Recently my personal site passed 20 years. I’m not 100% sure on the exact date it went online, but Smigit.com looks to have gone live sometime around January 2024. Over that time I’ve had multiple iterations of the page, and in recent years have more recently changed the domain to courtenay.net after a short stint as courtenay.io.
I thought it’d be interesting to go back and look at some of the designs over the years with Archive.org’s Wayback Machine. In many cases I didn’t even recall having used certain designs. Over time the site has certainly evolved from a more journal (stream of conscious) like platform with initially a forum attached, to something I’ve used more sparingly for blogging. The shift potentially has aligned with the rise of other social media platforms that I increasingly used around 2010. By 2020 I had de-emphasised the blog aspect entirely and had just a bit of a portfolio/cv style page in a design that never fully got fleshed out, before bringing blogging back more recently.
The Internet of January 2024
Before I jump into the screenshots I’ve taken, I thought it’d be fun to note what 20 years of the internet looked like.
- In January 2004, MySpace was 5 months old. Facebook would not arrive for another 13 months as “TheFacebook”, and it wouldn’t be until September 2006 that just anyone could sign up (initially Facebook was limited to people with select college email addresses).
- Gmail would not be announced until 3 months later, on April 1 2024, as an invite only beta. It would launch with a 1GB mailbox that would spend several years expanding its capacity daily. It was not until Feb 2007 that signups without an invite were possible. Microsoft responded to the initial Gmail announcement in 2004 by itself announcing in June that it would increase their Hotmail services mailbox from 2MB to 250MB.
- YouTube would not launch until December 2015, almost two years later.
- Twitter, Instagram, Google Maps and most other common platforms did not exist.
- Internet Explorer had 80% of the browser market, with version 6.0 being around 55% of that.
- Lastly, WordPress was at the time 8 months old. It would go on to become a dominant platform online for hosting sites with reportedly around 43.1% of sites in 2024 using it. While I wouldn’t use it day one, I did move to the platform relatively early on in its life (during the 1.x period).
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is a fantastically cute and a well crafted little puzzle game. Seriously, check out some footage from the video in this article.
In the past few months I’ve twice encountered an issue where my iPhone had a huge amount of storage allocated to ‘other’ files. You’d normally expect a few hundred megs to maybe a few gigs of storage to be allocated to these files as it’s what non multimedia/applications data gets labeled as in iTunes. It appeared though in my case that toggling Music Match had left my 70GB or so of music orphaned in the ‘other’ files dump as opposed to being listed under ‘music’.
Freeing up this space so I could re-sync my music proved problematic. The Music app showed no tracks available to play nor would selecting or deselecting the tracks in iTunes and re-syncing cause the desired effect. Deselecting music failed to trigger deletions, and selecting music did not cause the existing data on the phone to be recognised as the music that it was.
In the end the best option turned out to be to perform a backup of the phone and perform a restore.
- Plug the phone into a PC with iTunes and perform a backup. If it is not already selected, I strongly suggest that an encrypted backup is done, at least this one time. By encrypting a backup additional data will be retained such as passwords, Health Kit data and other information you likely won’t want to manually restore. Basically at the cost of having to remember a password, you’ll save a lot of effort once the phone is restored.
- Once the phone is backed up, on the iPhone go to Settings and proceed to do a full wipe of both the phones settings and all content (Settings -> Reset -> Erase All Content and Settings). At first I performed just a settings clear and after restoring found the space was still being consumed, so stick to doing a full clear. As long as the backup was successful there’s nothing to worry about. You’ll probably need to disable Find My Phone before proceeding (the phone will prompt if this is required).
- Restore the iPhone using iTunes. This may take a while, but if an encrypted backup was performed in step one there will be a minimal amount of configuration that need to be re-entered manually and you should have retained data in a number of other applications (Health for example). I also found I didn’t need to restore my Google Authenticator settings which was a great relief. If an unencrypted backup was performed, things should still work but expect to lose a bit of data and configuration so budget time to restoring your phone to its prior state.
And thats it! After performing those steps my ‘other’ space dropped from over 70GB to around 2GB, and I was then able to re-sync my music collection fine.
