Category: Weekend Projects

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Wherein Elmer Hunts for the Origin of Weblog

The first occurence of “weblog” on Scritping News: Dave searches for the first mention of the term weblog on his site and finds one from January 20, 1998. 

I thought, hey, sounds like a job for Google Groups.  An advanced search for weblog turns up this.  Early on weblog referred to those pesky streams of data written by http servers to some obscure spot on your hard drive. 

Then on March 24, 1997 this post from the Cyberspace Snow and Avalanche Center hit the rec.skiing and other outdoor newsgroups.  In the ‘Organizational’ section of the announcement it mentions “There is now a weblog available online so you can see what has been done lately. ”  Cool, an early weblog.  Next stop: the Way Back Machine.

The Way back Machine entry for CSAC is here.  Of interest is the Feb. 19, 1997 entry.
Near the bottom of the page under “Organizational Information” is this: “NEW:Check our web log to see what we’ve done on the site most recently.”  Alas, the web log is not included in the archive, but it certainly seems interesting.

The trail goes cold until Dec. 23, 1997 when Jorn Barger made this announcement to alt.society.neutopia:

After talking a lot about Frontier and Scripting News
(www.scripting.com), I decided to start my own webpage logging the best
stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis:

<URL:http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblog.html>

This will cover any and everything that interests me, from net culture
to politics to literature etc.

j

And a couple of days later, Dec 25, 1997, on comp.infosystems.www.announce he posted this:

My latest webpage is a daily running log of the best webpages I visit:

<URL:http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblog.html>

If your interests seem to overlap mine, even partially, bookmark this
link and check back every day or so for new discoveries.

I suspect that in a year there’ll be hundreds of people maintaining
pages like this, and that this will allow good URLs to spread much more
quickly… so I recommend that all enthusiastic surfers take a shot at
maintaining such a “weblog” (using the Frontier scripting environment, if you need to, for efficiency).

j

After that the rest is, as they say history. 

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TB-303 Give-Aways from Propellerheads and d-lusion

Slashdot | TB-303 Give-Aways from Propellerheads and d-lusion
“Good news for those of you who are into music synthesizers: Propellerheads has opened its Rebirth Museum and gives away the ‘revolutionary’ software simulation of the classic Roland TB-303. Interestingly, that happened just a day after the small German company d-lusion released another ‘legendary’ TB-303 simulator called Rubberduck as a free give-away.”

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DIY Arcade Box

This is cool. I’ve been thinking of putting something like this together for the kids.

MAKE: Blog: HOW TO make a Penny Arcade
“I have a hobby of creating arcade machines using computers and MAME. This is a budget arcade cabinet. Instead of a computer running the MAME software, the gaming is provided by a Namco TV Games 5-in-1 game controller, hacked for real arcade controls. So, instead of spending a few hundred on a computer, the controller is $20. Also, inside is a 14″ TV, saving money there too. The Penny Arcade plays Pacman, Galaxian, RallyX, DigDug, and Bosconian“

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Switching to an Alternative Windows Desktop

Using Explorer as the shell for Windows XP can be a bit of a drag. With the defaults, Explorer ties up a big chunk of memory and it has some issues as far as usability. If you’ve had any experience with X in the *nix world or the Mac’s OS X desktop, you know there are better solutions than the XP Desktop. Luckily, you don’t need to live with it. I’ve experimented with alternative desktops and utilities for Windows quite a bit over the years, and I think they have now matured to the point where they are usable. This piece describes what I’m using on my laptops and it is not intended to be some sort of general listing of utilities and shells.

Replacement Shell

Most folks don’t realize that you can replace the Windows default shell, Explorer. In early versions of Windows, it was easier, but it can be done in XP. There are lots of possibilites here, but I went with bblean, an offsheet of the X window manager Blackbox. Just download the zip archive, drop it on your C:\ drive and it runs. I chose it because it doesn’t use the XP registry, it has a relatively small memory footprint, has a lot of available styles, does a good job of grabbing existing desktop folders and such, is very configurable, and includes an utitlity to install it as the default shell, replacing Explorer as the Windows desktop.

Desktop Utilities

I added 2 utilities that provide a bit of advanced functionality to the desktop. YzDock is a neat little application launcher for Windows that behaves like the app launcher on the OS X desktop. You can add your favorite apps to it and let it rip.
Konfabulator is desktop widget maker/manager that was ported to Windows from the Mac world. It adds little utilities to your desktop including things like weather, a basic search box, to-do list, and more. Best part is that you can easily create your own Konfabulator widgets.

Elmer\'s new desktop.

Some Other Modder Resources

  1. Athene Operating System
    Athene is a high performance multimedia operating system for desktop computers.
    www.rocklyte.com/athene/index.html
  2. xtort.net – Dedicated to being massive directory of freeware
    Dedicated to being massive directory of freeware
    Lots of links to MSFT Windows shells and tweaks.
    www.xtort.net/sys/sys8.php
  3. :: Geoshell ::
    geoshell.com/index.asp
  4. PowerPro
    PowerPro Features. PowerPro incorporates these features: Starting Programs. Any number of small-footprint button bars (e.g. fits over title bar of maximized window).
    powerpro.webeddie.com/xfeatures.htm
  5. ShellON Features
    www.indexo.pionexnet.co.uk/surf.design/shellon/features.htm
  6. Aston – Desktop manager and Shell replacement for Windows 9x/Me/NT/2000/XP
    A skinnable desktop and browser program. Offers skins, themes, plug-ins, for many programs. Alternate interfaces for Windows
    www.astonshell.com/aston/index.html
  7. Talisman Desktop. Program for desktop management, shell replacement, 32bit XP icons, themes, skins, visual styles
    The creators of desktop manager and shell replacement software for the Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP system. IF you need fast, high-customized, skinable interface builder program(instead standard Windows Desktop) then you must try our software…
    www.lighttek.com/talisman.htm