Sandmill

This website.

Sandmill is a playground and the place where I write about my projects. The front page boots a small Linux VM in the browser tab, with a real GRUB menu, and lands you in a BBS: message boards, a chat room, mail, a guestbook, and a few doors. One of the doors is a Mac OS 8 emulator with Netscape and an IRC client. A retro proxy strips modern web pages down so Netscape can load them. There is a mill command line in the VM for reading and posting, and you can sign in with BrowserID.

I like retro computing. I had a modem growing up and knew of exactly one local BBS. Long distance calls were out of the question, and the phone lines were bad enough that I often had to drop to 1200 baud, sometimes 300, to hold a connection. I never got to run a board of my own. Now I have one, and thirty years later the cost of building things like this has collapsed. With AI doing much of the typing, a site like this is a few weeks of evenings rather than a project you never start.

The projects and blog boards are the same markdown files that make up the rest of the site, so anything I write here shows up in the terminal, in the BBS, and as plain HTML.