I now bring you, the Discourse browser
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Or, more useless shit you can do with Node.js.
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2hqkz3/cosmos_broswer_a_broswer_that_allows_you_to/
"After a person inputs a url, our app texts our Twilio number which forwards the URL as a POST request to our Node.JS backend. The backend takes the url, gets the HTML source of the website, minifies it, gets rid of the css, javascript, and images, GZIP compresses it, encodes it in Base64, and sends the data as a series of SMSes. The phone recieves this stream at a rate of 3 messages per second, orders them, decompresses them, and displays the content."
GitHub - ColdSauce/CosmosBrowserAndroid: Cosmos Browser allows a person to connect to the internet through the use of SMS. No data or wifi required.
Cosmos Browser allows a person to connect to the internet through the use of SMS. No data or wifi required. - ColdSauce/CosmosBrowserAndroid
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That reads like a winning OMGWTF contest entry.
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I had not thought of it, but it probably could be.
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Nah, this is not Atwoodian at all. It uses Node.js, but that seems to be it, there's no huge complicated stack; apart from that it supports old phones. And it might be genuinely useful if you're ever in a situation where you need a webpage right now but you don't have mobile internet (like if you're in a foreign country). It's a stretch but there's something.
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Nah, this is not Atwoodian at all.
How sad is it that "Atwoodian" has become an expression that when used everyone knows what it means?
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Not to forget, the Base64 isn't JSON-wrapped.
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there's no huge complicated stack; apart from that it supports old phones.
It's an Android and Firefox OS app. So much for "old phones", unless you have a sheet of paper and a pen to decode the Base64. And un-gzip.
And it might be genuinely useful if you're ever in a situation where you need a webpage right now but you don't have mobile internet (like if you're in a foreign country).
Step into nearest convenience store / bazaar / hut, buy a cheap starter, buy 1GB or data. There's zero use case for that, with today's prices if you can afford to send the text, you can probably also afford to open the page (even with ridiculous $300/GB prices we have in roaming).
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It looks like they're using http://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing
$0.08 per message to send to my phone! Considering a SMS has 140 bytes, and I currently pay 0,03€/MB of data, that's about 15,000x more expensive... but they're paying. I wonder what their monthly budget for this nonsense is.
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There is really only one way to find out... Time for a script.
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Reading that title, I thought this would be a web browser that took Inifiscroll to the next level and simply dumped the contents of each link directly below the previous page. No need for a back button if you can just scroll up.
In retrospect, I can't be the first person to think of this but I'm too lazy to go read through the bad / evil ideas threads looking for prior art.
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Safari has had something like this for a while. You can add pages to your 'reading list', and if you browsed to a page from your 'reading list' and scroll past the end, it'll load the next one. However, it's optional.
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Optional? Giving your users options is "Doing It Wrong..."
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@Intercourse said:
How sad is it that "Atwoodian" has become an expression that when used everyone knows what it means?
It has joined the ranks of “Orwellian”, and has similar ( less totalitarian, more exasperation ) connotations.
