Last night, some friends and I tried to visit a nightclub to see a buddy's band play their set. Things were going rather well as we got to the place; we were able to wait in the privileged guest line and, having checked our I.D.'s, the bouncer let us in with expediency.

Then, before paying the entry charge, we were asked for the I.D. again: not to verify our entitlement of age, but to record and retain personal information as a condition of entry. I didn't immediately know the terms but, being protective of my privacy, I protested.

I don't want you to scan my driver's license.

It's bar policy, sir. Everyone's I.D.'s are scanned. I can't let you in if you won't let me scan your I.D..

You do realise that what you are doing is illegal, right?

You do realise that this sign has been put up by the police department, right? was the reply, guided with a pointing finger.

Snide staff and illegal data collection! This sounded like my kind of place. The sign did describe the way data was collected, specifying an illegal retention range of two years, and that it was recorded for safety purposes, with the information being released only under the jurisdiction of a court order. Then it went on to read that no data would be used for any "direct marketing purposes" (emphasis mine).

But I thought the information wasn't available without a court order, so how could it be used for any marketing purposes? There was also no mention of police cooperation, outside of the removal and enforcement services they provide by course of their function, and no indication of police branding or approval. In fact, the only organisational identifier was the name TreoScope.

Clearly, I didn't go in, instead choosing to spend my time and money in an establishment that doesn't insist on branding patrons as guilty before innocent; which left me wondering about what they do with incompatible but legally qualified I.D..

I've recently started playing Rise of Nations again and could do little more than note how good the music is. But I'm quite angry about it.

Here's why: there was only ever one "soundtrack" release, but it was a live re-recording of some orchestra playing arrangements of a few songs, encoded into 5.1 DTS audio and released on DVD; the only source of what one could hear in-game are the audio files themselves, and those are compressed using MS-ADPCM (which sounds much worse than, say, a CBR-encoded 128 KbPS MP3). I found myself feeling much the same as when I gave the original Sims game another stint; like something brilliant got quashed in the hands of idiots, and that the situation could be very easily amended but will never be. There will, with overwhelming likelihood, never be a lossless release of either soundtrack.

So here is another reason to like games older than these: music therein is almost exclusively tracked, not stored directly as a waveform. This means that these sort of problems cannot appear, ever; the quality of the music is designed, somewhat, to scale up or down with the equipment available. MS-ADPCM will forever have the clicks and pops of a 16-bit recording reduced to a practical depth of 4 bits.

Amendment: It has come to my attention that, indeed, there was a very limited release of a part of the original soundtrack for The Sims, in the form of a promotional disc included with select pre-purchases made in a British-based game-store chain. The said release is incredibly rare, owing to the odd nature of its distribution. The only comparative that comes to mind is the lossless release of the Mirror's Edge soundtrack, which was available through online purchase for less than a day; after the few hours of legal availability, it was totally removed and, inexplicably, replaced with a lossy alternative.

If there is one thing I am a fan of, it's Linux. Linux on computers, Linux on smartphones, Linux on game consoles… where-ever. I've spent the past few days trying to install Gentoo on my Wii; it's one of the first manufactured, so perfectly exploitable for homebrew. Back in November 2006, a friend had asked me to keep him company in the overnight queue for the PS3; I had no intention of buying anything but, when dawn rolled around and workers showed up to inform customers that there were not enough PlayStations to go around, Wii pre-orders were offered instead. Pandemonium ensued. I took their offer.

And I got one two weeks later.

Of course, Wii Linux would not appear for many years, but I had the fortune of only updating the System Software to 4.1U, the last version to still support simple software-hacking.

Anyway, the Wii sports a PowerPC processor that belongs to the IBM 750-series family, the same family of processors used on G3 Macintosh computers. The Wii also has about 70 megabytes of combined RAM. By combined, I mean CPU and GPU memory together. It's a perfect candidate for a very small home server, something like a caching DNS server or a backup server using USB-connected hard disks as the destination. I'll probably end up using it as a SSH gateway, so that I can reach this network from the outside world.

I'll probably write a guide on how to do it, or at least a post describing how I did it.

This is the last update I'll be writing on this iMac. Sunday is the Lord's day, Yahweh go fuck himself, Chuthulu be blessed, and all the rest, and I'll be damned if I work then.

And this post will probably be the lamest one, too: actually, they're all pretty lame. I'm going to write about how incapable the iMac is.

Perhaps I've grown too accustomed to package managers, but it is too hard to get software for this system. It can do almost nothing on its own, and there are no tools with which to create software. Even the Amiga that I keep alluding to came with BASIC in the box. Here, one is entirely dependent on outside sources for software. Cue Joe User.

I guess this was a different world than the one I am now used to; there was no Linux, no unmitigated viewing and editing of source code.

Still, given its age, the software that was available for it runs quite well and can do quite a bit; the ancient version of Photoshop that came with this can still do a lot, even if certain open-source alternatives outperform this particular instance. AppleWorks is an incredibly well-integrated office solution; I was taken aback by how well together all the individual document modules work. It was something amazing. On that topic, there was a disc with Office 2001, but I didn't want to deal with Microsoft's failures on more than one platform.

And then there were the games: Lemmings was a gigantic nostalgia trip, until I found out that a bug with level selection mixes up levels and jobs; rather than give the player a choice of jobs for the correct level, it would give him or her the jobs from a completely different level. I couldn't be bothered to play the entire goddamn game at once, so I just played the first few levels of all the different difficulty levels. Mayhem is really fucking hard.

Oh, yeah, and there was also Starship Titanic. A clever little game that seems to be animated in real-time; but really, it is all frames from AVI files.

I'm actually quite tempted to install OS X on this now, just to make a comparison. I most definitely won't, however; having a deep distrust of the company, especially in its current state, will certainly prevent me from doing so. Apple has gone the way of Google: first tolerable, then evil.

It's not only extensions: bloody near everything is easy to install. Sometimes programs depend on a bunch of files, libraries and the like, around the main binary, but most of everything here adheres to "one program, one file". And that program doesn't need an installer, strictly speaking.

On that topic: this makes piracy laughably easy. Drop a file on a floppy or, better yet, use the "Disk Copy" utility included with the goddamn operating system to wrap up any program in a nice little package. Hell, the Amiga did more to stop copying. On the other hand, I don't think that developers were really expecting, well, the Internet. Then again, Mac OS 9 was dubbed the “Best Internet Operating System”. Hm.

In a way, little control is better: other than not restricting the user, it would allow him or her to run the program on several (of her or his own) computers, or even sharing on a small scale… much better than the current mentality of hurting the legitimate users in favour of stricter and stricter copy control mechanisms, which get end up getting compromised anyway.

Installing and removing system extensions is a snap. Copy into a folder, reboot, and it loads. I was surprised to find out that Photoshop 7 set up a bunch of extensions as part of the default install. If I recall correctly, the classic Mac OS'es run a microkernel , so this isn't quite comparable to Photoshop having its own kernel module in Linux or Windows. Although, it wouldn't be surprising if Photoshop did mess with the kernel for license enforcement, at least in Windows.

But, still, it's kind of odd to see that this sort of thing is necessary, particularly on something so memory-depraved. So far, this system loads at least five extensions that provide essentially redundant audio functionality. It is like a destitute fishmonger storing every different kind of fish in a different refrigerator; perhaps useful if he had a huge variety of fish (but he doesn't because he is destitute), or if he wasn't destitute (but he then he would have a huge variety of fish). Quite some time ago, a buddy of mine reflected about KDE 3: “it's like a French whore; all dolled up, but still ugly”. I feel the same way here.

Actually, I feel that way about Gnome 3 now. Thank god for XFCE.

Off-topic: To get these updates, I wrote a quick XHTML page with a few dozen input fields (the bug, which turns out is strictly a browser problem, involves truncating the content of text fields) and a script. Catch the text, contatenate it and show the result, and a post there is. Super.

I'm trying desperately to not write about the user interface again; it is very difficult to not to. After all, what else am I staring at all day? Ominous.

The environment works well regardless of colours used; I'm happy to switch between 8-bit and 24-bit colour without having to expect a puke-coloured widget-and-toolbar set to show up. That being said, this particular machine works much better in 800x600 than 1024x768. Much, much better; it's kind of a letdown. This was one of the last OS 9 Macs to ship, so I imagine this characteristic to be more spread; that being said, I have never used professional-level Apple equipment, which should be of a higher calibre. Should. But I'll rant about that later.

I honestly can't think of anything not design-related to say, so I'll just stop here.

I've got a confession to make: the interface I use to update this blog had a pretty serious bug, one that prevented me from updating after Tuesday. Well, serious when dealing with ancient browsers, anyway. So, in the spirit of carrying on, I figured I would just write updates into text files on the Mac and put them up here later.

That was a mistake. Getting any data from a Mac to something that isn't a Mac is goddamn notoriously hard; OS 9 doesn't recognise flash drives, nor can it upload to anything that isn't AppleTalk. Now I'm looking for a Linux distribution that still boots on such an old computer, since it can speak CIFS (or, you know, take your pick of protocols). Gentoo might be a good call, but the amount of effort to install it… I should have written the posts by hand, it would have been less work.

From an interface and usage perspective, the Mac is gold. I can see why these were as popular as they once were: the design is perfectly slick and completely transparent, very much like oil in one regard but actually very much unlike it; different elements match together so consistently that I'm often confused about where the desktop environment ends and the application begins. Kind of like the opposite of oil and water, I suppose, but that's not a fitting analogy either.

Also, I'm rarely ever aware of what's happening under the hood; technical details are kept at such a total minimum that it's hard to get to them, even when one wants to. And, although it drives someone like me to dust to be kept this much in the dark, it is absolutely what the everyday user wants. “I don't care how it's done, I just want it done with the minimum amount of effort and thought on my part”, Joe User thinks. “I can go a few more thousand dollars into debt; I think I'll go buy a Mac.”. Yessir, the American give-it-to-me-now, take-my-savings-if-you-can-make-it-easier mentality at its best.

But the scary thing is that, while doing anything here, I'm pretty well constantly aware of Apple's brand. I mean constantly to mean constantly. The bottom panel of this iMac advertises itself as an iMac, and there is no moment where something iconic to Apple is not on screen. At boot, I see a smiling Mac; then the smiling Mac OS logo; and, finally, the momentous, ever-present Apple icon from which, if one is accustomed to European writing concepts, everything appears to start. It lives at the top-left corner.

It feels like everything is full of this sort of subtlety.

That being said, there are some ideas and features which are, without a doubt, of the highest calibre: for example, how the system responds to user action (using a keyboard shortcut causes the toolbar element matching the shortcut to blink), and how the system can play a sound at defined intervals (as a clock might).

On the other hand, features such as extension management, hardware support, colour consistency, software dependencies and the like were only so easy for the user because of Apple's strict control over the platform: Mac OS would ever only run on Apple-provided hardware, or at least clones of official systems. One could not reasonably build his or her own Mac from a bunch of replaceable, standardised parts. This led to a less-varied computing ecosystem and, consequently, a more easily controlled one.

A word from the trenches: this shit is nostalgic. I can't remember the last time I heard (and got annoyed by) the whine of the disk-drive motor. It's the only moving part in this system: lots of older Macs were cooled by convection only.

For web browsing, there are only two reasonable choices: Classilla and iCab, both of which can just barely do something as recent as XHTML. Neither has any damn clue about the most basic CSS3 selectors; its immediate predecessor, however, seems to render somewhat better. I should not complain, on the other hand, as the only alternatives are Netscape Communicator (shudder) and Internet Explorer 5 (groan).

I just realised that copy-and-paste does not work between applications, only within applications. Advanced!

Well, at least the games are fun: at the behest of some friendly friends at the forum, I've been playing quite a bit of Nanosaur. Apparently it's being given away for free now… despite the “full version” still asking for a registration key. Hm. Also, Lemmings.

Today is Tuesday and this post is titled “Day One”, despite me saying on Sunday that ‘tomorrow’ would be the first day. Herp derp, I'm updating one day after creating the post. Proofreading counts, though Murphy's Law is certainly invoked as I type this very sentence holy shit I am typing what I am thinking.

I will soon embark on my most ridiculous enterprise yet: a whole week of only using an old iMac G3 as my computer. Oh, and it only runs Mac OS 9. By “my computer”, I mean the computer I primarly use at home; aside from some kind of terrible emergency that could rival being on the receiving end of an operation by 4chan, the iMac is all I will use for personal computing.

That being said, it might be a good idea be a bit clearer about what that means: cell phones, game consoles, refrigerators, cars and the like don't count as computers, unless there is duplicate functionality involved. For example, if a game console provided a web browser, and so did the iMac, I could not use the console's browser. Makes sense. As far as software on the iMac is concerned, anything that runs goes; while OS 9 has been dead since 2002, its software is still quite good… probably.

I had some fun downconverting a chronistic selection of FLACs into MP3s. OS 9 can't play compressed lossless audio (even in Apple's own shitty format), nor can it read UTF-8 ID3v2 tags. Wow. So much for using those awesome-looking (not) Harman Kardon speakers to their full extent.

I'll be keeping a journal of the experiences over the week, and posting the results here.

After some interesting feedback, I've changed the default theme to “Banana Mint”. Yes, I realise how much the old theme looked like shit; but its inspiration kinda looked like shit too.

I'm just unhappy that I probably made something as bad as Blackboard.

After a metric crap-ton of work, I'm somewhat proud to announce the grand re-launching of the blog no-one reads! I mean Zyx's Subdomain which, if one is so inclined, will provide hours of stupid time-wasting. A bright day for the Internet, indeed.