Direct: 9/25/2020
Posted in Directs September 26th, 2020 by dotcomboom

I’m kidding about the title, don’t worry, you didn’t miss a Nintendo Direct. And even if you did, it’s probably just another Wii U port.

This has been a quiet but certainly busy month from me, in regards to this site and things, so I figured I would write this post as a recap of sorts and a preview of what could be to come.

First of all, the obvious: since the last post I’ve been in school, and trying to break some procrastination habits– though, apparently, that can’t keep me from calling it for the rest of a Friday night to write a blog post. Hey, there’s still a lot of work to be done. Figuratively, and literally.

With that said, here’s what I’ve been up to in and around September 2020 thus far:

  • AutoSite is now on Download.com. Since it’s RC4 and they took that for a beta version, there are no options for reviews. I do kinda wish those 2 AV false positives were resolved too. (I sent RC3 to BitDefender back when I submitted to Softpedia a month or so ago. Sending RC4 wasn’t necessary afterwards, if I recall correctly.) In any case, it’s getting out there. Would like to do more stuff for it as it gets cooler.
Alas, I must be known as Dotcomboom, not dotcomboom or DOTCOMBOOM.
  • I want to put more stuff on this blog (or tumblog, depending on the time of day). It’s easy for me to get hung up on topics and what I’m gonna write about instead of straight up going for it. Speaking of which, I wrote a post earlier in the month for the group blog about my Android and Termux-based IRC bouncer setup that I’ve been meaning to do since June so if you haven’t read that, you may do so here. Excuse the technobabble.
  • Truth be told, I’ve been practice doodling more. Mainly fluffy things because I guess that’s the kinda person I am now. Noticably, a particular Lince on my revised homepage:
Ah ye. (9-5/9-7)
Notebook sketches of Beo, a Neopet of mine. Confident little rascal. (9-14)
Quick rough of a possible arctic fox lad? (9-24)

Definitely gonna share more, when the time comes. Get some more little drawings on my site, make an interests page, keep that place from getting too rusty. Gonna be good. Branching out, trying new things, gaining confidence. That’s been the goal for this year, and it’s finally starting to pay off in these couple of months. Love it.

  • Escargot got a board on a new forum, that’s pretty cool. And I have a gut feeling we might have WLM 2009 by the end of the year. Sure, it might have been the same gut feeling I had in 2018 and 2019 but that doesn’t mean I can’t still be excited for it!
  • Caby and Borb graced me on the 17th with some lovely birthday art! Click to view the images full-size.
  • I’ve been playing on Somnol’s newly resurrected whitelisted Minecraft servers, this time on Beta 1.7.3 (my new favorite Minecraft version as of late; you don’t need more mobs than there are Pokรฉmon to have a good time, lads) for survival and 1.8.9 for creative. If you’re cool and hang around our IRC, who knows, you might be able to join us. We’ll have a page to showcase what’s up there on our main site, keep your eyes peeled for that. The spirit of 2011 will never die.
My house on the right (bit obscured here), and the deck I built on a hill. I tunneled up through the hill into a cave and then built the out of a hole on the side. I love Beta’s hills.
Somnoville at night, as of now. Cammy recently put glowstone into the roads and the view from above is stunning.
Beta didn’t have such luxuries as a brightness slider, so keeping your world and builds well lit is a necessity for those cold, dark nights. I need to stock up on torches and eventually make it into the Nether myself to snag some of that stuff.
  • I’ve been thinking about 0x10c and listening to its music a lot. Might be a loose topic for a post in the future, not sure yet. Also wrote a bit about my X230 Tablet, that might surface sooner or later.
  • I did a little bit of overdue tidying to w2krepo and added a changelog.
  • This video. My kryptonite.
  • Some Ceramics classwork:
cat ๐Ÿ‘ mug ๐Ÿ‘ gato ๐Ÿ‘ mug

I’d like to do this more, like a rough recap of where I’ve been and where I’m at each month. I get to put up some things I wouldn’t have otherwise outside of my smaller circles, and I can sorta keep track of it better as time goes on.

Homework tomorrow! Fortunately not a crazy amount, unless I make it that way. Then Minecraft. Then getting destroyed by Cammy at Tetris maybe. Willpower, lads.

w2krepo: Media Player skins and more
Posted in w2krepo April 20th, 2020 by dotcomboom

I have now fleshed out the Windows Media Player section, available here.

  • 6 additional visualizations (making a total of 16 packs)
  • 183 skins (making up a total of ~314mb), including Beck
  • 12 plug-ins
The beautiful way.

I’d also like to note that most of (if not all) the skins do indeed work on WMP 12 and Windows 10, though it’s not immediately apparent. Just go to View > Skin Chooser while in the Library view.

Download and enjoy. Greetz to windows-media-player.com and this archive.org collection for making it happen.

w2krepo redesign complete!
Posted in Site Updates, w2krepo March 27th, 2020 by dotcomboom

I started reworking w2krepo’s styling back when I switched subdomains in February; finally I’ve come back to it and finished it up.

That list you see is actually dynamically generated with some PHP code I pulled together from stuff off the net.

<table>
<?php
$fileList = glob('*');
foreach($fileList as $filename){
    //Use the is_dir function to make sure that it is a directory.
    if(is_dir($filename) and ($filename != 'icons') and ($filename != 'blurbs')){
	echo '<tr><td style="min-width: 32px;">';
        echo '<a href="', $filename, '/"><img src="icons/', $filename, '.gif" width="32" height="32"></a>';
	echo '</td><td>';
        echo '<a href="', $filename, '/">', $filename, '</a>';
	echo '<br>', file_get_contents('blurbs/' . $filename . '.txt');
	echo '</td></tr>'; 
    }   
}
?>
</table>
<?php
$fileList = glob('*.7z');
foreach($fileList as $filename){
    //Use the is_file function to make sure that it is not a directory.
    if(is_file($filename)){
        echo '<a href="', $filename, '">', $filename, '</a><br>'; 
    }   
}
?>

The small blurbs I use as category descriptions are all stored in this folder. Those get written out through the script.

As for styling the directory indices, it’s pretty basic. I use a .htaccess file so my web server uses header and footer .html files.

<IfModule mod_autoindex.c>
	Options +Indexes
    	IndexOptions IgnoreCase FancyIndexing FoldersFirst NameWidth=* DescriptionWidth=* SuppressHTMLPreamble
	IndexIgnore header.html footer.html .htaccess index.css vduheader.png
	HeaderName header.html
	ReadmeName footer.html
	
	AddDescription "<span>Executable</span>" .exe
</IfModule>

From there, each folder has a header.html and footer.html file. header.html goes like this:

<!doctype html>
<html>
	<head>
		<title>Productivity</title>
		<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/kognise/water.css@latest/dist/light.min.css">
	</head>
	<body>
		<h1>Productivity</h1>

And footer.html:

                (I could put a readme here if need be)
	</body>
</html>

Although I would have liked to use one header.html and one footer.html for all of them (using some kind of tags similar to my own project AutoSite) this will work, at least in the interim. Things I could do in the future are adding more file descriptions to the .htaccess or put more information in the footers (possibly contact and contributing information, though that could be a hassle to update for each folder so another time, maybe).

It all also degrades gracefully in older browsers.

Visit here, or here for HTTP.

Chromium on Windows 2000
Posted in Software, ThinkPad T41 February 26th, 2020 by dotcomboom

As a partial followup to my last ThinkPad post, here’s Chromium 34 (from 2014) running on Windows 2000.

It’s not the most ideal for daily use as it’s quite buggy, but it astonishingly does work. If you want to grab a copy, go to this place here run by a nice fellow. No installer, just a zip.

If you don’t have KernelEx on your install, I have that stuff hosted on w2krepo; you’ll want usp51.zip and Windows2000-UURollup-v11-d20141130-x86-ENU (Extended Kernel).7z. I’d suggest to get them installed in that order, as UURollup messed IE stuff up for me before I did install the latter. They’re both very useful updates/patches to have, and the same sdfox7.com site has plenty of software that wouldn’t run on 2000 otherwise, such as Flash 29 (which, unfortunately, I haven’t gotten working as of yet) and a portable version of Firefox 48 (one I have not yet tried).

w2krepo, now on a new subdomain!
Posted in Site Updates, w2krepo February 8th, 2020 by dotcomboom

Since its inception, w2krepo had lived on my personal dotcomboom.somnolescent.net domain. I’m excited to announce that it now resides at w2krepo.somnolescent.net.

Moving the files was fairly painless, as the subdomain had been set up under my current FTP account. What was next was redirecting the old URLs to match the new domain, also fairly simple when you get down to it: just this .htaccess file in the w2krepo folder:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://w2krepo.somnolescent.net/$1 [R=301,L]

That left one thing: trying to get my root directory on the subdomain to display the builtin Apache directory listing was a bit problematic, so I settled on using a basic PHP script scraped from what I could find online:

<?php
$fileList = glob('*');
foreach($fileList as $filename){
    if(is_dir($filename)){
        echo '<a href="', $filename, '/">', $filename, '</a><br>'; 
    }   
}
echo '<br>';
$fileList = glob('*.7z');
foreach($fileList as $filename){
    if(is_file($filename)){
        echo '<a href="', $filename, '">', $filename, '</a><br>'; 
    }   
}
?>

It’ll work as a root for now, and I intend on messing more with .htaccess to get the subdirectories’ listings all prettied up as well.

For the future, I intend to get some sort of system up for user submissions, whether that be by anonymous FTP or an upload form, as well as some more information on the indexes and homepage.