Blog
Recreating the Windows Live Messenger Avatar in CSS
This past week I’ve been working on a big redesign of my site. I’m trying to recreate the vibe of MSN / Windows Live Messenger around 2008-2011. Today, I spent most of the day recreating the avatar frame from WL Messenger in CSS.
At first, I was trying really hard to recreate the kind of squircle shape from the login screen. It turns out this is quite difficult in CSS, and the only way I could possibly have done it is through creating an SVG path that I could use to clip the HTML element, but then I would lose access to the border and box-shadow properties. So instead I opted to just make a rounded square, using the first-radius value to round the corners with an ellipse shape rather than a circle. After all, we’re going for the vibe, not a 1:1 recreation. After hours of tinkering with just the shape, I added the gradient background, as well as a <span> on top of everything to add the “glossy” effect. You can see the code on CodePen.
February Updates
Man, my one blog post per week goal sure fell apart quickly. To avoid going too long without a post, I figure I’ll give a quick update on what I’ve been working on. Over at the 32-Bit Cafe, we announced we are expanding into a Discourse forum! I’ve been spending a lot of time setting it up and working alongside the rest of the mod team to get it ready before the February 15th launch. This weekend, I was able to find some time to work on projects, though. I built a PC for my partner, which they have been enjoying! It was a much needed upgrade over their old system, which was a frankensteined build made out of the core of my first PC build from 2015. I also spent some time working through Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment. I’m working on the first homework assignment, which is a simple program that copies a file. It’s been a fun challenge and I’m learning a lot. On the fitness side of things, I haven’t made much progress yet. I actually took the week off from the gym because of a combination of sleep issues and hurting my back, but I’m feeling a lot better now and will be back at it tomorrow! While the first month of 2024 hasn’t gone quite to plan, I’ve been keeping busy anyway.
Weekend SSD Adventures
Last weekend I was really getting the semi-annual itch to play Minecraft. When I loaded it up, I realized it would be a good idea to do a backup of my world, because I hadn’t done it in a while. I’ve poured a lot of hours into it with my partner and we would be devastated to lose it. So I wrote up a quick rsync command to send it over to my network storage (a strong term for an Raspberry Pi 4 with a USB hard disk attached). I/O error. Huh that’s weird. After some intense googling, I found out my SSD has reported 535 blocks unable to be reallocated. In other words, much of my SSD was becoming unreadable, and it was running out of good blocks to move my data to.
Reflecting on 2023
2023 was truly one of the years of all time. In this post, I will look back at some of the cool things I did in 2023 and set some goals to achieve in 2024.
Anti-cheat Software Sucks
This week, Riot Games announced they are bringing their Vanguard anti-cheat software to League of Legends. Previously introduced with the release of Valorant, Vanguard is a pretty typical kernel-level anti-cheat software, which is to say, a security nightmare. It runs at the highest level of permissions possible on your system.
A lot of people seem concerned that, because Riot is owned by Tencent, Vanguard serves as a backdoor for the Chinese government. Honestly that seems ridiculous. Not that it necessarily can’t be used for nefarious purposes by the Chinese government, but Chinese spying has a much lower possible material impact on U.S. players than American spying. In the video, Riot said that Vanguard “does not collect or process any personal information differently from our current Anti-Cheat software,” which I guess is something, but that can change at any moment. The bigger concern, in my view, is if Riot suffers from a security breach (again) and hackers are able to deploy malicious code through Vanguard. Truthfully, I’m not totally sure how feasible it is for that to happen, but it is certainly possible, which is worrying enough.
Re: The Art of Hyperlinking
I recently read fLaMEd’s post discussing the shortcomings of linking techniques frequently used on the smallweb, such as link pages, webrings, button walls, etc. Many websites on the smallweb employ these techniques in order to connect to other stops in the smallweb space. I don’t think they are inherently bad, of course, but the context matters a lot. I want to know why the webmaster has chosen to put these links on their website, even if the explanation is as brief as “these people are my friends and their websites are cool.”
Why Are We Still Using 88x31 Buttons?
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.
Cyberpunk 2077 Is Good, Actually
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 just couldn’t convince myself to try again.
Major Site Updates
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. As much as I enjoyed hiding the link descriptions until hovered, it makes for a poor experience both on mobile and for screen readers. Recent discussion about web accessibility of the smallweb in the 32-Bit cafe Discord server prompted me to rethink how I wanted to present the content of my website, especially on a page as important as my outgoing links page.
The Internet Is Crumbling
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. Everyone else hasn’t really hit that critical mass. The only thing of value these companies have is the data they host, which is now being siphoned for free by AI products, then repackaged and regurgitated to the consumer. To defend against this, both Reddit and Twitter have removed free access to their API and are charging exorbitant prices to restore access. The result is shittier platforms for the user, who create the entirety of the platform’s value in the first place.