2025-06-06 08:00:00
Recently someone on Mastodon said that in their opinion all negative takes on AI are just based on being afraid of the thing. Yesterday a critical post about the negative implications of "vibe coding" was deleted from reddit for being "clickbait" and "unpopular", so I wonder who's really operating based on fear here.
In other news, thanks to open source we can now hook up our old rotary phones to our PCs and old Blackberry keyboards to diy handheld devices, and one day I will do at least one of those things :)
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2025-06-04 08:00:00
If you're one of those weirdos who sucks at capitalism and you refuse to throw your old computers away like you're goddamn supposed to when uncle Tim and uncle Satya tell you to, then welcome! You came to the right place and you and I are now friends :)
But maybe if your old computers aren't too old (not Amiga old, more like iMac G3 old) and you have a homelab setup you still want to connect to your modern day equipment via ssh. If you tried this before, this might look familiar to you:
$ andreas@oldcomputer:~$ ssh newcomputer
no kex alg
Yeah. Old SSH clients and modern SSH servers are not friends. Over the years, SSH updated its protocol and introduced new cryptographic algorithms while retiring the old ones, and so the modern server simply doesn't support the protocol and encryption algorithms that the old client is trying to use anymore, and the connection fails.
I ran into this problem multiple times until I was sick of it and decided to do something about it.
Now I could just configure all SSH servers on my network to accept connections from older SSH clients, but that wouldn't be very smart and not very secure. So I decided to do something else: I'm using a Raspberry Pi as a jumphost.
The setup is simple: I configured the SSH server on the Raspi to accept connections from old SSH clients, and then from there I can connect to all other machines on the network via a modern SSH connection.
I already have a Raspi set up as a jumphost on which the SSH port is exposed to the internet so I can connect to my network from the outside. I didn't want to mess with this exposed SSH server for obvious reasons, but you can easily run more than one SSH server with different settings on the same machine, so that's what I did. I started a second SSH server on this Raspi which is only accessible from inside my home network, and essentially on purpose degraded its security.
Therefore, it' a two-step process: Start a second SSH server on the system and configure that server to accept connections from old clients.
This is actually really straight forward. All that's necessary is to start a new instance of sshd, point it at a config file and configure it to use a different port than the sshd that's already running.
Create a new config file
I started by making a copy of the ssh servers existing config file:
$ sudo cp /etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_retro_config
The second server needs to run on a different port, so I opened the new sshd_retro_config, found the line that said # Port 22 and changed it to Port 23
I chose to run the new server on Port 23 which is the telnet port; as I don't have a telnet server running and telnet is an outdated protocol that was used in the past, I found it quite fitting to use this port. Adjust to taste, obviously. Make sure to remove the # at the beginning of the line.
Create a new systemd service file
Raspberry Pi OS is Debian and uses systemd as its init system. I just made a copy of the existing SSH service file:
$ sudo cp /lib/systemd/system/ssh.service /lib/systemd/system/ssh_retro.service
Edit the systemd service file
I opened the new file ssh_retro.service and made changes to two lines:
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/sshd -D $SSHD_OPTS
became
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/sshd -f /etc/ssh/sshd_retro_config
and
Alias=sshd.service
became
Alias=sshd_retro.service
That's it. Now the new ssh server could be started with
sudo systemctl start ssh_retro.service
sudo systemctl enable ssh_retro.service
and it started right up and I could log in to it (from the Pi itself) with $ ssh localhost -p 23
Perfect.
Except that this new server can still be not accessed from an old computer because there's still the problem with the outdated encryption algorithms. Let's fix this.
Edit the config to be retro compatible
Make sure you do these edits on the config file ssh_retro_config!!
Two changes are needed here:
Protocol 2
needs to become
Protocol 1
And these lines have to be added:
KexAlgorithms +diffie-hellman-group1-sha1,diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha1
HostkeyAlgorithms +ssh-dss,ssh-rsa
Then the server can be restarted
$ sudo systemctl restart ssh_retro.service
And logging in from an older computer (tested with Ubuntu 7.04) works! Once logged in to the Pi, I can then jump from there to all the other machines on my network via SSH without having to do the same things on any of them.
Of course this Raspi is now not as secure anymore as it should be, so this second SSH server should never be made accessible to the open internet.
Also it's worth noting, I'm not an IT professional, so this process is probably horribly flawed and shouldn't be used by anyone, but for me it works. Use at your own risk, obviously.
I'm happy with it though because now I can SSH from my old computers via this Raspi into my modern machines without having to do anything to them or compromising their security, and as long as I don't expose this jumphost that I created here to the internet, I think that's fine.
2025-05-30 08:00:00
Recently I started to wonder if I was maybe cramming a little too much into these linkdumps. My gut feeling about other peoples linkposts is that between five and ten links is a good number; posts with dozens of links are impressive, but also overwhelming and I often end up not looking at anything because there's simply too much to choose. But that's just my personal feeling, so I decided to ask around on Mastodon to see what others think.
Turns out, most people feel the same way. (Also turns out that 23+63+13=100 according to Mastodon, but let's not be too pedantic here.)
The point is, less seems to be more, which is good to know and it means I don't have to try and put as much as possible in here. Which I never had to in the first place, I realise, but sometimes I need to remind myself of this.
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2025-05-29 08:00:00
Last week I talked about the fact that just because a piece of software is old doesn't mean it is useless and has no value anymore.
However, the world of operating systems still moves on, and so the question is: How do you keep an old program running? So what I thought we'd do this week is look at a few options we have.
Before I start I have to say, I'm talking mainly about Windows software and a little bit about Linux here. I don't have a (modern) Mac and I have no experience with modern versions of MacOS, so I simply don't know how things are in this ecosystem and I can't do any experiments either. It might be similar to the Windows world or completely different, I simply don't know.
Anyway, let's see what we can do if we want to keep using our favourite program that isn't supported anymore.
As much as I enjoy dumping on Windows here for a myriad of reasons, I have to give credit where credit is due: Windows is very backwards compatible.
I tried installing Winamp 2.95 from 2003, Office XP from 2000 and for no good reason ICQ 2000b from 2000 on Windows 11, and all three programs installed and started just fine. That was honestly pretty unexpected, but it's also good news if you want to keep some older programs running. Just see if they install on Windows 11 and if they do, perfect, problem solved!
Windows 11 also has a compatibility mode that might be worth a try if a program doesn't want to run. Simply right click on the installer or the exe that refuses to run, select "show more options", in the next menu select "properties" and then switch to the "compatibility" tab and try selecting different versions of Windows under "Run this program in compatibility mode for". Maybe this brings the program to life, who knows. It's worth trying out.
On Linux things are often more complicated as software is usually installed through the distribution's package manager which accesses the distro's repos, and these are usually more or less kept up to date - depending on the distro. Trying to install older versions of packages may or may not work, but it's worth trying. My gut feeling however is that it's probably not going to be as easy as it is on Windows because of dependency issues or older software being built against an outdated library that's no longer compatible with the current version of it... However, things could also just work, so it doesn't hurt to try.
Now this is not for everyone; some people don't have the space or simply don't want to have multiple computers in the house, and that's very understandable.
However, if you have the space then you might actually want to consider keeping an old laptop around; they don't take up that much room and you either have an old one anyway which you can keep using, can get one from a friend or relative or find one for little money on eBay.
I'd recommend looking at hardware from around the year 2010, as this is still new enough to have modern connectivity but old enough to often still be fully supported by Windows XP, maybe even Windows 2000, meaning you can run software from around the year 2000 onwards (and often older than that as 2000/XP can also run many Windows 95/98 applications). A laptop from this generation, upgraded with an SSD and 4GB of RAM (the maximum that 32 bit Windows can handle) with an installation of Windows XP is a surprisingly fast and usable computer. It can even be dual booted with XP and Windows 7/Windows 10 if necessary, or XP and an older Linux distro (though on the Linux side you're usually restricted to distros that are newer than the computer because otherwise they have no drivers available for the hardware and will probably not run very well, if at all).
The same is true for Macbooks; a Macbook from around 2007 to 2009 can be found for very little money, can be upgraded with an SSD and more RAM and can run software from the 2000s without any problems. Older Power PC Macbooks can even run MacOS 9 software, but these tend to be harder to find and more expensive.
If you can't or don't want to keep an old computer around but still want to use software from the past, you might consider virtualising or emulating an older operating system. There are some technical differences between virtualisation and emulation that we don't need to get into here, but essentially what we're doing is to run a different operating system inside a program (called virtual machine or emulator) on our regular operating system. The OS that's running inside is then called the guest OS while the OS the virtual machine is running on is called the host OS.
I typically use VirtualBox which is very easy to set up and use, runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and is very compatible with Windows as a guest OS back to Windows 2000. It can run Windows 9x too, but that isn't a great experience. For this, an emulator like 86Box might be better suited. On Mac, VirtualBox can apparently also run older versions of Mac OS X, but I can't confirm or test this.
Essentially, you download and install VirtualBox on your modern computer, "acquire" (ahem...) an ISO for Windows 2000/XP/7 and install it inside VirtualBox. I'm not going to go into detail on how to get everything set up and running, but I might do that in a future post. What's important to do after installing Windows is to install the VirtualBox guest additions (can be done via the "devices" menu), which installs drivers inside the guest OS. This enables more options for screen resolutions in the guest and also allows for things like sharing the clipboard between the guest and the host and sharing folders from the host with the guest, allowing for easy file access.
If you're interested in running older versions of Linux, I'd recommend having a look at the Ubuntu archive where they still have all the old installation images online and they install very easily inside VirtualBox. Once it's installed, a tweak to the package manager's config file even allows accessing the repos of that particular version of Ubuntu, which makes installing software that was built for this version really easy without having to hunt around online for old packages. Again, something we might dive deeper into in a future post. I tested a few versions of Ubuntu in VirtualBox, down to the very first one from 2004, and they all installed without a hitch and worked great.
Software manufacturers are using every trick in the book to get us to upgrade and pay money for newer versions that often have tons of features we don't need and sometimes offer a worse user experience than their outdated predecessors.
For a few years now the trend has been to move software more and more to a subscription model where you pay a monthly fee instead of a one time charge, which means the cost is adding up and you can only use the software (and open the files you create with it!) as long as you keep paying. There's also the model of making software dependent on being online and having a constant connection to the manufacturer's server, which means if the servers are turned off the software can't be used anymore.
All these tactics are nothing more than dirty tricks that big companies use to maximise their revenue to the detriment of their users, and I refuse to play this game. I'm happy to pay for a piece of software if it does what I need it to do and makes my life easier, but I will not buy into any subscriptions or pay for something that can be taken away from me at any moment because the manufacturer decides that it's now time for me to switch to the new version. In this case I'd much rather go on eBay, find the old version that I can still own for a few Euros and use that. It might be outdated, but as I said last week, that doesn't mean it's bad.
So there's a few options how we could keep our old programs running, and I hope some of them are feasible for you and worth exploring.
2025-05-23 08:00:00
It takes me about an hour to put together one of these posts. But that's because I'm stupid and write everything myself. If I used AI to create these posts, it would take me - drumroll please - about an hour. Such amazing technology!
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2025-05-20 08:00:00
I recently set up an old MacBook from 2006 with its original operating system. The installation image I used, which I found on archive.org, also contained the whole iLife software suite that Apple used to ship, as well as trial versions of iWork (Apple's office suite) and Microsoft Office 2004.
And I really enjoy using it. I played around with the integrated GarageBand application which is a slimmed down version of Apple's digital audio workstation Logic Pro. Music making software. I connected my midi keyboard to the MacBook, selected some of the integrated instruments and had a ton of fun just kind of jamming around and exploring the software.
This computer and these programs are 20 years old by now, give or take, and they've long been replaced by multiple generations of newer hardware and software. But they still work, they're still fun to use and you can still do productive things with them, just like you could 20 years ago.
This got me thinking that a piece of software might be outdated, replaced by a newer version and not be supported by the manufacturer anymore - but that doesn't mean it's bad and can no longer be used.
George R.R. Martin, author of the novel series "A Song of Ice and Fire" wich was adapted into the streaming series "Game of Thrones", famously still writes his novels using a writing program called WordStar on an ancient DOS computer (at least he did so until a couple of years ago as this article is from 2014).
Another author who does the same thing is science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer. He too uses WordStar for DOS, which saw its final release in 1992, 33 years ago. Last summer he published the version of WordStar that he's using on his website, installed and ready to run on a modern computer inside an emulated DOS environment, complete with a tutorial and all the relevant documentation that came out for this program, which is pretty cool.
So... what's wrong with these people? Why aren't they using Microsoft 365 like they're supposed to (according to Microsoft)?
Robert J. Sawyer wrote a very detailed post about why he prefers WordStar over pretty much everything else that's out there, and if you gloss over all the technical details of how the software works then fundamentally the reasons are very simple. He, George R.R. Martin and other authors keep using this outdated program because they have been using it for years, even decades, they know it inside out, have configured it the way they like it, and they are happy with it. It allows them to do what they want to do, and so they see no reason to upgrade and switch to a more modern piece of software that they would have to spend time learning and adapting their workflow to, which would be time they cannot spend on their craft, the thing that they actually want to do, which is writing.
The software they have does what they want it to, has done so for decades and will continue to do so, and so there's simply no need for them to move away from it.
We humans have a few psychological quirks that were probably useful when we lived in caves and had to fight for our survival, but which are not that useful in the modern world anymore. This article titled "The Psychology Of Stuff: Why We Want More" has a few great explanations for why we always want the newest and shiniest thing and why we never seem to be content with what we have. There's everything from fear of missing out, keeping up with the Joneses, trying to comfort us with shopping or trying to fill a void that we feel by filling it with "something nice"...
Advertisers and salespeople know this of course, and they spare no effort to try and get us to buy new stuff. In fact, if we're being a bit mean we could say that their profession is primarily about exploiting these psychological oddities into trying to trick us into buing things that we don't really want or need because they are new, shiny, sexy, and they promise to make us more productive or efficient or just cooler.
I understand that certain software needs to be kept up to date. IT systems, critical infrastructure, services that are exposed to the internet need to receive regular bugfixes and updates to remain secure and reduce the attack surface as much as possible.
But I'd argue that if you just want to write a letter, if you just want to do some light editing to your holiday photos, if you want to keep track of your expenses in a spreadsheet then you can do these things in a 20 year old copy of Word/Photoshop/Excel just as well as you can do them in their modern counterparts. I might even argue that you could do them better in the old versions of these programs because they're less bloated, but that may be debatable.
The point is, the older versions may not be supported anymore, but they still work fine and depending on what you want to do, they might be more than enough.
And there's one more argument for using older software: You could actually own it.
Back in the distant past, meaning 15 years ago or so, you could walk into a store and buy a copy of Office, Photoshop, Logic Pro or whatever, and then you installed it, entered a license code and that was it. You bought it, you owned it forever. You can still use it today. Try buying a copy of Photoshop today that you can still use in 20 years...
I recently started playing around with old operating systems and contemporary software packages, not just for fun but also with the mindset "could I actually still use this", and surprisingly often the answer is actually "yes". You can find old versions of Photoshop, Office, Logic Pro etc. as "abandonware" all over the internet, and if you're not comfortable pirating software, even if it's long been abandoned or replaced by newer versions, you can usually also find them for little money on Ebay, because remember, you could actually own them, so you can also sell them again.
To make a long story short: Old doesn't necessarily mean bad and useless. It can also mean good enough, no reason to change.