From the comments section of a 1996 drum and bass mix YouTube put in my recommendations (which I’ve been enjoying very much, going into the weekend!), I discovered Bryce: a fractal terrain generator, modeling program, and lost art.

Surprisingly, there still remains an active community for this piece of software and you can still purchase Bryce 7 Pro from Daz 3D, with the same iconic interface and rendering style. Top row of the gallery above was rendered in Bryce 2, and the bottom row in Bryce 7.

I love the look of Bryce’s output. It’s so.. vibrant and wistful, and yet has this pinch of digital surrealism you can’t quite pinpoint. It’s like a dream where you can’t quite figure out what’s happening, but want to see what happens next. In the age where photorealistic computer graphics are ubiquitous, it’s refreshing, and oddly soothing. And just perhaps, it’s the old drum and bass to the clean-cut EDM of today.

Mmm. Makes me want to make album covers.

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.)

Having to do some research for school and bored of just using the internet, I installed Encarta 99 earlier. It’s always been something of niche interest to me and I’d be more than happy to have some helpful information stored for when I need to work offline; on top of that, it’s just a plain neat piece of kit altogether.

While Encarta has sadly long bit the dust from the likes of Wikipedia and other internet resources (its last release was in 2009) leaving as but a faint memory, I can tell how exciting it must have been- and, arguably, still could be- to have a full interactive encyclopedia right on your hard drive.

Throughout the 90s, multimedia sold PCs. Interactive CD-ROMs popped up left on many subjects and niches. Microsoft Home had plenty of them, some of which I have in my posession, including the ever-so enlightening Julia Child’s Home Cooking with Master Chefs.

Encarta was the flagship of this era. Put away your Encyclopædia Britannicas and tap into a wealth of knowledge within seconds, with not only articles and images presented in dazzling hypertext but also maps, panoramas, presentations, tables, charts, a dictionary, web links, and updates for a whole year.

It was a breakthrough. So much content, delivered in a way that’s accessible and fun to explore. I really like the presentation of the articles and different topics in Encarta 99: it’s got that neat late 90s Microsoft aesthetic to it, which I’d totally use in a site sometime. It also appears that the Chicago font (of Classic Mac fame) was used quite a bit as well for small type, amusingly. Good choice, all things considered.

I’d still happily recommend trying out an old copy of Encarta one time or another in the same way one might keep around an old encyclopedia from yesteryear– just make sure you have Shockwave Player 8 installed first if you’re on modern Windows. A lot of the information is out of date, but when you’re looking in historical contexts or general subjects, it can be fun and useful. You might even learn something new just jumping around the navigation.

Wii Video 9 (nice title) didn’t want to work for me, so here’s a better way with ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i "gatogrande.mp4" -vf scale=-1:480 -c:v mjpeg gatogrande.avi

Videos don’t have sound, not sure which one I need to use, as it seems the default AAC codec ffmpeg uses does not work. Might update this post if I find out.

In any case, I’m happy to have finally got this elusive (to me anyway) feature to work: even the puzzle game works, and you can post frames to the Message Board and Wii Menu banner. The Photo Channel’s a lovely piece of kit, really. Good memories with it.

I’m kidding about the title, don’t worry, you didn’t miss a Nintendo Direct. And even if you did, it’s probably just another Wii U port.

This has been a quiet but certainly busy month from me, in regards to this site and things, so I figured I would write this post as a recap of sorts and a preview of what could be to come.

First of all, the obvious: since the last post I’ve been in school, and trying to break some procrastination habits– though, apparently, that can’t keep me from calling it for the rest of a Friday night to write a blog post. Hey, there’s still a lot of work to be done. Figuratively, and literally.

With that said, here’s what I’ve been up to in and around September 2020 thus far:

• AutoSite is now on Download.com. Since it’s RC4 and they took that for a beta version, there are no options for reviews. I do kinda wish those 2 AV false positives were resolved too. (I sent RC3 to BitDefender back when I submitted to Softpedia a month or so ago. Sending RC4 wasn’t necessary afterwards, if I recall correctly.) In any case, it’s getting out there. Would like to do more stuff for it as it gets cooler.

• I want to put more stuff on this blog (or tumblog, depending on the time of day). It’s easy for me to get hung up on topics and what I’m gonna write about instead of straight up going for it. Speaking of which, I wrote a post earlier in the month for the group blog about my Android and Termux-based IRC bouncer setup that I’ve been meaning to do since June so if you haven’t read that, you may do so here. Excuse the technobabble.
• Truth be told, I’ve been practice doodling more. Mainly fluffy things because I guess that’s the kinda person I am now. Noticably, a particular Lince on my revised homepage:

Definitely gonna share more, when the time comes. Get some more little drawings on my site, make an interests page, keep that place from getting too rusty. Gonna be good. Branching out, trying new things, gaining confidence. That’s been the goal for this year, and it’s finally starting to pay off in these couple of months. Love it.

• Escargot got a board on a new forum, that’s pretty cool. And I have a gut feeling we might have WLM 2009 by the end of the year. Sure, it might have been the same gut feeling I had in 2018 and 2019 but that doesn’t mean I can’t still be excited for it!
• Caby and Borb graced me on the 17th with some lovely birthday art! Click to view the images full-size.

• I’ve been playing on Somnol’s newly resurrected whitelisted Minecraft servers, this time on Beta 1.7.3 (my new favorite Minecraft version as of late; you don’t need more mobs than there are Pokémon to have a good time, lads) for survival and 1.8.9 for creative. If you’re cool and hang around our IRC, who knows, you might be able to join us. We’ll have a page to showcase what’s up there on our main site, keep your eyes peeled for that. The spirit of 2011 will never die.

• I’ve been thinking about 0x10c and listening to its music a lot. Might be a loose topic for a post in the future, not sure yet. Also wrote a bit about my X230 Tablet, that might surface sooner or later.
• I did a little bit of overdue tidying to w2krepo and added a changelog.
• This video. My kryptonite.
• Some Ceramics classwork:

I’d like to do this more, like a rough recap of where I’ve been and where I’m at each month. I get to put up some things I wouldn’t have otherwise outside of my smaller circles, and I can sorta keep track of it better as time goes on.

Homework tomorrow! Fortunately not a crazy amount, unless I make it that way. Then Minecraft. Then getting destroyed by Cammy at Tetris maybe. Willpower, lads.

Sometimes during long class sessions (look, I can’t help it-) I write stuff down and map projects out on paper. I found a couple of these from Spring 2019 (honestly a really long time now, gee) while cleaning my space around, so I’ve decided to copy them down to post here.

What’s on my Palm (2019 edition)

Here are some applications I use on my Palm Tungsten E.

Memo Calc

This serves decently as a basic scientific calculator. You can set variables as well, and it will save these to your Memo Pad.

Sega Swirl Lite

Fun puzzle game. The demo only has two levels and it doesn’t appear that the full version has been surfaced recently. Also available on PC and Dreamcast, with the latter version featuring Comic Sans MS and a snek. That’s clearly the definitive version, but this suffices.

Documents to Go

This was preloaded on a bunch of devices in the era. It brings Word, Excel, PowerPoint and an image viewer to this model. It requires some 3rd party software to HotSync, but it’s alright and the image viewing alone makes it worth it, since this model runs OS 4, which doesn’t have a native gallery feature.

SimCity

It’s the original SimCity but portable. The touchscreen usage is eh, but overall good. Features sounds and a decent interface nonetheless.

ZLauncher

This completely replaces the built-in Palm OS launcher and I’d say it does an excellent job at it. Themes, dragging and dropping to perform certain actions, and tabs make this a versatile replacement. A must.

A Word on AvantGo

AvantGo was slick. It could update certain “channels” every time you ran a HotSync and make them available offline. For a time, this way the best way to access internet content on your PDA. Unfortunately, however, the service closed, the enterprise server software hasn’t surfaced, and we don’t have a good idea how the service worked internally, meaning that unless something comes up, a replacement service is not likely. In the meantime, there is iSilo, but that is a commercial product and not all sites work with its companion application, iSilo X.

What is Gopher?

Editor’s note: A little bit here later made its way to my Gopher is Not the Web post in June 2019. The following’s pretty scattered, as most of my jotdowns are.

Gopher is an internet protocol, like HTTP (which serves as the backbone of the Web) and FTP. Gopher is not the Web, and is not indexed by Web search engines. And the Web is not equal to the internet; it instead builds on it with its own protocol, like Gopher, FTP, IRC etc. do. To fill the gap of searching the many Gopher servers available, there are search engines available for it.

Gopher should not be considered a lesser HTTP or Web, but more like an improved FTP. It offers a quick and easy way to find and retrieve resources on the internet.

Each Gopher server is made up of several menus with “selectors”, that link either to other menus or files. At the minimum, a Gopher menu is a list of files and folders. However, Gopher menus are flexible: a selector can have display text separate from where the selector links to, and they were designed in a forward-compatible way. Since the original standard, information text, URL links, and more file types have been implemented into clients. The result is a very easy to navigate interface.

Gopher’s forward-compatible nature means that any well-formed Gopher menu should display more or less correctly on any client, regardless of age. For example, when Gopher+ was proposed as a specification, it did not have to rework how menus behaved, instead only taking advantage of an extra field in selectors signifying support that would have been ignored in non-Gopher+ enabled clients. More recently, URL links have both client-side and server-side implementations for old clients. And information selectors, when rendered by a client that doesn’t support them display as a file that could at worst lead to a fake domain name when clicked on. Gopher can be used on the oldest of PCs (Macintosh System 6 and Windows 3.1 included!) without difficulty.

Gopher, from the beginning, has supported sending a search request to servers by means of the “7” item type. Just choosing a selector of this type will pull up a search dialog in your client. After typing it in, the client will send it along with the resource path to the server. While this is meant for searching servers, it also has been (ab)used in various ways: creation of ASCII text art through a Figlet gateway, link shortening, and even a playable version of Zork.

There is a wealth of information on Gopher: personal burrows and sites, software, articles, weather, full books from Project Gutenburg, and not to mention multimedia: audio, video, and images. Gopher is no means limited by age from delivering any type of file.

It’s been forever! The last devlog was all the way back in early April, before I quietly released RC3 in May. Since then AutoSite’s stayed mostly put while I’ve tried out other things. That said I’ve got kicked back into my stride and work goes on.

Quick Insert

A brand new menu has been added that can be brought up with Control+Space or Control+J that gives you a quick list of attributes you can reference and define.

Tidying and streamlining

Some dialogs and message boxes are being revised somewhat to be (I’m hoping) clearer. These include the phrasing in the message box that comes up for a Sanitary Build and the Insert Conditional dialog.

New conditional help text has been brought to the Quick Insert menu, making the old dialog explanation a little redundant:

If you have any suggestions for how I could improve this further, let me know.

Minor editor tweaks

The editor will no longer automatically indent existing lines. This got annoying for me and maybe other people too idk

Testing it for yourself

I don’t remember if I actually pointed this out before in a devlog, but I’ve got AppVeyor set up to build AutoSite whenever I push out new code. What this means for you is that you get to test stuff out on the bleeding edge today! Seeing as I’m currently torn between a new RC and waiting to release a final version 1.0 (I’ve still got some plans before then), the next release may not be for a while.

Everything’s packed in a zip file just like a normal release. Just grab autosite_nightly.zip at http://ci.appveyor.com/project/dotcomboom/autosite/build/artifacts. Remember though that fresh builds can be buggy while I’m working on stuff.

If you run into troubles or just want to suggest something, I’ve now set up issue templates on the source repository. If you don’t want to use them that’s fine too.