2025-08-01 08:00:00
Here's how you get some focused writing done. You go to a cozy café, find a nice table, you sit down with your laptop, order your coffee and then you discover that, right across the room from you and with his back to you sits a guy who doesn't understand why belts exist or why shirts should be tucked into pants... and so every time you look up from your computer you're staring right into his buttcrack. Amazing! Nothing will make you want to stay on task more than the prospect of looking at that.
So here's this week's linkdump, brought to you with the help of some random dude's hairy ass. Hope you enjoy :)
Articles
Software/Services
Around the Small Web
2025-07-25 08:00:00
This week we lost Ozzy, less than three weeks after he was on stage for his farewell concert. That was quite a shock, because while he definitely looked frail due to his illness, he didn't look like a man who was going to die two weeks later. The outpouring of love and appreciation for him throughout the music world these last couple of days was quite moving to read though, I don't think I've seen anything like it since Lemmy died 10 years ago. Farewell Prince of Darkness, and thank you for co-inventing Heavy Metal for us!
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Software/Services
Hardware Projects
Videos
Around the Small Web
2025-07-20 08:00:00
And that's it. The website design is back to normal, the OCC 2025 is over. How was it?
I would say I achieved what I set out to do. I wanted to set up a Windows 98 machine and see if I could recreate the feeling of going online in the late 90s. And I feel I was successful in that. I listened to internet radio in Winamp, chatted with people over IRC and ICQ (a big one!) and I surfed the information superhighway thanks to Protoweb. None of this is groundbreaking, but all of it is hugely nostalgic for me and I loved revisiting it.
It's also a little bittersweet. As much as I'd love to convince myself otherwise sometimes, the world has moved on and it isn't as simple as it used to be (or as it exists in my memories) anymore. This post will be gobbled up by countless AI bots as soon as it goes live, I'm being tracked 24/7 through the internet and in fact through almost my entire life by companies all across the world who make a fortune out of storing and selling my personal data to the highest paying bidder with complete and utter disregard for my privacy.
Playing around with old hardware and software and services provides some nice escapism, but it also serves as a reminder to me that things aren't like this anymore. Many things are better now of course, it isn't all doom and gloom, and not everything was great back then, either. I remember that ICQs terms of services back in the day stated that everything everyone sent via ICQ became their intellectual property. And that was before the days of encryption, when everything was transmitted and stored as plain text. We read it, we were outraged, and we kept using ICQ all the same. Now that I think about it, this hasn't changed at all. We still put up with highly intrusive terms and services because we shrug and think "what can you do".
Got a little off topic there I think...
Anyway, about the OCC - the last two years were also different in that by coincidence both times I had the week off and could dedicate more time to reading blogs, interacting with people etc. while this year it was a normal workweek for me and so I only dabbled in this stuff a bit in the evenings and on the weekends.
There was also some drama on IRC which left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, because none of it was necessary.
So overall, mixed feelings, but it was still fun playing around with all of this stuff and now that it's set up, I will keep this computer around and fire it up from time to time. It's a mini PC after all and it doesn't take up a ton of space.
Lastly, thanks to all the people who made it worthwile, who commented on my posts and especially those who hit me up on ICQ! That was pretty cool, even though it was a bit buggy. But I'm sure it'll improve over time, and now that I have an ICQ number again, I'm not letting it go :)
2025-07-19 08:00:00
How do you surf the web on an old Windows 98 PC? The answer is simple: Protoweb.
Protoweb is a service that has been around for a while and it's amazing. If you've never heard of it, it's aim is to restore the early internet as faithfully as possible, and they're doing a fantastic job at it.
If you'd like a thorough introduction, Michael MJD on Youtube made a very good video about it, interestingly almost exactly 2 years ago, so this really has been around for a while.
They have a getting started guide on the website that tells you everything you have to know, but I think I can make it even shorter. Here's what you do:
wayback.protoweb.org with Port 7851 as your http and ftp proxy.That's all. It even works on modern browsers, so you can try it right now if you want to, but the real fun lies in using it on an old OS with an old browser. Inode is the landing page for Protoweb, and all http and ftp requests will now be redirected to the Protoweb network. Here's what it looks like:
Instant old internet feeling!
If you've been online in the late 90s and you try this out, you'll know what I mean. It really takes you back. They restore all kinds of different sites from back in the day, webrings and personal blogs and geocities sites and on and on, so you can really surf to your hearts content. There's a Yahoo directory to navigate everything by category:
The best thing however is that there are a few categories where they retrofitted modern day internet services into this. There's Shoutcast, which houses internet radio streams:
You can select a station, click on it and it will open and play in Winamp. I don't know how this is curated, but it has Antenne Bayern which is a really popular here in Bavaria, so I can now listen to live local radio on my Windows 98 machine in Winamp!
There's also Wikipedia which has all current content, but looks retro:
And the craziest thing, there's a site called WarpStream which is essentially Youtube. They took videos from Youtube, I guess with the creator's consent, and put them on there so they can be streamed through Real Player, Windows Media Player or Flash.
Many of the more well known retro Youtubers like Michael MJD, Computer Clan and LGR are on there, as they should be. Here's the latest LGR video that he released this week in 2025 streaming in glorious potato quality inside Windows Media Player in Internet Explorer 5 on Windows 98:
It's pixelated and blocky and low resolution, which is terrible of course but that's what watching videos on the internet back in the day was like. If you could even get it working at all, because often you didn't have the bandwidth and all you got was a stuttery, blurry mess. But this here just works, and I love it.
There's also lots of ftp sites with all kinds of old software to download, so you really can go exploring. That's why you also need to set the ftp proxy configuration in the browser.
If you have an old system running, I cannot recommend giving this a try enough. It truly feels like surfing the web back in the day felt like.
What if you want to access modern sites though?
For that I tried out Browservice, which is a self hosted proxy that you run on a modern system and that essentially opens a headless browser and streams screenshots of whatever site you're accessing to your old browser. It sounds complicated and clunky, and it isn't the fastest browsing experience in the world, but it works surprisingly well.
Browservice comes as a single file that runs on Windows and Linux (both x86 and arm) and as such doesn't need any complex setup or configuration process. I ran the app image under linux from the command line and ran it with the option --vice-opt-http-listen-addr=0.0.0.0:8080 so I could connect to it from a different computer, otherwise it would just listen on localhost.
Then on the retro machine I navigated to the IP of that system, Port 8080 and got the Browservice start page which is really just an address bar at the very top. You enter the URL of the site you want to visit there (not in the browsers address bar), click "Go" and that's it, the site loads.
Notice the two address bars, the bottom one is from Browservice. It's designed to look like the one from the browser, but this is part of the website already and isn't a browser toolbar or anything like this. (Remember toolbars?)
The experience is a bit clunky as you would expect, but it works and it's perfectly serviceable for accessing your favourite sites that wouldn't otherwise work in the old browser.
... and this, kids, is how to get an old browser back online :)
2025-07-18 08:00:00
It's Windows 98 week, as you might be able to tell from the current look of this site. Despite this, this post was written on my normal computer because I was too lazy to try and figure out how to write and publish a post from Win98. Typing on that old Microsoft keyboard I dug out is also not the greatest experience. It's fine for a few ICQ messages here and there, but if I tried writing a longer text on it I'd probably hurt my hands. As much as I enjoy the look and feel of old hardware, I'm still glad that things have become a lot more ergonomic since then and we don't have to strain our eyes and hurt our wrists anymore using our computers.
Articles
Software/Services
Hardware Projects
Around the Small Web
2025-07-17 08:00:00
Yesterday I installed ICQ and registered a new ICQ number.
How did it go?
Actually not bad, but there were also quite a few bugs.
The good news first, I actually talked to two people yesterday on ICQ, for the first time in probably 15 years or so! One was Matto who I've known since the first OCC two years ago and who is always up for shenanigans like this, and the other was one of you with the nick "therefore", and that's all I know :) So at least one person actually followed my call to action and got in touch and it was quite a nice conversation! Thanks "therefore", it was great talking to you!
Unfortunately there are still quite a few bugs with the service. One of them is that receiving offline messages doesn't seem to work, so if somebody else tried texting me while I was offline then I apologise for not responding, I didn't get your messages. Asking users for authorisation to add them to my contact list also didn't work, and I had issues seeing users as online even though they were actively texting me.
In all fairness though, the ICQ service was advertised as being in "open alpha" on the website, so bugs are to be expected and the core functionality, sending and receiving messages worked fine. The other stuff might also have been a problem with my client, maybe other clients work better, who knows.
Still, it was a nice experiment and a lot of fun to hear that old "uh-OH" sound again when a new message came in. There's a lot of nostalgia connected to that sound and just the overall look and feel of ICQ for me.
I'm definitely keeping an eye on it and I will be available under this ICQ number (82130826) at least until the end of the OCC, so if you want to still say hi, try your luck! Maybe it works, but if you get no response it's nothing personal, then I simply didn't receive it.
That's all for today. Tomorrow we will talk about web proxies, because there is some very cool stuff around.
