Disc Master (Old NTV cam), Elon Cloud, FOOTSTEPPR, daydreaming with lua, enemy surfing, Skin Deep Soundtrack, CrazyCattle3D, Bare JS Runtime, Horse Race Tests, Tidbyt without the company, Anubis works.

I saw mention of the DiscMaster Jam while browsing the interwebs, and saw mention of the Internet Archive, so I took interest in the underlying tool the jam was based around, and discovered the Disk Master!

Experimental website to browse and search vintage computer files from archive.org

I’ve liked finding old CDs / DVDs of images / scripts / documents / etc. on the Internet Archive before discovering this, but to find a dedicated interface for only searching across all of this content, is very cool.

I put in some search queries for where I’m from, putting in Newfoundland resulted in a lot of maps / flags:

And I put in the city I’m from, St. John’s, and saw a bunch of results for a text file called St. John's-OZFM Cam.

Visiting one of these files, showed me its very small contents:

http://www.ntv.ca/station/batcam.jpg
4
UserID
Pass

Its a NTV URL, to a webcam!

NTV still maintains webcams available on their website to this day.

Now, it hasn’t maintained being located on /station/batcam.jpg all these years, which isn’t surprising, but it was still really cool to see how old this has been on the internet for!

And of course, armed with the old URL, I can yet again reach for another piece of the Internet Archive’s tools, the Wayback Machine, to see if there were any old captures of this site.

And there is!:

This capture is from Apr 17th, 1999!, I had no idea it had been a thing for this long.

The next capture however, (the only other one before 2000), is a very dark picture taken of what I think is looking out to the Narrows.

This one is dated…

…the day I was born.

Wow!

Honestly kinda a weird moment to have a piece of digital content you consider cool to be taken during you know, potentially the time period you started existing.

Thank you archive-tan, very cool.

I don’t even really care about the article I just saw this picture in it:

Cloud Musk, giving Koffing.

Thanks for linking in Riley.

FOOTSTEPPR, generate footstep sounds for your games

A tool from the powerhouse that is Increpare.

i think many programmers are conquerors. they want to bend reality to their will. to this end, making a software is an intense power fantasy, one where the programmer is given a problem and full control over a system to solve that problem, leveraging the unimaginable algorithmic power of the machine to obliterate tasks that would have taken human computers lifetimes of effort.

Yeah.

Ian made Your Only Move Is HUSTLE, a game which has done quite well from them, hence when they give insight into what technology they enjoy using / what they dislike, I feel like I take them more seriously than someone who has a lot of opinions about this stuff but has shipped, like, a hello world game maybe on Steam probably on Itch.io.

at the beginning of 2024 i made a resolution to ditch Godot. I had used it for 6 years or so, and for much of that time i held so much optimism for it and its future. but years of big and little issues wore me down, and finally i decided it was time to move on. i was done with doing things the Godot Way.

So Ian was a Godot user, but wanted to reach outside the Godot world.

I have also used Godot, and not loved it, and felt confined within its walls.

instead i was going to build my own engine in FNA, a fork of XNA similar to Monogame, which uses the C# programming language. i really did try to do this, and i spent several months on the foundation for a 2d engine, but what i found is that C# and FNA became a sort of creative prison for me.

While I haven’t touched it, FNA always seemed very cool, I hang around their Discord mostly because of all the SDL3 GPU chatter, but I guess depending on what type of programmer you are, you might still feel constrained by an existing structure being defined you have to work your system around.

C# is not made for artists, it is made for businesses. […]

This is a take that I think I mostly agree with, I honestly have never spent much time with C#, I think of all of the Java / Kotlin / OOP-heavy world, C# would be my most preferred language, but I’m still pretty eh on OOP.

the fact is, i wanted to try LÖVE long before i was ever interested in FNA. but something scared me about Lua, […] but i knew, deeply, even before my doomed tryst with C#, LÖVE was what was missing in my heart.

Oh intersting, LÖVE being the choice, its interesting to see somebody go from Godot, to FNA, to LÖVE.

In a way I think some would view this as a regression, but I do really see here how this is sort of a pathway to remove the chains of existing structures, while still reaching for something with ease of access / use / community / etc.

Ian has already finished two games using Lua, and working on another one:

Just posting this because of how cool this animation looks

Skin Deep’s soundtrack can now be purchased on Bandcamp!

A battle royale rage game about sheep; will you have what it takes to survive?

The soundtrack on Bandcamp.

Actually Run Javascript Everywhere

An interesting new player in the runtime space.

Want to require() an ESM module? Bare supports both ESM and CommonJS modules using the same module resolution algorithm. ESM modules can use CommonJS modules and vice versa.

This is nice to see, seems to be similar to what Bun offers.

At its core, Bare is minimal—no bloated standard library, no assumptions about how you’ll build. Instead, it gives you the freedom to compose your environment from a growing ecosystem of modules. Each module is small, purposeful, and designed to work seamlessly within the Bare runtime. No hidden dependencies, no unnecessary overhead—just building blocks you control.

While this feels like a little jab at Bun, which has gone the route of putting a lot of busy stuff into the runtime itself, which I’m personally a fan of, but I could see there being a want for a more lightweight option thats more modular to take place in the space.

However, pears, the company behind this, is big into the P2P space, which I respect, but the corner of P2P that is either really close to Crypto, or more of a Crypto entity waving the flag of P2P to not call themselves a Crypto entity.

We’ll see if this holds relevance, or is another Turbopack flop in that its sold as this big huge thing that will be really cool, but, its only really useful for the folks building it, they just wanted to package it up into a form others could look at it, and it could have its own marketing site.

Anyways, more ideas and competition is code, but Crypto is slop.

e1m2t2

Horse Race Tests.

That is all.

Remember the Tidbyt? It’s a super low-resolution, internet-connected, wood-paneled display that I wrote a review of it back in 2022. It’s been on my shelf for years now, showing the time, weather, warning me when the UV is going to be high. In 2023 I used it as an excuse to learn some Rust, to render custom graphics. It’s a toy, a distraction, a worry stone for me to work on when I need something open-ended and low-stakes.

Anyway, the company that made the Tidbyt is no more. They got acquihired by Modal, a company that makes serverless AI compute hosting. So, they aren’t making devices right now, and the blog post promises that their cloud services will keep working.

Sad that Tidbyt company no more, but I can’t hold a grudge against a company for getting the bag, at least they are giving tools into the hands of people like Tom to carry on the torch (which they basically already did before, there was no reason to use their cloud hosted stuff if you didn’t want to, it was just convenient).

Tom is actually writing a replacement for pixlet, Indiepixel, which is another take on a little tool to interface with a Tidbyt:

Pixlet was very convenient, but is an oddball for a tech stack: implemented in Go for people to consume in Starlark. Starlark is a niche language. It’d be nice to support a mainstream language.

This is a WIP implementation of the same concepts as pixlet in Python.

That meme is not an understatement, Anubis has been deployed by the United Nations.

Xe is truly winning, their AI detection / limiting / blocking tool, Anubis, is really starting to take off and be used by so many different sites.