Posts on C:\WhoIsThisJoker

Long time no update

Thu, 08 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

long time no update

It has been quite a while since I last posted, though there are good reasons. I am no longer working at LeTourneau University. I felt very conflicted about this back in november when I left, but I am enjoying my new position as a Systems Analyst at The Fikes Companies. I am currently working from home and assisting The Fikes companies with their merger with Caseys. Due to confidentiality I cannot talk much about it, but I am enjoying the work regardless.

I haven’t been doing much programming lately. Rather, I have been using my spare time to be reading novels and journaling. I feel as though I should be doing programming again, however as it has been a long time. My last major project was Bibliofile in 2023, and writing code is a lot of fun. I felt the need to post here, as I have not posted in months and want to let everyone know I am still alive and plan on doing nerd stuff again soon.

Until next time!

AOL Gold Browser Review

Mon, 12 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

As many people born in the 90s can remember, there was once a time when AOL, short for America Online, ruled the world. Besides Internet Explorer, they were one of the most used browsers in the world. From their humble beginnings on the Commodore 64 as Quantum Link, a series of network services, all the way to their “desktop browser” they had a lot going on for a long time. However, starting in 2006, they began to fall off. The reason why is that they had a security mistake that leaked millions of customers searches to the public. Why did they decide that was a good idea? No idea. It killed their juggernaut of a business, making way for Firefox and Chrome to dominate the browser market. That is a bit of an oversimplification, however now you will struggle to find anyone that talks about them at all.

I was thinking about them earlier today, and learned that they are, surprisingly, not dead. They got bought by Yahoo sometime in the past few years, which is another surprise survivor from the 90s, and have a currently maintained version of their famous Desktop Browser. It is a paid piece of software that you have to subscribe to, for $7 a month. Both nostalgia and morbid curiosity got the better of me, so I downloaded the free trial and played around with it for a while.

I highly doubt any tech nerd that reads this blog is seriously considering using AOL Gold. Still, it’s a piece of software I haven’t heard anyone else talk about so I think it is a worthwhile subject to explore.

Information about the browser

AOL has a very storied history, but that is a subject for another article. Gold Browser, I assume, uses a proprietary engine that they maintain. I could find no information anywhere on what it uses. They have used a number of engines over the years…namely Netscape and Microsoft’s Trident Engine. According to Wikipedia version 9.8 used a variant of Chromium, so I am forced to assume it uses that.

Getting the Browser

Getting the browser was fairly annoying. You have to put in your payment. They support PayPal, or using your credit card information. After that you have to navigate to your “subscription” page to download the browser. Not sure why it doesn’t automatically give the download link after you pay up. It seems like a no-brainer to make the software you just paid for as easy as possible to download. Regardless, you have to find the subscriptions page and click download.

After that, you get an install file which is about 2 megabytes. This is massive compared to Firefox’s install file at 364KB, but miniscule compared to Google Chrome’s 8.5 megabytes.

The thing that really bothers me about the download is that there is no Linux version. If you run Linux or MacOS and really really want to use this browser for some reason, you pretty much just have to eat bricks. I am primarily a Linux user as you can see in this article I wrote, however I do have a Windows partition just in case if there is something I can’t get running on my Steam Deck or on my Linux partition. It is rarely touched, but in this case it came in handy.

running the browser

Installing is not a problem. Standard “next, next, agree, next, finish” business. The first thing that you will see when you run it is the log in screen.

This screen feels redundant because as soon as you type in your username it takes you to another login screen asking for your username again.

So you have logged in. Great! Now you will get to see what glory awaits you in AOL-land. Wait, you can’t. First thing that shows when you log in for the first time is an advertisement for one of AOL’s other products.

Once you close that, the next thing you will see is the main screen loaded with absolutely nothing but ads and news articles.

I remember AOL’s front page being about like this in 2004 when my parents would log in. It was so bad, even back then, that when Senator Armstrong from Metal Gear Revengeance goes on his rant on how shallow society has become, it is always the very first thing that comes to mind. I remember seeing articles about celebrities getting pregnant, wearing “bold fashion choices” and all sorts of other inane things that no straight male tween cares about.

The bright side is, the browser layout looks EXACTLY how I remember AOL 9.0 looking when I was a kid. It is a dead ringer. When you log in you are greeted with the AOL WELCOME sound bite. I couldn’t find an audio sample on youtube, but it is every bit as crunchy as you remember.

Anyway, lets do something about those ads. Huh. I don’t see any addon support. Let’s check the settings.

I looked all over the settings and there was no place anywhere that I could find that let me install addons. Looks like I am stuck with the ads. Bummer. It let’s me customize the wallpaper of the browser and the taskbar color, so I changed it up a little to look cool.

Used to, AOL browser came with a bunch of included images. It still does, but now it includes much less than it used to. It does, however, let you search for an image from Pixabay and choose whatever you like as your wallpaper.

The problem with this approach is that you will forever have the “free image from Pixabay” disclaimer on the bottom right of your screen.

The bookmarks tab is still around, and great as ever. I was greatly disappointed that all my bookmarks from when I was 10 are no longer there. I was inactive on my AOL account for so long(Not since I was 14 so…14 years!) that they just deleted all of the data that was associated with my account. Email, bookmarks, search history, all of it. Gone forever.

The interesting thing about this is that the bookmarks had a built-in RSS feed. That is pretty handy. However, the better bookmarks area is the shortcuts area populated in the top-right of the browser.

As for search, there is no built-in way to change your search engine. You are stuck with AOL search unless you go type in the search engine url you want every time. You can customize your homescreen to your favorite search engine, but that is about all you can do. Search in the search bar, get AOL search.

I saw the games button in the shortcut menu, and gave it a shot. I remember AOL used to have links to all sorts of fun games when I was little. However, none of the games here are any good.

I played Chess, but that was all that looked remotely interesting. During gameplay, I was interrupted by many many video ads. I stopped counting after the 8th one.

The last thing that I was curious about was the AOL Keyword search. I remember being dropped off at my grandma’s house and being set in front of the TV with PBS Kids playing. Every ad section they would advertise their website with their games, and say something along the lines of “Visit us by URL pbskids.org or AOL keyword PBS Kids!”

As you can see in the video above, that was a pretty big part of PBS Kid’s marketing. I remember trying it out and it was pretty neat. Does that still work?

Nope. Keyword search is just a fancy search engine search bar now. I tried entering the keyword with and without the space, and neither worked. Frankly, I find that kind of disappointing. I have literally zero idea why it wouldn’t work. Does AOL just not index AOL keywords anymore? Did PBS ask to be delisted? Who knows? Either way it seems that keywords are just a different way of accessing your settings, or searching the internet.

final thoughts

There is no reason to use this browser. Besides the novel desktop layout, it has zero features that used to make it special. Used to be, the AOL ecosystem was part of what made it special. Have kids? Sign them up for the KOL account with games and strong parental controls. Want music? Go to AOL Radio. Want to talk to creepy elderly perverts? AOL Chat. However, most of the ecosystem is either nonexistent, or has been replaced by better 3rd party services.

As well, for a paid browser, I was repulsed by the sheer amount of advertisements there are. You would think, after paying seven dollars for a browser, advertisements would be unnecessary. But nope. Ads everywhere.

The browser feels strangely predatory. It used to be a family-focused browser, and the marketing on their website showcases young people on their PCs. They know though, that their biggest demographic is elderly people that don’t know how to use adblock, or don’t want to switch to something better.

Wanna know how I know they know that the main demographic is the elderly? If you click the safety tab, the first thing your eye will be drawn to is the “prevent elder fraud” button.

I am also not a fan of the fact that on the games page there are so many gambling games. It is a common path for the elderly to do gambling out of sheer boredom. However in the past they had to get out of the house and head to the casino. AOL is like “do all your gambling at home!” Knowing that their main demographic is one of the ones most likely to actually gamble money.

On to less emotionally charged points:

Things I liked

The browser was quite quick.
The style is exactly as you remember it from 20 years ago.
No broken websites that I could find.
Desktop layout
Crunchy nostalgic sounds

Things I did not like

No addons.
Ads before you even get a chance to use the browser.
Shadow of its former self.
Predatory vibe.
Costs too much for too few exclusive features.
Too many ads. Should be none for a paid browser.
Forced to use AOL’s email and search engine.
None of the services that were worth using are live any more.

As I said in the beginning of this section, there is zero reason to pay for this thing. I used a free trial, but even free it doesn’t feel worth using. Nothing about it besides the layout is unique, and what used to make it unique is long gone. It is a product that should stay in the past.

In a future article, I am going to document the various versions of AOL software. Wikipedia only documents it from 2005-onwards, and I feel that this is a shame that not much more is documented. They had browser software in the 90s and the early 2000s, long before AOL Desktop was released. As well, they had this weird spin-off of AOL called “Openride” that was released and literally abandoned less than six months later.

Deus Ex - Where Are They Now?

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Where Are They now? A new article series

Introduction, and why I am starting this series

The purpose of this series is to look at developers, writers, designers, etc. of popular games to see where they are now and what they have made in the decades since their “prime.” I am starting off with the Deus Ex development team because Deus Ex is one of my all-time favorite video games due to its philosophical narrative, immersive gameplay(especially for the time), and funny moments. It remains, to this day, to be the most interactive experience that I have ever had in a game.

Its a masterclass in game design, and the people who worked on it have gone on to work on other projects. I feel like it would be great to highlight these projects, so that people can see where “the people have gone” and showcase their lesser known “new works.”

updates it was pointed out to me that Alexander Brandon did not compose Human Revolution, and I corrected my mistake. He is credited in the game because he worked on a single track in the “bob Page ending” and I mistakenly thought he did more than thatsource.

I also reworded Robin Todd’s piece of the article to better reflect how they were involved with different projects, as the way I had previously written it implied that they were a producer for Redfall, when they were a writer.

Director

Warren Spector

The director of Deus Ex was Warren Spector. He is a legend in the video game industry. The titles/series most famous with his name attached are:

Wing Commander
System Shock
Thief: Deadly Shadows(he left this title before completion, but he had considerable influence over the direction of the project)
Ultima Series
Epic Mickey
And of course, Deus Ex

In October 2023, he wrote an article detailing his story for his 40th anniversary of game design. He is working on a new project called Argos: Riders on the Storm, but has kept his lips tight as to what kind of game this is. Hopefully he will knock it out of the park, and really amaze us. Only time will tell. From his most recent statement as of this article, it seems as though it will be a multiplayer immersive sim. I am not big on multiplayer, but considering how games such as Helldivers, Left 4 Dead, Deep Rock Galactic, etc. have taken the world by storm it might work. I always thought of the immersive sim as a single-player only genre, but if he can pull this off it might truly be something worth playing.

He has two blogs, currently. One is Junction Point which was put to rest. You can read his old articles there, but he has since migrated to his new site, Gaming the System.

writers

Deus Ex had three main writers. Sheldon Pacotti, Chris/Robin Todd, and Austin Grossman.

Sheldon Pacotti

Sheldon Pacotti was the head writer of Deus Ex, and according to his website he wrote most of the main script. Some of his works include Gamma which is a book with an eerily similar sounding plotline to Deus Ex, Demiurge which is a book in which all material reality has been transferred to the digital world, and Experiments in Belief. Of these three, Experiments in Belief is the only one that is readable for free.

books

Experiments in Belief is a collection of short stories written by Sheldon from 1990 to 2000, and they touch on cyberpunk themes such as dependence on pharmecuiticals, immortality, and similar. Its not all cyberpunk, but I can see why he was hired to write the project. It is free, and I think most of the stories are worth reading.

Demiurge is a novel written in 1996, but there was a new edition written in 2000 and another in 2014. I have not read it, but I am going to purchase it and write a review in a few weeks as time allows. From the description, it seems to ask the question “what would life look like if you could copy anything, even physical objects and people, for free? What would that do to society?” It looks like a real brain-scratcher and I can’t wait to pick it up and read it for myself. He offers it on Kindle and Nook, but also a copyright-free pdf for about six dollars.

Gamma is a book written in 2016, and takes place in a world where a new race of humans, the “transgenic race” are designed by biotech companies. Again, I have not yet read the book but I will be getting it and reviewing it along with Demiurge. From the Summary on his website alone, the book sounds a LOT like Deus Ex. Designer babies with enhanced abilities? Nanotechnology pushing humanity into an advanced but dangerous future? Sounds extremely familiar. I will definitely be picking this one up.

Games and software

Sheldon wrote a few pieces of software as well. A game called Cell Emergence that uses voxels, Game Blocks which is a game engine for 2d games, and Story Language which is a programming language for writing stories.

Cell Emergence has a free demo to check out. The full version is six dollars. Just like some of his previous work, it deals with themes of nanotechnology.

Game Blocks is free, but it is built for Scratch which I am not a fan of, personally.

Story Language doesn’t seem to be accessible. All links, including the ones on his official page, seem to be completely dead. I suppose Sheldon decided against making it public? Or perhaps it was accidentally deleted? This is a shame. I don’t see how a programming language would work for storytelling, but it would be interesting to see the attempt.

As for his professional works, his moby games page doesn’t have him listed on much. He recieved thanks on a few immersive sim games, but it seems that in the AAA game development sphere, he has only worked on Deus Ex 2 as a lead writer, and Little Strategy as a proffreader.

Despite not doing much in the AAA game market since Deus Ex, he has been a busy guy. I hope when I am his age, I will have made half as many creative personal projects as he.

Chris/Robin Todd

Chris Todd, now Robin Todd, was the writer that put together all of the data cubes. While their role in the writing of Deus Ex was not quite as important as Sheldon Pacotti’s, datacubes usually reinforced the themes of Deus Ex, and included both fictional and real-life novels. They wrote flavor text to give the world a lot more color, and also included excerpts from G.K. Chesterson’s book “The Man Who Was Thursday” which includes several themes included in Deus Ex.

It is also important to note that they wrote the dialogue for the intro and outro cutscenes for the game(spoilers for the outro cutscenes, naturally). Originally they worked on Wing Commander 3source as a programmer.

They did have a personal website titled 7crows.com, but that site seems to be down at the moment. The latest snapshot on the wayback machine is on June 16, 2014. And really, you have to go back as far as 2012 to see anything besides a Twitter link. Not really sure why the site got taken down, but it seems a shame to me. With blogs, you can express yourself much more freely than on a social media website, for better or worse.

Since Deus Ex, Robin has since worked on games such as Redfall as a writer, and Destiny 2 as a producer. Also worked on the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic. Moby Games lists their role as Production Team though I am not sure what that means. Additionally, they worked on Freelancer as a designer. source

As for their other creative works, I could only find sources on their old site, 7Crows. The main creative works they seem to have worked on solo are the comic Seraphim and Cyberpunk: The Seraphim Files. It seems they tried publishing a book called I Buy My Time Secondhand but I cannot find anything about it outside of the announcement on 7crows, so I assume it just never got published since their article said it was “under consideration.” There is an author on Goodreads called Chris Todd, but that author has published under that name even after Robin’s transition, and there seems to be no correlation with Robins work, so I assume that it is a different person altogether.

Austin Grossman

Austin Grossman worked on some of the dialigue of Deus Ex, and when looking at his personal website, him and Warren Spector seem to work on a lot of the same games and series. He wrote for games such as Dishonored, Dishonored 2, Neverwinter Knights 2, and Ultima Underworld 2. He was also a designer for System Shock.source

As for his creative endeavors, he has been super busy. He wrote a superhero novel titled Soon I will be Invincible, and is following it up with a sequel titled Fight Me on May 23rd, 2024. His other works include Crooked which looks like a lovecraftian horror book with Richard Nixon as the bad guy, and You: A Novel. You: A Novel seems to be a comedy sci-fi book about gaming, but the description doesn’t really tell me much about what the book is actually about.

Overall, it looks like Austin has been getting busy with his novels. The book about Richard Nixon sounds interesting, so I might pick that one up at some point.

level designers

Harvey Smith

Harvey Smith was the lead designer of Deus Ex, and has since worked with Ricardo Bare on games such as Weird West, Redfall, and Prey. He has a personal site but the last article he posted was in 2016. He did release a book titled Big Jack is Dead which is a book about a programmer with abusive parents. The concept sounds interesting and I may one day give it a shot. I had to go to his Twitter to find out anything about this book, which is surprising. I would think he would post about it on his blog as well.

Still, it looks like a good drama. I like that it takes place in Texas, and I am always down to read a story about programmers, even if it is fictional.

Marshall Andrews

Marshall worked on a few games since Deus Ex, but has mostly stayed to himself from the looks of it. According to Mobygames he worked as a playtester for System Shock: Enhanced Edition, which is a version of System Shock with quality of life improvements.

Ricardo Bare

This guy is very active in the game design world. He worked on Redfall(along with Robin and Harvey) and also was a designer for the game Prey.

Interstingly, he has produced two novels. Jack of Hearts, and Fool of Fate. He also wrote several short stories such as Worship Hymn, “The Rat Burner” and “Of Salmon’s Tails and Green-Eyed Girls.” The former two were both released in magazines and I do not know of any legal place to read them outside of those magazines, but if they are any good let me know.

You can view his personal website here but it doesn’t look like he keeps it updated.

Monte Martinez

He worked on several games that Ricardo and Robin have worked on. Redfall, Dishonored, etc. He doesn’t have a personal site that I could find, nor could I find any personal projects that he has put out.

Steve Powers

Same story. Worked in the same studios as Ricardo and Monte, so a lot of the same credits. Redfall, Prey, etc. He had a website in 2004 that contained some artwork and a picture of what is presumably his kid, but not much else.

Musicians

Alexander Brandon

This man is a legend in the world of video game music. Not only did he make the music for Deus Ex, but he did music for Unreal Tournament, Jazz Jackrabbit, Wasteland 2, Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, and much more. He has a Bandcamp where he releases his personal music for sale. Interestingly, he remastered the Deus Ex soundtrack as its own album Conspiravision alongside Michiel Van Den Bos. And I gotta say, it ROCKS. The full thing is available on Spotify but I recommend buying the album proper, to support him and Michiel.

Michiel Van Den Bos

Michiel only worked on the original Deus Ex game, but he is still working in the game music industry. Alongside Alexander he did the music for Unreal and Unreal Tournament. The most recent game that he composed music for is Sonic Dream Team, and Age of Wonders 4.

His Twitter lists a personal website(www.michielvandenbos.com/) but it returns a 404. Using the wayback machine we can see what it looked like but it immediately tries loading flash, and the latest post was in 2012 so there isn’t much to look at.

Daniel Gardopee

Daniel, alongside the previous two, worked on Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and Deus Ex. In the 24 years since Deus Ex, has mostly worked on the 2k sports games as an audio engineer.

He did, however, work on three albums with Mr. Brandon. AtmosphereS: Cultures, AtmosphereS: Moods and AtmosphereS: Pulses. However, for the life of me I cannot find these albums. Based on the cover art they seem right up my alley! If someone knows of a place I can purchase/listen to these albums, let me know!

Conclusion

There are many more people that worked on this game, but I think I got all the highlights. I cut out some “sections” such as programmers and artists because there just wasn’t anything interesting to talk about for those people in those sections, but they were just as vital to the game turning out as revolutionary as it did.

I was surprised to see how many people who worked at Ion Storm ended up working for Arkane! I suppose it makes sense, as Arkane is mostly known for Prey and Dishonored which are spiritual successors to games like Thief and Deus Ex. It is a shame that their latest game, Redfall, turned out to be a real stinker. However, considering their track record and how many people worked on amazing projects in the past, I hope that whatever they come out with next will be amazing.

As for the others, a lot of people ended up writing their own books and pursuing other creative personal projects. In the future, I want to purchase some of these novels, pieces of software and music, and talk about them here. Thats a little ways off, though.

image credits

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/42/Dxcover.jpg
By Official GDC - https://www.flickr.com/photos/officialgdc/52766574707/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=130006812

Alternative search engines

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

last updated 8/14/2024

Introduction

Google for decades now has completely cornered the market in terms of search engine use. The closest alternative most people know about is Bing by Microsoft. Both Google and Bing have many, many privacy concerns that security researchers often warn about. But, despite appearances, there is a whole plethora of search engines out there that are just as good, if not better than Google. In this article, I am going to try and highlight some of these, along with my thoughts on each. Please note, these are only the ones that I have personally used. There are dozens of search engines out there, and as I research them I will be updating this article. If there are any search engines that you wish for me to review, shoot me an email at daniel@whoisthisjoker.com.

Also keep in mind, I have not been sponsored by any of these search engines, and I try to be as positive as I can while talking about them, while being honest about what features they have, whether or not its worth using, etc.

DuckDuckGo

When most people think of “alt search engines” the first thing that comes to mind is DuckDuckGo. It is a nonprofit search engine that maintains its own web crawler, and delivers results similar to Google source. Feature-wise, you can use bangs to search different engines. You can also create your own bangs in the settings, which is neat.

They did also add an AI summarize feature that will take a look at your search results, and summarize everything in a paragraph. Sometimes it errored out on me. For some reason, when updating this article in August 2024, that feature disappeared on me. I am unsure if it was taken down, or if it is down for maintenance. However, they also have a plug for an anonymous chatbot session. Complete with GPT-4o mini, Claude 3 Haiku by Anthropic, and two open source GPTs. Llama 3.1 by Facebook, and Mixtral by Mistral AI.

None of these AI models are capable of generating images within DuckDuckGo, but they do pretty much everything else a language learning model needs to do.

They have a fantastic track record in terms of privacy, and because they rely on donations to keep the search engine free, it is a good option. Keep in mind, they DO use untargeted ads to help support the engine. If you use adblock these will disappear, but personally I just have an adblock exception to help support duckduckgo. Its the least I can do to support an engine with this good of a track record. It is worth mentioning that duckduckgo also allows users to disable ads in the settings, which is much appreciated.

Brave Search

Brave Search, supported by the Brave Browser project, is another search engine that is growing in popularity. They have a few features that I think are interesting. They have an AI tool called Summarizer that takes the results, and puts it together in a easily readable summary. Its a cool tool, but not one that I personally use very often.

Another feature that I like is their “goggles” functionality. Lets say that you want to catch up on the news. If you want to hear the leftist point of view on a matter, click “News from the left.” If you want to hear a more conservative point of view, click “news from the right.” Personally, I like this feature because I like to balance both views and come to my own conclusion, rather than just swallow up whatever point of view I see first. It is good to see multiple sides of the same issue, and consider perspectives you might not otherwise think of.

Other “goggles” are No Pinterest which filters out pinterest results, Hacker News which filters to just hacker news results, Tech Blogs if you wish to read smaller publications opinion on technology, etc. You can even create your own goggles.

Keep in mind that, like DuckDuckGo, it does use sponsored ads to support itself, as well as crypto that is generated from the browser. Once it releases from Beta, the plan is to offer a paid option and an ad-supported option source.

Searxng

Searxng is a strange one, because it is a search engine that you can host. I used to host my own instance at search.whoisthisjoker.com, but for various reasons I took it down. I will get into this in a bit. For this article, I am using the instance at search.ononoki.org. I am unfamiliar with ononoki and the articles that they write, or if their specific instance is to be trusted. I just want to give credit for borrowing it.

So searxng, to my knowledge, does not use its own webcrawler. Instead, it proxies other search engines and delivers you the results for each one. You can filter each search engine by going to preferences > engines and then selecting which search engines that you wish Searxng to use. It is very handy, and this sort of hyper-personalization is the sort of thing that I live for. Because it is self hosted there is no advertisements and your personal data is entirely hosted on your own server. No Big-Brother tracking allowed. That being said, I had a few issues with it. Namely speed.

Because it queries so many search engines and hands you the results, the engine is pretty slow in my opinion. On my own instance, it sometimes took as long as 30 seconds for results to show up. On the instance I borrowed for the review, it took a solid 7 seconds to search “laptop.” If you don’t mind this, it isn’t a bad engine. Just keep in mind that with the way it works, it is going to be slower than the other options.

Kagi

Kagi is a paid search engine, for people that believe paying for products directly is the best way to keep them running. The logic behind Kagi is “if its paid for already, we have no reason to invade your privacy.” This line of logic works, as long as the person you are paying doesn’t get greedy. I also have a problem with the idea that every service you use must be paid instead of ad-supported or donation-run, because money is a limited resource and not everyone can afford to pay for every service that is currently available. Especially the downtrodden that need free resources such as search engines to educate themselves and get back on their feet. However, that is an argument for a different article.

As for Kagi, I like it. It has tons of features that make it stand out amongst the crowd, such as its “lens” functionality and its summarization options. Lenses work similarly to Brave Browser’s goggle functionality, as in it is a search filter that allows you to filter out what you want to see. It is especially useful for searching up programming questions, as it has a specific lens for programming forums.

My favorite feature though, is the “summarize article.” Unlike Brave’s summarizer, this summarizes specific pages for you. Just click the elipses, and hit the summarize button.

Kagi also has a feature called “small web.” This allows people to submit smaller websites into a feed that updates periodically. It is a fantastic way to discover new blogs and websites, and it is much appreciated by me. Currently, my blog is not listed on this feed as they ask you to not submit your own blog before submitting a couple other people’e blog. Hopefully I can get that on there at some point.

One last feature that I really love is the “blast to the past” feature which serves up older articles. While this might not be useful to everyone, I like visiting old forgotten websites. It reminds me of a simpler time on the web, and sometimes you can get perspectives on events from the time period those events were actually happening. Some of the blast to the past results are still kind of recent though. As you can see in the screenshot, some of the results are from 2020 which, while it was 4 years ago, that isn’t a HUGE amount of time.

Lastly, I really like the “shield” button in search results. Hover over it and it will tell you everything that there is to know about the domain. Who registered it, how long it has been owned, what kinds of ads and trackers are found on the site, etc. It is an incredibly useful tool that can help determine whether a website is really legit or not.

Overall, I really like Kagi. Out of all the ones listed here, it’s probably my favorite. Its fast, it has tons of features that other engines don’t have, and it really feels like a premium product. It does require an account which raises some privacy concerns, but if that is something you are concerened about then using an anonymous email or an email mask will help conceal your identity. Where the sticking point for me personally though, is the price. The free tier gives you 100 searches for the lifetime of your account. Then there is a 5 dollar tier that gives you 300 searches a month, and a 10 dollar tier that gives you unlimited searches. That price to me seems kind of steep. I don’t know what the cost is to run a search engine, but that feels like a bit much. Still, the extra features make it worth it to me.

Ecosia

Ecosia is the “environmentally conscious” search engine. The idea is that with a few searches, you can help pay for trees to be planted and help offset carbon emmissions.

Privacy wise, as far as I know they do not sell data. You do, however, need to make an exception for your ad blocker because they serve up non-targeted ads to help pay for the trees. With an ad blocker, there really is no point in using this one. However if you want to help the environment a bit, Ecosia is certainly the best option out there. They don’t have much in the way of features. They are like DuckDuckGo in that way. Its a basic search engine that supports your privacy, and helps in planting trees. If you feel that your searching isn’t doing enough you can “gift” trees by purchasing a tree in their shop.

Now, they DO have an AI chatbot that you can use. The way it is used is a bit weird, though. You make a search, and next to images there is a tab called “AI Chat.” It then puts your search term into the chatbot and gives you an answer. Its really just a wrapper for Chat GPT-3. Nothing wild.

In all, Ecosia is just a browser you use moreso for its mission than the features you get from it. Nothing wrong with that, and I salute them for trying to provide a service to make the world a better place.

Wiby

Miss the old web? Think Javascript and CSS are the worst things to happen to the internet? Use Wiby. The idea of Wiby is that it only serves up older websites and newer websites that barely have any javascript or CSS. Websites are added manually so there is no webcrawler looking for sites to add. I really like this one, though there is not much to say about it. Its the internet, as it was in the 90s. Both old sites and new sites. I cannot recommend it for serious searching because all you will get is blogs and 20-plus year old websites, but overall its a lot of fun to use recreationally.

Webcrawler

Back in the 90s, there was an all-out war for search engine dominance. While preparing for my AOL Gold article, I learned that AOL in the 90s bought the original search engine aptly called…webcrawler. This one was one of the OG search engines, older than Google or even AskJeeves. It was created in April 1994 , was bought by AOL in 1995, and has been passed around by a few owners since. Their current owner is System1 which is an advertising company. This company also used to own Waterfox, but they became independent in 2023.

This search engine is as basic as it gets. You search for any term, and you get results. Most of the results look to be ads, which makes sense because it is owned by an ad agency now.

startpage

Startpage is also owned by System1. It was the default search engine of Waterfox, though I don’t know if that is still the case. The front page is pretty slick. It gives you a lot of reasons to use it such as “we don’t track your searches!”

when you search with it, you get a lot of ads. Again, just like webcrawler, this makes sense. Its an ad company. I do like that if you search, it automatically shows a map of the closest places that might sell the thing that you are looking for, based on your location.

As for features, nothing really stands out to me. It lets you edit what country you are searching from in case if you want results you would normally never see, and a few appearance options. Between this and Duckduckgo, I think Duckduckgo is the preferred engine. I especially don’t trust it because it is owned by an ad company. They say that they don’t track searches, and maybe they don’t. But it is awfully tempting for an ad agency to do so.

Conclusion

This is all I have at the moment. I will keep this list updated as I use more search engines and see what sort of features they offer, along with any privacy concerns that may arise with them. Stay tuned!

Upgrading The Steam Deck

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Steam Deck is a truly marvellous piece of hardware. Running off of a version of Arch Linux, selling good specs at a low cost, it is a good deal for anyone looking to play their Steam Library at a low cost.

The best model, in my opinion, is the 64 GB model. It costs $399 USD, and is exactly the same as the more expensive models save for a smaller hard drive.

The Steam Deck uses NVME drives which, while not the cheapest, have insane performance. The one that I used to upgrade my Steam Deck was the “Silicon Power 1TB UD90.” This is not a sponsored post, but it was the cheapest one at that size, at around 75$ for one TB.

So lets compare prices…a 64 GB model + 1 TB hard drive upgrade will cost you roughly $475 USD. The most expensive model of the Steam Deck, the 512 GB option, is $649 USD. By getting the cheaper model you get 500 GB more for 174 dollars less, not counting shipping and taxes. Its better all around to just get a cheaper model, and upgrade it. So in this article, I will show you how to do this. Keep in mind that this is the base model, not the new OLED Steam Deck. As far as I know the process is the same, but I cannot vouch for it.

To do these instructions you will need:

A Steam Deck
The case that came with your Steam Deck
A Steam Deck compatible NVME SSD
A couple of screwdrivers, preferably a set of them
A USB that is at least 8 GB in size
A Steam Deck Dock

Without these things, it will be much more difficult to pull this off.

[disclaimer] I forgot to take pictures while upgrading my deck. My coworker and good friend Zach also upgraded his and took pictures along the way. With his permission, I included them with this article to make it easier to follow. Thanks, Zach!

step zero

Turn off your Steam Deck. I hesitate to really call this a step because it should be common sense, but you never know these days. Turn it off, don’t turn it on again until you are done switching the SSD out.

step one

Put the Steam Deck in its case. You might wonder…why? Well, the Steam Deck case is indented as shown below so that the Steam Deck will stay in place. It’s easier to keep it there rather than balance it on its joysticks, and a case comes free with every Deck.

step two

Unscrew all the screws on the back. There should be about eight of them. Four big ones and four little ones. Use the appropriate size screwdriver for both sizes. The small ones in my experience were a lot harder to get out and nearly stripped, but they eventually budged. Just be careful.

step three

In step three, you will need to take off the backplate. This will feel weird and unnatural, but just be careful. I use a pry tool to get it open. You can use something similar, or if you don’t have one, use a flathead screwdriver to open it up.

step four

You will now need to unscrew the metal plate. This is covering the SSD, so to get to it, it will need to be removed. Depending, this step might vary. In the instructional videos I consulted while doing this, they showed three screws. My plate only had two. Also, the insides looked a bit different from what was displayed in a lot of other articles and videos displayed. I think there is a little difference between the older models and the newer ones. Just make sure all the screws are out of the plates, take it off, and set it to the side.

step five

After the plate is removed, unplug the battery. In the interest of total transparency, I could not get the battery to budge, so I did not unplug it. I was a bad boy that did a very dangerous thing, don’t be like me. It is generally supposed to be removed in case if something goes haywire. I skipped this step and was fine, but if you want to be extra cautious you can do it.

step six

Unscrew the SSD, and take it out. The picture down below is where the SSD is located. It should come out at an angle. Take off the sleeve, and put it on your new SSD. Like the other SSD, it should insert at an angle. Insert it into the slot and screw it down.

step seven

Put everything back. The faceplate, the backplate, everything.

step eight

Plug your Steam Deck into your dock. The Steam Deck does not come with one automatically, but Valve sells one. Problem is, it sells for around 89$. Expensive stuff. I got an off-brand one for about 40 dollars.

Once the Steam Deck is plugged in, go to the SteamOS recovery site to download the image on another PC you own.

step nine

Now here you have a choice. You need to image a USB with SteamOS 3. They recommend using Etcher, but in my experience just using the Linux command to re-image the USB is better in almost every regard. For Windows users, I find that Rufus is faster than Etcher.

For Windows users:

Plug in your USB. Go to https://rufus.ie/en/ and hit download. Run Rufus as administrator, select the USB as your install device and Steam OS as the recovery image. Hit start, wait for it to be done.

For Linux users:

First, you will need to know what your USB is called. Use lsblk to find it. Most of the time it will be called something like sda or sdb. Exceptions occur, however.

Once that is done, enter (or copy/paste) this command:

1

bzcat steamdeck-recovery-4.img.bz2 | sudo dd if=/dev/stdin of=/dev/sdX oflag=sync status=progress bs=128M

Replace the X in sdX with whatever your USB is called. If your USB is called sda, replace the X with an a. if your USB is called sdb, replace the X with a b. You get the idea.

Step 9 is going to take a WHILE. It took my PC about 10 minutes to write to the USB I had.

step ten

Once it is done, plug in the USB into your dock and power on your Steam Deck. If you do not have a dock, use a USBa to USBc adapter, but mind your battery life. USBc is the only port the Deck has, which is what it uses for charging. It’s better to use a dock in case if your battery runs out. Also, your trackpads are unlikely to work so a dock will allow you to use a regular mouse.

The Steam Deck should not have anything on it, so it will usually automatically boot into the BIOS. If not, power it off again and hold down the minus volume button plus the power button at the same time. That signals to the Deck that it needs to boot into the BIOS. It takes a while for some reason. Mine took 10 minutes to load. Be patient, your deck is OK. I promise.

Once it is fully booted, you will be presented with four buttons. If you plugged your mouse into the dock, click on the Boot Manager option. You will see your USB listed. Click that, and it will begin loading into SteamOS.

step eleven

Wait for SteamOS to load. It took my Deck FOREVER to load. I thought I busted it. After 20 minutes of waiting, it finally booted. You will see an option to re-image SteamOS. Do NOT click reinstall. That option is to reinstall SteamOS while keeping your games. You have no games. This will likely not work. Click re-image, go through the prompted steps, and all will be well.

step twelve

Once it is done installing you will need to reboot. Shut down your Deck, unplug the USB, and turn it on again. You will need to sign in to your Wi-Fi and your steam account. Please note, it is likely that none of your buttons or thumb sticks will be working. Mine were not. The mouse will also not work because the Deck will be in gaming mode. Just use the touchscreen to navigate. It works fine.

Once you are logged into Wi-Fi, the Deck will automatically install all the needed updates which include the drivers for the controller. Once the updates are installed, reboot.

Congrats! Everything will be working, and you now have 1 TB of hard drive space to enjoy as many games as you could possibly want.

New theme added + some announcements

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Added a new theme to whoisthisjoker.com! Trust me, there is a reason.

So originally I used hugo.386 as my theme. It was awesome, and I loved it like crazy. If I had the choice, I would have made that be my permanent theme and I never would have changed it.

for posterity’s sake, this is what it looked like:

As awesome as it was, it did NOT play well with pictures. At all. Case in point: My youtube article. One of the extentions has this logo:

With the old theme, that same logo looked like this:

As you can see, the difference is night and day. 386 was my favorite look for a website EVER…but I cannot deal with the problems related to the images. These are simple examples, but when a picture that was more complex was included it always looked downright unintelligible.

I decided that, rather than struggling with the javascript of the theme to make the images look good, it would be best to just change the theme wholesale.

Choosing a theme was difficult. I looked at several, but either I couldn’t make it work or it was too difficult and messy to edit myself. I chose ink-free because it is relatively easy for me to customize, and add what I need to it.

Upcoming stuff

At the moment I am working on an article about customizing the Steam Deck. It is nearly done, but I need to add the images and make sure all the information is correct.

I love this thing, and since I have been on the road more often than not, I appreciate the opportunity to play Dark Souls in the passenger seat.

Bibliofile

Also, Bibliofile is nearly complete. I figured out how to go about page turning, scrolling, and bookmarking and in my test cases it worked just fine. However, it is not fully implemented. I just know that it works.

I ditched TUIkit. It had only one example, there was almost no documentation anywhere, and after several months trying to work with it I gave up and switched to Cursive, with Termion as the back end.

I chose this crate because it not only has LOTS of documentation…like really, a lot…and I can choose several backends. The default backend was ncurses which…yuck. NCurses, if you are unfamiliar with it, is extremely unsafe to use and I have to run my functions in unsafe mode for it to work. If I have to run Rust in unsafe mode, I might as well use C instead. No point in dealing with the frustrations of Rust if Im just going to use an unsafe library anyway.

Termion had lots of documentation itself in addition to Cursive’s documentation which is why I chose it as the backend instead of the other options. Plus I don’t expect that any end-users will have to install anything themselves to get it running, which is not the case for Ncurses. With Ncurses, you have to have it installed to have any programs using it run. Not so with Termion.

It looks like a DOS program, which is good because that’s what I wanted.

However, a major reason I started this program was because terminals make excellent dark modes, and I am looking into seeing if I can add color-changing and won’t HAVE to stick to blue and grey. However, minimum-viable-product is way more important.

Here is a sneak-peak of the program:

I hope to finish it by end of year, but life comes at you fast and things have gotten a bit wild in my life lately. Almost as much as the beginning of the year was. I am trying to work on it on the weekends and that system seems to be working for me. Needless to say, with how long I have been working on this, I am READY for this project to be completed.

Current TODOs:

Finish implementing page turning
finish implementing bookmarking
add buttons
finish library management system
add color options

Once it is done:

package it for Debian
set up download website for the tarball and Windows version(domain bibliofiles.net secured)
package it for Arch
package it for flatpak

Minimum viable product is nearly complete, but I have a long way to go, even after the programming is done.

RSS Feed now fixed!

Mon, 04 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The RSS feed now shows the full body of every article, as of today! For some reason, Hugo chooses by default to only include the description of an article in the RSS feed rather than put everything into the feed. This, obviously, defeats the purpose of having RSS to begin with.

To fix this, I had to create rss.xml under themes>installed theme(hugo.386 for this site)>_default. I then posted the following xml into it. rss.xml overrides the default rss feed with custom settings, so that if there is something you want to include/exclude, you can do so.

Now, I cannot take credit for this XML as much as I want to. Huge thanks to godo.dev[mirror] for providing an excellent tutorial on how to do this!

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26


<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
 <channel>
 <title>{{ if eq .Title .Site.Title }}{{ .Site.Title }}{{ else }}{{ with .Title }}{{.}} on {{ end }}{{ .Site.Title }}{{ end }}</title>
 <link>{{ .Permalink }}</link>
 <description>Recent content {{ if ne .Title .Site.Title }}{{ with .Title }}in {{.}} {{ end }}{{ end }}on {{ .Site.Title }}</description>
 <generator>Hugo -- gohugo.io</generator>{{ with .Site.LanguageCode }}
 <language>{{.}}</language>{{end}}{{ with .Site.Author.email }}
 <managingEditor>{{.}}{{ with $.Site.Author.name }} ({{.}}){{end}}</managingEditor>{{end}}{{ with .Site.Author.email }}
 <webMaster>{{.}}{{ with $.Site.Author.name }} ({{.}}){{end}}</webMaster>{{end}}{{ with .Site.Copyright }}
 <copyright>{{.}}</copyright>{{end}}{{ if not .Date.IsZero }}
 <lastBuildDate>{{ .Date.Format "Mon, 02 Jan 2006 15:04:05 -0700" | safeHTML }}</lastBuildDate>{{ end }}
 {{ with .OutputFormats.Get "RSS" }}
 {{ printf "<atom:link href=%q rel=\"self\" type=%q />" .Permalink .MediaType | safeHTML }}
 {{ end }}
 {{ range .Pages }}
 <item>
 <title>{{ .Title }}</title>
 <link>{{ .Permalink }}</link>
 <pubDate>{{ .Date.Format "Mon, 02 Jan 2006 15:04:05 -0700" | safeHTML }}</pubDate>
 {{ with .Site.Author.email }}<author>{{.}}{{ with $.Site.Author.name }} ({{.}}){{end}}</author>{{end}}
 <guid>{{ .Permalink }}</guid>
 <description>{{- .Content | html -}}</description>
 </item>
 {{ end }}
 </channel>
</rss>

How to bring back old YouTube

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

YouTube ain’t great anymore. It used to be THE way to watch online video. It had lots of features that I loved, recommended me a lot of videos that I enjoyed, and was generally pleasant to use.

That has changed in the past few years. The front page, which used to be to show you your subscriptions, now serves to show you TikTok re-uploads. Tries to get you on the infinite scrolling hamster wheel. Wants to steal hours of your day away from you while taking away meaningful features. In this article, I seek to show you some browser extensions that “bring back the old YouTube”

Now, this is a bit of a misnomer. You can’t really “bring back the old YouTube.” Some parts of YouTube, such as the recommendation algorithm, have changed too far for a simple add-on to fix. However, these addons will be able to assist you in giving it the old “feeling” and return some of the functionality that Google has removed. I will be providing the Chrome links to these extensions, but not the FireFox ones. The reasoning behind this is that most browsers(sadly) are Chrome-based, so the chrome versions will be more useful to more people. Most if not all of these addons exist in Firefox, so searching them up in the Mozilla addon repository will yield results.

Return_YouTube_dislike

This one is the most obvious one. In 2021, YouTube removed the ability to see dislikes. Chances are, you probably already have this extension. However, for the three people that do not have it, here ya go.

YouTube-shorts_block

Once upon a time, short form silly vids were not called memes, or TikToks, or anything else like that. They were just “videos” or if they got a lot of views, “Viral videos.” You didn’t get an infinite scroll filled with teenagers describing a scene as it plays out, providing no additional information. You didn’t have people dancing while singing about depressing news that you have already heard a million times, or those brainless “is it cake” videos. I am only 27, but I feel like an old man the way my hatred for those types of videos runs deep. They hijack your brain for maximum interaction and to get you to scroll as long as possible viewing the most milquetoast content possible. YouTube shorts blocks that by making them regular videos. Accidentally click on one? You won’t get caught in the endless scroll on accident anymore. No more brain hijacking.

Clickbait_Remover

The point of this extension is similar to the previous. Clickbait has been strong on YouTube since its inception. Remember when every thumbnail had a picture of a woman in a bikini? However, with popular YouTubers such as Game Theory, Mr. Beast, the Paul Brothers, they make that bikini-laden clickbait era look tame in comparison. This extension picks a random point in the video, changes the thumbnail to that, and gives the title reasonable punctuation and capitalization. This one is less to make it more like old-youtube and more to make YouTube less irritating to use. I thought I would include it, because when looking at YouTube in the Wayback Machine, clickbait was still there but way less prevalent than it is now.

Replace_YouTube’s_Home_with_Subscriptions

Once upon a time, YouTube.com would present you with your subscriptions. Somewhere along the way, they changed things to serve you recommendations, and hid away your subscriptions in a tab on the top left section of your screen. This addon redirects all requests to youtube.com to go to youtube.com/feed/subscriptions. Simple, yet effective.

YouTube_Redux

This extension is delightful to me! A few years ago YouTube redesigned their entire website to look more “modern.” That is, to make it use way more empty space, make YouTube as bloated as humanly possible, etc. This extension makes YouTube look like it did in 2014 and 2015, back when it still had a simple look to it.

Conclusion

With these addons, you get minimized clickbait, just your subscriptions, a lightweight look, no crazy thumbnails with that annoying youtuber face, etc. It ain’t perfect, but its better than vanilla YouTube.

As I was writing this article, it occurred to me how silly it is that we need this many extensions to give us a decent experience on the platform. YouTube used to be a great place, but every change seems to be designed to make it less and less reasonable. There are alternative video sites that have many of the old features, such as Rumble and BitChute, but these platforms are riddled with borderline nazis and antisemitic conspiracy theories. Until we can get a video sharing site that isn’t considered a place for “those who got banned from YouTube,” we will pretty much be stuck with modding plain-jane YouTube.

Bibliofile update

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 21:59:10 -0500

Bibliofile_update

v. 1.0 did not release over July 4th break, and I did not update with a new post. Shame on me. It is very hard to self-motivate on personal projects, especially when you have family coming over, and you are getting ready to celebrate something. I don’t really have a good excuse…and because this project is solely for me, I am the one that I have failed.

Anyway, I started work on it again. Having never used a TUI framework before, it took me a bit to figure out TUIKit. I kept trying to get a hello world setup working with it and I finally figured it out, as TUIKit does not have much documentation outside the crates.io page. The weird thing about the crates.io page for TUIKit is that it shows how to move text around on the TUI, but not simply display text.

Both use different methods to accomplish the goal, so it is very weird to me that they decided to showcase something more advanced instead of showing off the basics first. Even ChatGPT spat out nonsense when I asked how to make a hello world program for the framework.

To make a basic “Hello World” program in TUIKit, first you of course have to import parts of the library:

1
2


use tuikit::term::{Term, TermHeight};
use tuikit::prelude::*;

Then you have to write out the following code in your function:

1
2
3
4
5
6


fn my_func() {
 let term: Term<()> = Term::with_height(TermHeight::Percent(90)).unwrap();
 let _ = term.clear();
 let _ = term.print(0, 0, "Hello world!");
 let _ = term.present();
}

Line one initialized the terminal space you will be using. TermHeight sets how high you want the terminal to be. The second line clears the screen for you. The third line tells TUIKit what text you want to print, and where to print it. Line four is where TUIKit takes everything you have given it and displays it.

Please note that before today, I have never used it before, so this may not be the best way to do things. The documentation on this framework is sparce so this may not be the best way to do it. I am iffy on setting the TUI screen to 90% of the terminal space, as I am sure there has to be a module included in this crate that lets it take the whole screen. When I set it to 100 it panics and crashes. I will figure it out.

Movin’_git

I am now hosting Bibliofile on Gitea, which you can find at gitea.whoisthisjoker.com. My reason for this is because I simply do not trust Microsoft to act in my best interest as a hobbyist programmer. With GitHub copilot they are already violating GPL licenses for open source projects, and I am not interested in contributing to that. My new repository might feed Bard, Google’s AI, and I am not sure what to do about preventing that. Adding my git to my robots.txt might help some, but there is nothing preventing Google from just ignoring it.

The bright side is that, AI regardless, if Microsoft decides to get weird with GitHub I will not be affected. It is easy to argue that Github will always remain the same because it hasn’t changed too drastically since it started, outside a few new bells and whistles. It will not stay the same though. Big Tech in 2023 is constantly making changes nobody likes, and frankly I think it will eventually get to Github. Copilot is already an iffy change that upset a lot of people.

The problem with the modern internet is that it is too centralized…everyone hosts on GitHub, or if they are hipster, GitLab. By hosting my own, I can continue contributing to open source and not contribute to the constant centralization and potential censorship that causes.

What a month

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 14:31:17 -0500

Storms, broken cars, power outages, and more

This month has been absolutely insane. At the beginning, my car broke down. Twice. Once it wouldn’t crank, the second time the engine nearly blew. Both times it turned out to be a minor fix that the mechanic barely even charged for.

Then once all my car issues were resolved, stormageddon happened and took out the power in parts of Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. I was unfortunate enough to be caught in that storm.

Hopefully, knock on wood, nothing else insane happens in the two days we have left of June. Now that everything feels settled, I have resumed work on Bibliofile. Today, I switched the HTML parser from Soup to Scraper. Soup was about to be stop working entirely because the author of the library stopped maintaining it, and the way it did several things it was about to make it stop being supported by RustC. My two options were: start maintaining the library myself, or just switch to a different library. I decided that switching to a new library was worth the trouble.

It took me a bit to get it updated. Soup automatically parsed the entire page, but Scraper asks that you specify what tag you want to parse and saves that within a vector. I specified that I wanted everything within the HTML tags to be parsed (thats <html> and </html> for those of you that don’t know the language) and then I had to iterate through every item within the vector and output it to the terminal.

I have a four-day weekend this week, and if nothing goes wrong HOPEFULLY I will be able to do what I said in my last blog post and actually finish it. The plan is that I will switch from ncurses to TUIkit, as TUIkit is more compliant with Rust’s memory-safe requirements and will feel less “hacky” getting it to work. Once that is done I will implement a menu system that will allow a user to add books to their library, and select which ones they want to read. This will be more intuitive than adding a book via commands.

My next blog post will be posted on Tuesday night explaining whether I was successful or not in releasing version 1.0. Again, assuming the Lord is willing and the creek doesn’t rise. Stay tuned.

Bibliofile

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 23:22:50 -0500

Bibliofile: the new ebook reader

So, in December, I wrote out a plan to write 10 medium sized programs in order to get myself enthusiastic about programming again. Some very unfortunate events that took place in January ensured that this would not happen, as there is literally not enough time in the year to do that after three months of grieving.

So, I decided to change tactics. Instead of writing a bunch of medium-sized programs, I am writing one very big, well-made project. Bibliofile. It is an ebook reader that is all about running on the command line. I got a TUI library all up and running for it, and I am hopefully implementing it on Saturday.

Once I add a couple more features, I am going to officially release it, and package it for Cargo, Rust’s built-in package manager. Then, I am going to add a new branch for implementing the menu system which will be released in v 1.1.

It is nearly complete, and I am excited to have a full project nearly finished! I have a lot of plans for it, but basic functionality is first and foremost. Right now one can fully read an ebook with it, but there is no bookmarking got “go to page #” system. I will need to implement that at some point before the 1.0 release.

I am going to try and finish 1.0 on Saturday, but there are no promises. My car broke down last Thursday and I have been stuck at home ever since. Tomorrow I am going to try and put in the starter, but being a total N00B at car repair, I don’t know how long that will take. Hopefully I can get the starter replaced in an evening.

I have posted to this blog quite a bit since I moved to HUGO, but I will not be uploading again until my car is fixed. Again, hopefully I can get it done in an afternoon. First I need to disconnect the battery and remove the intake manifold, and then I can replace the starter. But, again, I am a total N00B. Removing/replacing the intake manifold could take minutes, or hours. After that I am free to work on Bibliofile all I want, and write as many blog posts as I want. We will see tomorrow!

Thoughts on Apples viewfinder

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 16:06:44 -0500

WWDC recently happened, and overall it was mostly boring. They announced widgets four separate times, a Snoopy watchface for the Apple Watch, and you can now set multiple alarms for Iphone. Neat.

Then the “One More Thing” happened, as it always does. This “One More Thing” was Apple’s revolutionary VisionPro. The VisionPro is an AR device that is meant to be the next step in computing. The tech behind it is neat…the M2 and R1 chip inside pack some serious firepower, and it can fade in and out depending on if someone is trying to talk to you. Cool stuff! It came with a price tag though…3500 big ones.

Now, I have a hot take…if you look at it from a purely technological standpoint, it is totally worth the price. M2 chips are expensive. There also is not an AR device with the same level of functionality as the VisionPro. However, do I recommend getting it? Absolutely not. There are a few reasons for this.

1. Privacy_reasons.

Remember years ago when Google Glass came out and everyone freaked out about the possible privacy violations involved with owning one? How it makes visual surveillance a guaranteed factor, even in the privacy of your own home? That is literally this, but for Apple. With this pair of goggles, Apple can see everything you see, and archive it. Someone want to share something private with you? Make sure that your goggles are off.

2. It_is_more_distraction

Imagine a world where instead of just living in the moment, you decide that you want to look at reality through your cell phone camera exclusively. Birthday parties, playing with your kids, vacations, etc. You never saw any of it IRL, but you saw it on your screen when you hit the record button.

That is what VisionPro is. Two screens strapped to your eyeballs that are meant to record what you do and provide AR functionality. Imagine your most treasured memories with your parents when you were little…then reimagine them with a pair of big ugly goggles on their face. That is what Apple portrayed as a big selling point of the product.

Imagine a world in which your kids no longer look into your eyes, because they are not visible. That loving look a dad might give when his son rides a bike for the first time? Gone because he was recording it with VisionPro. Parents should set aside the toys, set aside the gadgets, and enjoy life with their kids. Live in the moment.

3. The_battery_life

Let’s say none of this bothers you. You still want to wear them all the time and replace your computer with this thing. Guess what? You cannot. The battery life only lasts two hours. This is a severe limitation, even if you are on board with the idea. It will get better over time, but for now it is laughably short.

4. The_price

“Wait, didn’t you say that technologically it was worth the price?” Yes, I did. However, 3500 is still a LOT of money. I could get a car with that. I cannot see this taking off for a few years at least. During this adoption period app support is going to be limited, and therefore usability will be limited. It is a vicious cycle. If somehow you still think that owning one is a good idea, you might have to wait a few years, if at all, before companies and hobbyists really start to make things for it.

Conclusion

Overall, I think that while it is a neat idea, I think the sociological concerns are too big for me to want one. Life should not be viewed through screens. That is not a concern right now with how short the battery life is, but the battery WILL get better. Apple is betting on AR big time, and I think that they will eventually get it right for mass adoption. However, I think that viewing reality through screens is a bad idea. Call me a myopic technophobe, luddite, or whatever, but I think that it is just a darn sad product.

Hello world

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 17:33:52 -0500

Hello! I have moved my blog from Wordpress to Hugo. Some reasons for this is:

Hugo is faster.
It can run on Github Pages.
It costs less than self-hosting a server to run Wordpress on.
Hugo is more customizable than Wordpress.

Wordpress required either a subscription, or a server to run. I figured that there was little sense in me hosting it when Github is willing to host for free. As a result, I am moving it. Over the next few days I am going to update this site to add my old blog posts to it. I backed them up before getting rid of my server, so all that is needed is to get them posted here.

First things first, I need to figure out how this system works. This post is a sort-of test to see if it is working. I know that the blog post list on the front page was having issues, so I will need to work that one out. Will post more later.

(update: got the front page blogposts working. Now to figure out categories and tags…)

Why I switched to Linux

Fri, 19 May 2023 17:09:33 -0500

In 2015 Windows 10 was released. Two years earlier I had gained a Windows 8.1 laptop that I had a love-hate relationship with. I preferred using Windows 7 on the desktop because it was a more traditional desktop than what I had running on my laptop. Then, something magical happened. Windows 10 was announced. Details were sparse, but as an at-the-time Windows enthusiast I scoured every nook and cranny of the internet about the fabled operating system. I did not like the flat look, but Win 8 had that going on anyway. Eventually, it released. I downloaded it. It…sucked worse than 8.

Dashed expectations

Now here’s why it sucked: during the upgrade, windows presented me with two options. The first option was to wipe my laptop and install Windows 10 from scratch. The second was to keep my files and programs. Well, with lots of classic games on my hard drive, I did not want to lose my saves! I was new to computers, and backups were a foreign concept to me. I hit “keep my files.” After it installed I didn’t love it or hate it…until a week later. At the time I was studying Business Management at Paris Junior College. I had essays due for a couple of my classes, and like every red blooded American student I waited until the last minute to do so.

I finished one of my essays and hit save, then “x’ed” it out and planned on editing it after my next class. Big mistake. The essay was still there, but for some ungodly reason the start menu refused to work. I rebooted…and it seemed to work again. Later it happened again, and then again, and again. Each period of peace growing shorter and shorter. Eventually it got to the point where if I ran the computer for more than 30 minutes, the start menu would just crash and I would have to reboot. After consulting the Youth Pastor at my Church, who happened to be a tech junkie, he said it was because I opted to save my files instead of doing a clean install. To fix the bug I would need to reinstall Windows, at least according to him.

A needed change

That was enough…I decided that instead of messing with Windows, I would try something new. I heard of Linux and that the two most popular were Ubuntu and Mint. Mint had an user interface similar to Windows, so I opted for that. OH GLORY! OH LOVE! IT WAS MARVELOUS! My laptop had always been slow to boot even when I first got it. But with Linux Mint, it booted in half the time it normally would have. On top of that, it had a SOFTWARE STORE! WITH NOTHING BUT FREE SOFTWARE! I had not known about that before installing, and it was a dream come true for me.

The rest is history. Tinkering with computers got me into programming. That led me to changing my major from Business Management to Information Systems. I now write software as both a hobby and as a job. To think…if Microsoft wrote an upgrade system that worked, my life would probably look a lot different than it does right now.

Microsoft weirdness

Now here is what made me mad enough to make the switch. When I brought up that I used the option to keep my files, pretty much every tech junkie…both ones I knew online and in person…said that it was my fault for choosing that option. Eight years later and I still feel that this is incorrect. I currently use Fedora as my main operating system. They just released Fedora 38, and gave an option to upgrade. When I did this, all my files were safe. Backed up, like a good little techie should always do, but safe. nothing was corrupted, I ran across few if any bugs, and it certainly did not become unusable.

So my question is this…if Fedora…a much smaller company than Microsoft I might add…can write an upgrade system that doesn’t botch your system or your files, why can’t Microsoft? Microsoft is the world’s de-facto leader in operating system technology. For their faults, I still respect them. But WHY, oh WHY did the upgrade system suck so badly in Windows 10? I had no viruses. No worms, trojans, or any other kind of malware. I had antivirus and scanned for it. Nothing. It was the upgrade system that borked it all up. If anyone could write an upgrade system that worked, the company that charges over 100$ per OS license for billions of computers should be able to have the funding to write something that works.

Why I stick with Linux

Back when Windows 7 was a big deal, I was a Microsoft fanboy. The Aero themes, the backwards compatibility, the history of Bill Gates and the company’s founding, it really interested me despite the fact that all I knew about computers was how to write programs in LOGO^. So when 10 ended up being terrible, I was really let down. My view of Windows has not brightened at all. Recently a video about how much telemetry gets sent before you can even interact with the system was released. Its a lot. Like, really. A LOT. When Windows XP, or even Windows 7 was popular, it wasn’t that invasive. It would phone home to see if there were needed updates, but that was all.

With Linux, my computer is fully my own. Very little telemetry, if at all. It has high customization, and best of all it doesn’t require an account to use. Windows 10 or 11 cannot claim any of that. Right now, as I said before, I am using Fedora. It uses Gnome. Don’t like Gnome? Install KDE. Both of those too modern for you? Install GnuSTEP or IceWM. The options are limitless.

Windows just isn’t cool anymore. It is the Facebook of operating systems. The only reason anyone uses it, is because everyone else is using it. Personally, I choose to “think different.” To let my computer be truly my own. I decide what my computer does, not anyone else. If anything breaks I don’t get to blame the dev team…I broke it myself. That is freedom.

^Logo is a toy programming language, similar to Scratch. I learned it when I was 12, but didn’t learn any serious programming languages until I was 21.

AmigaOS C and lifting

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 18:18:25 -0500

January was a pretty sad month. I don’t want to get into too much detail, as I already covered what happened in the article Absence. TL;DR my mother died, and I have had a hard time coping with that fact. As much as I miss her though, life must move on and I am trying to find healthy ways to cope. What I have found, to my surprise since my last article, was that programming actually takes my mind off of everything happening and makes me feel a lot better. Still feel awful, but not AS awful which is good.

In other news, I decided I didn’t like the old theme which used ASCII art as its main thematic element. It looked retro, which I liked, but on mobile it tended to look bad. So I found a minimalist theme, which looks sort of like a UNIX terminal. Depending on how I feel after I am done testing it for a month, I will either keep it or try out a different theme. That’s about everything in my personal life…lets talk nerdy.

Icaros and BSD

I started off the week by trying out Icaros. It is an Amiga-like OS that runs on x86 hardware. The only one that I personally know of that runs on x86. Having been using Linux consistently since Microsoft ruined my Windows 8 install by upgrading to Windows 10 in 2016, I felt like I needed to try something more esoteric. I always wanted an Amiga, so Icaros is the next best thing. Its definitely been a different experience. I’m used to things being UNIX-like, and Amiga is a whole ’nother animal. It is not installed on hardware. My drivers simply do not work with it. I am instead running it in VirtualBox. I will update next week on how I am enjoying it.

After next week, I will likely be using a BSD system as it will be BSD week. This feels like an interesting experiment, so I will be installing it after playing around with Icaros for a bit. I have some experience in Slackware, which is the oldest currently-maintained version of Linux, but I didn’t like the way upgrades worked. Linux is not Unix, but Slackware is as close to Unix as Linux gets.

Lifting

Earlier this week I started bench pressing with my brother. I was able to press about 90 pounds, and I didn’t even feel DOMs the next day. Monday is my arm day, so I will bump up the weight to see how high I can get the weight. My end goal is to lose weight and reduce risk of stroke, diabetes, and cardiac arrest. I am currently 260 pounds, so through lifting, eating healthy protein, and cardio, I am hoping to reach 120 by the end of the year. Admittedly, 40 pounds is a lot of weight to lose. Its reachable though. The strat is to drink protein shakes with Almond Milk, eat lots of fish, and even more veggies while doing these intense exercises four times a week. By 2024 I will be 120 pounds again.

Fun stuff

As for fun, non-nerd stuff I have done, I went to see Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. I loved just about everything about the movie. Puss in Boots coming to terms that he only has one life left, learning to value friends and family more than personal achievement, etc. all feel very topical for me right now. It hit me in just the right spot emotionally. And Death? Death really stole the show. One minute Puss in Boots is fighting with swords, being dashing and debonair, and the next minute he is running in a horror-movie style chase scene.

I particularly liked Goldilocks’s character arc. When I saw the trailer I thought that she and the bears looked boring, but for me they ended up being some of the most lovable characters in the movie. Her arc dealt with loving family, and appreciating what she has instead of what she could have had. Her Yorkshire(I think) accent was also very funny. I usually think of Goldilocks’s voice as being sweet and innocent when I read the fairy tale, but the British accent works for her.

This is a Shrek spin-off?

Overall, I was surprised how un-shreklike it was. Shrek is known for pop culture references, gross-out humor, and crass jokes. Nothing wrong with that, but Puss in Boots hardly had any of that. It was still very funny, but I could tell that the writers were playing it more serious this time around. Thankfully, we still had Perro the…well…perro, and Jack Horner around for comedy relief. The ending also teased heavily that Shrek 5 is in the works, which I am excited for.

I’m hoping that they hire the team that worked on Puss in Boots: The Last Wish for it, because the Shrek franchise needs this kind of writing to thrive. They can keep the gross-out humor, pop culture references, etc. all they want. But ever since Shrek 3 came out, the characters stopped being the focus, and the gross out humor was the main attraction. Shrek 1 and 2 weren’t exactly deep. They especially didn’t tackle existentialism like Puss in Boots did. If they play it right and hire the right writing team, Shrek 5 could be the best movie in the series.

Thats all

Mini-review aside, that’s pretty much everything I have done this week. The plan is to keep working on June Text Editor, get familiar with C, and become a good programmer. My goal with this project is to start using C more regularly, since in college I almost exclusively did my programming in Python. Python is cool, but its not challenging. I get bored when I use it. It is also slow. I will keep working on it, and update this blog next week.

Absence

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 18:14:35 -0500

So, it has been a LONG time since I posted here. And, believe me, there is a reason. For the most part, I got too busy spending time with family, so programming instead of spending time with loved ones was not appropriate. For January, the reason was because my mother passed away. Early in the morning on January 5th 2023, I was programming. I got a call from my brother, which was weird because he normally doesn’t get up as early as I do.

I learned that my mother, who we had just spent the holidays with and celebrated her 53rd birthday with on the 10th of December, had a stroke. Originally, the doctors said that she was going to make it, but that she was going to be different. While this is awful, I was hoping that she would pull through and I would get my mother back. On the 7th, I learned that was not happening. At 7 AM January 8th, she passed on her own.

I am currently in grieving. I am going to try and get back on the ball and start programming again, but I don’t know how frequent I will be. The most shocking thing is that she was so young, and ate healthy. She ate primarily vegetables, and very little meat. She was diabetic, but switched to a low calorie/low sugar diet because she wanted to mitigate the effects. I don’t know a lot about diabetes. I am a programmer, not a doctor or dietitian. Still, it came as an absolute shock and I am feeling miserable right now.

The rest of the family is taking it pretty hard as well. Besides the now-private Velma post I made back in October, and my brief also-privated existential crisis post, I want to keep personal feelings off of this website. I want this site to be a place for my projects. Still, I felt I should post about what has been happening since it has been so long. The funeral is over, and the memorial service was last week. It doesn’t make it better, but now I feel that I should move forward. I am going to go through the Build Your Own Text Editor course and update you as I go through it.

It feels wrong to just get back to work on these things, but it has been a very long time. I can’t just shut down because she is no longer with me. Honestly, I don’t know what I want to do and programming is the only thing that comes to mind. Will post next week.

Programming for fun vs programming for work

Sun, 04 Dec 2022 18:01:58 -0500

Lately, I have been trying to get back into programming. In college I used to program all the time, urged on by the ever-present deadline. But, having been graduated for years now, I find that programming for fun tends to become harder and harder. Don’t get me wrong, I love writing code and seeing the fruits of my labor bloom into an usable product. However, psyching myself up to program, finish projects that I started months ago, and get something together is a lot harder than it seems. To solve this issue for myself, I am going to work on completing at least 10 big projects by the end of 2023, programming as a daily chore instead of just doing it when I feel like.

Actually_Doing_the_Projects

To achieve this end, I am going to probably drop the “man of mystery” theme because it is really difficult to talk about personal projects without linking to my GitHub. I will keep the domain name for now, but I may switch it to match my name instead. While I already have a personal website, it has been dead for months at this point so it may be better for me to just change the domain name and change the site’s name as well to reflect that. I will decide after a while, but until then that would only be a distraction from programming.

As for the projects themselves, I am going to start with finishing one I started in early November, which is a downloader for my Church’s streams. We always record the sermons using Audacity. But, every once in a while someone will forget to hit record. We give CDs of sermons to those that request them, but we need the mp3 format to burn the disks. This presents an obvious problem. When someone is new to the media team and hasn’t gotten used to doing the work, or perhaps if someone forgets their coffee that Sunday morning, they forget to record the sermon. Then when someone needs a CD to share the lesson we have to download and then convert the file.

The purpose of the program is to automatically download the audio from the streams, and save it as .mp3. For some reason though, it only wants to download them as .mp4, audio only. Its very odd its behavior. Upon doing some research, it seems that the reason it is doing this is because when you use the audio-only flag, PyTube (the library I am using to download the audio) automatically uses the mp4 format instead of letting you specify which format that you want. There are ways of getting that to work, but I have not added in those methods yet. You can keep up with that project by looking at my GitHub account. The link will also be in my about page.

Future_Projects

The purpose of this goal is to do ten projects of at least medium scope by 2024 is to get me comfortable with programming for fun again. Like I said, the first project will be finishing an already existing project. The next project will probably be Android focused. I believe that mobile programming is the future because while not everybody has a desktop or a laptop, everyone DOES have a cell phone. Also, I want to do something using machine learning and the Electron framework at some point. I will decide on those projects when I get to them. In the meantime I will provide updates on this blog every Saturday.