Hi fellow archivists and retro-computing enthusiasts! If you have, like me, liked 2010-era Nokia smartphones (because they were smartphones!), you probably heard of Symbian S60, their OS. There was a cool app called ActiveFile, made by Alie Tan. Its source was hosted on code.google.com, but has unfortunately disappeared since. If any of you, my dear readers, have a copy of the sources on an old disk somewhere, I will pay you the bounty in any form you want (can be a donation in your name, can be a bank transfer, I can even mail cash to you, any currency or item I can reasonably get hold of), up to 50 (fifty) € (EUR euros), and publicly announce the winner. ...
I recently came across dérive, one of the few Linux distros distributing static binaries, and the one most actively maintained (maybe because the contributors are young and have plenty of free time; I hope that the project stays as active in a couple years). And it is heavily inspired by plan9 (something the community calls 9larping). I think this is a great idea overall. Anyway, let’s get to the guide part. Prerequisites a 3-button mouse, or a 2-button + scrollwheel mouse, internet (if you are reading this, you are probably good to go), a physical mouse, seriously go grab a mouse, if you only have a touchpad, you will be unable to do anything once the GUI starts. Launching You can download the iso from their official website, or directly from their repository. ...
The popular fallacy, repeated by economy textbooks, is that people invented money to replace burdensome barter (exchanging goods for other goods) with something simpler. This is not true, or not the whole story at least. The missing piece is debt. Proto-money At first, there were nice looking things that took some time to collect or process. Shells, metals, pretty stones. Some thought ‘anyone can go pick up some shells, and we all want pretty necklaces, knives and sculptures, but this is pretty time-consuming and I had better grow some food; let me grow some extra to feed these kids who collect the pretty shells’. ...
Today is the day 70 (or so) since I started selling 1-Click Linux, which is free software, released under GPLv3+ license. Yes, I do believe free / libre / open source software can be released and sold for money, just like DRM-free e-books. No tracking. And no freemium - a clean contract: you watch a demo then give me money - I give you a file. The problem is, I do not have a big follower base. Neither do I have a load of money to pour into advertising. And I honestly think that the whole advertising business is the reason behind much evil currently happening out there. The current figures are a couple visitors to the website each day, one in 20 of these wants to see the price, and one sale so far. I have no idea whether these are people or bots, but it is a data point. (The sale is an actual person though.) ...
A bit of history GIF is the oldest widespread compressed image format. Today, it is mostly famous for allowing animations in an image file, but I am not so interested in that use. Actually, it turns out this was the only image format ever supported by NCSA Mosaic. Your website must have a GIF fallback for all critical images if it ever wants to truly support old browsers. I’m not talking old as in old Chromium. I mean actual Mosaic, Netscape, IE, Netsurf, Dillo, Konqueror - like those you can try on oldweb.today. (You are probably not interested in supporting them, but this is a fun exercise.) ...