My favorite HTTP response code

29 Jul 2026
Computer Stuff

Over on *cough* TikTok, mostly-retro influencer MLGonzo (he has a COBOL beard, but also talks about contemporary geek stuff) states:

Everyone should have their own favourite HTTP request response codes!

And that’s true, of course! Just a day after I watched this clip I checked in at a hotel, and by coincidence, the room number was my favorite HTTP response code!

Everybody knows HTTP 404 (Not Found), and every other backend jester will probably pick HTTP 418 (I’m a Teapot) as their favorite. But HTTP 204 is special and weird, and it’s my favorite for nostalgic reasons as well.

GET /some/url HTTP/1.1
Host: heckmeck.de

HTTP/1.1 204 No Content

What do you mean, “No Content”? No response body, no redirect? What should I do with that?

Well, nothing, and that’s the beauty of it! Back in the late 1990s, it was the go-to solution to make a browser-based chat server work:

Everything was frame-based (a proper <FRAMESET>, in uppercase)
You didn’t have an XMLHttpRequest to issue custom requests
You couldn’t even rely on JavaScript (of course, JavaScript was there, but many tech-savy power users had it deactivated, and you didn’t want to piss them off – using JavaScript was mostly fine, but requiring it for your website to function was lame)
You didn’t want to reload the chat input frame every time the user typed something (because submitting the single-input chat form would trigger a POST-clear-load-render cycle – slow, brittle-looking, and flickering!)
But you still wanted the chat to work in the browser – without any plugins and especially without launching a Java applet, which was a tedious, ugly process (and lame)

“No Content” to the rescue! When the server responds with HTTP 204, you can submit the input form as much as you like, without the browser ever repainting anything. Oh, the response is No Content? Let’s just keep the current document, then! Observe this <iframe>:

Sadly, you can only really “observe” what happens in the browser debugging tools – cooking up a purely HTTP-based toy chat server would have been fun, but allowing even the tiniest amount of user-submitted content on my website is too much of a headache, sadly…

Anyway… the trip to Siegen was nice, and this was a nice trip down memory lane. So much content about no content! :)

What’s Cool? XI

23 Jul 2026
Amiga Style
Demo Scene

Cool stuff to stumble upon, new and old.
What’s Cool? · II · III · IV · V · VI · VII · VIII · IX · X

AmigaOS 2: The Greatest Upgrade
In the beginning, the Amiga gods created the classic GUI. The gods said “let there be blue,” and the blue was good. That was all nice and well, and I really dig the efforts to stay oldschool and keep modernizing the old look at the same time. But it’s also true that the fancy, professional-looking 3D update to the Amiga UI was really exciting at the time. Before we even got the update at home (by acquiring an Amiga 1200), I spent a lot of time designing application mockups (see here and here) out of sheer excitement. And that was only the visual part – the datagubbe post discusses a lot of the improvements under the hood as well.
How to start writing a music replayer for your demo in <200 lines
I don’t know if I will ever write a Windows demo (again *cough*), but it can’t hurt to keep up with the basics in Microsoft-land, either. Together with Gargaj’s demo writing mini tutorial referenced in the very first What’s Cool? post, this is a great starting point for dummies like me.
Der PET und die Demoszene
(German) Bodo und Krill wurden vom „Besser Wissen“-Podcast eingeladen, über den PET und die Demoszene zu quackeln. Natürlich auch über C64, Hardware, Demopartys und den kreativen Prozess. Reinhör-Empfehlung!
Building an AmigaOS Development Environment in 2026
Because why not? I remember when Hannibal’s WinUAE demo toolchain was all the rage in 2012 (because it was great, and at least for me, it was released just at the right time – thanks, Han!). Nowadays, there are a million more ways to conveniently build Amiga software, and that’s great. This one is built on gcc and Amiberry and even sports a gdb server on the Amiga side – cool stuff!
BoingKick
A boot screen replacement reminiscent of my own hack, but specifically for the Amiga 1000. This one also patches the “strap” module that is normally responsible for showing the boot prompt, i. e. the weird hand holding a Workbench disk. Instead of merely showing an alternative boot prompt picture, BoingKick also procedurally creates a Boing ball and animates it with palette cycling. Sweet!

Oh, noes! resp. Ouchie!

17 Jul 2026
Demo Scene

“Why are you upset, honey?”

“It’s just a mug…” :(

Of course, I’m not really upset! Well, not upset-upset; ignore the teeth-grinding noises. I try to move on, and accept that out of a hundred cups that we own this is the one that takes a dent.

Also, it’s not that there wasn’t a way to replace this mug with a new one in the future – even if it’s the distant future! :)

PS: Since I’m on vacation and don’t post a lot: Here is where I got that mug…

4 years of 420

4 Jul 2026
Teletext
Demo Scene

Four years ago, I was toying around with Teletext rendering prototypes for an Amiga demo. Those prototypes quickly turned into a demo in its own right, and I put aside the original goal of doing this on the Amiga.

That demo became 420 Years of Teletext.

Teletext output on the Amiga took another year to crack. It then turned out it wasn’t a “world’s first” achievement after all, but fun was had all around!

Back then, it was only a month before the party (Evoke 2022) when we had proof: This can actually work! The demo was already half done when Green hooked up the trusty Nokia TV of his youth, and it ran some effects in 25 fps. I only had a stupid smart TV myself, and the software-based Teletext rendering in those devices cops out at seven frames per second. Lame!

THAT was a relief!

At the party place, we recorded the thing hours before the deadline with Ghost’s mobile phone in a dark orga room, and this has been the only proper recording of the demo ever since.

Until now! A higher-resolution version is on YouTube, too. Enjoy and learn all about Teletext’s history! :)