rozodru

yeah mine ends the end of this week and I won’t be renewing. I have my own domain with a couple email accounts attached and I’m thinking of switching to Purelymail. as far as VPN goes? leaning towards IVPN.

edit: nvm found out Purelymail is US based, went with mailbox.org instead. very easy setup process and everything is already configured.

it’s a lot more than wordpress…

well i’m getting out of FOSS due to AI and contributions with it. I don’t want to touch code anymore.

Instead this past year I got REALLY into retro computing. buying old PCs and Macs and stuff from the 80s and 90s and fixing them up. So I think i’m good on the hobby front. modern computing and coding? no, i’m done. I don’t want to write another line of code ever again. but the hardware? fixing motherboards and stuff? yeah that’s fun.

and this is why I’m retiring in two weeks. They don’t get it, they never will. my work as a contractor trying to code review their slop and telling them what they needed to change fell on deaf ears. they cut me a cheque, thanked me for my time, and it was onto the next company/startup to perform the same song and dance.

i’m done. I’m done with the tech industry. 25 years just poof, gone. I’m in my mid 40s, i’m single, i own my condo, i’m done. I’m going to sit on my ass all day, play videogames, and clear out my codeberg and delete everything. I’m not even going to work on FOSS stuff anymore, i’m not going to maintain anything, I’m not going to contribute. I’m done. I want nothing to do with this crap.

probably a hell of a lot. I do a lot of travelling for work and thus I’m always connecting to open wifi spots (with a vpn naturally) and many times my browser won’t pick up the capture portal automatically so I use example.com or neverssl.com to trigger the capture portal. It’s also the site I use to a very quick/dirty internet test.

I imagine most people use it the same way.

so they paid peanuts for something they’ll likely continue to do.

I had completely forgotten just how awful microsofts websites were back in the early 00’s. Gates saying the site kept timing out or would go down all time is very much true and happened with everyone. Microsoft’s website would CONSTANTLY time out. downloading ANYTHING via microsoft was an absolute crap shoot if it would actually download or not.

I remember having a computer in the late 90s that only came with Netscape. In order to play games like X-Wing vs Tie Fighter online more easily than direct IP connection to someone you had to use Microsofts Internet Gaming Zone. in order to use that you HAD to have Internet Explorer, it wouldn’t work with Netscape. So you’d have to spend an entire day downloading IE and MOST of the time the download would time out or crash so THEN you had to use a download manager to prevent you from losing progress on the download for when Microsofts site would go down which again, was constantly. updating the OS was even more painful as again Microsofts online service would always go down.

If you think Microsoft is bad now, man it was A LOT worse back in the day for reliability.

i don’t even use menus anymore. it’s slow. heck I even hate using the mouse these days. We had the right idea back in the 80s and early 90s by running everything via the command line. it’s faster. Now to open stuff I just use a launcher. it’s faster to type what I want to run then it is to use a mouse to go find it in a menu.

building a browser from scratch is just an insanely difficult task to begin with. Building a browser from scratch tailored to each specific platform instead of doing something like QT is just idiotic. There’s a very good reason why the majority of todays browsers are forks of Chromium or Firefox and why very few are their own from scratch. Building a web browser is probably one of, if not the most, complicated bits of software to build other than building an OS from scratch.

I’m not a fan of Kagi, I can’t justify paying for a search engine especially after honestly trying it and getting mediocre search results. I was optimistic about Orion but after following the development for awhile I knew it wasn’t going to pan out. they spread themselves too thin on that project and it sows further doubt for Kagi overall.

I’ve also been trying to find more physical media lately. I’ve also recently gotten into “retro tech” for computers and other things. I’ve seen a huge uptick in that lately. It’s fun to go back to PCs I used to use in the 90s and early 00s and get them working again. and in most cases, all the parts and stuff still work just fine. I’ve started going to shows and small conventions for retro computer stuff and seeing what other people are working on and restoring is awesome. Seeing people getting old 30+ year old computers working with modern-ish Linux is really cool.

I just finished a project rebuilding a PC with parts from around '97 and '98 that is currently running Windows 98. thing booted on the first go after everything was put together. zero issues. Also because of this stuff I’ve learned to fix motherboards and finally, after decades of promising myself to learn how, I’ve learned how to solder. that stuff is fun. repairing motherboards and other various boards, switching out chips and capacitors, its REALLY fun.

it’s not really an “answer” to chatgpt or other LLMs at all. it’s a workspace. you still have to plug your own AI into it be it locally hosted or subscription based.

It’s like saying “PewDiePie has made a FREE Engine Mount that looks to be an answer to Honda’s Civic Engine” that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.