My Blog


welcome... to the underground (My goals for the future + Other stuff)

So, I'm in the process of a complete restructure of the infrastructure for my services. I'm planning a huge expansion that'll go on throughout the next few years, and I need to ready my infrastructure for this. I've decided to create an... organization for lack of better words for projects like WebTV Redialed and CrossTalk; major services that'll likely have/already have sizeable userbases, to keep them organized under one banner and have them better integrated/intertwined with one another. so, welcome traveler... to the undergr0und. With this expansion, comes a change of goals for projects like WebTV Redialed and CrossTalk. For the former, it's no longer just going to be a "snapshot" of WebTV as it was in 1999, but rather, not only just a total revival of the experience (this includes creating new services to replace the third-party ones it once relied on, i.e. no more showalert placeholders in the centers, but continuing to maintain it with new features/quality of life improvements. As for CrossTalk, it's goal remains the same, however, I'm working on properly ensuring that it's scalable to a large number of users. Not only a large number of users, but across multiple frontends. I may also work on a load balancing system of some sort to help with this. Because of this, some older, legacy, not really used anymore services unfortunately have to shut down. As of today, the Minecraft server is no longer operational. The server rarely saw activity, sapped about a quarter of the server's CPU and RAM just idling in the background. Some others may follow suit, but we'll see. Apparently my old domain (hiden.pw) got snagged by what I can assume is a bot, and now runs a... uh... certain type of website... it's porn. It's a damn porn site now. I don't even know how or why, but somehow it is. What about "hiden" is sexual in any way? I don't get it, lol. That's it for service updates for the time being, Now for personal life updates: It's been hard, but I've finally gotten myself in order, I think. I'm happy, and proud of the projects I make. So glad I don't have to deal with some... people... anymore. Alrighty, my bi-monthly autistic yapfest is over now. You can continue with your life now :P

Posted on September 22, 2024






It's time to fix things.

Hey, uh, this post is a doozy, so bear with me. I'm okay. I've just been taking a break from most of the internet for a multitude of reasons. First of all, my mental health is in a, quite frankly, unacceptable spot right now. I'm not feeling... self-destructive... but it's not looking good. I've made a lot of... incredibly stupid decisions as a result of my mental health and have been a massive asshole to multiple people. I've burnt bridges and upset a lot of people by acting on emotion, or really anything except actual logical thinking. To address the elephant in the room, I'm going through a very messy break-up right now, and I've said some... really nasty things to my ex as a result. I don't want to have any association with them, so I threatened a restraining order if they were to ever try to contact me again (which I should add, they haven't since the break-up)... I don't think I need to tell you what's wrong here. It's like killing an ant with a rocket launcher. He has been freaking out as a result over the past few days, and I feel really horrible... I'm an idiot who can't handle problems well. What he did to me was shitty, sure, but that gives me no ground to make threats, even if non-violent. They're threats, period. You know who you are, and to you, I'm deeply sorry for this and for all hardships I've caused you in the past, and I forgive you for everything you've done to me. I wish you nothing but the best. "He who conceals his sins will not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them will find mercy.", Proverbs 28:13 Secondly, I have had a generally unhealthy lifestyle for the past 5 - 6 years and I want that to change. I've heavily relied on the approval of others to make me happy, I'm addicted to caffeine (which amplifies my anxiety like 30 fold), I'm an anti-social shut-in, and I often talk without a filter. I pride myself on being honest, but I often speak without a filter and end up upsetting people. All of this helps contribute to my awful mental health, and I want to change it. I want to achieve self-sufficiency; autarky if you will. I want to be happy with myself, and healthy, both physically and mentally. I'm rebuilding my relationship with the Lord, and I've gotta say, that has been helping a lot. Among that, I've also been learning techniques of coping with my anxiety, and I'm also looking into therapy. With all this said, I'm taking a very extended break from 80% of the internet until I feel healthy and happy enough to return. Being on the internet is honestly extremely draining mentally, and has hindered all of my attempted recoveries over the past few years. This one will not fail. I will make sure of it. I'm going to become the best version of me, and hopefully when I'm back, I hope I can make up for lost time and for all of the hardships I've created. Goodbye for now, and I love you all /p.

Posted on June 18, 2024






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Posted on June 15, 2024






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Posted on June 15, 2024






Guestbook temporarily disabled

Due to spambots, posting to the guestbook is disabled for now until a captcha or something is implemented. Sorry!

Posted on April 16, 2024






Important announcement

Hey all. Due to some things happening in my personal life, I'm probably going to be gone for a long while so I can mentally refocus on myself. Don't know when I'll be back, but hopefully it's soon. Thank you to everyone.

Posted on March 04, 2024






Gitea registrations disabled

This happened yesterday, but for the time being, Gitea registrations are disabled due to a (seemingly) random wave of bot accounts.

Posted on February 26, 2024






Dumbassery

Sorry about the down time. I may have accidentally deleted the site's JSON data files (so stored blog posts and guestbook posts), and backups were limited, so I had to partially reconstruct the former and lost the most recent post of the latter. I will make sure this doesn't happen again.

Posted on February 23, 2024






Pleroma registrations are now up!

Registrations for my Pleroma instance are now up! I'll have to manually verify your account, however. If you want to sign up, you can do so here.

Posted on January 19, 2024






Note about the down-time

Sorry about the down-time. I shut off most non-critical services to help reduce stress caused by other, mostly unrelated personal stuff. Everything's back up now.

Posted on January 19, 2024






2023 retrospective

So you know how a few months ago, I said that 2023 was another stinker for me? Yeah... not exactly. If anything, this might be one of the biggest years for me; especially during the latter half. My projects and skills improved dramatically, and my depression and anxiety is mostly gone, or at the very least, much easier to cope with. While the year certainly sucked at points, in general it was awesome and I hope 2024 is even better. This will likely be the last blog post in 2023. One thing I can say for certain, 2024 is going to be a huge year for HIDNet though, maybe even bigger than 2023 was.

Posted on December 14, 2023






Christmas theme now up!

The site has been redesigned for Christmas! Sorry about the lack of updates, I've been mostly focusing on CrossTalk as well as school, personal things, etc. I'll be updating the site more often hopefully.

Posted on November 25, 2023






0 days since it was DNS

Apologies about the down-time. The stack of cards that is the weird DNS setup for my domain came crashing down, due to someone forgetting to renew a separate domain. Oh well, it's back up now :P.

Posted on September 11, 2023






2023 was... something alright.

2023 was certainly the year of all time. It had some of my worst moments, but also some of my best. A lot of terrible shit happened, and to be honest I was damn near close to just giving up, but there was a lot of amazing stuff too. Despite everything that has happened, I am happy to be alive, and happy to be doing what I do. I want to thank all of my friends for everything. I think I'm ready to come back to ScyNET full time... well as full time as I can right now :P. But yeah, this was simultaneously an awful and amazing year. Here's to 2024 being fully amazing.

Posted on September 09, 2023






HBot 1.10 announcement + other stuff

HBot 1.10 is in heavy development right now, and it's shaping up to be the biggest update it has seen yet. Hopefully to have a send-off for 2023. So far, I have added a starboard and bumped it up to DSharpPlus 4.4.2, with many, *many* more things on the way. I expect a stable release to come in mid August - early September. After that, I'll probably be done updating HBot (and the site) for a long time, probably even for 2023 altogether. This year has been yet another stinker. Personal drama and the tornado from March are mostly to blame, and I'm just burnt out from doing anything that isn't just relaxing and playing Minecraft or whatever. After HBot 1.10 releases, and for likely until some point into 2024, all projects will go into maintenance-only mode, and I'll only do what I'm obligated to keep them running and stable. Community contributions to HBot (such as fixes or even new features) are greatly welcome, but I probably won't work on my own for a long while after this. Who knows, we'll see. The future is unpredictable, and I may have a sudden urge to do it again.

Posted on July 26, 2023






Charred Braincells Update now out!

The Charred Braincells Update is now out! I forgot to make a post when I rolled it out this morning... so here it is now :P. I won't lie, when it wasn't frustrating as all hell, I had a lot of fun making this update. I think my burnout period has subsided at least for now. Changes-wise, it's mostly just small visual tweaks, bug fixes, and a new API for HBot (OCR if you're curious). But yeah, more to come in the future!

Posted on July 07, 2023






Burnout

Hey all, something important here. The updates attributed to the current development cycle (serenity) are being delayed until an indefinite time. I'm currently experiencing burnout from programming in general (and just general demotivation, fun :P) and I really don't want to work on them right now. There probably won't be any more updates to my projects besides fixes, small changes, and general obilgations for maintaining them for the time being. Sorry! As soon as I feel ready, I'll get back to it. Apologies for the disappointing news, if you found it to be that way.

Posted on July 03, 2023






New host!

I have a new host now! HIDNet has fully relaunched, and is now hosted on a VPS. Hopefully this means I can do even more things now.

Posted on June 27, 2023






Updates now out

The Dumpster Diver's Delight update and HBot 1.8.5 are now fully rolled out. Enjoy!

Posted on June 19, 2023






Next update

Hi all. I'd like to give some news on the next update for the website and HBot. The new site update will mainly be focused on QOL things, although there are quite a few new features planned as well. For what's already implemented, I have: a login system + a way to do some adminstraion tasks from the site itself (such as adding a blog post and banning someone from the guestbook), integration with Last.fm, porting the CSS animations to Javascript, as well as general decluttering and QOL stuff. As for HBot, it will likely be a minor update. The auth system has been implemented there as well, but nothing uses it yet, as well as general QOL improvements. I might add new stuff, but generally both updates are both in the stabilization/polish phase right now, and will likely release within the next couple of days - next month. That's all for now.

Posted on June 19, 2023






Birthday (2023)

Welp, today's my 16th womb evacuation anniversary. I... don't know how to feel about that, lol. I'll add another post at the end of the day/week/whatever with more details.

Posted on June 09, 2023






Pride month

Happy pride month! Now's the perfect time to be gay and do crime, so let your inner rebelious homosexual come out for the month. The summer update may enter development soon. I'm still gathering ideas for it + moving the rest of HIDNet to dkay's server in the coming days.

Posted on June 01, 2023






Status update (End of May 2023)

Good morning to you all! This is going to be a quick status update for the end of the month. I'm still working on getting the rest of HIDNet restored (still waiting on dkay to give me the proper privileges on his server to do that). I'm also working on modernizing the site (no, I will not be """"modernizing"""" (a.k.a. oversimplifying) the design). Right now, I'm working on converting all of the icons to SVG. Also, I have a few projects on the drawing board. I'll announce them when they're ready enough, if they'll ever be.

Posted on May 23, 2023






Surprise!

I've decided to release the update 4 days (well actually 3 in terms of deploying it, but that doesn't count) early. Have fun with this not-so-summer-but-instead-late-spring update! Unfortunately, I'm behind a CGNAT with my new ISP, which means I can't self-host HIDNet anymore :(. I have already worked out a new host and I'm working on moving to it as I'm posting this.

Posted on May 18, 2023






....Surprise!

The Pollen Pandemonium Pair updates for this site and HBot will release on May 21, 2023! The new features will be revealed shortly before it's rolled out (or you can go look at the source code and see for yourself, y'know :P) HBot v1.8.0 is pretty much complete, and the website's update still needs more polish, but I'll be hurrying to get them out before then! Stay tuned for more details about it, and prepare your Fexofadine!

Posted on May 14, 2023






2 years!

Happy 2 year aniversary of this website! I have confirmed that the new internet will be coming on May 17th. The ISP we're going to use is Woodruff. The summer updates for this website and HBot are still in development. One of the biggest features (a rewrite of this blog) is already mostly complete, and it should be out by early to mid June. You can keep track of development under the summer-2023-update branch in their repos, which you can find here and here.

Posted on May 10, 2023






A flaming update

Aaa-tention!

We're about a month away from summer, which means it's time for yet another piping-hot site update. But this isn't just a one time thing. There will be not one, not two, but FOUR (or maybe five... or six) WHOLE SITE UPDATES in a year every season, filled with new features and pages, design updates, and who knows what else?!?! However, to make it even better, I need suggestions, YOUR suggestions specifically. Let me know what you want to be added or fixed, or even submit the changes yourself! So prepare your sunscreen, shades, and Pepto Bismol from your amusement park trip, for this yet-to-be-named, probably not summer-themed-but-instead-suitated update!

Posted on May 05, 2023






Internet woes

You may have noticed some services have been offline for an extended period of time. Due to internal issues relating to my ISP being shitty, I am temporarily using another server (provided by dkay) until that is resolved. This issue should be resolved soon, but hopefully no later than 2023-05-11.

LONG VERSION:

Cablelynx - Giving Comcast a run for it's money

My ISP has been known to me to be shitty for a while. However, it seems they have raised the stakes on the shit scale 5-fold in the last 2-3 months. Uptimes are extremely shitty, it's been up less often than it hasn't, and it's WAYY overpriced for what I'm getting. Personally, I don't think $400 a month for 250mbps down/20mbps up internet that barely works is worth it. But, it's not completely the issue.

Bill bloat

Upon further research, it seems that it's actually the Cable TV we don't use that has been inflating the bill. So one of these actions will be what happens: But yeah. There's your reason why shit's been down over the past week (and will contine to be so for a while, most likely.)

Posted on April 24, 2023






Free-falling display

My monitor broke due to excellent engineering on Sceptre's part. The stand just randomly gave out and my monitor fell over while I was asleep, so I have to go back to using my TV as a secondary monitor for now. Fuck.

Posted on April 13, 2023






Tornado

Sorry about the long down-time. My city took a direct hit from an intense tornado on 2023-03-31. Due to the following, the April Fools 2023 event has been cancelled.

Posted on April 03, 2023






Severe weather - Might go down

Due to intense severe weather in my area that is expected later today, HIDNet may be down for several days/weeks. The first high risk for my area since 2011 has been issued, see below:

Posted on March 31, 2023






Cloud Nine Update

The Cloud Nine Update has arrived! Featuring a near-total rewrite of the site (both front and back), a new, no-longer-relying-on-a-service-that-may-or-may-not-be-good, Guestbook, as well as a bunch of other new goodies! Infact, the update is so huge that I utilized this fancy-shmancy new thing to annoucne it, called a "blog post". An all new, revolutonary technology that lets people "speak" or write about what's on their mind. You may have heard of it, but trust me, it's brand-spanking new (not really), and innovative (possibly). Anyway, enjoy!

Posted on March 24, 2023






THE GREAT DATA LOSS OF 2023 - DETAILS:

On Mar 9, 2023, I made a stupid mistake. I was preparing a Linux flash drive to install to a computer I had lying around. However, the Linux install I had on my main laptop, unknowingly to me at first, switched the paths of my OS flash drive, and my external HDD, which houses almost all of my important data (including but not limited to the VM keys). So basically, the drive's partition table was nuked. I quickly realized it, and stopped the flashing, but the damage had been done. Throughout the day, I had attempted to recover the data, to no avail. Therefore, I lost about 1TB of data, just from a stupid mistake that could've been mitigated by running lsblk. I am officially a donut. Well, that's how you learn, I guess. This explains the ~12 hour long downtime today. There is no easy way to decrypt a LUKS volume if you lost the key (unlike with Bitlocker on Windows), so I had to reinstall the OSes in the Linux VMs. I am extremely sorry for this and I'll take steps to make sure this never, ever happens again.

Posted on March 11, 2023






A new design!

A redesign for this website is being worked on. A W.I.P. version can be found under the redesign-2023 branch on the repository. Please test it and give feedback! To give feedback, contact me or use the guestbook. NOTE: The current design on said branch may not be repersentivve of the final design once the update came out, and is subject to any change, of any size, at any time. Consider it experiemental until I say it isn't.

Posted on March 06, 2023






Oh- and one more thing: I'm gathering feedback about this website and what everyone wants to see changed right now. What I won't do: Anything that requires a substantial layout/code-base change across the entire website, this includes (but is not limited to) mobile optimization What I will do: Everything else! You can submit feedback by using the Guestbook or contacting me at one of these services.

Posted on February 23, 2023






Twitter account retired, new VM

My Twitter account has been officially retired. My only active account now is for HIDNet updates only, which will also be retired by sometime within the next year. For HIDNet updates + everything else, go follow @hiden@mstdn.social on the Fediverse (specifically Mastodon, using the mstdn.social instance) instead. Also for a HIDNet update, NET5 has been created. It runs Ubuntu 22.04, and primiarily serves to host messaging/chat/communications/whatever you want to call it services. My main focuses for it right now are IRC and Matrix, which should be fully avaliable by the end of Q1 2023.

Posted on February 23, 2023






Horny diabeetus day

Happy Valentines day. To those without a SO, hope you have a good day regardless. I also completely switched to Linux (for real this time (get japed - HIDEN, May 7, 2023)). Haven't looked back since.

Posted on February 14, 2023






NVIDIA sucks

Alright, so I had to go back to Windows because NVIDIA hates Linux. Every time I switch TTYs and then go back to the one running X, the DE becomes a clusterfuck of visual gitches, optimus is a pain in the ass, the latest driver is bugged with Source Engine games, etc. So for now, I'm sticking with Windows. Sucks, but I have to, to actually have a working system.

Posted on January 29, 2023






Behold! The encryptioninator!

Apologies about the down-time. I was doing a little encryptification-ination. Basically, I had to reinstall the OS on all Linux VMs on my server because I didn't feel like going through the hell that is retroactively setting up LVM to set up LUKS. So yeah, LUKS and Bitlocker are re-enabled on all VMs. I wrote the decryption keys down somewhere this time, so what happened months ago won't happen again, I promise! For the SRCDS VM, it now uses VBS+HVCI for more even more sehcorities. Also, I fully switched from Windows to Linux on my daily driver... with some speed bumps of course (because fuck you NVIDIA). TLDR: Server VMs are now encrypted and the Windows one now uses VBS+HVCI for sehcorities improvements, I switched to Linux on my daily driver.

Posted on January 29, 2023






New year - 2023

It is now 2023 in UTC. Hopefully this year won't be as mid as last year. So uh, yeah, 2022 was a complete rollercoaster for me personally. I finally put some effort into improving my mental health, which has gone into the gutter after 2021 (and again around mid-2022), and it has worked extremely well. I also got a new PC, rewritten the backend to this site (although that was done toward the ends of 2021, although it was very unpolished then), launched a new server setup, found out I had GAD, and improved my skills with tech tremendously. Although some really shitty shit happened this year too, that I don't want to get into, so I guess it balances out. So yeah, I hope 2023 is a way better year for all of us. the last 3 have been a complete trainwreck through and through, although, for me personally, 2022 also had a lot of bright spots. Hopefully the bullshit gets cut down.

Posted on January 01, 2023






Gender moment

Well, I'm not nonbinary. I'm transfem (use she/her). I feel most comfortable like that. I think the "not feeling feminine" thing was just a phase/thing in the moment, because I got some very heavy gender envy earlier, and have been for the past day or 2. TLDR: I'm transfem again, and will stay that way.

Posted on December 28, 2022






Me being an idiot

Apologies about the downtime earlier this week. I was a dumbass and forgot the LUKS password to my Linux VMs, so I had to reinstall the OSes on them. My HDD cable died a few days ago as well, which means I couldn't update the site because the source code is stored on there. I got a replacement cable earlier today however. That's about it for now, another post is probably coming on Christmas.

Posted on December 22, 2022






Discord RSS relay

I set up a bot in my Discord server to relay posts from here to the announcements channel there. If you want to join, you can do so here.

Posted on December 14, 2022






Christmas 2022 update!

The Christmas 2022 update has arrived! A new design, some snow, and some music were added. An audio player for the music can be found at the bottom of whatever page you're looking at (since modern browsers are a pain in the ass with autoplay). Expect more major updates very, very soon. Have a merry Christmas and happy New Year, when those roll around.

Posted on December 05, 2022






Discord break

I'm taking a break from Discord. I don't know for how long, but it'll be a while. I'm doing this for my own sanity. Anyway, a Garry's Mod server was launched recently. Go check that out. Tons of visual and nonvisual updates were also added to the site, with a lot more likely on the way.

Posted on November 27, 2022






New computer + server overhaul

Apologies about the downtime, but 2 big new things. I have a new main computer, and I have a new server!. I absolutely fucking ADORE the new server setup, it's so fucking fast compared to the old one, plus it's more flexible, and secure. It utilizes Proxmox VE which lets me have each service has it's own VM, greatly improving security with virtually no performance cost. I sound like I'm being paid to say this like some fucking YouTube sponsorship, but I'm serious. I fucking love it. So if you notice everything I host suddenly being a lot faster... well now you know why. I've been needing a new computer for a while, and now I have it! I also love this thing! Oh, and, thanks to dkay for helping out with the web server configuration.

Posted on November 09, 2022






Shitting liquid bricks

I got sick with some kind of stomach bug last night. I feel better today, but still not paticularly well.

Posted on October 25, 2022






Linux 6.0 out

Linux 6.0 dropped for those running Arch Linux with the testing repos enabled. I installed it about 5 minutes ago from writing this post, so far I haven't had any issues. Also, Windows 11 is a year old today. Damn.

Posted on October 05, 2022






Halloween 2022... but no update :(

Happy spooky season. I'm currently debating if I should give my site a temporary redesign for October... a bit late for that now but yeah. Let me know what you think.

Posted on October 02, 2022






>:)

Making a blog post just to spite someone. Anyway, new shit got added. Check those out.

Posted on September 24, 2022






HDD death + procrastination = pain

Apologies about the long(er) downtime. The HDD in the server had died, and I put off on replacing it and setting it back up for a week due to schoolwork and lack of motivation, as well as a weird sleep schedule that ties it all together. The new HDD has been working well so far.

Posted on September 18, 2022






The queen died

So... the queen died. I'm... speechless to say the least. And there's a bunch of idiots joking about it. Well, trolls will be trolls I guess. 2023 retrospective: I'd piss on her grave now lmfao.

Posted on September 08, 2022






The penguin has died... again

Apologies about the down-time. The install of Fedora running on the server stopped working, and no other Linux distributions would work (including Fedora itself). I had to install Windows on the server just to get it to work, and I spent 2 days configuring everything. The Discord-IRC relay is currently dead due to bugs with Discord.NET on Windows. It's in the process of being replaced by Matterbridge.

Posted on September 03, 2022






The penguin has died

Apologies about the long downtime. The file system on the server was corrupt and then took a long time to repair.

Posted on August 31, 2022






Moderate your Minecraft server, folks.

Soooo... my Minecraft server was raided when I was asleep with a bunch of transphobic and racist shit. I have an idea of who might've done this, but they keep repeatedly denying it. To prevent this from happening again, I installed CoreProtect and set up a whitelist.

Posted on August 28, 2022






64 is dead. no 64

I removed the number from my username. I did this because it's much easier for me to say "HIDEN" without the number. 64 can be a mouthful to say quickly. :P That HP laptop is in my possession again. It was given back to me after I informed the person I've given it to the that HDD is starting to die (it's S.M.A.R.T. status in CrystalDiskInfo is "Caution"). A thing was added to the homepage called The Stuff Box. It pulls a random thing from a file of 57 other things. It was in testing limbo for a very long time because I didn't know how to implement it... but now I do, and I did it :P. On a semi-related note, fuck CSS.

Posted on August 23, 2022






HTTP is back + new shit

HTTP was re-enabled on the site for compatibility reasons. I still strongly recommend you use HTTPS if you have the option to. Quite a few new features are in development (some are implemented in some form already, but not quite ready to be made avaliable on the stable (aka live) instance yet). Over the past few weeks I've been focused on getting my life back on track, as well as updating this website with a bunch of major updates. I finally have ideas for them now, and I'm also doing this to make up for the lack of major updates. Anyway, I should be getting a new computer soon, probably in a few months at most. I've been having issues with my current one, specifically with crashing at seemingly random intervals. However, this doesn't seem to happen for right now. I've been using Linux Mint for a couple of days now and I haven't had a crash like that.....yet.

Posted on August 17, 2022






Mental health? What's that?

I'm taking a break from Discord and Twitter. I'm doing this for private reasons and to better my own mental health after something that has happened very recently.

Posted on July 31, 2022






Dusting this thing off

taps mic Is this thing on? Yeah, haven't added something here in a while. Sorry about that. You may have noticed, but I have a renewed focus on my YouTube channel, and haven't been updating this site as much as a byproduct. I'm trying, effective as of this post, to balance it out. Focus on both equally. I'm still out of ideas for major updates. If you have any suggestions, let me know.

Posted on July 22, 2022






I'm back on Discord. The break, although very short (only 2 days), was refreshing. I think I'm ready.

Posted on July 06, 2022






The return no one asked for

I will be coming back to Twitter as of this blog post. The contacts page was re-enabled, however the Discord one is not. I don't feel like I'm ready to come back to Discord yet. Good news is, however, I do somewhat feel better about myself, so there's that, I guess.

Posted on July 05, 2022






Imagine having decent mental health

Effective as of this blog post, I will be taking a break from most social media for a while, for mental health reasons.

Posted on July 04, 2022






A new computer

A new computer has come into my posession.

HP Pavilion TS 17 laptop from 2013. Shown in my lap; installing updates on Windows 8.1.

The specs are on the computers page. It's an HP Pavilion TS 17-e169nr. It's a hand-me-down that my sister gave to me. Right now, I'm not sure of what to do with it. Maybe I'll use it as a secondary laptop? I don't know. That's how I'm using it right now, I don't know if it's going to stay that way. Another thing I've considered is replacing my crappy server with it, but it seems to run hot very fast in some cases, so I don't know how well that'll play out. Hell, I'm thinking of throwing Windows Vista on it and using it as some sort of retro gaming machine. I'm conflicted, lol.

Posted on June 26, 2022






E-Hoarding problem

I installed every version of Windows from 98 - 11, excluding Me, in a VM for testing a bunch of software I have. Just as some experimentation to fuel my data hoarding addiction :P.

Posted on June 25, 2022






About me overhaul complete + burnout...?

The about me overhaul is complete. It took signaficantly less time than I expected. About the burnout thing, I don't know anymore. I had fun while making this update, maybe I found that spark again? I have no ideas for any more major updates, howerver. I'm open to suggestions. :P

Posted on June 22, 2022






About me overhaul in progress + burnout

The about me page is being overhauled, being split into multiple pages. As of this post, the contacts page is now it's own page. After this is done, I'm probably going to take a break from working on this site, because of burnout. I've been disuaded from working on this and other projects because programming is just a mental chore for me right now, and I don't find it fun anymore. These changes are also coming out at a pretty slow pace for the same reason. Sorry if this dissappoints you, but I want to find what makes programming fun for me again, as well as focus on other things I do that I've neglected (namely video-making).

Posted on June 22, 2022






Dynmap fixed

Finally resolved the weird problem with the MC Dynmap subdomain. View that here. The Discord server link was changed to one that doesn't link to the staff chat.

Posted on June 16, 2022






Birtday (2022, 15)! (cont)

My birthday went really well. One of the things I got from it was a dual monitor setup (I bought a DisplayPort-to-HDMI adapter). Here's what it looks like:

Image of my dual-montiors setup as of June 12, 2022.

So far, it has worked very well. I'm very happy with this. I also bought some other things, such as an external 4TB HDD so I don't have to go through partitioning hell when reinstalling OSes. All and all, I'm very happy with how it turned out.

Posted on June 12, 2022






Birthday (2022, 15)!

Today's my birthday! Hopefully everything goes well.

Posted on June 09, 2022






It's a blog now

The scope of news has been expanded, and as such it is now a blog. The Minecraft server was updated to version 1.19. Tomorrow is my birthday. I'll add a new post afterwards. I hope it goes well.

Posted on June 08, 2022






Old domain gone

The old domain has been shut down as of yesterday. If you have any links to my website, update them now.

Posted on May 24, 2022






Fedora 36 upgrade + old domain shutting down soon

The server was down from upgrading to Fedora 36 (and me falling asleep before restoring the services). The upgrade went smoothly; I haven't faced any issues so far, besides having to recompile the IRC-Discord relay for .NET 6, due to Fedora 36 not having a package for .NET 5 in it's repos.

Posted on May 14, 2022






The site was moved to a new domain, again, courtesy of dkay. The old domain will continue to work as a redirect until May 23, 2022. If you link my site on your own site, please update the link by then.

Posted on May 13, 2022






What's a mental health?

I'm taking a break from Discord. There is a long list of reasons why, but it's generally because it's been a burden on my mental health, and I need some time away from that mess. I'll still speak in some servers via IRC, including WinWorld and mine.

Posted on May 03, 2022






Six Flags's new rollercoaster

Well, that was a wild few days. This server expldoed, the temporary server exploded due to a MobaXterm feature/bug/whatever, and then everything got fixed. Sorry about all of this, I hope that something like this won't happen again. Anyway, yeah. Everything's back up now.

Posted on April 25, 2022






Distrohopping go br

The server now runs Fedora.

Posted on April 22, 2022






What the hell even happened here?

Sorry about the downtime. It was caused by a failed upgrade to Linux 5.15 which then spiraled into a hardware failure that somehow fixed itself. The Dynmap for the Minecraft server has been removed for now.

Posted on April 20, 2022






M o a r buttons

A bunch of new buttons were added. Mostly older ones that have been readded. I'm testing a new experiement.

Posted on April 19, 2022






HTTPS required, nginx caching

HTTPS is now forced, you may use TLSv1 - TLSv1.3. For older browsers you may need to add the Let's Encrypt certificate to your browser. Nginx now caches static content for a more sped browsing experience. dkay

Posted on April 14, 2022






Site now behind a reverse proxy and thus supports HTTPS, service status gone, other things

The site now supports HTTPS (thanks dkay). HTTP is still avaliable for now while I sort out cipher compatibility with older systems, however I strongly recommend against using it for security and privacy reasons. On top of this, all links that use HTTP and also support HTTPS have been changed to link to the HTTPS version. It is now powered under an Nginx reverse proxy to help achieve this. Service status was removed because it's a pain to maintain with my current server setup. The best way to know about outages is through my my Discord server. Links was rebranded to Places. The site design will change to accomodate holidays (as evident by the April Fools one not too long ago). Game servers other than Minecraft is cancelled for now, although I am considering hosting servers of things other than games. Sorry about the lack of updates. This is pretty much everything that's happened since the last post.

Posted on April 13, 2022






New project: PubSite

I have a new project available, called PubSite. Check it out. On top of that, the site is getting many adjustments to it's appearance and functioanlity. Check those out.

Posted on March 28, 2022






New shit

An update was just released for the site. A new download was added, some text across the pages was changed, and a few bugs were fixed (the computers link appearing weirdly on Safari and GNOME Web, links pointing to the old domain, old and out of date info, etc).

Posted on March 26, 2022






Toasty...

Something's on fire! Please wait while I see what the problem is.

Posted on March 21, 2022






More shit

A new page is available. Many visual adjustments were added.

Posted on March 08, 2022






Indescisive moment + cleanup + TF2s

News was briefly removed, and then readded. The code is seeing heavy cleanup from unused/nonfunctional things. A TF2 server is coming soon.

Posted on March 03, 2022






Winterization? What's that? Something bees do?

Sorry about the downtime. There was a power outage in my area caused by a winter storm, which took down some power lines. The Downloads page has been revamped.

Posted on February 27, 2022






Distrohopping!

Sorry about the downtime. I switched the server's OS to Fedora from Ubuntu.

Posted on February 18, 2022






Things that are no longer existing because... moment

(NO LONGER THE CASE, IT HAS BEEN CANCELLED) I'm opening a Team Fortress 2 server soon. The service status page has been removed for now. (NO LONGER THE CASE, THEY WERE SCRAPPED) There's a bunch of pages detailing my favorite crap in development. It's still in the early stages, though. (CANCELLED) You can view early, in development stuff, as well as experiements at the testing page. The pre-release code scattered all over the pages is being reloacated to the afformentioned page. As of 2022-05-09, the testing page is no longer avaliable to the broad public. Dev access (which requires me to personally trust you) or self-hosting the site is now required to access it.

Posted on February 10, 2022






Some stuff

Quality of life changes and many other improvments were added to many of the pages.

Posted on February 07, 2022






More

There's a new page. Meta (AKA Facebook) has seen their first full-blown user loss on Facebook... good.

Posted on February 03, 2022






Service status dead

The service status page is permenantly shut down, as I don't have a sufficient host for it. There's also going to be a very bad ice storm in my area later on tonight, so the server will certainly be down for at least 2 - 9 days. The server was restarted due to a Linux kernel update.

Posted on February 02, 2022






A thing that will NEVER happen

(NO LONGER THE CASE) This site will be rewritten with Bootstrap 5 later on this year.

Posted on February 01, 2022






Midly painful RAM upgrade

The server was down last night for a hardware upgrade (4GB -> 6GB of RAM), but things didn't exactly go to plan originally. After the upgrade, it only went to a black screen, no beeping, no special lights, no HDD activity, nothing. Reseating both RAM sticks fixed it. Because of that, it was down for much longer than expected. Sorry about that.

Posted on January 30, 2022






Ahhh, irony is a beautiful thing

Sorry about the long downtime of the service status page (irony), I had to do a reinstallation of both the OS and the Uptime Kuma instance itself. Apple is deprecating and removing Python 2 in macOS 12.3. Update ya damn code to use Python 3. Microsoft is soon going to cancel Xbox Game Pass subscriptions that haven't been utlizied in a long time, just to avoid draining the bank account of the buyer. And Google accdidentally confirmed the Pixel 6a. They should, y'know, fix Android 12 before doing something like that.

Posted on January 29, 2022






Many-a-issue

Sorry about the long downtime. A lot of issues came up in with the server. I was trying to create a systemd service to run the site, but it fails and doesn't tell me why (more details here), and then the server had a kernel panic. Hopefully this is the end of this. On the bright side, the server appears to run a lot faster, but this might just be placebo. Spotify stock is dropping significantly thanks to them promoting conspiracy theroies. Joe Rogan ramped up his attacks against the COVID-19 vaccine on the platform, and Spotify paid him $100m to do so. I can't believe I have to say this on a tech-focused website of all things, but please, get vaccinated and wear a mask. And don't start with that "THEY DON'T WORK!!!!!1111111111" bullshit, because they've been proven time and time again to work.

Posted on January 27, 2022






Reorganization

I'm doing a lot of moving around internally, so sorry if stuff works and/or looks like crap right now. There's now a service status page, that keeps track of when and why the site and other services I host go down. There's also a ton of new pages in development, plus a planned website rewrite. Which ever comes first is TBD as of now.

Posted on January 24, 2022






More new shit

Lots of the pages were given an update. A new download was added to the Downloads page. My contact information is now available on the about me page, in case you ever need to contact me, or just want to have a chat with me. The code of the pages is also being cleaned up quite a bit.

Posted on January 23, 2022






We win these

Major visual updates were added. 2 new pages were added. There will be more new pages soon(tm). The cryptocurrency market has crashed and burned............... TIME TO CELEBRATE YAYAYAYAYAAYAYAYAYAY-

Posted on January 22, 2022






Eye candy

Programs on the software downloads page now have icons, so they're more recognizeable. I added a new download for Netscape there too. Twitter launched an NFT integration feature............... Is there any good alternatives to Twitter?

Posted on January 21, 2022






Anna discovers margin-auto, more at 11

Added a few more visual updates. I'm now utlizing a more efficient way of updating the news and footer without having to manually change the size of those elements. There's a new page. This is to help reduce some clutter. (NO LONGER THE CASE) The guestbook link was moved to the links (now places) page. The news page has been tweaked visually to help with performance. The blur effect was reduced because it started causing eye strain for me. Some parts of the website were tweaked to comply with the W3C standards. I'm not Microsoft.

Posted on January 20, 2022






Don't use shady DDNS services

I've migrated the site to a new domain, because apparently the domain I used before was being flagged as malware by some AVs and websites. A lot of visual improvements were slapped onto here too. Microsoft purchased Activision... for whatever reason. They're going to have a total monopoly on gaming in the future just like they do with PCs, I know it.

Posted on January 18, 2022






Not-so-potential fix for HTTPS

I may have found a fix for HTTPS with this website. If I did, HTTPS will be enabled soon-ish. The new Intel Celeron's single core performance outperforms that of the Core i9-10900K, which is impressive. But of course, it's a Celeron, so it had to be kneecapped in some way. That way is that it's only 2 core, 2 threads. So single core wise, it outperforms the i9-10900K, but for anything multicore, the i9 curb stomps the Celeron.

Posted on January 13, 2022






Anti-YanDev measures

A new code formatting standard was introduced for this website's code, in an effort to make it organized and not a mess of spaghetti. A new page might be coming soon.

Posted on January 12, 2022






New eye candy things

Many visual updates were added to the site.

Posted on January 08, 2022






Connection logging

A logging feature was added to this site to monitor the requests, to make sure it's not from bots and/or spammers.

Posted on January 07, 2022






Internet woes

Happy (late) new year! Sorry about the extended downtime, I had an issue with my router that wasn't fixed until today. (HORIZON IS CANCELLED) Development of Horizon will start back up soon, I took a break from it to focus on other things.

Posted on January 05, 2022






Rewrite

The site has been rewritten to utilize jinja (an HTML templating engine for Python). The goal with this is to clean up the code, as well as allow for more possibilities than what you can have with just static pages. The actual content of the site is mostly unchanged as of now, but I plan on rewriting the site to utilize Bootstrap in 2022. News now supports RSS.

Posted on December 31, 2021






Footer e v e r y w h e r e + modernization

The footer now appears on every page. The news page was heavily reworked. Tables and site logos have been heavily reworked to utilize CSS instead of the archaic in-HTML style definitions. Many other visual tweaks have been added. The site logo has been updated, as this isn't really a ''90s-designed site'' anymore. I'm also cleaning up a bunch of things on the pages themselves, to fix issues and all that jazz.

Posted on December 27, 2021






Christmas 2021!

Merry Christmas! My gift for this year is the revival of the website after ~1 month of letting it rot. Sorry about that. Footer facts have also been removed as they are pretty bloaty and unessecary.

Posted on December 25, 2021






Halloween 2021!

Happy Halloween! Nothing huge today, just moving around and removing some things; fixing issues with the fonts, removing the RetroSite ad, removing the license (since it's pointless anyway), changing up some text, removing mentions of HM/XPCat besides one footer fact, moving unused images to old stuff, etc. Minor bug fixes too.

Posted on October 31, 2021






New thing

There's a new page.

Posted on October 23, 2021






Redesign cancelled

The redesign plan has been shelved. Instead, I'll opt for updating the current design. 2023 retrospective: lol. lmao, even.

Posted on October 06, 2021






Bits and pieces

I've added some prelimnary parts of the redesign that I was planning for a while.

Posted on August 10, 2021






TacoBot revival + new link

TacoBot is back. I've also added a new link to the homepage.

Posted on August 07, 2021






Mucho-shit

New major changes as well as minor changes to the website. The background has been changed, there is now a footer, hyperlinks now have their own colors. I also have been squashing some bugs and making some slight tweaks visually.

Posted on July 19, 2021






Y U G E cleanup

I made a major internal change to most of the webpages here. Most of the code was unorganized and bloated... until today!

Posted on July 12, 2021






Moved to GitHub pages

This website has moved to a new home. It is now being hosted on GitHub Pages instead of nitrate92/HM's secondary laptop. (Now hosted on my own hardware)

Posted on June 26, 2021






Now FOSS!

The website is now open source. You can grab the source code here. I am also planning to do a redesign of the site in the future. I also cleaned up the home page a bit.

Posted on June 22, 2021