Jason Scott's Weblog
This week, we got the emulation of MS-DOS programs (mostly) working on the Internet Archive. Up to now, every single emulated system has been via the JSMESS project, which supports well over 600 systems and which does a hell of a bang-up job on it. The fact that one system (MESS) emulates everything from an […]
Somewhere around the age of 26, I woke up and couldn’t really get out of bed. The reason, in the immediate, was that any attempt to put weight on my legs sent shooting pains through them. Real, intense, shooting pain like there were rods lodged inside the legs and they sent out shocks when they […]
The numbers are a little hard to calculate, because the Internet Archive, heroes to the core, do not keep logs for pretty much any time at all. But using a few methods, comparing some general graphs, and doing math, the admins handed me an estimate of how many people have played video games at the […]
I’m probably going to regret posting this, but I deal mostly in regret and nostalgia daily, so it’ll all be just fine. The Thing is now everywhere online. It’s absorbing everyone, every place people begin to talk about any aspect of people. I can’t think of a social interaction space of any part where it’s currently […]
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 […]
Every time I’ve spoken at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, I’ve always had someone else arranging all the details, including the panel and the attendant responsibilities of getting it to pass muster. This time, however, I’ve put together something neat, and the process needs, nay, requires you to really get out there […]
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 […]
This has been years in the making. When my living space looked like this photo. it was just vaguely problematic. Considering what I do and what is specifically needed day to day, this project and storage situation was an issue. But that was a while ago. Now we’re at this: See, that’s seriously out of […]
Mr. Stiles: I’m sure you get a bunch of these letters all the time, but I figured I’d add myself to the pile. I don’t know when I first got my hands on your Treehouse book, but based on the publication date, I guess it was when I was 10 or 11. This is the […]