laziness on my part when it comes to fixing it) and footer menu bars are functional and you can assign menus to them. How the actual content is laid out is kind of… meh, but there’s not much I can do at the time being. I keep trying to remove those darn bullet points from the sidebar, but nothing I’ve tried works. I’m probably missing something critical.

The MSN logo now links to the homepage of your site, and the admin bar actually shows up properly this time around. If you want to try it out for yourself (maybe fix it a little?) get the latest changes from GitLab. Maybe this theme will get to a point where it’s decent enough to be used on Escargot Spaces, who knows.

To do list as of the moment:

• Remove the bullet points from the sidebar once and for all
• See what I can do for making comments and BuddyPress not look bad
• Change the MSN logo to the blog title or something, or find a way to get the set blog logo

Spoiler, none of the versions of MSN that was on Escargot’s site worked on ReactOS.

Woah, that setup was fast.

No, seriously, it took like 3 minutes for me to set ReactOS all up. Or it would’ve, if it didn’t freeze while booting the second time around. It did boot properly when I chose the Debug option at startup time though, and afterwards through the default option. Weird.

ReactOS prompted to install a couple drivers for networking and audio, but it couldn’t find any. I searched online and found that I needed to set the networking card to PCnet-FAST III. I set the card to that and networking worked fine.

I went to install Firefox from the applications manager because it didn’t come with a browser. (probably to keep the download size small, and my 1.5 mbps connection and I appreciate that!) While Firefox was downloading, I messed around in Paint a bit.

Firefox was downloaded, and when I opened it it asked to import Internet Explorer data, heh. The control box wouldn’t display, so that was kind of weird.

So here comes the part you’ve all been waiting for: actually installing MSN. I went to Escargot’s site and downloaded the pre-patched 7.5.0324 installer. And…

It didn’t work. I was unable to sign in because the textboxes were broken. May be a font issue. I’d hate to end it here though, so I kept trying and going through each of the versions on the Escargot website. To avoid issues, I decided to go from oldest to newest, from 5.0 to 7.0.

To get rid of 7.5 I used Jonathan Kay’s ZapMessenger, which worked well after I installed 7-Zip (to open the archive) and .NET Framework 2.0. I installed 5.0.0575, but when signing in it gave me this error:

I didn’t get any option to log the connection, so I can’t pinpoint what the exact problem was. But I moved onward, to 6.2.0208. It kept my login information from 5.0.0575. It gave me pretty much the same error, but with an error code of 0x80004005 this time.

I tried a couple more times, getting the same error code. That brings us to 7.0.0820, which again saved my login info from 5.0 and 6.2. Guess what, yep, another error, with the error code of 800701f4. The second time the code was 80072efe.

I then tried again with logging enabled, but the log file still had nothing but the default comment saying “this has personal information, blah blah.”

Update (8:00 PM): As part of a complete coincidence, the Escargot server was down when I ran these tests originally. I’ve tried 7.0.0820 again and it did login, but fonts and profile pictures are kind of messed up:

I decided to try 7.5.0324 again because my login info was saved, and I wasn’t able to enter that info in that version the first time. Unfortunately, that info wasn’t carried over when I installed 7.5 again.

I’ve tried these same versions on WINE with similar results, so I think it’s safe to say that it’s not possible in the time being to run MSN Messenger on ReactOS or through WINE.

It was a fluke!

When I installed Windows 7 on Parallels, it was an OEM System Builder license. This is why moving it around from Parallels to VMware to VirtualBox upset Windows Activation; you’re only allowed to use that license on the first “motherboard” you install it on, in this case the virtual motherboard Parallels gave the virtual machine.

I’ll look into other options for running MSN. First of which being to try installing it into a ReactOS VM. All the versions of MSN I’ve tried won’t work in Wine, so I’m skeptical.

Apparently, loading up my vmdk file worked without a hitch. Booorriing. Last time I tried to load it in VirtualBox Windows Activation locked the entire VM unless I used another key or switched back to VMware, but apparently that wasn’t the case this time around.

So yeah I can use MSN again, woo!

Add me as a contact: c/o\o/l\t/i\l/e\@/s\d/f\./o\r/g