Good Morning and Hello! In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve got a new logo now, shoutouts to JoJo Lu for doing an amazing job!
I’m glad to report that the most of the news this week, not concerned with us, is also hopeful.
Starting from the worst we have to tell you today, The Eye has officially been down for 10 days now. The issue was reported to be related to the Server’s NIC (Network Interface Controller) malfunctioning, and as of today there has yet to be an estimate on how much longer the downtime will last.
The huge IRC archiveechelogwas reported to be shutting on May 29th of this year. For our readers who don’t know about the ancient chat relic which is IRC, it lacked a log feature and it was entirely optional for clients to have a history at all. As such, websites such as echelog emerged to provide publicly accessible chat logs. Seeing as IRC is a lot less popular today and privacy concerns have been on the rise, it was being shutdown for being obsoleted.
Fortunately there has been a development since the shutdown announcement. Brian Matzon, echelog’s maintainer, has had a change of heart and renewed the domain for one more year (up until 2021). He is currently looking for anyone who he can hand over the website to or anyone willing to unarchive it, so feel free to contact [email protected] if you’d be interested.
[18:22:13] <deavmi> And on IRC, well..... IRC's forever!
A similar story occurred on another site calledThe Wide World of IR Photography. Though perhaps a far younger website than echelog from above, it scheduled for shutdown on April 30th, due to inactivity. IR Photography, or infrared photography, refers to taking photos with infrared cameras. These images capture light invisible to the human eye, so the color here is only an approximation of what we could possibly see if we could see a wider range of the electromagnetic spectrum.
As one can imagine, the results are often very otherworldly.
On April 4th, the Admin, who goes by the name of Craig, announced that in line with suggestions from members of here and other forums, he was now in contact with a company in the IR camera business and is working to secure a sponsorship to keep the website up.
Last but not least we have some news on Twitch! Recently highlights before August 2016 had mysteriously vanished. Reddit user u/bismuth9 (speedrunner name: Bismuth) reported his discovery that the videos were still accessible, at least to channel owners:
With a few exceptions (it’s unclear why some videos were spared), the highlights category on any Twitch channel’s videos only goes back to August 2016 now. If you have any highlights older than that, they are not publicly available to view anymore, but they do still exist. To retrieve them, simply go to https://dashboard.twitch.tv/u/YOURNAME/content/video-producer. They can still be linked to and viewed by anyone, similarly to unlisted videos on YouTube.
And that’s about it for this week…
In order to better synchronize ourselves with announcements from the various channels we report on and to get a better of feel of what times people are reading these summaries, we’ll be experimenting with the time we post these.
Next week’s summary will be scheduled for 12 AM PST (PDT to be more exact), instead.
WW IR survived until November 2020(?), no thanks to us archivists, sadly. I believe I had heard about it from the Internet Archive Discord.
I’m more than heartbroken to see it dead, I was just about to show someone how trippy Infrared Photography is and there goes my best source. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯