Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

Before the advent of TCP (Transfem Communication Protocol), infodump data was often relayed by GGCP (Girl to Girl Copy) via PPP (Puppy to Puppy Protocol) links.

And if your typewriter has the keys your coding language uses. Oops. Using my '54 Royal QDL for math expressions and HTML just got more challenging.

Someone needs to make & sell removable SSDs openly standardized as 3-inch (7-cm) square wafers, together with removable SSD receivers (internal & built-in on laptops and tablets!), that look & work just like floppy disks & drives from days gone by.

The convenience of USB thumbdrives, without the drawbacks of laptop dongles, tiny & easily lost media, & "Which one of these stupid things did I put the files on!?"-itis.

Pictured: 3-inch square wafers of the past as real-world disks & TV props.

Maybe an animate inanimate as the talking PNG? A magic wand for magical girls who once thought they were boys? (And also not just for girls & boys?)

Google Maps is frequently & surprisingly wrong when it comes to rural addresses, & it has been since the beginning.

However, today I found out it's also terribly & hilariously wrong with directions, too, on roads the Street View car cased. It told me to turn down a gated dirt driveway, one that was explicitly & obviously a private driveway whats gate was shut to Google's Street View car, to get to another street on the way.

Isn't this why everyone ditched MapQuest?

The insides, although pretty much entirely proprietary, is surprisingly accessible. The only things needing a screwdriver to remove are the expansion cards.

The most annoying proprietary problem is the CD/DVD cable: I'm pretty sure it has the right number of pins for an IDE cable, but both ends are smaller and the pins thinner and more closely spaced than standard IDE connectors.

Also, the DVD-ROM drive is the only thing with a date code I could find: It was made in 2000.

Some photos taken with a Sony Mavica MVC-FD51 by an amateur photographer.

IBM Deathstar

I spent this evening falling down the rabbit-hole of S.A.M., the program "Software Automatic Mouth" for the Apple, Atari, and Commodore 8-bit computers made in 1982.

(More specifically, the JavaScript port at https://discordier.github.io/sam/ .)

Merry Ostara and happy first day of spring 2026, everyone!

(With this being what the first day after winter looks like, I'm genuinely worried about what summer will bring.) (Re-edit corrects alt-text mistake.)

Some random trivia living rent-free in my head:

The Fisher Price Laugh & Learn Game & Learn Controller knows the Konami code.

This video thumbnail image passed through my stream. To me, it looks like two cartoon race cars competing with each other over who can make better race car noises with their mouths. #FacesInThings #Pareidolia

Boxing Day
AKA
Christmas for Cats

Cookies *are* enabled, you daffy box of scrap metal! What I have blocked are *cross-site* cookies!

Why do you need me to save and send cookies to every random corner of the Web *except* the one I'm trying to read, just to prove my humanity to a bot? Why, especially, when the site you're blocking *doesn't* need cross-site cookies.

Related, the best movie website design is still online, having migrated slightly over the decades:

from spacejam.com/index.cgi

to spacejam.com/jam.htm

to warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm

to spacejam.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm

before finally moving into its retirement home today at www.spacejam.com/1996

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

/usr/ports/games/sl/

The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.

Today it's Microsoft's turn to be the somebody else's computer that goes down worldwide. News is saying Azure and 365 were down and are starting to come back up, but Microsoft's support website (support.microsoft.com) is still down for me as I post.

Tonight, an era ends.

After 32 years, you can no longer try AOL dial-up for any hours free.

AOL Help, captured by the Internet Archive, 2025-09-30, "Dial-up Internet to be discontinued": https://web.archive.org/web/20250930230532/https://help.aol.com/articles/dial-up-internet-to-be-discontinued