I think we're going to need to seize the means of computing, folks

In the 1970s the Personal Computer was heralded as a great revolution, bringing the power of computing to the masses. Democratising it. Taking it from something you had to be affiliated with an institution to enjoy to something many people could afford.

Halfway through the 2020s the Personal Computer appears to be a threatened species.

Decades of complacency have enabled corporate giants to own vast swathes of the computing market, and increasingly enclose their users with more and more restrictive computing platforms, and now with the advent of the AI bubble’s reshaping of the computing market, they appear to be preparing for a killing blow.

Gone are the days where a computer magazine would act as a hub for fellow readers’ shared source code, coach readers on how to approach computing problems and even programming. I fear we are in for a decade of the corporate interests pivoting us into owning nothing and enjoying only slop.

As a long-time Mac user it pains me to say it, but I think we’re gonna have to seize the means of computing. We must be free to use our bicycles for the mind lest it be taken from us. macOS has been slowly degrading for years now. Windows is way ahead of the curve on this. But from this position it feels inevitable.

You should be able to control your devices. You should be able to repair them. You should be able to upgrade them. You should be able to keep them going longer than the manufacturer would like to keep their profit margins up. You shouldn’t have to rent computing power from a datacentre which is poisoning your fellow human and the environment we share. And in the year where solar is starting to beat coal for the first time, we shouldn’t be investing in more dirty power to do it.

Hack your devices. Resist corporate control. Delete corporate bloatware. Run community-maintained software. Host your own services. And teach others to do the same. Keep using that “old” RAM they already sold you. It’s not broken, corporate software is just bloated.

I fear it’s our only path through this bubble.

Breaking up with iTunes Match

I’ve been using iTunes Match almost continuously for my music since September 2012. That’s a scarily long time. I’d been using iTunes even longer.

In 2026, I’m finally ready to move on.

iTunes Match, for those unfamiliar, is effectively a predecessor to Apple Music. Rather than a subscription to an entire catalogue of music, it was a subscription to stream your music collection. Sounds a little silly, but it did offer some tangible benefits;

  1. You don’t need to keep your entire library synced to your iPhone1
  2. Matched tracks could be “upgraded” to iTunes Plus quality if you had, say, an inferior 128kbps MP3 copy
  3. Easy playback across devices, streamed from the internet; your music follows you anywhere
  4. You could always download songs anyway; if you were going on a flight you could grab a few albums you planned to listen to and they’d be there for you

Ultimately, though, iTunes Match was a bit of a dead end, and perhaps Steve Jobs was the last Apple personality to truly care about it. Eventually Apple Music subsumed its features, but the legacy subscription stuck around, largely unmaintained, ever since.2

For a few years now we have kept a NAS at home. It’s great! It stores a bunch of our personal files, backups, and other precious data, like our movie and TV show collection. We have a Plex server running off it. Plex led me to think about my use of iTunes Match more, as it offered Plexamp, a quite decent little music player app for Plex.

Plexamp, however, just left me wanting more. It had issues on certain platforms, some playback and stability issues, and seemed to be written by people with some degree of contempt for anyone who thought any differently to them about how things should behave.

That led me down the path of trying out Navidrome. Navidrome is the Jellyfin of music; it’s open source, pretty quirky, and the default user interface is pretty rubbish. But it opens up one particularly intriguing option; it has an entire ecosystem of apps which are compatible with it.

With a Navidrome server in place, I am able to pick and choose player apps as I please, and the collection, playback stats, and scrobbling are all centrally-managed. Nice!

For Desktop, I settled on Feishin, a stylish web and desktop app (yeah, sorry, it’s Electron) which I find fairly intuitive and usable. I’ve run into a few quirks, particularly due to my music library being largely AAC and ALAC from years of iTunes use, but I have confidence they’ll be sorted out. The developer is quite responsive.3

On my iPhone, I like Arpeggi, which is sadly currently only available as a TestFlight beta, but is one of the nicest music apps I’ve ever used. Simple, modern, and reliable. I will gladly pay for this once the author is ready to publish it for real.

After a few months of running this setup, I was finally convinced; I didn’t need iTunes Match anymore. On the 2nd of February, it expired. And I’m pleased to say that I barely noticed!

Well, today, dear reader, I reached another milestone in this journey. I added my first new music without touching the Apple Music (née iTunes) app. FLACs put through Musicbrainz Picard for tagging and then transferred to the NAS. Navidrome immediately picked up the new albums, and they appeared like clockwork in Feishin and Arpeggi.

And it’s pretty great.

Do you have a favourite Navidrome client? Any fun ways you’re using third-party tools? Drop me a line 😄

  1. Flash storage was a much more precious commodity at the time. Yeah, even compared to the bubble we’re in now 😓 ↩

  2. It even kept the Lucida Grande era branding and an ancient iTunes screenshot on its emails until at least 2024! ↩

  3. Feishin is also pretty great on Steam Deck if you trick it into running full-screen lol ↩

You should listen to the Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge remaster

I usually think of album remasters as cynical cash grabs but I was alerted to the quality of the 2025 remaster of My Chemical Romance’s Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge the other day1 and I’ve been obsessed ever since.

The cover to the 2025 release of Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, depicting a set of rosary beads on a black background with small red text

Maybe it was what the band were going for at the time but the original mix always felt pretty busy and claustrophobic, hard to distinguish anything within the wall of sound; the 2025 mix is punchier, cleaner, and better distinguished.

I can hear vocals I didn’t even know were present in the original mix, it’s great! Honestly give it a go if you’re a fan. The live set at the BBC included as bonus tracks is also a fun time.

Embracing woodworking to soothe my tech brain

I have worked in tech for, goodness, sixteen years now. And if you do, or have, worked in tech, you probably know I have a problem1.

My brain is absolutely dead at the end of the day.

Now, I consider myself quite good at my job, but something I’ve learned is that being good at your job only makes people ask more of you.

But, that’s part of the problem. Now, I don’t have any clever solutions to that (other than being defensive of your time and kind to yourself) but I have found something that I think is helping me achieve balance, and it is woodworking!

Woodworking feels like the opposite of tech. Solutions are concrete, physical, measured in millimetres and minutes. You’re thinking not in abstract terms, but in real concrete terms. It also helps that I am working for myself.

In working for myself, I am learning to accept mistakes. I am learning to embrace the space between periods of intense focus. And I am learning to use my hands to make something tangible.

Slowly, and with an assortment of other life changes I have been making (not to mention therapy), I feel I am slowly fixing my addled tech worker brain.

I am really only getting started, but I’ve built a couple of little projects out of plywood, some power tools and some gumption and planning out on paper. It’s great. I feel so accomplished every time.

So if you feel similarly, I encourage you to find a way to build something physical. Find a problem in your life or just something that could be a little better and explore a solution. Build something for yourself and your loved ones, which will outlast the tech hype cycle.

And, frankly, I think this is making me better at work too.

  1. I hope it goes without saying that this post is my personal opinion and not that of my employer. ↩

J2ME development on modern Linux

For some reason I have decided I want to build a J2ME app in 2026. Don’t live like me.

Anyway, thankfully other people have already blazed this trail.

Specifically, this post is to provide an addendum to this post by the author of Microgram, a project to run Telegram on your old phone.

tl;dr:

  1. The author was using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (or a derivative)
  2. To enable i386 packages, run sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386; sudo apt update
  3. If you are not using an Ubuntu desktop installation you MAY need to run the JDK installer (and NetBeans and other installed components) with _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1 prepended
  4. Reboot before you run the MIDLet emulator to save yourself some panic
  5. If you are using a different distro and/or distrobox, read on for relevant info

in more detail

So, what I’ve found as someone who is using a Fedora Kinoite installation in 2026, and therefore doing this via distrobox, is that there are some specifics which are difficult to ascertain from the above-linked post alone.

First of all, their distro. In a previous post they mentioned using Linux Mint 20.3. In the latter post, they don’t clarify. My first instinct was to use a similar-vintage Ubuntu distrobox, and 22.04 was a fairly close guess, with the caveat that libxt6t64 was missing; it appears it was named libxt6 in 22.04. That perhaps should’ve been a clue, but I didn’t learn that until later!

Also worthy of note that the incantation to add i386 package support on an x86_64 Ubuntu or derivative is to run sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 and then run sudo apt update to fetch sources.

Anyway, I proceeded with the instructions under the distrobox on Fedora, and once I got to the point of trying to install the JDK, I ran into a bit of a brick wall. The installer’s GUI was blank. I am going to skip the full rundown but I installed a separate Ubuntu desktop VM to test which side of the Distrobox the issue was on, and it worked fine. Okay, so it’s something to do with my machine. Well!

It turns out that this is a well-known oldschool Java bug and was documented on the Arch wiki; Ubuntu’s default GNOME compositor for Wayland seemingly has a workaround for this implemented by default, but Fedora Kinoite’s KDE compositor for Wayland does not, so I ran the installer with the _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1 variable set, and it worked fine. Phew!

Now I know in theory distrobox has tools for exporting programs to the host system but the JDK installer had already created a shortcut to NetBeans on my desktop for me, so I rolled with it, updating it to run distrobox instead. I also added another Java workaround from the Arch wiki, which I don’t know if I specifically needed but it didn’t hurt. What I ended up with is as follows;

Name: NetBeans IDE 8.2 (Distrobox)
Program: /usr/local/bin/distrobox
Arguments: enter j2me --additional-flags '--env _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1 --env JAVA_OPTS=-Dsun.awt.disablegrab=true' -- $HOME/netbeans-8.2/bin/netbeans

I updated both the desktop shortcut and the launcher shortcut to match. I then rebooted. I am not sure why I needed to; perhaps my machine or my installation were haunted, but I could not get the emulator to launch a MIDLet without that step.

Then, magically, mercifully, it worked on my host machine running Fedora Kinoite 43. Ultimately having dug further I realised that the microgram author must been using Ubuntu 24.04 or equivalent, and their instructions would’ve worked fine there, but I only had the date and a hunch to go by!

So yes, running NetBeans circa 2016 and an SDK from 2008 on Linux circa 2026. I hope this mess of keywords saves someone some time.

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, things have been… weird.


88x31 button updated!

Well… Aura gifted me an animated 88x31 button right after I published my first. The old link will continue to work, but there’s a new animated version now!

drac.at on the web

Now available from my links page!


I have an 88x31 button now!

I’ve been collecting 88x31 buttons for a while but I never had one of my own for this site.

Which, well, isn’t actually true, I did make one back in September 2024, I just neglected to actually share it. 😅

…until now!

drac.at on the web

I think it’s pretty cute and nice and if you want you can put it on your website to link to me!


Feed Buttons

BTW does your site have RSS and/or Atom feeds? Modern web browsers not having feed buttons getting you down? Need a good way to advertise as such?

I pixelled some basic little buttons (in 1x and 2x density) like how I remember them being back in the day!

RSS

Atom

These can be used, with support for high-DPI displays, like this:

<img src="/img/rss.gif" srcset="/img/rss@2x.png 2x" alt="RSS" width="32" height="11" decoding="async" loading="lazy" />
<img src="/img/atom.gif" srcset="/img/atom@2x.png 2x" alt="Atom" width="38" height="11" decoding="async" loading="lazy" />

The 1x images are gifs, because gifs manage to be smaller than pngs at that size, while at 2x density, png wins. SVGs are provided in case you want to modify these further, but are much larger than the raster images. Text is based on the free Visitor font, a real classic.

Individual files:

You may use these however you wish. Those who care may consider these licensed under the Creative Commons Zero license.


you just have to do the thing

I keep finding myself struggling with the same problem, which is that I find it difficult to start something if I’m not sure I can finish it

maybe it sounds like a #humblebrag but it totally isn’t, it’s a massive impediment to getting better at stuff by starting out not being so good at it, or to accomplishing things that I can’t confidently polish off in an evening

so, yeah, with this refresh of my site, and this blog, I’m trying to just do the next bit, whatever it is, and accept that as progress even if it feels imperfect. I don’t have to have suddenly launched a next-generation, kickass version of this in the handful of weeks since cohost’s demise was telegraphed, I have done enough, and I will continue to do enough

relatedly, this post lives in the cohost post template not because it was posted to cohost, sadly that is no longer an option, but because it’s the only post style the site currently has other than the one for the art gallery

and that’s okay, because I can write here, and you can read it, and that is enough. I just have to keep being okay with taking the next step


cohost weaned me off Twitter

and if nothing else, that is a massive success. Twitter was part of my life for more than a decade, I met my wife on it for goodness’ sake. sadly, by 2021 it felt like the worst place to be on the internet. where you go to get in arguments with strangers for no reason

do I regret leaving Twitter once cohost became home, and once a certain billionaire took it over? in spite of the artists and acquaintances I’ve lost touch with, no, it’s done a lot for my personal health

so, for the short time it has been around, cohost felt like the place for me. assc’s manifesto still resonates in spite of their ultimate lack of success with it

the lack of numbers convinced me to turn off notifications for other platforms, and reduce the noise I have incurred by life with the ambient internet, I have no evidence but I would swear to you that my average resting heart rate is lower as a consequence

the comment structure made it feel like a place you could have conversations in context, with people, instead of shouting them out loud in a room filled with noise

frankly I always had anxiety around whether I was “mutuals” with people on Twitter, and on here? that wasn’t a thing, what a freeing experience

for all this and more I will be forever grateful to @staff for giving this a shot. I hope they can get the rest they deserve after all they’ve dealt with these past two years

so what are we left with, in cohost’s absence? a lot of people are retreating to Bluesky, some even to Twitter. hell, someone asked me for my Instagram the other day. none of those really strike me as home.

I’ve been on the fediverse the whole time. it’s still the fediverse. it makes a lot of the same tradeoffs as Twitter and its clones. it’s open source but in the way where nobody can practically steer it except one guy. don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot better, but this doesn’t feel like home. perhaps the Website League’s vision will bear some fruit, we’ll see

there’s a movement to the archaic internet, of RSS feeds, weblogs, link buttons and webrings, and I am participating in that with some degree of hope. back to the days of going on the internet, rather than the internet always being a waiting queue of content. I hope it’ll stick, and I hope basic HTML can become a form of baseline computer literacy again as it was in the 90s

whatever’s next, I hope it can be ours, and I hope to see you there.

thanks, cohost


hello, drac.at/posts

this is the first post that I am making in the cohost editor and which I will be posting to cohost.org/ticky and to drac.at/posts simultaneously

I plan to make this a more regular blog over time, but for now it’s mainly an archive preserving some of my favourite CSS crimes and cohost posts

I wanted to get this in before cohost goes away so I can cross-link them for when cohost goes read-only

I’ve done my best to achieve parity with the cohost format, which thankfully hasn’t been too difficult due to them using CommonMark (nice one @staff) and me never bothering to use the fancy math syntax

if you’re subscribed to the main drac.at feed, you don’t need to do anything; that’ll still show you everything I put here. for those who are more choosy, there are separate feeds for my art gallery and this posts section, and in both RSS and Atom formats

once again, working to accept progress above perfection. a better web is possible.


◍ + 👨‍🦲 are becoming Plungus™

Learn More

Originally posted to cohost


Johnny's avatar
Johnny
  • i ain’t reading all that
  • i’m happy for u tho
  • or sorry that happened

Originally posted to cohost


masklayer:
First person shot of spinning while holding green and purple peppers

why is peeper blurred radially?

simple, it is because://

gif of a plush deer at a computer spinning around very fast

👆

he spin

Originally posted to cohost


🌀

Dreamcast

Originally posted to cohost


Windows XP End of Support is on April 8th, 2014. Click Here to learn more.

Don't show this message again

Originally posted to cohost


sega: we want this racing game to have a soundtrack that resonates with today’s teens
richard jacques: makes sense
sega: we also do not have the budget to license a single song
richard jacques: who does
sega: can you pretend to be will smith and oasis
richard jacques: sure

richard jacques: here’s a buttrock song about having sex with a car, is this what you meant?
sega: see this is why we come to you, richard

Originally posted to cohost


gas
gate
girl
gas
light
keep
boss
light
gate
girl
gas
gate
keep
boss
light
keep
girl
gas
gate
girl
boss
light
keep
boss

Originally posted to cohost


you sniff the vent of your ThinkPad, it emits a "ding" and you see this

ThinkPad Olfaction Suite
×
🔴×

WARNING: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.

OK

Originally posted to cohost


Frogress Bar Simulator 2023

Feat. @numberonebug

What???: Check out this post.

Note: Don't see anything? Frogress Bar Simulator 2023 does not work with reduced motion enabled.

Frogress Bar

a dog with a dataset

frogress bar

now

Originally posted to cohost