Since Enhanced Tracking Protection was made default on Firefox 72, Cbox is being flagged by the tracking/fingerprinting heuristics because it's a Cross-Origin Resource Sharing iframe running analytics.
Cbox claims it's a false positive, that the IPs they collect are to display a visitor counter, number of unique visitors and country of origin, and also to give users the ability to block IPs in case of bots/spammers/trolls, and that there is no cross-user/chatbox tracking. They requested to be whitelisted, but to this day Firefox hasn't gotten back to them - Firefox 72 was released in January 2020.
Cbox is whitelisted by uBlock Origin, AdGuard, Brave Shield, and most importantly, it's not on any of HaGeZi's lists. On default ETP settings, Firefox no longer blocks the chat (neither does Mullvad and Tor browsers), but on strict settings it gets blocked (LibreWolf is strict by default).
If the chat is blocked and you really want to see it, you are going to have to turn off the Enhanced Tracking Protection for my page (the only CORS script running here is the Cbox analytics), or use a non-Firefox-based browser.
How to make Neocities' Screenjesus your bitch:
The JS way
You can control the agent who takes the daily screenshot of your updates for the Neocities feed. First time I came across a script for it was the Penelope is Missing campaign, then on a journal post I wanted to change the location of the screenshot, I used a modified version of it, just removing the weird margins and padding. One day Caroline was asking about that script and I showed her my version and then she made a way better one, so if you want to control what Screenjesus prints just put the following script in your <head> and put the URL of what you want it to see:
<script>
if (navigator.userAgent === "Screenjesus") {
location.replace("YOUR URL");
}
</script>
barndoors has a cool version of it showing a random image, but it's somewhere in his repo and I don't remember where, and it was easier to just write another version based on Caroline's script. So if you want it to pick random images try this one (and add as many URLs as you want following that pattern):
If you don't like JavaScript/simply don't want scripts running in your site, well, I have a script-free side-project and I wanted to manipulate the Screenjesus there as well, and after reading suboptimalism's article about Neocities hidden mechanics I realized it's quite easy to do it. The screenshoot is taken at exactly 1280x960, so you just have to control what's shown at that resolution, so add to your <style>/.css file the following:
#screenjesus {
display: none;
position:fixed;
inset: 0;
width: 100vw;
height: 100vh;
object-fit: contain;
background: black;
z-index: *higher than any other you are using*;
}
@media (width: 1280px) and (height: 960px) {
#screenjesus {
display: block;
}
}
Then put somewhere on your <body> an image with that id (if the image is already 1280x960px the width, height, object-fit and background rules are useless), it's going to be invisible to you but the only thing Screenjesus sees (or you can make 50 lines/900 characters of rules to rearrange your other elements like I did on PxHC). It's near impossible for someone to be browsing your site at that exact resolution, because even if they were using a 4:3 monitor at that resolution, the viewport is affected by the browser chrome, so they'd need to be in full-screen mode to get stuck - and if you are really worried about it, you can also display a fullscreen transparent label at that resolution on a higher z-index for a checkbox input to reverse the previous rules, so at the first click the site goes back to normal.
Let's hope the agent name and the resolution it takes screenshots at never change.
Get indexed EVERYWHERE!
Create your RSS feed
Make the small web welcoming
Good programs to have and services to use:
Over the years, the core stuff I'd install on every fresh start has changed widely. I have been a pirate all my life, so having full MS Office, Macromedia and Adobe packages weren't ever a problem. Over time I started favoring Open-Source initiatives, though.
LibreWolf is very privacy-oriented light web browser based on Firefox, fairly new but with a very active community and regular updates, but if you are looking for anonymity for some online activity, then you better go with Tor. I like that you can keep convenient accounts logged on LibreWolf and it comes with uBlock Origin. Tor has its own adblocking measures that is not as good, and although you can use uBlock Origin with it, the third party is a vulnerability if you are aiming at anonymity. Also, remember that Tor is not for streaming and stuff, for its layered encryption severely impacts the bandwidth.
I talk more about browsers and tons of other privacy stuff on Fuck Big Tech.
The main tool I use to control the connections going on my device, it's probably the first thing I'm installing after downloading a new browser. I talk more about why using firewall and DNS control on Fuck Big Tech too
Essential for compressing folders. WinRAR still has a special place in my heart for being a cool company with a fun PR, but although it's still the most popular program, 7-Zip is superior in every way.
LibreOffice is the best Open-Source alternative to the heavily bloated MS Office. But if you just want to quickly share some files online, try CryptPad - I've been saving some stuff on Proton Docs as well.
Moving away from the bloated crap that became Photoshop was quite hard. GIMP is still the best Open-Source option for heavy image editing, but quite hard to get into. Gladly, the PhotoGimp mod exists. For art, Krita is the way to go, but for some light work, Photopea it is.
Some may call it a convenience Photopea being an online tool, but I'd really like an official offline version.
My Open source recommended alternatives to AI-infested Windows crap.
Email services
Google is very convenient for logons on major services, sites, and quick checks through your web browser since all your activity is tracked and used for serving ads anyway. The easiest available free alternative focused on your privacy is Proton Mail, although their e2ee encryption is oversold, since metadata is not encrypted. My personal pick is pairing the Open-Source desktop service Mozilla Thunderbird with a RiseUp.net email. RiseUp.net is a non-commercial independent organization with strong ethics focused on privacy, that actively resists governmental control, and purges logs daily. However, check your ideological affinity before applying.
I talk more about email providers and tons of other privacy stuff on Fuck Big Tech.
Search Engines
DuckDuckGo is the most popular search engine if you want to avoid getting profiled, your history tracked, targeted ads, biased results and filter bubbles. However, DuckDuckGo is mostly based on Bing and Yahoo, while Google is still the behemot, with the amount of crawled and indexed content towering everything else, so what I really recommend is using Startpage, who uses Google's index but removes all their tracking and data collection. Or use both, why not.
Again, check Fuck Big Tech for more info.
Blogging and Web Hosting
If you want to focus on privacy, and your project is suitable, you should check the WordPress-based Noblogs and read their manifesto. Like RiseUp.net, they also encrypt your activity, purge your data, and protect your privacy and anonymity. They also offer free web hosting, but as a noncommercial organization maintained by donations and volunteer work, your project needs to share their ideological inclinations.
Finally, a great free web hosting service, reminiscing a time before social media killed internet creativity, is this very one you're surfing right now, Neocities :)
Check also NekoWeb.
VPN
VPN services are paid, and I don't have much experience with them, for I don't live in a country where corporations force ISPs to rat you out. But for light internet usage, i.e. no streaming or torrenting, consider using the free Proton VPN.
Again, I talk more about it on Fuck Big Tech.
Social Media
I've grown to loathe social media. I'm outdated and mostly uninterested at the moment. I was participating on lemmy.ml and then moved to lemmy.dbzer0.com but that's it (ml promotes itself as being about free open source software but it's actually a marxist-leninist stalinist instance, I moved to dbzer0 that is anarchist). However, I talk more extensively about social on Fuck Big Tech too.
Yes, I'm a Windows user, although I get madder at their increasing control and our decreasing customization options at every new release. I tried Ubuntu somewhen in the late '00s, but the low compatibility at the time, especially for gaming, drove me away - I'm sure it's way better now.
I'm not one to spend on hardware. I can count one hand the amount of desktop and laptops I have owned. When I tried to move my last laptop from Win10 to Win7, in a time Win7 was still supported, I discovered its hardware simply had no plugins for it, and I couldn't even use the keyboard or USB ports... discovering this industry practice was quite shocking for me, and my new device is also a laptop for I need its portability, and I never checked its compatibility with other systems, but if possible, I shall try Linux again in the future, probably Kubuntu for its stability, or Pop!_OS for its compatibility (also KDE Plasma and Cosmic looked like the most interesting desktop environemnts for me), then I will know more about which build to recommend. Also, I'm keeping my eyes on Tails if I'm ever to get nasty again.
Sharing is caring - and never trust corporate streaming!
My older brother came from Napster. When I joined the internet I was on Kazaa. I remember trying eMule and LimeWire later and finding them awnful, but in hindsight, Kazaa was also pretty crappy. It was only when I joined SoulSeek that I discovered what a great P2P community looked like.
And the best tool for very large files, like movies, series and softwares. Forget every other Torrent client that will bombard you with ads, try to sell you cryptocrap and even use your hardware to mine. qBittorrent is the superior and free Open-Source alternative.
Where to start? Well, I use it mostly for movies and series. 1337x has a lot trackers, EXT has more options. Nyaa is especialized in anime and manga. For old stuff I'm not finding, I still go to The Pirate Bay. There are tons of other options out there, though, and if you are not finding something, it never hurts to just enter the name followed by "watch/read online" in a search engine.
Store locally or let corporations destroy everything
There are a lot of online tools available to download content from most streaming platforms, but they are mostly very crappy. For most popular video hosting webistes I really like to use 4K Download, fairly generic name but also light and with very good options. Devs also seem fast to update protocols when needed. As for most popular music streaming platforms, I've been using Sidify, which is competent but I'm not that happy with the program. Both are paid services, but of course you can look for cracked versions at your own risk - both aren't very trustworthy to begin with.
I accept recommendations, though, because I'm not that knowledgeable on this and there might be better options out there.
It really whips the llama's ass!
I have been happily married to Winamp for almost 25 years now. Yeah, I may have accidently used Windows Media Player sometimes, and maybe I had gotten naughty with foobar2000 as well to experimence new things, but I always come back to you, my love.
The last version of Winamp is 5.666 from 2013, after that Nullsoft was terminated and Radionomy launched buggy versions focused on wallets and NFT crap, really laughable.
WinAmp Community Update Project, as the name suggests, is a community-driven project. It's working up from Winamp 5.666 and has a nice and active community. The best Winamp experience nowadays is through WACUP.
One thing I love about Winamp is the community it had behind it. Creating skins and visualizations was so easy everyone would do it and you had tons available, although several had very questionable quality. Winamp Skin Museum has an awesome collection of skins for the default form, but there were also freeform skins that completely changed the UI. I couldn't find a good library focused on freeform skins, but you can find a good amount at Winamp Heritage, which also has a plenty visualizations.
One of my favorite skins is PIPBoy 2000 by Gerk2077, based on the Fallout UI (by the way, the background here is my recreation of the original Fallout screensaver, and this font you are reading is the Fallout font. If you plan to use PIPBoy 2000 skin, you better use with the proper font!), but I also like a lot WACUPified color-theme.
obs: The song at the top of this page is Whip the Llama's Ass by Wesley Willis, the inspiration for Winamp's slogan "It really whips the llama's ass!".
Yeah I love Winamp, but when it comes to customization and library management, foobar2000 outclasses everything else. As I'm not very much into "exploring the library", having the music player occupying my whole screen, displaying information I don't really need while I listen to the music (of course, the customization includes removing all of that, and you can make a compact mode), and I prefer to play custom playlists, foobar2000 tools are way beyond my needs. Winamp may have more of a nostalgic value to me and WACUP is a great music player, but for a more "professional" experience, foobar2000 it is.
Audio Editing
These are not professional tools. They are light tools for quick use. I've picked them long ago, at the time they seemed the best or most suitable around. Although those projects are very much alive and active, I did not update myself, so if you think they are outclassed now, let me know.
Also, FLAC libraries are excellent and I fully support them, however audiophiles telling you they can tell the difference between 320kbps MP3 and FLAC audio are either lying or delusional, for even with expensive hardware people fail blind tests. If you are not a professional or an archiver, MP3 is more than enough for you.
VideoLAN Client is another proof that quality content, prioritizing user's experience and privacy, will never come from corporate overlords. A free Open-Source initiative that humiliates every player the billionarie tech giants have created. Light, fast, feature-rich, the only media player you need.
It also works as an audio player, so if its limited UI customization isn't a problem for you, then yeah, you don't really need other programs.
For more in-depth edits and more tools, another pretty good and light Open-Source option, although I had problems before trying to edit very large files. The community is pretty active and updates are frequent, so perhaps by time you read this I'd have no complains at all about it.
Another powerful, yet very light, Open-Source program. I know it's very popular for streaming, but I don't stream so I can't comment on it. It is, however, excellent for video capture, and only if you suffered through Fraps and Bandicam you'd know how great it is.
Other powerful Open-Source tools are Kdenlive, and Blender, but I haven't used them much.
About emulators and roms.
I used to game a lot when I was a kid. I had a Sega Genesis and a Nes-clone called Dynavision, a neighbor had a Master System, a friend from school had a Genesis and a Saturn, another had a SNES and a Nintendo 64, another had a PC, a cousin that I would see often had a SNES and a PC, another had a SNES and a N64, another cousin had fucking everything: Genesis, SNES, N64, Playstation, GameBoy, Game Gear and PC. But when I visited my brother while he was in college, and he showed me his emulator collection with hundreds of games, plus Napster, I realized PC was the way to go!
Before talking about emulation, let's talk about being a good boy. I mentioned before being a pirate all my life, but nowadays I have a GOG account and even bought quite a few games. The difference from GOG and other platforms is its DRM-Free policy, and despite the name originally meaning Good Old Games, every modern game that doesn't rely on extremelly shitty anti-consumer practices are available there as well. While you don't own shit on other platforms, and they force you to use their launcher to download, install and play the games, which they can cut your access to anytime, on GOG you have the option to just download the .exe and do whatever you want with it. After buying the game you don't depend on GOG for anything else anymore - they also have a launcher you can use if you want your gaming stats and the social features. GOG has been doing a great work for software preservation and restoration. ALWAYS BUY ON GOG.
The Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator is a wonderful Open-Source project developed by the most beautiful people. With almost 30 years in the making now, its objective is to emulate systems with perfection. Their library is insane, and they have done so much for software preservation!
As MAME want games to run 100% correctly, instead of just being playable, their system compatibility updates are very slow, but over the years I abandoned many other emulators, like FinalBurn Alpha and NeoRageX, because their whole libraries became fully compatible.
As of now, It's been more than ten years that I've last updated my MAME, and I just saw they incorporated MESS (Multi Emulator Super System, a related project doing the same thing for consoles). At the time MESS wasn't the best option for gaming, but I'm sure, especially after fusing with MAME, it developed greatly in those more than ten years.
As I don't know which systems are running perfect on MAME now, I will give here the list of emulators I'm using in my Arcade machine, which were the best and more active in the early 2010s, but they might be oudclassed now:
I always had a few emulators and games on my PC but I never took it very serious, then I saw an arcade machine running on emulators and I loved the idea. Having a full cabinet would be a tad unpractical for me, so my plan was just building a dedicated PC for gaming, pluging it on the TV and pluging an arcade controller, but even the dual controllers available had only 10 buttons and one joystick for each player, it wasn't compatible with the amount of systems I wanted to emulate. I ended up designing my own project, with an extra analogic stick for games that required it as well (every game that requires dual analog, though, I'd rather play on mouse and keyboard). My project also has universal save and load buttons. Anyway, I ended up using the HyperSpin front-end, which is super flashy and customizable, and I customized the hell out of mine. However, I guess it was only by chance that ended up on HyperSpin, for LaunchBox seems to be really good as well.
Through HyperSpin I ended up getting into the EmuMovies FTP server, and man, another beautiful project done by beautiful people! Insane amount of resources recording gaming history and preserving arts, manuals, boxes, flyers, ads, all kinds of stuff.
Other resources
And where to start getting roms? At the time my go-to sites were Emuparadise, rom hustler, and the defunct The Iso Zone. I remember checking them a few years ago and they having degraded a lot - with throttled bandwidth and ad-based link shorteners. I don't know what are the best place to get roms nowadays, but if HyperSpin still let members access its FTP, you can get your mindblowed there.
