ScuzzBlog: Diaries November 2017
Entry 15th November 2017: Post: 1
The future is retro - Seriously
Hi
'I am the prince of Valhalla. I have a sad story to tell. This castle
was my home.... ' Interesting lines from the Amiga game. And times like
this I just feel like the little guy. His world destroyed and only by
clever cunning can he put it back together. That my friends is what
retro lets you do. Read on.
It started with a little spellchecker that I had on the Win95 machine
and then on the Win98 machine. Sadly with XP it was outlawed. There are
plenty of spellcheckers you might say, but what in truth was wrong with
the one I had.
Solution: Keep your Win98 and Win95 machines running and the
spellchecker lives.
Next... I had a very wonderful menu add-on with Win95 and then Win98
which allowed me to interrogate file listings in way more detailed a way
than your standard menu facilities. It allowed me to make notepad
listings of the files contents so I could study in a text editor the
content and paste them into HTML docs. Sadly again with XP this was
outlawed by MS.
Solution: Keep my Win98 and Win95 machines running and the facility
still exists.
Fast forward.. or we will be here all day.
I had an FLV editor that not only saved and edited but played in the
browser. Sadly Adobe changed the Flash and all was lost.
Solution: Keep the XP machine offline and never update Adobe. And then I
can still edit FLVs and run them in the outdated browser. Better I can
still watch the gazillion pages of web stuff I have that use the player
and the videos. Otherwise you really are just looking at a blank screen.
I had a file converter. Sorry... I 'have' a great file converter. Its
magic does everything I need. Sadly it was deemed untrustworthy by
Microsoft and the owners forced to dump the software. However on my XP
machine it still works. No problems.
Solution use an XP machine that is not online to do all my file conversions.
I seriously had so many wonderful applications associated with Firefox
that one by one have been ticked off their list.
ANYWAY....
Fast forward again to yesterday.
Firefox updated the browser and in one sweep disabled... nay destroyed
and made them unusable all of the last remaining add-ons I had on the
browser. There are no alternatives. One was the very handy Norton page
checker that comes with my virus checker.
I have a sneaking suspicion who is behind it given that the software
does take advantage of certain sites and I am assuming the powers at be
caved to the pressure of the mighty internet Overlord. [ Back to Valhalla ]
Anyway... pissed me off big time. So I gave myself a simple challenge
this morning. I wanted to to carry out two functions that I was able to
do two days ago before the Firefox update.
01: Fire up an XP machine isolated from my current network.
02: Disable Firefox updates.
03: Set the machine on with no other computer active and connect to hub.
04: Update AVG
05: Fire up Firefox
06: Install the recently removed add-ons which remarkably were available
through Firefox and not tagged Legacy
07: Visit the two sites in question and download as I previously had
done so.
08: No problemo
09: USB stick. Copy files. Unplug the XP machine.
10: Reconnect Win7
11: Copy files to computer
12: Way to blind-side the blinder.
And so my friends the future is Retro. You may say that there are apps
on the internet that still let you do all these things, well sorry I for
one no longer trust the green download buttons on ANY site. I simply
cannot trust anything or nobody. However for stuff that I have been
using for years I am more than happy to use. Hence the term ' The future
is retro '.
I will ruffle a few feathers here but for me the problem in all this is
mobile phones and the acceptance of the worlds many to embrace social
media and the linking of all that is done with apps that link everyone
to bloody everything. Simply opens the doors to the watchers and the
controllers to implement methods for monitoring activity and reaching
the person who will have a unique telephone number.. unlike the
computer. The PC is dead in truth. It has its uses but the world is
phone bonkers. And the mighty Lord of Infinity is taking control of all
your browsing habits. It really is only a matter of time till they
implement the Kill Switch preventing any user from accessing the internet.
Well for now I can still do what I was doing three days ago but I have
to say its getting harder and harder. Thankfully I have the means to
carry on as normal. Just means sitting at a different desk.
And so unlike the term ' onwards ' I am again moved to proclaim ' back
to my future '. Retro rocks... go fish !!!
scuzz
So much of computing has been lost to the mighty mobile. Don't emulate
...... participate.
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