The Frugal Blog

I've been playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons for a while, but I'm a chronic single-player in most of the games I have. This is probably because most multiplayer games have gone the way of micro-transactions and other pay-to-win crap, but for all the terrible things Nintendo has done lately, they've nonetheless managed to create a wonderful multiplayer experience. Recently I had some friends over who also play the game, and we had a ton of fun visiting each other's islands and giving each other gifts, not to mention taking many, many photos. If you're in need of good party ideas and have a group of friends who own the Switch, Animal Crossing parties are great!



If you'd like to see everything we did, click through to the post below! Continue reading "Summer Time Fun: Animal Crossing Party!"

If you hang around the retro/indie/non-corporate web, you've probably come across Yesterweb.org, which was a community meant to spark enthusiasm for the self-owned web and serve as a resource for learning about how to build your own websites. It's being shut down, for a variety of reasons, which you can read about on the page I've linked above.

I'm not interested in talking about why it's being shuttered, though, I just wanted to give everyone a heads up that I've archived several of the pages they used to have available, and saved them both here to my website and to the Internet Archive. Some of these are also available via the Wayback Machine, but it's more difficult to navigate to them that way, and some of the more dynamic pages aren't easily manipulated there, so I've pulled them down into zips that you can crawl through locally.

Click through to the post to grab the forum archive, links directory, webring member list, and some visual resources that were shared via the Yesterweb Discord. Continue reading "I archived some stuff from the Yesterweb"

Update: comments are fixed for now! My webhost did a back-end update that messed up a few things, and I've disabled some functionality until some other things get caught up. It's nothing that should affect the reader experience, though.

Now that the weather is warming up a little (or a lot), I've been trying to get out and get some time in the sun, and I like to take pictures of different wildflowers that I see when I'm out and about. I usually don't have to go very far to find interesting plants and flowers, and most of these weren't even taken at parks or heavily wooded areas. You can find a lot of neat things if you're willing to pay attention and look closely.



Pink Evening Primrose

Click below to see the other things I've found.

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Continue reading "Spring wildflowers and others"

You may have noticed that I've reviewed several virtual pets at this point, and what I haven't yet mentioned is that it's part of a larger project I've been working on in the background to build up a database of Odd Pets eventually. While I will eventually make this a sub-section of my main site, for now I've been throwing everything into my personal wiki, which I use as a scratch pad for a number of projects. Most of it is private, but I've whitelisted the Virtual Pets pages in case anyone would like to look through them. They're available here for the curious:

The FrugalWiki - Electronic and Virtual Pets

But for today, I'll be looking at the GigaPets Virtual Unicorn pet. This is one of the newer, revamped Gigapets that you can get on Amazon right now, and from what I understand it was voted on by fans when they announced they were going to make a brand new pet. Of course I had to pick it up, because it's adorable! And I ended up running this one for a total of 24 days! That's probably a new record for my Gigapets so far. There's probably no limit on these things, but it's fun to keep them on for a while and try setting a new personal record when I feel up to it.



Click through the cut below to see my thoughts and a rundown of how it works.
Continue reading "Gigapets Unicorn Review"

So I used to have an Etsy store where I sold digital things to download, print, and create art with. Over time it became too much to handle and the fees starting eating into my profits, and the market was rather saturated anyway, so I closed it down. I don't really aim to come back to it, but I've decided that some of the things I had up there I'd like to give away here for free. So, if you're into coloring, I've posted nine different drawings, some of which I used to have for sale, and some of which I never got around to scanning until now. I like drawing flowers, cozy things, and sci-fi scenes, not necessarily together, and they're all in 8.5x11in dimensions ready to be printed. Here's a preview of a few of them that I colored:



Click here to see them on my Art Page

I follow a number of blogs and forums, and I've been looking for a while for a good way to pull the RSS feeds from most of these into one place for easy reading. On my Linux machine, QuiteRSS works really well. I like the features and interface, but I work on multiple computers throughout the day, and at night I read on my phone, so I really wanted one central place to go for checking up on things. Not wanting to reinvent the wheel, I went looking at the existing options, focusing on self-hosted solutions, because I really didn't want to throw all of that data into another for-profit site that would use my feeds to throw ads at me. And while I can deal with using a private server to install a fully-fledged RSS reader, I didn't really want to bother with logging into another service, then worry about updating it, and seeing that it is still maintained, etc. An RSS reader that stores a username/password combo is just one more security issue to worry about, and means that I'd have to make sure it's not easy to hack and get into. I'm not super concerned about being able to add new feeds on the fly, because I'm usually pretty close to web development tools, or I can wait until I get around to them--it's not the end of the world if I can't add something immediately.

So instead I decided to build my own. The scripts I've put together and modified work without a database because you must edit the file directly in order to add them, so the collection of feed is as secure as your site hosting is, plus there are no SQL calls to worry about. It's viewable anywhere you can run PHP, so there's no bother with logging into anything, and of course that means you can share it all you want just by sending people the link. Since it's all processed server-side, it basically acts like a static site for all intents and purposes, which was exactly what I wanted. There are some small downsides--right now it doesn't support Atom feeds, and there aren't any sorting options, but I'll probably come back to it and add those in the future.

I figured I might not be the only one wanting to do this, so I figured I'd share it here. Under the cut I've put a download link and a short explanation on how it works, so that you can add it to your own site if you like. Feel free to leave any questions you have in the comments. Continue reading "Making a database-free online RSS reader in PHP"

Today's review is about a handheld virtual pet made by Radioshack back in 1997. If you don't know about these, there were three different models: the Micro Dino that I have here, a PC Puppy, and the Data Cat. You can see the packaging for those pets below:


If you're familiar with virtual pets, especially "odd pets," which is the internet term for pets that aren't made by Bandai, you'll recognize that the cat and dog are apparently Nano pet clones, while the dino is different. According to what I've seen online, this one shares the same ROM as the MGA VR Creatures dino, though I haven't been able to verify this myself. You'll also notice that the cat, puppy, and dino trio are some of the most commonly made virtual pets, along with a baby/human type creature, although I don't know if Radioshack ever made one of those.

If you're interesting in seeing a ton of photos of this one and reading my thoughts about it, click through the cut to the rest of the entry.

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Continue reading "Virtual Pet Review: Radioshack Micro Dino"

While I haven't been playing anything I'm ready to write up a full-length review on, I have been playing through a few things here and there that I wanted to highlight and link to. The following games are either too short, didn't feel worth a completely review, or are too mainstream to really be featured here.

Here's a list of the games below:

• Peckin' Pixels
• Plant Therapy
• Gourdlets

Continue reading "Games I've Been Playing"

I've mentioned that I have an old laptop that I do most of my web development on in various places, but I thought it'd be nice if I went over its specs and why I use it. I think it's pretty important to minimize the amount e-waste I generate for a lot of reasons, and one of the ways I do that is by trying resurrect old hardware. Now, I didn't rescue this particular laptop off of the street or anything; I actually bought it new from the vendor when I had nothing else to work on. But instead of throwing it out after Windows 7 was clearly causing more issues than solutions, I decided to throw Linux on it instead of calling it trash. So far, my experience with it has been pretty great, and I'm glad I kept it around.



Click the link below to see what it's on it and how I use it from day to day.

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Continue reading "A look at my old laptop"

https://supertuxkart.net/ - Main_Page
https://online.supertuxkart.net/ - Add-on content

Super Tux Kart is a cart-racing game similar to games like Mario Kart and Diddy Kong Racing. It is free and open source, and runs really well on both new and old PCs. I actually got it running with ZERO issues on my Linux laptop, although it did initially complain and tell me that my graphics driver was really old. I'll include some side-by-side screenshots for comparison, but let me just say that I'm incredibly impressed. Most 3D games do not run on this thing!

Anyways, SuperTuxKart is actually based on an older game called TuxKart, which appears to no longer be available. This one was also free and open source, but the developers weren't able to continue the project and had to abandon it back in 2004. Fortunately for all of us, some lovely new developers picked it up and forked it, creating the game we're able to play today. In fact, if you've ever looked into Linux gaming you've probably come across this one, since it's pretty popular among Linux gamers.



Click the link below to check out my review and thoughts!

Continue reading "Tux Games: SuperTuxKart Review"

Maybe it's just because I've been spending a lot of time on the fediverse lately, which is usually embraced by folks who like open source alternatives to things, but it seems like Linux gaming has really been taking off recently. The Steam Deck, of course, has helped with some of this, due to the fact that it's Linux-based, but we're all becoming more mobile and remote these days, and making software that's OS-independent is more important now than ever.

But in the past, when it came to gaming, Linux users didn't have access to nearly the same array of options that the rest of us folks have. Because of that, many game makers created Linux-friendly clones of popular types of games, which has led to a fun collection of what I'd like to call "Tux Games."

Each of these PC games features the adorable little penguin mascot, named Tux, who was created in 1996 by artist Larry Ewing as an entry to a logo contest for the open-source operating system. Surprisingly, he didn't actually win the contest, though clearly he won hearts, since he was remembered and named shortly after by the Linux community, and has been used unofficially as a brand mascot ever since.

As a result, he's been used as the main character in a number of games for the system, and I'm going to be looking over and reviewing them here. There are a quite a few of them, so I'm going to break them up into separate posts, and today's entry is for a 2D platforming game called Super Tux.



Click below to read the whole thing!
Continue reading "Tux Games: Super Tux Review"

PeerTube is a decentralized alternative to Youtube that does not (currently) support monetization, and is not controlled by a single entity, and also happens to be my current obsession. Although the official website goes over the basics of how to use it, the official documentation assumes something of a technical background and a lot of people remain confused. I know I had a number of questions that weren't answered by the website.

So I'm not going to write up a complete, comprehensive introduction to how to use PeerTube, because it seems you can find those on every blog on the internet. If you're looking for that, there's a good one written up on Medium here:

https://medium.com/we-distribute/getting-started-with-peertube-ec5dbf007058

But I am going to answer a few of the questions I had that I had to search around for, and hopefully this will help someone out there. Continue reading "Answering questions about PeerTube + Curated Playlists"

Ever wanted to play around with vintage computing, but don't have the time/money/space? I get you. I love old PCs and other gadgets, but I'm really pretty limited on space and what I can bring into my house. And in some cases, I just don't have the money or time to devote to keeping them in running condition.

Fortunately a lot of really great, smart folks have taken the time to emulate a variety of different systems and you can run them right in your browser! I love playing around with these things and using them to run programs. A few of them let you upload and download files to them, so you can run your own applications and download any files you've created. I really like playing around with the paint programs in these in particular.

https://system7.app/ - Emulates MacOS 7
https://macos8.app/ - Emulates MacOS 8
https://macos9.app/ - Emulates MacOS 9

These MacOS emulators are great, and even let you add and remove files from them. They even support networking! Unfortunately I've had some issues with them crashing after a little bit of use in my case (on Windows 10). Hopefully you'll have better luck than me.

https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox - Windows 95, courtesy of archive.org
https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ - This is another MacOS 7 emulator, but also contains links to many others!
https://classicreload.com/Windows-1-01.html - Windows 1.01. It's got a lot of ads, though, and I couldn't find it hosted anywhere else yet.
https://classicreload.com/win3x-windows-31.html - From the same site. Turn your adblocker on!
http://retroweb.maclab.org/ - Little hard to use, but this one has several emulated systems
https://www.pcjs.org/ - More emulated systems. There are a TON here and they're lots of fun to play with!

MacBat 64

First up today I'll be talking about an adorable little game called MacBat 64. It’s clear from the start that the goal was to emulate the style of early Nintendo 64 games, and in that aim it succeeded very well! I mean, the whole thing gave me warm feelings while I was playing it, and I loved the character designs and fuzzy textures. The music nailed the style of Kirkhope’s old tunes, to the point where if I had heard them on their own, I would genuinely have wondered if they were outtakes from Banjo-Kazooie or its sequel.

As far as the gameplay goes, well it’s very simple. For me, this is not a problem, because I like chill experiences that are about more than just skill. As someone who makes games myself, I’m always interested in seeing how developers can keep gameplay fresh while only using a few tools--in this case, movement and jumping controls. There is no punch or attack, except for a few special sections, and I was impressed by how many different puzzles the levels were able to throw at me with only that set of tools.

There are a lot of easter eggs that you can find after you’ve completed the experience, which is about an hour long, maybe. It’s clear from all the little extras that there was a lot of affection put into this game, and I love to see it. After having enjoyed both this and the Toree 3D, which I’ll also be reviewing below, I’m officially a fan of this developer.

Overall Impression: Very cute! Fun and simple
Time to complete: About an hour, maybe more, but not much.
You'll like this if you like: Old Rareware games, nostalgia trips, simple platformers

Toree 3D

Toree 3D is a cute little retro-styled platformer with very simple controls that can be completed in an afternoon. The style is cute and very reminiscent of games from the PSX era--maybe a little too cute if you’re not into bright graphics. You play as the titular Toree, a little yellow bird who can run quickly and jump, and you’ll be trying to collect all the little stars in every level in order to complete them. The levels are laid out in a way that makes me want to speedrun them, so although the game isn’t on rails, I kind of think of it as a runner game. There’s no story or anything, although some of the characters show up in more than one place, so…I guess there’s some kind of idea behind it? I don’t know, that part kind of confused me, but I enjoyed the game nonetheless.

I will say that the music, while good, doesn’t really match the game much. Since the game is pretty laid back, I would have preferred a soundtrack that was a bit less…boisterous. Not that the music is bad or anything, I just felt it didn’t match.

The game also has the ability to unlock a few characters (one of them is Macbat!), and you do this by meeting different challenges on every level--I think you either collect all the stars or try and complete them in a certain amount of time, although I haven’t unlocked everything yet so I can’t be sure. All in all, I really enjoyed my time with this game, and I’ll probably come back to it again in the future.

Overall Impression: A little “loud” visually and musically, but lots of fun
Time to complete: an afternoon, maybe more if you want to 100% it
You like this if you like: VERY BRIGHT COLORS, games like Bit.Trip Runner, low stakes gaming

Greeting card software is such a weird niche to me. I think partly it's generational—the act of giving greeting cards seems to be less common than it was, and more and more people (of all ages in my experience) are forgoing the act of including cards with gifts as time goes by. I think this is probably because we're more connected than we used to be. I suppose the act of using greeting cards grew from the practice of letter writing, and since that has mostly moved online, giving decorative cards seems out of touch and unnecessary, especially when we have better ways of sending each other pictures, sentiments, songs, video, etc. This is a shame in a way, because looking at greeting card art throughout the years is an interesting window into the styles and customs of the time.

That said, there's probably always going to be a card section in most stores, at least as long as gift cards remain popular and need to be shoved into something. I don't think most of us really fret over which ones we're going to buy as long as they match the sentiment we're going for, so buying dedicated software for making custom cards is going to be left to hard-core card senders only. And that of course leaves out all the folks who would simply use an online card maker, of which there are TONS. How many of you even purchase software anymore? The few necessities, like office products and the ever-growing Adobe suite, are all going subscription only, and have scaled-down free versions for people who don't need full functionality. I've purchased a few things myself for specific hobby needs, but I'm weird and I like retro stuff, so I don't think I'm a typical consumer.

So when one of my family members found the "Christian Greeting Card Factory" at a local thrift store for a whopping two dollars, we all giggled and marveled at the novelty of not only a dedicated software package for making cards, but a niche religious one at that! And of course I had to install and review it. So if you're interested in old software and kitschy clip art, click below! Continue reading "Software Review: Christian Greeting Card Factory"