Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

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

A fascist state does not declare its fascism by announcing that it has become a fascist state.

A fascist state declares its fascism by announcing that antifascists are the enemies of the state.

CBS News, "Trump signs executive order calling antifa a 'domestic terrorist organization'": https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/trump-antifa-executive-order-domestic-terrorist-organization/

Thanks! You're a real IT pro!

The reality of landing on any website firewalled by ClownFlare, long before the "AI" scraper bots became the scourge of the Wild Wild Web, with untrusted, untrustworthy, and unauditable JavaScript either unsupported or forbidden from running roughshod over my PC.

Even when landing on websites that either don't need JavaScript to work or don't even use JavaScript themselves.

So I had x11/bitmap, `magick file.xbm +level-colors "[foreground]","[background]" -strip file.png` in my notes, and a stupid thought clawing its way out. To be fair, it's false yet almost true again in the worst way: Just substitute Canonical for AT&T.

After spending way too much time on these shenanigans, I've come to the conclusion that it's much quicker, easier, and more successful to install Windows 3.1 on MS-DOS 6.22 than it is to install it on FreeDOS 1.4.

Even after trying every fix I could find (short of learning how to install a dev system specifically for rebuilding a DOS kernel from source, toggling a single option I don't understand), Windows refuses to start because it can't find a file that neither it nor FreeDOS installed.