👟The Sneaker Web

physical internet inbound

Hey friends! Welcome to this week’s edition of The Land of Random.

I’m pretty tired after this weekend - lots of yard work! Weed whacking, garden weeding - the works.

And all this rain is GROWMAXXING the weeds - it feels like I’m reenacting that Indiana Jones scene where that buzzsaw train is ripping through the jungle.

The yardwork is a great workout - and I get lots of audiobook listening time.

I’ve finished all the Dungeon Crawler Carl novels, and am now working through a series about a platoon of Marines that end up in a fantasy world. The first book is called “Ice and Monsters.” I’m also working my way through a series called “Breeds” which is an intriguing Canadian Werewolf horror series.

Shelf is finally out on Android. I’ve discussed it in the past, but it’s a cool app for tracking your shows, books, and movies. Sure . . . you can do that on Facebook, but it’s . . . Facebook.

Speaking of Facebook - have you been able to check out their Gizmo Pocket app yet? It’s not available for me yet. I’m sure it’ll go the way of poor ole’ e.gg.

(E.gg was awesome and they should have made it the foundation of a retro aesthetic Facebook).

Another cool app to check out is Hypertexting - it’s basically rss feeds but social. VERY INTERESTING.

Let’s dive in shall we?

👟The SneakerWeb

Do you remember hearing about USB Club a few years ago? Either here or on Twitter (X).

💾The USB Club, Flipper Zero, and Kitchen Farming

USB Club is still going - but it was always a music/design focused kinda project.

Or is it?? I still need to buy one and try to get access. Only $40. Not bad.

OH - and Dead Drops is still around too, and people are still adding USB’s.

WAEL - regardless of whether you’re a member of the USB Club or not - there’s a new physical media game in town.

It’s the Sneaker Web Protocol

The sneakerweb is a peer-to-peer protocol for web publishing without permission: there are no DNS servers, domain registrars, or web hosts. Instead, websites are stored directly on user devices, and transferred between them through the ultimate fallback infrastructure: physical storage media. Your collected sites can be viewed offline, in the same web browser you normally use, and then shared with others via .snk files. (source)

So basically - create an offline website and share with friends.

In the documentation it says “In theory, you can share .snk files over the internet, of course. But we strongly encourage you to embrace the slowness of physical transport instead. It really makes a difference for how the sneakerweb will feel to you.“

The idea here is awesome - but the execution is definitely geared for more technically minded people.

In order to build your own “Sneakerweb” website - you need to download and use their CLI tool.

Soo - that already excludes a lot of casual users.

It’s a really cool project - It brings back the “mixtape” culture of the old days . . .

Hopefully they create a more easy-to-approach version in the future.

In any case - I’m going to try and give it a spin soon when I have more time.

Have time to mess around with CLI tools and build a site to share with friends physically?

Check out the Sneakerweb!

🐙The Land of Random

links links links!

Sleep Scroll

Obsessed with scrolling the internet? Scroll this one until you sleep . . .

Jiggy the Blob

A neat little combination of that old desktop gorilla with an AI agent.

Christmas in July

Yeah that’s right. Merry Christmas - and here’s some Kmart music.

The Last K Mart

There’s only one left - and it’s in Florida.

Rist Watch

It’s a watch! It’s a phone! It’s . . . a standalone Pebble clone? Looks interesting.

Vestaboard AI Agent

Ok, ok, this is actually a pretty good AI use case. Call your AI agent and it responds on a VESTABOARD. (I need to figure this out with the free Github)

/Friends

A really cool spin on the old webring idea! I might add this kind of idea to The Land of Random.

That’s all for this week. See you next time!