Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released 30 years ago today

According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the "What's Cool" button in the toolbar. (A couple days later, Jim Clark would go ballistic in a company-wide email because I had included a link to Bianca's Smut Shack.)

For those of you who are unaware of these finer details, 0.9 was the first release of the Netscape browser (which begat Firefox) available to the general public. This beta release was an unannounced surprise. Prior to this, everyone assumed that what we were doing was going to be a standard for-sale product where you sent off your $35 and then some time later got a disc in the mail with a license key. That we just said, "Here's our FTP site, come get it, go crazy" was, at the time, shocking to people.

These anniversaries keep piling up, so I don't really have a lot to add, but check my NSCP tag or the Previouslies for more, particularly the links in this one.


I'd still like to find a way to run a mid-90s vintage Unix version of the browser under emulation on an M1 Mac. I asked about that a while back but was never able to Make It Go.


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Hot Pi

Dear Lazyweb, at what temperature should I be concerned that a Pi 4 is too hot? There is here-say that the NIC is "qualified" to 70°C and the CPU to 85°C, but what does this mean in practice? Am I likely to see malfunctions at 71°C, or are the error bars wide enough that another 10°C doesn't matter?

(As per "vcgencmd measure_temp".)

Previously.

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Never underestimate the bandwidth of a pocket full of fingernail clippings

It was time to do some upgrades on the club's flyer screens. In the past, I had done that by ssh-ing in to each; turning off "Overlay"; rebooting; doing an update; turning on "Overlay"; and rebooting again. It was slow and error-prone and often ended up with a bricked system.

It was a real "what the hell am I doing" moment when I realized that 32GB microSD cards are now $3.50 each, so I just imaged each of them at home, then replaced the screens' digital-fingernail brains.

This was still tedious, since they do not each run 100% the same image. They each have "hostname" set differently, because otherwise I don't know how to associate them with the URL that they should load. But doing one install and then dd-ing it a dozen times saved a lot of grief.

Also it occurred to me that I had never written up how our flyer screens actually work, so I did that. There are many "Digital Signage Solutions". This one is mine.

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Current Music:Crows -- Healing ♬

Binding source IP on AWS

Lazyweb,

My tinyproxy installation is making outbound connections using my machine's primary IP instead of the IP to which the connection was made. How fix?

I have an "Amazon Linux 2023" instance with several IP addresses: Private IPs 172.[ABC] bound to public IPs 3.[ABC]. The Elastic IP dashboard shows them associated to each other. Connections from the outside world to 3.[ABC] are received by the host. However, when I connect from localhost to tinyproxy on 172.C, the outgoing connection has source IP 3.A instead of 3.C.

ifconfig shows only the one ens5 interface, bound to 172.A. I tried creating a /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ens5:1 to bind to 172.C but "ifconfig ens5:1 up" says "Cannot assign requested address".

How am I even receiving connections on 3.C / 172.C when ifconfig does not list it?

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Here is your demo version of Energize for Solaris

I got an email yesterday asking if I had a working copy of the Lucid Energize Programming System for HPUX. I do not! But I dug around and I found a demo version of it for Solaris, as well as a few other ancient CDROMs. Let me know if you get any of these to run!


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XScreenSaver 6.09 out now

XScreenSaver 6.09 is out now, including iOS and (maybe someday) Android. Please see Previously:"Your personal information is very important to us."

Two and a half new hacks this time, by me: Kallisti, High Voltage, and Headroom now has a suit.

After Jared made me that amazing Apple of Discord, I couldn't resist turning his model into a screen saver, so now your computer can launch a thousand ships while you're not even there. He also modeled the suit.


Update: Great news, everybody! Google has approved the updated XScreenSaver for Android Privacy Policy. I assume that this means that they find it 100% factual and endorse it entirely.

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Fallout Cyberdeck


This is very pretty! But...
  1. Anything claiming to be Fallout-themed that does not use a CRT is invalid.
  2. For both the claims of "it's a Faraday cage", and, "because of that it will survive an EMP"... Wow that is very much [citation needed].

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Enumerating objects... Counting objects... Compressing objects... Using up to 4 threads... Receiving objects... Resolving deltas.... Updating files.... Fast-forward....

It's always entertaining when movies inspire real-life user interfaces.

Office Space came out in 1999. Git came out in 2005.

And the git developers managed to exactly replicate the user experience from the movie. This simulation has such fidelity, you can tell it was a labor of love. Great job everybody!

This is the future we were promised, and this is the future we got.

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The time_t is now

Debian: 64-bit time_t transition in progress:

The goal of this transition is to ensure that 32-bit architectures in trixie (whether they are currently release architectures, or out of archive, etc) will be capable of handling current and future timestamps referring to times beyond 2038. [...] The implementation of this plan [...] involves mass-NMUs of > 1200 library packages to rename them for (presumed) ABI-breaking changes.

Here's a glibc roadmap of one possible solution, which sounds pretty sensible to me. It's not clear to me whether Debian is doing that, something else, or a combination.

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Web browser retrocomputing

Dear Lazyweb, I momentarily got interested in being able to run the primordial browsers because there was a screen shot I wanted to make. I took a brief crack at it, mostly failed, and gave up. How about someone else does the legwork on this? Some or all of the things that I would like:

  1. Tell me how to get my Emularity upload of the Mac versions to have networking.
  2. Tell me how to get that same disk image running in BasiliskII on macOS 14 M1 to have networking.
  3. Figure out how to get the Emularity to boot Red Hat 5.2 i386 in order to run the Unix versions of the browsers.
  4. Tell me how to install Red Hat 5.2 in UTM / Qemu. It just gives me a UEFI prompt and never boots the install floppy.
  5. I'm guessing the "emulate Red Hat" approach would be easier than convincing a Raspberry Pi to execute i386 a.out executables, but maybe not?

Previously, previously, previously.

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