2013-05-09 03:01 update: I was terribly wrong in this post, PCManX had many more updates after 2005, I just didn’t find the appropriate page at the time. As you can see from the git log, there have been commits up until the Year of our Lord 2013.

Today I tried the BBS specific telnet client I talked about yesterday. The X11 version is ancient, last updated in 2005, so I wasn’t really confident it would work at all, more the opposite.

I downloaded, I executed. It was just missing two libs that were quickly installed, and it seemed to run fine. I clicked connect, first entry in the menu, “Site List”

Function not implemented yet!
Debug: Site List goes here.

Then don’t put it in the first menu entry, silly.

Seems quite okay though, it’s nicer than using the VTE terminal (for fonts, for example). It just has the unfortunate tendency to segfault every now and then. It crashes when I try adding a favourite for example, but it seems to happen randomly sometimes. Well, it’s from 2005 so it’s nice that it just runs, though.

I had a look at their ascii art boards—very nice stuff. The animated text art movies are fun, too. Prior to this the only exposure I had to animated telnet text art was the (insanely awesome) Star Wars ascii movie, I imagine those old BBS had a lot more goodies like that, but I’m 21, it’s mainly from before my time.

It was funny seeing an animated (」・ω・)」うー!(/・ω・)/にゃー! post, too:

For some reason, telnet BBS are still used in Taiwan. One of the largest online discussion fora in Taiwan is PTT or 批踢踢, a classic telnet BBS.

Rather than using cmd.exe, the more popular way of accessing it is to use a dedicated BBS client, like PCMan^[1], which also has an X11 version and exists as a Firefox extension.

I’ve been having a look at it, and it’s pretty intriguing. Mainly because it’s a damn telnet BBS in 2012, and it thrives. Rather than trying a BBS-specific client like the aforementioned PCMan, I just used vanilla telnet in a VTE terminal. Just had to make sure the terminal was using BIG5 encoding rather than UTF8.

Of course, PTT has a lot of text art banners, like here in the main menu:

Here is the movie board as an example of a board index:

And here’s a post from above board:

There’s also an 《ALLPOST》 board, which is an index of all posts on the board. Sitting there is kind of interesting to feel the speed of the place, every few seconds there’s new posts.

Pretty interesting stuff. It’s remarkable that the place not only managed to stay up, but also grow over years well into the web era.

2012-11-19 17:50 update: this is the number of online users at 17:50 (CET, 0:50 in Taiwan) today: 線上102145人.

telnet://ptt.cc

[1] — This is from 洪任諭 Hong Jen Yee, the same guy who wrote the file manager PCManFM

cont’d here

Hello I just changed the site again to keep the swag fresh, gnome saiyan?

And what’s more, soon 4skin Studios will resume business after a hiatus. This means we will get one step closer to the next 《My Wife Lopan》 episode getting released!

The site will be fully operational once lolidunno decides to write something about the game again.

Please wait warmly!

2012-11-19 update: development on the 4skin projects is put on hiatus again because lolidunno is a busta

I’m clumsily making an effort to modify the default Kareha stylesheet (blue_moon.css, which I like) to an okayish darker colour scheme, so that /idk/ matches the theme of the rest of the site a bit better.

Just picking some darker colours to replace the blue was easy enough (see new_moon.css, but when I tried to pick some suitable colours for the posts – the more important part of a page that consists mostly of posts – I started failing miserably (see soul.css).

Excerpt from IRC where I discuss this with renowned musician^[1], web designer, and expert programmer «nivi».

[18:18:16] <@sutol> nivi: refresh, I am screwing up
[18:18:32] <@nivi> sutol: hmm
[18:18:37] <@nivi> not sure how i feel about this
[18:18:49] <@nivi> it looks a little confusing
[18:18:54] <@nivi> more than a little
[18:19:03] <@nivi> difficult to work out what's inside what
[18:19:13] <@sutol> Yeah I am screwing up
[18:19:22] <@nivi> also: 無名 is still blue
[18:19:29] <@sutol> Not for me
[18:19:51] <@nivi> i mean like very dark, very slightly blue
[18:19:56] <@sutol> Oh right
[...]
[18:25:05] <@sutol> nivi: whacky thing done
[18:25:16] <@sutol> Makingitworse
[18:25:20] <@nivi> that is even worse
[18:25:26] <@sutol> I know

Then I suddenly lost interest, maybe I’ll pick a decent scheme tomorrow.
Or perhaps I’ll go back to a light scheme for the site, but that would not reflect my dark soul very well.

[1] — His music is actually pretty nice, although you might think otherwise if you have a distaste for distortion. He loves him some distortion. Give it a try!

I just found this again: a lovely portrait of me by a renowned #99 artist. I would say it’s very accurate.

Not sure if it’s right, but the last modified date is 2011-04-03. I don’t think my appearance changed much at all the past year, so it’s still valid.