Why Are We Still Using 88x31 Buttons?
#tech
Web 1.0 revival is pretty popular these days in the smallweb circles, but one aspect of it should have remained in the grave: the 88x31 button.
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Web 1.0 revival is pretty popular these days in the smallweb circles, but one aspect of it should have remained in the grave: the 88x31 button.
The last time I played Cyberpunk 2077 was shortly after release in late 2020 on the PS4 version, which was a rough experience, to say the least. I had been excited for the game since the announcement almost ten years ago now, so the disappointment was quite painful. As a result, I left the game alone for the past 2.5 years, even though I heard the patches fixed a lot of issues.
I did a complete overhaul of the layout of my site. When I launched my website a year and a half ago, I designed it while under the influence of web 1.0 nostalgia. With this redesign, my goal is to better use the amount of screen space PCs have these days, while also making it easier for the content to be responsive on mobile. The links page has been revamped as well.
It is an interesting time to be online. Twitter went from bad to worse. Reddit kneecapped itself. It seems now that the period of free money is over, tech companies are finding out that operating at a loss to amass users and putting off any sort of monetization plan as long as possible isn’t as great a business model as was once thought. So far it appears to only work in a monopolistic scenario, like with Google and perhaps Meta.
Normally gacha games aren’t my thing, but I downloaded Honkai Star Rail on a whim and now it’s consumed so much of my time. I know basically nothing about the lore, but regardless I’m really enjoying the story and characters. The combat system is really fun and I like getting to try different characters. It’s so weird because I’ve tried to get into more “traditional” turn-based RPGs to no success but this game just scratches an itch in my brain.
Recently, I was working on a toy Linux shell to learn about the fork and exec system calls, and I got curious about how the popular shells like bash implement shell scripting languages, which led me down a rabbithole of lexers, parsers, and formal language definitions. It led me to Robert Nystrom’s Crafting Interpreters, a book that guides you through writing an interpreter for a toy language called Lox. Nystrom’s code is in Java, but I wanted to do it in C, which has been a bit of a headache.
For the past year, this website has been generated using some Go code I wrote, which was fun while it lasted, but it got to the point where every time I wanted to add something I would have to hand-code the new feature, which resulted in my website never getting updated. So moving forward, I’ve gone back to using Hugo as a static site generator. It’s been a great experience so far, converting my old stylesheets into a Hugo theme has been quite easy.
Specifically, I got a ThinkPad T450s from 2015 for about $40. It didn’t come with storage, a power adapter, or the external battery, which cost me about an extra $100 to order. The internal battery is there but I can’t really test it until my power adapter comes in (I forgot to order it at the same time as the laptop whoops). There are also some keycaps missing. I can’t test if the switches are good yet but hopefully it turns out to be an easy fix.
I’ve spent the majority of my holiday break working on my PC and software instead of relaxing. Here is a quick recap of what I’ve been up to. First is powerlinx, the static site generator that runs this site. I rewrote major parts of the program and finally gave it a cli. I’m gearing up to add some cool features, like tags and categories on posts. This website now generates Atom feeds for all directories in the site contents.
I can’t seem to find a healthy way to use TikTok, so I just shouldn’t use it at all. I first installed it during the height of the pandemic in 2020 and have since uninstalled and reinstalled it at least 4 or 5 times. While there is a huge load of shit on the platform, there are also cool and interesting creators on there, lots of funny jokes, shitposts, and memes, and even videos where I legitmately learned something!