967 karma · joined December 8, 2019
I find the ability to seamlessly switch between services, and create playlists containing both YouTube videos and SoundCloud audio, to be a complete game-changer.
I doubt I could easily go back to the official YouTube app now.
> This idea of using a proxy to render the browser view into images has been used before by WRP (Web Rendering proxy). Browservice differs from WRP in that it uses JavaScript on the client browser to animate the browser view and gather user input events, while in WRP, the user has to use web forms and image maps to provide the input, and the page has to be reloaded for every update in the view. Thus Browservice gives the user a more immersive web browsing experience, but also requires a newer client browser and more powerful hardware. While WRP can run on browsers as old as NCSA Mosaic 2.0, the earliest supported client browsers for Browservice are from late 90s and early 00s.
> In our software collections, we have brought back thousands of hypercard stacks[1] that used to be easily available for Macintosh computers in the 1980s and 1990s – they will boot in your browser and let you enjoy them near-instantly.
The collection is certainly something that couldn't exist in it's current form without the Internet Archive. Sure, there are collections of .sit files sitting in old FTP mirrors, but it's the Internet Archive's in-browser emulation that makes them accessible. (It's unlikely that someone is willing to download an emulator and configure ROMs / system disks, just to play with a stack for 15 seconds).
Now for my usual shout-out: if you have some old stacks sitting around that you want to add to the collection, there's an online uploader[2]. I'm always pleased to see more stacks!
[1] https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks?sort=-publicdate
I don't think the plan is to "become the norm". It's an 'emergency library', and it exists currently because the pandemic has forced regular libraries to close.
Semi-unrelated, but if you're looking for ways to help and have a spare server, Archive Team [1] is always looking for additional capacity. Although Archive Team != archive.org, they do grabs of at-risk content which (almost always) get uploaded to archive.org. [disclaimer: I help out with various Archive Team projects, the most recent of which was the backup of Yahoo Groups).
The major disadvantage that comes with hosted solutions is that you have no control over the service. Consider Yahoo Groups, which deleted all of its mailing list archives last year. I was one of the project leads for the Archive Team effort [1] to make a copy of those groups before they were lost forever, and although we saved several hundred thousand groups, we lost a lot more. Many millions of groups just vanished. Many of them, despite being long abandoned, were basically the only evidence left of that community, containing vital archives and information that is now gone.
I'm not saying this doesn't happen with self-hosted groups, but if a self-hosted group decides to shut down, it's their choice. (Rather than Yahoo emailing you to tell you that everything will be gone in a month).
> 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.
NewPipe also supports other services such as SoundCloud, MediaCCC and PeerTube right out of the box. The killer feature for me is that you can make up playlists containing media from different sources (which I use for playlists containing music from both YouTube and SoundCloud).
(I'm not involved in NewPipe, except being a very happy user).
I know that the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/) are always willing to host CD images for their software collection. They accept uploads from anyone, but Jason Scott (@textfiles on twitter and HN) is their software curator if you need assistance.
and then part 2: https://www.coursera.org/learn/nand2tetris2
[Both courses are free]
These are fantastic courses, by far the best MOOCs I have ever taken. I went into them knowing nothing about computer architecture, and by the end of the first course I was able to design a fully-working digital computer in Logisim.
While other courses consist of lectures + text content, with Nand2Tetris the course is practical. The authors have developed a complete software system to allow you to complete the course:
* A simplified hardware programming language to design the ALU, CPU, clock, RAM, etc..
* A hardware simulator and debugger to allow you to test the hardware that you develop
* An assembler for the assembly programs you write for the computer
* A compiler for the higher-level programs you write for the computer
I'm probably banging-on about this course more than I reasonably should, but that's just because I enjoyed the course so much!
The (minority) stake in Yahoo! Japan that was owned by Yahoo is now owned by Altaba. Probably the only connection between Yahoo and Yahoo! Japan is the name, which Yahoo! Japan license from Verison.
source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-m-a-verizon-idUSKCN...
While I wouldn't normally link to a YouTube video in this context, KaiOS Technologies specifically reached out to TechAltar to provide him with details so he could cover the story.
It's likely that one of the reasons KaiOS decided to reach out was because of his July 2018 video[2] covering KaiOS, which has over a million views.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UPk3mpcDP4 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA_g2bQgOXY
In this case, it's interesting to see how the incentives for preventing such a mistake are skewed. It was the responsibility of the distributor to ensure the correct copyright notice, but they stood to gain when they didn't (and reportedly[1] kept all of the profits).
[1] https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2011/10/10/how-a-copyright-m...
However, I'm part of ArchiveTeam, and we use IRC pretty much exclusively for all our projects. Sure, we have a wiki for permanent notes, but all of the discussion, decisions, etc.. happen over on IRC.
Right now quite a few of the channels used by ArchiveTeam are migrating away from EFNet to hackint, due to connection issues with EFNet. Although migration to a different communication platform was brought up, it was almost immediately discounted.
What's the reference you've found on Usenet?
We're always looking for more stacks, and have an upload form[2] for stacks to be added to the collection. If you've got some old stacks lying around, they'd be a great addition to the collection.
Extracting stacks off old Macs, floppy disks and SCSI hard drives from the 80s / 90s isn't always the easiest, but I'm always happy to help people with this - my email is hypercardonline@gmail.com .
[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/03/yahoo_groups_neo_de...
(a) The "We're deleting all your content" message was only visible on group home pages, not when viewing messages, meaning a lot of the people who used the web-interface didn't know about the shutdown.
(b) The email sent out to all members about the deletion was sent weeks after the initial notice, often didn't arrive, and was inaccurate (dates had changed by the time people received the email). So many folks that used the email interface also didn't know about the deletion.
(c) The amount of time given was far too short. Yahoo Groups had existed as a brand since January 2001, and was based off Yahoo Clubs / eGroups, both of which had existed for several years before that. Two months notice for a 20+ year old service is laughable.
(c) The site has been unreliable during the last few months, due to the high traffic of people trying to save their stuff. This has significantly complicated efforts to archive it.
(d) Yahoo's solution to the data destruction, their "Get My Data" feature, is poorly thought out and often doesn't work. No photos are included in the download unless uploaded by that account. Many groups had members who uploaded photos / scans / schematics / etc.. and since left the group. Those photos are now lost. We've also found the downloads to be missing content that necessitated the request be made multiple times until you could patch together a complete version from all the incomplete ones.
Does anyone have any experience with this? Are there pitfalls to using the AGPL for a regular program that I'm not thinking of?
"It is not worth the trouble to use copyleft for most small programs. We use 300 lines as our benchmark: when a software package's source code is shorter than that, the benefits provided by copyleft are usually too small to justify the inconvenience of making sure a copy of the license always accompanies the software."
[0] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html#sm...
Yahoo aren't making this easier, either. (Blocking our efforts, unreliable servers, limiting what can be downloaded, providing incomplete archives, etc...)
Once the dust has settled we'll be able to start going through what was saved. There have been a lot of really interesting aspects to this project that I hadn't encountered before, and I hope to document them when I have the time.
[0] https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=File:Archiveteam...
The reality is that in order to archive a site as large as Yahoo Groups, you need a critical mass of people willing to commit time and energy to the project. And people are more likely to commit to an "urgent" project, where there is a set deadline.
What's the name of the group?
If you're able to make a disk image, you can use the uploader site at http://hypercardonline.tk/ to upload stacks to the archive. If you need help reading the disks in the first place, contact me (hypercardonline@gmail.com) and I can see if I can help.
Additionally, the 'Get My Data' only gives you access to all the files / photos that you uploaded to the group. These archives should not be considered complete archives of the group - is it really reasonable to suggest that in order to completely back up a group, every member must complete their own data request?
I appreciate this isn't made clear in the instructions, but if you have a desired set of groups in mind, you don't need to use the chrome extension. Just join the groups you want saved and (provided you've sent the account details through the form) they'll be added to the queue to be archived. I did a lot of Amateur Radio (Ham Radio in US) groups that way.
[0] https://modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/verizon-...
And we're only archiving things that "any guy on the internet" can see. If someone can access the messages simply by joining a group (with no moderator approval), I'd argue it's fair game.
We're not going to be unreasonable, though. If something private slips through and we receive a takedown request from the author, we typically remove it.