Jason Scott's Weblog
It’s been time to make vintage software accessible. That’s about to take a great leap forward. Last year, it was the Console Living Room, where running versions of 21 different game consoles were put up. That’s been up for basically a year (although it started at around 11 consoles, which were added to over time). […]
Update: Ultimately, the grant was not accepted, although it was a really important process to describe the importance of JSMESS and the rest of the related projects, and more grants will be applied for. Thanks for everyone for their encouragement. At the urging of the grant-writer for the Internet Archive, I have submitted an application […]
In 2009, I proposed the idea that rapidly-shutting-down websites should be quickly downloaded and saved by a fast acting and future-minded group of web archivists. I called them the A-Team, or Archive Team, and said they’d be the last resort for online history that was otherwise doomed. An unbelievably huge amount of web history had […]
The Screen Shotgun, as mentioned before, is continuing its never-ending quest to play tens of thousands of games and programs, take screenshots, and upload them into the Internet Archive. Like any of these tinker-y projects, I’ve written a bunch of additional support, error checking, and what have you to the process, so that it can […]
In some circles, I’m known as the guy who wrote Fuck the Cloud. Yet as of this past weekend, I have three Amazon EC2 instances doing massive amounts of screenshots of ZX Spectrum programs (thousands so far) using the Screen Shotgun. Nobody has specifically come after me about this, but I figured I’d get out ahead of […]
Continuing the thoughts I had in the previous entry, I’ve been working on a side-project to improve access to all the software and console games I’ve been uploading to the archive. To some percentage of the populace, it is a simple and obvious thing, but that’s how a lot of efficient breakthroughs happen – doing […]
(I do not speak for my employer. I am just very loud.) Pretty much any organization of any size has certain themes, beliefs and outlooks baked into them. Some of them might be obvious from the outside. Others are so inherent that the members might not even notice they’re completely steeped in it. At the […]
FTP is kind of over. Now, don’t get mad at me for telling you this. It’s not like I’m the one killing it, and I’m certainly one of its biggest fans. It’s a really mature technology that does exactly what it’s supposed to do. It is flexible, pumps through almost anything, and has features that […]
I am an extremely lucky person. I’m lucky for a host of reasons, but in this particular case, I’ve been matched up with the Perfect Job very early in my life – my 40s. Some people get earlier, of course, but many more get it later, if at all. Life at the Internet Archive is […]