If you've never made a simple web page before, it's not that hard!

You can sign up over at Github.com for an account, and follow their Quickstart Github Pages guide to create your own web page at <username>.github.io. As you grow more experienced, you can then hook it up to a real .com domain or something else.

This thread can be used for support if you're interested in trying this out and need some assistance. I think for the most part you can do this all from the Switch and browser UI, including even editing the code.

My first website was on freewebs (now called webs.com), which is a less technical option. Learning how to make basic websites on my own time was more useful than most other things learned that I learned while in school. (But I was not a great student, so I'm not the best example).

My current Github pages site is at http://vgmoose.github.io and it isn't much special, just an aggregation of blog posts I've had throughout the years.

gross gelatin

Little Brother is a book by Cory Doctorow freely released under a Creative Commons license. The book is about a group of teens that use technology alongside social activism to protect themselves against an overwhelming abuse-of-authority (aka: a malicious Big Brother).

It can be read on Switch / pure HTML here:
https://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.htm

(also available in other formats, for eBook readers or phones)

Little Brother features a bunch of examples of tech being able to exert an unfair and unreasonable amount of control over groups of people that are otherwise innocent. One example is the students have locked down laptops that can only visit school websites, but have a workaround in the form of going online via their Xbox's (sound familiar?).

I read this book in high school and it's influenced which software I use, and how I think about digital rights with respect to users. I recommend it!

The app Krita is a nice alternative to Photoshop for making digital art. It can be downloaded here for Mac/Windows/Linux.

Image of how the interface looks:

I started learning how to use Photoshop in school, but it was always frustrating to come home and be unable to use it for other stuff, and being stuck with MS Paint or Preview. The school had a license deal, and I would've had to pay for it for my own use. Later I did pay for Photoshop for a while, but now I just use this instead!

A starting tutorial is here: https://docs.krita.org/en/tutorials.html But a fair amount of basic Photoshop-style stuff works, such as dealing with layers and blending options.

@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.

Linkin Park, Gorillaz, Motion City Soundtrack, The Killers, Glass Animals, Pomplamoose, Ludo, La Roux, Green Day

Posted an update to this petition describing browsedns and its purpose: https://www.change.org/p/nintendo-nintendo-expose-the-fully-functional-internet-browser-built-into-the-switch/u/30399120

I started my YouTube channel way back in 2006 (yes, I know). The first things I posted were 3rd gen Pokemon game mods. Here are a few of the better performing videos (If on Switch, you can add to watch later + use the YT app):

Missingno in Ruby (14 year old vid):

Eevee "beta" types (clickbait!):

Team Rocket Event in Firered:

And then this one was "only" ~5 years ago, Missingno in Omega Ruby / Alpha Sapphire:

And if you like B2W2 this is a good one as well:

Obligatorily I'd STILL like to make more videos, but after you say that for like >10 years things start to become a little awkward. I love Missingno and how much it contributes to Pokemon rumors, and do still wish that the Pokemon company would acknowledge it one day.

The search bars that show up on this site on Switch just run a regular Google search, they shouldn't be able to bypass any restrictions. It opens a Google URL with the query passed in, such as: https://www.google.com/search?q=test+search

You can also see them if you change your PC user agent to match the Switch. If it's bypassing some restrictions there is probably something else going on there, either at the DNS, browser, or PC level.

For copy and pasting on the same page: the website owner has to add support for this

For between pages: Closest solution is manually posting them here or on Switchbru. Like, logging in on a phone or PC for instance and making a new forum draft/post or visiting adding custom bookmarks at https://dns.switchbru.com

Is there a version of this for Twitter as well?

If you're having issues seeing the shoutbox (after logging in) try using this direct link for now: https://browsedns.net/shoutbox

Also, if you're having this problem, it would be helpful if you could let us know what browser + device it's not showing up on.

Does anyone have some more concrete information on when this appears?

There's a project here: switch-gba by BFriedrichs for running a GBA emulator within the switch browser. I haven't tried it yet, the requirements are Docker + a PC with ROMs on the same network.

Because of that last requirement it's not going to be easy to have a simple link for playing a GBA game without having a locally networked PC serving the copyrighted content as well.

Also worth mentioning: the GB Operator is one legal option for getting a ROM file from a physical cartridge.

@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.

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.

The DNS servers are running the same software, so from a technical perspective they are very similar. As others stated, the main difference is which landing page you get.

Switchbru:
45.55.142.122 - the original server we've been running since 2017, located in NY, USA
This server also provides update blocking.
Info page: https://switchbru.com/dns/

browseDNS:
45.55.112.11 - new server located in California, USA
46.101.65.164 - new server located in the UK
Info page: https://browsedns.net/topic/8/browsedns-enable-access-to-the-open-internet

Both landing pages also link to each other, so you can use whichever server one is fastest. In theory, that's the one that's physically closest to your location, however there might be other networking factors that make it not that straightforward.

@SnowRunnerLegend No worries. Will have to mention this explicitly in our rules in the near future.