Podcasts about bbses

Kacper "prefetcher" Staroń created the PinkSea oekaki BBS on top of the AT Protocol. He also made the online multiplayer game MicroWorks with Noam "noam 2000" Rubin. He's currently studying Computer Science at the Lublin University of Technology. We discuss the appeal of oekaki BBSs, why and how PinkSea was created, web design of the early 2000s, flash animations, and building an application on top of the AT Protocol. Prefetcher Bluesky Github Personal site Microworks (Free multiplayer game) PinkSea and Harbor PinkSea PinkSea Bluesky Account PinkSea repository Harbor image proxy repository Harbor post from bnewbold.net imgproxy (Image proxy used by Bluesky) Early web design Web Design Museum Pixel Art in Web Design Kaliber10000 Eboy Assembler 2advanced epuls.pl (Polish social networking site) Wipeout 3 aesthetic Restorativland (Geocities archive) Flash sites and animations My Flash Archive (Run by prefetcher) dagobah Z0r Juicy Panic - Otarie IOSYS - Marisa Stole the Precious Thing Geocities style web hosts Neocities Nekoweb AT Protocol / Bluesky PDS Relay AppViews PLC directory Decentralized Identifier lexicon Jetstream XRPC ATProto scraping (List of custom PDS and did:web) Tools to view PDS data PDSls atp.tools ATProto browser Posters mentioned vertigris (Artist that promoted PinkSea) Mary (AT Protocol enthusiast) Brian Newbold (Bluesky employee) Oekaki drawing applets Tegaki chickenpaint Group drawing canvas Drawpile Aggie Other links Bringing Geocities back with Kyle Drake (Interview with creator of Neocities) firesky.tv (View all bluesky posts) ATFile (Use PDS as a file store) PinkSky (Instagram clone) front page (Hacker news clone) Smoke Signal (Meetup clone) -- Transcript You can help correct transcripts on GitHub. Intro [00:00:00] Jeremy: Today I am talking to Kacper Staroń.  He created an oekaki BBS called PinkSea built on top of the AT protocol, and he's currently studying computer science at the Lublin University of Technology. We are gonna discuss the appeal of oekaki BBS, the web design of the early 2000s, flash animations, and building an application on top of the AT protocol. Kacper, thanks for talking with me today. [00:00:16] Prefetcher: Hello. Thank you for having me on. I'm Kacper Staroń also probably you know me as Prefetcher online. And as Jeremy's mentioned, PinkSea is an oekaki drawing bulletin board. You log in with your Bluesky account and you can draw and post images. It's styled like a mid to late 2000s website to keep it in the spirit. What's an oekaki BBS? [00:00:43] Jeremy: For someone who isn't familiar with oekaki BBSs what is different about them as opposed to say, a photo sharing website? [00:00:53] Prefetcher: The difference is that a photo sharing website you have the image already premade be it a photo or a drawing made in a separate application. And you basically log in and you upload that image. For example on Instagram or pixiv for artists even Flickr. But in the case of an oekaki BBS the thing that sets it apart is that oekaki BBSes already have the drawing tools built in. You cannot upload an already pre-made image with there being some caveats. Some different oekaki boards allow you to upload your already pre-made work. But Pinksea restricts you to a tool called Tegaki. Tegaki being a drawing applet that was built for one of the other BBSes and all of the drawing tools are inside of it. So you draw from within PinkSea and you upload it to the atmosphere. Every image that's on PinkSea is basically drawn right on it by the artists. No one can technically upload any images from elsewhere. How PinkSea got started and grew [00:01:56] Jeremy: You released this to the world. How did people find it and how many people are using it? [00:02:02] Prefetcher: I'll actually begin with how I've made it 'cause it kind of ties into how PinkSea got semi-popular. One day I was just browsing through Bluesky somewhere in the late 2024s. I was really interested in the AT Protocol and while browsing, one of the artists that I follow vertigris posted a post basically saying they'd really want to see something a drawing canvas like Drawpile or Aggie on AT Protocol or something like an oekaki board. And considering that I was really looking forward to make something on the AT Protocol. I'm like, that sounds fun. I used to be a member of some oekaki boards. I don't draw well but it's an activity that I was thinking this sounds like a fun thing to do. I'm absolutely down for it. From like, the initial idea to what I'd say was the first time I was proud to let someone else use it. I think it was like two weeks. I was posting progress on Bluesky and people seemed eager to use it. That kept me motivated. And yeah. Right as I approached the finish I posted about it as a response to vertigris' posts and people seemed to like it. I sent the early version to a bunch of artists. I basically just made a post calling for them. Got really positive feedback, things to fix, and I released it. And thanks to vertigris the post went semi-viral. The launch I got a lot of people which I would also tie to the fact that it was right after one of the user waves that came to Bluesky from other platforms. The website also seemed really popular in Japan. I remember going to sleep, waking up the next day, and I saw like a Japanese post about PinkSea and it had 2000 reposts and 3000 likes and I was just unable to believe it. Within I think the first week we got like 1000 posts overall which to me is just insane. For a week straight I just kept looking at my phone and clicking, refresh, refresh, refresh, just seeing the new posts flow in. There was a bunch of like really insane talented artists just posting their works. And I just could not believe it. PinkSea got I'd say fairly popular as an alternative AppView. People seem to really want oekaki boards back and I saw people going, oh look, it's like one of those 2000s oekaki boards! Oh, that's so cool! I haven't seen them in forever! The art stands out because it's human made [00:04:58] Prefetcher: And it made me so happy every single time seeing it. It's been since November, like four months, give or take. And today alone we got five posts. That doesn't sound seem like a lot but given that every single post is hand drawn it's still insane. People go on there and spend their time to produce their own original artworks. [00:05:26] Jeremy: This is especially relevant now when you have so much image generation stuff and they're making images that look polished but you're kind of like well... did you draw it? [00:05:39] Prefetcher: Yeah. [00:05:40] Jeremy: And when you see people draw with these oekaki boards using the tools that are there I think there's something very human and very nostalgic about oh... This came from you. [00:05:53] Prefetcher: Honestly, yeah. To me seeing even beginner artists 'cause PinkSea has a lot of really, really talented and popular people (and) also beginner artists that do it as a hobby. Ones that haven't been drawing for a long time. And no matter what you look at you just get like that homely feeling that, oh, that's someone that just spent time. That's someone that just wanted to draw for fun. And at least to me, with generative AI like images it really lacks that human aspect to it. You generate an image, you go, oh, that's cool. And it just fades away. But in this case you see people that spent their time drawing it spent their own personal time. And no matter if it's a masterpiece or not it's still incredibly nice to see people just do it for fun. [00:06:54] Jeremy: Yeah. I think whether it's drawing or writing or anything now more than ever people wanna see something that you made yourself right? They wanna know that a human did this. [00:07:09] Prefetcher: Yeah. absolutely. [00:07:11] Jeremy: So it sounds like, in terms of getting the initial users and the ones that are there now, it really all came out of a single Bluesky posts that an existing artist (vertigris) noticed and boosted. And like you said, you were lucky enough to go viral and that carried you all the way to now and then it just keeps going from there, [00:07:36] Prefetcher: Basically if not for vertigris PinkSea (would) just not exist because I honestly did not think about it. My initial idea on making something on ATProto and maybe in the future I'll do something like that would be a platform like StumbleUpon -- Something that would just allow you to go on a website, press a button, and it gets uploaded to your repo and your friends would be able to see oh -- you visited that website and there would be an AppView that would just recommend you sites based on those categories. I really liked that idea and I was dead set on making it but then like I noticed that post (from vertigris) and I'm like, no, that's better. I really wanna make that. And yeah. So right here I want to give a massive shout out to vertigris 'cause they've been incredibly nice to me. They've even contributed the German translation of PinkSea which was just insane to me. And yeah, massive shout out to every single other artist that, Reposted it, liked it, used it because, it's all just snowballed from there and even recently I've had another wave of new users from the PinkSea account. So there are periods where it goes up and it like goes chill -- and then popular again. Old internet and flash [00:08:59] Jeremy: Yeah. And so something that you mentioned is that some people who came across it they mentioned how it was nostalgic or it looked like the old oekaki BBSs from the early internet. And I noticed that that was something that you posted on your own website that you have an interest in that specifically. I wonder what about that part of the internet interests you? [00:09:26] Prefetcher: That is a really good question. Like, to me, even before PinkSea my interests lie in the early internet. I run on Twitter and also on Bluesky now an account called My Flash Archive, which was an archive of very random, like flash animations. And I still do that just not as much anymore 'cause I have a lot of other things to do. I used to on Google just type in Flash and look through the oldest archived random folders just having flash videos. And I would just go over them save all of that or go on like the dagobah or Z0r or swfchan. 'cause the early internet to me, it was really like more explorative. 'cause like now you have, people just concentrated in those big platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, whatever. And back then at least to me you had more websites that you would just go on, you would find cool stuff. And the designs were like sometimes very minimal, aesthetically pleasing. I'd named here one of my favorite sites, Kaliber10000 which had just fantastic web design. Like, I, I also spend a lot of time on like the web design museum just like looking at old web design and just in awe. My flash archive on Twitter at least got very popular. I kind of abandoned that account, but I think it was sitting at 12,000 followers if not more? And showed that people also yearn for that early internet vibe. And to me it feels really warm. Really different from the internet nowadays. Even with the death of flash you don't really have interactive experiences like it anymore. 'cause flash was supposed to be replaced by HTML5 and JavaScript and whatever but you don't really make interactive experiences that just come packaged in a single file like flash. You need a website and everything. In flash, it just had a single file. It could be shared on multiple sites and just experienced. That kind of propelled my interest. Plus I, I dunno, I just really like the old internet design aesthetics it really warms me (and really close..?) Flash loops [00:12:01] Jeremy: The flash one specifically. Were they animations or games or was there a specific type of a flash project that spoke to you? [00:12:15] Prefetcher: Something we call loops. Basically, it's sometimes animations. 'cause, surprisingly while I like flash games they weren't my main collection. What spoke to me more were loops. Basically someone would take a song, find a gif they liked, and they would just pair it together. Something like YTMND did. At least from loops I found some of my favorite musical artists, some of my favorite songs, a lot of interesting series, be it anime or TV or whatever. And you basically saw people make stuff about their favorite series and they would just share it online. I would go over those. For example, a good website as an example is z0r.de, which is surprisingly still active and updated to this day. And you would see people making loops about members of that community or whatever they like. And you would for example see like 10 posts about the same thing. So you would know someone decided to make 10 loops and just upload them at once. And yeah, to me, loops basically were like, I mean, they weren't always the highest quality or the most unique thing, but you would see someone liked something enough that they decided to make something about it. And I always found that really cool. I would late at night just browse for loops and I'm like, oh, oh, this series, I remember it. I liked it (laughs)! But of course flash games as well. I mean, I used to play a lot when I was younger, but specifically loops, even animations and especially like when someone took like their time to animate something like really in depth. My favorite example is, the music video to a song by the band Juicy Panic called Otari. Someone liked that song enough that they made an entire flash animated music video, which was basically vectorized art of various series like Azumanga Daioh or Neon Genesis Evangelion as well, and other things. And it was so cool, at least to me, like a lot of these loops just basically have an intense, like immense feeling on me (laughs). I just really liked collecting them. [00:14:38] Jeremy: And in that last example, it sounded more like it was a complete music video, not just a brief loop? [00:14:45] Prefetcher: No, it was like a five minute long music video that someone else made. [00:14:48] Jeremy: Five. Oh my gosh. [00:14:49] Prefetcher: Yeah. You would really see people's creativity shine through on just making those weird things that not a lot of people have seen, but you look at it and it's like, wow. It's different than YouTube (Sharable single file, vectorized) [00:15:01] Jeremy: It's interesting because you can technically do and see a lot of these things on, say, YouTube today, but I think it does feel a little different for some reason. [00:15:16] Prefetcher: It really is. Of course I'm not denying on YouTube you see a lot of creative things and whatever. But first and foremost, the fact that Flash is scalable. You don't lose the quality. So be able to open, I don't know, any of the IOSYS flash music videos for like their Touhou songs and the thing would just scale and you would see like in 4K and it's like, wow. And yeah, the fact that on YouTube you have like a central place where you just like put something and it just stays there. Of course not counting reuploads, but with Flash you just had like this one animation file that you would just be able to share everywhere and I don't know, like the aspect of sharing, just like having those massive collections, you would see this flash right here on this website and on that website and also on this website. And also seeing people's personal collections of flash videos and jrandomly online and you would also see this file and this file that you haven't seen it -- it really gives it, it's like explorative to me and that's what I like. You put in the effort to like go over all those websites and you just like find new and new cool stuff. [00:16:32] Jeremy: Yeah, that's a good point too that I hadn't thought about. You can open these files and you have basically the primitives of how it was made and since, like you said, it's vector based, there's no, oh, can you please upload it in 1080 p or 4K? You can make it as big as you want. [00:16:53] Prefetcher: Yeah. Web design differences, pixel art, non-responsive [00:16:55] Jeremy: I think web design as well it was very distinct. Maybe because the tools just weren't there, so a lot of people were building things more from scratch rather than pulling a template or using a framework. A lot of people were just making the design theirs I think rather than putting words on a page and filling into some template. [00:17:21] Prefetcher: Honestly, you raise a good point here that I did not think much about. 'cause like nowadays we have all of this tooling to make web design easier and you have design languages and whatnot. And you see people make really, in my opinion, still pretty websites, very usable websites on top of that. But all of them have like the same vibes to them. All of them have like a unified design language and all of them look very similar. And you kind of lose that creativity that some people had. Of course, you still find pretty websites that were made from scratch. But you don't really get the same vibes that you did get like back then. Like my favorite, for example, trend that used to be back on like the old internet is pixel art in web design. For example, Kaliber10000, or going off the top of my head, you had the Eboy or all the sites and then Poland, for example, ... (polish website) those websites use minimal graphics, like pixel graphics and everything to build really interesting looking websites. They had their own very massive charm to them that, I don't know, I don't see a lot in more modern internet. And it's also because back then you were limited by screen size, so you didn't have to worry about someone being on a Mac with high DPI or on a 32x9 monitor like I am right now. And just having to scale it up. So you would see people go more for images, like UI elements, images instead of just like building everything from scratch and CSS and whatnot. So, yeah, internet design had to accommodate the change. So we couldn't stay how it was forever 'cause technology changed. Design language has changed, but to me it's really lost its charm. Every single website was different, specific, the web design had like this weird form, at least on websites where it was like. I like to call it futuristic minimalism. They looked very modern and also very minimal and sort of dated. And I dunno, I just really like it. I absolutely recommend checking, on the web design museum fantastic website. I love them and the pixel art in web design sub page. Like those websites to me they just look fantastic. [00:19:52] Jeremy: Yeah, and that's a good point you brought up about the screen sizes where now you have to make sure your website looks good on a phone, on a tablet, on any number of monitor sizes. Back then in the late 90s, early 2000s, I think most people were looking at these websites on their 4x3 small CRT monitors. [00:20:20] Prefetcher: My favorite this website is best viewed with an 800 by 600 monitor. It's like ... what? [00:20:28] Jeremy: Exactly. Even if you open your personal site now the design is very reminiscent of those times and it looks really cool but at the same time on a lot of monitors it's a small box in the middle of the monitor, so it's like -- [00:20:49] Prefetcher: I saw that issue, 'cause I was making it on a 1080p monitor and now I have a 32x9 monitor and it does not scale. I've been working on reworking that website, but, also on the topic of my website, I, I wanna shout out a website from the 2000s that still exists today. 'cause, my website was really inspired by a website called Assembler. And Assembler, from what I could gather, was like a net art or like internet design collective. And the website still works to this day. You still had like, all of their projects, including the website that my website was based off of. [00:21:28] Jeremy: Yeah, I mean there, there definitely was an aesthetic to that time. And it's probably, like you said, it's probably people seeing someone else's site in this case, what, what did you call it? Assem? Assembler? [00:21:42] Prefetcher: Assembler. [00:21:42] Jeremy: Yeah. You see someone else's website and then maybe you try to copy some of the design language or you look at the HTML and the CSS and I mean, really at the time, these websites weren't being made with a ton of JavaScript. There weren't the minifiers, so you really could view source and just pull whatever you wanted from there. [00:22:06] Prefetcher: We also had those design studios, design agencies, notably 2advanced which check in now, their website still works, and their website is still in the same aesthetic as it was those 20 so years ago just dictating this futuristic design style that people really like. 'cause a lot of people nowadays also really like this old futurism minimalism for example a lot of people still love the Wipeout 3 aesthetic that was designed by one of my favorite studios overall the designers republic. And yeah, it's just hard for me to explain, but it feels so soulful in a way. [00:22:53] Jeremy: I think there are some trade offs. There's what we were talking about earlier with the flexibility of screen size. But there used to be with a lot of websites that used Flash, there used to be these very elaborate intros where the site is loading and there's these really neat animations. But at the same time, it's sort of like, well, to actually get to the content, it's a bit much, but, everything is a trade off. [00:23:25] Prefetcher: People had flash at their disposal and they just wanted to make, I have the tooling, I'm going to use all of the tooling and all of it. [00:23:33] Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah. but yeah, I definitely get what you're saying where when I went to make my own website I made it very utilitarian and in some ways boring, right? I think we do kind of miss some of what we used to have. [00:23:54] Prefetcher: I mean, in my opinion, utilitarian websites are just as fine. Like in some cases you don't really need a lot of flashy things and a lot of very modern very CPU intensive or whatever animations. Sometimes it is better to go on a website and just like, see, oh, there's the play button and that's it. [00:24:17] Jeremy: Yeah. Well definitely the animations and the intro and all that stuff. I guess more in terms of the aesthetics or the designs. It's tricky because there's definitely people making very cool things now things that weren't even possible back then. But it does feel like maybe the default is I'll pick this existing style sheet or this existing framework and just go with that. [00:24:47] Prefetcher: A lot of modern websites just go for similar aesthetics, similar designs, which they aren't bad, but they are also very just bland. They, they are futuristic, they are very well designed. But when you see the same website. The same -- five websites have the same feel. And this is especially, at least in my opinion, visible with websites built on top of NextJS or other frameworks. And it just feels corporate kind of dead. Like someone just makes a website that they want to sell something to you and not for fun. [00:25:26] Jeremy: With landing pages especially it's like, wow, this looks the same as every other site, but I guess it must work. [00:25:38] Prefetcher: It works. And it really cuts down on development time. You don't need to think much about it. You just already have a lot of well-established design rules that you just follow and you get a cohesive and responsive design system. Designing the PinkSea look and feel [00:25:56] Jeremy: Let's talk about that in connection with PinkSea. What was your thinking when you designed how PinkSea would look and feel? [00:26:06] Prefetcher: Honestly, at first I have to admit I looked at other websites. I looked at Bluesky first and foremost. I looked at, front page. I looked at Smoke Signal, and I thought that I might also build something that's modern and sleek and I sketched it out in an application and I showed it to some friends. One of them suggested I go for more like a 2000 aesthetic. I'm like, yeah, okay. I like that. As the website was built, I just saw more and more of how much I feel this could sit with others. Especially with the fact that it's an oekaki page an oekaki BBS and as you scroll through oekaki has a very distinct style to it. And as you scroll and you see all of those, pixel shaded, all those dithered images, non anti-aliased pens and whatnot. It feels really really cohesive somehow with the design aesthetic. But of course, PinkSea in itself is a modern website. Like if you were to go to my PinkSea repository. It's a modern website built up on top of Vue3, which talks via like XRPC API calls in real time and it's a single page app and whatever. That's kind of the thing I merged the modern way of making sites with a very oldish design language. And I feel, in my opinion, it somehow just really works. And especially it sets PinkSea apart from the other websites. It gives it that really weird aesthetic. You would go on it and you would not be like, oh, this is a modern site that connects with a modern protocol on top of a big decentralized network. This is just someone's weird BBS stuck in the 2000s that they forgot to shut down. (laughs) [00:28:00] Jeremy: Yeah. And I think that's a good reminder too, that when people are intentional about design, the tools we have now are so much better than what we used to have. There's nothing stopping us from making websites that when people go to them they really feel like something's different. I know I did not just land on Instagram. [00:28:27] Prefetcher: Yeah. And making PinkSea taught me that it's really easy to fall into that full string of thought that every site has to look modern. Because I was like, oh yeah, this is a modern protocol, a modern everything, and it has to look the part. It has to look interesting to people and everything. And after talking with a bunch of friends and other people and just going, huh, that's maybe like the 2000s isn't as bad as I thought. And yeah, the website especially it's design people seem to just really like it. Me too. I, I just absolutely love how PinkSea turned out it is really a reminder that you don't need modernness in web design always. And people really appreciate quirky looking pages, so to say, quirky like interesting. [00:29:23] Jeremy: I interviewed the, the creator of Neocities which is like kind of a modern version of GeoCities and yeah, that's really what one of the aspects that I think makes things so interesting to people from that era is, is that it really felt like you're creating your own thing, and not just everything looks the same. The term I think he used is homesteading. You're taking care of your place and it can match your sensibilities, your style, your likes, rather than having to, like you said, try to force everything to be this, this sort of base modern, look. The old spirit of the internet is coming back [00:30:08] Prefetcher: I mean Neocities and by extension also Nekoweb are websites that I often when I don't have much to do -- I like just going through them because you see a bunch of people just make their own places. And you see that even in 2025 when we have those big social media sites. You have platforms where you can get a ton of followers. You can get a ton of attention and everything. People to some extent still want that aspect of self-expression. They want to be able to make something that's uniquely theirs and you see people just make just really amazing websites build insane things on those old Geocities-like platforms using nothing but a code editor. You see them basically just wanting thing to express, oh, that's mine and no one else has it. So to say that's why. Yeah. I feel like to some extent the old school train of thought when it comes to the internet is slowly coming back. Especially with the advent of protocols like ATProto. And you'll experience more websites that just allow people to make their own homes on the internet. Cause in my opinion, one of the biggest problems is that people do not really want to register on a lot of platforms. 'cause you already have this place where you get all of your followers, you have all of your connections, and then you want to move and then you'll lose all of your connections and everything. But with something like ATProto, you can use the social graph of, for example, Bluesky. I want to add followers on PinkSea. So for example, you have an artist that has like 30,000 followers for example, I can just click import my following from Bluesky. And just like that they would already get all of the artists that they follow on Bluesky already added as followers on PinkSea. And for example, someone else joins and they followed that big artist and they instantly followed them on PinkSea as well. I think that we are slowly coming back to the advent of people owning their place online. PinkSea and ATProto (PDS) [00:32:24] Jeremy: Yeah. So let's talk a little bit more about how PinkSea fits into ATProto. For people who aren't super familiar with ATProto, maybe you could talk about how it's split up. You've got the PDS, the relays, the AppView. What are those and how do those fit into what PinkSea is? [00:32:48] Prefetcher: My favorite analogy, ATProto is a massive network, and at least me, when I saw the initial graph I was just very confused. I absolutely did not know what I'm looking at. But let's start with the base building block, something that ATProto wouldn't exist with. And it's the PDS. Think of the PDS as like a filing cabinet. You have a bunch of folders in which you have files, so to say. So you have a filing cabinet with your ID, this is the DID part that sometimes shows up and scares people. It's what we call a decentralized identifier. Basically that identifier is not really tied to the PDS, it just exists somewhere. And the end goal is that every user controls their DID. So for example, if your PDS shuts down, you can always move to somewhere else. Still keep like, for example, that you are prefetcher.miku.place. But in that filing cabinet the PDS going back to it you have your own little zone, your own cabinets, and that has your identifier, it's uniquely yours. Every single application on the AT protocol creates data. They create data and they store the data in a structured format called a record. A record is basically just a bunch of data that explains what that thing is, be it a like, a post on Bluesky an oekaki on PinkSea and an upvote on front page, or even a pixel on place.blue. And all of those records are organized into folders in your cabinet. And that folder is named with something we call a collection id. So for example, a like is, if I remember correctly, it's app.bsky.feed.like, so you see that it belongs to Bluesky. The app.bsky part. it's a feed thing, and the same way, PinkSea, for example, the oekaki and PinkSea uses com.shinolabs.pinksea.oekaki with com.shinolabs being the the collective that I use as a, pen name, so to say. PinkSea being, well, PinkSea and oekaki just being the name. It's an oekaki. If you want to see that there are a lot of tools, for example, PDSls or atp.tools or ATProto browser, if you had to go into one of those and you would type in for example, prefetcher.miku.place, you would see all of your records, the things that, you've created on the AT protocol network. Relay [00:35:19] Prefetcher: So you have a PDS, you have your data, but for example, imagine you have a PDS that you made yourself, you hosted yourself. How will, for example, Bluesky know that you exist? 'cause it won't, it's just a server in the middle of nowhere. That's where we have a relay. A relay is an application that listens to every single server. So every time you create something or you delete something, or for example, you edit a post, you delete an oekaki. You create a new, like -- Your PDS, your filing cabinet generates a record of that. It generates an event, something we call a commit. So, anytime you do something, your PDS goes, Hey, I did that thing. And relays function as big servers that a PDS can connect to. And it's a massive shout box. The PDS goes, Hey, I made this. Then the relay aggregates all of those PDSs into one and creates a massive stream of every single event that's going on the network at once. That's also where the name firehose comes from. 'cause the, the end result, the stream is like a firehose. It just shoots a lot of data directly at anyone who can connect to it. And the thing that makes AT Protocol open and able to be built on is that anyone can just go, I want to connect to jetstream1.west.bluesky.network. They just make a connection to it and boom they just get everything that's happening. You can, for example, see that via firesky.tv. If you go to it, you would open it in your browser. Every single Bluesky post being made in real time right directly in your computer. So you have the PDSs that store data, you have the relay that aggregates every, like, builds a stream of every single event on the network. AppViews [00:37:26] Prefetcher: You just get records. You can't interact with it. You can see that someone made a new record with that name, but to a human, you won't really understand what a cid is or what property something else is. That's why you have what we call AppViews. An AppView, or in full an application view is an application that runs on the AT protocol network. It connects to the relay and it transforms the network into a state that it can be used by people. That's why it's called an application view. 'cause it's a, a specialized view into the whole network. So, for example, PinkSea connects, and then it goes, hey, I want to listen on every single thing that's happening to com.shinolabs.pinksea.oekaki, and it sees all of those, new records coming in and PinkSea understands, oh, I can turn it into this, and then I can take this thing, store it in the database, and then someone can connect with a PinkSea front end. And then it can like, transform those things, those records into something that the front end understands. And then the front end can just display, for example, the timeline, the same way Bluesky, for example -- Bluesky gets every single event, every single new file, new record coming in from the network. And it goes. Okay, so this will translate into one more like on this post. And this post is a reply to that post. So I should chain it together. Oh. And this is a new feed, so I should probably display it to the user if they ask for feeds. And it basically just gets a lot of those disjoint records and it makes sense of them all. The end user has a different API to the Bluesky AppView. And then they can get a more specialized view into Bluesky. PinkSea does not store the original images, the PDS does [00:39:26] Jeremy: And so in that example, the PDSs, they can be hosted by Bluesky the company, or they could be hosted by any person. And so PinkSea itself, when somebody posts a new oekaki, a new image, they're actually telling PinkSea to go create the image in the user's PDS, right? PinkSea is itself not the the source of truth I guess you could say. [00:40:00] Prefetcher: PinkSea in itself. I don't remember which Bluesky team member said it, but I like the analogy that AppViews are like Google. So in Google, when you search something, Google doesn't have those websites. Google just knows that this thing is on that website. In the same vein, PinkSea, when you create a new oekaki, you tell PinkSea, Hey, go to my PDS and create that record for me. And then the person owns the PDS. So for example, let's say that in a year, of course I won't do it, but hypothetically here, I just go rogue and I shut down PinkSea, I delete the database. You still own the things. So for example, if someone else would clone the PinkSea repository and go here, there's PinkSea 2. They can still use all of those images that were already on the network. So, AppViews in a way basically just work as a search engine for the network. PinkSea doesn't store anything. PinkSea just indexes that a user made a thing on that server. And here I can show you how to get to it somehow. Those images aren't stored by PinkSea, but instead, I know that the image itself is stored, for example, on pds.example.com, and of course to reduce the load, we have a proxy. PinkSea asks the proxy to go to pds.example.com and fetch the image, and then it just returns it to the user. [00:41:37] Jeremy: And so what it sounds like then is if someone were to create oekaki on their own PDS completely independently of Pink Sea the fact that they had created that image would be sent to one of the relays, and then PinkSea would receive an event that says oh, this person created a new image then at that point your index could see, oh, somebody created a new image and they didn't even have to go through the PinkSea website or call the PinkSea APIs. Is that right? Sharing PDS records with other applications [00:42:14] Prefetcher: Yep. That is exactly right. For example, someone could now go, Hey, I'm making my own PinkSea-like application. And then they would go, I want to be compatible with PinkSea. So I'm using the same record. Or what we call a lexicon, basically describe how records look like. I forgot to mention that, but every single record has an attached lexicon. And lexicons serve as a blueprint. So a lexicon specifies, oh, this has an image, this has a for example, the tags attached to it, a description of the image. Validate that the record is correct, that you don't get someone just making up random stuff. But yeah, someone could just go, Hey, I'm making another website. Let's call it GreenForest for example. And GreenForest is also an oekaki website, but it uses, for example, chickenpaint instead of tegaki but I want to be able to interoperate with PinkSea. so I'm also gonna use com.shinolabs.pinksea.oekaki the collection, the same record, the same lexicon. And for example, they have their own servers and the servers just create regular oekaki records. So for example, GreenForest gets a new user, they log in, create, draw their beautiful image, and then they click upload it. So GreenForest goes to that person's PDS and tells the PDS, Hey, I want to make a new. com.shinolabs.pinksea.oekaki record. The PDS goes okay, I've done it for you. Let me just inform the relay that I did so, relay gets the notification that someone made that new PinkSea oekaki record. And so the main PinkSea instance, pinksea.art, which is listening in on the relay, gets a notification from the relay going, Hey, there is this new oekaki record. And PinkSea goes, sure, I'll index it. And so PinkSea just gets that GreenForest image directly in itself. And in the same vein, someone at PinkSea could draw something in tegaki -- their own beautiful character. And the same thing would happen with GreenForest. GreenForest would get that PinkSea image, that PinkSea record, and index it locally. So the two platforms, despite being completely different, doing completely different things, they would still be able to share images with each other. Bluesky PDS stores other AppView's data but they could stop at anytime [00:44:38] Jeremy: And these images, since they're stored in the PDS, what that would mean is that anybody building an application on ATProto, they can basically use Bluesky's PDS or the user's PDS as their storage. They could put any number of images in there and they could get into gigabytes of images. And that's the responsibility of the PDS and not yourself to keep track of. [00:45:12] Prefetcher: Yes, that can be the case. Of course, there is a hard limit on how big a single upload can be, which is, if I remember correctly, I don't wanna lie, I think it's 50 megabytes, I don't recall there being a hard cap on how big a single repository can be. I know of some people whose repositories are in the single gigabyte digits but this kind of is a thing scares app developers. 'cause you never know when Bluesky the company -- 'cause most people registering, are registering on Bluesky. We don't really know whether Bluesky, the company will want to keep it for free. Forever allow us to do something like that. You already have projects like, for example, ATFile, which just allow you to upload any arbitrary data just to store it, on their servers and they are paying for you. So we'll never know whether Bluesky will decide, okay, our services are only for Bluesky if you want to use PinkSea you have to deal with it. Or whether they go, okay, if you want to use alternative AppViews you have to pay us in order to host them. So, that also leads me to the fact that decentralization is an important part of AT protocol as Bluesky themselves say that they are a potential adversary. You cannot trust them in the long term. Right now they are benign right now, they're very nice, but, we never know how Bluesky will end up in a year or two. So if you want to be in the full control of your data, you need to sadly host it by yourself. And it's honestly really easy in order to do so. There is a ton of really useful online content blogs and whatever. I think I've set up my PDS in 10 minutes on a break between classes and university. But to a person that's non-technical that doesn't know much I'd say around an hour to two hours The liability and potential abuse from running a PDS [00:47:14] Jeremy: Yeah, I think the scary thing for a lot of people is technical or not, is even if it's easy to set up, you gotta make sure it keeps running. You gotta have backups. And so it could be a lot. [00:47:30] Prefetcher: Yeah. This is to be expected by the fact that you're in control of your data. Keeping it secure the same way, for your personal photos or your documents, for example, your master's diploma or whatever. And it's on you to keep your Bluesky interaction secure. On one hand, it's easier to get someone to do it, and I expect in the future we'll get people that are hosting public PDSes I sometimes thought of doing that for PinkSea, just like allowing people to register by PinkSea. But, doing so as a person, you also have to be constantly on call for abuse. So if someone decides to register via PinkSea and do some illicit activities, you are solely responsible for it. PDS and AppView moderation liability [00:48:17] Jeremy: So if they were to upload content that's illegal, for example, it's hosted on your servers so then it's your problem. [00:48:27] Prefetcher: Yeah, it is my problem. [00:48:29] Jeremy: At least the way that it works now, the majority of the people, their PDS is gonna be hosted by Bluesky. So if they upload content that's breaks the law, then that's the Bluesky company's problem at least currently. [00:48:44] Prefetcher: Yeah. That is something that Bluesky has to deal with. But I do believe that in the future we are going to have, more like independent entities just building infrastructure for ATProto, not even the relay it's just like PDSs for people to be able to join the atmosphere, but not directly via Bluesky. [00:49:06] Jeremy: I'm kind of curious also with the current PDSs, if it's hosted by Bluesky, are they, are they moderating what people upload to their PDSs? [00:49:16] Prefetcher: Good question. Honestly, I don't think they're moderating everything 'cause, it's infeasible for them to, for example, other than moderate Bluesky to also moderate PinkSea and moderate front page and whatnot. So it's the obvious responsibility to moderate itself and to report abuse. I'd say that if someone started uploading illicit material, I do not think, and this is not legal advice, I do not think that they would catch on until some point let's say. [00:49:52] Jeremy: I mean, from what you were describing too, it seems like the AppViews would also, have issues with this because if, let's say someone created a PinkSea record in their PDS directly and the image they put in was not an oekaki image, it's instead something pretty illegal in the country that your AppView is hosted then, Wouldn't that go straight to the PinkSea users viewing the website? [00:50:20] Prefetcher: Yes, sadly, this is something that you have to sign up as you're making an AppView and especially one with images. Sooner or later you are going to get material that you have to moderate and it's entirely on you. That's why, you have to think of moderation while you're working on an AppView. Bluesky has an insanely complicated, at least in my opinion, moderation system, which is composable and everything, which I like. But for smaller AppViews, I think it's too much to build the same level of tooling. So you have to rely more on manual work. Thankfully so far the user base on PinkSea has been nothing but stellar. I didn't have to deal with any law breaking stuff, but I am absolutely ready for one day where I'll have to sadly make some drastic moderation issues. [00:51:18] Jeremy: Yeah. I think to me that's the most terrifying thing about making any application that's open to user content. [00:51:29] Prefetcher: I get it, sadly. I'm no stranger to having issues with people, abusing my websites. Because since 2016, my, first major project was a text board based off of, a text board in a video game called DANGER/U/. It was semi-popular, during the biggest spike in activity in like 2017 and 2016, it had in the tens of thousands of monthly visitors. And sadly, yeah, even though it was only text, I've had to deal with a lot of annoying issues. So to say the worst I think was I remember waking up and people are telling me that DANGER/U/ is down. So I log in the activity logs and someone hit me with two terabytes of traffic in a day. There was a really dedicated person that just hated my website and just either spam me with posts or just with traffic. So, yeah, sadly I have experience with that. I know what to expect that's something that you sadly have to sign up for making a website that allows user content. Pinksea is a single server [00:52:42] Jeremy: To my understanding so far, PinkSea is just a single server. Is that right? [00:52:47] Prefetcher: It is a single server. Yeah. [00:52:48] Jeremy: That's kind of interesting in that, I think a lot of people when they make a project, they worry about scaling and things like that. But, was it a case where you just had a existing VPS and you're like, well hopefully this is, this is good enough? [00:53:03] Prefetcher: I actually ordered a new one even though it's not really powerful, but my train of thought was that I didn't expect it to blow up. I didn't expect it to require more than a single VPS with 8 gigabytes of RAM and whatnot. And so far it's handling it pretty well. I do not expect ever to reach the amounts of traffic that Bluesky does, so I do not really have to worry about insane scalability and whatever. But yeah. I thought of it always as a toy project until the day I released it and realized that it's a bit more than a toy project at this point. To this day, I just kind of think that that website even if it were popular, I would never expect it to have -- And in the best, most amazing case scenario, like a hundred posts a day. I do not have to deal with the amount of traffic that Bluesky does. So one VPS it is. [00:53:59] Jeremy: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean the application is also mostly reads, right? Most people are coming to see the posts and like you said, you get a few submissions a day, but all the read stuff can probably be cached. Harbor image proxy [00:54:15] Prefetcher: Yeah. The heaviest, thing that PinkSea requires is the image proxy harbor, and that's something that right now only runs on that server. It's in Luxembourg. I think that's where my coprovider hosts it but yeah, that gets the most reads. 'cause in most cases, PinkSea, all it does, all you get is reads from a database, which is just, it's a solved problem. It's really lightweight. But with something like image proxying, you have this whole new problem. 'cause it's a lot of data, and you somehow have to send it -- it's enough for me to just host it locally on that PinkSea server and just direct people to it. But sooner or later, I can always just put it behind something like Bunny CDN or whatnot to have it be worldwide. [00:55:09] Jeremy: So Harbor is something I think you added recently. How did the images work before and what is Harbor doing in its place? [00:55:18] Prefetcher: Before I did what a lot of us currently do and I just freeload atop of Bluesky CDN 'cause Bluesky CDN is just open so far. But it's something that personally irked me. 'cause, I want PinkSea to be completely independent of Bluesky Corporation. I, I wanted to persevere even if Bluesky just decides to randomly, for example, close, the CDN to others or the relay to others or the PLC directory in the worst case scenario. So I wanted to make my own CDN more like proxy. You can't really call it a CDN because it's not worldwide. It's just a single server but let's just say image proxy. So Harbor whenever a person goes to PinkSea, they start loading in all of the images and every single image instead of going to, for example, the PDS or to cdn.bluesky.app. They go to harbor.pinksea.art, you get attached the identifier of the user and what we call a content identifier. Every single, thing uploaded to a PDS has an attached content identifier, which identifies it in a secure way so to say. So Harbor does in reality a really simple set of things. First and foremost, if the user has not seen it, like, not loaded it before first Harbor asks the local cache, do I have this file? If they do, if Harbor does, it just sends the file and it tells the browser, Hey, by the way, please don't ask me about this file for the next day. And in most cases, after one refresh, the user, all of the images load instantly because the web browser just goes, of those files were already sent. And Harbor asked me not to like, ask it more about the same file. So in the case of the image isn't in harbor's local cache, Harbor, first does a lot of those steps to resolve, the users identifier through their PDS, basically resolving that identifier, the DID to a DID document, which is a document basically explaining how that user, what is their, alias, what is their handle and where can we find them, which PDS. So we find the PDS and we then ask the PDS, Hey, send us this file for this user. The PDS sends it or doesn't, in which case we just throw an error and, Harbor just saves it locally and it sends it to the client. It basically just that. But to my knowledge, it's the first non Bluesky image proxy that's deployed for any AppView. Which also caught the attention of Brian Newbold one of the Bluesky employees and made me really happy. DID PLC Lookup [00:58:14] Jeremy: The lookup when you have the user's, DID and you wanna find out where their PDS is that's talking to something called, I think it's the PLC directory? [00:58:25] Prefetcher: Actually there are two different ways. First is PLC directory, PLC originally standed for a placeholder, and then Bluesky realized that it's not a placeholder anymore, and they stealthily changed it to public ledger of credentials. So we have PLC and we have web, the most common version is PLC. The document, the DID document is stored on Bluesky controlled servers under the moniker of PLC directory. They expose a web API that basically just allows you to say, Hey, give me the document for did:plc, whatever. And, the directory goes, have it. And this is the less decentralized version. You can host your own PLC directory and you can basically ask (their) PLC directory to just send you every single document and just you can have your local copy, which some people already do, you kind of sacrifice the fact that you are not in control of the document. It's still on a centralized server, even if you control the keys. 'cause every single DID document also has a key. And that key is used to sign changes to the document. So technically, if you define your own set of keys, you can prevent anyone else from modifying your document, even Bluesky. 'cause every single document is verifiable back and forth. You can see the previous document and its key is used to sign the next document and the chain of trust is visible and no one can just make random changes to your identity, but yeah, it's still on Bluesky to control service and it's a point of contention. Bluesky eventually wants to move it to a nonprofit standards organization, but we have yet to see anything come out of it, sadly. DID WEB lookup The next method is web. And web instead of -- 'cause in did:plc, you have did:plc, and a random string of characters. [01:00:30] Prefetcher: Web relies on domains. So for example, the domain would already like be the sole authority of where the file is. So for example, if I had did:web:example.com, I would parse the DID and I would see it's hosted at example.com. So I go to example.com, I go to /.wellknown/did.json which is the well-known location for the file. And I would have the same DID document as I would have if I used, for example, a PLC DID resolved via the PLC directory. the web method, you are in control of the document entirely. It's on your server under your domain. While it's the more decentralized version, it's just kind of hard for non-technical people to make them. 'cause it relies on a bunch of things. And also the problem is that if you lose your domain, you also lose your identity. [01:01:23] Jeremy: Yeah. So unlike the PLC where it's not really tied to a specific domain, you can change domains. With the web way, you have to always keep the same domain 'cause it's a part of the DID and yeah, like you said, you can't let your renewal lapse or your credit card not work. 'cause then you just lose everything. [01:01:49] Prefetcher: Yeah. You would still be able to change handles, but you would be tied for that domain to forever send your DID otherwise you would just lose it forever. [01:01:57] Jeremy: Yeah, I had mostly only seen the PLC and I wasn't too familiar with the web, form of identification, but yeah that makes sense. [01:02:06] Prefetcher: I think the web if I remember correctly, there is slightly over 300 accounts total on the entire network that use it. Mary who is a person on Bluesky that does a lot of like, ATProto related things, has a GitHub repository that basically gives insight into the network. And on her GitHub repository, you can find the list of every single custom PDS and also how many DID webs there are in existence. And I think it was slightly over 300. [01:02:38] Jeremy: So are you on that list? [01:02:40] Prefetcher: My PDS Yeah. If you were to scroll down. I don't use a web DID 'cause I registered my account before when I was brand new to ATProto, so I didn't know anything. But if you had to scroll down, you would see pds.ata.moe, which is my custom PDS just running. [01:02:55] Jeremy: Cool. [01:02:57] Prefetcher: Yeah. Harbor image proxy can cache any image blob [01:02:58] Jeremy: So something I noticed about harbor, you take the, I believe you take the DID and then you take the CID, the content identifier. I noticed if you take any of those pairs from the ATProto network, like I go find a image somebody posted on Bluesky, I pass that post DID and CID for the image into harbor. Harbor downloads it and caches it. So it's like, does that mean anybody could technically use you as a ATProto CDN? [01:03:38] Prefetcher: Yes, the same way anyone could use like the Bluesky CDN to for example, run PinkSea like I did. cause I do not know if there is a good way to check if a CID of an image or a blob basically. 'cause files on ATProto are called blobs. I do not think there is a nice way to check if that blob is directly tied to a specific record. But that also allows you to make cool, interesting things. Crossposting to Bluesky talks directly to the PDS [01:04:06] Prefetcher: 'cause for example, PinkSea has that, cross post to Bluesky thing. So when you create an image, You already have an option to cross post it to Bluesky, which a lot of people liked. And it was a suggestion from one of the early users of PinkSea. And the way it works is that when we create a PinkSea record, we upload that image, right? And then PinkSea goes, okay, I'm gonna use that same image, the same content identifier, and just create a Bluesky post. So Bluesky and PinkSea all share the same image. I don't upload it twice, I just upload it once. use it in PinkSea and I also use it in Bluesky. And the same way Bluesky its CDN, can just fetch the image. I can also fetch the image from mine, 'cause blobs aren't tied to specific records. They just exist outside of that realm. And you could just query anything. Not even images. You could probably query a video or even a text file. [01:05:04] Jeremy: So when you cross post to Bluesky, you're creating a record directly in the person's PDS, not going through bluesky's API. [01:05:14] Prefetcher: No, I sidestep Bluesky's API completely. And, I basically directly talk to the PDS at all times. I just tell them, Hey, please, for me, create a app.bsky.feed.post record. And you have the image, the text, which also required me to manually parse text into rich text. 'cause like, Bluesky doesn't automatically detect for example, links or tags And you basically get -- like PinkSea creates a record directly with the link to the image. And all of those tags, like the PinkSea tag and whatever, And I completely sidestep. Bluesky's API. If Bluesky, the AppView would cease to exist, PinkSea would still happily create Bluesky crossposts for you. Other applications put metadata into Bluesky posts so they can treat them differently [01:06:02] Jeremy: And since you're creating the records yourself, then you can include additional metadata or fields where you know that this was a PinkSea post, or originally came from PinkSea. [01:06:13] Prefetcher: I could do that. I don't really do that right now 'cause I don't really have much of a reason other than adding a PinkSea hashtag to every single oekaki. But I, noticed, for example, I think it was PinkSky, interesting name, PinkSky, which is like (a) Bluesky Instagram client. Any single time you make a post via PinkSky it uses the Bluesky APIs. It's Bluesky, but it attaches a hidden hashtag like PinkSky underscore some random letters. In its feed building algorithm, it basically detects posts with that hashtag, that specific hashtag, and it builds a PinkSky only timeline. 'cause it's still a Bluesky post, but it has hidden additional metadata that identifies, Hey, it came from PinkSky. [01:07:02] Jeremy: It's pretty interesting how much control you have over what to put in the PDS. So, I'm sure there's a lot of interesting use cases that people are gonna come up with. [01:07:14] Prefetcher: Yeah, of course. You still lose some of the data when you go through the Bluesky API. 'cause of course it stores the record and it's all in formats and whatnot. But you can attach a lot of metadata that can identify posts and build micro networks within Bluesky itself. I see it like that. Bluesky CDN compression [01:07:37] Jeremy: And I think, this might have been a post from you. I think I saw somebody saying that when you view an image from the CDN that the Bluesky CDN specifically, there's some kind of compression going on that that messes with certain types of art. [01:07:55] Prefetcher: It's especially noticeable artists are complaining about it all the time, left and right. Bluesky is very happy with jpeg compression, by default, their CDN, -- like to every single image it applies a really not good amount of jpeg compression which is especially not small. If you compare an image that's uploaded via PinkSea, view an image on PinkSea, and view the same image, which is, it's the same content id. It's the same blob. And you view it on Bluesky, it loses so much fidelity, it loses so much of that aliasing on the pen. You just see everything become really blurry. And on top of that, when you upload an image via Bluesky itself, if I remember correctly, I don't wanna lie here, but they also downscale the image to 1024 pixels by default. So every single image, not only big ones, and artists usually work with really big canvases, they get, downscaled and also additionally they get jpegified. So for example, PinkSea directly uploads PNG files to the PDS. And for example, Harbor gives back the original file. It does no transformations on it, but Bluesky transforms all of them into JPEG compressed images and for photos, it's fine sometimes. 'cause I've also seen people just compare directly, downloaded images of the PDS versus images viewed on Bluesky. But for art it's especially noticible. And people really (do) not like that. [01:09:31] Jeremy: Yeah, that's kind of odd. 'cause if, if I understand correctly, then if you post directly to your PDS and Bluesky pulls it in you'll avoid that, that 1024 resizing. So your images will be higher quality? [01:09:47] Prefetcher: I actually do not know. That's an interesting question. Cause I know that the maybe their CDN also does that 'cause that's what I've heard from others, that on upload the image gets processed and squashed down. So I don't know if doing it via an alternative AppView would change it or would Bluesky just directly reject this post? Because for example, PinkSea, I have built-in which I think I might change in the future -- PinkSea will reject your post if it's bigger than 800x800. 'cause then it'll notice that something is off. This could not have been made with PinkSea. [01:10:26] Jeremy: Yeah, that's a good point I suppose we know at the very least, they have some third party and internal moderation tools that they feed the images through to, so they, they can do some automatic content tagging. But yeah, I, I don't know, like you said, whether, the resizing and all that stuff is at the CDN level [01:10:50] Prefetcher: The jpegification is definitely at the CDN level. 'cause, Bluesky is actually running an open source image proxy. It's called imgproxy. Brian Newbold talked about it a bit on that harbor post. And, yeah, so a lot of the compression, the end user things are done via image proxy, but that, downscaling, I don't know, you'd have to ask someone who's a bit more intimate with Bluesky's internals. [01:11:19] Jeremy: Cool. yeah, I think we've, we've covered a lot. Is there, is there anything else, you wanted to mention or thought we should have talked about? [01:11:26] Prefetcher: Regarding PinkSea I think I've mentioned a ton both the behind the scenes things and, the user things, the design principles. What I'd want to absolutely say, and it will sound cheesy, and, is that I'm eternally grateful to anyone who's actually visited PinkSea. It's definitely grown outta all of my like dreams for the platform, to the point where I'm sitting here just talking about it. I definitely hope that the future will bring us more applications (in) ATProto. I definitely have ideas on how to expand PinkSea, a lot of ideas, a lot of things I want to do, and I'm also a very busy person, so I never get around them. But yeah, think that's it, at least regarding PinkSea. [01:12:15] Jeremy: Cool. Well, if people want to check out PinkSea or see what you're up to, where can they find you? [01:12:22] Prefetcher: So PinkSea is at pinksea.art. That's the website and Bluesky Handle is at pinksea.art and me, well, search prefetcher on Bluesky, you'll probably find me. My tag is at prefetcher.miku.place. all of my socials are probably there. I'm Prefetcher pretty much every single platform except for the platforms that already had someone called Prefetcher. GitHub, github.com/purifetchi because Prefetcher was taken. And, yeah, hit me up. I'm always eager to talk. I don't bite. [01:13:00] Jeremy: Very cool. Well, Kacper thanks. Thanks for taking the time. This was fun. [01:13:04] Prefetcher: Thank you so much, Jeremy, for having me over. It was a pleasure.

The Learning Process Episode: My Extreme Oscillation in Learning, Why I Learned The Way I Did, BBSes and Textfiles, Where This Worked, Fastest Temp, The Non-Threat of Failure, The Narrative, What Has Changed. A rumination on my personal learning process and where it has gotten better (or not) and why I think that it all worked out, ultimately.

The Time Bandits Episode: The Dutchess Mall, Movies 4, Suburbia Boring/Excellence, Chaotic Universe, Surpreme Being, Great Evil, Foundations, Portals of BBSes, Robbery of Textfiles, Before It's All Ruined. A short meditation on one of my favorite films, Time Bandits (1981) before a remake arrives. I have many movies that I enjoy, but this is a movie that formed a big part of my worldview when I saw it for the first time as an 11 year old. 

Not much news so we talk about BBSes.Swiping to change faces is coming back to the Apple Watch.Captain Kirk is climbing the mountain.Dan and Lex like Puzzmo.Moltz recommends Stitch for relaxing gameplay.Our thanks to Rocket Money, a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps you lower your bills - all in one place. Cancel unwanted subscriptions – and manage your expenses the easy way – by going to rocketmoney.com/rebound.If you want to help out the show and get some great bonus content, consider becoming a Rebound Prime member! Just go to prime.reboundcast.com to check it out!You can now also support the show by buying shirts, iPhone cases, hats and more items featuring our catchphrase, "TECHNOLOGY"! Are we right?!

Darko Mesaroš, Senior Developer Advocate at AWS, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss all the weird and wonderful things that can be done with old hardware, as well as the necessary skills for being a successful Developer Advocate. Darko walks through how he managed to deploy Kubernetes on a computer from 1986, as well as the trade-offs we've made in computer technology as hardware has progressed. Corey and Darko also explore the forgotten art of optimizing when you're developing, and how it can help to cut costs. Darko also shares what he feels is the key skill every Developer Advocate needs to have, and walks through how he has structured his presentations to ensure he is captivating and delivering value to his audience.About DarkoDarko is a Senior Developer Advocate based in Seattle, WA. His goal is to share his passion and technological know-how with Engineers, Developers, Builders, and tech enthusiasts across the world. If it can be automated, Darko will definitely try to do so. Most of his focus is towards DevOps and Management Tools, where automation, pipelines, and efficient developer tools is the name of the game – click less and code more so you do not repeat yourself ! Darko also collects a lot of old technology and tries to make it do what it should not. Like deploy AWS infrastructure through a Commodore 64.Links Referenced: AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/ Blog post RE deploying Kubernetes on a TRS-80: https://www.buildon.aws/posts/i-deployed-kubernetes-with-a-1986-tandy-102-portable-computer AWS Twitch: https://twitch.tv/aws Twitter: https://twitter.com/darkosubotica Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@darkosubotica TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Chronosphere. When it costs more money and time to observe your environment than it does to build it, there's a problem. With Chronosphere, you can shape and transform observability data based on need, context and utility. Learn how to only store the useful data you need to see in order to reduce costs and improve performance at chronosphere.io/corey-quinn. That's chronosphere.io/corey-quinn. And my thanks to them for sponsor ing my ridiculous nonsense. Corey: Do you wish your developers had less permanent access to AWS? Has the complexity of Amazon's reference architecture for temporary elevated access caused you to sob uncontrollably? With Sym, you can protect your cloud infrastructure with customizable, just-in-time access workflows that can be setup in minutes. By automating the access request lifecycle, Sym helps you reduce the scope of default access while keeping your developers moving quickly. Say goodbye to your cloud access woes with Sym. Go to symops.com/corey to learn more. That's S-Y-M-O-P-S.com/coreyCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and my guest today is almost as bizarre as I am, in a somewhat similar direction. Darko Mesaroš is a Senior Developer Advocate at AWS. And instead of following my path of inappropriately using things as databases that weren't designed to be used that way, he instead uses the latest of technology with the earliest of computers. Darko, thank you for joining me.Darko: Thank you so much, Corey. First of all, you know, you tell me, Darko is a senior developer advocate. No, Corey. I'm a system administrator by heart. I happen to be a developer advocate these days, but I was born in the cold, cold racks of a data center. I maintain systems, I've installed packages on Linux systems. I even set up Solaris Zones a long time ago. So yeah, but I happen to yell into the camera these days, [laugh] so thank you for having me here.Corey: No, no, it goes well. You started my career as a sysadmin. And honestly, my opinion, if you asked me—which no one does, but I share it anyway—is that the difference between an SRE and a sysadmin is about a 40% salary bump.Darko: Exactly.Corey: That's about it. It is effectively the same job. The tools are different, the approach we take is different, but the fundamental mandate of ‘keep the site up' has not materially changed.Darko: It has not. I don't know, like, what the modern SRS do, but like, I used to also semi-maintain AC units. Like, you have to walk around with a screwdriver nonetheless, so sometimes, besides just installing the freshest packages on your Red Hat 4 system, you have to also change the filters in the AC. So, not sure if that belongs into the SRE manifesto these days.Corey: Well, the reason that I wound up inviting you onto the show was a recent blog post you put up where you were able to deploy Kubernetes from the best computer from 1986, which is the TRS-80, or the Trash-80. For the record, the worst computer from 1986 was—and remains—IBM Cloud. But that's neither here nor there.What does it mean to deploy Kubernetes because, to be direct, the way that I tend to deploy anything these days, if you know, I'm sensible and being grown up about it, is a Git push and then the automation takes it away from there. I get the sense, you went a little bit deep.Darko: So, when it comes to deploying stuff from an old computer, like, you know, you kind of said the right thing here, like, I have the best computer from 1986. Actually, it's a portable version of the best computer from 1986; it's a TRS-80 Model 102. It's a portable, basically a little computer intended for journalists and people on the go to write stuff and send emails or whatever it was back in those days. And I deployed Kubernetes through that system. Now, of course, I cheated a bit because the way I did it is I just used it as a glorified terminal.I just hooked up the RS 232, the wonderful serial connection, to a Raspberry Pi somewhere out there and it just showed the stuff from a Raspberry Pi onto the TRS-80. So, the TRS-80 didn't actually know how to run kubectl—or ‘kube cuddle,' what they call it—it just asked somebody else to do it. But that's kind of the magic of it.Corey: You could have done a Lambda deployment then just as easily.Darko: Absolutely. Like that's the magic of, like, these old hunks of junks is that when you get down to it, they still do things with numbers and transmit electrical signals through some wires somewhere out there. So, if you're capable enough, if you are savvy, or if you just have a lot of time, you can take any old computer and have it do modern things, especially now. Like, and I will say 15 years ago, we could have not done anything like this because 15 years ago, a lot of the stuff at least that I was involved with, which was Microsoft products, were click only. I couldn't, for the love of me, deploy a bunch of stuff on an Active Directory domain by using a command line. PowerShell was not a thing back then. You could use VB Script, but sort of.Corey: Couldn't you wind up using something that would effect, like, Selenium or whatnot that winds up emulating a user session and moving the mouse to certain coordinates and clicking and then waiting some arbitrary time and clicking somewhere else?Darko: Yes.Corey: Which sounds like the absolute worst version of automation ever. That's like, “I deployed Kubernetes using a typewriter.” “Well, how the hell did you do that?” “Oh, I use the typewriter to hit the enter key. Problem solved.” But I don't think that counts.Darko: Well, yeah, so actually even back then, like, just thinking of, like, a 10, 12-year step back to my career, I automated stuff on Windows systems—like Windows 2000, and Windows 2003 systems—by a tool called AutoIt. It would literally emulate clicks of a mouse on a specific location on the screen. So, you were just really hoping that window pops up at the same place all the time. Otherwise, your automation doesn't work. So yeah, it was kind of like that.And so, if you look at it that way, I could take my Trash-80, I could write an AutoIt script with specific coordinates, and I could deploy Windows things. So actually, yeah, you can deploy anything with these days, with an old computer.Corey: I think that we've lost something in the world of computers. If I, like, throw a computer at you these days, you're going to be pretty annoyed with me. Those things are expensive, it'll probably break, et cetera. If I throw a computer from this era at you, your family is taking bereavement leave. Like, those things where—there would be no second hit.These things were beefy. They were a sense of solidity to them. The keyboards were phenomenal. We've been chasing that high ever since. And, yeah, they were obnoxiously heavy and the battery life was 20 seconds, but it was still something that—you felt like it is computer time. And now, all these things have faded into the background. I am not protesting the march of progress, particularly in this particular respect, but I do miss the sense of having keyboards didn't weren't overwhelmingly flimsy plastic.Darko: I think it's just a fact of, like, we have computers as commodities these days. Back then computers were workstations, computers were something you would buy to perform a specific tasks. Today, computer is anything from watching Twitch to going on Twitter, complaining about Twitter, to deploying Kubernetes, right? So, they have become such commodities such… I don't want to call them single-use items, but they're more becoming single-use items as time progresses because they're just not repairable anymore. Like, if you give me a computer that's five years old, I don't know what to do with it. I probably cannot fix it if it's broken. But if you give me a computer that's 35 years old, I bet you can fix it no matter what happened.Corey: And the sheer compute changes have come so fast and furious, it's easy to lose sight of them, especially with branding being more or less the same. But I saved up and took a additional loan out when I graduated high school to spend three grand on a Dell Inspiron laptop, this big beefy thing. And for fun, I checked the specs recently, and yep, that's a Raspberry Pi these days; they're $30, and it's not going to work super well to browse the web because it's underpowered. And I'm sitting here realizing wait a minute, even with a modern computer—forget the Raspberry Pi for a second—I'm sitting here and I'm pulling up web pages or opening Slack, or God forbid, Slack and Chrome simultaneously, and the fan spins up and it sounds incredibly anemic. And it's, these things are magical supercomputers from the future. Why are they churning this hard to show me a funny picture of a cat? What's going on here?Darko: So, my theory on this is… because we can. We can argue about this, but we currently—Corey: Oh, I think you're right.Darko: We have unlimited compute capacity in the world. Like, you can come up with an idea, you're probably going to find a supercomputer out there, you're probably going to find a cloud vendor out there that's going to give you all of the resources you need to perform this massive computation. So, we didn't really think about optimization as much as we used to do in the past. So, that's it: we can. Chrome doesn't care. You have 32 gigs of RAM, Corey. It doesn't care that it takes 28 gigs of that because you have—Corey: I have 128 gigs on this thing. I bought the Mac studio and maxed it out. I gave it the hostname of us-shitpost-1 and we run with it.Darko: [laugh]. There you go. But like, I did some fiddling around, like, recently with—and again, this is just the torture myself—I did some 6502 Assembly for the Atari 2600. 6502 is a CPU that's been used in many things, including the Commodore 64, the NES, and even a whole lot of Apple IIs, and whatnot. So, when you go down to the level of a computer that has 1.19 megahertz and it has only 128 bytes of RAM, you start to think about, okay, I can move these two numbers in memory in the following two ways: “Way number one will require four CPU cycles. Way number two will require seven CPU cycles. I'll go with way number one because it will save me three CPU cycles.”Corey: Oh, yeah. You take a look at some of the most advanced computer engineering out there and it's for embedded devices where—Darko: Yeah.Corey: You need to wind up building code to run in some very tight constraints, and that breeds creativity. And I remember those days. These days, it's well my computer is super-overpowered, what's it matter? In fact, when I go in and I look at customers' AWS bills, very often I'll start doing some digging, and sure enough, EC2 is always the number one expense—we accept that—but we take a look at the breakdown and invariably, there's one instance family and size that is the overwhelming majority, in most cases. You often a—I don't know—a c5.2xl or something or whatever it happens to be.Great. Why is that? And the answer—[unintelligible 00:10:17] to make sense is, “Well, we just started with that size and it seemed to work so we kept using it as our default.” When I'm building things, because I'm cheap, I take one of the smallest instances I possibly can—it used to be one of the Nanos and I'm sorry, half a gig or a gig of RAM is no longer really sufficient when I'm trying to build almost anything. Thanks, JavaScript. So okay, I've gone up a little bit.But at that point, when I need to do something that requires something beefier, well, I can provision those resources, but I don't have it as a default. That forces me to at least in the back of my mind, have a little bit of a sense of I should be parsimonious with what it is that I'm provisioning out there, which is apparently anathema to every data scientist I've ever met, but here we are.Darko: I mean, that's the thing, like, because we're so used to just having those resources, we don't really care about optimizations. Like, I'm not advocating that you all should go and just do assembly language. You should never do that, like, unless you're building embedded systems or you're working for something—Corey: If you need to use that level of programming, you know.Darko: Exactly.Corey: You already know and nothing you are going to talk about here is going to impact what people in that position are doing. Mostly you need to know assembly language because that's a weeder class and a lot of comp-sci programs and if you don't pass it, you don't graduate. That's the only reason to really know assembly language most of the time.Darko: But you know, like, it's also a thing, like, as a developer, right, think about the person using your thing, right? And they may have the 128 gig us—what is it you called it? Us-shitpost-1, right—that kind of power, kind of, the latest and greatest M2 Max Ultra Apple computer that just does all of the stuff. You may have a big ‘ol double Xeon workstation that does a thing.Or you just may have a Chromebook. Think about us with Chromebooks. Like, can I run your website properly? Did you really need all of those animations? Can you think about reducing the amount of animations depending on screen size? So, there's a lot of things that we need to kind of think about. Like, it goes back to the thing where ‘it works on my machine.' Oh, of course it works on your machine. You spent thousands of dollars on your machine. It's the best machine in the world. Of course, it runs smoothly.Corey: Wait 20 minutes and they'll release a new one, and now, “Who sold me this ancient piece of crap?” Honestly, the most depressing thing is watching an Apple Keynote because I love my computer until I watch the Apple Keynote and it's like, oh, like, “Look at this amazing keyboard,” and the keyboard I had was fine. It's like, “Who sold me this rickety piece of garbage?” And then we saw how the Apple butterfly keyboard worked out for everyone and who built that rickety piece of garbage. Let's go back again. And here we are.Darko: Exactly. So, that's kind of the thing, right? You know, like, your computer is the best. And if you develop for it, is great, but you always have to think other people who use it. Hence, containers are great to fix one part of that problem, but not all of the problems. So, there's a bunch of stuff you can do.And I think, like, for all of the developers out there, it's great what you're doing, you're building us so many tools, but always that take a step back and optimize stuff. Optimize, both for the end-user by the amount of JavaScript you're going to throw at me, and also for the back-end, think about if you have to run your web server on a Pentium III server, could you do it? And if you could, how bad would it be? And you don't have to run it on a Pentium III, but like, try to think about what's the bottom 5% of the capacity you need? So yeah, it's just—you'll save money. That's it. You'll save money, ultimately.Corey: So, I have to ask, what you do day to day is you're a senior developer advocate, which is, hmm, some words, yes. You spend a lot of your free time and public time talking about running ancient computers, but you also talk to customers who are looking forward, not back. How do you reconcile the two?Darko: So, I like to mix the two. There's a whole reason why I like old computers. Like, I grew up in Serbia. Like, when I was young in the '90s, I didn't have any of these computers. Like, I could only see, like, what was like a Macintosh from 1997 on TV and I would just drool. Like, I wouldn't even come close to thinking about getting that, let alone something better.So, I kind of missed all of that part. But now that I started collecting all of those old computers and just everything from the '80s and '90s, I've actually realized, well, these things are not that different from something else. So, I like to always make comparisons between, like, an old system. What does it actually do? How does it compare to a new system?So, I love to mix and match in my presentations. I like to mix it, mix and match in my videos. You saw my blog posts on deploying stuff. So, I think it's just a fun way to kind of create a little contrast. I do think we should still be moving forward. I do think that technology is getting better and better and it's going to help people do so much more things faster, hopefully cheaper, and hopefully better.So, I do think that we should definitely keep on moving forward. But I always have this nostalgic feeling about, like, old things and… sometimes I don't know why, but I miss the world without the internet. And I think that without the internet, I think I miss the world with dial-up internet. Because back then you would go on the internet for a purpose. You have to do a thing, you have to wait for a while, you have to make sure nobody's on the phone. And then—Corey: God forbid you dial into a long-distance call. And you have to figure out which town and which number would be long distance versus not, at least where I grew up, and your parents would lose their freaking minds because that was an $8 phone call, which you know, back in the '80s and early '90s was significant. And yeah, great. Now, I still think is a great prank opportunity to teach kids are something that it costs more to access websites that are far away, which I guess in theory, it kind of does, but not to the end-user. I digress.Darko: I have a story about this, and I'm going to take a little sidestep. But long-distance phone calls. Like in the '80s, the World Wide Web was not yet a thing. Like, the www, the websites all, just the general purpose internet was not yet a thing. We had things called BBSes, or Bulletin Board Systems. That was the extreme version of a dial-up system.You don't dial into the internet; you dial into a website. Imagine if you have a sole intent of visiting only one website and the cost of visiting such a website would depend on where that website currently is. If the website is in Germany and you're calling from Serbia, it's going to cost you a lot of money because you're calling internationally. I had a friend back then. The best software you can get were from American BBSes, but calling America from Serbia back then would have been prohibitively expensive, like, just insanely expensive.So, what this friend used to do, he figured out if he would be connected to a BBS six hours a day, it would actually reset the counter of his phone bill. It would loop through a mechanical counter from whatever number, it would loop back again to that number. So, it would take around six and some hours to complete the loop the entire phone counting metric—whatever they use back in the '80s—to kind of charge your bill, so it's effectively cost him zero money back then. So yeah, it was more expensive, kids, back then to call websites, the further away the websites were.[midroll 00:17:11]Corey: So, developer advocates do a lot of things. And I think it is unfair, but also true that people tend to shorthand those of those things do getting on stage and giving conference talks because that at least is the visible part of it. People see that and it's viscerally is understood that that takes work and a bit of courage for those who are not deep into public speaking and those who are, know it takes a lot of courage. And whereas writing a blog post, “Well, I have a keyboard and say dumb things on the internet all the time. I don't see why that's hard.” So, there's a definite perception story there. What's your take on giving technical presentations?Darko: So, yeah. Just as you said, like, I think being a DA, even in my head was always represented, like, oh, you're just on stage, you're traveling, you're doing presentations, you're doing all those things. But it's actually quite a lot more than that, right? We do a lot more. But still, we are the developer advocate. We are the front-facing thing towards you, the wonderful developers listening to this.And we tend to be on stage, we tend to do podcasts with wonderful internet personalities, we tend to do live streams, we tend to do videos. And I think one of the key skills that a DA needs to have—a Developer Advocate needs to have—is presentations, right? You need to be able to present a technical message in the best possible way. Now, being a good technical presenter doesn't mean you're funny, doesn't mean you're entertaining, that doesn't have to be a thing. You just need to take a complex technical message and deliver it in the best way possible so that everybody who has just given you their time, can get it fully.And this means—well, it means a lot of things, but it means taking this complicated topic, distilling it down so it can be digested within 30 to 45 minutes and it also needs to be… it needs to be interesting. Like, we can talk about the most interesting topic, but if I don't make it interesting, you're just going to walk out. So, I also lead, like, a coaching class within internally, like, to teach people how to speak better and I'm working with, like, really good speakers there, but a lot of the stuff I say applies to no matter if you're a top-level speaker, or if you're, like, just beginning out. And my challenge to all of you speakers out there, like, anybody who's listening to this and it has a plan to deliver a video, a keynote, a live stream or speak at a summit somewhere, is get outside of that box. Get outside of that PowerPoint box.I'm not saying PowerPoint is bad. I think PowerPoint is a wonderful tool, but I'm just saying you don't have to present in the way everybody else presents. The more memorable your presentation is, the more outside of that box it is, the more people will remember it. Again, you don't have to be funny. You don't have to be entertaining. You just have to take thing you are really passionate about and deliver it to us in the best possible way. What that best possible way is, well, it really depends. Like a lot of things, there is no concrete answer to this thing.Corey: One of the hard parts I found is that people will see a certain technical presenter that they like and want to emulate and they'll start trying to do what they do. And that works to a point. Like, “Well, I really enjoy how that presenter doesn't read their slides.” Yeah, that's a good thing to pick up. But past a certain point, other people's material starts to fit as well as other people's shoes and you've got to find your own path.My path has always been getting people's attention first via humor, but it's certainly not the only way. In many contexts, it's not even the most effective way. It works for me in the context in which I use it, but I assure you that when I'm presenting to clients, I don't start off with slapstick comedy. Usually. There are a couple of noteworthy exceptions because clients expect that for me, in some cases.Darko: I think one of the important things is that emulating somebody is okay, as you said, to an extent, like, just trying to figure out what the good things are, but good, very objectively good things. Never try to be funny if you're not funny. That's the thing where you can try comedy, but it's very difficult to—it's very difficult to do comedy if you're not that good at it. And I know that's very much a given, but a lot of people try to be funny when they're obviously not funny. And that's okay. You don't have to be funny.So, there are many of ways to get people's attentions, by again, just throwing a joke. What I did once on stage, I threw a bottle at the floor. I was just—I said, I said a thing and threw a bottle at the floor. Everybody started paying attention all of a sudden at me. I don't know why. So, it's going to be that. It can be something—it can be be a shocking statement. When I say shocking, I mean, something, well, not bad, but something that's potentially controversial. Like, for example, emacs is better than vim. I don't know, maybe—Corey: “Serverless is terrible.”Darko: Serverl—yeah.Corey: Like, it doesn't matter. It depends on the audience.Darko: It depends on the audience.Corey: “The cloud is a scam.” I gave a talk once called, “The Cloud is A Scam,” and it certainly got people's attention.Darko: Absolutely. So, breaking up the normal flow because as a participant of a show, of a presentation, you go there you expect, look, I'm going to sit down, Corey's going to come on stage and Corey says, “Hi, my name is Corey Quinn. I'm the CEO of The Duckbill Group. This is what I do. And welcome to my talk about blah.”Corey: Tactically, my business partner, Mike, is the CEO. I don't want to I don't want to step too close to that fire, let's be clear.Darko: Oh, okay [laugh]. Okay. Then, “Today's agenda is this. And slide one, slide two, slide three.” And that the expectation of the audience. And the audience comes in in this very autopilot way, like, “Okay, I'm just going to sit there and just nod my head as Corey speaks.”But then if Corey does a weird thing and Corey comes out in a bathtub. Just the bathtub and Corey. And Corey starts talking about how bathtubs are amazing, it's the best place to relax. “Oh, by the way, managing costs in the cloud is so easy, I can do it from a bathtub.” Right? All of a sudden, whoa [laugh], wait a second, this is something that's interesting. And then you can go through your rest of your conversation. But you just made a little—you ticked the box in our head, like, “Oh, this is something weird. This is different. I don't know what to expect anymore,” and people start paying more attention.Corey: “So, if you're managing AWS costs from your bathtub, what kind of computer do you use?” “In my case, a toaster.”Darko: [laugh]. Yes. But ultimately, like, some of those things are very good and they just kind of—they make you as a presenter, unpredictable, and that's a good thing. Because people will just want to sit on the edge of the seat and, like, listen to what you say because, I don't know what, maybe he throws that toaster in, right? I don't know. So, it is like that.And one of the things that you'll notice, Corey, especially if you see people who are more presenting for a longer time, like, they've been very common on events and people know them by name and their face, then that turns into, like, not just presenting but somebody comes, literally not because of the topic, but because they want to hear Corey talk about a thing. You can go there and talk about unicorns and cats, people will still come and listen to that because it's Corey Quinn. And that's where you, by getting outside of that box, getting outside of that ‘this is how we present things at company X,' this is what you get in the long run. People will know who you are people will know, what not to expect from your presentations, and they will ultimately be coming to your presentations to enjoy whatever you want to talk about.Corey: That is the dream. I really want to thank you for taking the time to talk so much about how you view the world and the state of ancient and modern technologies and the like. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Darko: The best way to find me is on twitch.tv/aws these days. So, you will find me live streaming twice a week there. You will find me on Twitter at @darkosubotica, which is my Twitter handle. You will find me at the same handle on Mastodon. And just search for my name Darko Mesaroš, I'm sure I'll pop up on MySpace as well or whatever. So, I'll post a lot of cloud-related things. I posted a lot of old computer-related things, so if you want to see me deploy Kubernetes through an Atari 2600, click that subscribe button or follow or whatever.Corey: And we will, of course, include a link to this in the show notes. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Darko: Thank you so much, Corey, for having me.Corey: Darko Mesaroš, senior developer advocate at AWS, Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry and insulting comment that you compose and submit from your IBM Selectric typewriter.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

In this episode, John and Dave talk about how they got started in 8 bit computers and gaming.  John talks about his love for the Atari 800XL, the Vectrex and other machines.  Dave talks about his admiration of the Commodore 64 and how he almost got a VIC20 instead. The guys talk about BBSes, trading pizza subs for floppy disks and a lot more!

“And what really struck me from that was that not only was this audience a fan of the show, they were more like family, and it really changed my appreciation for the listener, so I really took a lot of care following that to understand their value. So, even though we're creating great audio, great content, we're putting out consistently, I didn't realize how tight [that connection] was until that particular episode. So I think, from my perspective, that one stands out in a big way, not only in the ability to talk about what's happening but also, at the same time, just this whole community element that goes along with creating podcasts and the power of audio.” -- Todd Cochrane   This episode's guest is the CEO of Blubrry Podcasting and the author of a book on podcasting, "Podcasting: The Do-It-Yourself Guide." He's the founder of the People's Choice Podcast Awards and the Tech Podcast Network and is credited with introducing the first advertisers into podcasting, GoDaddy. He was inducted into the inaugural class of the Podcast Hall of Fame in 2015, but perhaps his biggest influence on podcasting is Blubrry Podcasting and its parent company RawVoice, which offers a directory of more than three million shows, the number one podcasting plugin for WordPress, and much more. A United States Navy Veteran who served for twenty-five years and retired with the rank of Senior Chief Petty Officer, he now lives in Quincy, Michigan after spending the majority of the past 25 years in Honolulu, Hawaii, with his family. His name is Todd Cochrane, and I think you'll agree he knows a thing or two about podcasting. We'll not only be discussing that but also getting his perspective on what it takes to really make a mark in podcasting and in sound these days.  I definitely learned a thing or two from our interview, and you too might want to take notes. As always, if you have any questions for my guest, you're welcome to reach out through the links in the show notes.  If you have questions for me, just visit http://www.audiobrandingpodcast.com/ (www.audiobrandingpodcast.com) where you'll find all sorts of ways to get in touch. Plus, subscribing to the newsletter (on the http://www.audiobrandingpodcast.com/ (www.audiobrandingpodcast.com) webpage) will let you know when the new podcasts are available.   Times Have Changed We start things off with a look at Todd's formative memories of sound and his first experiences with sound and internet radio back during the turn of the millennium. “In the early days, sound was largely music,” Todd explains. “It wasn't talk, that's for sure. But times have changed.” The topic turns to how BBSes, FidoNet, and a brief stint as a blogger led him to find his calling as one of the first podcasters in 2004. “My introduction into podcasting was really just wanting to communicate verbally,” he says. “For me, it was the perfect venue. It just felt natural for me to pull up a mic and talk.”   Forgiving Bad Audio “If you think about what was different,” Todd tells us as we continue our look back at the early days of indie podcasting, “there was no podcast host, so we were on our own for our media.” We discuss how improvements in online audio helped pave the way for podcasting as we know it today, and how his firsthand experience with the importance of editing and audio quality to an audience:  “I've always said that they'll forgive you for bad video,” Todd says, “but they won't forgive you for bad audio.”   More Like Family Next, we talk about one of Todd's most memorable podcast episodes, and how a personal tragedy gave him new insights into the bond between podcasters and their listeners. “What really struck me from that,” he notes, “was that not only was this audience a fan of the show, they were more like family, and it really changed my appreciation for the listener.” He also gives us a startling reminder that we never quite know who might be listening to a show, as he...

About BrandonBrandon West was raised in part by video games and BBSes and has been working on web applications since 1999. He entered the world of Developer Relations in 2011 as an evangelist for a small startup called SendGrid and has since held leadership roles at companies like AWS. At Datadog, Brandon is focused on helping developers improve the performance and developer experience of the things they build. He lives in Seattle where enjoys paddle-boarding, fishing, and playing music.Links Referenced: Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/bwest TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate. Is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other; which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability: it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Fortinet. Fortinet's partnership with AWS is a better-together combination that ensures your workloads on AWS are protected by best-in-class security solutions powered by comprehensive threat intelligence and more than 20 years of cybersecurity experience. Integrations with key AWS services simplify security management, ensure full visibility across environments, and provide broad protection across your workloads and applications. Visit them at AWS re:Inforce to see the latest trends in cybersecurity on July 25-26 at the Boston Convention Center. Just go over to the Fortinet booth and tell them Corey Quinn sent you and watch for the flinch. My thanks again to my friends at Fortinet.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. My guest today is someone I've been trying to get on the show for years, but I'm very bad at, you know, following up and sending the messages and all the rest because we all struggle with our internal demons. My guest instead struggles with external demons. He is the team lead for developer experience and tools advocacy at what I can only assume is a Tinder for Pets style company, Date-A-Dog. Brendon West, thank you for joining me today.Brandon: Hey, Corey, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Finally, like you said, it's been a couple of years. But glad that it's happening. And yeah, I'm on the DevRel team at Datadog.Corey: Yes, I'm getting a note here in the headset of breaking news coming in. Yes, you're not apparently a dog dating company, you are a monitoring slash observability slash whatever the cool kids are calling it today telemetry outputer dingus nonsense. Anyone who has ever been to a community or corporate event has no doubt been tackled by one of the badge scanners that you folks have orbiting your booth, but what is it that you folks do?Brandon: Well, the observability, the monitoring, the distributed tracing, all that stuff that you mentioned. And then a lot of other interesting things that are happening. Security is a big focus—InfoSec—so we're adding some products around that, automated security monitoring, very cool. And then the sort of stuff that I'm representing is stuff that helps developers provide a better experience to their end-users. So, things like front-end monitoring, real-time user monitoring, synthetic testing of your APIs, whatever it might be.Corey: Your path has been somewhat interesting because you—well, everyone's path has been somewhat interesting; yours has been really interesting because back in 2011, you entered the world of developer relations, or being a DevReloper as I insist on calling it. And you were in a—you call it a small startup called SendGrid. Which is, on some level, hilarious from my point of view. I've been working with you folks—you folks being SendGrid—for many years now. I cared a lot about email once upon a time.And now I send an email newsletter every week, that deep under the hood, through a couple of vendor abstraction layers is still SendGrid, and I don't care about email because that's something that I can pay someone else to worry about. You went on as well to build out DevRel teams at AWS. You decided okay, you're going to take some time off after that. You went to a small scrappy startup and ah, nice. You could really do things right and you have a glorious half of the year and then surprise, you got acquired by Datadog. Congratu-dolances on that because now you're right back in the thick of things at big company-style approaches. Have I generally nailed the trajectory of the past decade for you?Brandon: Yeah, I think the broad strokes are all correct there. SendGrid was a small company when I joined, you know? There were 30 of us or so. So, got to see that grow into what it is today, which was super, super awesome. But other than that, yeah, I think that's the correct path.Corey: It's interesting to me, in that you were more or less doing developer relations before that was really a thing in the ecosystem. And I understand the challenge that you would have in a place like SendGrid because that is large-scale email sending, transactional or otherwise, and that is something that by and large, has slipped below the surface level of awareness for an awful lot of folks in your target market. It's, “Oh, okay, and then we'll just have the thing send an email,” they say, hand-waving over what is an incredibly deep and murky pool. And understanding that is a hard thing requires a certain level of technical sophistication. So, you started doing developer relations for something that very clearly needed some storytelling chops. How did you fall into it originally?Brandon: Well, I wanted to do something that let me use those storytelling chops, honestly. I had been writing code at an agency for coal mines and gold mines and really actively inserting evil into the world, power plants, and that sort of thing. And, you know, I went to school for English literature. I loved writing. I played in thrash metal bands when I was a kid, so I've been up on stage being cussed at and told that I suck. So I—Corey: Oh, I get that conference talks all the time.Brandon: Yeah, right? So, that's why when people ask me to speak, I'm like, “Absolutely.” There's no way I can bomb harder than I've bombed before. No fear, right? So yeah, I wanted to use those skills. I wanted to do something different.And one of my buddies had a company that he had co-founded that was going through TechStars in Boulder. SendGrid was the first accelerator-backed company to IPO which is pretty cool. But they had gone through TechStars in 2009. They were looking for a developer evangelist. So, SendGrid was looking for developer evangelist and my friend introduced me said, “I think you'd be good at this. You should have a conversation.” My immediate thought was what the hell is a developer evangelist?Corey: And what might a SendGrid be? And all the rest. Yes, it's that whole, “Oh, how do I learn to swim?” Someone throws you off the end of the dock and then retrospect, it's, “I don't think they were trying to teach me how to swim.” Yeah. Hindsight.Brandon: Yeah. It worked out great. I will say, though, that I think DevRel has been around for a long time, you know? The title has been around since the original Macintosh at Apple in 1980-ish. There's a whole large part of the tech world that would like you to think that it's new because of all the terrible things that their DevRel team did at Microsoft in the late-90s.And you can go read all about this. There were trials about it. These documents were released to the public, James Plamondon is the lead architect of all of this nastiness. But I think there was then a concerted effort to memory-hole that and say, “No, DevRel is new and shiny.” And then Google came along and said, “Well, it's not evangelism anymore. It's advocacy.”Corey: It's not sysadmin work anymore. It's SRE. It's not on-prem, it's Sparkling Kubernetes, et cetera, et cetera.Brandon: Yeah, so there's this sense in a lot of places that DevRel is new, but it's actually been around a long time. And you can learn a lot from reading about the history and understanding it, something I've given a talk on and written a bit about. So.Corey: My philosophy around developer relations for a while has been that in many cases, its biggest obstacle is the way that it is great at telling stories about fantastically complex, deeply technical things; it can tell stories about almost anything except itself. And I keep seeing similar expressions of the same problem again, and again, and again. I mean, AWS, where you worked, as an example: they love to talk about their developer advocates, and you read the job descriptions and these are high-level roles with sweeping responsibilities, broad basis of experience being able to handle things at a borderline executive level. And then they almost neuter the entire thing by slapping a developer advocate title on top of those people, which means that some of the people that would be most effectively served by talking to them will dismiss them as, “Well, I'm a director”—or a VP—“What am I going to do talking to a developer advocate?” It feels like there's a swing and a miss as far as encapsulating the value that the function provides.I want to be clear, I am not sitting here shitting on DevRel or its practitioners, I see a problem with how it [laugh] is being expressed. Now, feel free to argue with me and just scream at me for the next 20 minutes, and this becomes a real short show. But—Brandon: [laugh].Corey: —It'll be great. Hit me.Brandon: No, you're correct in many ways, which makes me sad because these are the same conversations that I've been having for the 11, 12 years that I've been in DevRel now. And I thought we would have moved past this at some point, but the problem is that we are bad at advocating for advocacy. We do a bad job of relating to people about DevRel because we spend so much time worried about stuff that doesn't really matter. And we get very loud voices in the echo chamber screaming about titles and evangelism versus advocate versus community manager, and which department you should report up to, and all of these things that ultimately don't matter. And it just seems like bickering from the outside. I think that the core of what we do is super awesome. And I don't think it's very hard to articulate. It's just that we don't spend the time to do that.Corey: It's always odd to me when I talk to someone like, “Oh, you're in DevRel. What does that mean?” And their immediate response is, “Well, it's not marketing, I'll tell you that.” It's feels like there might be some trauma that is being expressed in some strange ways. I do view it as marketing, personally, and people who take umbrage at that don't generally tend to understand what marketing is.Yeah, you can look at any area of business or any function and judge it by some of the worst examples that we've all seen, but when someone tells me they work in sales, I don't automatically assume that they are sending me horrifyingly passive-aggressive drip campaigns, or trying to hassle me in a car lot. It's no, there's a broad spectrum of people. Just like I don't assume that you're an engineer. And I immediately think, oh, you can't solve FizzBuzz on a whiteboard. No, there's always going to be a broad spectrum of experience.Marketing is one of those awesome areas of business that's dramatically misunderstood a lot. Similarly to the fact that, you know, DevRel can't tell stories, you think marketing could tell stories about itself, but it's still struggles, too, in a bunch of ways. But I do believe that even if they're not one of the same, developer relations and marketing are aligned around an awful lot of things like being able to articulate value that is hard to quantify.Brandon: I completely agree with that. And if I meet someone in DevRel that starts off the conversation by saying that they're not in marketing, then I know they're probably not that great at their job. I mean, I think there's a place of tech hubris, where we want to disrespect anything that's not a hard skill where it's not putting zeros and ones into a chip—Corey: And spoiler, they're all very hard skills.Brandon: [laugh]. Yeah. And so, first off, like, stop disrespecting marketing. It's important; your business probably wouldn't survive if you didn't have it. And second of all, you're not immune to it, right?Like, Heartbleed had a logo and a name for vulnerability because tech people are so susceptible to it, right? People don't just wake up and wait in line for three days for a new iPhone because tech marketing doesn't work, right?Corey: “Oh, tech marketing doesn't work on me,” says someone who's devoted last five years of their life to working on Kubernetes. Yeah, sure it doesn't.Brandon: Yeah exactly. So, that whole perspective is silly. I think part of the problem is that they don't want to invest in learning how to communicate what they do to a marketing org. They don't want to spend the time to say, “Here's how the marketing world thinks, and here's how we can fit into that perspective.” They want to come in and say, “Well, you don't understand DevRel. Let me define DevRel for you and tell you what we do.” And all those sorts of things. It's too prescriptive and less collaborative.Corey: Anytime you start getting into the idea of metrics around how do you measure someone in a developer advocacy role, the answer is, “Well, your metrics that you're using are wrong, and any metrics you use are wrong, and there's no good way to do it.” And I am sympathetic to that. When I started this place, I knew that if I went to a bunch of events and did my thing, good things would happen for the business. And how did I articulate that? Gut feel, but when you own the place, you can do that.Whereas when you are a function inside of another org, inside of another org, and you start looking at from the executive leadership position at these things, it's, “Okay, so let me get this straight. You cost as much as an engineer, you cost as much as that again, in your expenses because you're traveling all the time, you write zero production code, whenever people ask you what it is you do here, you have a very strange answer, and from what we can tell, it looks like you hang out with your friends in exotic locations, give a 15-minute talk from time to time that mentions our name at the beginning, and nothing else relevant to our business, and then you go around and the entire story is ‘just trust me, I'm adding value.'” Yeah, when it's time to tighten belts and start cutting back, is it any wonder that the developer advocacy is often one of the first departments hit from that perspective?Brandon: It doesn't surprise me. I mean, I've been a part of DevRel teams where we had some large number of events that we had attended for the year—I think 450-something—and the director of the team was very excited to show that off, right, you should have seen the CFOs face when he heard that, right, because all he sees is outgoing dollar signs. Like, how much expense? What's the ROI on 450 events?Corey: Yeah, “450 events? That's more than one a day. Okay, great. That's a big number and I already know what we're spending. Great. How much business came out of that?”And that's when the hemming and hawing starts. Like, well, sort of, and yadda—and yeah, it doesn't present well in the language that they are prepared to speak. But marketing can tell those stories because they have for ages. Like, “Okay, how much business came from our Superbowl ad?” “I dunno. The point is, is that there's a brand awareness play, there's the chance to remain top of the mental stack when people think about this space. And over the next few months, we can definitely see there's been a dramatic uptick in our business. Now, how do we attribute that back? Well, I don't know.”There's a saying in marketing, that half of your marketing budget is wasted. Now, figuring out which half will spend the rest of your career, you'll never get even close. Because people don't know the journey that customers go through, not really. Even customers don't often see it.Take this podcast, for example. I have sponsors that I do love and appreciate who say things from time to time on this show. And people will hear it and occasionally will become customers of those sponsors. But very often, it's, “Oh, I heard about that on the podcast. I'll Google it when I get to work and then I'll have a conversation with my team and we'll agree to investigate that.”And any UTM tracking has long since fallen by the wayside. You might get to that from discussions with users in their interview process, but very often, they won't remember where it came up. And it's one of those impossible to quantify things. Now, I sound like one of those folks where I'm trying to say, “Oh, buy sponsorships that you can never prove add value.” But that is functionally how advertising tends to work, back in the days before it spied on you.Brandon: Yeah, absolutely. And we've added a bunch of instrumentation to allow us to try and put that multi-touch attribution model together after the fact, but I'm still not sure that that's worth the squeeze, right? You don't get much juice out. One of the problems with metrics in DevRel is that the things that you can measure are very production-focused. It's how many talks did you give? How many audience members did you reach?Some developer relations folks do actually write production code, so it might be how many of the official SDK that you support got downloaded? That can be more directly attributed to business impact, those sorts of things are fantastic. But a lot of it is kind of fuzzy and because it's production-focused, it can lead to burnout because it's disconnected from business impact. “It's how many widgets did your line produce today?” “Well, we gave all these talks and we had 150,000 engaged developer hours.” “Well, cool, what was the business outcome?” And if you can't answer that for your own team and for your own self in your role, that leads pretty quickly to burnout.Corey: Anytime you start measuring something and grading people based on it, they're going to optimize for what you measure. For example, I send an email newsletter out, at time of this recording, to 31,000 people every week and that's awesome. I also periodically do webinars about the joys of AWS bill optimization, and you know, 50 people might show up to one of those things. Okay, well, from a broad numbers perspective, yeah, I'd much rather go and send something out to those 31,000, folks until you realize that the kind of person that's going to devote half an hour, forty-five minutes to having a discussion with you about AWS bill optimization is far likelier to care about this to the point where they become a customer than someone who just happens to be in an audience for something that is orthogonally-related. And that is the trick because otherwise, we would just all be optimizing for the single biggest platforms out there if oh, I'm going to go talk at this conference and that conference, not because they're not germane to what we do, but because they have more people showing up.And that doesn't work. When you see that even on the podcast world, you have Joe Rogan, as the largest podcast in the world—let's not make too many comparisons in different ways because I don't want to be associated with that kind of tomfoolery—but there's a reason that his advertisers, by and large, are targeting a mass-market audience, whereas mine are targeting B2B SaaS, by and large. I'm not here shilling for various mattress companies. I'm instead talking much more about things that solve the kind of problem that listeners to this show are likely to have. It's the old-school of thought of advertising, where this is a problem that is germane to a certain type of audience, and that certain type of audience listens to shows like this. That was my whole school of thought.Brandon: Absolutely. I mean, the core value that you need to do DevRel, in my opinion is empathy. It's all about what Maya Angelou said, right? “People may not remember what you said, but they'll definitely remember how you made them feel.” And I found that to be incredibly true.Like, the moments that I regret the most in DevRel are the times when someone that I've met and spent time with before comes up to have a conversation and I don't remember them because I met 200 people that night. And then I feel terrible, right? So, those are the metrics that I use internally. It's hearts and minds. It's how do people feel? Am I making them feel empowered and better at their craft through the work that I do?That's why I love DevRel. If I didn't get that fulfillment, I'd go write code again. But I don't get that sense of satisfaction, and wow, I made an impact on this person's trajectory through their career that I do from DevRel. So.Corey: I come bearing ill tidings. Developers are responsible for more than ever these days. Not just the code that they write, but also the containers and the cloud infrastructure that their apps run on. Because serverless means it's still somebody's problem. And a big part of that responsibility is app security from code to cloud. And that's where our friend Snyk comes in. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets developers where they are - Finding and fixing vulnerabilities right from the CLI, IDEs, Repos, and Pipelines. Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS offerings like code pipeline, EKS, ECR, and more! As well as things you're actually likely to be using. Deploy on AWS, secure with Snyk. Learn more at Snyk.co/scream That's S-N-Y-K.co/screamCorey: The way that I tend to see it, too, is that there's almost a bit of a broadening of DevRel. And let's be clear, it's a varied field with a lot of different ways to handle that approach. I'm have a terrible public speaker, so I'm not going to ever succeed in DevRel. Well, that's certainly not true. People need to write blog posts; people need to wind up writing some of the sample code, in some cases; people need to talk to customers in a small group environment, as opposed to in front of 3000 people and talk about the things that they're seeing, and the rest.There's a broad field and different ways that it applies. But I also see that there are different breeds of developer advocate as well. There are folks, like you for example. You and I have roughly the same amount of time in the industry working on different things, whereas there's also folks who it seems like they graduate from a boot camp, and a year later, they're working in a developer advocacy role. Does that mean that they're bad developer advocates?I don't think so, but I think that if they try and present things the same way that you were I do from years spent in the trenches working on these things, they don't have that basis of experience to fall back on, so they need to take a different narrative path. And the successful ones absolutely do.Brandon: Yeah.Corey: I think it's a nuanced and broad field. I wish that there was more acceptance and awareness of that.Brandon: That's absolutely true. And part of the reason people criticize DevRel and don't take it seriously, as they say, “Well, it's inconsistent. This org, it reports to product; or, this org, it reports up to marketing; this other place, it's part of engineering.” You know, it's poorly defined. But I think that's true of a lot of roles in tech.Like, engineering is usually done a different way, very differently at some orgs compared to others. Product teams can have completely different methodologies for how they track and manage and estimate their time and all of those things. So, I would like to see people stop using that as a cudgel against the whole profession. It just doesn't make any sense. At the same time, two of the best evangelist I ever hired were right out of university, so you're completely correct.The key thing to keep in mind there is, like, who's the audience, right, because ultimately, it's about building trust with the audience. There's a lot of rooms where if you and I walk into the room; if it's like a college hackathon, we're going to have a—[laugh], we're going to struggle.Corey: Yeah, we have some real, “Hello fellow kids,” energy going on when we do that.Brandon: Yeah. Which is also why I think it's incredibly important for developer relations teams to be aware of the makeup of their team. Like, how diverse is your team, and how diverse are the audiences you're speaking to? And if you don't have someone who can connect, whether it's because of age or lived experience or background, then you're going to fail because like I said that the number one thing you need to be successful in this role is empathy, in my opinion.Corey: I think that a lot of the efforts around a lot of this—trying to clarify what it is—some cases gone in well, I guess I'm going to call it the wrong direction. And I know that sounds judgy and I'm going to have to live with that, I suppose, but talk to me a bit about the, I guess, rebranding that we've seen in some recent years around developer advocates. Specifically, like, I like calling folks DevRelopers because it's cutesy, it's a bit of a portmanteau. Great. But it's also not something I seriously suggest most people put on business cards.But there are people who are starting to, I think, take a similar joke and actually identify with it where they call themselves developer avocados, which I don't fully understand. I have opinions on it, but again, having opinions that are not based in data is something I try not to start shouting from the rooftops wherever I can. You live in that world a lot more posted than I do, where do you stand?Brandon: So, I think it was well-intentioned and it was an attempt to do some of the awareness and brand building for DevRel, broadly, that we had lacked. But I see lots of problems with it. One, we already struggle to be taken seriously in many instances, as we've been discussing, and I don't think we do ourselves any favors by giving ourselves cutesy nicknames that sort of infantilize the role like I can't think of any other job that has a pet name for the work that they do.Corey: Yeah. The “ooh-woo accounting”. Yeah, I sort of don't see that happening very often in most business orgs.Brandon: Yeah. It's strange to me at the same time, a lot of the people who came up with it and popularized it are people that I consider friends and good colleagues. So hopefully, they won't be too offended, but I really think that it kind of set us back in many ways. I don't want to represent the work that I do with an emoji.Corey: Funny, you bring that up. As we record this through the first recording, I have on my new ridiculous desktop computer thing from Apple, which I have named after a—you know, the same naming convention that you would expect from an AWS region—it's us-shitpost-one. Instead of the word shit, it has the poop emoji. And you'd be amazed at the number of things that just melt when you start trying to incorporate that. GitHub has a problem with that being the name of an SSH key, for example.I don't know if I'll keep it or I'll just fall back to just spelling words out, but right now, at least, it really is causing all kinds of strange computer problems. Similarly, it causes strange cultural problems when you start having that dissonance and seeing something new and different like that in a business context. Because in some cases, yeah, it helps you interact with your audience and build rapport; in many others, it erodes trust and confidence that you know what you're talking about because people expect things to be cast a certain way. I'm not saying they're right. There's a shitload of bias that bakes into that, but at the same time, I'd like to at least bias for choosing when and where I'm going to break those expectations.There's a reason that increasingly, my Duckbillgroup.com website speaks in business terms, rather than in platypus metaphors, whereas lastweekinaws.com, very much leans into the platypus. And that is the way that the branding is breaking down, just because people expect different things in different places.Brandon: Yeah and, you know, this framing matters. And I've gone through two exercises now where I've helped rename an evangelism team to an advocacy team, not because I think it's important to me—it's a bunch of bikeshedding—but it has external implications, right? Especially evangelism, in certain parts of the world, has connotations. It's just easier to avoid those. And how we present ourselves, the titles that we choose are important.I wish we would spend way less time arguing about them, you know, advocacy has won evangelism, don't use it. DevRel, if you don't want to pick one, great. DevRel is broader umbrella. If you've got community managers, people who can't write code that do things involving your events or whatever, program managers, if they're on your team, DevRel, great description. I wish we could just settle that. Lots of wasted air discussing that one.Corey: Constantly. It feels like this is a giant distraction that detracts from the value of DevRel. Because I don't know about you, but when I pick what I want to do next in my career, the things I want to explain to people and spend that energy on are never, I want to explain what it is that I do. Like I've never liked those approaches where you have to first educate someone before they're going to be in a position where they want to become your customer.I think, honestly, that's one of the things that Datadog has gotten very right. One of the early criticisms lobbed against Datadog when it first came out was, “Oh, this is basically monitoring by Fisher-Price.” Like, “This isn't the deep-dive stuff.” Well yeah, but it turns out a lot of your buying audience are fundamentally toddlers with no visibility into what's going on. For an awful lot of what I do, I want it to be click, click, done.I am a Datadog customer for a reason. It's not because I don't have loud and angry opinions about observability; it's because I just want there to be a dashboard that I can look at and see what's working, what's not, and do I need to care about things today? And it solves that job admirably because if I have those kinds of opinions about every aspect, I'm never going to be your customer anyway, or anyone's customer. I'm going to go build my own and either launch a competitor or realize this is my what I truly love doing and go work at a company in this space, possibly yours. There's something to be said for understanding the customer journey that those customers do not look like you.And I think that's what's going on with a lot of the articulation around what developer relations is or isn't. The people on stage who go to watch someone in DevRel give a talk, do not care, by and large, what DevRel is. They care about the content that they're about to hear about, and when the first half of it is explaining what the person's job is or isn't, people lose interest. I don't even like intros at the beginning of a talk. Give me a hook. Talk for 45 seconds. Give me a story about why I should care before you tell me who you are, what your credentials are, what your job title is, who you work for. Hit me with something big upfront and then we'll figure it out from there.Brandon: Yeah, I agree with you. I give this speaking advice to people constantly. Do not get up on stage and introduce yourself. You're not a carnival hawker. You're not trying to get people to roll up and see the show.They're already sitting in the seat. You've established your credibility. If they had questions about it, they read your abstract, and then they went and checked you out on LinkedIn, right? So, get to the point; make it engaging and entertaining.Corey: I have a pet theory about what's going on in some cases where, I think, on some level, it's an outgrowth of an impostor-syndrome-like behavior, where people don't believe that they deserve to be onstage talking about things, so they start backing up their bona fides to almost reassure themselves because they don't believe that they should be up there and if they don't believe it, why would anyone else. It's the wrong approach. By holding the microphone, you inherently deserve to hold the microphone. And go ahead and tell your story. If people care enough to dig into you and who you are and well, “What is this person's background, really?” Rest assured the internet is pretty easy to use these days, people will find out. So, let them do that research if they care. If they don't, then there's an entire line of people in this world who are going to dislike you or say you're not qualified for what it is you're doing or you don't deserve it. Don't be in that line, let alone at the front of it.Brandon: So, you mentioned imposter syndrome and it got me thinking a little bit. And hopefully this doesn't offend anyone, but I kind of starting to think that imposter syndrome is in many ways invented by people to put the blame on you for something that's their fault. It's like a carbon footprint to the oil and gas industry, right? These companies can't provide you psychological safety and now they've gone and convinced you that it's your fault and that you're suffering from this syndrome, rather than the fact that they're not actually making you feel prepared and confident and ready to get up on that stage, even if it's your first time giving a talk, right?Corey: I hadn't considered it like that before. And again, I do tend to avoid straying into mental health territory on this show because I'm not an—Brandon: Yes.Corey: Expert. I'm a loud, confident white guy in tech. My failure mode is a board seat and a book deal, but I am not board-certified, let's be clear. But I think you're onto something here because early on in my career, I was very often faced with a whole lot of nebulous job description-style stuff and I was never sure if I was working on the right thing. Now that I'm at this stage of my career, and as you become more senior, you inherently find yourselves in roles, most of the time, that are themselves mired in uncertainty. That is, on some level, what seniority leads to.And that's fine, but early on in your career, not knowing if you're succeeding or failing, I got surprise-fired a number of times when I thought I was doing great. There are also times that I thought I was about to be fired on the spot and, “Come on in; shut the door.” And yeah, “Here's a raise because you're just killing it.” And it took me a few years after that point to realize, wait a minute. They were underpaying me. That's what that was, and they hope they didn't know.But it's that whole approach of just trying to understand your place in the world. Do I rock? Do I suck? And it's that constant uncertainty and unknowing. And I think companies do a terrible job, by and large, of letting people know that they're okay, they're safe, and they belong.Brandon: I completely agree. And this is why I would strongly encourage people—if you have the privilege—please do not work at a company that does not want you to bring your whole self to work, or that bans politics, or however they want to describe it. Because that's just a code word for we won't provide you psychological safety. Or if they're going to, it ends at a very hard border somewhere between work and life. And I just don't think anyone can be successful in those environments.Corey: I'm sure it's possible, but it does bias for folks who, frankly, have a tremendous amount of privilege in many respects where I mentioned about, like, I'm a white dude in tech—you are too—and when we say things, we are presumed competent and people don't argue with us by default. And that is a very easy to forget thing. Not everyone who looks like us is going to have very similar experiences. I have gotten it hilariously wrong before when I gave talks on how to wind up negotiating for salaries, for example, because well, it worked for me, what's the problem? Yeah, I basically burned that talk with fire, redid the entire thing and wound up giving it with a friend of mine who was basically everything that I am not.She was an attorney, she was a woman of color, et cetera, et cetera. And suddenly, it was a much stronger talk because it wasn't just, “How to Succeed for White Guys.” There's value in that, but you also have to be open to hearing that and acknowledging that you were born on third; you didn't hit a triple. There's a difference. And please forgive the sports metaphor. They do not sound natural coming from me.Brandon: [laugh]. I don't think I have anything more interesting to add on that topic.Corey: [laugh]. So, I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more about what you're up to and how you view the world, what's the best place to find you.Brandon: So, I'm most active on Twitter at @bwest, but you know, it's a mix of things so you may or may not just get tech. Most recently, I've been posting about a—Corey: Oh, heaven forbid you bring your whole self to school.Brandon: Right? I think most recently, I've been posting about a drill press that I'm restoring. So, all kinds of fun stuff on there.Corey: I don't know it sounds kind of—wait for it—boring to me. Bud-dum-tiss.Brandon: [laugh]. [sigh]. I can't believe I missed that one.Corey: You're welcome.Brandon: Well, done. Well, done. And then I also will be hiring for a couple of developer relations folks at Datadogs soon, so if that's interesting and you like the words I say about how to do DevRel, then reach out.Corey: And you can find all of that in the show notes, of course. I want to thank you for being so generous with your time. I really appreciate it.Brandon: Hey, thank you, Corey. I'm glad that we got to catch up after all this time. And hopefully get to chat with you again sometime soon.Corey: Brandon West, team lead for developer experience and tools advocacy at Datadog. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry and insulting comment that is talking about how I completely misunderstand the role of developer advocacy. And somehow that rebuttal features no fewer than 400 emoji shoved into it.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

The Prank Call Episode: An Early Call, The Disappointed Monk, Phones and BBSes as Refuge, Learning Voice Skills, An Eternal Battlefield, The Landline Stare, Middle Distance, Holding Your Own, A Breakdown Of The Disappointing Challenger, Inviting The World to Prank, A Welcome Second Prank Call. A rumination on prank calling and the unspoken rules within, as well as why people know my number. Some time ago, I compiled the many hours of recorded prank calls people had uploaded to the Internet Archive, and they're listenable here: https://archive.org/details/prankcallarchive

The Mini-Appler Episode: A Classroom Epiphany, Beautiful Boot, 612 BBSes, Safehouse, Midwest Pirates' Guild, Gods Among Us, BBS Documentary, A Living Room Interview, The Art of Luding, Applesauce, A Day Late, The Golden Wake.   A full interview with MPG is here: https://archive.org/details/20040125-bbs-612 Here's beautiful boot in action: https://archive.org/details/Dung_Beetles_Ms._PacMan_Pooyan_Star_Cruiser_Star_Thief_Invas._Force There are many games and programs by Mini Appler/Matt Dornquast around, here's a terminal program written in his teens: https://archive.org/details/a2_Megaterm_v3.0_1984_Novation

There was once a time when it took hours to download a file, when you had to find out from friends and magazines the numbers to the best… well.. let's call them “sites,” and when your home phone (no mobile back then) was the same line that you used to access remote servers. That was the wonderful, frustrating, and amazing world of BBSes. In this episode, we talk about our first time using computers to access a larger world! Patreon » patreon.com/genxgrownup Facebook » fb.me/GenXGrownUp Twitter » GenXGrownUp.com/twitter Website » GenXGrownUp.com Podcast » GenXGrownUp.com/pod Merchandise » GenXGrownUp.com/merch Theme: “Grown Up” by Beefy » beefyness.com iTunes » itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/genxgrownup-podcast/id1268365641 Google » play.google.com/music/listen#/ps/Iuthetoh4i5abybbnn4em36icwi PocketCasts » pca.st/8iuL Stitcher » www.stitcher.com/s?fid=146720&refid=stpr TuneIn » tunein.com/radio/GenXGrownUp-Podcast-p1020342/ Show Notes A History of BBS » bit.ly/2ESsVTH History of Early Modems » bit.ly/2Q1zwfv The Sounds of Different Modems » youtu.be/ckc6XSSh52w The Lost Civilization of Dial Up Bulletin Boards » bit.ly/2fsiTJE Forgotten World of BBS Door Games » bit.ly/2EKviHj History of Online Forums » bit.ly/2FFVynV RIP CompuServe » bit.ly/2hrWHAH Wikipedia on GEnie » en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEnie AOL at 30 » time.com/3857628/aol-1985-history/ Visit us on YouTube » GenXGrownUp.com/yt Email the show » podcast@genxgrownup.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And we're back! Sometimes. On this episode, Josh dives into the dark history of the Shaka hand signal, how its origin is based in brutal hand mangling and how it has been adopted by the terminally cool and the socially awkward alike. Then Nick discusses the not-so-widely-known world of the mid-nineties multiplayer text-based games hosted on standalone servers. Anyone could dial into one of these servers, called "BBSes," as long as they had a modem. Guest host (and the world's third contentologist) took advantage of these super computer nerd's network and became quite fond of several of these games. Nick walks us down memory lame, covering these simple yet great BBS Door Games and ultimately asks the question, what makes a game good? The answer may lead Josh and Nick to burn their XBoxes and PlayStations! He's talking: Barren Realms Elite (BRE) and Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD).   Off-top Links and References: Dark History of the Shaka   Content: BBS Door Wiki Legend of the Red Dragon Barren Realms Elite Synchronet BBS List What Makes a Good Game?   SPECIAL PLUG: (...seriously, these dudes and their show are awesome...)   The Don't Assume Podcast   Follow Us: All of our links! Facebook Instagram Discord Sponsor: Best Maps Ever   Other Podcast Appearances: Josh on Have Not Seen This: Ep. 66 - Devil's Rejects Josh on The Don't Assume Podcast: Ep. 24 - Skydiving

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K. Facebook outage and BGP routing. A new issue of phrack released on Oct 5 results a discussion on the good ol' days, BBSes, and the commercialization of security. Finally, thoughts on paved paths and how they affect security.

Las comunidades online existen desde que internet empezó a dar sus primeros pasos. Los bulletin board services (BBSes) se crearon ya en la década de los 70 para conectar máquinas de Unix y desde entonces han existido -y seguirán existiendo- numerosas comunidades de usuarios que se agrupan en torno a un interés común. Idear, crear, escalar y mantener comunidades online no es para nada una tarea sencilla. Sin embargo, hacerlo bien puede ayudar a crear barreras de entrada y salida muy relevantes y, lo que es más importante, puede tener un impacto en negocio significante. Para tratar el tema de la importancia de las comunidades online hemos hablado con dos personas que conocen bien el asunto: Vicent Martí, cofundador y CMO de Streamloots, y Bosco Soler, fundador de Sin Oficina. En este podKast, tratamos con Vicent y Bosco los siguientes temas: - Cómo son y en qué se diferencian las comunidades de Streamloots y Sin Oficina - Cómo medir el impacto de una comunidad en negocio y qué KPIs utilizar - La importancia de tener dentro de una empresa perfiles dedicados exclusivamente a la gestión de comunidades - Cómo escalar una comunidad y cómo moderarla - Y muchos otros temas

Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! (https://www.patreon.com/topiclords) Lords: * Ryan * https://twitter.com/RyanIkeComposer * Alicia * https://www.instagram.com/historianraptor/ Topics: * How many throw pillows is too many? Does it depend on number of pillows? Size of furniture? Number of family members? Softness/firmness level? * Why are yawns considered a sign of boredom? * Art packs/music disks * https://16colo.rs/pack/wiz-0296/ * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlvsDtevNJ0&feature=youtu.be * Ville asks "Chester Bolingbroke is blogging his attempt to finish every computer RPG ever in chronological order, despite this being clearly impossible. He started at The Dungeon (1975) and is currently up to Legends of Valour: Ragged Chet (1992)." * http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/ * Do you consider listening to an audio book "reading?" What about having a book read to you by someone, live? Could we interpret radio plays or listening to a film with our eyes closed "reading?" Microtopics: * Getting good enough at English to speak in Instruction Manual. * Back before the content ocean. * A whole slew of trucks that have jobs. * Your two year old wishing you good luck by leaving a cement mixer on your desk. * A lateral career move where you decide to stop releasing games. * Occult and magic in the Greco-Roman world. * Talking the kids out of going to college. * Using Greco-Roman erotic curse tablets and binding spells to examine romantic relationships of the time period. * How nobody calls love potions "curses" any more. * Variable demand for throw pillows over the course of the day. * Needing to get more dogs because your have too many throw pillows for the number of dogs you have. * A bowling pin orientation of ten to twelve pillows that you have to clear out of the way before you can sleep. * A barricade of squish. * A wheezing Darth Vader mask. * Sleeping in an ominous dark orb next to your wife in bed and she complains that your orb is too hard and it pinches when it closes. * A lacerating throw pillow. * Opening yourself up to the soft life. * A badminton racket in your closet that you haven't used in over a decade. * Edible pillows. * Yawning whenever you see the sun. * Possible origins of the myth that yawning indicates boredom. * A yawn factory to your left. * Trying to change society in the next ten minutes. * A manatee at the zoo giving you a hard time because you yawned at their enclosure. * Oxygenating before you charge an invader. * Hippos yawning in order to fuck you up. * Getting kicked out of the zoo after yawning at the chimpanzees and the admission booth putting up a photo of your gaping mouth saying "don't let these teeth in." * What you get for challenging a peacock. * Living in a bad society and being tired all the time. * Yawning it out. * Sticking a finger in your elderly dog's mouth when they yawn because they don't have enough teeth left to bite you. * What you did with a modem before the internet was a thing. * BBS operators commissioning ANSI art to differentiate their BBS from other BBSes. * Making elaborate works of art within the constraints of IBM PC text mode. * An executable that displays procedural animations on the screen and describes the features of a BBS. * What Minnesota locals think of Bruno Mars' hats. * Minnesota not having any LAN parties but you can get a deep fried floppy disk on a stick at the state fair. * How to fool 2008-YouTube into allocating extra bandwidth to your fluorescent waffle pattern. * A logo that is shimmering so hard that it is impossible to read. * Never reading a video title because you don't want to be biased going into it. * The script you would read on the side of an obelisk on an ancient asteroid. * Whether the sci-fi story you just wrote is just Mass Effect again. * Making art for your friends. * Inventing a podcast because you need an excuse to chat with friends. * Watching your wife's phone ring and asking if she's going to do something about that. * Being on a podcast where you have to do homework. * The LAN party of podcasting. * Creating a box for your podcast so you can put a quote on it. * Legends of Valour: Ragged Chet. * Creating content in order to make friends. * Whether you can play every RPG faster than they are released. * When it's okay to feed Gremlins again. * Setting out on a quest to do something esoteric that nobody has asked for. * Whether the guy in Zelda who said "tenth enemy has the bomb" made sense in Japanese. * Whether Gremlins respect the daylight savings time changeover. * Whether leaving food out on the counter that the Gremlin later eats counts as "feeding" it. * A Bubsy 3D-style Gremlins sequel. * Abandoning the topic to just talk about Gremlins for ten minutes. * Yelling to the sky in impotent rage when an inanimate object rips one of your earbuds out. * Buying a pianist an incredibly sharp kitchen knife. * Cutting your sandwiches with a machine gun. * Getting knife proof gloves for the kitchen and then just wearing them all the time because who knows when your fancy new chef's knife will strike. * Engaging with the story and creating a construct in your imagination. * Whether it's okay to "read" a book on tape. * Calling NES cartridges "tapes" because Nintendo deliberately designed them to resemble VHS tapes. * A sci-fi video game filled with Data Prisms which have identical storage capacity and security properties to Post-It notes but are way more futuristic. * Leaving a note saying "Don't forget to get paper towels at Fred Meyer" for the post-apocalyptic scavenger exploring your kitchen. * Dying together on the toilet in a heartwarming embrace. * A framed Post-It note saying "Ryan's favorite number is 63." * Digging Jim's corpse up and squeezing him like a bagpipe into his CPAP machine to unlock Frog Fractions 3. * How at Taco Bell "supreme" means sour cream and tomatoes but at Pizza Hut "supreme" means sausage and green peppers but at the combination Taco Bell and Pizza Hut it means pouring Baja Blast on your Pizzone. * Choosing your bad handle and owning it.

DJ LAW joins me to talk tales of Ottawa, what was happening on The Tom Green Show, the first planking video of all time, Nickelback hate, computer geek talk and BBSes, and of course, the rap group he was a part of, Organized Rhyme. Check the O.R.!

Matt Dole asks engineer Chris Pappas who he is and how he got here. Tune in to learn about BBSes and how skateboarding started Chris's career in software.

E estamos de volta… E hoje em um episódio totalmente não recomendável para menores de 18 anos. Em um episódio com um humor de certa forma ácido, caústico e brutal, os Fate Masters Rafael, Fábio e Luís vão revisar um jogo que, tanto pelas suas mecânicas, artes e posicionamento chocou, polemizou e foi um dos mais comentados nos últimos tempos: #iHunt. Venha se sujeitar a ser um fodido e caçar monstros na economia colaborativa, onde todas as pequenas e grandes mazelas do capitalismo apenas reforçam três coisas: te fuder de maneira literal e abstrata mostrar que monstros não são analogias, são criaturas nem todo monstro suga sangue: alguns sugam seu dinheiro Vamos falar sobre as várias mecânicas novas e não tão novas, como os Pacotes de Perícias, Criação dos Monstros, A Vantagem que faz com que uma luta justa seja apenas um eufemismo para bater as botas e muito mais. Vamos também falar sobre como os Monstros em #iHunt não são sempre maus, e às vezes nem o pior mal, embora ocasionalmente alguns deles sejam tão ruins que o Alemão possui uma palavra especial para eles, backpfeifengesicht, ou seja, “alguém que tá pedindo um soco na cara”. E sobre como o nível de Ameaça é definido e sobre como é uma péssima ideia tentar estacar um vampiro pelo peito, graças a um treco chamado Esterno. Venha para San Jenaro, a Sunnydale hipster do Vale do Silício, onde uma caçada de monstros está a um clique e enquanto não está caçando monstros você tem um Emprego vindo diretamente do Vagas Arrombadas. Está desesperado o bastante para arriscar seu pescoço contra a Duqueza Demoníaca de San Jenaro para juntar dinheiro para pagar contas, comprar aquele remédio contra fibromialgia e (se sobrar algum) tomar um sorvete? Se sim, apenas deslize para a direita no #iHunt para aceitar o serviço. Mas lembre-se: o sistema é foda e tem toda uma série de pequenas merdas para te fuder de todos os jeitos em todos os momentos. E acima de tudo: NADA DE FASCISTAS! NADA DE FASCISTAS Se você é um fascista, você não é bem vindo nesse jogo. É contra as regras. Se você está lendo isso e pensando, “Porra, agora todo mundo que não concorda com você é fascista?”, então provavelmente você é um fascista, ou ao menos é incapaz de inferir coisas do contexto e reconhecer um ambiente político perigoso que tornou aqueles que são oprimidos mais raivosos. Não jogo esse jogo. Vá se tratar. Cresça. Aprenda. Vá assistir “Um lindo dia na vizinhança” ou algo similar. Lembrem-se: qualquer dúvidas, críticas, sugestões e opiniões você pode enviar na comunidade do Facebook do Fate (com a hashtag #fatemasters), pelo email fatemasterspodcast@gmail.com, pela página do Fate Masters no Facebook e agora pelo servidor do Movimento Fate Brasil no Discord E as redes sociais dos Fate Masters: Mr Mickey: fabiocosta0305 ou hufflepuffbr em quase todas as redes sociais Velho Lich: rafael.meyer no Facebook ou eavatar no Tumblr Cicerone: lcavalheiro#0520 no Discord e lcavalheiro no Telegram Abaixo, a tabela dos materiais analisados até agora Posição Cenário Mr. Mickey Velho Lich Cicerone Média 1 Uprising - The Dystopian Universe RPG 5 5 5 5   #iHunt 5 5 5 5 3 Masters of Umdaar 5 4,5 5 4.83   Chopstick 5 4,75 4,75 4.83 5 Wearing the Cape 4,8 4,75 4,38 4,78 6 Secrets of Cats 4,7 4,5 4,5 4,73 7 Templo Perdido de Thur-Amon 4,6 4,75 4,75 4,68   Jadepunk 4,8 4,75 4,5 4,68   Nest 4,8 4,5 4,75 4,68 10 Bukatsu 4,75 4,5 4,5 4,58 11 Boa Vizinhança/Good Neighbors 4,7 4,25 4,75 4,56 12 Daring Comics 4,25 4,5 4,75 4,5 13 Mecha vs Kaiju 4,25 4,75 4 4,33 14 Atomic Robo 4 4,5 —- 4,25 15 Destino em Quatro Cores 4 4 3,75 3,92 16 Atomic Robo: Majestic 12 3,5 3,5 —- 3,5 17 Projeto Memento 3,5 3,75 2,75 3,33   Ferramentas de Sistema 4 —- —- 4   Horror Toolkit 4,5 4,5 2 3,6 Link para o programa em MP3 Participantes: Fábio Emilio Costa Luís Cavalheiro Rafael Sant’anna Meyer Duração: 100min Cronologia do Podcast: 00:00:14 - Introdução 00:01:20 - Uma introdução ao #iHunt (e sobre como hoje a coisa vai ladeira abaixo) 00:04:09 - Sobre o cenário de #iHunt e o Aplicativo do #iHunt e sobre como ele é um jogo que não é para qualquer um (nada de Fascistas aqui, catzo!) 00:26:01 - As Perícias (ou Pacotes de Perícias) e Aspectos do #iHunt 00:35:30 - Sobre os Lances, as formas que existem de se matar monstros em #iHunt (e como isso não é uma categorização como no Storyteller) 00:44:21 - Sobre os Monstros em #iHunt, seus poderes, características e fraqueza, e como construir suas próprias coisas ruins 00:53:29 - O Nível de Ameaça e a Vantagem 01:01:21 - Sobre o gerador aleatório de Caçadas de Monstros e sobre como várias caçadas são embebidas na vida cotidiana do #iHunter, e como nem sempre você é o lado bom da coisa 01:10:05 - Sobre Arriscar Aspectos e Essência 01:22:19 - Intervalo Comercial (o X-Card do jogo), Formulário de Consentimento e Selfies como Marcos de Evolução e os Callbacks e o Cenário de San Jenaro 01:28:10 - Sobre Notas e Adoção de Regras 01:53:47 - Considerações Finais Links Relacionados: #iHunt Uber 99 Taxi Microsoft Facebook Google iFood Rolemaster Hinode OSE (Old-School Essentials) Priscila a Rainha do Deserto Matadores de Vampiras Lésbicas Zumbilândia Caça-Fantasmas Elvira Vampirella Walking Dead Resident Evil Santa Clarita Diet Resenha de #iHunt do Mr. Mickey para a Dungeon Geek Gráfico dos Dados Fate no AnyDice Gráfico dos Dados Fate com Vantagem no AnyDice #iHunt: Killing Monsters in the Gig Economy (English Edition) Machine Age (itch.io) Machine Age no Twitch Aphoteosis Drive/X Machine Age Olivia Hill Rule John Constantine BBSes Dracula Fate - Criaturas Fantásticas Ceifadores Discord da Machine Age - San Genaro Link para a comunidade do Google+ do Fate Masters Comente esse post no site do Fate Masters! Assine no iTunes Trilha Sonora do Podcast: Clandestino por Manu Chao / Playing For Change Ambient Pills por Zeropage Ambient Pills Update por Zeropage

Our guest in Episode 015 is John Newman, Senior Software Engineer (Java/Spring/Oracle). After growing up on a steady diet of BBSes, John went from the physical therapy program to the programming program. After his start in Ops he moved to Dev and has been coding ever since. John talks about developing for the fun of it, his early days on the dial-up bulletin board systems in Boston, and how coaching youth sports helps him with his job.    What is a BBS - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system Commodore 64 - https://www.google.com/amp/s/gizmodo.com/a-commodore-64-clone-with-a-working-retro-keyboard-will-1835836875/amp Umass Lowell CS Dept. - https://www.uml.edu/sciences/computer-science/ BU Met CS - https://bumetprograms.bu.edu/computerscience/ Spring Boot - https://spring.io/projects/spring-boot

BBSes, the Internet, and fiction. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/infernaldesign/message

Nineteen episodes people! Lyle and Lopp walk through their thoughts on 2019's WWDC. We also take a trip down memory lane to discuss the Apple II+, BBSes, and spinning cursors. Trippy.

Aliens. Conspiracies. The unsolved mysteries of the world -- and the universe. In the 1990s these elements came together in The X-Files and a fandom that was almost as mythical as the lore it so rabidly discussed. What made it so special was that it would forge a path for all future fandoms on the then fledgling public internet of BBSes and mailing lists and forever change fan culture.

There was once a time when it took hours to download a file, when you had to find out from friends and magazines the numbers to the best... well.. let's call them "sites," and when your home phone (no mobile back then) was the same line that you used to access remote servers. That was the wonderful, frustrating, and amazing world of BBSes. In this episode we talk about our first time using computers to access a larger world! Patreon » https://patreon.com/genxgrownup Facebook » http://fb.me/GenXGrownUp Twitter » http://GenXGrownUp.com/twitter Website » http://GenXGrownUp.com Podcast » http://GenXGrownUp.com/pod Merchandise » http://GenXGrownUp.com/merch Theme: "Grown Up" by Beefy » http://beefyness.com iTunes » http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/genxgrownup-podcast/id1268365641 Google » https://play.google.com/music/listen#/ps/Iuthetoh4i5abybbnn4em36icwi PocketCasts » http://pca.st/8iuL Stitcher » http://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=146720&refid=stpr TuneIn » https://tunein.com/radio/GenXGrownUp-Podcast-p1020342/ Show Notes A History of BBS » https://bit.ly/2ESsVTH History of Early Modems » https://bit.ly/2Q1zwfv The Sounds of Different Modems » https://youtu.be/ckc6XSSh52w The Lost Civilization of Dial Up Bulletin Boards » https://bit.ly/2fsiTJE Forgotten World of BBS Door Games » https://bit.ly/2EKviHj History of Online Forums » https://bit.ly/2FFVynV RIP CompuServe » https://bit.ly/2hrWHAH Wikipedia on GEnie » https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEnie AOL at 30 » http://time.com/3857628/aol-1985-history/ Visit us on YouTube » http://GenXGrownUp.com/yt Email the show » podcast@genxgrownup.com

Once upon a time, I was on the cutting edge of online technology. I used BBSes, before the Internet was a thing.Now? I'm too old for this.So I asked Derek (from the Sometimes Geek and Rolling Misadventures podcasts) to help me sort out some of the bigger crimes and dangers lurking on the web today. And we remembered something very important: people suck.Disclaimer: Cambo, from True Crime IslandPromos: Voice of the Victim and Sac 'Em Up SundaysSponsors: Sudio Sweden (https://goo.gl/TPqhU7 with code IWB for 15% off) and BathByBex.com (code CBDkate for 15% off)Merch: bit.ly/iwbpodcastmerch

Nostalgia! Jon and Justin talk about their "tech origin stories."

This week on BSD Now, we will be discussing a wide variety of topics including Routers, Run-Controls, the “Rule” of silence and some This episode was brought to you by Headlines Ports no longer build on EOL FreeBSD versions (https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/5ouvmp/ports_no_longer_build_on_eol_freebsd_versions/) The FreeBSD ports tree has been updated to automatically fail if you try to compile ports on EOL versions of FreeBSD (any version of 9.x or earlier, 10.0 - 10.2, or 11 from before 11.0) This is to prevent shooting yourself in the food, as the compatibility code for those older OSes has been removed now that they are no longer supported. If you use pkg, you will also run into problems on old releases. Packages are always built on the oldest supported release in a branch. Until recently, this meant packages for 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 were compiled on 10.1. Now that 10.1 and 10.2 are EOL, packages for 10.x are compiled on 10.3. This matters because 10.3 supports the new openat() and various other *at() functions used by capsicum. Now that pkg and packages are built on a version that supports this new feature, they will not run on systems that do not support it. So pkg will exit with an error as soon as it tries to open a file. You can work around this temporarily by using the pkg-static command, but you should upgrade to a supported release immediately. *** Improving TrueOS: OpenRC (https://www.trueos.org/blog/improving-trueos-openrc/) With TrueOS moving to a rolling-release model, we've decided to be a bit more proactive in sharing news about new features that are landing. This week we've posted an article talking about the transition to OpenRC In past episodes you've heard me mention OpenRC, but hopefully today we can help answer any of those lingering questions you may still have about it The first thing always asked, is “What is OpenRC?” OpenRC is a dependency-based init system working with the system provided init program. It is used with several Linux distributions, including Gentoo and Alpine Linux. However, OpenRC was created by the NetBSD developer Roy Marples in one of those interesting intersections of Linux and BSD development. OpenRC's development history, portability, and 2-clause BSD license make its integration into TrueOS an easy decision. Now that we know a bit about what it is, how does it behave differently than traditional RC? TrueOS now uses OpenRC to manage all system services, as opposed to FreeBSD's RC. Instead of using rc.d for base system rc scripts, OpenRC uses init.d. Also, every service in OpenRC has its own user configuration file, located in /etc/conf.d/ for the base system and /usr/local/etc.conf.d/ for ports. Finally, OpenRC uses runlevels, as opposed to the FreeBSD single- or multi- user modes. You can view the services and their runlevels by typing $ rc-update show -v in a CLI. Also, TrueOS integrates OpenRC service management into SysAdm with the Service Manager tool One of the prime benefits of OpenRC is much faster boot-times, which is important in a portable world of laptops (and desktops as well). But service monitoring and crash detection are also important parts of what make OpenRC a substantial upgrade for TrueOS. Lastly people have asked us about migration, what is done, what isn't? As of now almost all FreeBSD base system services have been migrated over. In addition most desktop-facing services required to run Lumina and the like are also ported. We are still going through the ports tree and converting legacy rc.d scripts to init.d, but the process takes time. Several new folks have begun contributing OpenRC scripts and we hope to have all the roughly 1k ports converted over this year. BSDRP Releases 1.70 (https://sourceforge.net/projects/bsdrp/files/BSD_Router_Project/1.70/) A new release of the BSD Router Project This distro is designed to replace high end routers, like those from Cisco and Juniper, with FreeBSD running on regular off-the-shelf server. Highlights: Upgraded to FreeBSD 11.0-STABLE r312663 (skip 11.0 for massive performance improvement) Re-Added: netmap-fwd (https://github.com/Netgate/netmap-fwd) Add FIBsync patch to netmap-fwd from Zollner Robert netmap pkt-gen supports IPv6, thanks to Andrey V. Elsukov (ae@freebsd.org) bird 1.6.3 (add BGP Large communities support) OpenVPN 2.4.0 (adds the high speed AEAD GCM cipher) All of the other packages have also been upgraded A lot of great work has been done on BSDRP, and it has also generated a lot of great benchmarks and testing that have resulted in performance increases and improved understanding of how FreeBSD networking scales across different CPU types and speeds *** DragonFlyBSD gets UEFI support (http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/commitdiff/7b1aa074fcd99442a1345fb8a695b62d01d9c7fd) This commit adds support for UEFI to the Dragonfly Installer, allowing new systems to be installed to boot from UEFI This script (http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/commitdiff/9d53bd00e9be53d6b893afd79111370ee0c053b0) provides a way to build a HAMMER filesystem that works with UEFI There is also a UEFI man page (http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/commitdiff/d195d5099328849c500d4a1b94d6915d3c72c71e) The install media (http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/commitdiff/5fa778d7b36ab0981ff9dcbd96c71ebf653a6a19) has also been updated to support booting from either UEFI or MBR, in the same way that the FreeBSD images work *** News Roundup The Rule of Silence (http://www.linfo.org/rule_of_silence.html) “The rule of silence, also referred to as the silence is golden rule, is an important part of the Unix philosophy that states that when a program has nothing surprising, interesting or useful to say, it should say nothing. It means that well-behaved programs should treat their users' attention and concentration as being valuable and thus perform their tasks as unobtrusively as possible. That is, silence in itself is a virtue.” This doesn't mean a program cannot be verbose, it just means you have to ask it for the additional output, rather than having it by default “There is no single, standardized statement of the Unix philosophy, but perhaps the simplest description would be: "Write programs that are small, simple and transparent. Write them so that they do only one thing, but do it well and can work together with other programs." That is, the philosophy centers around the concepts of smallness, simplicity, modularity, craftsmanship, transparency, economy, diversity, portability, flexibility and extensibility.” “This philosophy has been fundamental to the the fact that Unix-like operating systems have been thriving for more than three decades, far longer than any other family of operating systems, and can be expected to see continued expansion of use in the years to come” “The rule of silence is one of the oldest and most persistent design rules of such operating systems. As intuitive as this rule might seem to experienced users of such systems, it is frequently ignored by the developers of other types of operating systems and application programs for them. The result is often distraction, annoyance and frustration for users.” “There are several very good reasons for the rule of silence: (1) One is to avoid cluttering the user's mind with information that might not be necessary or might not even be desired. That is, unnecessary information can be a distraction. Moreover, unnecessary messages generated by some operating systems and application programs are sometimes poorly worded, and can cause confusion or needless worry on the part of users.” No news is good news. When there is bad news, error messages should be descriptive, and ideally tell the user what they might do about the error. “A third reason is that command line programs (i.e., all-text mode programs) on Unix-like operating systems are designed to work together with pipes, i.e., the output from one program becomes the input of another program. This is a major feature of such systems, and it accounts for much of their power and flexibility. Consequently, it is important to have only the truly important information included in the output of each program, and thus in the input of the next program.” Have you ever had to try to strip out useless output so you could feed that data into another program? “The rule of silence originally applied to command line programs, because all programs were originally command line programs. However, it is just as applicable to GUI (graphical user interfaces) programs. That is, unnecessary and annoying information should be avoided regardless of the type of user interface.” “A example is the useless and annoying dialog boxes (i.e., small windows) that pop up on the display screen with with surprising frequency on some operating systems and programs. These dialog boxes contain some obvious, cryptic or unnecessary message and require the user to click on them in order to close them and proceed with work. This is an interruption of concentration and a waste of time for most users. Such dialog boxes should be employed only in situations in which some unexpected result might occur or to protect important data.” It goes on to make an analogy about Public Address systems. If too many unimportant messages, like advertisements, are sent over the PA system, people will start to ignore them, and miss the important announcements. *** The Tao of tmux (https://leanpub.com/the-tao-of-tmux/read) An interesting article floated across my news feed a few weeks back. It's what essentially boils down to a book called the “Tao of tmux”, which immediately piqued my interest. My story may be similar to many of yours. I was initially raised on using screen, and screen only for my terminal session and multiplexing needs. Since then I've only had a passing interest in tmux, but its always been one of those utilities I felt was worthy of investing some more time into. (Especially when seeing some of the neat setups some of my peers have with it) Needless to say, this article has been bookmarked, and I've started digesting some of it, but thought it would be good to share with anybody else who finds them-self in a similar situation. The book starts off well, explaining in the simplest terms possible what Tmux really is, by comparing and contrasting it to something we are all familiar with, GUIS! Helpfully they also include a chart which explains some of the terms we will be using frequently when discussing tmux (https://leanpub.com/the-tao-of-tmux/read#leanpub-auto-window-manager-for-the-terminal) One of the things the author does recommend is also making sure you are up to speed on your Terminal knowledge. Before getting into tmux, a few fundamentals of the command line should be reviewed. Often, we're so used to using these out of street smarts and muscle memory a great deal of us never see the relation of where these tools stand next to each other. Seasoned developers are familiar with zsh, Bash, iTerm2, konsole, /dev/tty, shell scripting, and so on. If you use tmux, you'll be around these all the time, regardless of whether you're in a GUI on a local machine or SSH'ing into a remote server. If you want to learn more about how processes and TTY's work at the kernel level (data structures and all) the book The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System (2nd Edition) by Marshall Kirk McKusick is nice. In particular, Chapter 4, Process Management and Section 8.6, Terminal Handling. The TTY demystified by Linus Åkesson (available online) dives into the TTY and is a good read as well. We had to get that shout-out of Kirk's book in here ;) From here the boot/article takes us on a whirlwind journey of Sessions, Windows, Panes and more. Every control- command is covered, information on how to customize your statusbar, tips, tricks and the like. There's far more here than we can cover in a single segment, but you are highly encouraged to bookmark this one and start your own adventure into the world of tmux. *** SDF Celebrates 30 years of service in 2017 (https://sdf.org/) HackerNews thread on SDF (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13453774) “Super Dimension Fortress (SDF, also known as freeshell.org) is a non-profit public access UNIX shell provider on the Internet. It has been in continual operation since 1987 as a non-profit social club. The name is derived from the Japanese anime series The Super Dimension Fortress Macross; the original SDF server was a BBS for anime fans[1]. From its BBS roots, which have been well documented as part of the BBS: The Documentary project, SDF has grown into a feature-rich provider serving members around the world.” A public access UNIX system, it was many people's first access to a UNIX shell. In the 90s, Virtual Machines were rare, the software to run them usually cost a lot of money and no one had very much memory to try to run two operating systems at the same time. So for many people, these type of shell accounts were the only way they could access UNIX without having to replace the OS on their only computer This is how I first started with UNIX, eventually moving to paying for access to bigger machines, and then buying my own servers and renting out shell accounts to host IRC servers and channel protection bots. “On June 16th, 1987 Ted Uhlemann (handle: charmin, later iczer) connected his Apple ][e's 300 baud modem to the phone line his mother had just given him for his birthday. He had published the number the night before on as many BBSes around the Dallas Ft. Worth area that he could and he waited for the first caller. He had a copy of Magic Micro BBS which was written in Applesoft BASIC and he named the BBS "SDF-1" after his favorite Japanimation series ROBOTECH (Macross). He hoped to draw users who were interested in anime, industrial music and the Church of the Subgenius.” I too started out in the world of BBSes before I had access to the internet. My parents got my a dedicated phone line for my birthday, so I wouldn't tie up their line all the time. I quickly ended up running my own BBS, the Sudden Death BBS (Renegade (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renegade_(BBS)) on MS DOS) I credit this early experience for my discovery of a passion for Systems Administration, that lead me to my current career “Slowly, SDF has grown over all these years, never forgetting our past and unlike many sites on the internet, we actually have a past. Some people today may come here and see us as outdated and "retro". But if you get involved, you'll see it is quite alive with new ideas and a platform for opportunity to try many new things. The machines are often refreshed, the quotas are gone, the disk space is expanding as are the features (and user driven features at that) and our cabinets have plenty of space for expansion here in the USA and in Europe (Germany).” “Think about ways you'd like to celebrate SDF's 30th and join us on the 'bboard' to discuss what we could do. I realize many of you have likely moved on yourselves, but I just wanted you to know we're still here and we'll keep doing new and exciting things with a foundation in the UNIX shell.” *** Getting Minecraft to Run on NetBSD (https://www.reddit.com/r/NetBSD/comments/5mtsy1/getting_minecraft_to_run_on_netbsd/) One thing that doesn't come up often on BSDNow is the idea of gaming. I realize most of us are server folks, or perhaps don't play games (The PC is for work, use your fancy-smanzy PS4 and get off my lawn you kids) Today I thought it would be fun to highlight this post over at Reddit talking about running MineCraft on NetBSD Now I realize this may not be news to some of you, but perhaps it is to others. For the record my kids have been playing Minecraft on PC-BSD / TrueOS for years. It's the primary reason they are more often booted into that instead of Windows. (Funny story behind that - Got sick of all the 3rd party mods, which more often than not came helpfully bundled with viruses and malware) On NetBSD the process looks a bit different than on FreeBSD. First up, you'll need to enable Linux Emulation and install Oracle JRE (Not OpenJDK, that path leads to sadness here) The guide will then walk us through the process of fetching the Linux runtime packages, extracting and then enabling bits such as ‘procfs' that is required to run the Linux binaries. Once that's done, minecraft is only a simple “oracle8-jre /path/to/minecraft.jar” command away from starting up, and you'll be “crafting” in no time. (Does anybody even play survival anymore?) *** Beastie Bits UNIX on the Computer Chronicals (https://youtu.be/g7P16mYDIJw) FreeBSD: Atheros AR9380 and later, maximum UDP TX goes from 250mbit to 355mbit. (https://twitter.com/erikarn/status/823298416939659264) Capsicumizing traceroute with casper (https://reviews.freebsd.org/D9303) Feedback/Questions Jason - TarSnap on Windows (http://pastebin.com/Sr1BTzVN) Mike - OpenRC & DO (http://pastebin.com/zpHyhHQG) Anonymous - Old Machines (http://pastebin.com/YnjkrDmk) Matt - Iocage (http://pastebin.com/pBUXtFak) Hjalti - Rclone & FreeNAS (http://pastebin.com/zNkK3epM)

A Special Yule tide episode, full of stories and recipes for the holiday.The story of how Yule got its name, is called The First Song, and is a traditional story from Northern Europe. I've been telling this story to my children for many years, and have changed and added to it over time, as we do with all folk tales. The poem Welcome Yule is by Susan Cooper. A Visit to Mother Hulda was a story I originally found many years ago in Circle Round by Starhawk, Diane Baker and Anne Hill as "A Visit to Mother Winter." Over the years, I have changed and adapted the story to fit with our family practices and beliefs. The version told here is my own. Twas the Night before Yuletide is a poem that circulated the interwebs long ago in the time of BBSes. I have adapted the poem and retold it to my own family over the years. Lots of recipes this week; Snow Candy, Yule Porridge, Snow Ice Cream, Lussekatter (saffron buns), and Papparkakor (ginger snaps). These are all foods and fun things we do every Yuletide that have found their way into our practices for the 12 days of Yule. This episode is 50 minutes long. For show notes and more go to our website: http://www.AcrossTheHedge.com

This week Evan and Carissa reminisce about the technology which shaped our generation. The 8088 and the Apple ][e, BASICA games and TI graphing calculators, the Hayes SmartModem and AOL, BBSes and MUDs, Betamax and VHS, and so much more. Progress marches on, moving ever faster and with increasing promise, so we pause to relish in the view from the top, standing on the shoulders of the giants which brought us into the future.

Jason Scott Presentation at VCF Southeast 3.0 in Roswell, GA, May 2, 2015.   This is the Floppy Days Podcast on vintage computing and my name is Randy Kindig.  This is a special episode featuring Jason Scott of archive.org fame.  Many of you will be familiar with Jason Scott and the work he does in helping to preserve media and content, including content associated with our beloved vintage computers.  You may or may not be as familiar with the work also being done to emulate vintage computers and vintage gaming platforms in a browser.   On May 2, 2015 Jason Scott gave a presentation to the crowd at VCF Southeast entitled “Every Computer in Your Browser-The Internet Archive Emulated Software Collection.”  Jason and the VCFSE organizers  were kind enough to agree to allow me to rebroadcast this presentation on Floppy Days to help get the word out about all the great work being done to preserve our machines.  Jason also had presentation material to go along with the talk that I am posting on the Floppy Days site for your enjoyment.   Jason Scott is a Free-Range Archivist at the Internet Archive (archive.org), home of the Wayback Machine and 20 petabytes of saved media and content, provided for free for all. As the software curator, he is responsible for JSMESS project and integration into the Internet Archive's seemingly-endless pile of software, making it playable. He lives in Hopewell Junction, NY, mere hundreds of feet from where the CPUs of Nintendo 64s were manufactured. Jason is also a filmmaker. He is the creator of a 2005 documentary film about BBSes, BBS: The Documentary, and a 2010 documentary film about interactive fiction, GET LAMP.   Links   Presentation material - http://imgur.com/gallery/cNX4E

Tyde/Jewdonk co-hosts, until he gets excessively drunk and Druff hangs up on him 2/3 of the way through. Elvis-impersonating WSOP dealer murdered at his Las Vegas home. Poker HOF candidates announced. Will it be semi-rigged again? Antonio Esfandiari and Phil Laak to star in new poker show on Discovery Channel on Sept 10. Pokerstars meets with NJ players in preparation for joining legalized online gambling market there. Trump Taj Mahal files for bankruptcy. Did Caesars Palace gift shop attempt to steal from Seven Stars customer? Online in the '80s: Druff talks about his life on BBSes, the precursor to today's social media (small portion missing from the archives due to technical issue). Druff gives his opinion on the Altanta Hawks racism controversy.

Tyde/Jewdonk co-hosts, until he gets excessively drunk and Druff hangs up on him 2/3 of the way through. Elvis-impersonating WSOP dealer murdered at his Las Vegas home. Poker HOF candidates announced. Will it be semi-rigged again? Antonio Esfandiari and Phil Laak to star in new poker show on Discovery Channel on Sept 10. Pokerstars meets with NJ players in preparation for joining legalized online gambling market there. Trump Taj Mahal files for bankruptcy. Did Caesars Palace gift shop attempt to steal from Seven Stars customer? Online in the '80s: Druff talks about his life on BBSes, the precursor to today's social media (small portion missing from the archives due to technical issue). Druff gives his opinion on the Altanta Hawks racism controversy.

Molly Holzschlag has been working on the web from the very beginning of its invention. She joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons to talk about those days, and what it was like to be online in the time of BBSes, Gopher, and the text-only web. They discuss accessibility, the blink tag, the Web Standard Project, how Microsoft started embracing web standards and much more.

Rongbin Han, University of California, Berkeley Rongbin Han is a Ph.D. candidate at Political Science Department at University of California, Berkeley. His primary interests are contentious politics, social movements and comparative democratization. His dissertation focuses on internet governance in China, particularly how state and non-state actors interact on online forums and bulletin board systems (BBSes), not only on censorship, but also on mass opinion engineering and discourse competition.

Rongbin Han, University of California, Berkeley Rongbin Han is a Ph.D. candidate at Political Science Department at University of California, Berkeley. His primary interests are contentious politics, social movements and comparative democratization. His dissertation focuses on internet governance in China, particularly how state and non-state actors interact on online forums and bulletin board systems (BBSes), not only on censorship, but also on mass opinion engineering and discourse competition.

Before millions of people strolled around checking Facebook on their smartphones, bulletin-board systems connected computer users across the world. So what happened to these precursors of the Internet when the Web went mainstream? Tune in and find out. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

This week, Troy and Rob are joined by Jenn Cutter in a trip down memory lane. The topic: How did you end up the gamer you've become? When did Rob and Troy learn they were strategy gamers? How do games fit into the rest of your life? How do you deal with being the only gamer in a social circle? Which games poke which aspects of our character? Troy and Jenn also explain BBSes to Rob.Also, a date is set for the Washington DC area Flash of Steel/Three Moves Ahead meet up.

Hi there everybody! Show #4 - We're on a roll... This episode of the Retrobits Podcast is a grab bag.  There are several things I wanted to talk about, none of which would make up a central theme, so this show is "potpourri".  Here are the URLs referenced in the show: The Denial website/forum focuses on the VIC-20.  Missed this one during the VIC-20 show (#001).  Thanks to folks for pointing out this great resource! Computer Chronicles, a television program that ran from the 80s until the late nineties, is available for download and/or viewing at the archive.org website.  It is really fun to watch these shows in our modern day context... BBSMates is a website dedicated to online bulletin board systems (BBSes).  It has a searchable database of over 75,000 systems, from the 80s to modern day! Classic Gaming Expo is an event dedicated to "the people, systems and games of yesteryear". DigitalPress covers a wide spectrum of retro gaming. The UCSD P-System is a computing environment from days gone by.  It's most famous component was the Pascal compiler.  There was a reunion of some of the original folks that developed it, and they made videos, which are available for download and viewing. Fire In the Valley is a must-read book for those interested in the history of personal computing.  I will do a full book review in a subsequent podcast.  For now, if you've got some reading time to kill, run, don't walk, to buy this book.  I have read it twice, and will be reading it again soon.  You can get it on Amazon, among other places. Also coming soon, a book on the rise and fall of Commodore.  I've noticed this book actively promoted in vintage computer settings, like the USENET groups.  It's not out yet, expected to go to press pretty soon.  Some impromptu reviews from some famous names in the Commodore fan realm have seen chapters, and they stated they like what they saw.  Even though it's kind of pricey for a casual read, I'll probably get it, given my long-term interest in Commodore, and the lack of historical information about the company. Be sure to send us any comments, questions or feedback to retrobits@gmail.com Our Theme Song is "Sweet" from the "Re-Think" album by Galigan Thanks for listening! - Earl