Investigating corrupt Winamp skins
jordaneldredge.com
jordaneldredge.com
His project page: https://jordaneldredge.com/projects/
To this day I’m the type to customise everything I own and I despise staring at generic looking programs all day. It’s even worse when it’s stuff like Discord that has a very opinionated style that won’t even respect the small amount of customisation my Linux theming gives me.
I feel like a huge reason the indie web died off was OSes and programs limiting user customisation which was a gateway drug for many. MySpace themes would get people learning html/css. Winamp skins got people learning photoshop/graphics. mIRC scripting taught people basic coding. OS customising had all of it. Now you just shut up and use it as they dictate.
Of course, this was back in the kde3 and gnome(2?) days. It’s different now, it seems like theming has become actively discouraged, especially in Gnome.
It makes me sad wondering how many young creative people the community is missing an opportunity to captivate.
I ran a Mac at home, and had that customized as well, I forget the name of the app that would install custom themes/docks, but CandyBar would install custom icon sets.
Now days most people don't even bother to change their wallpaper. Live a little!
There are some nice communities around custom desktops, like https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/top/?t=year (despite the odd name)
For other OSes there’s also https://www.reddit.com/r/desktops/top/?t=year
That said, for many the defaults are sufficient and I guess people just use what’s there out of the box to get things done.
Anyway I think your proposal is flatly absurd. People stopped changing their wallpaper because of housing prices? Shoosh
Shapeshifter! Those were the days...
Agreed.
I worked at a huge corporation for one of my first developer gigs. All the devs were super into desktop mods and customizing everything to the hilt. It was crazy to think we all had these third party apps running on our corporate laptops. I know I had my laptop completely crash twice and needed it replaced because one of the apps I loved, I installed an extension for it and turned out it was malware. Other devs had similar things happen too.
As a developer it was like the Wild West back then, you had complete and utter freedom to do what you wanted with your hardware. The funny thing was the hardware support people didn't even blink at all the stuff you had installed either, they just shrugged and downloaded your ROM to a new laptop and sent you on your way.
We didn't have a dedicated IT department, we had a customer support person who doubled as IT. When he failed, we had a very knowledgeable guy who ran our servers remotely from Alaska.
When something went wrong with our computers, it was almost always down to us to fix them.
I miss those days. Everything is so serious now days. It was a lot more fun back then.
That experience helped me back up my smart-ass comments to a manager at my job about being able to write better software than they were forcing us to use.
Eventually I leveraged that experience into getting a real dev job.
I used to use the Bdog871018 skin. Which one is yours?
Happy 4th decade!
It was 26 years ago.
Are we old yet?
[1]https://www.thrashermagazine.com/articles/magazine/the-regro...
> By the end of 1999 an idea that has been talked about for years begins to take seed. The Habitat is formed under the Sovereign Sect in December…The Alien Workshop and its divisions are guided by this philosophy to this day. A Sovereign Sect of individuals with the goal to evolve skateboarding, projects and ideas free from outside pressures or rules.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As for the "look", I'm not a photographer but this was likely taken on either a low-end handheld film camera or disposable jobbie, which were absolutely ubiquitous around this time frame because they were so cheap (practically free, until you went to develop them). The picture was taken on an overcast day at dusk, later in the evening. Just dark enough to auto-trigger the insufficient flash which lights up the middle of the image and puts everything in the periphery in a dark shadow.
I do like that the kid with the beer isn't looking at the camera and seems to have missed the point that everyone was supposed to be holding the ball.
It's really neat to find something that I grew up with like Winamp skins become a subject of anthropological/historical study.
It's gonna be neat/kinda creepy to see how much of this sort of application of investigative techniques can turn up stuff from my younger years that I ever could have thought would still exist.
Almost never happens with Mac or Linux. How's that? :)
KDE's Dolphin is much better here, can be set to single click open with drag selection box or click + icon to select.
- View->Options->Change folder and search options
- Enable single-click, then on the View tab, enable "use check boxes to select items"
- Then Regedit...
- HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Mouse
- Set MouseHoverWidth and MouseHoverHeight to 0, or increase MouseHoverTime.
Now you have single-click without hover-select, and checkboxes to select.
The default is 4 pixels, which I’m inclined to agree is low these days.
"what does this do" causes a lot of things to happen. you zip up a folder and forget the metric tonne of other files in it, which don't interfere with the prime function so just come along for the ride.
It was what I did in a class in high-school and it instantly reminded me of that.
Edit: shorter url
https://maps.app.goo.gl/?link=https://www.google.com/maps/pl...
https://maps.app.goo.gl/?link=https://www.google.com/maps/pl...
It doesn't seem to happen now we're older :(
Sadly, I haven’t been able to find it on any of the archives. Does anyone remember this one?
Not open source, but it’s the closest I have come to Winamp. It’s really good!
It’s the most true WinAmp for Mac I’ve ever found.
if I remember correctly, Windows Updates were a pain in Windows 98 or even Windows XP. Maybe it was just a pain because I was on slow as molasses dial up but just the fact that active x(?) only worked on Microsoft Internet Explorer and it was required(?) for Windows Update, made me wonder why updating Windows requires a web browser.
I think Windows auto updates are a good thing. I just think people should have to opt IN to auto updates for different stuff differently and then opt IN to automatic reboots. An operating system should never auto reboot without at least a one time user consent. Any corporate computer I've ever used disables this automatic reboot when a user is logged in. I think this is proof that the setting should be like this.
Of course, over the long term, what we really need is to make more of updates not require a reboot, but that is a different conversation.
For me, XP is what drove me to Linux full-time. (Later, a bit of Mac OS X on the desktop, when I could afford the hardware.) But I've always kept a toe in the Windows pie, the tool that, after MS-DOS, built my career.
Win11 makes me almost nostalgic for Win10. But Win10 is a sad crippled thing, it's just that you're allowed to prune it back hard. (Removing all Modern apps, for instance.) Do that to 11, it dies.
But using Win10 for a couple of hours a year is enough.
Recently a friend bemoaned being forced to move to Win10 because 7 wasn't getting updates and drivers, and apps were no longer working. So I tried a couple of fresh installs. It's so much better it's not funny; it's sad.
So I reached back and put XP64 on an old spare Core 2 Duo. It flies along. It's so snappy and responsive and so lightweight. It will run, not usefully but functionally, in 64MB of RAM. Pruned down hard it takes about 50MB. It doesn't fill a CD.
I am now idly considering trying Windows 2000 on my lowest-end functional laptop.
But that wasn't really what the post was about. It was about the smugness of trying to gotcha the parent with a caveat that hasn't been valid for a decade.
Decades of experience and deep knowledge doesn’t keep me out of wrestling with the machine like this. What is it like for someone who devotes a lot less of their attention span and learning to computers?
Perfect.
Young people today are on Minecraft, Roblox, VRchat, Discord, and YouTube. That's their frontier internet, and they probably feel the same way about it as you do.
A Geocities website, phpBB or EZBoard, webring, Xanga, and AIM/IRC has a similar analogues today. The pieces just have different names and shapes.
It really is just that we're old now so we don't interact with them.
Although I agree the grindset culture has harmed Internet culture.
But overall people are just trying to optimize total compensation and bend over backwards to get into FAANG. Imagine telling us to get into IBM back in the day.
So things have definitely changed. The punk spirit has also been lost. Normies have arrived. It's good for the normies, but we won't get a Napster again.
And no, this is not the rambling of getting-older-man.
Rampant corporate control, completely sanitized internet by default, “social” networks that literally give kids https://cwi.pressbooks.pub/urj/chapter/2022-first-place-inst... mental disorders, political agenda pushed from every hole, disinformation campaigns, bots to the point where you don’t even know if you’re talking to a real person. Internet became a weapon.
Back then we an intranet within local ISP (additionally to internet access) that had a sense of community, local services, file sharing, chats, meetups which generally self moderated themselves and everyone knew each other. What do you have now? Proprietary discord chat rooms filled with degeneracy? Good luck going through that.
Say what you want, but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September is real.
I think the big reason why social media is toxic is because going online is no longer a choice and it follows you around. Some decisions by social media providers aren’t helping, but mobile is more guilty than social itself.
I think the Internet is a lot like that.
Guess I'll have to consider myself a bryophite of the information age from now on.
I think it's a curse of progress. Once you get the taste of a highly developed, efficiently functioning society you can't go back and live in a cave again. At the same time you can't deny that living in a cave has its charm.
To keep the analogy going, mankind introduced a few invasive species to the island.
I am enjoying actively participating in mailing lists and USEnet these days. The S:N ratio is pretty good now.
On the other hand, my eight year old is a big fan of a YouTube channel called Pilot Debrief. We just watched a documentary on the Gimli Glider and when we talked about it after, it was apparent that she has learned a tremendous amount about flying from that channel.
So for my kid, that spirit of sharing cool things because cool things are fun is still going strong. And when I experience her experiencing things like that, I’m reminded that that spirit is still out there but I’m just old.