One uneventful night, much like any other, I entered my blog’s homepage into the URL bar, computer screen glowing against my glasses.

One-second-two-second—three:

Silence.

My steaming coffee slowly dissipates and grows cold, and a chill creeps up my spine in perfect, quiet synchronization. “Something strange is brewing,” I think to myself as colorful words begin their pre-flight ballad.

Uh oh—

Inevitability came knocking, unwelcome and uninvited. WordPress had nosedived into classic dependency hell. PHP errors sprawl everywhere like washed-up jellyfish on the shore, and yep, here comes the all-nighter we sysadmins dread.

Every modern desktop computer has a built-in search engine. System-wide search has become so ubiquitous, we’d be at a loss without it. Can’t find your wedding photo? Search it up. Last night’s spreadsheet astray amid a sea of desktop icons you promised yourself you’d tidy up last spring? Search to the rescue!

History

OS X (–erm, macOS) users have come to rely on the likes of Finder and Spotlight, while Windows users similarly turn to file Explorer and the Start Menu for their queries. Unremarkably, those of us in the greater Unixsphere tend to be equally complacent; haphazardly fumbling through our desktop’s environment’s file browser for what should be a trivial task.

(insert year) is the year of Linux!

While this age-old running gag may have grown tired since its inception in 1991, the Year of Linux is finally among us (sus) in this household. Given Microsoft’s current state of affairs, one could argue that they’ve lost their way. I would go as far as to say that the entire industry has gone completely off the rails!

Having exhausted the reliable ol’ Windows NT 6.x and endured a brief and rather underwhelming period with Windows 10 LTSC, it was high time to seek alternatives.

Lately, I’ve been reminiscing the days of the old internet. You know? When everyone had a personal blog like this one, and brand new televisions on display were packaged with bright shimmering aquatic graphics to catch your eyes in awe. The internet has a habit of labelling everything, and in that same spirit, this particular era of flashiness has been designated Frutiger Aero.

The reality however, is that Frutiger in the wild takes on a vastly different form than pictured above. See image below:

Let’s begin by revisiting August of 1995.

When Windows 95 was introduced, Microsoft set the stage for multitasked computing as we know it. Sure, some will argue its design principles were not unique to Redmond, but Microsoft’s initiative helped to influence the standardization of the modern window manager. Together, with the help of the Windows NT codebase Microsoft would later adopt, the personal computing industry was pushed into making faster hardware capable of utilizing these new design conventions that emphasized multitasked computing so heavily. This would eventually pave the way for the standardization of multi-threaded CPUs, like the one you’re probably using to view this webpage.

A satirical twist on the Russian Sleep Experiment creepypasta, covering my grievances with an unnamed video sharing community I’ll be referring to as “Video Site” throughout this piece.

Researchers in the late 2010s enlisted 5 internet personalities to abandon their YouTube channels for 15 days, moving instead to a smaller alternative startup. Their engagements with the surrounding community were to be kept to a minimum, since it was presumed to be increasingly toxic with each visit.

(The following is not intended as a tutorial)

Sony’s PlayStation 3, the once touted ‘unhackable’ console.

So unhackable, it is, that softmodding at present requires little more than a USB flash drive and active internet connection. While the PlayStation Store’s foiled retirement plans are still making press headlines, I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce you to the world of CFW (custom firmware). I argue why I still find a jailbroken PS3 to be a relevant platform, worthy of occupying space on your shelf.

An anecdotal angle on the topic:

By making it to this article, I’m sure you’ve read late night Creepypasta‘s or have heard horrorstories about sleep paralysis, a rather unusual transitional state between sleep and wakefulness. Sleep paralysis occurs during REM sleep, the phase of sleep in which most vivid dreaming occurs. As you enter the REM stage, your body induces a temporary state of muscle paralysis. This in turn serves as a safety mechanism, protecting the subject from physically acting out his or her dreams. The dreamer is usually not aware of the transition. Let’s take usually with a grain of salt here. Shall we? If this process were impervious to error we would have no article to write. Fragmentation between sleep cycles is believed by some to be responsible for triggering this undesired lucidity.