Don't blindly believe everything you read online, tempting as that is. Do your homework first. This video series will help you do it well: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtN07XYqqWSKpPrtNDiCHTzU
new blog post!
https://lina.sh/blog/hijacking-e164-arpa
i hijacked some telephone infrastructure of a few islands over the span of multiple months; and accidentally logged information of a few hundreds of thousands of phone calls going to military bases in the process..
it's a really really silly story :P
re: No-AI TTS question
I was recommended RHVoice, and that seems like the most ethical option for voices.
RHVoice: https://rhvoice.org/
The second most ethical voice option seems to be abandonware SAPI 5 voices on the Internet Archive, virtually all made in 2010 or earlier.
And I can use Balabolka's command line utility, balcon, in both Windows 7 and Wine to make the voices speak plain and SAPI 5 XML text into .wav files.
Balcon: https://cross-plus-a.com/bconsole.htm
new blog post
what to do with a retro computer?
SlopHub AI
I found what appeared to be the perfect tool for my need on GitHub, & the code seemed slightly off but not rancid.
So I checked out the author: The avatar is a floppy disk with two notches near the shutter & barely-Latin letters. Well, crap, so just how slopped is it?
It has a .gitmodules naming a URL. Follow it down: Same author & now claude. It has a casual file committed with the author's home URL: It peddles a Discord with a DALL-E bot. Slop!
I hate that I have to do this now.
The Aesthetic Rebellion
Bonus speedpaint: https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/miniFantasyTheater/066.html#bonus
Netscape Navigator 3.0 was released 30 years ago today.
As I mentioned in my post on the 2.0 anniversary, what you knew of as "3.0" had internally been slated to be the "2.1" bugfix release, to be soon followed by a 3.0 release based on the Collabra...
https://jwz.org/b/yk-2
Dial-up ISP tale
Suddenly remembering that I saved more than one dial-up customer from meeting the same fate with the "as seen on TV" MagicJack devices sold at the nearby Walley World, shortly after Vonage faded from TV screens.
Dial-up ISP tale
Suddenly remembering that time I had to explain to a customer why their dial-up Internet access quit working.
It wasn't because they got Vonage. Not per se.
Remember those woo-hoo "people do stupid things" commercials? Yeah, them. Vonage is a VoIP service which, like all VoIPs, needs high-speed Internet access to work.
It was because they canceled their expensive telco/DSL bundle in favor of the cheaper Vonage for phone calls and dial-up Internet.
rad
less javascript in the world is a great thing
AI, BitKeeper
Related forum thread: https://users.bitkeeper.org/t/experimental-bazel-branch/1213
AI, BitKeeper
So it turns out BitKeeper is still a thing (yes, Linux greyhairs, _that_ BitKeeper), and Open Slopware lists it as an alternative VCS:
https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware#user-content-version-control
Even more amazingly, it's still being updated. However, I regret to inform that its lead dev was slop-shotted, its only side branch was slopified last Friday, and PR#15 is open to pull it into main:
https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper/commit/0b292334aa83fdb434d84f3e8715a0a43e1fdac1
Some pre-slop forks already exist:
https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper/forks?include=active&page=1&period=5y&sort_by=last_updated
Travel Oregon (via YouTube), "Only Slightly Exaggerated" [1:30]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doVV1a7XgyQ
✨ Kind 'Net Help Desk fairy by day. ✨
✨ Weird & furry Unix fairy by night. ✨
✨ Sometimes a retrocomputer fairy. ✨
✨ Pays the ComputerFairi.es bills. ✨
✨ Sparkly✨shellscript✨princess. ✨
✨ Age: Mere days younger than ✨
✨ the Intel 4004 & Unix 1st Edition. ✨
✨ Follow requests welcome. ✨
✨
✨