Making YouTube Work in the Netscape 4.5 Browser on Windows 98
The World Wide Web of the 90s was a magical place, where you couldn’t click two links without getting bombarded with phrases such as the Information Super Highway and Multimedia Experience. Of course, the multimedia experience you got on your Windows 9x PC was mostly limited to low-res, stuttery RealMedia and Windows video format clips, but what if you could experience YouTube back then, on your ‘multimedia-ready’ Celeron PC, running Netscape 4.5?
Cue the [Throaty Mumbo] bloke over on that very same YouTube, and his quest to make this dream come true. Although somewhat ridiculous on the face of it, the biggest problem is actually the era-appropriate hardware, as it was never meant to decode and display full-HD VP9-encoded videos.
Because the HTTPS requirement has meant that no 1990s or early 2000s browser will ever browse the modern WWW, a proxy was going to be needed no matter what. This Python-based proxy then got kitted out with not just the means to render down the convoluted HTML-CSS-JS mess of a YouTube page into something that a civilized browser can display, but also to fetch YouTube videos with yt-dlp and transcode it into MPEG1 in glorious SD quality for streaming to Netscape on the Windows 98 PC.
Because the same civilized browsers also support plugins, such as Netscape’s NPAPI, this meant that decoding and rendering the video was the easy part, as the browser just had to load the plugin and the latter doing all the heavy lifting. Perhaps unsurprisingly, with some tweaks even Netscape 2.0 can be used to browse YouTube and play back videos this way, with fullscreen playback and seeking support.
Although these days only a rare few modern browsers like Pale Moon still support NPAPI, it’s easy to see how the introduction of browser plugins boosted the multimedia future of the WWW that we find ourselves in today.
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Recovering Data from the OceanGate depths
When the files on the Titan submersible disaster were published, most people skimmed for drama. Hackers, however, would likely zoom in on the hardware autopsy. [Scott Manley] actually did this. He faced a hacker’s nightmare: three crushed PCs, bent SSDs, and an encrypted SD card from a camera that survived six kilometres under pressure, all sealed in titanium and silence.
[Scott] went all in to resurrect data. First came CT scans: firing 320 kV X-rays through a kilo of mangled electronics to hunt for intact NAND chips. When that failed, he desoldered UFS memory by hand, used custom flash readers, cloned NV-RAMs, and even rebuilt boards to boot salvaged firmware. The ultimate test was grafting the recovered chips onto donor hardware in Canada. Like the monster of Frankenstein, the system came to life.
In the end, it partially worked. Twelve stills and nine videos were retrieved, albeit none from the fatal dive. The process itself was a masterclass in deep hardware forensics, here covered in a video worth watching.
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Building A Clamshell Writer Deck
Most of us do our writing on computers these days, but the modern computing environment does present a lot of distractions. That’s let to the concept of the writer deck, a simplified device intended more specifically for word processing tasks. [Ashtf] has built a great example of the form with a modified version of the PocketMage device.
The PocketMage is a clamshell PDA device that [Ashtf] has been working on for some time. It’s powered by an ESP32, hooked up to a nice e-ink display. In its basic form, it’s not the ideal device for doing serious writing work, mostly because of its tiny keyboard. However, [Ashtf] has since added external keyboard support, which completely changes the game. With the use of a small USB C to USB A adapter, you can hook up any conventional USB keyboard that you like to best attain your maximum typing speed.
The result is a compact, simple device that lets you type away without distractions. If your latest fanfic isn’t coming along quickly enough because you keep losing focus to social media, perhaps this is a route you might like to go. [Ashtf] also included Markdown support so you can create richer documents on the device while operating in what is still fundamentally a text-only environment.
It’s neat to build custom devices that suit your own personal productivity needs. If you dig the PocketMage, you might like to check out the design files on Github. We’ve featured some other fun writer decks before, too. Video after the break.
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