Why does this fucking site exist?

Well… that’s complicated. Like many during the COVID-19 pandemic, I spent some time reflecting on how much easier this tech bullshit used to be—back when it was a tool, an extension of humanity, not a means by which to control it.

This site is about how we used to do things, how you can still do them, and how they let YOU take back control from googlmetapplsoft, inc.

Useful Nostalgia

There is a tendency in the retro-tech community to treat computing history like a museum exhibit or a purely aesthetic costume. But the reason so many of us remember earlier computing eras fondly isn’t just pixel art or beveled grey buttons—it’s because we actually owned and understood the machines we used.

Software didn't require a monthly cloud subscription. It didn't harvest behavioral telemetry to sell advertising. Files were files on your drive, text was plain ASCII or ANSI, and the web was a decentralized collection of independent pages linked together by simple HTML.

The Test Bed for 60119.net

RetroTech.io also served as the working incubator for what became 60119.net.

What started as an experimental local weather and alert monitor running on this server gradually expanded into a full meteorological data warehouse: fetching Open-Meteo observations, caching records into SQLite, generating NWS HeatRisk map exports, and serving static RSS feeds to the local community.

When the weather project outgrew this personal playground, it spun out into its own dedicated site at 60119.net. RetroTech continues as the home for retro experiments, personal writing, and digital preservation.

Technical Colophon

No MySQL database. No dynamic WordPress framework. No plugin security nightmares.

• Hosting: Apache Web Server running on a Synology DiskStation NAS.
• Stack: Flat text files, clean CSS3, lightweight PHP, and vanilla JavaScript.
• Blogging: Raw flat text files in /blog/ indexed with zero database locks.
• Syndication: Standard RSS 2.0 at /blog/rss.xml.
• Tracking: Zero cookies, zero analytics, zero advertising networks.