I discovered today that tucows is retiring/disappearing/perhaps mostly gone. Admittedly I don’t think I’ve used it since my windows XP days. Was a fab source for shareware/freeware utilities to enhance XP. There used to be another site, now long gone, called DownloadSquad that would have regular reviews/announcements of new software and I’d usually try out something new every other week. Over time, some of those things have been incorporated into operating systems.

I remember there used to be a tool so that I’d hit the space and start typing to launch documents and software. These days, that’s built into windows via the windows key and windows indexing has improved lots. There are still things I like to install on new systems like cygwin and text adventure interpreters but a lot less than I used to.

Meanwhile I came across a timeline of web browsers dating back to the early 90s and of course my old favourite text only browser, lynx, is still kicking about – I usually have it installed as part of my cygwin setup. The downside of using a text viewer to browse webpages is that you usually have to scroll through a bunch of pages to get to the content as per below:

There’s been a European case around geoblocking game purchases ie forcing folk to buy games in their country rather than from whatever country they can get it from cheaper. It’s an interesting result as gaming isn’t the only area that’s done this sort of thing, books being another good case. I remember when I started buying via amazon how much cheaper the same edition of a book was that way than locally. These days, I don’t buy much from Amazon tending to either buy from local distributors like Booktopia or direct from publishers.

In other news, the Alta-Vista URL still works but redirects to Yahoo…which still works.