PS

Continuing the PS-on-paper thought-experiment:

If, in the tradition of cheaper-end books/volumes which were printed to economize pages with small text and single-spacing on cheap paper (to sell cheaply and widely at the expense of reading comfort), we doubled the 300-words-per-page average and pegged the project to 500 words/page INCLUSIVE of images and formatting, the whole thing could get down to 5000 pages.

But, hey, wasn't PS Post-1 in November 2016? Nine years ago? So those economized 5000 pages would be something like 555 pages per year? Now that's not so overwhelming. A bimonthly magazine format, less than 100 pages per issue, six issues per year.

OTOH, people tend not to be able to concentrate on the single-spaced, small-text, economized printings. And the extreme of my analog text-preservation thought-experiment would not be paper at all but Microfilm.

PS: Late night edit...

I have a similar naming scheme in my httrack directory

should read:

I have a similar naming scheme in my httrack directory as you do, Mr. Hail. (eg. indexcb54.html & blogworks61f8.html)

But, you know the thing... ☮️

PS: Good evening, Jim!

https://i.ibb.co/d0kyzF0K/ICANN-Lookup.jpg

Apparently, autopay, has re-registered peakstupidity.com for two more years. (Problem averted!)

So that's pretty cool.

****

Mr. Hail,

I ran httrack from my command line and httrack downloaded 3,460 items, totaling 201.9 MB (208.9 MB on disk) into the images directory.

httrack took about two hours and forty minutes to capture 9,340 items, totaling 321.2 MB (336.7 MB on disk) while wget took 25 minutes to capture 9,315 items, totaling 322.8 MB (338.9 MB on disk)

I haven't yet figured out what's different about the two sets though I have a similar naming scheme in my httrack directory. I think wget did a better job naming the files.

Happy Wednesday morning, gentlemen. Cheers! ☮️

PS:
Sorry I haven't been checking in as often as I'd wanted. So many distractions! I'll be sad for this place to go away. Hopefully resolution.

Jim

PS: I forget the pictures or video areas that take up space, Mr. Hail. That'd be another 20% maybe, so probably still within my huge tolerance band. Then, though, if you do go to smaller than normal text, but not tiny, you could get it down by what, 50% more maybe?

PS: I'd say 10,000 pages +/- 5,000, Mr. Hail.

You may not recall, but in the old days of typewritten pages, 300 words per page was a normal double-spaced page. We normally read single-spaced stuff now, though we do give an extra line-break between paragraphs, something I don't think was in practice back then. Also, since a simple space between words was not part of that 300, but is a character nonetheless, we could say 6 characters per word.

I checked this database just now and it uses utf8mb4 unicode, meaning, it CAN store characters as up to 4 bytes, but normal letters will take only 1.

There's lots of slop in this rough calculation, but if there are 6 characters per word, that's 1,800 bytes per page, call it 2,000 for some odd characters - for single-spaced 4,000 bytes then. I have had the database in a word editor, and it was mostly the words, with not too many other formatting characters that have to do (not with HTML, BTW, which do change my calculations non-negligibly) with the database itself. So, let's divide that 34 MBytes by 5,000 or just say 3,400 to make a very rough calculation easier - that's 10,000 pages!

That'd be 20 reams of paper. Good thing I and you commenters DIDN'T have to use a typewriter!

PS

Just curious if hypothetically the entirety of PS were entirely printed on paper, in small but not tiny text, how many pages would it take? Pictures and formatting and all included.

PS: "A good example of how inefficient video is as a form, content vs size." Oh, yeah, and that's even after being greatly compressed with amazing algorithms.

Text rules, huh? Then again, I started with pictures in '17 sometime, as they do catch one's eye and often explain about 1,000 words worth.* A commenter way back then also suggested using a picture or two per post.

That's what is great about youtube, rumble, etc - let them store all that data. The only videos I stored - still do, for now - on the GD servers is a few of that '22 crazy China Kung Flu re-Panic, because I got them from a different source than usual.


* Let's see. That's still inefficient, right, as an average word length of 5 characters** means a picture ought to be 5 kBytes when, instead, I average 50?



** This site will do the simple - for a computer! - calculation for you:

https://wordstats.net/average-word-length/

PS

The peakstupidity.com main-site download gives me 253mb.

A lot of the extra size that led me north of 10gb is from Wikipedia, for some reason. But the videos seem obviously the big thing. A good example of how inefficient video is as a form, content vs size.

PS

Adam Smith wrote: "3456 images"

My site-download effort leaves me with 3,460 images. I wonder what the discrepancy comes from?

PS: That was VERY quick, Adam. Of course, having done it on the apple device, I have no idea where to look at actual files and such, but I'll do this same to get the .zip file on an actual working-man's computer. The apples do what they do very well, but that company does not want anyone to know what's actually going on.

Then, I'll see if my alt-zip program (not the official one) can extract these files and check them out. That would have save a WHOLE LOT of time. Thanks... for next time.

PS: Good afternoon, Messrs. Hail and Newman!

Mr. Moderator, it truly wasn't any effort at all on my side. Just a minute to look up the proper command, put it in the command line and let it roll. Then another couple minutes to zip it up, upload it, download it and test it. Here's a link...

https://tinyurl.com/ywcj9bvr

It looks like all the important stuff is there. (Including 3456 images totaling just over 200 MB.) (Sorry to hear the godaddy interface made this difficult. It was super easy with wget.)

If anyone has trouble downloading the PS archive from the link above I can upload it elsewhere.

Happy Tuesday! ☮️

PS: Messrs Hail and Smith: That's a lot of effort. I promise I have all the posts and comments saved (the small tables are of topic keys and links between these topic keys and the posts, etc.). I have all the images saved too.

Those numbers make sense now. Anything in GBytes must include video. Adam was very close to on the money, as the dBase - posts and comments - is at ~34 MB right now. I was estimating pictures as averaging* 50-60 kbytes apiece. I didn't start putting in images regularly till about 300-odd posts in. Then, too some still have none - the ones with videos in particular, but some have 2, even rarely up to 5 or 6. Let's just say one per post, so that's about 200 MBytes for images.


* It took an hour of pressing buttons over and over to save these, and this with help from a more current computer guy. You couldn't highlight, then copy, the images all together - he says the GoDaddy interface sucks in this respect. Keep in mind that likely more than 1/2 of the images I had already from working on them, but the problem is most were not saved by post number elsewhere. It'd be a LOT of trouble to connect their respective posts.

oops, I really wrote this footnote only to say that that's why I don't know the exact size of the image storage files, saved in a few places due to GoDaddy weirdness.

PS: One more thing...

𝐼𝑡'𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑛𝑑 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑙𝑑,
𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑤𝑒'𝑟𝑒 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑙𝑙 ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒?

I'm pretty sure, but not certain, that godaddy has a five day grace window during which peakstupidity.com will keep working. (Longer if the site is on autopay.)

I suppose time will tell... ☮️

PS: Greetings, Mr. Hail!

𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑠𝑎𝑣𝑒𝑑 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦 𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑙𝑒 𝑣𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑜 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑃𝑆 𝑎𝑠 𝑎 𝑙𝑜𝑐𝑎𝑙 𝑐𝑜𝑝𝑦, 𝑡𝑜𝑜.

That's really pretty impressive, ackshually. I've never used httrack before, but I just installed it a few minutes ago. I'll give it a try in the spirit of inquiry.

On my side here, the pages have embedded videos, but I don't think it saved local copies. (Just the link info embedded in the php files.) Which is cool because they work well. It downloaded 3456 (how fun!) items in the images directory for a total of 208.8 MB.

Interestingly, (to me anyway), it did not download page 5150 or 8675309. It downloaded all the pages up to and including 3378. It also did it in duplicate, so to say. There are files named blogworks.php?action=viewbpost&id=x and files named index.php?post=x as well as the topic key files named index.php?tkid=x

But it does look like all the post and comment data is there.

So yeah... I think I'll give httrack and curl a try, mostly for fun, and I'll package this archive up for you and post it to mega.nz (if that works for you).

Until later... ☮️

PS: Good afternoon, Mr. Hail...

So, it's working...

https://i.ibb.co/ymLm5tdt/PS-Archive-Screenshot.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/s9xmjksf/post-2288.jpg

(A few minutes later...)

Ok. It just finished. 9,315 items totaling 322.8 MB. (338.9 MB on disk.)

https://i.ibb.co/WRmd2N1/post-2288-final.jpg

It didn't follow links within the comments or within the posts themselves. Just the local peakstupidity files.

I might try the other methods too, (or I might try wget again with different options?), just to see what happens. (Who knows, curl or httrack might work even better?) But this seems to have done the trick. I can archive this and send you a link. (I'll do that in a while after I tinker with the other options. But so far, this looks pretty good.)

Cheers to a wonderful afternoon, Mr. Hail! ☮️

PS

It's the end of the world,
and we're all still here?

__________

Mr. Smith: The method I tried was "HTTrack website copier." I didn't much know what I was doing and just pressed some buttons to see what would happen. There surely must have been a way to avoid downloading everything from every linked page.

I finally pressed the Stop button after it the "Links scanned" number reached 67,364, and "Files written" reached 36,803 with 42 errors.

In the local-copy of the website now housed in one of my local folders, there are 3,460 images.

The grand list of unique webpages comes in at 5,689 pages. That's more than the number of entries, but it must be including comments non-comments pages.

I've also now seen why the total reached 10gb: this thing saved every single video ever posted to PS as a local copy, too.

PS: Good morning, Mr. Hail!

Thank you for your quick thinking and your heroic efforts to save a local copy and create a PS archive. I find it interesting that it (apparently) saved external links and such. 6.7+gb sounds pretty huge for the 5-6 million(ish) words found here. I would imagine this info in the database is dramatically smaller. Like (perhaps) 40mb or something.(?) (This is something Achmed would know.)

I'm curious though... What software did you use? Did it save images and documents from the links it found in the comments and the main articles? (Did it save the hidden posts like 5150 and 8675309?)

When you say it has file names like 𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑥𝑓𝑏50 are these sequential? Or are they all over the place?

I'm just curious is all. (Anyway...)

I think I'm going to try it too and see what happens.

Plan A: wget --mirror --page-requisites --convert-links --no-clobber --no-parent https://www.peakstupidity.com

(Or something like that?)(Fingers crossed)

If that doesn't work I'll try curl or httrack or ???.
(In the interest of science I might try them all?)

I hope you have a most wonderful day, Mr. Hail!
(And thanks again!) Cheers! ☮️

PS

PS local-copy saving project final update for now:

Checked many of the saved pages (locally hosted) and although everything appears, I haven't figured out how to search in any easy way.

The file names are also things like "indexfb50," which is not helpful for navigating even if I did know exact entry-numbers.

PS

Ok, it looks like I have indeed saved local copies of at least a great portion of PS. I still don't know if I have the entries+comments for at 3,378 posts made up to D-Day here.

PS

This was posted with the PS loss in mind, among other website losses I've seen over the years. The universalization of that experience as a thought-experiment:

https://www.unz.com/isteve/isteve-open-thread-14/#comment-7361701

PS

I did this attempted PS site-saving exercise during the marathon of a World Series game.

The attempt to save the site's contents should've been completely straightforward, but it's still lumbering along, now at 6.7gb and nearly 30,000 "files written"! What I can tell is it's also saving every link ever put into every PS entry... And I haven't been able to confirm it's actually successfully saved what I was aiming to save (i.e., can I click locally on a post and it brings up the PS entry? I haven't tried during the site-download process).

Meanwhile, the site itself has not yet disappeared.

PS

update.....

14,000 files written; 2.7gb

Hoping for the best.

PS

The website-downloading program I've tried to use apparently also wants to download every link ever appearing on PS.

All I wanted was the original-material main entries! 1.3gb and counting.

PS

I've tried using a program to download the entire PS site. We'll see how it works out. It's running now. So far "250 files written, 10mb saved, 1 error."

The loss of Internet data is a very real phenomenon. Some huge portion of everything ever done on the Internet has vanished.

PS: I've been thinking hard about your Ron Unz idea, Mr. Hail. Yes, if I did this, I would do as you wrote and make sure he can tell an email is not SPAM.

Something tells me that I don't want to deal with that guy.

PS: Thanks, Mr. Hail, for those piece of contact info. I'll put them below a further post that I'll write about this, which may or may not be readable tomorrow.

I'll keep your Ron Unz suggestion in mind.

PS

If PS disappears for any short or long term, everyone can feel free to contact me via:

_________

HailToYou.wordpress.com

hail_to_you@mail.com

https://x.com/hail__to_you (I'm using Adam Smith's Hulk Hogan Freedom Fries as the background pictures, thanks!)

https://substack.com/@hailtoyou (so far commenting only)

https://gab.com/Hail (basically unused)

https://www.bitchute.com/profile/joM4E2nMOuor (I think I again have access but had lost it for a long time)

I can't think of any more for now.

_______

Oh, and...

https://www.unz.com/comments/all/?commenterfilter=Hail

(unless I get "Greta Handle'd")

PS

This is bad news! I hope neither the PS archive/database nor the URL get lost to the world.

I am not sure I fully understand the problem, but here is my idea for saving PS, if saving it needs:

Contact Ron Unz and ask for his help.

As you are a longtime Unz Review 'contributor' (with over a million words of comments since 2016), he may be willing to help. It seems it'd go without saying that he'd be able to help on the technical side with rehosting or something, I don't know. He salvaged the old iSteve-dot-com site and archived it, with relatively minimal overall loss, and many other such things.

(And: The way I see it, the high-quality and pro-social contributions you've made to the PS comments sections constitute a kind of unpaid labor for Ron Unz all these years, even though he has called you a "random right-wing ranter" at least four or five times.)

Contact address:
Ron@unz.com

If you do do this, it'd be prudent to add a comment to the effect that you are emailing him in the Reader Feedback Open Thread, under the AEN handle, which would confirm with him it's not a scam.

PS: That might very well be the case, SafeNow. I'll write some more about this tomorrow.

Adam, I forgot to say that I don't know my PW because I usually send them to myself on my email accounts, and those accts are toast. It's a catch-22, as I need an email address to get a new PW, but to change from my current yahoo-locked-or-gone address to another that I can get into requires the PW. !!

Well, see, if I had kept my email accts I would not have to show that ID, because I never did way back 12 years ago. To get re-secure with GoDaddy, I do. I am not sure what happens when you register a URL and such with them now.

I appreciate your attempt to help. I'll try a few more things in the morning. I'd like to migrate everything off GoDaddy, but we'll see how that works...

PS: Good evening, gentlemen,

Do you have access to your godaddy account?
(If so,) Have you tried changing the contact email address?

https://www.godaddy.com/help/regain-access-to-my-domain-or-my-godaddy-account-4043

https://www.godaddy.com/help/reset-my-godaddy-password-8

Maybe there is a way you can do this online?

Also, what if you don't have a "government" ID? (No godaddy for you?) Surely that's not a requirement to do business with godaddy.(?)

Good wishes and good luck! ☮️

PS
The possibility occurred to me that this is happening to you for reasons.