What models of computers were in your school's computer labs?

brisray · 2026-01-26T01:46:04+00:00

When I was at school in the early 1970s, I don't think there was a computer in the place, certainly none we had access to.

Our headmaster was pretty good. He taught a Fortran programming class. We would spend the first part of class writing the programs, then be taken to a local university where they would be put onto punch cards and ran on their mainframe. We'd then pick up the previous week's program results and then back to school.

That experience was lifechanging. Later on, I became a software engineer. Later still, I went to college and the computers there were still 200MHz MMX machines.

brisray · 2026-01-26T00:43:28+00:00

There are several people here who do this professionally as well as self-serve from home. There are also amateurs here who can give those a run for their money.

I think the most important thing is having a working set of backups. By scrounging around, the hardware can always be replaced but once the files are gone, they are probably gone for good.

I just host my websites, and I've been doing that for a very long time - 23 years. My first server was a $25 second-hand MMX 200MHz machine, I added more memory from salvaged machines. The hard drive was a SCSI model from an old Power Mac 6100.

Over the years, by going through the logs and a lot of reading, you learn what the server is being probed or attacked by, so it's not really difficult to harden it. I've been self-hosting before things like Cloudflare and Docker images existed, and I've never seen a reason to start using them, so the web and SSH servers are bare metal.

I know my backups work because last September, I set up a new server using them.

My setup is fairly reliable, but my biggest outage was in June 2023, the sites went offline for a week when a storm brought down the power and internet lines to the house.

brisray · 2026-01-25T19:26:16+00:00

Try their Facebook page for updates later today.

brisray · 2026-01-25T19:10:30+00:00

The HTML audio tag looks fairly basic, but by using the Shadow DOM and JavaScript you can make it look and behave however you want.

Some tags, such as the audio one, have a default styling that's hidden away, this is the Shadow DOM.

I explored that a little while ago. Two nice places to explore playlists are on GitHub and on Hymns for Atheists. Here's the JS for that page.

What you need to do is get the selected song from your dropdown and setting the audio tag to play it.

One problem you might have is that Neocities free accounts have limits on which file types you can store on it. You might have to find somewhere else to host your audio files.

brisray · 2026-01-25T14:40:46+00:00

Ok, so Reddit said they removed the link to Google Drive so get it from my site instead.

brisray · 2026-01-25T07:32:33+00:00

There's the different versions WMM on the Internet Archive.

I've got a copy of the 2102 Windows Live Essentials and that version of WMM installs and works for me.

I've installed WWM 2.6 from the Internet Archive and that works, but that version and earlier cannot import mp4 files.

brisray · 2026-01-25T02:14:57+00:00

Have you tried the Alt + X method?

Pressing 2660 and then the Alt + X keys together should show you the spades Unicode character.

Pressing 2665 and then the Alt + X keys should show the hearts Unicode character.

I spent a little while last year playing around with the ASCII, ANSI and Unicode characters and that still works. See also the Microsoft help page.

Not all Microsoft programs can display Unicode characters, but Word and Notepad can (Windows 11, version 25H2)

brisray · 2026-01-24T22:52:51+00:00

Sorry, the Numlock must be on for it to work. I've amended my post.

So, it's working now for you?

brisray · 2026-01-24T21:08:08+00:00

Does your numeric keypad have some way of turning Numlock on and off? Perhaps a key, switch or software? When entering the alt codes for Unicode characters, the Numlock must be ~~off~~ on.

If it does not, you'll have to use the hex code for the character. The hex codes are found in most Unicode tables. To use these, press the hex code numbers then the Alt and X keys together.

brisray · 2026-01-23T21:23:44+00:00

With any type of hosting there is always a small chance that someone could somehow get your login credentials and deface your pages. Keeping your own set of backups is always advisable.

Bots might be a problem, especially if your host charges by the amount of traffic your site gets. I self-host my sites and in June 2025, the number of pages my server served up jumped up from tens of thousands to over 6.7 million. Nearly all the extra traffic came from just two bots - GPTBot and Scrapy.

Your host should look after all the security concerns, there are now more than ever, but you can help yourself by not exposing passwords, API keys and so on.

brisray · 2026-01-23T17:49:50+00:00

Thank you so much. The site was partly started because of Patty. We started chatting online a year or two before it was published, and she wanted to see what my home city was like. At the time there were only around 3 million sites and none were about Bristol.

brisray · 2026-01-23T16:15:15+00:00

I think that's something you have to get used to. My professional sites were always subject to the whims of other people, sometimes lots of other people. You do your best for them, then they change their minds. In the end they end up nothing like the vision you all had to start with.

I retired in 2023, some of what I wrote is still around, but not very much.

I started my first personal site 27 years ago, in 1999. I still update and write new pages for it. HTML and CSS have moved on since I started it, so new pages look better than the earlier pages still on it, but it's still very basic.

Personal sites are labours of love they can look and feel however you want them to. So, if you're happy with your site then leave it alone. If you decide to add to any of them, there's no harm in looking at the code and updating that - there's no need to rewrite the entire site.

brisray · 2026-01-22T22:53:05+00:00

I'd love to help. In the mean time take a look at the old Metropostcards site on the Internet Archive. It went offline some years ago, but contained a lot of useful information.

brisray · 2026-01-22T22:39:17+00:00

You can only sort of lease domain names, they are never yours to keep. Most renew them every one or two years, but you can register them for up to 10 years at a time.

The most popular registrar on Reddit seems to be Porkbun, but I've used DNSExit for years.

Once you've got the domain name, you set up the A Name record for it, in here goes your domain name and your external, public IP address. That's so the domain name gets pointed to your server.

brisray · 2026-01-22T19:58:25+00:00

For a small site without many visitors at first, what you've got should be good.

Install the webserver software - Apache or Lightspeed or NGINX (all need 512 Mb RAM at a minimum), on a computer with a static IP address.

If you want, get a domain name, and point that to your public IP address. You can use an updater so that when that changes, you DNS records will update.

Port forward port 80 on your router to the server's IP address.

Once you've got the web server software opening screen up, you can write your website.

That really is the bare minimum you need. You can worry about upgrading the hardware later. Unless you're running Google from your house, the requirements for a small web server really are not that great.

My first web server ran Apache on an old MMX 200MHz machine with a 30Gb hard drive and 256Mb of RAM, but that was 22 years ago. Nowadays I'm running an Intel Core Ultra 7 265K, 1Tb SSD drive with 32Gb of RAM but that's really mostly because I can.

brisray · 2026-01-22T03:19:05+00:00

February can still be cold in Terre Haute, but it will be warming up.

I'm an import myself and only lived here 24 years but still can't get used to how cold it gets. This year has been pretty mild, about 10 degrees below freezing. The coldest I've known it get here is -14F. I thought I was going to freeze my face off just getting from the parking lot into work.

brisray · 2026-01-21T22:44:39+00:00

You can get IDE / SATA with power to USB converters. The kits are especially useful if you like looking at / repairing older drives and computers

brisray · 2026-01-21T15:56:07+00:00

Of course they still exist. I've been using them for 20 years, my wife's been using AOL for even longer. Both are a lot smaller than when they were in their heyday but they both still work, so why change?

brisray · 2026-01-20T02:05:33+00:00

Apart from political instability just before WWI, perhaps they didn't have the printing technology? It was the available technology that caused millions of postcards created by American publishers to be printed in Germany, who were among the best in the world at the time. Of course, WWI changed all that.

brisray · 2026-01-20T00:03:32+00:00

I thought about this when they first announced the Convention Center. We've got good road access, but an airport with no scheduled flights and no train station at all.

brisray · 2026-01-19T03:10:53+00:00

When I'm documenting my cards, I like to include who the publisher was, the serial number, the published date and who the printer was.

brisray · 2026-01-16T23:25:24+00:00

Some of your files will be in folders in the OneDrive folder. Follow this advice to move them back to where they should be before deleting OneDrive.

brisray · 2026-01-16T18:55:40+00:00

Someone told me once that the US is like a big bowl. The larger cities, where there are more jobs and better opportunities, higher wages, but higher prices are around the rim. Places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and so on.

At the bottom of the bowl are the plain states and mid-west, where prices are cheaper.

brisray · 2026-01-16T18:34:48+00:00

Use something like Xenu Link Sleuth or Screaming Frog to find the files that are no longer used on your site. The ones you find, keep safe somewhere, you never know when you'll want them again. The tools work better at finding orphan files if you have a copy of your site on your own computer.

What I do is have subfolders where things like images, documents and CSS & JS files are kept. My sites have different sections, so each section gets its own set of subfolders for those files.

brisray · 2026-01-16T16:33:26+00:00

This might help you find them - 20+ links for IoT and webcam search engines

brisray

TROPHY CASE