A 56.6 kbps modem just needs an analog audio channel to work, right? A stereo jack has two channels for full duplex communication at that point.

It wasn’t the buffer itself that drew power. It was the need to physically spin the disc faster in order to read the data to build up a buffer. So it would draw more power even if you left it physically stable. And then, if it would actually skip in reading, it would need to seek back to where it was to build up the buffer again.

taking a shot at installing a new OS

To be clear, I had been on Ubuntu for about 4 years by then, having switched when 6.06 LTS had come out. And several years before that, I had previously installed Windows Me, XP beta, and the first official XP release on a home-built, my first computer that was actually mine, using student loan money paid out because my degree program required all students have their own computer.

But freedom to tinker on software was by no means the flexibility to acquire spare hardware. Computers were really expensive in the 90’s and still pretty expensive in the 2000’s. Especially laptops, in a time when color LCD technology was still pretty new.

That’s why I assumed you were a different age from me, either old enough to have been tinkering with computers long enough to have spare parts, or young enough to still live with middle class parents who had computers and Internet at home.

I can’t tell if you were rich, or just not the right age to appreciate that it wasn’t exactly common for a young adult, fresh out of college, to have spare computers laying around (much less the budget to spare on getting a $300-500 secondary device for browsing the internet). If I upgraded computers, I sold the old one used if it was working, or for parts of it wasn’t. I definitely wasn’t packing up secondary computers to bring with me when I moved cities for a new job.

Yes, I had access to a work computer at the office, but it would’ve been weird to try to bring in my own computer to try to work on it after hours, while trying to use the Internet from my cubicle for personal stuff.

I could’ve asked a roommate to borrow their computer or to look stuff up for me, but that, like going to the office or a library to use that internet, would’ve been a lot more friction than I was willing to put up with, for a side project at home.

And so it’s not that I think it’s weird to have a secondary internet-connected device before 2010. It’s that I think it’s weird to not understand that not everyone else did.

Getting a smartphone in 2010 was what gave me the confidence to switch to Arch Linux, knowing I could always look things up on the wiki as necessary.

I also think my first computer that could boot from USB was the one I bought in 2011, too. Everything before that I had to physically burn a CD.

It’s worth pointing out that browser support is a tiny, but important, part of overall ecosystem support.

TIFF is the dominant standard for certain hardware and processes for digitizing physical documents, or publishing/printing digital files as physical prints. But most browsers don’t bother supporting displaying TIFF, because that’s not a good format for web use.

Note also that non-backwards-compatible TIFF extensions are usually what cameras capture as “raw” image data and what image development software stores as “digital negatives.”

JPEG XL is trying to replace TIFF at the interface between the physical analog world and the digital files we use to represent that image data. I’m watching this space in particular, because the original web generation formats of JPEG, PNG, and GIF (and newer web-oriented formats like webp and avif) aren’t trying to do anything with physical sensors, scans, prints, etc.

Meanwhile, JPEG XL is trying to replace JPEG on the web, with photographic images compressed with much more efficient and much higher quality compression. And it’s trying to replace PNG for lossless compression.

It’s trying to do it all, so watching to see where things get adopted and supported will be interesting. Apple appears to be going all in on JXL, from browser support to file manager previews to actual hardware sensors storing raw image data in JXL. Adobe supports it, too, so we might start to see full JXL workflows from image capture to postprocessing to digital/web publishing to full blown paper/print publishing.

iPhone 16 supports shooting in JPEG-XL and I expect that will be huge for hardware/processing adoption.

You can get my source code but good luck compiling it.

content-aware filling

For what it’s worth, GIMP has had the resynthesizer plugin since the mid or late 2000’s, and at the time it was significantly ahead of Adobe’s Content Aware Fill.

Sorry best I can do is a programmable turtle that moves around as a pen.