Site News

Apparently I missed it. Shows how much I care 🙂

At some point in October or November of 1999 I converted over from a BBS to a web site. Ran it using a dynamic dns url for about a year and purchased shadowscope.com in December of 1999 (I think)

My first couple of months were hand coded entries and at the time I mainly posted about BBS news and Windows customization. Unfortunately since I was handcoding I would just delete the old ones and post over the top so the oldest stuff I have online is from November of 1999. I managed to recover those from the Wayback machine a few years ago and insert into my blog.

I’ve met some awesome people over the last 30 years of being online through BBSing and blogging so here’s to another couple of decades!

Wow. 2019. Looks like I haven’t posted since 2017. Time flies right?

Anyway, you can access still access the BBS from the menu links above by choosing the ftelnet option. I have also got a small applet hosted at shadowscope.noip.us, as Mystic now has a builtin web server.

I am in the process of adding SSH, SMTP and POP3 to the BBS. The POP3 support is only currently for local BBS mail for the time being. I have not yet tested out SSH to see how ansi support is. Only SSH client I have ever used is puTTY and I have no idea how that will look.

I can’t find very much information about the html support that was added to Mystic so not yet sure what I will be able to do. One of the very few things I miss from Synchronet (and EleBBS before that) is being able to get to my netmail and echomail from the web. I work so much and spend so much time on my phone that it would be very convenient to access it from there. I have tried a couple of android fidonet apps a couple of years back and for what I want they really didn’t work very well. Not well written, fonts too small, crash continuously, etc.

That’s it for now. I’ll try to get on and post more HA and BBS stuff than I have been the last two years. The site is coming up on 20 years old now so wow. Christmas I will have had this domain for two decades.

My BBS and corresponding internal web site will be down for a while this afternoon as I change my network over. Should be back up in the next couple of hours.

Updated – The BBS itself should be available now as well as the Fidonet mailer. If there’s any issues please let me know. Best way is to shoot me an email.

My BBS and a few other internal services will be down until  tomorrow evening. My router (or at least it’s settings) has gone tits up and reset everything to default including all of my port forwarding settings. I don’t have the time or patience to mess with it tonight but will fix it as soon as I get home tomorrow afternoon.

Looking through the logs this was apparently the result of a pretty heavy DoS attack.

Growing up I played Dungeons and Dragons extensively. The original D&D, Advanced D&D, 3rd Edition, you name it. Really from about 1976 up until the early 90s I was a big fan. Still have most of the books, boxed sets, modules, dice and a crapload of full notebooks where I created my own stuff.

Anyway, that’s what it was all about. Pen & Pencil. Even just getting ready to set up a new campaign took a lot of preparation before you could even begin.

While I haven’t played in years I still occasionally follow news of the game. RPGs are using new technology to help improve game play and make it a little easier and Wizards of the Coast is attempting to join the club by creating D&D Beyond, a new digital toolset to be used with Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition.

D&D Beyond is being built in partnership with Curse and provides players and DMs with a rules compendium, character builder, character sheets, item listings and more.

Back in 2014 they attempted to release a tool called Dungeonscape and that ended up falling through.

D&D Beyond isn’t ready for a full release yet but if you want to sign up to beta test it once they are ready you can check it out here.

Several years ago the wife received as a gift a really nice acoustic guitar from a friend of her’s that was going through a divorce. She likes to tell the story about it as it belonged to one of the three or four men that she hates the most and truly wished harm to come to them. This gentleman belongs to a list that includes Kim Jong Il. Wow.

Anyway, the guitar is pretty awesome, like you might find at music stores st louis.

It’s currently being used by my eldest daughter, who taught herself how to play. She’s pretty good at any type of musical instrument that she wants to play.

Before I head out the door to the salt mines I just wanted to take a moment to wish everyone a very merry Christmas, Happy Holidays (and Happy Hanukkah, which coincides with Christmas this year…) Merry Festivus and all that other stuff.