New School vs New School Internet

I probably have ADHD. It'd explain where my son gets it from. In fact, it'd explain a LOT of things actually.. possibly including why coffee has been a vice since childhood that I've needed to keep my brain even remotely focused. Yes, coffee as a stimulant is believed to have some impact - no where near as much as amphetamines, but it does help. And I've been drinking the stuff for way, way too long. Seeing the affect of stimulants on my son, I start to see why my parents might have tolerated a 10 year old with a coffee problem. 

I tend to jump around with ideas a lot and it's very difficult to stay focused on one thing for that long. When I do, it tends to be a bit overboard.. and that's where the neuro-diversity starts to come in I guess. 

Recently, Amazon had their Prime Day sale and I found myself spending money. The Apple TV in the lounge blew a power supply a while ago and a new board isn't cheap.. or easy to obtain.  They had a deal on Fire TV 4K sticks.. 2 for $69. That solves the issue of the TV in the kids playroom - it had, until the Fire TV stick arrived, a Chromecast that I loathe - simply because it required using a device.. ie. my phone to control it. My son can use a remote control. 

I also purchased an Echo Show 8. My intention was to put it in the bedroom, replacing the Amazon Dot and my clock radio. 

It's an interesting device. The light sensing is good - when the room is dark, it darkens off, and starts to drop a lot of the blue light from the display. I had to tweak its brightness slightly after lights out so that I could read the time without my glasses on, but once that was done, it seemed to be good. 

I've added some "skills" to it as well - it is able to view a couple of our security cameras, though the that requires a third party proxy that needed some fiddling. I did note however the video was lagging by around 10 seconds. Something that the proxy plugin provider insists is due to the limited processing power of the Amazon devices and h264 video feeds. Others have suggested possibly it's just trying to fill a buffer. Not really ideal for what I want.. mostly for seeing the Uber Eats drivers pull up and get to the front door. 

I leveraged the inbuilt web browser to access my Plex Media Server to watch a TV show for a while in bed, with my "MusiCozy" headband speakers on (I often wear this at night to play some sound that distracts from my tinnitus). It seems to handle that pretty well. Interestingly to the point above - the videos on my Plex server are h265 encoded - making them smaller but requiring more processing power to decode. The web player indicated that it was in DirectPlay mode, so the device was decoding the video and it didn't seem to have any trouble. And unlike the camera stream that was a secondary channel at 640x480, this video was full 1080p. 

Interesting, but makes me wonder if the device is really the issue with the camera feed lag. I can't really reduce the quality of the video any more. I've heard a couple of suggestions of actually increasing the bitrate to see if that fills the buffers on the device faster. That might be worth pursuing. 

That is all very "New School" internet - a device that does all manner of things on the Internet but turns itself into a clock when not in use. It does have a stack of apps built in, including Netflix. I can "drop in" from the Alexa app on my phone, enabling the camera and communications back to the device (the camera can be disabled easily though).  It also has full integration to our "Smart Home" - so all the things we have running - the ability to boil the kettle, control most of the lights, etc., are all tied into it. 

Conversely..

The other day I thought it'd be fun to bring back an old school BBS but with the usual modern twists - no more dial up lines being the main one. 

It turns out that there are plenty of BBS applications still out there. The last time I built one was around 1997. I was handed a "spare" Pentium 166, a bank of "old" 28.8K Banksia modems and was told to go build a BBS by the owner of the ISP that I'd been doing work for. He started out as a BBS, and he wanted to resurrect it. 

His choice of software ran on Windows, so it was all fairly straight forward. 

Being a system administrator, I tend to work on the theory of "the right tool for the job" followed by "if it doesn't need to run on Windows, it won't be". I fiddled with a few BBS applications and settled on Synchronet. It's available for Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. 

I set it up on FreeBSD - my preferred OS choice. I can have it setup and running while Ubuntu is still asking questions before it installs. 

After about a day of fiddling, I got it mostly functional. Not wanting to allow an open telnet port into anything on my network, I opted instead to enable the inbuilt web server. That gives the concept a new twist. You're able to authenticate the site, access the "Forums" (mostly a DOVE-Net tie in) and see some basic stats. You're also able to see the various Doors (external applications such as the Americanised Ham Radio Test application). The embedded telnet client allows you to then login much the same as you would a regular telnet connection. 

From the main page, the experience is a full BBS experience - connect, see board stats, read your messages, see a million messages from DOVE-Net then do other things. From the "Games" section of the website, you're able to get to functional applications a little more directly with the telnet client. 

The site? Bofhnet.au  

Right now the functionality is a bit limited. I need to put some more work into the email integrations, test the DOS emulator and see what other applications I can add in. 

I need to put some thought into what "services" I allow for a more traditional experience. Direct telnet is not on the cards given that it's a notorious service for getting compromised. I may do something with SSH at some point though. 

FTP will probably never see the light of day. Finger and Gopher - I'm simply not sure on yet. None of these services are particularly secure but their functionality is available through the board directly.

I must admit, I never spent a lot of time using BBS services when I was younger. I dialled into a few that I found, poked around a few minutes here and there and that was about it. There were other interesting services, including some that were available calling unusual numbers (I recall one that accessed entire news repositories) that were far more interesting. Then of course, there was the Internet itself. 

There are some surprisingly retro BBS services still running. I discovered one recently that uses a bank of floppy drives wired to act as a RAID set connected to an older iMac, with various gizmos such as a SCSI2SD converter to allow him to use an SD card for the operating system, a Zip drive as backup and so on. The web interface for his BBS is effectively like looking at an early Mac trying to dial a modem. 

From an administrative view point, it's hard to get my head around some of this stuff; it's foreign. I'm young enough to have missed some of the technical realities of interconnected BBS back in the day, but old enough to miss them. The functional documentation isn't what we're used to these days; often being pages and pages and pages of words discussing how something works that may not actually contain the answers required.  A Google search for a problem doesn't necessarily give you results that cover anything close to the problem you're seeing (Have become way too used to this luxury it seems). 

At the same time, there's a lot of interesting concepts like "embedded telnet" via web sockets, that can be pushed over SSL, but the applications of this aren't necessarily common to make troubleshooting easy. 

The web interface in this case is Javascript heavy. Something that I loathe but it appears to work fine. I've tried to avoid JS longer than most people have ever know it exists, so my recollection of it is... limited.  One day though I might actually work on customising it. 

The ANSI artwork has presented new challenges. I can't find any ANSI editors on FreeBSD that aren't segfaulting, so I need to put some additional effort into that so I can customise the menu art. I suspect that'll be a long term goal if I keep this site going.

This looks like it'll be a long term project; something to tinker with occasionally. It serves no real useful purpose other than trying to keep the tradition alive. I have plenty of other things that I should be doing.