Hmm.

ICQ is going down!

Though the parent company is VK?! When did Russia buy ICQ... or was it always Russian?

It wasn't apparently. It was an Israeli startup initially. Then AOL took over. Then VK. Or rather: AOL sold ICQ to Russia's Digital Sky Technologies, who now owns what would become VK, in 2010.

I might've used ICQ back in the day. I might have. Not sure. Never was a big proponent of IM type stuff. But I've always loved the acronym, and so it is a bit sad to see it go.

RIP, the longest living IM client in HISTORY.

I think? At least one of.

ICU...

Ever heard of puter.com?

It's a virtual browser-based OS! A free one, with 500MB storage and a variety of standard apps and games installed and ready to use, in a style that seems familiar both to Windows and Mac, and thus ought be easy to get accustomed to for just about everyone.

I haven't tried running my own stuff, or uploading my own files, or creating an account to keep track of them (you get a guest session created for you when you visit the site without), but first impressions are: I'm impressed.

It seems you can even use it for website-related work. You can publish things, and link to them, and being able to do both that and computing, for free, with seemingly no restrictions at all on bandwidth and use, with an interface as smooth and inviting as this, is pretty dang cool.

And the name! Genius.

I'm not sure for what yet, but I think I might be using this more in the future... the .com Puter.

I've been getting fearful of Windows updates lately, cause recently they've been failing all the time. Both at home and at work. Both with Windows 10 and 11. Both on my laptop and stationary... not all updates, but some particularly annoying and persistent ones on pretty much all devices.

The issue at work was particularly troublesome, since it was a time-consuming update, and it kept failing halfway through, and it was at work! Each time it failed it spent even more time than it'd spent on the update subsequently restoring the earlier configuration too.

For a few weeks at least every time I'd get to the office and reboot the computer the update would kick in, and it'd chug away, and fail, and revert, and when I left the office and shut down the computer it'd try installing it again, so the next time I get in...

It just kept happening!

I tried troubleshooting. I cleared out temporary files, I restarted the update service, went through settings and CMD directives that might potentially fix things, but no dice. Eventually I just disabled updates for a certain period of time, and either I've yet to turn them back on again or this issue might've actually resolved itself with a latter one...

On my laptop I had to increase the HDD partition size for boot-related files for one particular update to finally go through.

My home computer's been upgraded to Windows 11 for a while, and so far it's been pretty buggy.

I don't recall the update number, but there was a notorious one that just wouldn't go through no matter what - I found out when I Googled the issue, and saw that at least I wasn't alone with it.

Today though? Windows just installed an update for me, so I rebooted, and suddenly all is good! It went fast too...

This is almost... unreal.

It works again.

It's almost like a palindrome innit?

CyberD is suddenly showing up first on Google when you search for CyberD! Give it a try. :)

Well at least it was. It seems it's currently showing up #2... but that's still quite the jump since last I searched for it, and it seems other pages on-site have gotten a well due boost too.

My unintentional strife to contribute quality content here must be paying off, since I've been making absolutely zero effort at actually improving my SEO otherwise... which I maybe should. Some day. It could be good.

I do however currently reside on shared servers with a fair use policy that may pose a problem if all too much traffic suddenly starts streaming in. And this isn't the only site I host.

Alas there's a pretty big conflict of interest in how I most certainly do want more visitors, but also don't want to start paying more for hosting, or riddling the site with ads and such if increasing costs become a thing. I'm happy having this but a passion project, but then again if a little extra traffic would also mean a little extra income...

I mean I wouldn't mind making a living off of this. On just blogging, ransacking my mind for thoughts people may find interesting, or ideals and ideas I'd hope the world pick up on, sharing random things on the Internet that catch my eye, money just streaming in en masse as I do...

And I do have skills in the SEO department. I've optimized other sites. Surely I could do the same with my own pretty easily. The site resides on a soon twenty-year old domain and is just bursting with content. Well over ten thousand posts and pages. There's plenty of potential.

You see how easy it is to get carried away though?! I shan't sell my soul. I say a Sea shanty to the demons of the deep sea scantily - may they let me be, let me keep on penning ponderings and mending dreams. And who knows, maybe one day I'll blow up, like one big blas(t)phemy.

For now at least the site shows up when you search it, even without the .ext. ;)

And that is neat indeed.