
Tilde.Club: I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds - libovness
https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf
======
pja
_Who am I? I am the system administrator, Paul Ford. Like any system
administrator, I will be slow to respond, will get everything wrong, and will
act imperiously while never acknowledging wrongdoing. Consider this part of
your authentic tilde.club experience!_

That is just perfect.

------
joshmillard
It's been a wonderful weird little thing so far, with folks having a mix of
nostalgia for and first exposure to shell account stuff, playing around with
oldschool webbery, hacking little things together across user accounts, and
just generally being great people in a nice place.

I got inspired yesterday and wrote us up our own custom low-rent version of
Flappy Bird:

[http://www.tilde.club/~cortex/js/tildebird/](http://www.tilde.club/~cortex/js/tildebird/)

~~~
gohrt
It's called Helicopter :-(

~~~
nnnnni
Helicopter had "hold to increase elevation" rather than "tap to fly up"... and
was a MUCH better game for it.

------
danso
If tilde club someday dies, either by crushing-traffic, hackers, negligence,
commercialization, or acquihire, I'm hoping we get a post-mortem that was as
fun to read as this origin story. I would love to even just see more machine
configuration details for the "one cheap, unmodified Unix computer on the
Internet" that is hosting it.

Reading this post about someone building a community just out of a whim, and
then seeing how quickly and quirkily a community can arise from such minimal
environment, reminded me of what's still probably my favorite submission I've
ever read on HN: [http://burakkanber.com/blog/sitechat-a-postmortem-or-the-
ris...](http://burakkanber.com/blog/sitechat-a-postmortem-or-the-rise-and-
fall-of-a-society/)

~~~
beaugunderson
There's more configuration/management information here:

[https://github.com/tildeclub/tilde.club](https://github.com/tildeclub/tilde.club)

------
Mizza
I'm going to use this opportunity to shamelessly plug my tildeclub page:
[http://tilde.club/~rich](http://tilde.club/~rich)

edit: Please also go to my girlfriend's page! She's jealous of my hit counter:
[http://tilde.club/~arch](http://tilde.club/~arch)

~~~
syntheticnature
Your girlfriend's main page is quite nice.

The frames link, though, reawakened fear I'd not felt in years.

Haven't been to yours, so that her hit counter has a chance to catch up. ;-)

~~~
archedeyebrow
You, sir or ma'am, are a gentleman and a scholar. I literally just created
this account to thank you.

PS if you know how to make a link target a frame in a nested frameset, please
let me know. It must go deeper.

~~~
Intermernet
I haven't dealt with framesets for almost 20 years (I'm still scarred), but I
seem to recall that you can target nested frames just by providing them with a
unique "name" attribute. I may be wrong though.

You may also want to change the doctype header to use the HTML 4
"frameset.dtd" instead of the "strict.dtd". Just change the first line of your
frame-enabled pages to:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN"
"[http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">](http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">)

Or, for extra 90's authenticity, you could use the HTML v3.2 doctype:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">

~~~
archedeyebrow
But what I'm after is recursion. Rather than make 20 individual frameset pages
each with different target="name"s, it would be way cooler simply to populate
each frame area with itself.

Pedantic props for the doctype tip.

EDIT: In theory this should work, but browsers are uncooperative:
[http://tilde.club/~arch/frames-odd.html](http://tilde.club/~arch/frames-
odd.html)

~~~
Intermernet
According to [http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-frames-970331](http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-
frames-970331) :

"Infinite recursion is prevented. Any frame that attempts to assign as its SRC
a URL used by any of its ancestors is treated as if it has no SRC URL at all
(basically a blank frame). This doesn't prevent all malicious documents, but
it eliminates a troublesome class of them."

Ah well, probably for the best really... It seems to have a recursion limit of
10 on Firefox, and 12 on Chrome.

I cheated by creating your original frameset pattern and then just recursing
index.html in the middle frame. It improves the recursion effect a bit, but
still isn't infinite.

[http://downloads.intermer.net/frames/](http://downloads.intermer.net/frames/)

------
edavis
I love this. I absolutely love this.

This project hits that sweet spot where "old timers" who remember the lo-fi
social web have a place to call their own while also being appealing to the
"young guns" who have only ever known the social web in the age of
Facebook/Twitter and are looking for an alternative where not everything is
easy and beautiful.

~~~
NovaS1X
I was born in 1990, but I was also introduced to computers at a very young
age.

I've been using the internet before the Facebook/Myspace boom, but I never had
the chance to really experience the "old-web" or usenet. This "project" gives
me a chance to see a part of internet history that I missed or was too young
to remember delivered from people who were there.

It's a really unique project for people like myself, and I find it comforting
to see culture of the internet that I saw a glimpse of in my childhood.

~~~
edavis
I was born in 1989 and my experience is very similar.

As I came of age on the internet in the early 2000s, there were enough
vestiges of stuff like Usenet that I was _familiar_ with it but it was clear
it was in terminal decline. And I always felt bummed that I missed that era.

Another thing that I really like about this project is how it combines new and
old technologies. Like how it's a "standard UNIX computer on the internet" but
runs on Amazon's cloud. Collaboration is done via Github. You sign-up via a
Google Form. We have these amazing infrastructure tools now which didn't exist
10 years ago. It's really something to see.

------
mr_brown
/me also misses IRC from the times where you could type --<\--{@ and you could
be sure it looked just the same on the other end. Monospace was the norm, not
the exception and all the IRC clients displayed _all_ lines aligned (to the
left, however unbelievable that sounds) regardless of the length of the users
name. Today I have to pay attention not to write (b) or (c) because it might
turn into a beer or coffee. We often forget to appreciate the simplicity of
things.

~~~
arm
That behaviour sounds great, although I’m curious which old IRC clients you
are referring to. I actually make use of an old Power Mac G3 (B&W) running Mac
OS 9 for connecting to some IRC servers (using ircle) and in its case, at
least, nicks are assumed to be 10 characters or less. This is quite annoying
since there are active users on the channels who have nicks longer than that,
so the client simply displays their messages with the extra characters of
their nick cut off (to keep the messages left aligned). While I suppose ircle
could dynamically resize the area for nicks based on the length of the longest
nick that has posted a message, that could be pretty inefficient… not to
mention if the channel messages are being logged in a text file with messages
left-aligned in there as well (which is what ircle does); the whole file would
have to be recreated.

~~~
vertex-four
> While I suppose ircle could dynamically resize the area for nicks based on
> the length of the longest nick that has posted a message, that could be
> pretty inefficient

XChat does exactly this. So do a few other clients still.

------
rev_bird
This is probably the most endearingly fascinating project I've ever read about
on the internet. Just a guy saying, "Hey, let's do something simple and fun,
maybe people will like it." I can't pinpoint why it seems like so much fun,
but I'm glad it's around.

------
kamikazi
Upvoted with a thousand clicks!! Probably the most gleeful project I've come
across in years. On to the waiting list.

I'm of the generation where Windows 3.0 was just coming up and there was DOS
and as fresh highschool kids we just didn't know what we were tinkering with.
A prof used to came and blabber about internal commands and external commands
without really explaining the difference because most likely she herself was a
n00b. And we used to get excited if we ever got a 30-min lab session to poke
around with Lotus-123, Wordpro, Foxbase or Turbo Pascal. Then in grad college
we got Novell Netware and some of us figured out how to crack into classmate's
home directories and play pranks. I'm missing a few pieces but there was a
kind of a LAN manager and it was possible to 'poke' other users. Like a
Unixish Yoapp of that time. That was my first experience of cross-computer
realtime chat.

Anyway longstory short this project brings back all the nostalgia of pre y2k
and early college days for me. Can't wait to get in. So so happy.

ps: Anyone from India in yet?

------
jonathanyc
“That’s a west coast thing,” said Mo, who grew up in California. “You use
tildes instead of colons or dashes, it’s more like handwriting.”

Interesting. I also grew up in California but never saw the tilde used as a
colon or dash. I thought it was more used as a replacement for periods when
the author wanted to come off as light/flirty/caring/sing-song.

~~~
pyrocat
Yeah I heard it originated in Korea, as a way of signifying a light hearted
teasing / sarcasm (e.g. "see you at the finish line~")

~~~
minikomi
In Japan a ー is used to extend a sound. Characters like ne or yo are used to
casually finish sentences and it gives them a hightened sense of friendliness
to extend them with 〜 instead of ー. It also can be used to make effeminate or
suggestive sounds like あーん would be ahhn like sticking out your tongue to
check your throat but あ〜ん is ahnn but in a seductive/sexy way

~~~
arm
Please correct me if I’m wrong (still learning Japanese), but isn’t「ー」only
used to extend sounds written in katakana? In the case of the「あーん」that you
wrote, I would think that it would be written as「ああん」instead since that’s the
way sounds are extended in hiragana. I agree with your usage of「あ〜ん」though.

~~~
Zarel
To be precise, 「ー」 is mostly only used to extend vowels when it wouldn't
change what Japanese/Chinese word it's referring to. For instance, 「お」 can
mean "honorable", but 「おう」 means "king" and 「おお」 means "large". If you wanted
to convey that you're saying "honorable" but dragging it out, you'd write it
like 「おー」 such as in 「おーにいーさん」 ("Brooooother"), so it wouldn't be confused
with 「おう」 or 「おお」 even though it'd be pronounced the same way.

You could think of it this way: if you wanted to convey that you were saying
the word "god" but stretching it out, the Japanese solution would be to write
it as "go–d" (since "good" would have it be confused with a different word).

(This isn't the only way to convey that a long vowel in hiragana isn't
semantic, though. It's also common to write the vowel in small font, such as
「あぁぁ」 or 「ねぇ」)

You can also write things that are usually written in katakana in hiragana
instead. This makes it look softer, and is similar to the idea of writing
English without capitalizing words (such as at the beginning of sentences). In
these cases, you'd still use ー as if you were using katakana, such as in the
song title 「とらぶるめーかー」 ("Troublemaker", the opening theme song from the anime
Himegoto).

------
linguafranca
Ahh, now I remember why these kinds of websites died out.

It's exciting a lot like Minecraft, in that we can make our own little worlds.
We exercised both sides of the brain by learning how to write HTML and maybe
some Perl, all while writing actual content.

But just like Minecraft, that world is isolated and lonely. Nobody visited our
sites, that's why we stopped updating them. They were inherently isolated from
the beginning.

So we built social networks to replace them. We have new places to go to share
our random thoughts. Places where it's slightly more likely they'll be seen by
someone.

~~~
hvs
And much less interesting than Minecraft.

~~~
72deluxe
I'm not sure. Some of the most informative pages were available under Tripod,
written by people into obscure subjects. They were typically ugly (the pages,
not the people), but were informative. They were a source of more interesting
information than today's social network's "here's a picture of me eating
something". You could actually learn something from reading the pages instead
of just observing someone else's behaviour / possessions.

~~~
vertex-four
The home education community in the UK had a huge amount of information up on
Tripod and similar sites, pointing to all sorts of useful resources for those
who wanted to teach their kids at home. I'm not sure where they post
information these days. Probably in Facebook groups.

------
peterjmag
This made me giggle pretty much uncontrollably:
[http://tilde.club/~david/imgs/top5big.gif](http://tilde.club/~david/imgs/top5big.gif)

Via
[http://tilde.club/~jeffbonhag/index.shtml](http://tilde.club/~jeffbonhag/index.shtml)

------
peterwwillis
So, there's a lot of good reasons why nobody runs shell servers anymore. One
reason is that the FBI may one day knock on your door with a letter that says
they're going to need access to all your user's accounts, and that you can't
tell them or anyone else, and if you do you're going to jail for a felony. If
you're lucky you'll be able to tell your users about 6 months later. Other
things that happen is you become a spam, DDoS and CnC host, and you end up
spending the great majority of your time preventing 1% of your users from
ruining the internet. And of course the inevitable takedown notices for
pirated or illegal material.

Good luck...

~~~
TrevorJ
How is this any different than the situation for anyone running any kind of
web service anymore?

~~~
peterwwillis
Almost everyone running a 'real' web service puts in place limits to prevent
this kind of abuse or isolate their customers from it. Gone are the days of
running eggdrops from $1/month php hosters and hosting warez on Geocities. And
most of the time these providers have an abuse reporting system with forms
that allows for efficient review and process of complaints.

The combination of 'unlimited' access of a shell along with the shared nature
of the host causes shells to be targets of more nefarious activity. Due to the
personal nature of the account, people often host more personal information on
a shell. So when it comes time to fork over account access, people are at more
risk than just a web site host.

I understand the nostalgia of having a place for shared accounts. I have
friends who host shells for their friends; a throwback to the days where it
cost real money to colo a dual pentium machine with a SCSI RAID array on a
10mbit connection. But the world isn't a safe place anymore, and the feds
don't just ignore cybercrime like they used to. They could probably trump up a
charge of 'accomplice' just for having an account on a box that had some crime
associated with it. I feel much better paying a few bucks a year for my own
VPS.

------
ErikRogneby
I was hoping to look at some plan files remotely and tried finger. It
connected but hung.

~~~
droob
Yeah, finger only works locally.

~~~
jethro_tell
No, if you ask it: finger jethro_tell it will work locally, if you ask it:
finger jethro_tell@example.com, it will check to see if example.com is running
a finger server on tcp/79 and will return the reply if example.com answers.
Otherwise it will just time out.

------
72deluxe
This is clearly the best one:

[http://tilde.club/~cat/](http://tilde.club/~cat/)

------
bespoke_engnr
Oh man, this reminds me of my first shell account, and SDF, and the actual
reason I got into computers. So excited. Maybe I could write a little
communication API-type thing that these kinds of shell servers could
implement, so communities could be linked together in some way? Hmm. That
would be cool. I think I just found a good reason to mess around with Rust.

~~~
steauengeglase
Yep. Same here.

For you young 'uns itching for the headaches of yesteryear SDF has been
kicking, in one form or another, since 1987. Yep, you can also setup a vanity
(~) page(s).
[http://sdf.org/index.cgi?faq%3FBASICS%3F11](http://sdf.org/index.cgi?faq%3FBASICS%3F11)
or dive into the wonders of Gopher space
[http://sdf.org/?tutorials/gopher](http://sdf.org/?tutorials/gopher)

~~~
gergles
I highly recommend that if you support experimentation you join and donate --
I have a MetaARPA account that I don't think I've logged into in 3 years, but
I just send them a $36 check every year because I think it's important people
be able to have a safe, free place to tinker.

(Also, if you want to sign up, I can validate your account. Email me a link to
your HN profile and if you have enough contributions to convince me you're an
okay person, I'll take care of it.)

------
cyanbane
I remember being 14 and creating ANSI art was my favorite pastime other than
gaming and browsing ACiD and other creator groups art over 14.4. This taps so
into that nostalgia, hope I can get a folder.

------
codva
Neocities did something similar a couple of years ago - with more of a
Geocities focus (obviously!) My Neocities page -
[https://chrisod.neocities.org/](https://chrisod.neocities.org/)

------
d23
What if we made an image of the server and anyone could download and operate a
box and somehow they would be like, distributed and talk to one another? I
don't know what else would happen, but it would be cool.

------
cosarara97
> People logged in and started live-chatting all-text pictures of dragons to
> everyone on the computer.

"wall" command? (I've never used a Unix system at the same time as another
person, I think)

~~~
mattdotc
In addition to 'wall' you can write to another user's tty if you're logged
into the same machine with 'write'

[https://blogs.oracle.com/pranav/entry/how_to_send_message_to...](https://blogs.oracle.com/pranav/entry/how_to_send_message_to_users_l)

~~~
ook
Try c-hey! It's skinnable write :)

[http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~c-hey/](http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~c-hey/)

~~~
mattdotc
That's awesome! Thanks for pointing it out.

------
keithpeter
_" There is no need to get in on the ground floor, because the ground floor
has been there for decades."_

I (still)edit the smaller pages on my personal site from an ssh session using
nano. The big productions get done in markdown with a couple of bash scripts
on the laptop.

All good fun, and nice to see how little bandwidth/processor resources a bunch
of static pages can live in. I don't think I'll go on the wait list as I have
a perfectly good slice of web server already but I hope this gets popular.

------
bmh100
My concern for this project is that it is so dependent on the culture of its
users that is has to be strictly controlled. It cannot scale up, because a
strong culture like this does not scale. There might be more Tilde Clubs over
time, but such a machine is too easily disrupted by even a single bad actor,
like peterwwillis says. Even if that did not happen, cultural erosion would
happen, like a mini Eternal September or take your pick of communities:
Reddit, Slashdot, HN, etc.

~~~
b2themax
So the only usefulness of this product is that it provides a feeling of
nostalgia, and smug belonging? (Like you're cool now if you have a tilde.club
page?) Thus we cannot invite lots of people to the tilde.club because... we're
just too cool for them. I predict #Fail.

~~~
bmh100
I think that it is useful for nostalgia, yes, and also as a small community.
But its structure makes it inherently fragile and dependent upon a strong
culture. As a result, as long as it is successful, I could see members taking
pride in being members of a special, unusually great community.

------
lucb1e
Might be just me, but it took a few seconds after clicking away I realized
that I probably should scroll down on that page. Indeed I should.

------
freshflowers
This reminds me I need to make work of starting the quest for my very first
homepage (with ~). It's still online, I just have no idea where it physically
located and I've lost access to it in late 1996. The page is under the domain
of an ISP that no longer exists, having been bought by another ISP... that no
longer exists either.

------
moeamaya
This reminded me MIT still uses ~<email> for public www space. Must be an
artifact of this UNIX paradigm. Brian Chan as an example:
[http://www.mit.edu/~chosetec/](http://www.mit.edu/~chosetec/).

~~~
rhizome
It's Apache's default UserDir module that does that. It's only the request-
controller model of dynamic web application development that has made it look
unusual compared to something like /user?id=moemaya or /users/moemaya or
whatever.

------
bdm
This is the Burning Man of the Internet.

~~~
mortenjorck
I had exactly the same thought. The fact that you aren't running Rails and you
can't clone a bunch of open-source libraries from Github, but rather must
start from scratch with your own handmade HTML, is absolutely Burning Man's
"radical self-reliance."

------
xtat
I never stopped using a tilde + mod_userdir You hipsters know how to make a
guy feel old :F

[http://rapidpacket.com/~xtat/](http://rapidpacket.com/~xtat/)

------
urschrei
I'm accepting pull requests for my tilde.club page
([http://tilde.club/~urschrei](http://tilde.club/~urschrei)) at
[https://github.com/urschrei/edit_my_tilde](https://github.com/urschrei/edit_my_tilde),
if anyone wants to put some of their own content / JS /CSS / images up.

A merged request triggers a web hook that pings a heroku app that performs a
git pull on tilde.club using Fabric

~~~
sroerick
> A merged request triggers a web hook that pings a heroku app that performs a
> git pull on tilde.club using Fabric

Can I ask you to explain this in a little more detail? I've tried to host
pages with Git and run into weird errors cropping into my HTML and webdev
people telling me "GIT IS NOT A DEPLOYMENT TOOL".

------
prawn
I got into web design around when it first became a thing. Browsers allowed
images, tables permitted layout, etc.

I can remember when you'd be working for a client who had a tilde account
(ISPname.com/~client), but then get particularly enthused when working on a
job that had its own domain! Those looked so much better in a portfolio!

All pretty tragic to consider now when it's so cheap and fast to set up any
old domain and a lot of the charm and wonder is gone.

~~~
72deluxe
I would agree that a lot of the charm and wonder is gone, as the Internet is
commonplace and many of the technical marvels are taken for granted, sadly.

------
mescalito
[http://tilde.club/~cortex/js/tildebird/](http://tilde.club/~cortex/js/tildebird/)
\- extremely hard to play!

~~~
sejje
I got 8. I never played the original so I'm a n00b.

------
awakened
Shell accounts are like short wave radios, wrist watches, cameras and landline
telephones. Not many people have them anymore but they are oh so useful.

------
nwatson

      com aplicação dos dons intelectuais e sociais
      duma companhia grande do internet eu seria chefão
     
      entre a mulherada eu teria muitos fãs
      e eu as levava pelo mundo inteiro num roteiro no meu avião
     
      mais a compulsão de estudar computação
      so resultou em eu ser cidadão do Nerdistão

------
nysv
But ~ doesn't mean person. It means 'home'. Hence, 'ls ~' lists the contents
of your home directory and 'cd ~root' takes you to home directory of root.

In web context ~user translated to 'home of user' which was fitting in most
cases.

~~~
timdev2
Also: "home page".

------
jh3
This kind of stuff is part of the reason I started loving the Internet. It's
also why I wanted to learn what Unix meant :)

[http://silenceisdefeat.com/](http://silenceisdefeat.com/) was where I had my
last free shell account.

------
lawl
I might be too young. But I like writing webpages on my own isolated vps :) I
can move around my own domain and even install packages! While still having
the shell experience. And these days you can go as low as $10 per _YEAR_ on a
vps.

~~~
coryfklein
Where can you get a vps for $10 a year?

~~~
spindritf
You can get one for €3/yr [http://lowendspirit.com/](http://lowendspirit.com/)

------
ilamont
Brings back memories of learning HTML and creating my first page, a shout-out
to friends on a grey background.

And webrings. Forgot about those ... I believed they died out by 2000 or so,
maybe when people realized they were detrimental to PageRank and SEO.

------
ForHackernews
There are lots of places online that will give free UNIX shell accounts:
[http://shells.red-pill.eu/](http://shells.red-pill.eu/)

I used to have one on rootshell.be many years ago.

~~~
chippy
What's the difference between those and tilde.club?

~~~
ForHackernews
None as far as I can tell. Tilde club is new/momentarily popular and active.

------
0898
Massively off-topic – but in American English is "a couple drinks" correct?
British English would be "a couple of drinks". Just curious – I notice this a
lot of US tech blogs.

~~~
GavinB
This is common usage. I couldn't begin to tell you if it's "correct" or not.

~~~
Tomte
If it's common usage, it's correct.

------
salgernon
Someone should mention telehack.com here - not quite shell, but a brilliant
simulation and set of emulations. It attempts to replicate life as we knew it
in 1986 or so.

~~~
kordless
Or [http://terminal.com](http://terminal.com) \- $1 a month shells.

------
ook
Please tell me someone has setup c-hey?
[http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~c-hey/](http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~c-hey/)

------
neilellis
If I could upvote this a 1,000 times I would. Here's to nostalgia!

Anyone doing a vetted version of this, now that I would (not literally I might
add NSA) kill for.

~~~
otakucode
Vetted?

~~~
neilellis
To prevent it ever being spammy, which is my first concern with any anonymous
group of people. Just a place where you know everyone is a hacker (in the
coding sense) and you know who they are in real-life.

Vetting is the opposite of Twitter/Reddit et al.

~~~
lelandbatey
I have half a mind to just start giving away shell access to my servers I
liked the person. But it's quite a time commitment, so I don't know.

------
Mimu
Am I missing something here or did the guy just used "~" to make it look like
he was singing?

I feel like the guy that didn't get the joke.

------
oggy
Sweet! I am a bit disappointed to see that you don't get your own e-mail
subdomain, to which mail is routed using UUCP...

------
epaladin
Maybe we can make a simple gateway page that lists all the pages that would
actually render properly in Mosaic?

------
Globz
Wow this project is amazing, brings back a lot of good memories. I will find a
way to help out for sure!

------
Tepix
But do you have nethack and bsdgames (with the cool game "hunt") installed?

------
clairity
the screenshot of alpine was a nice bit of nostalgia for me. also gopher,
before the newfangled "world wide web", awkward name and all, took over.

------
nickstinemates
This is definitely going to become a thing. I want one!

------
arjie
Ha ha, this is great. Amusing and nostalgia-inducing.

------
tomphoolery
This is awesome. I remember those days fondly!

------
blhack
This article makes it seem like writing code over a shell is some ancient
mystery.

Am I really the only person that still codes everyday all day like this?

~~~
corobo
You're not :)

I am a scumlord though cause I do it in nano

------
harryjo
difference from NeoCities?

~~~
stephancoral
Invite-only. Also NeoCities doesn't give you a full shell account

~~~
pbhjpbhj
NeoCities is a web host isn't it, they don't give out shell at all?

~~~
stephancoral
They sandbox it by only allowing you to drag and drop files. Make a domain for
yourself and you'll see.

------
Crito
Here is a weird quirky thing that I have been noticing a lot recently: People
taking screenshots that have a tooltip window visible.

Is this accidental? An attempt to make the screenshot seem more spontaneous?
Did Windows or OSX recently change something in such a way that this is now
easy to accidentally do? Are people simply not proofreading their screenshots
anymore? Is it a "west coast thing"?

I'm being serious. I was writing it off as user-error but I'm starting to
doubt that now with how frequently I see it.

~~~
Intermernet
I've done this in documentation in order to show a visual indicator of what
the user should be clicking on, or filling in next. This is especially
important in programs with confusing or ambiguous UIs (Find the "Settings"
option in a Lotus Notes email database? <shiver>).

Ideally, it wouldn't be necessary, but it can help as an extra guide in docs.

------
sanchayan
Can we get it hosted on ARM Servers like X-Gene .. [ disclosure : work for APM
which makes X-Gene ARM 64b processors]

~~~
wtracy
Letting the rest of us know where we could buy one would be a good start. :-)

