2023 Week 6 in Review

"Either you run the day or the day runs you."
— Jim Rohn

This week Jet Brains sent me a price increase notification for the Laravel Idea plugin. This is a third party plugin by Adel Faizrakhmanov and that link will take you to their post explaining that up until now the plugin had been developed by a single person as a side project and had now become unsustainable. In open source software this is a story as old as time however this isn't open source and Adel wishes to continue developing the plugin. In order to do so they will be creating a company with the intent to hire at least one or two developers to relieve the burden.

I fully support Adel's decision. Their Laravel Idea plugin has proved itself time and time again to be incredibly helpful and certainly worth the $39 I paid last year. The price is only increasing this time by $10 to $49 for the first year, with the usual 20%/40% discounts for second/third+ years. Whether we will see an additional price increase in the future is yet to be determined.

Beyond researching for my #OldWeb series of posts, I haven't done a lot else this week. I dug deep into my notebooks going back as far as 2017 and was suprised to see so much Link Rot after only a couple of years!

For example: ROMVLVS a Text Mode Civilization/SimCity crossover that I found via a post in the /r/roguelikes sub-reddit has seemingly been wiped from the internet. Not only does the Tumblr dev blog no longer exist but the GitHub repository has been deleted as well.

ROMVLVS was just a developer side project that probably ended up on the digital graveyard like so many other side projects. I was interested in it because the single screenshot I had seen looked visually beautiful albeit entirely #TextMode.

Following that Rabbit Hole ended up with me spending several hours researching the two Lost Smiley ASCII DOS Games by Henry Truong that I last played in 1999. I reached out to @vga256 on The Fediverse with this message and the subsequent back and forth resulted in them managing to dig out a screenshot, which I had up until now not seen in over ten years!

I followed that up with the following post:

I wonder if someone familiar with the #FidoNet of old, if it's possible to find a zip file that might have been on a #BBS in 1999?
— Source

This also gathered a lot of people helping, but unfortunately no fresh leads. I think my next course of action will be contacting Darren Hewer the author of dosgames.com and researching other dos game archives both present and shuttered to see if I can find someone else who re-hosted the files.

The endgame however might be that I rewrite one or both of the games this year for #DOSCember .

Joke of the week

"I used to be addicted to the hokey pokey. Then I turned myself around."

Notable Articles Read

• Andy Bell: My favourite 3 lines of CSS
• Winnie Lim: Keeping a personal changelog

Notable Videos Watched

• Ben Eater: Let's build a voltage multiplier!
• Chernobyl Family: Computers of Chernobyl; Ep.8. When a Modem is made in the Soviet Union, you get this.
• Trash Puppy: Odin Project Weather App; Pt.2. My 1st Solo Coding Project!
• Mighty Car Mods: Making The Worlds Fastest Midget

Cool things from around the internet

• Curses City a simple Sim City style game written in C++ and using ncurses to display an ASCII UI in a terminal^[1]
• PocketPy C++17 header-only Python interpreter for game engines
• The Newton Glossary a comprehensive collection of terms, definitions, acronyms, colloquialisms, and bits of trivia relating specifically to the Apple Newton