Michael's Blog

Memories

This is going to be my longest post in a while and you'll have to excuse me if I ramble a bit.

Lately it seems I have been in a really nostalgic mood, I've started playing around with old network protocols like gopher and telnetting into BBSes, it's not the same as hooking up a phone line and connecting over 2400 baud though, nothing will replace those late nights of dialing in to a BBS while your parents are sleeping, hehe. It's amazing how small the world really has become, 100 years ago nobody would have believed you if you said you could have a video conference with somebody thousands of miles away, they'd probably lock you in the looney bin.

When I look back I'm REALLY glad that I got into computers as a kid, the moment I set hands on my first Apple II I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. At times I feel like I wasted my youth staying inside and hacking on stuff all the time but it made me into who I am now and I still have that old hacker mentality, I love to tear things apart and figure out how things work, that's what makes me so good at my job I guess.

To supplement my trip down memory lane I downloaded some Atari ROMS along with a 7800 emulator, the graphics are pretty crappy compared to today's standards and some of the games just outright suck, time definitely has not been good to some games. I also installed a Playstation 1 emulator so that I can play the games I have, my PSX died a while ago and I never got around to replacing it.

I really do miss the old days, sure there wasn't as much money to be made (Liquid Web didn't even exist then) but the internet has become filled with so much crap now it's ridiculous, hopefully somebody comes up with a solution soon.

Going Underground

Some how I got on the subject of the gopher protocol today and just for kicks I set up a gopher daemon on my server, you can access it at gopher://watters.ws. Firefox will work with this link along with any regular gopher client of course. I had to do some digging to find details on how to create the main gopher links page but it's actually pretty simple since everything is plain text, I understand the basics now so I can add anything that I want to the menu.

My music collection is also being run over a read only NFS mount here, feel free to browse around but I may take it down soon, the chances of the RIAA checking gopher sites is pretty slim but you never know.

Xbox 360 Video Streaming

Last night I set up ushare to stream videos from my PC to the Xbox, it's a lot more comfortable sitting on the couch to watch movies and now I can just download anything that I want to watch.

Setting things up wasn't too difficult, I had to add an extra NIC and run a crossover cable for the connection, I also had to set up IP masquerading which only requires 4 simple iptables rules. After that stuff is done just start up ushare and point it to your video directory, the Xbox will automatically see the share and let you browse videos.

If you don't have an Xbox ushare also works with the Playstation 3 or any other UPNP or DLNA device, there's also dedicated boxes that you can buy for your TV that just need a network connection.