Zishan Rahman

He/him. 22. Computer Science @ King’s College London (ongoing PhD candidate, BSc First Class with Honours in 2023). Jumping from one thread to another.

2 minute read

There’s an amazing website called (the) Internet Archive, a non-profit website storing hundreds and thousands of stuff contributed (mainly) by many of the site’s users. It has everything from eBooks and texts to photos to even websites and Grateful Dead concert tapes! Usually, I use it to download old DOS and Windows games and software that I wouldn’t otherwise obtain, because ‘tinkering with VirtualBox and DosBox’ isn’t a good enough justification for the cost of obtaining the discs from eBay and making ISO files out of them, but I did find an actual disc for a Windows 95/98 game lying around in the house.

That disc was a CD-ROM adaptation of the ever-popular board game Scrabble, released in 1999, published by Mattel Interactive and developed by a French company called Azursoft. It was in the family stuff for ages, and I found and acquired it several years ago. Here’s an image of the disc:

Image of the actual Scrabble disc. A truncated version of said image is on the CD's page on the Internet Archive.

Pretty cool, huh?

And, when I was looking for the exact same CD on the Internet Archive’s software collection(s), it didn’t seem to be there. At least, the UK version wasn’t, but I don’t think I’ve found the French version of the same game there either.

So I did what I should’ve done a long time ago.

I created the ISO file and uploaded it to the Internet Archive.

And here it is!

About the somewhat weird URL: It was originally meant to be this. I uploaded it to the Community Software collection, the only software collection that anyone can upload their things to. Which is fine in itself, until I discovered that the collection ID for this collection was open_source_software. Which the game was OBVIOUSLY NOT. And as soon as it was derived (as in, the torrent and thunbmail files were created for the upload), I deleted it.

Too bad I didn’t read the help page(s) sooner. Otherwise I’d realise that only the community sections were open to uploads to everyone, and I had to email the guys at the Internet Archive to change the collections. And, by the time I realised that, I already deleted the original item. Oof, indeed.

So I uploaded it again, this time with a different URL, and this time, I wrote an email to the dudes at Internet Archive to get it in the right collection and they sorted it out the next day.

So the moral of the story, I guess, is this: Don't rush what you do. Always think and be patient. There IS a solution. You just have to find it. And, sometimes, it's right in front of you, even if you don't see it. I don’t usually like getting this philosophical and whatnot, but there you go.

Anyway, here’s my library, and especially my web archive, at the moment, if you wanna have a peek. I suppose I needed to update this blog by the end of August, especially since I’m almost about to start my second year at King’s College London soon. If you’re reading this, somehow, please hope and pray that I’m not this stupid during this second year. Even though I probably will be. Who knows?

You May Also Enjoy

I’m not the biggest user of Vim/Neovim… but it became REALLY useful for a funded project I did

19 minute read

For that same project I hosted a conference presentation for back in July, I decided to start using Vim/Neovim (Neovim specifically) for a very specific reason that ended up being very useful to me for said project. This article goes into depth about how I got to using Vim/Neovim, and also how I continued using Neovim afterwards from there. This isn’t going to be a tutorial, though I will show the most useful Vim/Neovim commands I’ve learnt so far (as of the time this article goes live). Hope you enjoy it!

I Upgraded My Uni Laptop To Linux Mint 22. It Went Alright… Eventually.

19 minute read

Getiing the webcam drivers to work was a bit of work, but I eventually got there in the end. The rest of the process went somewhat smoothly (keyword: somewhat). Now that I actually remember (mostly) how mintupgrade worked during the upgrade process, I can actually write an article about it!

Using Linux Mint As My Daily Driver: Three Years On. Well… An Anthology Of Sub-Articles About Me Using Linux For The Past Three Years (With Some Comparisons To Windows Here And There).

84 minute read

Well, the time has finally come to do one more of these, and this year I took the time to plan out what I was going to say. Things are a quite different, now that I am effectively using a different laptop now that my red one got borked. Also, this post is far longer than what I usually write, but I split it up into subsections that can basically count as articles in their own right. I hope you enjoy reading through all of this as much as I have enjoyed writing all of this!

A (Not So) Brief Update On My Life And What I Want To Do With This Website, Now That I’m Doing A PhD And Have Just Co-Hosted My First Conference Presentation

15 minute read

I last wrote a blog post in 2023, my yearly Linux Mint anniversary post. It’s been almost a year since then, so now is time for an update, now that my life and career path have both changed considerably. Long story short: I started a PhD in February and I just co-hosted my first conference presentation with my PhD supervisor. I’m very much looking forward to it, so read on for a brief-ish summary of what’s going on in my life (as of Tuesday 9th July 2024).