Hello! Welcome to issue 2 of This Station is Non-Operational; the first issue to be sent to an email inbox that isn't my own.

Looking back over it, this week's issue seems mainly to be railing against the Walled Gardens every tech company has built and is battling to keep us in, which is a thing I've never liked but have really come to dislike over the past few weeks and months - I think the decision to start taking a few of them out of my life has made me realise just how happily held captive we are.

The response to this newsletter has been great, especially over on Linkedin, but if you're reading this I have a teeny-tiny favour: If you like this, if it stokes a fire in your belly to do something or you find it interesting or useful or even if it just makes you laugh, drop a link to the archive or to this post on your socials - whether that's Discord, Whatsapp, Bluesky or one of the bad ones owned by one of the men who could decide to bring about the end of the world.

I'll keep writing these even if you don't do it obviously, but - and I mean this 100% sincerely - if you give it a share on your socials I'll buy you a drink. Even an expensive IPA or a cocktail.

What Happened To Custom Roms?
9to5Google

I'm an unrepentant tinkerer. Nothing in my house stays on a stock operating system or remains otherwise un-messed-with for long, except for (and this is what the video is talking about) my mobile phone.

This never used to be the case; I used to spend hours on forums checking out custom Android ROMs to see what weird quirks and changes people were making (although often all I wanted was stock Android that was free of the nonsense most OEMs fill their phones with straight out the factory) - except at some point, the process of getting your phone ready for a custom ROM meant breaking really useful features like Google Pay and banking apps; things that I rely on every day and that I really don't want to discover have been broken by an overnight update to something, leaving me unable to pay for the fuel I've just put in my car or whatever - the juice wasn't worth the squeeze anymore.

If you're going to tell me that actually it's easy to keep your banking apps working so long as you follow this 97 step process, save yourself the energy.

Zombie Netscape Won’t Die
Hackaday

You could have offered me a million quid and given me a billion guesses and I would never have said that Netscape Dial Up got turned off last year - I also didn't know that at some point the name had been slapped on a browser once again, as if everyone had spent the last 15 years desperately howling at the moon waiting for a return of Netscape Navigator.

The other thing the article mentions that I thought was interesting was how it's built off Chromium, the privacy policy is on Yahoo, it's using the Netscape name and it's got AOL branding on it; not only is it a rogue's gallery of early 00s internet brands, it also reminds me just how merge-happy businesses were in that time, with every telecommunications business and media company in the world seemingly trying to take a slice of the dot-com boom.

The UK paid £4.1 million for a bookmarks site
Mahad Kalam

I really, really don't understand what the UK government is trying to prove with AI. OK, it's nice to see them entertaining the idea of a Universal Basic Income, but doing so to soften the blow of industries "going away" because of generative AI is absolutely wild to me.

Still, that's not what the above is about. The post above is about the government's new £4.1m AI skills hub, which seems to have been thrown together by someone with Claude Code access and an inbox full of press releases from LLM vendors.

If we're going to train adults on AI, I really feel like training people how to spot misinformation generated by AI would be a far more useful skill to have. Every millenial I know spends their life having to explain to their boomer parents why the thing they read on Facebook just isn't true, and since AI image and video generation has started to pick up in terms of quality, explaining to the 60 year old in your life that no, the dog in the video didn't actually drive the car is becoming exhausting - and that's to say nothing for the politically led lies it can help to further.

This website is bad for a ton of reasons; it's legally incorrect and based entirely on the assumption that AI should broadly be allowed to do what it wants, it looks bad, and the content is provided almost entirely by LLM providers. A dreadful rushjob that is of benefit to almost nobody - and literally as I am writing this I'm now seeing news that there's courses on there from 2004, courses from degree mills, and references to courses that simply don't exist; all of which smells, to me, like someone asked an LLM to curate a list of courses about AI.

Raspberry Pi is cheaper than a Mini PC again (that's not good)
Jeff Geerling

I'm sharing this piece not just to complain about the price of RAM (although that is wild; if you're building a mid-high spec gaming PC at the moment you will probably pay as much for your RAM as your GPU, whereas 12 months ago the RAM in a desktop PC was probably 25% of the cost of a decent graphics card) - but I also want to talk briefly about the wonders of reusing old hardware.

I use an old Android phone to listen to music at the gym; it stays in airplane mode unless I want to download new songs so the battery lasts like a week, it means I don't get distracted by a million other things on my phone, and it also means I can throw it in my bag and not worry about my actual phone getting smashed up or scuffed or covered in sweat or whatever.

And this is the cool thing, if you have some old hardware lying around in your house somewhere, there's likely a use for it - and an old laptop or similar is a great entryway into homelabbing, which is what I REALLY wanted to talk about.

What's homelabbing? Basically, it's regaining a little bit of data sovereignty from Google and Spotify and all the other cloud services we got tricked into relying on over the last ten years or so - in slightly more complex terms it's hosting your own services to do things like stream music and store photos and all that good stuff. The big companies have been charging you 5, 10, 20 dollars a month for something that any piece of computer hardware built in the last 10 years is capable of, and building a homelab allows you to take that power (and cash) back.

Obviously, this is appealing because when you own the hardware and the software, you're in control - Nobody is going to raise the price or make the service worse in the name of profit or hide things via an algorithm, you just get to own it.

And man, when you start looking into this the first thing you'll notice how simple it all is; it turns out that internet enabled computers are exceptionally good at talking to one another when they're not trapped within the walled gardens built by Meta and Google and Amazon that we've all got used to living in.

Obviously some people get carried away and 3d print cases that end up looking like ghoulish cuboid robot squids (not me of course, at least not until I clear the space to get a 3d printer), but I really can't overexaggerate just how much of this stuff you can achieve with an old laptop and an evening with some youtube videos.

Neocities Is Blocked by Bing
Neocities

Shout out to all my fellow rapidly decaying millennials who remember Geocities. Being into the internet in 2003 or so meant that if you wanted an online presence it was either a Geocities or an Angelfire site - a couple of years later the true sickos had a .tk domain, but they were normally reserved for professional organisations like your mate's band. Anyway, this isn't a newsletter about Tuesday band nights at the Royal Mail Club in Chester, it's about the internet, and this little section isn't even about Geocities, it's about Geocities. What's Neocities? Well if you're being unkind it's Geocities for kids who think the first years of the millennium are retro; if you're being a little less cynical it's a little taste of what the internet was like in 2003 before we all got trapped in the walled gardens Bezos and Zuckerberg built.

But why do we reckon Bing have totally deindexed neocities.org? I'll admit that I've never dealt being hit by this sort of thing by Bing, but usually search engines provide some kind of guidance as to why decisions like this are made - it's obviously absolutely possible (as it is with any site that allows for such extensive UGC) that someone is using the site for some kind of nefarious (or at least non-search-engine friendly) behaviour, but surely the site should be informed of this and given the ability to fix it?

Obviously the big caveat here is that I don't have access to their Bing Search Tools (I don't even know if they have one, although if they didn't I imagine it would have been the first thing they did when trying to diagnose a problem like this) so maybe there's a big MANUAL PENALTY notice in there somewhere, but the apparent complete lack of communication as to what the problem is (a problem that Google doesn't seem to have!) isn't really on. I don't want to type the words "walled garden" AGAIN this week but our hyperscalin overlords and their little kingdoms are an ongoing source of vexation to my old brain.