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Webmention (W3C Recommendation)
Dec 19, 2024 A simple, standard way to send or receive notifications when content is referenced across the internet.

Posts

HTML5 Canvas Tips programming html5 canvas tips

Dec 2, 2024
The <canvas> element may be the best thing to happen to HTML since <marquee>. I’ve been using it a lot for various projects recently and thought it’d be nice to collect some of the tips and tricks I’ve learned into once place.
Booting Sun SPARC Servers retrocomputing sun-sparc

Poking NVRAM like it's 1994
Oct 4, 2024
In early 2022 I got several Sun SPARC servers for free off of a FreeCycle ad: I was recently called out for not providing any sort of update on those devices… so here we go!
How I Back Up Google Photos datahoarding self-hosting zfs photoprism truenas

Using ZFS and Photoprism
Jun 28, 2024
Google Photos is wonderful. It backs up my photos and videos, tags them, and makes them available to share with my family.

But I also don’t trust that Google will never accidentally “loose” my photos. Here is the process I use to back up my Google Photos data to a self-hosted instance of Photoprism.
Reverse Engineering a Windows 95 Game Part IIIprogramming reverse-engineering ghidra

Editor Mode, and Conclusion
Feb 1, 2024

I recently rediscovered an obscure 1997 Simon & Schuster / Marshall Media edutainment game for Windows 95 that I played as a kid: Math Invaders. In this part, we’ll investigate whether we can enter an “editor mode”, hinted at within the strings contained within the program. There’s even a ✨surprise ending✨ that I didn’t see coming!
Colloquial Skeuomorphisms linguistics

Everyday Phrases That Don't Make Sense Anymore
Aug 18, 2023

Language is strange – why do we say “hang up the phone” even when using a cell phone? This page documents some examples of “skeuomorphisms” in our common vernacular.

I’ll be updating this page as I come across more!
Reverse Engineering a Windows 95 Game Part IIprogramming reverse-engineering ghidra

Reversing (Undocumented) Settings
Mar 16, 2023

I recently rediscovered an obscure 1997 Simon & Schuster / Marshall Media edutainment game for Windows 95 that I played as a kid: Math Invaders. In this part, we’ll investigate disassembling and reverse engineering the binary to identify an undocumented settings file format.
Reverse Engineering a Windows 95 Game Part Iprogramming reverse-engineering

Reversing Asset Storage
Feb 23, 2023

I recently rediscovered an obscure 1997 Simon & Schuster / Marshall Media edutainment game for Windows 95 that I played as a kid: Math Invaders. Let’s reverse engineer the game a bit and see what we can find; are there any secrets, unused assets, etc?
PowerShell Profile Instant Prompt programming powershell

Sep 29, 2022
Recently I began using Oh My Posh for PowerShell 7+ (pwsh). One thing I noticed however is that it takes upward of a second to activate in my pwsh $profile. Let’s dig in and see if we can’t improve that.
How I Built This Website, And How to Do It Yourself Part Iprogramming meta

Static Websites with Jekyll
Aug 22, 2022
Sidneys1.com is built statically using Jekyll, and then published on the world wide web, GitHub Pages, Tor, and IPFS. How is this all accomplished, and how can you host your own website this way? Let’s walk through it step by step. We’ll be looking into (over the course of several posts):
- Building a website with Jekyll
- Hosting on NearlyFreeSpeech.net
- Customizing the site layout and adding useful features
- Hosting on GitHub Pages
- Hosting on IPFS
- Hosting on Tor
Retro Roundup 2022 retrocomputing collecting

Jun 3, 2022
Here’s a quick roundup of the retrocomputing projects I worked on and devices I’ve acquired! Since this is the first year I started collecting retro computers, it will also contain a few items that I’ve had for over a year as well.