Apologies if I’ve been spamming anyone out there in twtxt-land today.

I’ve been working on a couple of twtxt-related projects, and one of them is a reader (tentatively called twtstrm) written in JS. I used dummy data for the first few stages of development, but now I’m at the point where I need some real data, and that meant hitting up my actual following list.

Of course, it didn’t help that I had a typo in my If-Modified-Since headers, but all that has since been resolved.

Anyways, if I accidentally spammed you with requests today, I am sorry, and it shouldn’t happen anymore.

We thank you for your patience, and apologize for the inconvenience.

💻 Issue 487 - Scala Projects course from Rock the JVM ⌘ Read more

Working on a project that does Augmented Reality and computer vision object detection and QR code and image recognition inside a Web application. Pretty neat what can be done today with a few thousand lines of JavaScript.

XMPP Interop Testing: Lots More Options
Since the last update, we’ve added a lot more options on how to run your tests. We’ve added a slew of new CI systems, this time focussing on freedom-respecting, open source CI systems for your open source projects.

Recent additions include Jenkins, Drone, Harness and Woodpecker.

This brings our total number of CI systems in which you can run XMPP interop tests up to a whopping ELEVEN, plus anywhere else you can run containers!

Whether you’re building … ⌘ Read more

Since Google announced their intentions to heavily limit sideloading on Android, starting end of 2026, I’ve been looking for potential solutions, for this policy change, that threatens the majority of projects I maintain, in some way. Google already killed my browser project years ago, but I have no other choice, than to fight this, any way I can.

The best choice to deal with this, will probably be the Android Debug Bridge, which can be used not only to install apps unrestricted, but also to uninstall, or remove, almost any unnecessary part of the OS. Shizuku, combined with Canta Debloater, is the winning combination for now.

I’ve already removed most Google apps from my device: the annoying AI assistant, the stupid Google app adding the annoying articles, left of your homes screen, Google One, Gboard, Safety app… it’s amazing, no distracting Google slopware, like in the good old Android 2 days! And I absolutely intend to keep it this way, from now on, no new Google apps or services on my devices, unless Google can give me a good enough reason, to allow them there and whenever the app that verifies signatures, to block installing apps not approved by Google, I’ll just remove it from my device and advocate others do so too.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @dce@hashnix.club It’s pretty cool, I won’t argue that, but also really simple, to be completely honest. 😅 The BIOS already provides all you need to send data to the printer:

https://helppc.netcore2k.net/interrupt/bios-printer-services

The BIOS actually does provide a great deal of things, which, to me, was one of the most surprising learnings of this project (the project of writing a little 16-bit real-mode OS, that is). It often doesn’t feel like I was writing an operating system – it felt more like writing a normal program that just uses BIOS calls like we would use syscalls these days.

(I’ve also read a lot of warnings, like “don’t use the BIOS for this or that”. Mostly because it tends to be very slow.)

The XMPP Standards Foundation: The XMPP Newsletter August 2025

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XMPP Newsletter Banner

Welcome to the XMPP Newsletter, great to have you here again!
This issue covers the month of August 2025.

Like this newsletter, many projects and their efforts in the XMPP community are a result of people’s voluntary work. If you are happy with the services and software you may be using, please consider saying thanks or help these proj … ⌘ Read more

Now that’s interesting. Some of these bots start crawling at URLs like this:

https://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/NetTracer-Scenes/GPUTracer/multipass/xlonitor/http-collect/getpw

That is obviously completely wrong. But I can explain it. Some years ago, I screwed up my nginx rewrite rules, and that’s how these broken URLs came to be.

It all redirects to /git now, which is why that endpoint sees so much traffic lately.

But what does that mean? Why do they start there? I can only speculate that this company bought an old database of web links and they use that to start crawling. And it was probably a cheap one, because these redirects have been fixed for quite a long time now.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks, glad you like it, but sadly I’m not sure, if there’s still a way, for this particular project, to continue.

Reducing 38 pixels (previous smallest) to 27, inside of a 7x7 square canvas, is a result I’m really happy with. Now it seems I can only shave off single pixels and get a lot worse looking results - to the point it doesn’t even look like my mascot, to me.

There doesn’t seem to be a hard cap for drawing tiny dogs. It’s possible to arrange 5 pixels, in a way someone recognizes them, as some kind of a dog. The record for cats, is currently a single orange pixel: https://youtu.be/gzeK8NKuzmg

The only way to beat that, is either a monitor, with just a single red diode lit, inside one of its pixels, or an image file that’s broken and empty, on purpose.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de having to go to a gopher proxy to see a text document better served on readily available web servers… 🤭, but I digress. Verbatim text:

What's Missing from "Retro"
~softwarepagan
------------------------------------------------------------------
You know, often, when I say I miss older ways of computing or
connecting online, people tell me "there's nothing stopping you
from doing that now!" and they are technicay correct in most cases
(though I can't, for example, chat with friends on MSN ever
again...) However, let me explain that while this type of thing can
*sort of* fill that hole in my heart, it isn't *the same.*

Say, for example, I wanted to connect with others over a BBS. This
wouldn't offer the same types of connections it used to. While
there are BBSes around with active users, they're no longer there
to discuss movies, Star Trek, D&D, games, etc. They're there to
discuss *BBSes.* The same can be said for Gopher, old-school forums
and all sorts of revival projects (such as Escargot, Spacehey,
etc.) Retrocomputing enthusiasts, while they have a variety of
interests, are often in these spaces to discuss the medium itself
and not other topics. This exists at a stark contrast from how
things were in the past, where a non-tech-inclined person may learn
the tech to connect with likeminded others (as I did as a
Zelda-obsessed kid.)

The same can be said of old media. People will say "well, nobody is
stopping you from watching old shows/movies now!" Again, they are
technically correct. I can go home right now and watch *Star Trek:
The Next Generation* to my heart's content. It will never again,
however, be current, or new. When something is new, it serves as a
shared cultural experience. Remember how "Game of Thrones* felt in
the mid-to-late 2010s? Yeah, that.

It's sad. I sustain myself on a mixed diet of old things, new
things, and new things intended for old millenials like me who like
old things. It can be bittersweet. 

The XMPP Standards Foundation: The XMPP Newsletter July 2025

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XMPP Newsletter Banner

Welcome to the XMPP Newsletter, great to have you here again!
This issue covers the month of July 2025.

Like this newsletter, many projects and their efforts in the XMPP community are a result of people’s voluntary work. If you are happy with the services and software you may be using, please consider saying thanks or helping these project … ⌘ Read more

XMPP Providers: A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats

In May 2025, we ran a small survey to gather feedback from XMPP server operators.
Our main concerns were XMPP Provider’s service and the project itself.
First of all, we would like to thank almost 60 people who participated in this survey.
While the XMPP Providers project currently lists a little more than 70 providers, this is a good turnout.
At this point we can already tell that the gen … ⌘ Read more

XMPP Interop Testing: MOAR TESTS!
Ever heard of XMPP Interop Testing? It’s this cool project that helps make sure different XMPP servers can all work
together smoothly. Our XMPP Interop Testing project provides a suite of automated tests that can be integrated into
CI/CD pipelines to verify the compliance and interoperability of XMPP server implementations.

Late last year, we reported that we had secured funding graciously provided by NLnet that allowed
us to massively build out t … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org YEAH THEY ARE SOOO GOOD SINGING TOGETHER!!! it’s kind of their label (hello project)’s thing :]

Since Fastly acquired and recently shut down glitch.com, some of my ancient webapps are no longer available, nor do I have any plans to make them available again - all had either zero, or very few monthly visits, used outdated libraries and would be a waste of money, to continue hosting and updating elsewhere.

All art archives remain unaffected and all projects shut down before 2025, were already permanently deleted, but if there’s someone out there, still relying on the recently discontinued projects, somehow - you can reach out and request their source code.

These requests will only be honoured, until the end of this year, when we plan to permanently delete, all of this data (both webapps and files only hosted on Amazons CDN).

Canine out °_°

Status 2025-07-21
Morning, computer! Spending my days off trying to figure things out.
Some of them will occur in this post. I think best when I’m writing,
after all.

I’m back from a short vacation since a couple of weeks. I’m still
going to take a few days off every week for a while. I need the break.
It’s been way too many 12-16 hour workdays. I’m nominally working 80%
(~6 hour days), so I figure I’ve been working a lot for free.

Yeah, well, I like the TKey project to succeed. The ideas behind it
have implicatio … ⌘ Read more

i should work on my PHP project again just so i have an excuse to use htmx

TKey: The Next Generation
Not speaking for my employer, just as an interested developer in an
interesting open source project.

As you might have noticed, the platform repo of the Tillitis TKey has
some alpha tags for the next generation, Castor:

https://github.com/tillitis/tillitis-key1/tags

An alpha tag means that all planned features for the platform are in
place, but there’s not yet a complete audit and a lot of testing … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, luckily, there is the suckless project. I couldn’t live without dmenu!

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, this really could use a proper definition or a “manifest”. 😅 Many of these ideas are not very wide spread. And I haven’t come across similar projects in all these years.

Let’s take the farbfeld image format as an example again. I think this captures the “spirit” quite well, because this isn’t even about code.

This is the entire farbfeld spec:

farbfeld is a lossless image format which is easy to parse, pipe and compress. It has the following format:

╔════════╤═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Bytes  │ Description                                             ║
╠════════╪═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ 8      │ "farbfeld" magic value                                  ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (width)                      ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (height)                     ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ [2222] │ 4x16-Bit BE unsigned integers [RGBA] / pixel, row-major ║
╚════════╧═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

The RGB-data should be sRGB for best interoperability and not alpha-premultiplied.

(Now, I don’t know if your screen reader can work with this. Let me know if it doesn’t.)

I think these are some of the properties worth mentioning:

• The spec is extremely short. You can read this in under a minute and fully understand it. That alone is gold.
  
• There are no “knobs”: It’s just a single version, it’s not like there’s also an 8-bit color depth version and one for 16-bit and one for extra large images and one that supports layers and so on. This makes it much easier to implement a fully compliant program.
  
• Despite being so simple, it’s useful. I’ve used it in various programs, like my window manager, my status bars, some toy programs like “tuxeyes” (an Xeyes variant), or Advent of Code.
  
• The format does not include compression because it doesn’t need to. Just use something like bzip2 to get file sizes similar to PNG.
  
• It doesn’t cover every use case under the sun, but it does cover the most important ones (imho). They have discussed using something other than RGBA and decided it’s not worth the trouble.
  
• They refrained from adding extra baggage like metadata. It would have needlessly complicated things.

Someone did a thing:

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/114763322251054485

I’ve been silently wondering all the time if this was possible, but never investigated: Keep doing X11 but use Wayland as a backend.

This uses XWayland’s “rootful” mode, which basically just gives you a normal Wayland window with all the X11 stuff happening inside of it:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-Rootful-Useful

In other words, put such a window in fullscreen and you (more or less) have good old X11 running in a Wayland window.

(For me, personally, this won’t be the way forward. But it’s a very interesting project.)

It annoys me when I clone a git repository A in order to build and self-host some software, only to realize later that I also needed to clone repos B, C and D. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing–logical separation of code between, say, a client and a server is very handy–but some projects do not communicate very well when you need multiple tools to get it running independently.

I was this 🤏 close to buying a couple of baby-cactus plants but, I couldn’t … I still have to save up for that future screen printing project. 🥲

(Of course, if we’re talking about a project you’re doing for a customer and the customer keeps asking for new stuff, then you’re never done, and you have to think ahead and expect changes. Is that what they mean? 🤔)

@prologic@twtxt.net Ahhh, right, my bad, I could have easily found that. 🤦

There’s also a project page which lists some limitations of this study: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/your-brain-on-chatgpt/overview/

It certainly sounds plausible. “Use it or lose it.”

On my blog: Developer Diary, Day of the African Child https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/16/african-child.html #programming #project #devjournal

The Project Has Been CANCELLED ⌘ Read more

The XMPP Standards Foundation: The XMPP Newsletter May 2025

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XMPP Newsletter Banner

Welcome to the XMPP Newsletter, great to have you here again!
This issue covers the month of May 2025.

Like this newsletter, many projects and their efforts in the XMPP community are a result of people’s voluntary work. If you are happy with the services and software you may be using, please consider saying thanks or help these projects! Int … ⌘ Read more

Current toy project: an image feed generated by mk(1). Still some edges to clean up but it’s nice: http://a.9srv.net/img/_readme.html

Kubeflow Advances Cloud Native AI:  a glimpse into KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025
The Kubeflow community is rapidly growing due to its contributions to advancing AI by streamlining the AI/ML experience in Kubernetes. Kubeflow provides a composable ecosystem for implementing end-to-end solutions for AI/ML. Kubeflow includes the following projects:… ⌘ Read more

PEP 794: Import Name Metadata
This PEP proposes extending the core metadata specification for Python packaging to include a new, repeatable field named Import-Name to record the import names that a project owns once installed. A new key named import-names will be added to the [project] table in pyproject.toml. This also leads to the introduction of core metadata version 2.5. ⌘ Read more

Sony’s NEWS UNIX workstations
The first prototype was ready in just six months. By October 1986, the project was announced, and in January 1987, the first NEWS workstation, the NWS 800 series, officially launched. It ran 4.2BSD UNIX and featured a Motorola 68020 CPU. Its performance rivaled that of traditional super minicomputers, but with a dramatically lower price point ranging from ¥950,000 to ¥2.75 million (approximately $6,555 to $18,975 USD in 1987). Competing UNIX workstations typically cost clo … ⌘ Read more

Canada to expedite nation-building projects to counter Trump ⌘ Read more

GNOME OS ready for more extensive testing
While it’s still early days and it’s not recommended for non-technical audiences, GNOME OS is now ready for developers and early adopters who know how to deal with occasional bugs (and importantly, file those bugs when they occur). ↫ Tobias Bernard This is great news, and means GNOME OS is progressing nicely. I’m a proponent of this and KDE’s equivalent project, because it allows the people working on GNOME and KDE to really showcase their work in … ⌘ Read more

On my blog: Developer Diary, International Sex Workers’ Day https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/02/sex-workers.html #programming #project #devjournal

10 Epic Construction Projects That Took Centuries to Complete
These ten cathedrals and basilicas around Europe (and beyond) were built over many generations, reflecting changes in style, politics, and technology. From the Sagrada Família in Barcelona to the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna, each project faced delays due to wars, funding shortages, and shifts in power. Some took more than six centuries to […]

The post [10 Epic Construction Projects That Took Centuries … ⌘ Read more

Precision Clock Mk IV
Comments ⌘ Read more

Precision Clock Mk IV
Article URL: https://mitxela.com/projects/precision_clock_mk_iv

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44144750

Points: 501

# Comments: 119 ⌘ Read more

Flatpak “not being actively developed anymore”
At the Linux Application Summit (LAS) in April, Sebastian Wick said that, by many metrics, Flatpak is doing great. The Flatpak application-packaging format is popular with upstream developers, and with many users. More and more applications are being published in the Flathub application store, and the format is even being adopted by Linux distributions like Fedora. However, he worried that work on the Flatpak project itself had stagnated, a … ⌘ Read more

GNOME’s Anti-Lunduke Religious Crusade
The GNOME Project and Foundation is obsessed with Lunduke. ⌘ Read more

Olimex Showcases Open Source €20 Smart Home Server Project
Olimex has recently highlighted a new open-source hardware and software project aimed at creating a €20 smart home server. The initiative was introduced during a lightning talk at TuxCon 2025, a community-driven open-source conference held earlier this month in Bulgaria. The project aims to deliver a compact, easy-to-use smart home server that prioritizes local control, […] ⌘ Read more

4 trends shaping open source funding—and what they mean for maintainers
Get insights on the latest trends from GitHub experts while catching up on these exciting new projects.

The post 4 trends shaping open source funding—and what they mean for maintainers appeared first on The GitHub Blog. ⌘ Read more

Non-Pointless Software Projects for New Devs in the LLM Age
Comments ⌘ Read more

plwm: X11 window manager written in Prolog
plwm is a highly customizable X11 dynamic tiling window manager written in Prolog. Main goals of the project are: high code & documentation quality; powerful yet easy customization; covering most common needs of tiling WM users; and to stay small, easy to use and hack on. ↫ plwm GitHub page Tiling window managers are a dime-a-dozen, but the ones using a unique or uncommon programming language do tend to stand out. ⌘ Read more

On my blog: Developer Diary, Memorial Day https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/05/26/memorial.html #programming #project #devjournal

No Github

Please don’t upload my code on Github!

I’m thinking about putting this up on all my projects and even on the front page of my Gitea instance 🤔

10 Games Milked for All Their Worth
Sticking with what works is nothing new, especially in gaming. New stories, characters, and mechanics are increasingly rare. Long development times and ballooning budgets only compound the issue, as studios must take a larger gamble with every project. Why take that risk when going with a guaranteed success is safer? That mindset prompts developers to […]

The post [10 Games Milked for All Their Worth](https://listverse.com/2025/05/25/10-games-milked-for-all-th … ⌘ Read more

Home Assistant deprecates Core and Supervised installation methods and 32bit systems
We are today officially deprecating two installation methods and three legacy CPU architectures. We always strive to have Home Assistant run on almost anything, but sometimes we must make difficult decisions to keep the project moving forward. Though these changes will only affect a small percentage of Home Assistant users, we want to do everything in our power to … ⌘ Read more

My vision with this newsletter is to have a slower medium for communicating about my art as well as ideas and projects I’m working on regarding how we can use digital technology to our own benefits instead of being exploited by big tech.

Twtxt not sloe enough for you? 🤣

Shine a spotlight on your open source project
Celebrate #MaintainerMonth with two big opportunities to showcase your open source project at GitHub Universe and WeAreDevelopers World Congress. Applications are open. Don’t miss out!

The post Shine a spotlight on your open source project appeared first on The GitHub Blog. ⌘ Read more