May 20th '96

Well, I'm back after like 2 years. I keep leaving the site dormant for long periods of time but I also always come back. Some links are dead and some information is out of date. Hopefully, in the next few weeks, I'll be able to fix the broken links and update old information as well as adding more articles. I have some personal electronics projects I plan to work on and I might post info about those as well since it might help somebody.

My life is pretty solid right now.

May 1st

I was thinking. Most of the bad stuff in life is free of charge but the good stuff is much harder to find. You have to prepare yourself assuming you're going to get f*cked at every turn, and if you do that, then you're ready for it when it happens.

How many times have you stepped in shit, or stubbed your toe? Now, how many times have you found five dollars on the floor? I'm willing to bet that the average person has stepped in shit, or stubbed their toe, many more times than they have found five bucks on the floor. It's because when someone finds the five bucks, they take it, and it's gone. (Not to mention for you to have found it, someone else lost it). In comparison, the toe-stubbings are an infinite resource. You want another? You can have as many as you like, they're free. You see what I'm getting at? This is true in real life and also in a metaphorical sense. You're more likely to come across inconveniences than you are to come across good luck. Now I'm not saying this to be pessimistic. It's not really a big deal, anyway. But what I am saying is, think about your life and what you do, and if you can have redundancies, and redundancies for your redundancies, then that's a good thing. When you have a backup plan for your backup plan you don't worry so much.

I'm writing in my notebook, I'm making bullet points of some various things I'm doing and working on, and under each one I'm gonna write down a reasonably likely worst case scenario and see if I can figure out how to avoid that or deal with it if it happens. I think I've learned my lesson from all the years of ignoring the fact that things might not go my way.

I hope that makes sense. It's just that recently I got screwed a couple times and I realized it could have been avoided or I could have minimized the damage if I'd been a bit more quick to act and had a plan from the start instead of being afraid to confront the problems. It seemed like I preferred to let things just happen to me, for some reason. I don't know why I'm like that. But I think learning to just figure I'm gonna get shit dumped on me from the beginning will be good in the long term. When it happens I'll be expecting it and I can at least close my mouth so I don't swallow the shit-dump, and if it doesn't happen, then that's a nice thing, too.

January 19th 1994

As usual I haven't updated the site in a while. But I'm still here.

October 31st

I am very busy these days. I want to start updating this site again, but I don't know when that will be. Hopefully, it'll be soon.

June 18th

I heard that it's possible to have different color themes for your site WITHOUT using javascript. I'd like to see if I could get it to work here, that should be pretty cool. here is a link to a tutorial for doing that if you're interested.

I made some more updates today. A few cosmetic changes, and some more content. The articles section will probably get split up into separate pages pretty soon as I start filling it up. I'm also using much smaller images now on some pages to save data. I want my site to be able to load reasonably quickly with a 56k connection. So some images that don't need to be very big can just be 100 or 200 pixels on a side. Dithering can save space, in other cases using a slightly lower jpeg quality can be done as well.

It was pretty hot today so I left the house and found a place with AC to get some work done.

I'm planning to write some more about cameras and film. Maybe I can include some helpful recommendations. In a similar vein I think I may put up something about what to look for when buying a cassette deck.

June 17th

I redesigned the look of the site a little bit, like I always do, but this time I actually did add some more content. I'm working on a guide to choosing a Web browser for a more '90s experience on my articles page. I have also put up some of my thoughts on privacy and using a password manager which I will update and clean up. I'll start putting things onto their own pages.

Please check out my music page as well. I gave it a unique design and I embedded some cool music videos on the page. I have to say I think the page looks pretty cool now.

I think I have a problem with brevity when I write stuff. I tried writing some of my thoughts down to make helpful articles from them, but I'm worried that they're kind of long and drawn out. Maybe people will see that much text and decide not to read it (even though it only takes a few minutes). I assume that most people have very short attention spans these days, so if the article is helpful it should be pretty short and to the point. But I also don't want to skip over any potentially useful information. And I also don't want to waste people's time or cause people to spend more time on the internet instead of outside or reading an actual book (or any number of things that are better than being online). I'll try to revise and condense some of these pages if I can. What do you think? Feel free to leave a comment in the lounge if you want.

Have a look at this article titled "Cultivating the Real World over our own Digital Space." I thought it was interesting to read.

June 6th

I was on saint-images.neocities.org which is a neat site, by the way, and I noticed that there was a link to my site with a button. I've been meaning to make a button but I never got around to it yet, and it looks like someone else beat me to it. Frankly, seeing that made me feel pretty happy. Looks like whoever made it (maybe the owner of that site? I'm not sure.) used the World Trade Center image that was previously on my front page as the background design for the button. Now I kind of feel bad that I changed the image on the main page since it looks like it maybe has no connection to my site. But I change the image all the time, anyway. I still like the button:

I think it looks pretty cool. So thanks to whoever made it.

May 24th

I put up an articles page, but it's still blank. I've always wanted to write some useful articles but I can't really think of anything to write.

same day as the previous post

There. I restructured the blog pages. Previously I had multiple pages and I thought it was a good idea to limit each page to 10 entries, but then if I added a new post, I'd have to move the oldest one off that page and put it in the next page, and then from THAT page, move the oldest post to the page after that, and so on. So you can see it would quickly become a headache.

I think I don't need to limit it to 10 entries per page, anyway. So now I have a current page with mostly new entries but then I put some of the older ones onto separate pages, sorted by year. I think this should work well, as time goes by I can just make a new page for a certain year and put all the entries there in one move.

2021-05-12

I recently removed links to the site updates part of my page. I've pretty much stopped using it since I realized it didn't really serve any purpose. I never look at it anyway, so I may as well get rid of it and not have to worry about maintaining it anymore.

I would like to do something more with my site. But as much as I've always wanted to put some better content up, I've never gotten around to it.

I also need to change up the blog pages. I need a system that requires less work to update every time I add a new post.

Also I think I'm going to remove some blog posts and stuff that aren't comfy. Too much negativity in my life. I may as well get rid of some of it from my site. There, that's a little better.

2021-05-10

I recently updated Pale Moon (my Web browser) to version 29. I heard that with this version they've dropped support for older add-on types or something but so far all my add-ons seem to work just fine.

2021-03-27

I've been using my browser's element inspector functions to modify the CSS of sites I visit so I can write my own user styles. They're not very good but I might try to refine some of them and publish them. I would like to write a set of userstyles that make some commonly used websites look like a site from the '90s, it'd be cool.

2021-03-35 | How I get music online. Refilling inkjet printers.

I just added a small section in my music page about ways I download music online. Please check it out and see if it helps you!

Also, my cheap junk printer ran out of ink. The printer was, no joke, only $20 and it came with a couple "starter" ink cartridges, and it costs like $30 to get new ink. There are people who actually buy a whole new printer when they run out of ink, I've heard. It should be illegal to sell stuff like that for various reasons. But anyway, you can actually refill these inkjet cartridges on your own.

I heard these cartidges take, generally, 5mL of ink in them. I just checked on eBay and it looks like HP sells these for $27 for two cartridges. So you're paying about $15 per cartridge, and that works out to something like $11,000 dollars per gallon to put it in terms of gas prices. lol. What a ripoff.

But my point is, you can refill them pretty easily. I saw videos of people buying bottles on inkjet ink for $20, and you just take a syringe and put a little ink back into the cartridge and you can print with it again. So for $20 you can refill your ink dozens of times. Maybe hundreds, but I'm not sure, but either way you're saving a whole lot of money and a whole lot of waste. I'm thinking of getting one of these refill kits, if I do, I will take some pictures and see how it turns out and let you guys know so you can try it too.

2021-03-24

I'm adding links to more Neocities sites and I will also add buttons when I can find them.

I am still trying to get a job. I haven't worked in a while. I'm still in school but I prefer having a part time job. Having a decent job really enables you to do so many more things. When I think about it, I realize that basically all the hobbies I want to do need me to spend money on them so it's nice to have an income.

2021-03-22

I don't think there are even any decent imageboards left at this point.

2020-12-06 | Great Article from DigDeeper

https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ghost/corona.html

2020-08-11 | Writing "good" HTML

I doubt that my site is by any means a shining example of good HTML, but even so I make an attempt to write clear HTML and follow the standards. Not everything is perfect--for example, the < center > tags I like to use are considered "obsolete".

I encourage you to validate your HTML. You can upload files or paste text into the validator at validator.w3.org/ and it will tell you anything that doesn't properly follow standards.

2020-05-15

I noticed some people have passed through the Lounge and left some comments. I'm happy to know people are reading my site. Hello, everyone!

email me at floppy@airmail.cc.