two things makes computers slow more than anything else
Computers from years ago were slow for a number of reasons. Slow seek time on the hard drive, low amount of RAM, an operating system choked with a bunch of bloatware, and so on.
Today, computers are only slow for only two reasons.
First, the internet itself.
With anything internet-based, you wait while things load from a remote server. I don't think people really appreciate how much waiting there actually is to do anything online.
And it doesn't help that so many programs are "required" to connect to the internet by design. This means that no matter what, any program that connects to the internet means you wait. A lot.
Second, the web browser.
A web browser these days is like running an entire operating system in your operating system. The level of crap a browser loads both locally and online is insane, and all the crap a browser does in the background is also insane.
Want to see your computer run fast? Use programs that don't connect to the internet at all. With the exception of super chunky stuff like editing giant photos and/or videos, everything is quick.
My phone, which is "old", probably has 100x the computing power compared to the my first PC with Windows (version 3.1, thank you very much) did. But try to do anything online and sloooowwwww.
The primary browser on my phone is DuckDuckGo. Yes, they have a mobile browser. The reason I run it is because it blocks a lot of crap and connects to the least amount of stuff while still delivering a modern mobile browser experience...
...but it's still slow. Fault of the browser? No. Fault of my connection speed? No. It's the fault of the internet.
Since my site doesn't load any needless crap, oh yeah, loads super fast on anything, including the phone. My site isn't on any high-tier super fast ultra business class server or anything like that. It loads fast because it's crap-free. How I wish other web sites were like that.
Try and load a banking web site (especially one that's for a credit card) on your phone in the browser and you'll feel like you're on dialup internet all over again, if you're old enough to remember that experience. Using DuckDuckGo will make the experience slightly better, but that browser can't fix a web site that's a slow-loading pig.
Or better yet, try loading any popular social media site in the browser. Stuttering, pausing, jumpy pages, and ridiculous amounts of background crap happen when all you want to do is send a message, view a photo or watch a video.
This is 2026 internet? Seriously?
your gps is too old, my dude
A followup to the oldest usable Garmins of sorts.
I periodically receive communications concerning old and sometimes really old Garmin nuvi navigators since I know a lot about them. Whether I actually answer those communications depends on what's being asked.
If the vibe of the communication is along the lines of, "I'm asking for help, but what I actually want is for you to take time out of your life and fix my problem for me, totally for free", nope, thanks for playing. I'm not your personal free tech support. And you gotta love it when they end it with, "Thanks in advance!" Anybody who says that should be slapped.
Or, if the communication is a wall-o'-text accompanied by several giant attached images (hello, rude), no, not reading that. Sir, I use NeoMutt and I'm not detaching your dumb images, nor will I read the tome you wrote. In instances like that, I will call upon Jesus's lesser known dopey cousin Yeezus, as in, "YEEZUS! The hell is this happy horseshit?!" Yes, I know I'm going straight to hell. See you there.
Old crusty dudes aren't the only ones who do this, although a fair amount of them are. Crusty bought a then-expensive nuvi back when it was new, wants to keep it working, doesn't know how to do it, bounces around forums to try to get people to do it for free, nobody does, he searches around more, finds me, then bounces a communication my way to see if he can sucker me into being Free Tech Support Guy for him. Nope. Go back to the forums, Crusty.
The other type I get fix-my-stuff-for-free communications from is Son of Crusty.
Son of Crusty finds dad's old nuvi and asks if he can have it. Crusty replies with, "Yes, Son of Crusty, I bequeath my old navigation tech to you. Fear not its dim screen, dead battery and aged plastics, for it shall serve you well. Go now. Navigate to the package store, and return with a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon."
Before Son of Crusty can embark on his perilous journey to the package store, he has to get Ye Olde Nuvi to work first.
Unfortunately, Son of Crusty hasn't got a clue how to go about that since it uses tech completely outside of what he knows.
Let's say it was a nuvi 360. Too old, my dude. That 2006 model was released before multiple map image support and before Lifetime Maps. And I'm not about to explain memory card types, FAT32, USB mini connectors, and how to use workarounds with the 360 file system to support more than one map image (doable, but not easy).
A nuvi 360 is 20 years old as of 2026. It's my belief that tech ages 3x as fast as real life does, at least where consumer electronics are concerned. Yeah, I'm saying 20-year-old tech might as well be 60 in human years.
This is why I say the nuvi 200 white-sticker serial (meaning not gray-sticker) is the oldest usable nuvi. True, a 200 is just slightly younger than a 360, but with far less bullshit involved to update the maps with an OpenStreetMap replacement.
You have to be a bit of a nerd to even get a 200 working, but that's as far back as you can go for old-but-usable. And by usable, I mean a single nuvi using a single memory card with map data to navigate you anywhere in the United States. A 200 can be made to do that, but the 360 (or any other like model such as 350, 370, 660, 670, 680) cannot.
i remember 2008
2008 is a year I remember because that's when gas prices spiked and stayed that way for a while, and at the time I was driving a stupid truck that averaged around 17-18 MPG.
There's also something else I remember. Going to a gas station to fill the truck, and seeing an older guy at a pump with his little car, a Nissan Versa Note. I felt two things. Regret and jealousy. Regret in that I was driving a stupid truck, and jealous in that I wasn't driving a little car like that other guy had.
I made a promise to myself when I saw that. "Never again."
Never again would I own a gas-sucking stupid truck and be caught paying for it literally every time I go to the pump. Some time later, I finally got rid of that truck, and have been driving small cars ever since.
The car I drive now is small and over 15 years old, but with a proper driving technique can achieve 40+ MPG. No, it's not a hybrid. Just a regular gas car with 5-speed manual transmission. The proper driving technique I'm referring to is hypermiling, and I know it well.
It's now 2026, and sure enough, another gas price spike. For how long? No idea. But when I got wind that gas prices were going up again, I immediately went to the gas station and filled the tank, which in one day jumped up about 40 cents per gallon more compared to the previous day. Thankfully, I was already at 3/4 tank, so the cost wasn't too bad.
After filling the tank, it was once again time to start using the hypermiling driving techniques I learned all the way back in '08. And they're just as useful now as they were 18 years ago.
On a trip I just drove that was about 15 miles away, both highway and city driving were involved. I saw more than a few cars and stupid trucks driving real slow instead of barreling down the road like they ordinarily do. Those drivers know. They remember high gas prices and are already slowing down.
There were two other things I noticed that are the same as the last time a gas price spike happened. Other drivers being far less annoyed and more accepting of others driving slow, and being more annoyed at anybody going fast.
What happens if gas prices skyrocket?
Will HEV and EV car sales increase? No, because nobody can afford a new car. As if anyone wants to take on an 84-month auto loan. I don't think so.
Instead, people will just keep the cars they have, drive less on weekdays, and more on weekends.
What people do by default whenever a gas price spike happens is a) go without, and b) change daily errands to weekly.
On a daily commute, if that included a stop to a coffee place every day, that stops. Coffee is made at home, put in a travel mug (there are some real nice options for those these days), and that's that.
If errands are run a few times a week, that's rescheduled so everything is done on Saturday. I think the smarter move would be to get all the errand stuff done on a Wednesday if it all possible, because Saturday is when all the grocery and department store parking lots get jammed.
"I'll get there when I get there"
For that 15 mile trip, I only looked at the ETA on my Garmin DriveSmart once. After that, I said whatever, I'm in no rush, I'll get there whenever.
What I was going to do but didn't was craft a custom route to the place I was going to, extreme hypermiler style. One hypermiling technique is to make every effort to avoid stopping, because when stopped, you're getting 0 MPG.
I could have studied the map, then used the Garmin to customize a route where I stop the least, avoiding every stop sign and traffic light possible. But then my brain kicked in, and I remembered there's a whole lot of road construction going on all over the place. Sure, I could look up where all the construction is and adjust my route accordingly, but that would have been too much hassle, and possibly used more gas just trying to avoid stopping.
I just said screw it, punched in the location to the DriveSmart and headed out. Yes, I did encounter construction, but it was only minimal.
"I'll get there when I get there" is definitely a frame of mind you must use when hypermiling, because it's always going to take longer to get places when doing it. More time is spent, but money is saved. However, when you hypermile enough, over time you figure out ways to get places where barely any time is lost at all, so it's definitely worth doing.
2008's gas price spike sucked for driving. As for the spike now in 2026, again I do not know how long this spike will last for (nor does anyone else), but this time around I have the right car and hypermiling knowledge so it won't sting nearly as bad.
garmin 2027.10 map update
The latest 2027.10 map update is out for Garmin navigators. Garmin for whatever reason uses the future year for version numbers. No idea why, but whatever. I own a bunch of Garmins both current and old, and all my screens were updated with the exception of two that are over a decade old, which is understandable. If I really wanted to use those two old screens, I could load in alternative OpenStreetMap map data. Some features are lost using OSM data (speed limits, junction view, etc.), but it keeps them working.
Even with the latest maps, there is one thing I know will never be fixed.
Points of Interest, a.k.a. POIs.
Regardless of whether a Garmin or smartphone navigation app is used, POI accuracy has been a problem for a long time. Is there any way to fix it? No, so a workaround has to be used.
Close to 20 years ago, I learned that I can't trust a POI, and that's when I learned the workaround of using GPS coordinates instead.
A very simple example of that is when going to a business at a shopping mall. If I wanted to go to a GAP store at 2223 N Westshore Blvd Ste 142 Tampa Florida, punching that location in to any navigation system or app is worthless. That store is inside a mall, so what I specifically need is directions to the closest parking spot. That spot is coordinates 27.965574, -82.518710. When I punch that in, then I get the correct destination of where to park the car.
Coordinates is literally the only way to very specifically be directed to where I want to park.
When I say this will never be fixed, I'm not kidding
If AI or drones or both were thrown at the POI accuracy problem, it wouldn't fix it. The only thing that works is having every single POI confirmed manually by an actual person. And since there are many millions of POIs, yeah, nobody is going to bother ever fixing the problem.
I'll put it another way. This is a bit lengthy but it needs to be to get the point across.
Let's say a body of government contacted and said they'd pay me $500K to make a super-accurate POI list of every single government property in the state. And I mean all of them. This list would be used for internal use only. Every courthouse, every police station, every firehouse, every school, every power/utility station, and other government properties even for ones that are just fields with unmanned towers on them. Every single frickin' thing the state has. If the state owns it, it goes on the list.
Could I do this job? Yes. Could it be deployed on any government issued Garmin device? Yes. Could it be used on PCs internally? Also a yes.
How long would it take to get this list done? Depends on the data I'd get and what driving would be involved, because I know exactly what would happen. I'd be contracted to do the work, but the data given to me would be "dirty" as hell. It'd be nothing more than an enormous CSV or spreadsheet with many thousands of entries sprawled all over the place, many of which being completely uncategorized, and many locations pulled from data from as far back as 50 years ago or possibly earlier.
Some of those entries could be confirmed by online maps, but there would be many where the only way to confirm the existence of certain properties would be to physically drive there, and possibly involve walking and/or hiking after that. Yes, I said hiking, because some government properties are literally in the middle of the woods.
And on top of that, everything would need to be categorized.
This is a doable job, but absolutely not something that could be done in a week. It would take months. Maybe up to 2 years or more. It depends on how many locations I'd have to deal with and how far apart they are from each other.
But once it's all done, things are a whole lot better because now the proper, accurate and completely searchable POI list exists. All the properties are in there, nice and tidy. And they can be loaded into government issued automotive or handheld navigators, which is great because those are not phones and pass security checklists. Nice. And because I'm such a stickler for documentation, anybody who gets the list after I make it would have an easy time making periodic additions or modifications. Not a problem.
Now imagine trying to get that same style of accurate POI list for every single residential and commercial address. A government owned property list is doable, but residential/commercial? That's a much bigger job.
Maybe, maybe if a government body threw enough money at me, I could do the job of going through every residential and commercial address town by town, city by city, until every last one of them was accounted for. Cities and towns in particular value that data because it makes it far easier to track things like property taxes. But wow, what a slog of a job that would be. Not fun, even though very useful in the end for government. At least I'd get to drive around a lot. True, the fleet vehicle I'd be assigned would be some little hybrid car or small SUV, but that suits me fine. I enjoy driving and exploration anyway, so there's that. And I'd be up to the job, but still, big slog of a job.
In the end...
Whenever I encounter a wrongly marked POI, I really don't complain because I understand how giant of a job it is to even make and maintain POI lists. The fact POI lists exist at all is a miracle in itself, even if they're not that great.
I'm okay with manually getting coordinates due to wrongly marked POIs, because I'm not afraid to fix the problem myself.
fixing geocities animated gifs
I've been using internet since the mid-1990s, so of course I remember Geocities and even had a page there once (which I think was under the "TelevisionCity" category). A very common thing was to use animated GIF images.
Were those images saved somewhere? Yes. Internet Archive has GifCities, which has hundreds of thousands if not millions of those GIFs, all searchable, and in original form...
...and that's the problem.
Many of those old crusty GIFs never had a frame rate set, and I know exactly why.
Mid-to-late 1990s PC specs meant you either had a CPU that was a 486 or a Pentium. It was unlikely you had a Pentium II unless you had serious cash for it, and you absolutely did not have a Pentium III since that didn't exist until 1999.
Combine that with using Microsoft Windows 95, and using Netscape Navigator 3, Netscape Communicator 4, Microsoft Internet Explorer 2, or Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 as your browser.. and yeah, things were slow.
Oh, and let's not forget WebTV a.k.a. MSN TV, as in the thing you connected to your television for internet use. That was also dog slow, both for hardware and software. I never had one of those, but I knew one person that did back in the day. Just one. WebTV never sold all that well.
An animated GIF without a frame rate set means it will go through its frames as fast as possible. On a mid-to-late '90s era PC, the GIF looked fine because even at the fastest the browser could display an animated GIF, it was still "normal" speed. But on a modern computer now, it's way too fast.
Two animated GIF examples from Geocities pages in original form to show the speed problem:
There are two methods to fix this.
Method 1: gifsicle
The easiest way I found to introduce a proper frame rate with gifsicle is to explode the original GIF into separate frames, then recombine.
Put the GIF into a folder.
Run this:
gifsicle -e file.gif
A bunch of frame files are created, starting with .000 and counting up from there.
Move the original GIF out of the folder.
Run this:
gifsicle -d 1 -m * -o fixed.gif
This tells gifsicle to set a delay of 1/100th of a second, merge all frames into one file, and output the file fixed.gif.
And we end up with this:
Method 2: GIMP
This is way more involved, but may be preferable if you need to set a more precise frame rate and/or fix other things on a per-frame level.
Open the GIF in GIMP.
The first thing to do is "unoptimize" the GIF to eliminate weirdness (mostly to do with transparencies, should the GIF have any).
Filters > Animation > Unoptimize
If there is nothing to be done on a per-frame level, you can just export as this point.
File > Export As...
Yes, Export As... must be used and not Save As...
Title the file fixed.gif and click Export.
Now we set the frame rate. Using 100 for all frames is the one that usually works. If you notice it's too slow or too fast at 100, just export again and adjust until it looks right.
The end result:
Dealing with GIFs that have varying frame delays
An example of this is a GIF animation has some frames at 100ms, but then a half-second "pause" with one frame at 500ms, then loop.
The vast majority of Geocities animated GIFs don't have any of this going on, but on rare occasion, some might.
GIMP is the easiest way to deal with this. In the Layers list is where all the frames are. Each frame will show how many milliseconds of delay it has, identified with parenthesis. Using a 10 frame animation example, let's frames 1 through 9 have a delay of 100ms. You'll see each layer as something like Frame 1 (100ms), Frame 2 (100ms), and so on. Now let's say the tenth frame is where the animation "pauses" for one-half second before looping. The name there would be Frame 10 (500ms).
Any Layer, which in this case is any frame, can be changed just by double clicking it. For example, if I wanted to make the "pause" on the tenth frame longer, I just double-click and change (500ms) to (1000ms), and that increases the time just for that frame from one-half second to a full second.
Yes, it is possible to adjust delays on a per-frame level using gifsicle, but way more difficult. In GIMP I see a nice tidy list of everything in Layers, and can quickly find which frame(s) have different delays.
Convert the GIF to MP4
Some may want to do this to put the GIF in a video. Use FFMPEG for that.
Fix the frame rate of the GIF first and export, then do this:
ffmpeg -i fixed.gif fixed.mp4
You only get one animation loop from this. Take your fixed.mp4 and create another file that has the loop repeat 20 times:
ffmpeg -stream_loop 20 -i fixed.mp4 -c copy fixed20.mp4
Done.
If the resulting MP4 has a frame rate running way too fast, it's probably because you used gifsicle. Try exporting from GIMP instead to make your fixed GIF, then make your MP4 clips.