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LBRY and Odysee – A video hosting review.

April 16, 2022April 9, 2022 by S-Config

Wooo-boy here goes S reviewing another crypto service!

You are absolutely right in the respect that we are reviewing a little site known as Odysee.com. A site that wants a piece of that sweet YouTube traffic out there but also has its own blockchain services powering it. We’ve been very critical about Web 3.0 services in the past such as PreSearch and now we really want Odysee to prove us wrong. After all, for those readers who come to my site, I’ve published article, after article, after article of YouTubes atrocities, and there came a point in our blogging career that frankly, we were sick of doing it because a blog is supposed to help you the reader. It’s supposed to offer an alternative to the wrongs that exist on the internet.

Is Odysee that solution? Is it here to save us from tyranny and censorship? Is Odysee going to release us from the borderline Stockholm syndrome caused by YouTubes’ actions and decisions?

Probably not, but read on if you want to hear my diatribes!

Web 3.0

January 24, 2022January 16, 2022 by S-Config

What is “Web 3.0”

Sometimes it’s also referred to as “Web3.” This subject was actually a hard to really pin down. As we are living in the screaming 20’s where the world is fast tracking itself for CostCo levels of stupid it’s impossible to really find a pure example of Web 3.0. So , the quick and dirty answer to how we feel about Web 3.0?

We’ve come to the conclusion that Web3 or Web 3.0 is pretty much unproven marketing hype and vaporwave made up my crypto-bros that want to put a price tag on the internet.

Read on if you wish to hear my diatribes.

Clarification time!

December 7, 2021November 13, 2021 by S-Config

It’s time to shed some light and clarification on some of the things we do here.

Lately, we’ve gotten some feedback that people are getting our message and wanting to start a website which is excellent. The more people that start their own website means less centralization underneath the banner of a major conglomerate. Especially to those who choose a local or small web provider that gives you superior service versus the complete ambivalence of sites such as GoDaddy. Now for those who are interested in how we got into the blogging business, we have an article talking about how trials and tribulations from a shared hosting provider that only gave us 25MB of web space to the present time. We even have another article talking about how to start a blog right. This article mostly discusses the time frame and research it took to get where we are today.

Read on if you wish to know more.

JXL – JPEGXL and the web experience here.

September 26, 2021September 23, 2021 by S-Config

Addressing the JXL or JPegXL format floating around the internet.

We’re going to do something we usually do not do for ANY of our blog articles. We’re going to purposefully STOP all optimization of our files in this entry and only use ONLY PNG files (Blog article only, navigation, footer, and backgrounds will still be processed. It may sound totally counter productive to do when making an article about a new format that the developers insist that you use. However, in order to graphically demonstrate my points about the “New kid on the image war block” we must go totally lossless with a codec we trust and has been proven for almost 20 years.

Now, for those users running nightly builds of Chrome or Firefox that want to test out JXL Good news! Every article EXCEPT this one is already encoded thanks to scripting mentioned on this blog article. So once you’ve enabled JXL in your browser (details described below) you can explore this site with it and see if it’s really all of the hype it’s meant to be!

Read on if you care about my rants and opinions of this format.

Nginx and the Image format wars.

September 24, 2021September 21, 2021 by S-Config

We’ve talked about the videos, we’ve talked about the images. Now we talk about the web-server, Nginx.

In this entry we’re going to get crazy technical with how we deploy all of these new image formats that are being introduced in what feels like the “The Great Video/Image War” to finally put GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs, and MP4s to bed. But instead we’re going to talk about a section that seems skipped a lot. How to actually implement these new formats? Because if we do a review on an image format, and it’s good. Then as bloggers it would be hypocritical to not apply these formats to our site. It however opens up questions. How do we maintain the security of our readers while at the same time giving them the very best image as the lowest bandwidth conceivable? To which thankfully since we have a VPS a lot of the encoding is handled via CRON. While a lot of the deciding factors of which browser gets served what is all in the hands of NGINX web daemon.

Read on if you want to know more.

Presearch – a search engine review.

April 14, 2022September 5, 2021 by S-Config

About the Presearch engine.

We bring some different news as well as to offer a possible resolution to our previous posting about the “Google/YouTube Monopoly” as we pointed out a few blogs back. There is a new search engine in town that is called Presearch. This search engine unlike others such as DuckDuckGo is instead of it being a privately run organization that profits off of the baseline search keywords and advertisement revenue all surround their blockchain. Which they claim is decentralized searching but is still privately run and profits of your searches through advertisers! Presearch actually rewards you back by giving out its own cryptocurrency known as “PRE” which gives off the vibe of fake Microsoft Bing Currency except they give off the hope of ‘cashing out for real money!’

This is a classic playbook for most startups on the internet. Identify an enemy for being old and too big like Google. Then, position your product as something new, exciting, and liberating from those practices. Finally, provide only a basic structure that an open-source product could provide the illusion of something different while setting up a blockchain with ridiculous hype to have hordes of people throw real money at you.

Read on if you wish to see our diatribes.

State of the blog 2021.

August 15, 2021 by S-Config

State of the blog 2021. Now with more of that “Secret Sauce.”

Hello, everyone out there in the vastness of the internet. This is “S” bringing to you an almost early edition of “State of the blog.” This is mostly an overview of where we are going as well as a projection of where we would like to go in the future. Usually, we do a “state of the blog” at the start of a new year as a form of resolution of what projects we want to complete and which ones we want to start.

The overall challenges of blog-hosting in the year where the entire internet is funneled into a handful of networks owned by narcissistic assholes; Ex-television and radio executives just to name a small group of those people. However, within these dark times, we must take an opportunity to thank those who take the time to separate themselves from the giants of the net and visit this blog to read a few of our articles. That alone is worth the costs of running this server. So thank you to those reading.

Would you like to know more?

Read Onward.

The Dark-Web: Hidden Wiki Edition!

May 22, 2021February 14, 2021 by S-Config

The Hidden Wiki – Now with V3 onion goodness!

For anyone who has read articles in the past, this should come as no surprise of us reviewing a service such as the Hidden Wiki as they are on the “Spooky scary Dank-Web!”.

However, know that we are big fans of the Dark-Web services. In the age of “Big Tech” attempting to delegitimize the mass of the Clear-Net as a whole in taking unique websites and burying them in an SEO-hellscape. The dark web to us is a fresh start. Almost a reset button to the earlier years of the internet. Where concepts like “Web-Rings” would pass you the reader along to like-minded websites. The dark-web by its very design cannot be tracked and cataloged by major corporations (At least not yet!) This means that the Dark-Web for those who want to be vocal about their services can post their links to people who may not want to be tracked on their day-to-day usage of their computers.

Read on if you want to know more.

AVIF and WEBP is now being hosted here.

September 21, 2021January 30, 2021 by S-Config

First there was AV1. Now there’s AVIF

A while back during my video encoding sessions, I toyed with the concept of serving AV1 videos on my site. The results were not great out of respect that we could not find a great way of detecting the client’s capabilities of video decoding without writing some shitty JavaScript system to snoop around and break privacy rights all the way. However, there’s a branch of the Av1 system known as “AVIF” which is designed to use for still images. It boasts about getting better compression ratio’s to that of even WebP images that we discussed a while back.

Why did we implement AVIF here? Read on if you want to know more.

MOZ declaring sites as spam.

February 15, 2021October 1, 2020 by S-Config

What the hell is a MOZ?

Moz is a service that no one asked for. A variant of the old Google “PageRank” engine ideologies where just like that system is bases your ‘domain authority’ off of an obscure pyramid scheme of “more important” domains to prove your worth. MOZ isn’t the first to try to ‘rank’ the internet. There was WOT (Website of Trust) which had it’s own issues with legalities. And of course there’s the Amazon Giant in the corner “Alexa” which quietly monitors everyone’s website traffic if you want them to or not.

Read on to dive deeper into my diatribes.