Act 5: Tinkerer’s High Ah, high school—the golden age of LAN parties and laughably slow broadband connections. Picture this: My friends and I making do with download speeds that hovered around 1 to 3 Mbps and data caps that made us stingier than a coupon-clipping grandma.
Act 4: Building Computers, Console Modding The year is 2009, I’m well and truely fat from country bakery potato pies (stay away, theyre dangerous), and I decide I’m done in the country town and decide to head south from the north and well and truely in to the east.
Act 3: Dial-up Dilemmas in A World of Windows Sometime around 2006/7, my family and I relocated from a remote city to an even more remote town. With fewer distractions than ever, I plunged headfirst into the digital world (I imagine some kind of tron moment here but really I was a fat kid sitting in his boxers on a pre-reddit gaming forum).
Introduction It’s no secret that I’ve plunged headfirst into the world of virtualization. It began innocuously enough—a virtual machine here, a router there, all basking in the virtual goodness. This obsession has grown to the point where I find myself looking at everything, wondering, ‘Can I virtualize it?
Act 2: Emulation Excitement As a youngster, DVDs were a marvel to us—but, man, they were pricey. Enter HandBrake and Nero Burning ROM, two programs that introduced me to the world of digital wizardry. With these tools, I discovered that renting a movie and spending a mere five to ten hours could result in a home-burned copy.
Skiddish