Text Pages Redone

About a month ago I discovered that the scripts that classify pages as either “text” or “comics” on kwakk.info‘s section for “text pages from comics” (*phew*) didn’t like pages like the above. Which meant that all letters pages that had illustrations and stuff were categorised as comics and left out of the search index.

So, for instance, none of the Johnny DC pages were included. Which is a serious mishap as you can imagine!

Even worse — Usagi Yojimbo letters pages like the above were also excluded.

Well, a new classification script was put into production, and it chewed through nine million comics pages and spat out a new list. Those pages were then put through the OCR and indexing processes. The computer worked at this for three weeks.

The results seem promising — there’s now more pages included, of course, but it might well miss some other pages now. I mean, classifying pages into “text” and “not text” is a probabilistic enterprise, so it’s going to make mistakes: Some previously correctly identified text pages may now be misclassified and missing from the new search index.

But there you go.

Have at it.

And with that, we now seem to have over 1,1M pages (in total) in the search index.

Imaging The Past

I’m continuing to root through the hoard of Commodore 64 diskette images from the 80s I rediscovered the other day, and I found that the diskettes contained a large number of files called things like DDLARS3. That’s my name! So what could they be?

Well, some Googling shows that the DD files are from Doodle Draw, which I have no recollection of what so ever. But looking at the images (after converting with recoil2png), I’m starting to recover some (possibly false) memories…

I had a digitiser! Or was it called a “frame grabber”? It plugged into the C64 and digitised a one-bit image! In real time! It was like magic! But… er… how did it work? Was it a camera? No, that doesn’t sound likely. Did I borrow a video camera for the images below? Did it plug into the VCR?

I’ve googled a bit now, and I can’t seem to find anything that jogs a memory — and they talk about the digitiser being slow? No, it was real time as far as I can recall? I mean, it showed a moving 1-bit 320×200 image in real time — when you triggered a snap, it took a while to spit out the data so you had to pause it… So I guess it was plugged into the VCR?

Does this ring a bell with anybody?

Oh, I probably have the software to the device on one of the diskette images. Yes!

This must be it? This seems to belong with the “Print Technik Video Digitizer”, which doesn’t look familiar at all, but it was a cartridge that plugged into the C64 and took composite in? So I guess that means that I borrowed a VHS camera from someone…

Anyway, here’s a field of images that must have been captured by this device, whatever it was:

I think I remember asking him to look particularly evil in those last shots… I was going to use him as the villain in a adventure game I was writing.

Speaking of which! I also found some images that were meant as assets to that game, so… enjoy?

Some of those are clearly copied from comics and stuff — that’s a Barks ghost at least… And a house from Stig’s Inferno… Oh, and Maggie from Love & Rockets, but I mentioned that before.

Anyway.

The Bubbles Aesthetic

I’ve been vaguely reading the Bubbles RSS feed for the past month or so. Bubbles aggregates a bunch of “small web”/”indie web” blogs, which sounds like it should give you a variety of diverse, interesting things to read: Original, different approaches to writing and design and etc etc etc, right?

I don’t want to be mean, but it’s not working.

The above grid is pretty representative, and it’s striking how uniform the blogs are. OK, I’m being unfair. While going through the newest entries in the feed, I removed a couple that didn’t use this template. But this really is what you’re going to see almost all the time if you’re reading these blogs.

How did all of these people arrive at the same design? Well, many of these “indie” blogs are hosted on Bear Blog.

And that’s the colour scheme they use… so everybody’s who’s hosting their texts there are using something similar? That is, a kinda desaturated bluish-gray background, and then text that’s also kinda bluish grayish, leaving you with a pretty low contrast page. I guess it’s supposed to be soothing? “Less distracting”? Demure. Making you concentrate on the text?

No menus… no images… no header… Just one (wide) column of text.

But apparently you can choose your own colours… and almost everybody has chosen colours that are within three degrees of the default ones? And while a lot of these are Bear blogs, many of them aren’t, and they’re still using the same design.

There’s a striking lack of images on these blogs, but that’s more easily explained: Most of them are written in Markdown, which makes it really easy and streamlined to write the text. But images are a totally different thing that you have to arrange separately, so it’s just too much work to casually drop something in there. So people don’t?

(Here’s where the Markdown blogger enthusiasts are going to say “but you just snap an image on your phone, and then drop it in Dropbox, and you just sign up for an AWS account, and then you put your image in an s3 bucket, and then you use the AWS command line tool to determine the URL, and then you paste that into your Markdown file, trying to remember the syntax, and of course, add a descriptive alt text. It literally couldn’t be easier”.)

What about the texts themselves, though?

Well, half of them are about how awesome it is to blog, and that everybody should blog, and rah rah rah INDIE WEB whoho! And also that you shouldn’t worry about whether anybody’s reading anything, because that doesn’t matter. JUST WRITE DAMMIT

I’m all for enthusiasm, but it’s starting to sound more like people are trying to will Something Interesting into happening, and that’s not really how things work.

But perhaps things will be different this time?

While typing away at this blog post, a Twitter user linked to this article about Camille Paglia on the Madonna blog (because of course it is). I just mention it because I was just struck by how diametrically opposite it is to the Bubbles aesthetic: There’s lots of images; several columns; stuff that moves; and black text on a white background.

Some of the Bubblers talk about how they absolutely can’t read anything if it’s like that… which I just find strange. But perhaps this is just the way people are these days? Can’t read a text if there’s anything else on the screen?

Anyway, here’s a picture of the neighbourhood cat as a reward for reading all that. Or if you just skipped down here without reading; that’s fine, too. In fact, that might well have been a better choice.

Perhaps I should look up the statute of limitations

But surely they can’t be more than forty years?

Anyway, when I was like fifteen, I cracked a bunch of Commodore 64 games. Games came on tapes, and they usually had some sort of turbo loader thing. Most of the turbo loaders were straightforward, but some were heavily obfuscated as a form of copy protection.

So my methodology would be to create “friendly” versions of these turbo loaders, and then use that to get the files off of the tapes and save them to diskettes. Then I just had to write a little loader, and then everything worked fine.

Not very complex cracking, but I was pretty good at it, so people brought me bags of tapes. I remember having a little hand held tape deck that I used to give the tapes a brief listen first — I could often identify which loader had been used by how the tapes sounded. BBZBTBSBBZZZ vs BZBZBBTTTTTSSSS.

And yesterday I re-discovered the C64 image files that a mate had transferred back in the 90s from the floppy diskettes, so I thought it’d be fun to see how many games cracked by me were included.

And it’s… 34? I don’t think this is a complete collection — if I remember correctly, a bunch of the floppies had degraded by the time he did the transfers, but whatevs. (And some of these were done with the help of other people, left anonymous in case forty years isn’t enough.)

Looking at the loading screens brings back memories — I remember that we were quite amused at the beefing that was going around in the C64 demo circles, with people insulting and challenging each other. So we came up with an imaginary beef between us and an imaginary other cracking team, and you can see traces of some of that on the loading screens below.

I suspect that we grew tired of this pretty soon… or perhaps the rest of the saga is just on those missing diskettes.

But I have to say that I had a surprisingly consistent design sense? Heh heh.

Commodore 64 Disk Image Hoard Found

tl;dr: I found a trove of C64 disk images, so I put them on the web. Have fun playing some bad old games!

OK, here’s the story: I’ve been digging through old documents, and I found the old charts for the game I was writing when I was sixteen. Which made me wonder whether I had the disk images for the work in progress…

And the answer was yes: Two decades ago, a friend ripped all my C64 diskettes from the 80s, and I was going to go through them, but then I forgot. And then the .d64 files went missing — until two days ago, when I remembered that I had a backup of a backup disk here, and did some searching. And there they were! 170 disk images!

Now what? OK, I fired up an emulator:

Err… OK… Sure… I mean, this works (FSVO “works”), but I’ve got 170 disk images, many with dozens of files. Using this to do triage would be weeks of work. And I’m lazy.

But then I remembered that Javascript-based emulators for C64 has been a thing for a long time now… so perhaps I could just whip up a simple web site to allow me to click through all the programs quickly, and then note in a data file somewhere what’s what and what works and what doesn’t and etc.

I.e., a simple package for doing triage of a large number of images.

Now, I’m sure there are a whole bunch of these things already — the emulator community is large and mature, apparently, but a few moments of googling didn’t show anything promising. They seems mostly geared towards people actually using the emulators to play games, which is understandable, and leaves triage to be done “manually”.

So I just asked Fable to make a web site that wraps EmulatorJS, along with a script to create a manifest.json file that has all the images/programs, and allows you to edit it to add categories/hide programs/etc. $50 later, here’s the results on Microsoft Github. You’re welcome I’m sure.

(Using LLMs for stupid projects like this is so… exactly what they should be used for. But it’s striking how different things are now: In the before times, I’d have to learn to work with EmulatorJS and figure stuff out and learn stuff; becoming more knowledgeable. With an LLM, it’s so much quicker… and I’m left stupider afterwards. I haven’t learned a single thing.)

So… play Space Pilot or something?

I haven’t actually tried playing many games — I’ve just observed that they actually start. You may have to go into the EmulateJS settings menu to tweak input methods and stuff. And I guess the vast majority of these games are already available on sites like c64online, so there’s no reason to use “my” version — until I finally figure out how to start the game I was writing when I was sixteen! It’s gonna be an exclusive for sure!