Not sure where you are, but where I live, college and community radio stations are still old school, and very worth listening to. Most if not all now stream online too, so, they’re around if you’re looking for that hit of the olden times.

Nice!

Been hunting for an old tube state radio ever since I heard one last year - it blew my fucking mind how deep, rich, and punchy FM radio came through on that little thing. I couldn’t believe how good it sounded.

deleted by creator

It’s not obscure, but, for me, Wikipedia is the ultimate example of the old internet that still persists today.

Free to use, no account required, ad free, non-corporate, multilingual, heavily biased toward text, simple and utilitarian design. Hyperlinks concatenate relevant pieces of information, which serve as the means to navigate the site. The code is very simple (seriously, view the page source of a wikipiedia article). It’s based on the human desire to learn and share knowledge with others, and has remained resilient to corruption by commercial interests that pervert that desire for monetary gain. It’s a beautiful thing.

This is the sort of thing that the old internet could really deliver on. Chances are, a search query could lead you to some guy’s hoodie blog, and he just liked hoodies, and posted honestly about them.

Now, it’s all a mess of SEO pumped affiliate link lists filled with crapware. If the query is even thinkable, there will be AI generated pages stuffed with sponsored links, ready and waiting for you. And with search engines preferring recent results, that’s the type of page you’ll be served.

I’ve had decent luck using marginalia search to seek out some of those old internet type results. Obscurity works as a barrier to corporate infiltration. Plus you get page results that don’t have a million tracking and analytics scripts running on them, which is refreshing.

You’re right to point out the difficulty of preparing installation media.

Also, for the average person, friction will probably happen during installation - possibly having to circumvent safe boot to install and run a new OS (knowing how to enter the bios, feeling comfortable playing around in the bios, knowing how to even disable safe boot once you’re there, not exposing your device to security vulnerabilities by having safe boot disabled), the need for an existing understanding of how partitions work and how the partitions are structured on your specific device in order to test the waters with a dual boot setup on a drive that has data/functionality you want to preserve. Needing to know the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of swap, /home, and /root partitions. These points all came up on a recent installation, and I’m sure they would scare some people off.

Installation will be easy if you have the time, motivation, existing knowledge and/or bandwidth for a learning curve. But not everybody has that.

And that’s just installation, to say nothing of the actual use of the desktop environment, which is not as intuitive as its often claimed to be.

Very cool concept.

Always wanted to go to Def Con. Good luck & have fun!

Eventually it turns out that Project Hype Train does not have a functioning train system at launch.