Jordan Eldredge, the author, has done some amazing WinAmp-related projects over the years, including WebAmp (a web-based, from-scratch reimplementation of much of WinAmp) and a WASM engine for WinAmp-style music visualisation.
I miss skinning so much. I was hugely into the scene of making/releasing skins for any/every program that included the ability (and a bunch that didn’t, thanks to unsigned applications).
To this day I’m the type to customise everything I own and I despise staring at generic looking programs all day. It’s even worse when it’s stuff like Discord that has a very opinionated style that won’t even respect the small amount of customisation my Linux theming gives me.
I feel like a huge reason the indie web died off was OSes and programs limiting user customisation which was a gateway drug for many. MySpace themes would get people learning html/css. Winamp skins got people learning photoshop/graphics. mIRC scripting taught people basic coding. OS customising had all of it. Now you just shut up and use it as they dictate.
I truly miss working in software in the early 2000's. We were all using XP but it was all customized up the wazoo. Almost all of us had custom themes and icons and what not.
I ran a Mac at home, and had that customized as well, I forget the name of the app that would install custom themes/docks, but CandyBar would install custom icon sets.
Now days most people don't even bother to change their wallpaper. Live a little!
I feel like the cost of housing along with layoff culture has caused an underlying sense of desperation, software isn’t fun when you’re just trying to avoid being homeless/deported
More likely is that was most of your online entertainment, while today people are mostly hooked on cheap sugar that is social media/short content (me included unfortunately)
Fwiw, you'll be happier and more secure at a stable Midwest company than a trendy coastal company. In my twenty years of doing this, I know personally two developers who were laid off, one of whom was hired back after COVID calmed down.
Anyway I think your proposal is flatly absurd. People stopped changing their wallpaper because of housing prices? Shoosh
Maybe Kaleidoscope? There was also the built in Appearance Manager, but it wasn't supported after Jobs returned around 8.5 and wanted a more consistent interface.
>> We were all using XP but it was all customized up the wazoo.
Agreed.
I worked at a huge corporation for one of my first developer gigs. All the devs were super into desktop mods and customizing everything to the hilt. It was crazy to think we all had these third party apps running on our corporate laptops. I know I had my laptop completely crash twice and needed it replaced because one of the apps I loved, I installed an extension for it and turned out it was malware. Other devs had similar things happen too.
As a developer it was like the Wild West back then, you had complete and utter freedom to do what you wanted with your hardware. The funny thing was the hardware support people didn't even blink at all the stuff you had installed either, they just shrugged and downloaded your ROM to a new laptop and sent you on your way.
We didn't have a dedicated IT department, we had a customer support person who doubled as IT. When he failed, we had a very knowledgeable guy who ran our servers remotely from Alaska.
When something went wrong with our computers, it was almost always down to us to fix them.
I miss those days. Everything is so serious now days. It was a lot more fun back then.
I completely agree. I, in no small part, owe my career as a software dev to falling in love with Linux because of the ability to theme everything, apps, desktops, ui toolkits.
Of course, this was back in the kde3 and gnome(2?) days. It’s different now, it seems like theming has become actively discouraged, especially in Gnome.
It makes me sad wondering how many young creative people the community is missing an opportunity to captivate.
There's another benefit to opening this kind of functionality to apps - it's very friendly towards developing interfaces that are more friendly to the disabled. I have certain disabilities where specific types of UI designs are basically unusable to me, and without the ability to customize them, I kinda just cannot use them (unless they provide an API as an alternative).
mIRC scripts were also my first foray into writing code for anything more than "playing around". I write mIRC to help automate some of the things I was doing on IRC at the time.
That experience helped me back up my smart-ass comments to a manager at my job about being able to write better software than they were forcing us to use.
Eventually I leveraged that experience into getting a real dev job.
Wow believe it or not I was thinking about that program about 2 weeks ago but thought I'd never be able to remember the name of it. You've made my week.
I used to use the Bdog871018 skin. Which one is yours?
One of the first things I did on my Steam Deck was to get Winamp running via Bottles :) it lives on the inbuilt screen when I’ve got it docked in desktop mode on my 2 desktop monitors.
Audacious with a Winamp skin is close enough that it has replaced the need to have Winamp proper on my Linux workstations. Mostly because I want MPRIS integration, but also because I just can't be bothered to setup WINE or Crossover these days.
"Old" is a state of mind. If you find yourself believing that everything new is terrible and you want to go back to "the good old days," then yeah, you're old. If you're still open to learning new things and adapting to and exploring the world as it changes around you, then you're not old yet.
It’s the name of the distribution company a bunch of brands are housed under.
> By the end of 1999 an idea that has been talked about for years begins to take seed. The Habitat is formed under the Sovereign Sect in December…The Alien Workshop and its divisions are guided by this philosophy to this day. A Sovereign Sect of individuals with the goal to evolve skateboarding, projects and ideas free from outside pressures or rules.
It's not from a digicam, it's a scan of a photo. The white bar on the left is from a subpar cropping job and is slightly crooked. The resolution (1275x1167) is higher than a typical 3:4 digital image sensor of the day, which would have maxed out at 640x480 in the late '90s to early 2000's, maybe 1024x768 for a really high-spec (expensive and uncommon) camera.
As for the "look", I'm not a photographer but this was likely taken on either a low-end handheld film camera or disposable jobbie, which were absolutely ubiquitous around this time frame because they were so cheap (practically free, until you went to develop them). The picture was taken on an overcast day at dusk, later in the evening. Just dark enough to auto-trigger the insufficient flash which lights up the middle of the image and puts everything in the periphery in a dark shadow.
I do like that the kid with the beer isn't looking at the camera and seems to have missed the point that everyone was supposed to be holding the ball.
Digital camera sensors are still quite noisy, perhaps even more so as sensors have gotten smaller while resolutions have gotten higher (meaning even smaller pixels). We just process all the noise away most of the time.
> TinEye searched over 69.1 billion images but didn't find any matches for your search image. That's probably because we have yet to crawl any pages where this image appears.
Yandex reverse image search can also be useful often, although in this case it just gives you other images of people with basketballs. Curse whoever decided to introduce AI to reverse image search.
It's really neat to find something that I grew up with like Winamp skins become a subject of anthropological/historical study.
It's gonna be neat/kinda creepy to see how much of this sort of application of investigative techniques can turn up stuff from my younger years that I ever could have thought would still exist.
A notorious issue when doing Windows support (An experience I recommend to every developer!): Double clicking a folder or file in Explorer in order to open it, but slipping the mouse and therefore accidently moving the target into another folder.
If you're willing to try something a little bit different, Windows also has a single-click to open mode ('View->Options->Change folder and search options' in Win 11). To only select, you point and hover for a moment.
I wish it would let do single click open without hover to select. It's just too easy to mess up your selection if you are not careful where you park your cursor for even a split second.
KDE's Dolphin is much better here, can be set to single click open with drag selection box or click + icon to select.
FWIW, you can configure the minimum distance for a mouse move to count as a drag. The default was adequate for 640x480, but maybe should have been increased.
For others: I was curious how to do this, so if you put “change windows drag drop sensitivity” into your search engine of choice you’ll find a tutorial for which registry settings to change.
The default is 4 pixels, which I’m inclined to agree is low these days.
To be more precise, it’s the registry settings HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\DragWidth and DragHeight. You can also use a tool like Winaero Tweaker to adjust the values.
Some of it was stupidity, some of it was cupidity, some of it was deliberate. The piece about people running slow IP over the text fields in the website for their frequent flyer miles homepage (accessible for free on in-flight wifi without paying for it) is an example of deliberate: I think some of this was early file sharing and warez in .. winamp skinz.
"what does this do" causes a lot of things to happen. you zip up a folder and forget the metric tonne of other files in it, which don't interfere with the prime function so just come along for the ride.
I have a theory that at least some of them might be taking advantage of an (un)official website/forum that allows for free sharing/hosting of wsz files, which of course are just zips
I thought “corrupt Winamp skin” means it's infested with digital parasites feeding on the RGB values of the pixels, making them look like rusty metal or rotting flesh. But this isn't bad either.
They're storing information about the app's current state, as well as tracking/analytic info. If you don't care about linking to an identical view and just want to link to a specific location, you can trim the URL down to just the coordinates like this: https://www.google.com/maps/place/@55.9285659,-4.7106362,17z...
I went to listen to the songs featured in the playlist screenshot from resubmitted.2003_rsx.wsz file. From the Youtube comments I figured a lot of people also did.
I've always love WinAmp due to the simple reason that it is keyboard friendly. For example, the 5 buttons for Previous, Play, Pause, Stop, Next map to zxcvb. Simple and fun. Operations like searching for and queuing up files to play are lightning fast compared to Spotify, YT Music, et al. Also, I absolutely detest how YT Music keeps A/B testing ALL THE TIME, changing the location of things around. Ultimately, a website is never in your control.
As a home grown hacker from before the time of internet, I increasingly understand why people despise computers. I was always telling people, that you can make computers do your bidding, make them part of your life, frictionless. But I never needed IT help, I knew that whatever frustrations I might have are because of something I can work and fix with some digging around. But having things like Windows auto updates, websites ever changing makes even me feel the frustration and friction. It's no longer a wrench, it's a wireless corporate-run ad-powered e-wrench which needs printer ink for bolt-screwning.
if I remember correctly, Windows Updates were a pain in Windows 98 or even Windows XP. Maybe it was just a pain because I was on slow as molasses dial up but just the fact that active x(?) only worked on Microsoft Internet Explorer and it was required(?) for Windows Update, made me wonder why updating Windows requires a web browser.
I think Windows auto updates are a good thing. I just think people should have to opt IN to auto updates for different stuff differently and then opt IN to automatic reboots. An operating system should never auto reboot without at least a one time user consent. Any corporate computer I've ever used disables this automatic reboot when a user is logged in. I think this is proof that the setting should be like this.
Of course, over the long term, what we really need is to make more of updates not require a reboot, but that is a different conversation.
I just love how I am in a constant funnel trying to move me to a Microsoft account, and get to find new ad-funnel content on my task bar and get to figure out how to turn it off and hope it sticks more than a couple of days over and over again. And preventing playing this game requires disabling security updates and getting pwned.
Decades of experience and deep knowledge doesn’t keep me out of wrestling with the machine like this. What is it like for someone who devotes a lot less of their attention span and learning to computers?
For me, XP is what drove me to Linux full-time. (Later, a bit of Mac OS X on the desktop, when I could afford the hardware.) But I've always kept a toe in the Windows pie, the tool that, after MS-DOS, built my career.
Win11 makes me almost nostalgic for Win10. But Win10 is a sad crippled thing, it's just that you're allowed to prune it back hard. (Removing all Modern apps, for instance.) Do that to 11, it dies.
But using Win10 for a couple of hours a year is enough.
Recently a friend bemoaned being forced to move to Win10 because 7 wasn't getting updates and drivers, and apps were no longer working. So I tried a couple of fresh installs. It's so much better it's not funny; it's sad.
So I reached back and put XP64 on an old spare Core 2 Duo. It flies along. It's so snappy and responsive and so lightweight. It will run, not usefully but functionally, in 64MB of RAM. Pruned down hard it takes about 50MB. It doesn't fill a CD.
I am now idly considering trying Windows 2000 on my lowest-end functional laptop.
Not inherently, no. I haven't daily-driven Windows in years, either.
But that wasn't really what the post was about. It was about the smugness of trying to gotcha the parent with a caveat that hasn't been valid for a decade.
When a new island is formed, usually it is first inhabited by algae and moss. As the ecosystem matures, plants, birds, insects, and all sorts of organisms populate it. You can still usually find the early algae and moss. They are just harder to spot due to the thriving and abundant ecosystem.
I think that this analogy is really fitting. The old internet was way less organized, which means that it was less useful, but it also gave this fantastic sense of exploring something new. It was highly personal, the lack of common standards meant that everyone had to reinvent the wheel in their own way. Its dangers were more direct and "in your face". Yes, you could stumble upon a pedofile on an open forum and ordering a taxi online was wrong on so many levels, but there was no systematic explotation of human weaknesses like we have nowadays. The phrase "global village" captures the experience really well, as opposed to the megacity we have now.
I think it's a curse of progress. Once you get the taste of a highly developed, efficiently functioning society you can't go back and live in a cave again. At the same time you can't deny that living in a cave has its charm.
You were young and not working. The world was full of new frontiers and possibilities.
Young people today are on Minecraft, Roblox, VRchat, Discord, and YouTube. That's their frontier internet, and they probably feel the same way about it as you do.
A Geocities website, phpBB or EZBoard, webring, Xanga, and AIM/IRC has a similar analogues today. The pieces just have different names and shapes.
I get this argument from a lot of people but it is not true. There was a much higher spirit of sharing and just cool shit back in the day. Now everyone is trying to make a buck, and shit is slow, like Slack.
There still is amongst the users on Discord, e.g. in some gamedev Discords, etc. - it's even easier to do things together ad-hoc with screen sharing built-in.
It really is just that we're old now so we don't interact with them.
Although I agree the grindset culture has harmed Internet culture.
I'm in my 30s and I am interact a lot with discord. I agree gamedev is one last large scale space where interesting things happen.
But overall people are just trying to optimize total compensation and bend over backwards to get into FAANG. Imagine telling us to get into IBM back in the day.
So things have definitely changed. The punk spirit has also been lost. Normies have arrived. It's good for the normies, but we won't get a Napster again.
That’s not the point. Modern crap doesn’t hold a candle to what we had back then.
And no, this is not the rambling of getting-older-man.
Rampant corporate control, completely sanitized internet by default, “social” networks that literally give kids https://cwi.pressbooks.pub/urj/chapter/2022-first-place-inst... mental disorders, political agenda pushed from every hole, disinformation campaigns, bots to the point where you don’t even know if you’re talking to a real person. Internet became a weapon.
Back then we an intranet within
local ISP (additionally to internet access) that had a sense of community, local services, file sharing, chats, meetups which generally self moderated themselves and everyone knew each other. What do you have now? Proprietary discord chat rooms filled with degeneracy? Good luck going through that.
I think there is great stuff on Discord and people do the same things they did then and enjoy similar tomfoolery.. they just don’t own it and are monetized, and don’t have viable alternatives (none of which was true back then).
I think the big reason why social media is toxic is because going online is no longer a choice and it follows you around. Some decisions by social media providers aren’t helping, but mobile is more guilty than social itself.
It's still like that. There's a lot of weird things you're gonna find on the tail end of Github repositories, or Pastebin uploads, Imgur, or YouTube... it's just hard to find unless you crawl the whole thing or otherwise come into the possession of the underlying database (as this person did).
It might be somewhere between the two. The internet was messier back in the day. It didn’t feel as corporate and there was a strong spirit of sharing cool things because cool things are fun. Nowadays, it seems like everyone is just trying to get paid. And that’s fine because getting paid is fun too, but the spirit has changed.
On the other hand, my eight year old is a big fan of a YouTube channel called Pilot Debrief. We just watched a documentary on the Gimli Glider and when we talked about it after, it was apparent that she has learned a tremendous amount about flying from that channel.
So for my kid, that spirit of sharing cool things because cool things are fun is still going strong. And when I experience her experiencing things like that, I’m reminded that that spirit is still out there but I’m just old.
source available is not the same as open source nor have any terms been provided on what that'd actually be other than it's seemingly just about them getting a free dev team or looking to be doing some good from an investors view point.
I think AOL sold it to a random company at least a decade ago, and then they announced they will modernize it and have a big surprise and shit, then nothing happened for years, and then maybe two years ago they actually released a new update to winamp 5.
Also while it's not open source, the source also leaked years ago, and there are unofficial updates to the old AOL winamp too. No idea if they kept going once the real thing got an update...
No legit project could ever make use of the leaked source code even if it was from just before the end of the pre-sale AOL era so the person who did that never actually helped anyone & imho just hindered things.
I can't use it for WACUP & I don't see how any of the other players out there (clone / compatibles / just looking to hack in some features from it) could ever use it either.
There's also the whole "source available" thing they announced earlier this year still likely means it's never going to be proper open source against how media / others at the time took it to mean. Not like things couldn't be done via plug-ins but for whatever reason so many seem to forget about that & only see source code as the only way to modify things which imho is just going to make things messier if / when something does happen.
I worked for that company 7 years ago, they were looking a way to make money with it but didn’t found out how. They already make money from radio advertisement products and didn’t seems willing to put resources on anything not lucrative. Updating/open sourcing was not on the agenda.
Because they primarily wanted shoutcast (ironic since they sold that off last year & got played in the process of doing all of that) which meant taking winamp with it. It's all a mess now but most care not for that and just see that "winamp is back".
His project page: https://jordaneldredge.com/projects/