Internet Archive
Do you know that the modern web browser can access real musical instruments? With the help of Web MIDI API, we can create a web application that can access MIDI devices connected to our computer. In this article, I will explain how I use Google Sheets as a music sequencer for composing and playing ambient music with a hardware synthesizer. Next thing you tell me browsers have an API for gamepads and joysticks connected through the game port.
A browser(/web) engine essentially takes in a URL(/etc) and gives you it rendered into a window for you to view and interact with. <shadow> does this too, almost entirely from scratch, made in JS. It runs in your browser! Node backend soon™ too? The host browser(/etc) is only used for networking (fetch) and renderer backend (<canvas>). I feel like I have opinions, but I can’t express them. This is equal parts genius and madness.
So you ended up with this JavaScript quirk where it was possible to create unique URLs that ran a bit of JavaScript on whatever page you happened to be looking at. It could even make changes to that page. Move things around. Replace words. Open links. And pretty early on, people realized that these JavaScript URLs were also bookmarkable, just like any other URL. And, crucially, easily shareable as links. I had almost forgotten about these things.
Meta is preparing to charge EU users a $14 monthly subscription fee to access Instagram on their phones unless they allow the company to use their personal information for targeted ads. The US tech giant will also charge $17 for Facebook and Instagram together for use on desktop, said two people with direct knowledge of the plans, which are likely to be rolled out in coming weeks. The move comes after discussions with regulators in the bloc who have been seeking to curb the way big tech companies profit from the data they get from their users for free, which would be a direct attack on the way groups such as Meta and Google generate their profits. Is anyone really stupid enough to think that even if you pay, Facebook won’t monetise your behaviour anyway? Sure, you might not see ads, but paying customer or not, your data is still going to be used for literally everything else Facebook does. I hope people don’t fall for this nonsense.
Twenty years ago, a group of friends shot a Matrix fan film on a limited budget. Sharing their creation with the rest of the word initially appeared to be too expensive, but then they discovered a new technology called BitTorrent. Fast forward two decades and their “Fanimatrix” release is the oldest active torrent that’s still widely shared today. That’s amazing. When reading the headline, I assumed it’d be some copyrighted blockbuster – not something the creators actually wanted to share via BitTorrent.
I’ve always been fascinated by remote island communities, and few places are more remote and more island than St. Helena. They have a wonderful page about communications to, on, and from the island, and it’s delightful. However you connect, the Internet on St Helena is slow and expensive! For technical details and pricing information please contact Sure. Assuming you are a visitor you are best to access the Internet via your mobile (cell) Device. Otherwise you will not have a telephone account so will need to use one of the few Internet Kiosks, mostly in Jamestown, which are very expensive. If you are staying longer you can sign up for an Internet access package, billed on your telephone account (this should be available even if you are renting accommodation but check with your landlord). Broadband Internet was introduced in 2007, but be aware that data transfer speeds on St Helena are considerably slower than in most other countries and monthly data transfer limits are very low. None of the above will be surprising. There’s tons of information and history on this page, and it’s definitely worth a read.
This repository is part of the GoSub browser project. Currently there is only a single component/repository (this one), but the idea will be that there are many other components that as a whole make up a full-fledged browser. Each of the components can probably function as something standalone (ie: html5 parser, css parser, etc). In the future, this component (html5 parser) will receive through an API a stream of bytes and will output a stream of events. The events will be consumed by the next component and so on, until we can display something in a window/user agent. This could very well be a text-mode browser, but the idea is to have a graphical browser. Any new browser project has a certain “madman” quality to it, and I’m sure GoSub is no different.
Servo, the Rust browser engine originally developed by Mozilla, has posted an update about the project’s progress over the past month, and there’s a lot of good stuff in there. While our WebGPU support is still very much experimental (--pref dom.webgpu.enabled), it now passes over 5000 more tests in the Conformance Test Suite, after an upgrade from wgpu 0.6 (2020) to 0.16 (2023) and the addition of GPUSupportedFeatures. A few WebGPU demos now run too, notably those that don’t require changing the width or height on the fly, such as the Conway’s Game of Life built in Your first WebGPU app. On the CSS front, floats and ‘white-space: nowrap’ were previously only supported in our legacy layout engine (--legacy-layout), but now they are supported again, and better than ever before! Floats in particular are one of the trickiest parts of CSS2, and our legacy version had many bugs that were essentially unfixable due to the legacy layout architecture. On top of this and other improvements, Servo’s reference browser now also comes with a new user interface, and it comes with a location bar! Keep in mind this is not supposed to be a full-fledged user interface comparable with Chrome or Firefox, so don’t expect the world as a user.
Back around the time I convinced my family to switch from a 56 kb/s dial-up modem to ADSL, the website milliondollarhomepage.com was launched, and quickly became an Internet phenomenon, selling pixels for advertising space on a 1000×1000 canvas. 18 years later, the homepage is still standing, proudly displaying the Internet billboard of 2005, frozen in time. Some time ago I bought one of the expired domain names the page points to, pixels4all.com. In this post I’m exploring this Internet garden. This whole thing was such a massive hype back then, but since it took place about a year before I became the news-post-person around here, I didn’t actually remember if OSNews covered it, and it seems we didn’t. It’s definitely a fun exercise to look back at these pixel links, and actually owning one of the original domains is amazing.
Regular readers will know that I have a lot of love for the French Minitel system and own a couple. In the past I’ve written about using a Minitel 1B as a terminal and replacing the EPROM in a Minitel 2 to run custom firmware. Today I’m going to blog about a project called Minimit. The Minimit is a small, Minitel-shaped box that attaches to the Minitel’s DIN port and brings the Minitel experience back to life. The box contains an ESP32 which talks to the DIN port outputting Minitel-compatible text and graphics. And the graphics and letters appear slowly just as they would have in the 1980s. Minitel is such a fascinating topic and technology – Teletext, but more versatile. I’m so glad people are keeping it alive like this.
Ichido is a set of experimental search engines and software projects created by Anthony Mancini. The flagship project is the Ichido general purpose search engine, a classic search engine with its own independent index. Now, indexing the web is hard and this is in beta so the search results aren’t exactly what you’d call competitive, but I have to say – the user interface for this search engine is downright fantastic. It emulates that late ’90s look, and does a very interesting thing where it adds buttons for things like RSS feeds and social accounts for the pages it links to in the results. On top of that, it will list less desirable features of websites – trackers, ads, etc., as red warnings. No, this can’t replace DDG or Google – but I love the thought put into the UI.
In the year 1999, Bandai announced the MobileWonderGate – a device which allowed connecting a WonderSwan to the Internet thanks to a collaboration with the mobile network NTT DoCoMo. This was primarily used by a selection games to provide downloadable content, as expected for this type of handheld attachment. … Oh, it also came with a web browser supporting a subset of HTML 3.2, tables, GIF images, reading Japanese websites, a bookmark system, and cookies. On a handheld competing with the Game Boy Color. Did i mention it also acted as an SMTP/POP3 e-mail client? However, this browser assumed you’re on NTT’s network; it utilized a special service called “mopera”, short for Mobile OPErator RAdio. Unfortunately, on the final day of 2004, this service was shut down. Since then, nobody could use a WonderSwan to browse the web, which naturally is the kind of injustice that just cannot be left uncontested. Hardware and software will never be buried by the sands of time as long as crazy people like these exist.
The Brave web browser has carved out a niche over the past few years as an alternative to Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and other mainstream web browsers. Some of that has come from its marketing as a privacy-preserving web browser, and it has also been repeatedly evangelized by cryptocurrency enthusiasts. If someone recommends Brave to you, you should ignore them, because they are wrong. Brave Browser is a mess of a software project, and the company building it is even worse. Do not use Brave. It’s a Chrome skin from a slimy company peddling crypto schemes, building an ad network, hijacking the URLS you type to get affiliate money, ran by a homophobe. There are so many better and less sleazy alternatives. Use those instead.
I’ve never used Zoom or similar tools, but I know it’s extraordinarily popular in the business world. You’d make a good one if you informed whomever is responsible for IT at your company that using Zoom puts your company’s data at risk.
The “enshittification” of social media started around 2016, but it reached new highs in 2023. All chronological feeds and hashtag importance have given way to narrow-AI algorithms and recommendation engines. The result was that reach has become impossible for the common user, and many art creatives lost their livelihoods. Enter the Fediverse. From Wikipedia: “The fediverse is an ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other.“ This system has some advantages: It is almost impossible for governments to shut down in its entirety. User load can be shared among different servers (“instances”). Different instances have different rules, so you join the one you agree best with. Generally no spam and fewer bots. A non-aggressive environment as users get along better. No telemetry or ads. Everything is chronological so there are equal chances to be seen, no weird recommendation engines here. As for the disadvantages: Some instance admins are too twitchy, and can block other servers on a dime (my main gripe with the system). Some users are too sensitive for some topics, and require you to self-censor. The system probably can’t sustain more than 10-20 million active users, because not many people have the expertise to run their own instance and pay for the financial costs before donations start rolling in. If your instance goes down, you’ll have to migrate and re-acquire all your followers from scratch. Your family and friends aren’t on it, and probably never will be. Here are the Fediverse alternatives to the classic options: Alternative to Twitter: Mastodon The biggest federated environment with over 2 million active users. Great for “toots”, and small-sized blogging. Very actively developed. While there’s an official app for it and a third party one called… Shitter, and FediLab, the best way to view it remains the web browser. Alternatives to Mastodon: Pleroma, Diaspora, Misskey/Calckey (they mostly interoperate anyway). Alternative to Reddit: Lemmy Since the latest Reddit shenanigans Lemmy has jumped to become the second most used fediverse service. Still under active development, but it works great and it has all major Reddit features. People there are much nicer too! Alternative to Lemmy: Kbin (they interoperate, so Kbin content is available on Lemmy, and vice versa). Apps: Jerboa, Lemming, LiftOff, Summit, Connect. Alternative to Instagram: Pixelfed A bit slow compared to the other fedi services, but it’s unique in getting the original Instagram experience. As an artist, I love it. PixelDroid is the mobile app for it. Alternative to Youtube: PeerTube Well, there’s TilVids, and then there’s everyone else. TilVids doesn’t want to federate with everyone else, but it does have the most interesting videos (particularly of Linux interest). Spectra.Video and Diode.Zone are also great options to move your videos at. Just note that bandwidth is limited in these free services, so it’s best to upload in 1080p instead of 4k. There are 3-4 mobile apps for it. Alternative to Medium/Wordpress/SubStack: WriteFreely Not much to say here, a very modern editor that acts as blogging and article publishing service. Secure Messaging and IRC/Discord alternatives: Matrix Matrix is secure messaging end-to-end with Element.io being the main provider. It can also act as a community messaging server. Nostr and Jami are the newest such services on the block, but they’re a little bit weird to get into, I still prefer Matrix. Alternative to TikTok: none Thank the Olympian gods! Finally, the best way to deal with some smaller instances going down and losing your account is to get 1-3 different accounts on different instances. I personally have 3 Mastodon accounts, 3 PeerTube ones, and 2 Lemmy/1 Kbin ones. I used an older $70 phone (Moto G5 Plus) where I have installed the free, and very private Murena /e/ OS. It’s a totally de-googled Android OS (more so than LineageOS) that uses the iOS UI paradigm. In it, I use three app stores that only carry open source apps: F-Droid, IzzyOnDroid, and Obtainium. I avoid as much as possible from installing from the Aurora or the included App Lounge app stores that use the Google Play Store. The OS uses the open source microG service to replace the Google Play Services. So, I have almost completely left behind the normal social media and moved on to the Fediverse (apart from FB messenger with my mom, and a couple of special-interest subreddits via my laptop). You see, after leaving OSNews 15+ years ago, I became an artist. And social media was the way to get sales back then. I started with Tumblr, and later Instagram and FB. Overall, I had amassed about 340,000 followers across all social media. Sales were good for a while. Then, the enshittification started. The biggest blow was Instagram removing the chronological feed and hashtag importance, and little by little only superstar accounts were pushed by the recommendation engines. By 2020, it was near-impossible to survive online selling your art. Now, I don’t have any illusions that the Fediverse can replace the golden era of social media (2010-2020). I have calculated that you need a minimum of 100 million active users for various niche business to survive under a fair social media system. And currently, the whole Fediverse only has about 14.5 million accounts, with only about 2.2 million being active. In fact, I don’t expect the fediverse to ever achieve more than 10 million active users… And yet, I prefer to stay on it. It’s simply a more fair system. It’s not a corporation that changes its policies at a whim, or sells your data. I rather use a “lesser” system in terms of reach and maintain my mental health, than battling Instagram’s algorithms all day long (“no, I don’t want to shoot useless vertical short videos”). So, come on and join us on the fediverse. The more the merrier! Note: OSNews is very active on the Fediverse. We have the main OSNews account which posts our stories,
There’s a specter looming over the realm of Mastodon, and it’s the ghost of computing’s past. A loose group of retro computing hobbyists have taken it upon themselves to build Mastodon clients for various operating systems. Developing web clients using the technology of the 80’s and 90’s is a challenge, but the following projects have proven that their devs are up to the task! Should we find ourselves in the unlikely scenario where an apocalypse happens, people can still post to Mastodon using retro PCs. This is an impressive list, and demonstrates the skill and dedication you can find in the retrocomputing community.
Today, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has added 802.11bb as a standard for light-based wireless communications. The publishing of the standard has been welcomed by global Li-Fi businesses, as it will help speed the rollout and adoption of the data-transmission technology standard. Where Li-Fi shines (pun intended) is not just in its purported speeds as fast as 224 GB/s. Fraunhofer’s Dominic Schulz points out that as it works in an exclusive optical spectrum, this ensures higher reliability and lower latency and jitter. Moreover “Light’s line-of-sight propagation enhances security by preventing wall penetration, reducing jamming and eavesdropping risks, and enabling centimetre-precision indoor navigation,” says Shultz. The technology can work using regular lighting points, but you won’t see any flicker or strobing, since it uses infrared. I honestly like the idea of every light fixture in your house being a network access point, but I’m also getting flashbacks to using IrDA to sync PDAs to PCs, and what would happen if you obstructed the line of sight.
Apollo, the popular Reddit app for iOS, could face millions of dollars in fees as a result of Reddit’s new paid API model. According to an update posted by developer Christian Selig, Reddit could charge Apollo roughly $20 million per year if it continues operating at its current scale. Reddit announced changes to its API policy in April, which allows the platform to put limits on the number of API requests made by a third-party client like Apollo. But now, we have more details on what exactly this means: Selig says Reddit plans on charging about $12,000 per 50 million requests. Reddit looked at Twitter and thought now that’s how you run a business.
The United States surgeon general, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, issued a public advisory on Tuesday warning of the risks of social media use to young people. In a 19-page report, Dr. Murthy noted that although the effects of social media on adolescent mental health were not fully understood, and that social media can be beneficial to some users, “there are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” The surgeon general called on policymakers, tech companies, researchers and parents to “urgently take action” to safeguard against the potential risks. I don’t think anyone sane really needs to be convinced of the dangers of poorly-run and terribly moderated social media like Twitter and Facebook, but I do wonder why the supposed dangers stop at the age of 18? If we look at the past 10-15 years, it seems like to me the people who most easily fall prey to misinformation and targeted troll campaigns on social media are people of older generations, who then proceeded to to incredible damage to our societies in voting booths – something that can still get a lot worse in the coming years. I have no idea how to fix any of this – social media will always exist, and so will its dark side – but we better start thinking of something, fast, because I’m afraid the damage to our society we’ve seen so far from gullible idiots falling for obvious nonsense on social media is only going to get worse from here on out.
Outlook on Windows has very much been the Internet Explorer of email clients. The Outlook desktop app on Windows, along with the Windows Mail app, were the only reason developers had to continue building emails with HTML tables. (Outlook apps on macOS, iOS, and Android are unproblematic.) Tables within tables within tables… It’s well past time that Outlook got a proper update, and it’s finally here. The new Outlook switches rendering engines from Microsoft Word to Edge. Support for CSS features in the new Outlook application appears to be identical to that of outlook.com, which is a great leap forward. I had to read that quite a few times before I really internalised that yes, Outlook for Windows used Microsoft Word to render HTML emails.
