A nice find and a fun question
The nice surprise: An Apple-to-USB adapter
In my last post, I asked for thoughts and opinions on de-googled phones. It was nice to see where my fellow nerds stand on the subject, and I really appreciated all the useful feedback. Thanks guys.
But in the discussion, one thing came up that I kinda couldn't believe: Apple makes adapters for their homemade "Lightning" port. And with the Files app, it was supposedly possible to actually move files on and off the device and use them with whatever apps you like. I was skeptical, to say the least, cuz file transfer with Apple has always been a colossal pain in the bits. But I grabbed one for like $10 on Amazon, and I was kinda blown away. I was able to upload music (which I didn't buy on iTunes) and play it with the VLC app. Now obviously, this doesn't include "apps", but it does include software of other kinds. I wrote a Lua script on my computer, then ran it inside the "a-Shell" app. I also edited it, in Vim (on a-Shell, which felt kinda hilarious) and copied it back to my flash drive and yeah, it worked. Of course now I want to really learn BBC BASIC, cuz I have it on both my Linux laptop and my iPhone. And speaking of retro, Apple has lifted the ban-hammer on emulators (for now), so I can even load game ROMs and run them in RetroArch. It was so weird to type C64 BASIC on my Bluetooth keyboard... looking at my tiny iPhone screen. Kinda reminds me of the SX-64, full-sized keyboard with a hilariously small screen. So now I'm able to do all the more computer-like things I'd expect: I can play my music, write my notes, and do what I want with my files. I feel like they're MY files again. Whether they are or aren't is a debate I don't want to start, but frankly this was a HUGE selling point of de-googled Androids for me. Now don't get me wrong: I still wouldn't use my phone to do anything like shopping, e-mail or banking - I do all that at home on my own network, and that's not a slam on Apple or anyone else, so much as on public wi-fi - but I like that my phone doesn't have to do everything over the internet anymore. Shoot, now if I want to, I can put the darn thing in Airplane Mode and turn off cellular data and STILL be able to enjoy all the stuff I would want a "computer in my pocket" for. So that was a nice little score. Now if only I hadn't deleted my copy of iDOS. iDOS 3 is not free and I don't want to store my card on that thing. Boo. idk, I may have to add my card, buy the app, and delete the card just to have a full-on DOS computer. š
The fun question
So, if you've been on my website (thegeekonskates.com) anytime recently, you'll see I haven't done much with it in like ages. There was that one day I finished a project, and put that up there, but my website doesn't really link to it anywhere. Back when I started coding it, I was playing with this whole idea of doing everything on the server, like the old mainframe systems, so that the client is just a "dumb" terminal (dumb by today's standards - xtermjs can do color and clear the screen and all that good stuff). It was fun, it worked, and I left it alone for idk how long. But now... yeah, that weird little PHP state machine is now just one project out of many that are up there. Plus the terminal requires JS and I don't like that (lol).
So I was thinking, I'd kinda like to redo it. Old-school. As in, works fine in Lynx, looks good on NetSurf, and would even work on retro browsers. Now I know some of you are into that here more than I ever was, so let me ask you this: how do I do that? Like I've gotten so used to HTML5 and CSS that the best I could do is kinda imitate the style. So like, do modern browsers still support HTML4? I don't even remember what HTML4 looked like, apart from little things like using <b> instead of <strong> and <i> instead of <em>... but I remember it had a <font> tag and other stuff that only those of us who were coding HTML in the late 90s/early 2000s would remember. Faking the style is easy; writing a web page that's actually old-school is a whole other thing entirely. I think <b> and <i> still work at least, and I don't really care about colored fonts... idk, just a fun thought for a fun way to give my old website a fresh coat of paint.
