If you live in the United States, today (November 5th) is election day! For info on your local voting locations, times, and how to vote, please visit https://vote.gov

If you've never voted in person before, it's actually very easy. All the people running the polls are both politically neutral, and dedicated to respect/privacy for carrying out the electoral process.

Once you go to your polling location, there will be a line that you get in. (Usually it's not too long, and around a 10 minute wait). When you get to the front, you give the poll workers your info, they cross your name off a list, and hand you a ballot. Then you take the ballot to a privacy booth, circle in your candidates, and drop it off in the ballot box.

Here's a great video from Hank Green that goes into detail about why voting is important: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWpdkmKMjeA

If you live in one of the following states, they offer same day registration, and you can just show up:

California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Maine (online only), Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming

Just a reminder!

To repeat: This post is only about the visual countdown timer. The actual 20 minute limit that closes the browser is built into the Switch OS.

We have over 27,000 signatures on the petition to Nintendo to change this. It seems unlikely that they will, but this is our only real course of action.

Petition link:
https://www.change.org/p/nintendo-nintendo-expose-the-fully-functional-internet-browser-built-into-the-switch

@poyo Okay it should be working again on 45.55.112.11

Sounds like a DNS resolution issue related to the restarting. Is it better if you use 45.55.142.122 instead of 45.55.112.11 ?

Edit:
yep.. google not resolving from the server:

# ping google.com
ping: google.com: Temporary failure in name resolution

Fixing it now

If you're working on a website for a console that doesn't have a modern browser, or web dev tools, and can't figure out why something is broken on the console, the following HTML snippet can be used to display and alert any javascript errors:

<script>
   window.onerror = function(message, source, lineno, colno, error) {
      alert(`Error: ${message}\nSource: ${source}\nLine: ${lineno}\nColumn: ${colno}\nError object: ${error}`);
      return false;
   };  
</script>

This will only help for websites where you can control the source code. It displays whatever errored on the page, and the filename and line number that generated it.

For the Flatly Cookies notice that pops up at the bottom of the screen (and an issue on Switch, as it would appear on every visit):

.cookie-consent {
    position: relative;
}

Lots!!!

@lollapalooza it's https://www.1001fonts.com/gooddog-cool-font.html with the dots removed!

I remember using it cause it looks like the Nintendogs font

We're working on a Switch-compatible IDE still, and you can see the preview of the progress here: https://sailboat2.bdns.dev (This is just the UI only, it doesn't build any files yet). This would be for Javascript and HTML/CSS page editing though, not python. I'm also having trouble getting the Switch to use monospaced fonts in code areas.

That being said, there are some projects to run python via javascript, which could be interesting: https://pyscript.net

There's an app on the Switch eShop called FUZE4, which lets you write actual code and run it on the switch directly! You can control it with the onscreen keyboard, or plug in a USB one too for faster coding.

eShop page: https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/fuze4-nintendo-switch-switch/

You can switch really quickly between the code editor and running the code, which is important for iterating and learning.

Also, I can answer any questions if needed about some of the functionality, the coding language is similar to Python but a little simpler (like BASIC).

Yeah, sleeping the system will pause the timer, but still it will count down when you go back to using it. If there were a way to trick the system into thinking you weren't using it, it might be possible to bypass it, but the options are so limited while the browser is up.

Basically, every website you ever visit (on any device, on the Internet) is able to see the IP that you're connecting and viewing it from. (And this is one reason why VPNs advertise themselves as helping improve privacy, as they mask your IP). So, if someone links you to a suspicious looking website or image, it can be possible to fully view IP + browser info.

That being said, though, an IP does not usually enable someone to do something malicious. The worst is often location-leaking (as IPs are issued for different general regions). As a tip, you can likely easily to get a new IP by disconnecting your modem/router from the internet for ~5 min, and the ISP will issue you a new one.

Very nice! Let's try it out!

FYI we're asking so that we can set up some bookmarks easier

@poyo for reddit, https://old.reddit.com still works, although it's a dated looking interface

When using BrowseDNS or Switchbru DNS to access the browser, video playback is unavailable with the following message: "Support Code: 2809-1212 This feature is not available".

However, videos do work elsewhere on the system (eg. the eShop, News app, or even YouTube app). The Switch has several different browser web applets on it, each with different permissions. Here's a table from the Switchbrew Wiki:

Custom DNS settings can allow the last one, WifiWebAuthApplet, to allow the user to browse the Internet. This applet has no whitelist, and allows any URL to be visited. However, it does not allow video playback. This is done intentionally by Nintendo to limit the usefulness of playing videos when using a custom DNS. (For more on how BrowseDNS works, see this this post, or this one for self hosting).

Unfortunately, that means video playback only works if you can serve it from an Applet that only allows a short list of whitelisted domains. As all of these domains are https, there is no chance to bypass this using a custom DNS server.

As of v13.2.0, the whitelisted domains include: nintendo.com, twitter.com, facebook.com and google.com. You would have to have control over a domain or subdomain from one of these to allow video content to play. Previously, sites.google.com could be used (aka SwitchTube), however this is now explicitly blacklisted as well.

The only real hope to get this functionality working is to publicly let Nintendo know that there is user demand for a standalone web browser (like on Wii, Wii U, DS, and 3DS) that supports these features.

If you have a homebrewed Switch, the app BrowseNX also allows browser video playback, but that is becoming increasingly rarer and unfortunately does not match the ease of use of an officially available browser.

I'm checking the switchbru survey responses, and people are still commenting asking us to remove the timeout...

There's nothing we can do! I put it in bold in so many places! Sorry everyone!

I'm at the point where I think people should individually reach out to Nintendo. We see hundreds of thousands of users using the DNS every month. I feel like they don't understand the potential user-base here.

@lollapalooza Just wrote a post on self-hosting here: https://browsedns.net/topic/88/how-to-self-host-a-dns-server-for-web-browsing

tldr: Switchbru/BrowseDNS both use LaneChange to handle the landing page redirect, but for most use-cases (that don't need to handle different user preferences) just a DNS server that redirects to an HTTP page that then links to Google / other sites will do.

@Gorzog oh wow that's very useful! Thanks! I didn't realize the timeout was so precisely at 20 minutes. This is for 45.55.142.122? It would be nice if there was some networking-level thing that could be done to stretch it out longer.

When I sleep my Switch while in the browser, I am able to get a single page to last for multiple days, but maybe that is due to the total time not yet exceeding 20 minutes. I'll need to get some specific data too.

Described in the BrowseDNS post, the Switch will display a web browser applet as a part of its built-in Captive Portal functionality. The connection test domains are redirected when in a captive portal, and allow you to display your own web content inside the applet.

The BrowseDNS servers will provide this redirect, but if you want more control or cannot access external DNS servers (eg. if there's a router/ISP override on outbound DNS requests), then you may want to self-host from another device on the network.

Below are two ways to do this!

The Easy Way (GUI)

There's a Linux/Windows/Mac/Android app called YourFriendlyDNS by softwareengineer1 on Github. it can be downloaded here.

After running the app, it will display the IP to enter on your Switch under "Listening IPs" in the top-left. This is the IP of your computer which will need to stay online for the DNS to continue resolving

Advanced (Command Line)

If you have a raspberry pi or a pi-hole, you can manually configure a DNS override for the following two connection test domains:

• conntest.nintendowifi.net
• ctest.cdn.nintendo.net

These will need to be pointed to a reachable IP with an HTTP server listening on port 80, which will serve the web content that you want to appear in the browser applet. BrowseDNS uses LaneChange for this purpose, which will perform a redirect to another URL, or allows a custom response to be configured.

You can use any HTTP server though, such as python simple http server, and serve a static index.html page from the current directory.

For the DNS server, pi-hole uses FTLDNS. Other common Linux DNS servers are dnsmasq, bind, or systemd-resolved. Any should work well, a DNS server responds on port 53 via UDP to a domain query with a response IP, and in this case only the Switch connection domain needs to be overridden. There are approaches to do this directly in python as well.