circuitshelter

Ad blocking, privacy, and common sense from a macOS perspective

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 13:51:26 +0000

Let’s look at what we have for an “obvious TOP 3 things” (Safari/WebKit, Chromium/Blink, Firefox/Gecko). Initially there are many options, especially with all the forks. However, this list narrows down significantly after introducing three obvious requirements:

Open-source (in case of 3rd party tools)
Transparency. Being able to react and contribute to changes is a must. This also helps to eliminate (or at least to highlight) shady practices like secret deals with advertisers.
Traceable product owners
Your browser and content filter know everything. Trusting an anonymous developer isn’t the best idea. Real people and companies have much more on a line when it comes to accountability, as their careers and reputations are directly affected.
I’m always surprised when people use things without knowing who’s behind them, especially for critical stuff.
Decent performance
It should obviously do the job well.

Safari + Ghostery

Safari

Safari is likely the fastest and certainly the most well-integrated thing available for macOS. Apple keeps its web browser simple and uncluttered, without any fuss around, which is kinda rare nowadays. It also blocks common trackers on its own.

Filtering API
Safari offers a native content blocking API that is quite fast and efficient (amazing for battery life). However, it has many limitations, mostly for security reasons. Extensions need to jump through a lot of hoops to be able to filter complex content like a YouTube page.

Ghostery

The story of Ghostery is quite a rollercoaster. It started in 2009 as a promising anti-tracking project, doing very well. However, things went downhill when it was acquired by a marketing-oriented company (twice). During those dark days, they shared data with advertisers, tried to remove negative reviews, and leaked some email addresses of their users.
Currently, Ghostery has new owners who seem to be doing their best to turn things around. The project has moved to an open-source model and trying to be engaged with its small community. Performance-wise, Ghostery is quite impressive when compared to what is available for Safari.
They also maintaining a public tracker database.

Brave (Chromium)

Simply put, Brave aims to deliver privacy oriented “Chromium experience”. The company behind it was founded by a guy who started JavaScript and also co-founded Mozilla back in the day. They did a pretty good job at stripping out the creepy stuff from Google and hardening. However, they also add Web3 and crypto features, though you can easily opt out of those. Brave also includes a built-in Tor implementation, although it worth mentioning that early versions had some nasty bugs in it.

In Brave you also can get a rewards (in their own crypto) by allowing some ads… yep.

Filtering API
Brave is quite unique; it has a built-in content blocker written in Rust which is very close to a performance of FF+uBo (which is fantastic), but can be very power-hungry as well. The fact that it’s not affected by Google’s Manifest V3 rollout plays a significant role here.

Firefox + UBlock Origin

Firefox

The current state of Firefox and its future is quite controversial. Mozilla’s focus shifted from open standards towards advertising and AI, and they are constantly surrounded by drama and scandals in recent years. They also love to collect user data. To an extent where Firefox now has telemetry that can be disabled only during compilation. And things got only worse after Mozilla stated in 2025 to have a right to use almost everything that a user puts in a browser window, which expectedly sparked a massive backlash. Despite some attempts to backtrack, the damage to their reputation was done.

To add insult to injury, Mozilla’s primary source of income is Google, which recently lost an antitrust case alleging Google’s illegal advertising monopoly. 🙈

Filtering API
Firefox offers the most powerful API; extensions can do almost anything with any type of requests. Which means top performance. On the other hand, you are going to be totally screwed if such extension gets compromised.

UBlock Origin

UBlock Origin is universally considered a top performer when it comes to ads and tracker blocking; there is no controversial stuff (so far). The only thing that sparks concern is that it’s heavily relying on just one person.

Final thoughts

Things are complex and uncertain. The current state of the web leaves a lot to be desired. “Privacy first” solutions often do pretty weird stuff, and most likely there are a lot of things that stay under the radar.

The possibility of an alternative approach

Avoid places with intrusive tracking and ads, cold turkey. Find better alternatives that treat their users better. Also, it’s always a good idea to periodically reevaluate things you spend your time on and just cut the crap. Always try to have a clear understanding of WHY you need something. And if you absolutely love to have things like YouTube in your life, maybe buying a “pro” subscription is the way to go.

The bottom line is: You can do quite well without any special tools just by avoiding bad places. Take care!

Persistent port forwarding for NAT-PMP clients on Linux

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 06:54:29 +0000

NAT Port Mapping is a convenient way to dynamically forward ports for clients, it is quite widely used and appreciated for its simplicity. Unfortunately, sometimes implementation on the application side is lacking. In such cases, and also if you need to deal with a firewall (UFW in this example), you can do a quick fix with some shellscripting and natpmpc utility.

Low-tech Magazine

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 04:39:35 +0000

Low-tech Magazine questions the belief in technological progress, and highlights the potential of past knowledge and technologies for designing a sustainable society. Because a web redesign was long overdue – and because we try to practice what we preach – we decided to build a low-tech website that meets our needs and abides by our principles.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/

Other than just a very cool concept, this project has amazing practical articles on the subject of alternative solutions in tech.

Like this one: How to Build a Low-tech Internet.

Side-note
They are now building their site with Hugo 👏

Run custom screensaver on a modern GNOME/Wayland desktops

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 19:50:01 +0000

There is no way to run anything custom as a screensaver on modern GNOME, well, not “natively” 🙂. Such functionality has been stripped a long time ago (around 2011 in GNOME 3.something). Canonical planned to reimplement the thing, but idea was abandoned after some time.

Anyway, if your system can detect user inactivity and sleep-inhibitors, you can script it yourself.

Turn your old laptop into low-end gaming machine

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 00:13:34 +0000

Typical low-end laptop specs

10+ years old jank from a budget line-up.

CPU: Mid-tier/limited (even back when it was released), likely from Haswell era
RAM: 8Gb, ancient and unupgradable
GPU: iGPU + NVIDIA M-something
STORAGE: ~256Gb SATA HDD, that is still somehow works

This post was "inspired" by experience with potatoes like that.

Why Windows is a NO-GO for an old laptops

but Linux do the job.

Expectations: OS detects and drives all your hardware properly
- Reality: Sometimes there just no drivers for your old crap (especially on Wndows 10+). Sometimes drivers are buggy or/and limited, ex. lacking Vulkan implementation for your old GPU, since manufacturer stopped care many years ago. In contrast, linux kernel most likely has driver for your device + some extra fixes, since community still care.
Expectations: OS runs stable
- Reality: Old hardware are well known source of random BSODs on modern Windows. Linux typically behave much better.
Expectations: OS receives updates regularly and installs them in non-intrusive way
- Reality: You know how it is 🙈
Expectations: OS has low overhead
- Reality: Windows always gonna do a lot of stuff in the background (even when you cripple it by “de-bloating”). It’s almost impossible to make Windows do ONLY that ONE particular thing that YOU want. Linux distro can do a great job of standing out of your way.

Other reasons

Windows installation can be a total p-i-a, since your old buddy probably lacking TPM and other things that Windows 10+ so desperately needs.
Steam dropped support for Windows <= 10 (and Windows 10 will reach EOL in 2025).
Using unsupported Windows version is a security hazard.
Windows is not free of charge. Obviously.

Choosing the right Linux distro

avoid following the hype.

Grabbing SteamOS and shoving it into your poor potato most likely not gonna end well! Despite being “gaming oriented OS” it is quite HEAVY AND HARDWARE-SPECIFIC. Popular full blown desktop distros like Pop!_OS are also sub-optimal for low-end devices, because of their full blown fat DEs. Same goes for a thing called Bazzite, too fat, too complicated, new hardware only.

Lubuntu can be a quite decent choice, it only takes about 500(Mb!!!) of your RAM and do almost nothing in a background. To my knowledge it is the lightest distro available, that is still easy to install and use. It runs really fast and feels like something from XP era, thanks to LXQt desktop environment.

Further topics are based on experience with Lubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat).

Installation notes

LTS version will provide packages that are more stable.
Minimal installation option is an obvious choice for our use-case.
You’ll probably want to opt-out from full disk encryption, since it’s gonna take its toll on performance.

Configuration

We are not going to use Snap or Flatpack for this setup, otherwise we introduce noticeable overheads, as well as some hard to trace issues

sudo systemctl stop var-snap-*
sudo apt remove --purge snapd

echo '
Package: snapd
Pin: release a=*
Pin-Priority: -10
' | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap

sudo apt update

Install proprietary drivers if you need to (ex. for an old NVIDIA GPU)

sudo ubuntu-drivers devices | grep recommended 
sudo ubuntu-drivers install nvidia:XXX
sudo prime-select nvidia

Install some packages

sudo apt install procps featherpad partitionmanager qdirstat exfatprogs lm-sensors fancontrol smartmontools mesa-utils libd3dadapter9-mesa libd3dadapter9-mesa:i386 vdpau-driver-all mesa-vdpau-drivers:i386 ffmpeg vlc qbittorrent gamemode k3b

featherpad: lightweight Qt-based text editor.
partitionmanager: Qt version of GParted partition manager.
qdirstat: light and blazing fast disk analyzer (shows where your disk space has gone and help you to clean it up). I wonder why it wasn’t included in Lubuntu by default.
exfatprogs: contain all of the standard utilities for creating, fixing and debugging exfat filesystem on Linux. Also wondering why it’s not out of the box.
lm-sensors: (Linux monitoring sensors) provides tools and drivers for monitoring temperatures, voltage, and fans.
fancontrol: can be used to control the speed of CPU fan.
smartmontools: allows to read S.M.A.R.T. values from most modern ATA/SATA, SCSI/SAS and NVMe disks. In many cases this will provide advanced warning of disk degradation and failure.
mesa-utils: contains essential mesa utilities like glxgears.
vdpau-driver-all: Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix, provides hardware acceleration.
libd3dadapter9-mesa: Gallium3D state tracker that implements the Direct3D9 API. Combined with the gallium-nine branch of Wine or Steam Proton, programs using D3D9 can achieve native (or better) graphics performance.
ffmpeg: a complete cli solution to record, convert and stream audio and video.
vlc: multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
qbittorrent: fast and reliable Qt-based BitTorrent client.
gamemode: a daemon/lib combo that allows games to request a set of optimizations be temporarily applied to the host OS and/or a game process.
k3b: most likely your laptop still has an optical disc drive (and that’s a good thing). This app will handle every CD/DVD/BD related task: burning, imaging, ripping you name it.

The only service that is somewhat worth disabling is CUPS (since you’ll probably never gonna use it on gaming machine)

sudo systemctl disable cups.service
sudo systemctl disable cups-browsed.service
sudo systemctl disable cups.socket
sudo systemctl disable cups.path
sudo systemctl disable cups-browsed.socket

What to expect

let’s be realistic.

Expecting drastic FPS increase would be silly. The main benefits here are uninterrupted gameplay and lower latencies, as well as OS that works with your antique stuff and still actively supported. Sometimes you can get moderate boosts for certain titles, but there is obviously no way around hardware bottlenecks. Anyway, here is a very basic representation of what can be achieved:

Environment	Average performance increase vs Windows
Native	5%-15%
Translated with Steam Proton*	5%-10%
Emulation	5%-10%

Steam Proton is a way to go for Windows games. Not everything gonna work well, or even launch. But in a lot of cases if it runs, it runs on a par with Windows configuration or better.

Side-notes

Get an SSD.
If you can choose a GPU, go with AMD, NVIDIA linux drivers still sucks.
X.org/X11 works better for an old stuff, both software and hardware and it will continue to be supported. Wayland is primarily build with modern things in mind and legacy stuff WILL BREAK.
It’s preferable to use wired (since most old bluetooth chips are crap) gamepads that has drivers implemented directly in linux kernel (ex. 8BitDo Pro 2).
Things that do software rendering and other CPU-intense stuff (ex. emulators), don’t take frequency spikes that well. If you have a very old Intel CPU consider disabling things like Speedstep (current implementation is fine, but back in the early days it was a mess).
Try Lakka if you only looking for emulation and want an easy turn-key setup. It is optimized to run on Raspberry Pi and other SMBCs.
Lutris can help with an installation of games that are not available on Steam.
gamemode provides some additional optimizations on demand, this can be useful when we launching something local from Steam (ex. Retroarch).

gamemoderun %command%

gamescope is a micro-compositor from Valve, that allows you to conveniently set things like frame-rate limit, create a border-less window or even inject Reshade effects/shaders.

# Limit a vsynced game to 60 FPS in border-less window
gamescope -b -r 60 -- %command%

XanMod Kernel looks interesting, but overall performance increase vs potential stability, security and support issues making it a questionable choice.
Useful resources

Steam

By default Proton utilizing DXVK which requires Vulkan support.
- If your GPU doesn’t support Vulkan you can switch to WineD3D by adding launch option PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1.
- If your GPU has partial Vulkan support (< 1.3), you can try to downgrade to older Proton versions (<= 7), or try special fork called Proton-Sarek.
- You can also try Gallium Nine (DirectX 9 only). Proton launch options: PROTON_USE_GALLIUM_NINE=1 PROTON_GALLIUM_NINE_MODULEPATH="/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/d3d/d3dadapter9.so.1:/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/d3d/d3dadapter9.so.1".
Try to experiment with custom Proton builds like proton-ge-custom, you can manage them in ProtonUp-Qt.
You can enable autologin + autostart Steam in Big Picture Mode for “console-ish experience”.

Retroarch

Use Vulkan or GLCore as display drivers if you can.
Use preemptive frames with auto detection to battle input lag.
In case you wanna play some retro games that was designed to be played on CRT TVs: try crt-lottes or crt-guest shaders which looks and runs great even on slowest potatoes (use fast or fastest presets).

SerenityOS

Tue, 17 Aug 2021 13:36:41 +0000

SerenityOS is a love letter to ’90s user interfaces with a custom Unix-like core. It flatters with sincerity by stealing beautiful ideas from various other systems.

Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix.

Also take a look at:

Chicago95

backy: Tiny multiprocessing utility for file backups

Mon, 16 Aug 2021 18:08:53 +0000

Sometimes the best option is the simplest one.

If you need something to reliably sync and archive files without unnecessary integrations and complicated logic, this can be your thing.

❌ External dependencies ❌ Service authorizations ✅ Friendly CLI ✅ Small code base that you can read and understand

Can also be used as a complementary solution for cloud agents like Dropbox or Google Drive (e.g. continuously archive directories to cloud folder).

Comes with install script for Launchd in case you plan to natively schedule backup tasks for macOS 10.4+.

Features

Directories synchronization
Full directories archiving: hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly with
Auto re-archive option if previous archive lost or corrupted
Using native rsync(rsync over SSH supported) and tar(+bzip2) tools from your OS
Linux, macOS and *BSD supported

https://github.com/vdbsh/backy

Kid Pix 1.0 in JS

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 20:59:56 +0000

Kid Pix is a bitmap drawing program designed for children. Originally created by Craig Hickman, it was first released for the Macintosh in 1989 and subsequently published in 1991 by Broderbund. Hickman was inspired to create Kid Pix after watching his son Ben struggle with MacPaint, and thus the main idea behind its development was to create a drawing program that would be very simple to use. Since then a lot of people from all over the world have great memories about this friendly drawing app.

JS Kid Pix

Now you can experience it as well by this web app: https://kidpix.app/

JS Kid Pix / Kid Pix 1.0 was released in to the public domain and this is an HTML/JS re-implementation.

Just like the original Kid Pix, there’s no guide—have fun! Most of the tools support Shift (^) to enlarge. There are a handful of hidden tool features behind various modifier keys (⌘, ⌥, ⇧). The modifier keys can also be combined.

https://github.com/vikrum/kidpix

Another honorable mention is Tux Paint, it follows the same principles and available on Linux, macOS and Windows.

Configuring DNS settings on Ubuntu with Netplan

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 18:21:03 +0000

Since 18.04, Ubuntu started to utilize systemd-resolved for a name resolution, which means that setting DNS servers in /etc/resolv.conf file will no longer work. Now such changes needs to be done in Netplan configuration (which delegates name resolution to systemd-resolved.resolv.conf).

nano /etc/netplan/my-dns-config.yaml

Example: Assuming that we want to set public Cloudflare DNS for both IPv4 and IPv6 on an interface ens3:

# This is my DNS config
network:
  ethernets:
    ens3:
      dhcp4: true
      dhcp4-overrides:
        use-dns: false
      nameservers:
        addresses: [1.1.1.1, 1.0.0.1, 2606:4700:4700::1111, 2606:4700:4700::1001]
  version: 2

Configuration test:

netplan --debug apply

Apply:

netplan apply

Check DNS settings with systemd-resolved:

systemd-resolve --status

Personal Computing On An Amiga In 2021

Thu, 05 Aug 2021 19:48:30 +0000

Great article about current state of Amiga community:

Original art by Toni Bratincevic

Browsing modern internet on vintage computers

Tue, 03 Aug 2021 16:36:03 +0000

Retro Computing Internet Resources

Amazing curated list of projects which let vintage computers connect to the internet!

https://github.com/ssshake/retro-computing-internet-resources

Highlights

FrogFind!

The search functionality of FrogFind is basically a custom wrapper for DuckDuckGo search, converting the results to extremely basic HTML that old browsers can read. When clicking through to pages from search results, those pages are processed through a PHP port of Mozilla’s Readability, which is what powers Firefox’s reader mode. Then it further strip down the results to be as basic HTML as possible.

FrogFind designed with classic Macs in mind, so it’s been tested on SE/30 to make sure it looks good in 1 bit color with a 512x384 resolution. Most of testing has been on Netscape 1.1N and 2.0.2, as well as a few 68k Mac versions of iCab. FrogFind should also work great on any text-based web browser!

https://github.com/ActionRetro/FrogFind

68k-news

Basic HTML Google News for vintage computers. Tested on Netscape 1.1 through 4 on a Mac SE/30.

https://github.com/ActionRetro/68k-news

The Old Net

The Old Net is a project to take you back to those early days of the WWW. Pulling in results from the Wayback Machine, it strips away all of the modern scripting from archive.org. Using a simple drop down menu, you can visit your favourite websites from the past as far back as 1994.

https://github.com/ssshake/theoldnet.com

Also take a look at:

Browservice: A web “proxy” server that enables browsing the modern web on historical browsers

After Dark in CSS

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 16:58:37 +0000

Experience the classic macOS screensavers like flying toasters and other goodness:

Also take a look at:

Awesome Web Desktops

Windows 95 in Virtual Reality

Wed, 28 Jul 2021 15:58:53 +0000

Also take a look at:

Workaround for VLC fullscreen flickering in macOS

Tue, 27 Jul 2021 14:16:57 +0000

If you are experiencing flickering or resizing glitches in fullscreen in macOS, this trick can help:

Preferences > Show All

Interfaces

Main Interfaces > macosx > [v] Use the native fullscreen mode
Main Interfaces > macosx > [ ] Resize interface to the native video size

Video

[ ] Embed video

It’s quite a mystery why attached playlist can cause drawing defects, hopefully this will be fixed in upcoming versions.

Age of Empires II: Best Migration game ever

Sun, 25 Jul 2021 20:37:16 +0000

Also check out:

Best islands game ever

On Coding for Fun

Sun, 25 Jul 2021 16:29:47 +0000

Software doesn’t always need to serve a “high purpose”.

Coding is a neat hobby that can be applied to virtually anything. You can code stuff for fun and feel good about it, as much as when you do it for profit. And you really can’t put a price tag on feeling good.

Like a bonsai tree. This type of activity can be relaxing and even therapeutic if it takes place in relaxed environment, where no money, competition or drama are involved.

It’s just you having a great time in a way you like it, and you doing it just because.

Just for Fun. No, Really.

original pixel art on cover

Workaround for Audible authorization with Apple Books

Sat, 24 Jul 2021 19:42:38 +0000

Apple Books is a great way to listen Audible audiobooks offline on macos devices. It is quite handy to have everything in one place. But looks like integration between these two are not perfect. When you try to follow official instructions there is a chance that after you get your signed link for Apple Books it’s not gonna be accepted by the app.

So here is the workaround:

Open audiobook file
Apple Books: Authorize This Computer
Apple Books: QUIT FROM THE APP!
Audible: Activate in (iTunes) Apple Books
Open signed link specifically in the Apple Books app (Not Music)

Hugo post template generator

Sat, 24 Jul 2021 14:53:09 +0000

This Python script will generate valid post template for hugo. It is cross-platform, and have no dependencies.

Usage:

python3 hugo-post-generator.py "My beautiful post"

Also check out VSCode snippet for Hugo.

Age of Empires II: Best islands game ever

Sat, 24 Jul 2021 13:41:56 +0000

Also check out:

3D level design museum

Thu, 22 Jul 2021 12:24:45 +0000

noclip.website: is a celebration of video game level design and art. It’s a chance to explore and deepen your appreciation for some of your favorite 3D games.

https://github.com/magcius/noclip.website

Creating bootable USB drives with GNOME Disks

Mon, 19 Jul 2021 21:01:43 +0000

Just launch GNOME Disks:

gnome-disk-utility

Select your thumb drive -> [context menu] -> Restore Disk Image... -> Select your ISO

Notes

This is not gonna work with anything that require complex partitioning like Windows 10, but will do for a vast majority of linux distributions which can boot from single UDF partition.

Checking host availability with Python and AWS Lambda

Mon, 19 Jul 2021 14:30:00 +0000

AWS Lambda is great for quick and straightforward tasks. Let’s make minimal host availability check.

For this task we are going to use Low-level networking interface from Python 3 to try establish connection directly to remote socket without help of any additional protocols like ICMP.

Where to find old games and software

Sun, 18 Jul 2021 12:12:25 +0000

Stores

If you can find your title here, look no further.

GOG: The Good Old Games (GOG) is a digital distribution platform with a curated selection of games, a “you buy it, you own it” philosophy, and vast selection of classic game titles for Windows, Mac & Linux, DRM-free.
Steam: the biggest video game digital distribution service around.
EBay: here you can find almost anything available on real physical media, price may surprise you.

Databases

MobyGames: is the oldest, largest and most accurate video game database. Spanning over 260 platforms from 1950 to date. For 20 years, it’s been widely considered the IMDB of the games industry and often referenced as the canonical source for game information.
No-Intro: catalogs the best available copies of ROMs and digital games, providing DAT files for ROM managers and an online database.
Redump.org: is an disc preservation database and internet community dedicated to collecting precise and accurate information about every video game ever released on optical media of any system. The goal is to make blueprints of the data on console and PC game discs. Redump also provides guides to ensure the dumps are correctly done. Users of the website who follow the guides correctly are encouraged to share their results to help build the database. Multiple dumps of games with the same serial number by different people are collected to ensure the same results are gathered, which help correct any incorrect dumps in the database as well as to help recognize alternate versions of the same game.
TOSEC: The Old School Emulation Center (TOSEC) is a retrocomputing initiative dedicated to the cataloging and preservation of software, firmware and resources for microcomputers, minicomputers and video game consoles. The main goal of the project is to catalog and audit various kinds of software and firmware images for these systems.

Public Archives

Safety First!

ALWAYS be careful when downloading, and especially when executing ANYTHING from public sources!
NEVER put ANYTHING questionable along side of ANYTHING critical or personal!
It’s really hard to check ingenuity and trustworthiness of public sources, you can easily get something very nasty.
Make sure you run it in a safe environment like virtual machine or isolated box.
At least scan it with antivirus and limit network access.
Respect the intellectual property rights.

The Internet Archive Software Collection: largest vintage and historical software library in the world, providing instant access to millions of programs, CD-ROM images, documentation and multimedia. The collection includes a broad range of software related materials including shareware, freeware, video news releases about software titles, speed runs of actual software game play, previews and promos for software games, high-score and skill replays of various game genres, and the art of filmmaking with real-time computer game engines.
The Macintosh Garden: is an abandonware archive, dedicated in particular to supporting the Macintosh computer platform. A notable feature of Macintosh Garden is its emphasis on emulation, encouraging users to run historical software on modern systems. Software featured on the Macintosh Garden has been discontinued by their publishers and is no longer commercially available. The Macintosh Garden aims to preserve these treasures for future generations, providing documentation and downloads of the original files.
My Abandonware: was created in February 2009. Over the years, thousands of games have been added to the site. Authors want to create the best video game museum on the web and let everyone around the world enjoy the incredible amount of great software created in the 80s and 90s. 18k+ games are available at the moment. They also have nice useful links section.
The Patches Scrolls: a very well known website that hosts patches, mods and demos for games since 1995.

Also take a look at:

free and open source game engines that allows to play old games on modern platforms.

RetroArch now available on the Amazon App Store

Sun, 18 Jul 2021 11:47:40 +0000

You can even run it on your Kindle!

As of now, RetroArch is available on almost every modern platform imaginable 🎉

RetroArch is a frontend for emulators, game engines and media players. It enables you to run classic games on a wide range of computers and consoles through its slick graphical interface. Settings are also unified so configuration is done once and for all. In addition to this, you are able to run original game discs (CDs) from RetroArch. RetroArch has advanced features like shaders, netplay, rewinding, next-frame response times, runahead, machine translation, blind accessibility features, and more!

Age of Empires II: The Legend of Fatslob

Sun, 18 Jul 2021 07:24:05 +0000

Also check out:

The Legend of WALL

Browservice

Sun, 18 Jul 2021 06:52:50 +0000

How does it work?

The Browservice server uses CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) to run a Chromium browser instance that renders the browser view into an off-screen buffer. The browser view, combined with a control UI bar, is then compressed as a PNG or JPEG image and served to the client using an embedded HTTP server. The client browser runs a JavaScript application that requests and shows the images. It also listens for keyboard and mouse events from the user and forwards them to the proxy by including them in the URLs of the image requests.

Initially, this approach of sending the whole browser view as a new image every time it changes might sound quite inefficient. However, it is surprisingly usable if the network connection between the proxy server and the client is fast (such as 100 Mbit/s Ethernet LAN). Early 00s hardware (~1 GHz CPU clock) can often surpass 10 FPS in video streaming. The performance is also tolerable on older machines if a low JPEG compression level is used and the browser window is small.

https://github.com/ttalvitie/browservice

Chicago95

Sun, 18 Jul 2021 05:49:57 +0000

https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

Included in this theme

New icons to complete the icon theme started with Classic95
GTK2 and GTK3 themes
Edited Redmond XFWM theme to more accurately reflect Windows 95
Chicago95 Plus! A tool to preview and install Windows 95/98/ME/XP themes
Plymouth theme created from scratch
An MS-DOS inspired theme for oh-my-zsh
Partial support for HiDPI monitors

Requirements

GTK+ >= 3.22
Xfce >= 4.12
gtk2-engines-pixbuf

Installation

git clone https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95.git
cd Chicago95
python3 installer.py

If you are interested in retro user interfaces take a look at:

Fixing Secure Boot Violation on linux

Sat, 17 Jul 2021 11:40:56 +0000

On the linux machines with enabled Secure Boot you can catch something like this:

---------------------Secure Boot Violation---------------------
|Invalid signature detected. Check Secure Boot Policy in Setup|
|-------------------------------------------------------------|
|                          [  OK  ]                           |
---------------------------------------------------------------

There can be different reasons for this to happen. But if it occurs right after bootloader re-build (e.x after Kernel upgrades), most likely your UEFI boot order messed up.

Solution

Check your boot order by:

efibootmgr -v

Assuming that you want to boot right into OS e.x Ubuntu, wrong sequence can look like:

BootCurrent: 0000
Timeout: 0 seconds
BootOrder: 0003,0002,0000,0001
Boot0000* ubuntu
Boot0001* CDROM
Boot0002* NIC
Boot0003* ubuntu

In this example Ubuntu tries to boot within unsigned bootloader (which is obviously not gonna work). Let’s change it from grubx64.efi to shimx64.efi, So sequence become: 0000, 0003, 0001, 0002.

We can set it directly in BIOS/UEFI or with efibootmgr:

efibootmgr -o 0000,0003,0001,0002

Reboot the machine to test changes.

Fix for screen tearing on linux using NVIDIA drivers

Sat, 17 Jul 2021 08:21:55 +0000

Sometimes when using proprietary NVIDIA drivers on linux machine you can experience something like this. Unfortunately this is a very common issue on laptops with hybrid graphics, that use NVIDIA Optimus. To address this, a little trick called PRIME Synchronization was introduced back in 2016. It works well, but users often need to enable it manually.

Solution

Make sure that you are using drivers >=364.12

Add nvidia-drm.modeset=1 parameter to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line in /etc/default/grub file.

So it’s gonna look like this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nvidia-drm.modeset=1"

Update GRUB bootloader:

update-grub

Restart your machine

Using BIND 9 RPZ as DNS firewall

Sat, 17 Jul 2021 04:20:16 +0000

DNS Response Policy Zones (RPZ) is an open and vendor-neutral standard for the interchange of DNS firewall configuration information. It is a standard feature of BIND 9, and is expected to be supported by other (non-BIND) name networks. By utilizing it we can easily build something like Pi-hole.

RPZ file generation

Let’s generate RPZ file with hosts we want to filter using HOSTS from StevenBlack and Python.

Configuration

RPZ zone files can be added to named.conf.options as:

zone "rpz-filter" { type master; file "/etc/bind/rpz-filter.db"; };
options {
    response-policy { zone "rpz-filter"; };
};

Check and reload configuration:

named-checkconf
named-checkzone rpz /etc/bind/rpz-filter.db
service bind9 reload

Age of Empires II: The Legend of WALL

Sat, 17 Jul 2021 03:53:06 +0000

Awesome Web Desktops

Sat, 17 Jul 2021 03:44:02 +0000

If you are a fan of websites, web apps and portfolios which resemble desktop graphical user interfaces here is an awesome curated list!

P.s.

If you want to build something similar you can do it with 98.css: a design system for building faithful recreations of old UIs.

Winamp Skins Gallery

Fri, 16 Jul 2021 07:08:29 +0000

Windows MIDI tracks

Fri, 16 Jul 2021 05:52:44 +0000

Canyon.mid Oh yeah!

Widelands 1.0 Released

Fri, 16 Jul 2021 05:33:06 +0000

Widelands is a free, open source real-time strategy game with singleplayer campaigns and a multiplayer mode. The game was inspired by Settlers II™ (© Bluebyte) but has significantly more variety and depth to it.

Since the release of Build 21, developers implemented several hundreds of new features and bugfixes; for example, to name just a few of the highlights:

A new tribe: the Amazons
An add-on system
A third frisians scenario
Dynamic tribe loading to speed up game loading
Targeting individual map objects for removal
Mute/unmute messages by buildings
Fully redesigned main menu
Configurable keyboard shortcuts
Enhanced keyboard and mousewheel support in the UI
Long-term stable Lua API for game content designers

https://www.widelands.org/

Bongo Cat LIVE

Thu, 15 Jul 2021 06:11:42 +0000

https://bongo.cat

https://github.com/Externalizable/bongo.cat

Free and open source game engines

Thu, 15 Jul 2021 03:48:17 +0000

🗺 Strategy

OpenRA: a flexible game engine (the OpenRA engine) that provides a common platform for rebuilding and reimagining classic 2D and 2.5D RTS games. The OpenRA engine is not restricted by the technical limitations of the original games. It includes native support for modern operating systems (like Windows 10, macOS, and Linux) and screen resolutions without relying on emulation or hacks, and integrated online multiplayer.
OpenDUNE: re-creation of the popular game “Dune II”, originally made by Westwood Studios, and released by Virgin Entertainment. It attempts to re-create the original game and apply modern technology to it to allow it to be run natively on most operating systems.
OpenSAGE: re-implementation of SAGE, the 3D real-time strategy engine used in Command & Conquer™: Generals and other RTS titles from EA Pacific.
openage: cross-platform RTS game engine that provides the mechanics of Age of Empires.
OpenTTD: simulation game based upon the popular Microprose game “Transport Tycoon Deluxe”, written by Chris Sawyer. It attempts to mimic the original game as closely as possible while extending it with new features.
OpenRCT2: re-implementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 (RCT2), expanding the game with new features, fixing bugs and raising game limits.
CorsixTH: reimplementation of the 1997 Bullfrog business sim Theme Hospital. As well as faithfully recreating the original, CorsixTH adds support for modern operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and BSD), high resolutions and much more.
Julius: fully working open-source version of Caesar 3, with the same logic as the original, but with some UI enhancements, that can be played on multiple platforms.
Open Fodder: is an open source version of the Cannon Fodder, an action-strategy shoot’em up game developed by Sensible Software and published by Virgin Interactive.
fheroes2: remake of Heroes of Might and Magic II game engine.
VCMI: work-in-progress attempt to recreate engine for Heroes III, giving it new and extended possibilities. Among current features are: complete gameplay mechanics, almost all objects, abilities, basic battle AI and adventure AI.
OpenXcom: clone of the popular “UFO: Enemy Unknown” (“X-COM: UFO Defense” in the USA release) and “X-COM: Terror From the Deep” videogames by Microprose, licensed under the GPL and written in C++ / SDL.
Return to the Roots: remake of the original The Settlers 2 which aims to introduce new features such as a multiplayer mode via internet as well as the support for modern hardware and several operating systems.
OpenKeeper: project goal is to fully implement the game (version 1.7 with 3 bonus packs) as open source cross platform version, with minimal or no changes at all, using the original game assets.
FreeSynd: is a cross-platform, GPLed reimplementation of engine for the classic Bullfrog game, Syndicate.

📜 RPG

freeablo: modern cross platform reimplementation of the game engine used in Diablo 1.
OpenDiablo2: an ARPG game engine in the same vein of the 2000’s games, and supports playing Diablo 2. The engine is written in golang and is cross platform.
OpenMW: modern engine which re-implements and extends the 2002 Gamebryo engine for the open-world role-playing game The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.
xoreos: ongoing FLOSS project to reimplement BioWare’s Aurora engine (and derivatives) as used in their 3D games, beginning with Neverwinter Nights. The goal is to have a portable program to play those games even on operating systems those games were never meant to be played on, such as GNU/Linux and Mac OS X.
GemRB: the goal of the project is to make the Infinity Engine games like Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale available on a wide range of platforms forever, fix or avoid old bugs, add new features and provide a superb platform for mod development. All done in the open by players for players.
ScummVM: a set of game engine recreations originally designed to play LucasArts adventure games that use the SCUMM system, it also supports a variety of non-SCUMM games by companies like Revolution Software and Adventure Soft.
EasyRPG: community project to create a free, open source, role playing game creation tool, compatible with RPG Maker 2000/2003 games.

🔫 FPS

ZDoom: is a family of enhanced ports of the Doom engine for running on modern operating systems. It runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X, and adds new features not found in the games as originally published by id Software.
EDuke32: free homebrew game engine and source port of the classic PC first person shooter Duke Nukem 3D— Duke3D for short—to Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, several handhelds, your family toaster, and to your girlfriend’s vibrator.
ioquake3: the intent of this project is to provide a baseline Quake 3 which may be used for further development and baseq3 fun.
ET: Legacy: project that aims to create a fully compatible client and server for the popular online FPS game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory - whose gameplay is still considered unmatched by many, despite its great age.
Shockolate: cross platform source port of System Shock, using SDL2. This runs well on OSX, Linux, and Windows.

🏎 Racing

OpenNFS: an attempt to recreate the classic Need for Speed Games (1-6), unpacking their original data files into a modern scratch built engine.

VSCode snippet for Hugo post

Thu, 15 Jul 2021 03:19:47 +0000

Guide

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/userdefinedsnippets#_creating-your-own-snippets

How Hugo Setup action works

Thu, 15 Jul 2021 01:44:17 +0000

It’s really easy to host your Hugo site with GitHub Pages, just use GitHub Actions for Hugo.

Flow diagram

This is how it works:

|files| /archetypes, /content, /static, /themes, config.toml| -+ [branch] main] -> (trigger) Build)
                                                                                    |
                                                                                    *
|files| /assets, /categories, /img, /page, /tags, index.html, 404.html, index.xml, sitemap.xml|
                                                                                        |
                                                                                        +
                                                                                [branch] gh-pages]
                                                                                            |
                                                                                            *
                                                                                    /site.github.io/

Notes

Don’t forget to change your GitHub Pages settings to

Branch: gh-pages
Directory: / (root)

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

circuitshelter

circuitshelter.com is a blog about peaceful tech tinkering. With a great respect for an old hardware, video games and a freedom of personal computing.

🗞️ RSS feed

Contact

Have some cool idea, found mistake or just wanna say hi:

✉️ > echo🍥circuitshelter.c🍩m

Disclaimer

ALL INFORMATION IS PROVIDED ON THIS WEBSITE AS IS AND FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE ONLY, IN THE HOPE THAT IT WILL BE USEFUL, ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OR LIABILITIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL WEBSITE AUTHORS AND OWNERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL RISKS OR DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS INFORMATION, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE. THIS WEBSITE DOES NOT REPRESENT ANY ORGANIZATION, ENTITY, GROUP OR INDIVIDUAL. THE ENTIRE RISK OF INTERPRETATION OR USAGE OF ANY KIND OF PROVIDED INFORMATION IS WITH YOU.

All trademarks are property of their respective owners.

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License

Good stuff

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Computers

LWN.net An old-school news site dedicated to producing coverage from within the Linux and free software development communities.
The Eclectic Light Company: In-depth articles on various Mac-related topics.
Low-tech Magazine: Alternative solutions in computing and general tech.

Games

Indie Retro News: From Amstrad CPC, C64 and ZX Spectrum to the latest Free Indie PC Releases.
Fabien Sanglard’s website: The author of Game Engine Black Book: DOOM and Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D.
The Copetti site: Architecture of gaming consoles by Rodrigo Copetti.
The Digital Antiquarian: A History of computer entertainment and digital culture by Jimmy Maher.

Wellbeing

Digital Minimalism: How to use “just enough” technology by Amy Lamb.
Solving Procrastination: Help with understanding and overcoming procrastination.

Humans do it better.

circuitshelter

Ad blocking, privacy, and common sense from a macOS perspective

Safari + Ghostery

Safari

Ghostery

Brave (Chromium)

Firefox + UBlock Origin

Firefox

UBlock Origin

Final thoughts

The possibility of an alternative approach

Persistent port forwarding for NAT-PMP clients on Linux

Low-tech Magazine

Run custom screensaver on a modern GNOME/Wayland desktops

Turn your old laptop into low-end gaming machine

Typical low-end laptop specs

Why Windows is a NO-GO for an old laptops

Choosing the right Linux distro

Installation notes

Configuration

What to expect

Side-notes

Steam

Retroarch

SerenityOS

backy: Tiny multiprocessing utility for file backups

Sometimes the best option is the simplest one.

Kid Pix 1.0 in JS

JS Kid Pix

Configuring DNS settings on Ubuntu with Netplan

Personal Computing On An Amiga In 2021

Browsing modern internet on vintage computers

Retro Computing Internet Resources

Highlights

FrogFind!

68k-news

The Old Net

After Dark in CSS

Windows 95 in Virtual Reality

Workaround for VLC fullscreen flickering in macOS

Preferences > Show All

Interfaces

Video

Age of Empires II: Best Migration game ever

On Coding for Fun

Workaround for Audible authorization with Apple Books

Hugo post template generator

Age of Empires II: Best islands game ever

3D level design museum

Creating bootable USB drives with GNOME Disks

Notes

Checking host availability with Python and AWS Lambda

Where to find old games and software

Stores

Databases

Public Archives

Safety First!

RetroArch now available on the Amazon App Store

Age of Empires II: The Legend of Fatslob

Browservice

How does it work?

Chicago95

Included in this theme

Requirements

Installation

Fixing Secure Boot Violation on linux

Solution

Links

Fix for screen tearing on linux using NVIDIA drivers

Solution

Links

Using BIND 9 RPZ as DNS firewall

RPZ file generation

Configuration

Links

Age of Empires II: The Legend of WALL

Awesome Web Desktops

Winamp Skins Gallery

Windows MIDI tracks

Widelands 1.0 Released