I bet you never thought you’d be nostalgic for the good old days of Windows 10.
Over the past day or so, I’ve discovered a few neat things on the Internet that I felt like sharing.
First — I always had some kind of obsession with having full control over my Internet experience. If you had known me about a year ago, I had a SearXNG instance themed to look like old Google, and I even tried customizing a web proxy to make browsing the Internet look like it did in 2012 (to only moderate success).
Well, I guess other people feel the same unquenchable nostalgia that I do, because now we’re seeing actual programmers put actual work into making tools that do these things.
First, I learned about a browser customization tool called Geckium. It makes new installations of Firefox look like versions of Google Chrome from the good old “don’t be evil” days. Too bad Geckium ditched the nice site design from its predecessor, Silverfox, which also looked just like the iconic old Google Chrome download page.
Isn’t that just beautiful? I had to go to the Internet Archive for this (an old version of silverfox.neocities.org).
Anyway, after I found out about Geckium, I kept going and, through a Reddit post, learned about StarTube — a userscript for Tampermonkey that (requires a dependency I’ve forgotten the name of — it’s on the page and can also be installed as a userscript) replaces the modern YouTube layout with a nicer-looking, more functional, surprisingly nostalgic one (that wasn’t that long ago, was it?).
Augh. I can’t believe how quickly time passes. I’m not even old.
And I hope you believe me when I say I think these are practical modifications, too. Everything feels faster, cleaner, and easier to understand. My favorite argument is to always take the engineer’s perspective, and I hope I can convince some other engineers to take their arms up against the graphic designers of the world.
Unrelated, but similarly exciting for no objective reason — the venerable, the tried-and-true, the age-old reliable Mac Mini — finally got a redesign!
Mac Minis litter schools and trash cans alike around businesses where I live, and remembering that the last Mac Mini design came out when Snow Leopard was still new is a good enough reason to cement it in the history books by discontinuing its surprisingly heavy, large flat squarish profile for good and replacing it with something that looks more suitable next to those big monitors in Apple Stores that are three times as expensive as the computer itself.
Isn’t it adorable?
If I had $500 burning a hole in my pocket, it’d be out the other end and into an Apple Store right now. Unfortunately, I don’t, and I might be more of a Windows (10) guy anyway. I bet that thing would boot into Asahi Linux, though, faster than you could reach around to the back of an old Mac Mini to plug in a USB flash drive.
…it seems like every day, we take two steps forward and one step back.
At least we’re all doing it in sync.
Thanks for reading!