"Bunnyrom" is the name given by the virtual pet collecting community to the software that is found on countless cheap virtual pets. The name comes from the recognizable bunny sprite which is the first character and often appears on product listings. Their more official name is Jia Yuan.

Also recognizable as the 168-in-1 pet, they come in many shapes and sizes but always have the exact same programming. They're sold and packaged under many names like Cyber Pet, Digi Pet, or some even claim to be Tamagotchi Connections. They're easy to find on sites like AliExpress and eBay, but manage to show up in physical stores and gift shops as well.

The origin of this pet software is unclear as there is no information about who made it or where it originated, but they seem to have been around since the Connection era of Tamagotchis (circa. 2005) and apparently lifted all of their menu icons from them. The characters on the device also include recognizable faces from various well-known franchises like Spongebob, Digimon, and One Piece.

No Photoshop, no rendering, no cheating
Only working computers
What you see on screen was actually on the screen (no overlays, no copy and paste, etc.)

All images on this page are available under Creative Commons license — feel free to use them!

Welcome to Elpis, a place of articles, interesting materials and links that I hope be useful for you. This magazine is in continuous development, slowly but surely, and our main goal is to inform and educate. We'll show that there is an alternate path to development, which is not limited to endless upgrades for the sake of the process itself, or to the accumulation of resources without a set goal. After all, you can be content with little, and achieve a lot.

Tumblr and WordPress.com are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI, according to a source with internal knowledge about the deals and internal documentation referring to the deals.

UGH also bottom of the article says Reddit is also selling user data to AI companies

Part of the fun of journaling is seeing your past journals, and admiring the progress that you’ve made. To do that, I built a little “On this day” feature that simply surfaces old journal entries that match today’s date.

Very cool!

With the introduction of the new built-in Obsidian Bases feature, detecting and listing orphaned images is now easier than ever. No extra plugins required. The attached file Orphaned Image Report.zip (657 Bytes) contains an Obsidian Bases file Orphaned Images Report.base with two intuitive views:

Condensed Table View: See all orphaned images in a sortable, filterable table.
Cards View: Visualize orphaned images as cards, making it easy to preview/rename/delete images.

Simply download and unzip the attached file to your vault and start housekeeping.
You can modify the filter expression to tune the report to your specific needs.

Hacker bootsplash themes just like in the movie!

Custom bootscreens based on the computers in the movie Hackers!

Offpunk allows you to browse the Web, Gemini, Gopher and subscribe to RSS feeds without leaving your terminal and while being offline.

A huge blocklist of manually curated sites (1000+) that contain AI generated content, for the purposes of cleaning image search engines (Google Search, DuckDuckGo, and Bing) with uBlock Origin or uBlacklist.

The best free Instagram browser for exploring public stories, posts, reels, tags, followers, and more.

So you don't have to sign into an IG account to view stuff!

GoatCounter is an open source web analytics platform available as a free donation-supported hosted service or self-hosted app. It aims to offer easy to use and meaningful privacy-friendly web analytics as an alternative to Google Analytics or Matomo.

Raised on “Stranger Danger,” today’s helicopter parents are so overprotective and safety conscious they won’t even let their children go on unsupervised playdates. So how did Disney convince them to willingly give away the entirety of their children’s personal information to a faceless corporation: their names and addresses, what they like to eat, the names of their friends and family members, and their favorite cartoon characters?

Apparently, the answer is convenience.

Companion piece here, focusing on the tech stuff: https://www.optoutproject.net/data-free-disney/

This is not to say that I never use GPS systems, but I try to minimize my use — using them only when absolutely necessary — because becoming dependent on them causes the parts of your brain that do that work to atrophy. Literally.

Whoops, never thought of that before! Like, I know using AI to write makes me a worse writer, but using GPS directions in Google Maps also makes me worse at navigating? It makes sense in retrospect. And with the GPS I never have to develop the skills to navigate in the first place. Yikes!

Today, it may seem to many that the cluster of technologies marketed as “AI” is entirely new, and, logically, that objection to it must likewise be unheard-of. But, as the demonstration shows, not only is “AI” not especially new; protesting it has a long history. [...] [W]e are calling for resistance to the AI industry’s ongoing capture of higher education.

We envision a resistance that is, by its very nature, a repudiation of the efficiencies that automated algorithmic education falsely promises: a resistance comprising the collective force of small acts of friction.

Some fun (for a variety of fun) Microsoft Windows horror graphics (not graphic-graphic, no worries).

But what I vehemently object to in this situation is the use of the first-person voice without my review or permission. The language used in the description makes it sound as if I wrote it (“In this post, I share my personal journey…”). Because I have fiercely protected my authorship throughout my life and what my name is attached to, any generative AI writing that purports to be in my voice without my informed consent is a profound violation of my authorial voice, agency, and frankly it feels like fraud or impersonation. As an archivist who has spent almost twenty years thinking about accuracy in information, it makes my skin crawl that there is a metadata field with the sole purpose of generating SEO-engagement purporting to be my voice that doesn’t disclose the authorship was actually non-consensual AI.

I always knew that if I was going to make it big, I had to have a deep faith in these stories, yet I could never muster that conviction. I still believe in the things that I build, but never for long. I consider that a blessing, because I feel freer from the illusions that so many tech people seem caught up in. But having my third eye open doesn’t help me achieve great things.

Nor do I feel at peace sitting still. I can’t seem to accept that I would spend this one precious life I have not shining as bright as I possibly can, not for the money or the status, but just to feel what Teddy Roosevelt called the “strenuous life,” to enjoy it juice, pulp, and pith.

I don’t know if there’s a career for me beyond tech’s golden handcuffs. It’s funny, no one ever went out of their way to compliment me on my engineering prowess, but I’ve had many people tell me that I have a gift for words and for teaching. I feel called to write, but the things that well up in my chest sometimes feel too controversial and vulnerable. I’m afraid of being hurt.

I think Millennials as a whole were told that if we want to succeed we have to go whole-hog into one thing and make it our identity. If you can't or won't do that, then you're not a success. (I think this is capitalism doing something. You can't market yourself to a boss or to an audience if you like 5 things and they're all different topics.) But I think a lot of people would actually prefer to just be mildly amused (especially at work) and spend time doing other things and not just ONE THING FOREVER.

I fucking hate the Tech Bros. I hate the hype. I hate the Bros wrongly claiming LLM's will turn us all into toast. I hate their never-ending quest to make their investments have a return. I hate the venture capitalists in their Patagonia vests who talk about "disruption" while they burn down the library of human experience and fuck over workers. I hate them with the specific, intricate hatred of a survivor who knows exactly how the grift works.

I hate LLMs. My hatred knows no bounds. I love the small web, the clean web. I hate tech bloat.

And LLMs are the ultimate bloat.

[...] I posit: Kovid betrayed us with Calibre 8.16.2, and we as a community never should have let that happen, never have placed such a burden on individual generosity. The synthesis of these two truths, then, is nearly self-evident. There must be a new effort, free from AI encumbrances, that is built from the ground-up as a community effort. Something that can outlive the decisions of any one participant, something that does not place any one individual under an untenable load.

The rereading Project aims to do precisely this.

I'm interested to see where this project goes. It's unfortunate that Calibre is really the only widely-used/available cataloging system (I know there's other options but not if you a) want to use Linux and b) have thousands of things to catalog) so another option or two would be great!

Gemini is a new internet technology supporting an electronic library of interconnected text documents. That's not a new idea, but it's not old fashioned either. It's timeless, and deserves tools which treat it as a first class concept, not a vestigial corner case. Gemini isn't about innovation or disruption, it's about providing some respite for those who feel the internet has been disrupted enough already. We're not out to change the world or destroy other technologies. We are out to build a lightweight online space where documents are just documents, in the interests of every reader's privacy, attention and bandwidth.

I want to make a Gemini version of my site! For fun!