From the "odd ways to fill your spare time" department: Reviving Netscape(R) Composer(R) in contemporary internet. Which feels like unearthing, respawning something horrible. Too: HoTMeTaL, anyone...? Interesting read nevertheless:
As a geek born in the early 1990s, who has been playing with computers from a young age, I think fondly of what tech looked like in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
So, naturally, when I got my hands on an old computer a few months ago, I installed Windows 98 on it as a way to revive software from my childhood and play around with it. Among the gems I wanted to revisit was Netscape Communicator, a software suite from 1997 centered around Netscape Navigator, which was the first web browser I ever used. One of the other applications included in that suite was a WYSIWYG web page editor named Netscape Composer.
https://plbrault.com/blog-posts/i-used-netscape-composer-in-2024-en/
Close to 4pm. Different kinds of shutdown. Waiting for remote machines to come to conclusions, unsure whether or not that will happen in time. (All along the way, there's always a digital paper trail one leaves behind, an odd kind of footprints in sand and dust. Wondering who will eventually track that back, one day.)
(Close to 11pm. Rabbit holes of reading up on security issues, old programming languages, poor project management and even poorer communication skills. Dull clouds behind bedroom windows. Straylight of lanterns keeping the dark at distance. And deeper sleep, too.)
Close to 10am: Watching infrastructure stumble and fall. Again. Ending up in the usual cycle: Restart. Look closely. Miss that crucial moment. Repeat. (Log files flooding disks. Next issues are expected. Digging through lines of text and pondering how to teach the art of writing meaningful status output in reasonably complex systems.)
Close to 8pm. Left of the day is dessert and wine, and maybe that's something to work with. Also: The joys of installing software on old, odd devices when it actually works without really being usable for anything. Ways to spend quiet hours too.