textfiles.com
textfiles.com
textfiles.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSWqx8goqSY&ab_channel=Chris...
I'm glad everyone else seems to have had positive interactions with him also.
I appreciate when someone young or curious reaches out to me for context or questions because I did that throughout my life and I always appreciated when it was rewarded with a response. I try to be the person I always hoped was on the other side.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU
GET LAMP: The Text Adventure Documentary (shot in 1080p)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU
and (apart from his many talks) his podcast "Jason Scott talks his way out of it" which is just gem after gem of documented tech ephemera.
It's baffingly hard to quantify how many people he (and all the other great people at the Internet Archive) has affected with his bullheaded conservation efforts.
Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/jasonscotttalks
So great.
Initial post: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/989
Post about goatse: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1011
More: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1012 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1127
Moral: HOTLINKING BAD
I think the moral is rather that hotlinking is dangerous.
I've known Jason for years from the old scene and was one of the old school original (uberspace) textfiles mirrors, which was hosted on a modified Cobalt Cube running NetBSD from my 22nd story apartment (Golden Gate Apartments) in SF, which at the time, happened to include free internet on a full T1 back in 2002!
@textfiles, thank you for continuing to bring joy to the world. Personally I've most recently enjoyed your MAME archives as I'be been building Retropie boxes from Arcade1Up cabs to play the classics with my daughter. Thanks for all you do.
That doesn't reflect my experience. If you buy fancy single origin beans, the taste varies wildly from region to region. I think within a region the taste differences mostly come down to roasting, but an Ethiopian and Kenyan coffee aren't going to taste the same at all.
To me the best quickie coffee explainer I've seen is https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52d4cb70e4b0ba94ab0ae... . The coffee control diagram is basically everything you need to tell a new wannabe coffee snob.
> Fact: Unless you are buying some major debris, bean quality is not very important, as compared to 1-3 and 5.
I’d wager that it doesn’t matter how nice your beans are, if they were roasted a long time ago, ground a long time ago, and brewed with unclean equipment and poor quality water the bean quality matters not at all.
Even then, the file explains:
> Fact: The prepackaged stuff you buy in supermarkets is major debris, (in general).
So if you are using supermarket coffee, you can at least grind it yourself and try to use decent water.
So obvious, yet so important.
I'm not a water snob or chemist but I've been around.
What qualifies tap as "good" is highly subjective but on the one hand you have places like Florida where the tap is desalinated and tastes like farm runoff, and then you have places like Southern California where the mineral content/hardness of the water itself makes it taste like soapy bathwater. I've even noticed it vary within the same municipality-- in two apartments I rented in Atlanta, one mile apart, one had tap that tasted fine, the other (near a swamp) tasted like sewage (we were convinced groundwater was seeping into the water main).
In cases of hard water, the brewing process seems to serve as its own distillery that separates minerals from the water. The resulting water/coffee tastes fine to me but you'll find all sorts of mineral buildup clogging your coffee maker if it doesn't have its own filtration system (my Cuisinart has a filter-on-a-stick that lowers into the water tank).
Nothing seems to make Florida water palatable though. That taste passes straight through into the coffee, like burned urine. Use distilled.
I've yet to be convinced that subtly in wine and coffee flavor is an objective matter.
I'm a supertaster myself-- certain pungent/sour tastes will literally make me gag; I don't like foods with a million different components since I can taste all of them quite clearly. My wife on the other hand will smell things on the wind (like smoke) that I'll only notice 5-10 minutes later. I hear there are others who can see gradients of colors that others cannot.
> wetting the filter before you make your coffee
This isn't really voodoo, but it is debatable whether it matters for such a low volume. Since no filter fully expresses the fluid it absorbs, if you put exactly 4 cups of water through a dry filter, you're not getting exactly 4 cups of water out of it. The result might be a stronger cup of coffee (since there is less water to dilute it). Wetting the filter gives you a more "accurate" result, but you'll get a consistent cup of coffee either way if you commit to either always wetting it or not doing so.
This matters more for things like oil changes, which is why after changing your oil filter and refilling the oil, you're supposed to run the car for a few minutes to operating temperature and check the oil levels again-- the dry filter will have added to the total capacity of the engine block and soaked up some of what you thought you put in.
The big difference that wetting a filter has is that certain filters have a slight taste associated with them. If you wet the filter first and throw that water away you get a cleaner/brighter cup without the paper filter adulterants.
You'll taste paper bag, I guarantee it.
For example: http://textfiles.com/100/black.box gave me "application/vnd.previewsystems.box".
Full access for first-time callers. We don't want to know who you are, where you live, or what your phone number is. We are not Big Brother.
Although it is not the type of artificial intelligence work people usually pay me to do, my passion is knowledge representation and automatically extracting meaning from text. textfiles.com looks like a great resource. Thanks for posting this.
This french soup recipe is a gem. I didn't know that I could use "3/4 cup of COCA COLA" to make onion soup.
"International Cooking with Coca-Cola", a give-away pamphlet from The Coca-Cola Company, 1981
It feels like a bait and switch to me because search used to yield more interesting results, and social networks did relatively little to get you to buy something, but as their precision in achieving their commercial goals have increased that is no longer true.
Back in those days a place like textiles would be an aggregator on a fairly small internet. Most of those content types can be found with their own larger more focused niche sites.
Like ahlzeimers? It doesn't make sense that the graphics heavy world would have less personality than the constrained world of text.
Some of the larger zines (like Phrack) still exist, but only release new ones every few years. Back in the day (90's) it was every month!
If you are on Windows, I have written a nice modern gopher client: http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-wind...
That said, Cameron Kaiser has done so much to promote gopher, I don't feel it's fair to redirect people away from his site though.
http://telehack.com/
"You can telnet directly to Telehack on the regular telnet port of 23.
"Open a command shell and type
telnet telehack.com
"See http://telehack.com/telehack.html for more information."
Poking through the posted site... I still remember when I discovered this[1] circa 1993-ish. It was the funniest thing ever back then.
It's a lot harder to explain the whole "anarchy" obsession that shows up in the files, though. Maybe that kind of loser attitude would make you "cool" and "a tough guy" back in the 1980s and the 1990s. Or at least that's what the file authors thought.
That attitude was indeed cool and definitely not loser back then. It was “anti-The-Man”, much like the Anonymous movement whenever that was... 10 years ago?
The world was a different place back then. I was 7 in August of 91, too young to remember or have experienced much of the world but I do remember the culture of pre-9/11 internet being starkly different from that of today.
That would explain some things, then. Indeed, those writings have a lot more in common with the pre-Soviet "nihilist" movement than anything relating to anarchism as it would be understood today.
The new web is commercial, monitored, controlled.
There is a version of communism that says that people should live in a local community that helps people who need it. As long as someone who doesn't want to live that way has the reasonable option to leave, this is actually pretty hard to object to.
There is a version of anarchy that says that all laws and taxes should be at the local level and furthermore that some localities might then choose not to have any, or only the most basic ones like a prohibition on violence. It's almost the same thing -- pretty hard to object to when people have the option to exit.
What they have in common is that they can't exist when you have a central government de facto prohibiting them. There might be some real efficiencies in a commune that has its own doctors, but that doesn't really work if everybody there still has to pay twice the cost of their own community's doctors in Medicare taxes. You can't have much of an anarchist collective if the feds are still arresting anybody who tries to sell pot brownies or break DRM so they can repair their own tractor.
So people have been looking for ways to shed the yoke of central power for a long time. The US was practically founded on it, both in terms of why the revolution was fought and how the constitution was laid out, but the forces of centralization have been hacking away at those foundations and doing what they can to destroy the "laboratories of democracy" of Brandeis for a long time now.
Is it really that surprising that people were excited about a then-emerging opportunity to potentially take some of it back?
It's a sign of the times. The mid-to-late 1980s saw a very conservative shift in politics that continued into the 90s-00s.
Once the whole "anarchy" thing started manifesting in real ways (numerous domestic shootings/bombings) by the mid-90s it was pretty dangerous to be associated with.
Can you expand on this? I used to be active in the demoscene 2 decades ago, but haven't really kept up lately, how have they changed?
As someone who grew up in the BBS era I am often nostalgic for it because everything felt a lot easier to grasp and much more simple, but in truth the amount of information out there and easy to access is many orders of magnitude higher these days.
On the discussions side of things, there are actually decent independent forums still hanging around. They are usually hobby-oriented or for cars (shoutout to any fitfreaks) but they are pretty good quality.
Somewhere along the road the medium changed partly from text to video, this was initially surprising to me, but on the whole isn't particularly important.
Then Reddit ate the forums, and I'm not sure what happened to the blogs, but they don't feel the same either.
So they got spread out, got sold out, and overshadowed by louder people doing the same except with ads and for money.
I totally skipped over some bits of Internet history, but the point is, it used to be more open. Maybe harder to use and smaller. But it wasn't all being funded by gigantic ad corporations. Because the platforms they provide may technically seem capable of providing the same ground as for textfiles, they're also continuously pushing on their users to behave in certain ways to optimize advertising profits. And that kind of sucks the life out of everything, it seems.
http://www.textfiles.com/apple/wiztips4.txt
I wish I was five years older and to have experienced the Apple II bbs era instead of getting an old hand me down //c in the early 90's and not having the cash for a modem.
I remember this era. I wish I could transport all my younger friends to those days. They seemed more...humane, and mysterious. There was an optimism and exhilaration about computers that seems all but snuffed out.
And Jason Scott is a saint.
Thankfully I didn't blow my face up/go to jail for terrorism.
Stuffing a pile of dot matrix printouts of this and similar stuff into a backpack and reading it on the school bus was pretty exciting stuff for 12 year old me and a few friends.
The fact that is was mostly ludicrous or tongue-in-cheek for the writers was, of course, mostly lost on us at that age. Although the pay phone paperclip trick was real and sure was helpful for calling home after a day of skateboarding around empty parking garages.
Closed in 2006 but looks like it was archived it here : http://ivanlef0u.fr/repo/madchat/
My internet connection blocks most pages of the site as "Adult content", presumably because it has bomb making instructions on, and the UK government is tetchy about that kind of thing nowadays.
Interesting which early internet acronyms survived and which dropped out of use.
e.g. I haven't seen PMJI (Pardon My Jumping In) (at least not in a decade, if ever).
Notable absences from the early days: IANAL / IANAD
Love it. My wife gestures all the time. I'm going to show her how boring it is based on an ASCII document from the 90s :-P
Everything else was plain ASCII over serial connections with modems between two devices.
> It can hardly be beleived that Apple would put out an overpriced product that works halfway and not be willing to fix it or at least offer our money back.
Ha, just you wait.
(Former IIGS owner, owner of many Apple devices before and since.)
For some reason, the original is gone. That's his sequel.
I tracked down the links to the saga:
This archive is an amazing glimpse at my youth.
> If you've got some old disks that have files you never did anything with, please consider sending them or a copy of them to me. That stuff is precious; and it is rare; and it is finite. That's what matters.
I'd suggest emailing him at jason@textfiles.com . He has the equipment to transfer most types of disk, and can also guide you through the process if you don't want to send the disks away.
Some examples here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_element#Implementation
But bad for us :(
Love your work.
Most arguments are BS but still keep popping up:
- heavy on the CPU (not with anything after 2006)
- hard to setup (not with LE + ACME)
- I don't process information (that doesn't matter/is not the reason, DPI, MITM come to mind)
- browsers can't handle it (lies, browsers handle it fine, unless you're using a browser from <2010)
Better yet: even if the resource/browser stuff were relevant, you can still leave http up and add https as an option.
To be fair, a lot of Jason Scott's audience is people who might choose to use ancient browsers on obsolete platforms.
Again, people might come up with the argument that it's their own problem if they get abused, but also that is just not the reality we live in; any compromised system can (and will most of the time) be used to infect/compromise/attack other systems.
And if you don't want to exploit the browser or the hardware, you can still simply inject a self-refreshing iframe in to the plain text html stream and have that z80 act like a (slow) proxy so you can do things that will point to that Z80 being the 'origin'.
Everybody assumes that 'simpler' or 'reduced' systems are always safer, but as soon as you deal with external interfaces and the outside world, that goes out the window. Lynx was thought to have less of an attack surface because it just did basic text-based browsing with HTML and not much else. Turns out that wasn't the case either.
Ok, I guess that explains downvote to my post. I was just wondering. Cause now we can get free SSL with let's encrypt. And since traffic and be hijacked and modified, it just seems to make sense to have a site that serves text files to have ssl.
this comment mentions their provider inserts ads in non-https traffic.
right in the feels.
Not sure if serious... just rotate the device into landscape. Or stick to old Apple][ / C=64 stuff.
As for hurting your eyes.. that's user preference and this isn't my site. Try reader mode I guess?
Also, what’s the first problem?
It's a reference to jwz's saying "some people, when they have a problem think 'I know, I'll solve it with regular expressions!'. Now they have two problems" (not an exact quote).
The user posting this makes me think the whole post was a joke ;)
https://web.archive.org/web/19990203134049/http://www.textfi...
https://web.archive.org/web/19990208014216/http://www.jwz.or...
https://web.archive.org/web/20200214203348/https://www.jwz.o...
“Sometimes people ask me why my web sites use those colors. This is a thing that people sometimes ask.”