Ah, thanks for the feedback. Can you give me an idea of areas that I should improve? I tried to keep it simple, you should just be able to select a game and play, but maybe there is a pain point that I don’t notice anymore now that I’ve gotten used to it.

Thanks! What do you mean about smartphones, can you share what phone OS and browser you are using? It should work on Android (Firefox/Chrome) and iOS (Safari), I consider mobile to be just as important as desktop. Ah, I remember some FOSS mobile browsers have WebAssembly disabled… here is an older version compiled to JS instead of WASM, let me know if that works: https://alexbarry.net/dev/games/reversi-ai2-no-wasm-2025-01-05/

In hindsight I should add some browser side detection of if WASM is supported, then show a warning at least, if not redirect to a JS version.

And yes, it’s all one big code base (https://github.com/alexbarry/AlexGames), each game is pretty small though, maybe 500-1000 lines of Lua on average: https://github.com/alexbarry/AlexGames/tree/main/src/lua_scripts/games . Overall it’s quite simple, the Lua/Rust APIs just call simple browser APIs to draw shapes and graphics. The harder part was being able to re-use the same code on Android and desktop (wxWidgets). Also I’m running into some WASM/browser limitations when trying to do heavy processing for board games AI.

What do people think of my hobby project, “AlexGames”: (F-Droid) (Web version) (Source on Github, AGPLv3).

It’s a collection of simple games, mostly solo or local multiplayer, though the web version supports network multiplayer by sending your friend a URL: solitaire, chess, go, reversi, checkers, minesweeper, backgammon, some word puzzle games, and some arcade type games.

I was planning on adding AI next. And I really should polish the Android app, I’ve mostly only focused on the web version. And if people want, I could also submit to Google Play. My calculator app seems to be a lot more popular on F-Droid than Google Play, so I haven’t bothered uploading this one to Google Play yet.

Happy to hear any feedback! I suspect that it looks too bland and unpolished for many people to be interested, or maybe it needs different kinds of games? My goal was to not need to download a bunch of ad filled free apps from the play store for when I wanted to play games with a friend on a flight or something, or just idly play something simple like solitaire.

edit: also in the Android app, stick to the “webview” version… the native Android version is mostly an experiment, I meant to hide it behind a setting but never got around to it.

What does “boundaries” mean here? Did you mean “binaries”? Apologies if this is obvious to most people, I never used BBS myself and only saw my father use them. I know he used BBS to find shareware games for me, I’m not sure if he actually downloaded them through usenet.

The cookie popups (you mean the cookie consent ones, right?) weren’t really common until like ~2016 or so, were they? (I found this post that claims May 2018) And I thought there were actual pop up ads before then, though yeah not as bad as modern internet browsing without an ad blocker, in some ways.

But there were other usability quirks… I remember always downloading Firefox on a new computer, because Internet Explorer 5 or whatever didn’t have tabs (and Firefox did). Then Chrome was faster and seemed to quickly take over. I remember that javascript alert popups were somewhat common, and would force their window or tab to the top, so a site could easily kind of hijack your whole desktop session, since I think you couldn’t resize the window or even close it until dismissing the popup. In fact at some point the major browsers added a checkbox “prevent this site from showing this dialog” (or something like that) as a mitigation. Before that you could do like while (true) { alert('hello world'); } and I think the only workaround was to force-close the browser? Other random tidbit: you could also execute arbitrary javascript by putting it in the address bar, javascript:alert('hello world') would show the popup. And ha, I remember when the address bar didn’t default to search, it would only accept URLs.

In 1996 I was quite young, but I remember my father connecting to bulletin boards to download free shareware games for me, and it would use up the home phone line. (For anyone who doesn’t know, bulletin boards were text based, like a terminal… and he’d have to call a number, we’d look up some in our area code to avoid long distance fees, I think. When visiting my grandmother’s house in another province, we used a different set of bulletin boards, I think. I remember seeing something like a phone book that would list a bunch of servers that could be called for different things. I remember seeing something like this on Reddit a long time ago:

Its like this area of tall building that has little to no safety. No elevators, a staircase that ran from ground floor to like idk 7 or 8 floors? And the stairs were exposed to outside the building, meaning you could accidentally fall and die. It took a half an hour to get to the main road where you can actually take a bus and where the malls are at.

Could you share a picture of this? I tried to find one myself on the internet but couldn’t. That sounds really interesting… were there handrails?

I think I first started regularly using the internet in the early 2000s, when I was a little older than 10.

I mostly remember looking up N64 game walkthroughs on “GameFAQs”, reading some big text file with occasional ASCII diagrams. I think I’d sometimes print them. I also used MSN Messenger to talk to some friends. Not many people had microphones so often I’d still use the house phone to call a friend if we were chatting over MSN but wanted to say a lot over voice.

But for most of my PC gaming time before that, I would just ignore the (network) multiplayer option in games, since I never had a LAN party and mostly only had dial up, where you would tie up the home phone line, and I assume actually call the person you want to game with, or maybe call some specific server (and I was too young to do that on my own anyway).

But I remember one day playing StarCraft (the original), realizing that I finally had a dedicated and decent internet connection, and that I’d be ignoring the multiplayer button unnecessarily. I joined a random multiplayer game, a 7 vs 1 “comp[uter player] stomp”. It was quite novel for me to get to play a computer game and chat with random people, I remember showing my parents. Later I played “James Bond: Nightfire” on PC a lot with randoms, and joined clans and all that. Later I played Runescape and most of the rest of my friends and classmates eventually played too.

It’s kind of sad now that everyone is on the internet, and that we’re “always” on. You don’t really say “brb” anymore. I kind of liked when the internet was something that you’d only get to see when using the shared family computer, not something that’s constantly accessible to us at all times. I even wrote this when I meant to just relax in the sun, not scroll on my phone.

After reading a bunch of comments about people using electronics in this post, I had initially pictured “jumpers” as either “jumper cables”, the things people use to boost car batteries with, or small plastic coated pieces of metal or wires that can be placed over exposed pins on circuit boards to connect them (e.g to enable some behaviour). Generally I’d only assume this meaning in a discussion about electronics, though.

(I’m not the person that you replied to, and I knew that jumper means sweater or jacket or something in British (and possibly Australian?) English.)

And now that I think about it, most of my clothing gets worn after a few years, at least on the elbows.

I like how Mastodon lets you post links to things like your personal website or GitHub, and show a “verified” check next to them if you add something to your site/github to indicate that you’re the owner.

I don’t really use Bluesky but I like how they let you use your domain name as a username.

It probably rules out bots but I assume propaganda/troll farms could still do this.

Another thing I was thinking of is if there could be separate moderation lists that people could subscribe to. Maybe one basic one for “obviously spam”, but others for people who are suspected of being bots. I’m sure there would be abuse and echo chambers, but if anyone can create and many people can contribute to a list, people could just go with whatever list they prefer, perhaps looking at the blocked content itself to see if the list is implemented well.

I think some people used Reddit enhancement suite to tag users that they interact with. I like that idea but have never gone to the effort, and don’t usually read usernames enough to remember people. So a crowdsourced version of that might work.

If this is it then OP should just offer to get coffee to-go and go for a walk or sit in a nearby park, perhaps with a playground. Then they wouldn’t have to worry about bothering others. A coffee shop seems like a boring place for a 3 year old.

My assumption is that there is a chance (not sure how large) that kids could be restless and need constant attention, and then it would suck for OP and is a bit much to expect someone you barely know to meet up just for that.

But I think there’s a chance that the young one will just sleep, and the older one could occupy themselves at the playground or even with a tablet or something. Then it should only be a minor hassle for the OP.

Maybe OP could just ask the person if they think they’ll be able to actually talk or if the kids will need constant attention.

Thanks, this is something I was considering. I’ve always wanted to dive into the code for something like VLC or Firefox, but I feel like it would take a while before it becomes fun. I still plan on doing it when I feel like I have more free time. Maybe I need to find simpler projects.

I guess in this post I was hoping for something that could have meaningful progress made in a few hours, without a ton of ramping up time. Maybe that doesn’t exist?

I agree and am surprised that this isn’t more in demand. I like matrix.org and use it as a regular messenger for people that I’ve convinced to use it. But it is dependent on people hosting their own instances, or using the official public one (for free).

They do have a “peer to peer” matrix experiment that I’ve heard about but it was in its early stages when I last looked at it: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/02/introducing-p2p-matrix/

I bought a 512 GB SanDisk one for $65 USD a few years ago. I don’t like Samsung software bloatware on their phones, but having 512 GB of storage for $65 feels pretty futuristic to me. I can’t believe more phone manufacturers don’t offer external SD card support… you’d think more consumers would demand it, given that the alternative is to pay a lot more, every time you get a new phone.

I’m basically able to keep like every photo I’ve taken for the last 10 years or so (though not at original resolution).

I was thinking this too, but consider some improvements:

• wireless printing seems to “just work” now. Besides having to painfully enter my wifi password with up and down arrows on my printer, it seems like my windows and Mac laptops are able to print to it wirelessly without any initial setup. (I use Linux on my desktop but haven’t tried printing from it yet). I think it even works from phones.
• cables: I don’t remember what type of cable printers used, but I remember the big keyboard cable, then the smaller purple and green PS/2 ones (I think keyboard and mouse were different?)… I vaguely remember multiple different peripheral cables, like FireWire? Giant parallel ports for things like scanners?

I hate that most printers don’t come with the USB (B?) cable that seemingly only printers need now, but I’m glad that it’s standard and that everything supports <strikethrough>USB-A</strikethrough> I mean USB-C (except my PC) now. Such a utopia.

I find that stove top popcorn is even less convenient (so less tempting to eat all the time), but much cheaper, and maybe tastier in some ways.

Get a ~500 g (1 lb or so?) bag of whole kernels for $3-ish, some oil that you use for cooking other stuff anyway, and salt. Heat the oil on the stove with a few kernels, then when those pop, briefly remove from heat and add more. Make sure the pot has a lid. Keep shaking it side to side to keep the popcorn from burning.

I find it adds just enough oil to taste good, but not so much that I’m eating something super awful for me. (And it’s much tastier than air popped). And I assume you could still add melted butter if you want an extra treat.

I want to get one of those movie theatre style things where the popcorn can fly out of the pot.

My problem may be related: how do you find people to follow? I wish I could just follow communities like on Lemmy. I’ve tried following hastags I’m interested in, but it seems like they aren’t always used.

I’ve instead searched for topics that I’m interested in, followed a bunch of people, then unfollowed the ones that post too much stuff I’m not interested in. But this seems like a pain.

I also don’t necessarily want to see everything that a single person posts.

Cool, thanks! This is what I was looking for. I’ve briefly tried playing with Nextcloud before, but this seems like another good option.

This is what I do for my own notes now, but could it work for students writing essays and that sort of thing? I suppose there must be some markdown to HTML/PDF/etc converters (also probably ODT or DOCX or whatever).

This is actually what I did when I was in school, and overall it was quite pleasant. There was some WYSIWYG LaTeX program too that I shared with some colleagues when we were working on a document together, I remember it working okay.

But I don’t see the average student, especially studying non technical stuff, to pick up LaTeX just for normal sort of essays. Even I am fairly rusty now. And honestly I don’t even know if I could have managed it during high school, where I had to write English essays and stuff with specific formatting for references. (I am grateful that my engineering education was less strict about that sort of thing).

I was hoping that someone would suggest a self hosted web document suite, I think “Nextcloud” is a popular one. Then it should work on any OS, and you don’t have to worry about syncing files. Even if you can pay to have someone else host an instance (not sure if this exists), and ideally a program that can keep a local backup synced to your PCs would be a big step in the right direction. Syncthing seems pretty great, though I haven’t used it much, and on iOS it doesn’t seem to be able to run in the background.

edit: I just read another comment that recommended OnlyOffice, this seems like another good option (source: this reply: https://lemmy.ca/comment/9415293). Aside: is there a proper way to link to a comment on lemmy that will go through your own homeserver?

What do you recommend? I love LibreOffice on Windows and Linux, and it still works well on macOS but the GUI seems weird on it, the buttons are really large. I still use it but my partner is put off by it.