instant messenger nerds are a funny lot
I just talked about modern social media security stupidity, and had the thought to check what's going on with the ancient instant messenger stuff.
How ancient am I talking about? Late '90s. There are instant messenger nerds out there who are bound and determined to recreate that Windows 95 instant messaging experience. As in using Windows 95 with specific software, such as ICQ, AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, whatever, take your pick.
Why would anybody even bother trying to make all that ancient crap work again? You can probably guess the answer.
It's nostalgia, 100%. Nostalgia is the thing that drives people to buy things like a Pet Rock, board games (which I admit are still cool and always will be), old style electronic handheld game, and so on. It's also the thing that drives the desire to use old crusty messaging software on old crusty operating systems.
What the nerds are chasing after can be broken into three parts. The first two I've already mentioned, that being the old OS and old messaging software. The third part is act of chatting with other people using a PC.
Instant messaging is not something you do on a phone. If you want to chat on a phone, that's as easy as sending a text message and Bob's your uncle. Or, if you want a "chat room" on phone, that is what group messaging is for.
A true old style late '90s instant messaging experience is not a mobile thing. Rather, it's about using very specific software using specific hardware in an environment where you are committing to the act, so to speak.
There have been and still are a few independent projects going in an effort to recreate the old ICQ/AIM/YIM/MSN experience. For example, some people put up servers running the OSCAR protocol for AOL Instant Messenger use. Servers like this stick around for a while, but then eventually shut down.
The shutdown reason is more or less always the same. Cost. The server starts free at first, costs add up, server operator asks for money from its users to keep it going, nobody pays, server shuts down.
IRC has always been the better option. If you're into old style internet ways of chat, internet relay chat is the only thing worth using because it's text-based. If you can get that crusty old PC connected to the internet, you most likely can get IRC working.
Even a DEC VT220 from the 1980s can do IRC. It just needs to connect to a Linux box. Use a USB-to-serial adapter and a null modem cable, configure the terminal for 9600 or 19200 baud, run a getty service on the Linux box for managing terminal connections, connect, use a terminal based IRC client like irssi and ta-da, chat. It's completely GUI-less, but it works.
Also, when popular YouTube tech nerds want to do a nerdy retro chat thing, IRC is what they use. None of them say "add me to your AIM buddy list", but instead point to a IRC server and instruct to join their IRC channel instead.
The look, sounds and feel of those old IM clients is strong for some. Seeing that old AOL Running Man icon or the Yahoo emoticons (which I admit were some of the best ever made) brings back nice memories of a simpler, kinder internet.
But at the same time, those same old IM clients were designed to use proprietary protocols and centralized servers. Better to just let that all go and use IRC instead, if for no other reason that it works on more computers.
With IRC, somebody using Windows 11 can chat with somebody else using an Amiga. Or OS/2 Warp. Or Mac OS 8. Or MS-DOS. Or whatever. You can't do that with old instant messaging because it's too proprietary. But you can with IRC.
modern social media security is hilarious
I've been on the internet a long time, so of course I have social media accounts. Do I use them? No. Very briefly, I recently tried using one again, and that went over like a lead balloon, so I just shelved it. More on that in a minute.
Originally, social media was used solely in the web browser, but that's not how they're intended to be used anymore. Every social media platform absolutely wants you to use their app on a phone. Were it up to the social media companies, they wouldn't even offer a way to use their systems with a regular web browser. So why haven't they dropped browser logins? I'll answer that later.
I'm going to talk about two social media platforms. The names of the platforms won't even be said because that doesn't matter, although I'm sure with barely any guessing you'll know what they are.
Platform A sends me emails (yes, plural) several times a week with the subject line:
12345678 is your password reset code
The reset code is obviously different each time.
Did I request a password reset? No.
And before you even think you know what caused this, no, you don't.
I do the dance of logging in and putting in my TOTP, go to the account settings to examine recent email communications, and there are two sections. Security emails and "Other".
These password reset emails are always under "Other" and never security, which means the email was never a security thing in the first place. It's something else.
I have been up and down and around this entire account several times, and it is not connected nor authenticated to anything anywhere else.
Have I changed the password before? Yes. Have I changed the email address to login with before? Yes.
Did that make any difference? No. These emails just keep coming. I have never figured out why this stupid platform keeps sending password reset emails over and over.
Even though the account has never been compromised, this has been going on for YEARS. Sometimes these password reset emails arrive every day, sometimes it's like it is now where it happens a few times a week, sometimes it's once every few months.
But make no mistake, they don't stop. Not for the long term, anyway. It's to the point where I have an email filter set up to put them elsewhere so I can examine them later instead of seeing them in my inbox all the time.
And no, there's no happy ending here. That's the best I can do to deal with this crap.
With Platform B, it's a different sort of hilarity.
I am shadowbanned on B. Did I do something bad to deserve that? No. Did I violate terms of service? No. Did I post anything I shouldn't have? No.
The reason I am shadowbanned on B is literally from doing absolutely nothing.
No, really, I'm not kidding.
I'll explain.
I signed up for this B account back in the late '00s, so oh yeah, it's old. I messed around with it for a time, but after some years said eh, I'll just set-private the account and maybe come back to it later.
Years pass without a single thing being posted to the account.
After a while, I login to the account. And because I wanted to be "SECURE", I thought okay, I'll set up TOTP because that's what you're supposed to do.
Platform B spits a notice at me stating if you want to enable that, cough up some money.
Um, no. Not happening. I logged out and let it collect dust again.
Another year or two passes until a month or so ago where I thought hey, I should try that platform B again since I still have the account.
I login, and whoa, NOW they graciously allow setup of TOTP for free like they should have in the first place. I set that up, and yep, working. Good.
After that, I make a few public posts, and none of them appear publicly at all. That's the shadowban part. My account is live, in good standing, has no terms of service violations, but nothing I post appears publicly. I can post, but anything I put there is only seen by an audience of one. Me. And bear in mind this is just family-friendly text posts with no links.
After some digging around, some others said yeah, a shadowban can happen when you "reactivate" a dormant account. Just post a few things for a week, and the shadowban should be lifted.
So I did that.
Nope. Still shadowbanned after a week.
Logged out. Screw that place.
On both platforms A and B, there is absolutely nothing that can be done to fix this crap.
On A, my tin foil hat senses are going off and I'm thinking the system purposely sends reset emails just to get me to login. And yes, this does make me wonder if anything truly bad would happen if I ignored those emails and just logged in once a week.
On B, I just gave up since there is no documentation anywhere on how to fix a shadowban there. Nobody knows, AI doesn't know either, so screw it.
There are two things I'm reminded of from these experiences.
First is my car navigation. Anyone who reads my stuff here knows I use a Garmin DriveSmart. The only time that thing ever connects to the internet is for system or map updates and that's it. And I know that is the reason it works as it should. Saved locations never vanish for no reason. I never have to login to the stupid thing. I just turn it on and go. No "required" internet connectivity = it just works.
Second is my email, which is the hosted type. Oddly enough, and hilariously enough, that really does seem to be the best way to use email. If my email was some "free" web-based email thing, that could and most likely would have glitchy problems similar to social media platforms.
This is my theory of why the social media platforms I use have glitches and/or shadowban crap going on:
It's because I don't use the apps social media companies want their entire user base to use. I use a browser.
Do social media companies purposely make it more difficult to use their platforms using a browser? I believe the answer is yes. With the "official" app, you have to deal with ads and all sorts of juicy personal info is sent over every time the app is used. With a browser, you can put on the brakes. Ads can be blocked, cookies can be deleted, and so on.
It would not surprise me in the slightest if all the security/shadowban crap I deal with magically fixed itself were I using the "official" apps for those A and B social media platforms.
But again, this is just a theory.
And why do social media platforms still support web browsers at all? I honestly don't know, especially considering it's obvious they hate them. My guess is that there still must be enough market share of web browser users to keep that support going?
In the end, for that A platform, I'll just keep filtering the emails. Whatever.
And for that B platform, it can go pound sand. Whatever.
the lightest casio watches
I'm personally not a fan of heavy watches, and my daily wearer is current the WS1600H that weighs in at 39g.
Given I like light, I wanted to know what the lightest watches Casio makes are, so I did some research, and this is what I found.
The lightest of the regular unisex size models is the Casio MQ24 at 20g. Regardless of which style it comes in (there are several), if the model starts with MQ24, it weighs 20g.
The lightest men's size G-SHOCK is G5600 at 50g and the GA2100 at 51g.
The lightest women's size G-SHOCK are what Casio calls Baby G models. Lightest of the light is the BGD565 at 30g.
In the Casio Edifice line, they're all heavy, but the "lightest" one is the EFV160D at 110g. Nice looking timepiece, I must admit.
For an Oceanus, a very highfalutin Casio model line, the lightest is the OCWS400 at 79g, and that is with a steel bracelet. How did they get the weight down? A lot of titanium.
The lightest Pro Trek model is the PRG340L at 52g. That is impressively light given the watch is large.
The lightest digital Casio in unisex size is a tie between the F-91W and F105W, both at 21g. Right after that is a much more recent model, the LF30W, at 23g.
The absolute lightest Casio digital is classified as a women's size, the LA11WL at a ridiculously light 10g in weight. And oh yeah, it's small. 31.4mm lug-to-lug, 25.5mm diameter, 7.6mm thick.
i bought a garmin drive 53
The Drive 53 is the entry level car navigator from Garmin. Even though I already own the 6" DriveSmart 66 and the 7" DriveSmart 76, I wanted the 5" Drive 53 anyway just to see if there are any real disadvantages using a smaller display.
I think a Drive 53 is worth owning, but not for the typical reasons others mention.
One typical reason might be "works where a phone doesn't". A particularly nasty gotcha is having phone app navigation suddenly stop working when crossing a country border, depending on phone plan. For example, you're happily driving in the northern United States on your way to Canada. Phone navigation is working just fine. You reach the Canadian border, cross, and uh-oh, now the phone doesn't work. Service off, data off, and that nav app that requires data to work? Yep, that's now nonfunctional too. You just learned the hard way that your phone won't work in Canada. There's your gotcha.
The Drive 53 has no gotchas like that and just keeps working, but again, I think it's worth owning for other reasons most don't think about.
There were two main reasons I wanted a 53.
First, I like that it uses the older style micro USB connector, because aside from the DS66 and DS76, all of my other Garmins use that style port.
Second, the 53 is a featherweight, weighing in less than any Seiko dive watch with metal bracelet. In fact, the 53 is more close in weight to that of an Apple Watch Ultra 3. And yet, the 53 doesn't feel cheap nor flimsy in the hand. That's pretty impressive.
The 53 is basic. It doesn't have Wi-Fi nor Bluetooth and no voice control, which is fine. I have a bunch of Garmins, and over the years it has been the advanced models that seem to start failing earlier compared to the basic ones.
What's already interesting about it is that the legibility is almost equal that of the DriveSmart 66. Some things on the 53 are smaller compared to the 66, but not significantly smaller.
Fortunately, the Drive 53 has on-map turns like the DS66 and DS76. Once a route is set, tap the bottom right, tap Turns, turns list is shown on the right, map on the left. It's a beautiful thing. You couldn't do that on the older Garmin nuvi models but can with the modern Drive/DriveSmart.
Drive 53 reminds me of what truly matters with GPS navigation
Because I don't do smartphone navigation since that's total trash, I am all-in with Garmin navigators. Even so, what I've learned over the years is that as long as the navigation is working and I can read the screen, nothing else matters.
On the first real drive I had with the 53, something that stuck out was how easy it is getting along with a basic no-traffic navigator. I just punched in a destination and started driving. No need to talk to it since it has no voice control. Nothing on screen for traffic reports happened either since it wasn't receiving any. It actually felt better not talking to the screen and not seeing any traffic stuff.
I don't know if I'll stick with the 53 for the long haul as it's too soon to tell. If I do go back to the 76, I may go ahead and turn off the voice control and traffic reporting just because that legitimately made for a better navigation experience. For me, anyway.
about that aws outage thing
On 20-Oct-2025, there was a boo-boo over at AWS (Amazon Web Services), and because roughly about a third of the internet runs off that, when AWS has a problem, the internet as a whole has a problem. Amazon has since fixed the problem. But a lot of people realized how much of the internet relies on AWS to actually be up and running for things to work.
No, it was not a security breach thing. A lot of people think it was. Nope. It was a straight up IT thing. DNS resolution, specifically. That's the thing that translates names into internet addresses. In very oversimplified terms, that means that when you type a whatever-dot-com in your browser, DNS translates that into the numerical address (i.e. IP address) of the server serving the web site, finds it, then the site is served to your browser. It was the DNS as far as I know that temporarily broke on Amazon's end.
Did this outage affect me?
Yes, but only in a minor way.
At the time of the outage, I needed to use part of the US Postal web site to check and see if a package had been shipped, and that didn't work. There were also a few web sites I normally use that took a really long time to load, but eventually did.
Briefly, I actually thought the connectivity problems stemmed from my internet connection, or maybe something screwy going on with my browser or whatever. Nope. It was AWS.
This outage reminded me of why I do things in certain ways concerning my own digital life.
One of these ways is, of course, how I do navigation.
Because I use a Garmin DriveSmart 76, no internet is used when I navigate since all the map data is hosted locally to the unit.
I've personally never been screwed over using a Garmin, but from the user reviews I've read over the years, a ton of people routinely get screwed over using smartphone navigation.
The worst concerning smartphone navigation cloud crap is when the entire "timeline" gets wiped. You login to the app one day, and every location you saved along with every location you've been to is gone, and there's no way to get it back. It's gone forever.
For any location I save, that's stored on my Garmin navigator, but I take it one step further. If it's a location I deem important, I get the GPS coordinates for it and save that separately.
Small example: 41.46809, -71.30303. Those coordinates point to a tree on Wetmore Ave in Newport Rhode Island. Anything special there? No. It's just a place to park that's within walking distance of the Cliff Walk on Belmont Beach. I like that place. Quite nice to visit.
If I were using some crappy smartphone nav app, "pinned" that location, but then my "timeline" was wiped out due to a system glitch, now it's gone. I would have to remember the location was in Rhode Island and remember Wetmore Ave if I had any hope of ever getting back there again.
Have I ever had to refer back to an old CSV, GPX or even a plain text file with coordinates to find a location of the past? Yes, and more than once. Addresses change, street names change, businesses sometimes up and vanish like a fart in the wind, whatever. GPS coordinates is sometimes the only way to find locations. And the last thing I need is some stupid nav app wiping out previously saved locations because of an "update".
Again, the DriveSmart 76 saves locations locally and doesn't need internet to work, which is good. Satellites in space is how it knows where it is. And the nice part is that there's even a backup for that. If GPS fails temporarily, the DS76 uses two fallback satellite networks, Galileo and BeiDou. Very nice.