Thursday, December 7, 2023
New developments in CassieIsWatching
The WHERE poem from Oct 2, 2006 (and solved on Oct 4):
--
Inside the gate you will defend
the doe-eyed moppet’s only friend
The picture has not yet commenced
so depicts a rose in soil fenced (soil fenced anagrams to second life!)
The garden where the killer wined
Still holds the cup for you to find
--
The interesting bit was the double anagram, as Cassie's presence in Second Life wasn't known until the Revelation 3 video.
Another interesting tidbit is that Cassie's Second Life avatar was quite obviously created to look similar to Jessica Rose, the actress who played Bree aka Lonelygirl15, which CiW played off of. "Depicts a Rose in Second Life," indeed.
A final interesting tidbit it that the picture I posted the other day was from the Revelation 1 video from October 1, 2006. (Due to a technical issue with YouTube back in 2006, the last second(s) of videos were frequently cut off. We're not sure of the puppet master of CiW would have been aware of that. Until YouTube fixed that issue years later, it would not have been possible to discover that clue). We missed that clue. Since discovering the picture, I have speculated that we may have missed a drop, but it was still likely to have been recoverable. If he was the picture of the cathedral back then, there were a group of players in CA ready to go looking.
So frustrating to be 17 years removed from the clues to be able to verify any of this, as the puppet master of CiW remains a mystery. I have my suspicions, along with other players, but those suspicions continuously sing towards then away from one particular party. These recent developments point those suspicions squarely at them. If it were them, I don't think they'll ever break their silence, which would be the only way to confirm any of these thoughts at this point. A physical drop in a public area is likely long gone. And a virtual drop in Second Life is most definitely long gone... Unless anyone who reads this has an in at Linden Labs, and Linden Labs happens to have backups from that long ago which could be scoured. lol
edit: A final, final interesting tidbit. I had partially solved the first Maddison Atkins 1.0 clue as TWO BAGS. I was not aware at the time (and Jeromy eventually had to find another way to get us the final solution) but this was a reference to OpAphid clues frequently being double-encoded. I wonder how many other double anagrams Cassie slipped in which went unnoticed. But this leads me to believe maybe, just maybe, OpAphid's PM was already double-encoding clues before they launched OpAphid ;)
Sunday, December 3, 2023
Tuesday, November 21, 2023
Sunday, November 5, 2023
Beth
Friday, October 13, 2023
Thursday, October 12, 2023
Bait and switch
Tuesday, October 10, 2023
Link rot, and how the Internet is dying
This is the post I teased. ;)
Methos is a bit younger than myself, having stated that his first computer as a kid was running Windows 95, but I believe he has a history degree, or was at least a history major, and is a civil war re-enactor. At ahcapella's suggestion, I started sharing some of my interest in computer history, and my collection, and how my goal is to open a computer museam and such, and Methos is apparently also into the retro-futuristic aesthetic, personified by r/cassettefuturism, which is not a Reddit I was aware of, so thanks for the link ;) There are also sites like the Vault of VHS tumblr, which are interesting in certain circles, I suppose, but not something you're likely to stumble upon unless you know exactly what you're looking for or, in my case, provided a link by someone whose interests overlap my own. (Also, there's a guy who does videos like this one where they watch and review mystery VHS tapes. The YouTube algorithm likely never would have put it in front of me, and I never would have known to look. But it's fascinating.)
He started bemoaning the fact that the Internet is dying, partially due to link rot, but also partially due to the commecialized nature of it, instead of the "wild west" that it used to be. Used to be that everyone end their mother, brother, uncle, etc, had a personal website somewhere, either on Geocities or some other free space, or with their ISP under their ~username folder. You could get lost for hours down one rabbit hole or another, just following links from someone's personal website. Some of those pages still live on the Wayback Machine at archive.org. The problem is, while sites like TheOldNet make it easy to access those old pages, if they exist, the search engines don't exactly show results for personal pages these days so there's no longer an easy way to just stumble across them.
I mentioned tilde club to him, which he found very interesting, and we discussed webcomics (thanks for the index, Methos!) as well, and conventions and fandoms and such. If it's packaged up as a nice, shiny commercial project, it'll rank on searh engines. If it's on a personal website, unless there are few other hits on the specific search terms, the algorithm which once saved us from blackhat SEO has made things worse for the rest of us who are not commecial entities.
Maybe this is why I'm so interested in resurecting the old ISP I used to work for, at least to some extent. There was such a wealth of information of the ~user sites on it which have been lost to time. I would love to recover what I can and restore the long-dead links. The current world wide web feels sterile and corporate. I miss the days where you could spend hours exploring links off of some randome page you stumbled upon. I want to restore at least a small slice of that.
Monday, October 9, 2023
Kane is (not) full
Every Saturday night, there is a gathering of Cassie's Watchers near the church in Second Life. Normally, there are only a couple of people on at a time, and I don't make it nearly as often as I like, so it's been awhile since there have been six of us on at once. Modelmotion also joined, but not before someone else had jumped off. In case you cannot read, the people who joined were:
- ahcapella
- Nath
- Methos
- Jupiter Vale
- Pizza Gator
- Modelmotion
- myself (Wintermute)
As I tend to do, I either stay quiet or talk about old computers, or the Cassie Is Watching ARG itself. Mostly I stay quiet and talk about the game, because many of my interests are somewhat niche, but apparently Methos is a history buff and civil war re-enactor, so we got into a discussion with him about not just old computers, but also the current state of the Internet, link rot, and associated subjects. We shared some links, and it has given me an idea for a post. This is just a teaser for it, to set the stage a little bit ;) More to come...
Friday, October 6, 2023
New lease and other news
I may be leasing some office/retail space coming soon, in part because my vintage computer collection is overwhelming my home, and in part because my wife needs space for her craft business. Just storing my collection in an environmentally-controlled environment would cost more than this lease, so it will be a really good thing. It also allows me to do restoration work on items in my collection, a place for my 3D printers (yes, plural. I got a larger-format one, and may add a resin one at some point). Finally, since I am 100% work-from-home, it gives me office space to work out of should I need a little separation in order to concentrate.
In other news, I am looking to obtain the greenapple domain from its current owner, but I am not 100% certain if anyone is even monitoring the email address I sent my message to. From my understanding, the people who bought it are no longer maintaining a website for it, and the site they were forwarding it to appears to be down at the moment. I believe there may be maintaining an email server for the domain, but I would be able to maintain one for any former customers or employees that which to continue using them. If I get the domain, I don't have any contrete plans, other than to possibly pull some specific content from the Wayback Machine to make it live in it's original home. I may do some limited web hosting under the brand, or even set up an extremely small-scale dial-up ISP under the brand, just for kicks. Nostalgia. It's a helluva drug. ;)
The office that I'm hoping to lease also gives me plenty of space to set up for video production to launch my own retro YouTube channel, and maybe even a small vintage computer museum.
More to come.
Thursday, October 5, 2023
PiDP11 running 211BSD
I can't believe I haven't posted this here yet, but I odered a PiDP11, built it (with one switch that is either faulty or has a bad solder joint. I'm guessing the latter.) and installed BSD 2.11 on it, which includes a minimal web server. I'll build out the website on it a little more soon, but it was a fun little project, which I continue to work on whenever I have a few minutes.
I came up with a way to make "~user/" spaces work in the web server, but it's a kludge which requires at least the / at the end (if not the index.html too), so I plan on adding the capability into the server itself instead of doing stuff on the OS to make it work. (My technical-minded friends have probably already figured out how I made it work. lol) I've also compiled a minimal irc client, but it requires that the server and nick be hard-coded into the source. I plan on using the username as the nick, which would resolve that issue, and I'm thinking of also building a minimal irc server, so I can hard-code localhost into the client and use it local-only.
I'd like to build it out into a tilde server, but it only supports telnet at the moment. A friend gave me an idea on how to secure it, and based on that idea, I may be able to (sorta) enable ssh via keys, then telnet to BSD automatically upon connection . I'd have to do some security testing to make sure that the users couldn't gain access to the ssh endpoint. There are also a ton of other services which would need built out, but maybe if I get a minimum-viable system in place, the users who join may help built it.
The web server currently resides at http://pdp11.nitemarecafe.com/, but that may change based on some other projects I'm working on.
Friday, September 15, 2023
Friday, September 1, 2023
Wednesday, August 30, 2023
Friday, August 25, 2023
Thursday, August 24, 2023
Retro Computers
Monday, August 21, 2023
Macintosh & Co
I am not sure why, but this entire thing popped into my head yesterday. I ordered slightly too little fabric back then, but kept the tartan and the paper packaging it was shipped in. I knew exactly where I have it stored, so I went out to grab a picture of the shipping label because I decided to look and see if the company was still around. Unfortunately, Macintosh in Scotland is like Jones or Smith is here, so Macintoch and Company doesn't really help. So I decided to look up the address it shipped from, which apparently houses a sweet shop now.
I am sure the owner would have retired by now. Or grown and changed their name. Or been put out of business by a larger company. Or merged with another company. Or any number of other possible fates. At any rate, if anyone happens to know what happened to Macintosh and Co, which was located at 499 Lawnmarket in Edinburgh back in 1997, please contact me. I would love to know what happened to the owner in the 25+ years since.
Friday, August 11, 2023
Friday, July 14, 2023
Friday, July 7, 2023
Friday, June 16, 2023
Thursday, June 15, 2023
Capture the Flag
Wednesday, June 14, 2023
And Hello, new employer!
Friday, June 9, 2023
Farewell, old employer
Sunday, June 4, 2023
Last week!
Friday, June 2, 2023
Thursday, June 1, 2023
T-7 days!
Friday, May 26, 2023
Thursday, May 25, 2023
Wednesday, May 24, 2023
Tuesday, May 23, 2023
Goodbye, Netflix
Friday, May 19, 2023
Future plans
All this is to (also) say, that with at least some amount of free time coming, I hope to be writing here a little more than I have been in some time. I've already started, and am enjoying it immensely, so hopefully I can get on a roll and keep it going, regardless of where everything else lands :)
Wednesday, May 17, 2023
Anti-snoring device
Monday, May 15, 2023
Reduction In Force
Friday, May 12, 2023
Wednesday, May 10, 2023
Hello Blogger, my old friend!
Saturday, February 11, 2023
First ride
Tuesday, February 7, 2023
My first e-bike
FWIW, here's a non-affiliate Amazon link to the 26" Totem Victor 2.0 that I purchased. I've read that many of the under $1000 bikes of any given style are pretty much the exact same bike with different branding on it, so, in this price range, it's best to go with the cheapest. With shipping factored in, this was, indeed, the cheapest I could find on Amazon. There were ones (basically, the exact same one) available for maybe $20 less which came out to more with the shipping, so, this is what I wound up with. I hope to assemble it Friday night and take my first spin around the block over the weekend. Lots about this bike will be different from the last bike I rode, so I am sure I'll have thoughts ;)