A brief history of the numeric keypad
The title is a lie. This isn’t brief at all. Picture the keypad of a telephone and calculator side by side. Can you see the subtle difference between the two without resorting to your smartphone? Don’t worry if you can’t recall the design. Most of us are so used to accepting the common interfaces that we tend to overlook the calculator’s inverted key sequence. A calculator has the 7–8–9 buttons at the top whereas a phone uses the 1–2–3 format. Subtle, but … ⌘ Read more

10 Invisible Standards That Make the Modern World Work
Modern life feels seamless. You buy a phone charger, and it fits. You send a letter, and it gets delivered. But behind that convenience is a complex web of invisible global standards—quiet, often century-old decisions that the entire planet just agreed to follow. Without them, your printer wouldn’t know how to format a page, your […]

The post [10 Invisible Standards That Make the Modern World Work](https://listverse.com/20 … ⌘ Read more

@sorenpeter@darch.dk No because as the spec statd originally, and we didn’t change that syntax at all:

Mentions are embedded within the text in either @ or @ format

So the lextwt parser we use will simply call this an invalid mention, which it does.

@sorenpeter@darch.dk Unfortunately it does break all clients, because the original spec stated:

Mentions are embedded within the text in either @ or @ format

Why are we testing, or playing with, an alternate non-fully-compatible feed format within the same feed that we use daily?

What is this ‘format:’ inside of printf? ⌘ Read more

Nobody writes emails by hand using RFC 5322 anymore, nor do we manually send them through telnet and SMTP commands. The days of crafting emails in raw format and dialing into servers are long gone. Modern email clients and services handle it all seamlessly in the background, making email easier than ever to send and receive—without needing to understand the protocols or formats behind it! #Email #SMTP #RFC #Automation

OSTIF Announces NATS Security Audit Results
OSTIF is proud to share the results of our security audit of NATS.  NATS is an open source project made by Synadia Communications for secure always-on messaging for a variety of digital formats and clients. With… ⌘ Read more

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Zulu said:

what is twtxt for you?

For me Twtxt is just the underlying format that Yarn.social builds upon 😅

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz (as I was trying to say…), Glad you think so👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (best that I can anyway) truly decentralised (slow) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

Holy hell?! When I post this:

@<kate https://yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz/user/kat/twtxt.txt> Glad you think so! 👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (_best that I can anyway!_) truly decentralised (_slow_) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

Something is swallowing it.

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Glad you think so! 👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (best that I can anyway!) truly decentralised (slow) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

Glad you think so! 👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (best that I can anyway!) truly decentralised (slow) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Glad you think so! 👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (best that I can anyway!) truly decentralised (slow) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Glad you think so! 👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (best that I can anyway!) truly decentralised (slow) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

I asked ChatGPT what it knows about Twtxt 😂 And surprisingly it’s rather accurate:

Twtxt is a minimalist, decentralized microblogging format introduced by John Downey in 2016. It uses plain text files served over HTTP—no accounts, databases, or APIs.
In 2020, James Mills (@prologic@twtxt.net) launched Yarn.social, an extended, federated implementation with user discovery, threads, mentions, and a full web UI.
Both share the same .twtxt.txt format but differ in complexity and social features.

@prologic@twtxt.net @bmallred@staystrong.run So is restic considered stable by now? “Stable” as in “stable data format”, like a future version will still be able to retrieve my current backups. I mean, it’s at version “0.18”, but they don’t specify which versioning scheme they use.

i feel so powerful i wrote a 3 line script that takes an inputted markdown filename from the current working directory and then spits out a nicely formatted html page. pandoc does all the work i did nothing

Managing multi-line logs with Fluent Bit and Python
In this blog you will learn about:  Introduction Logs are essential for monitoring and debugging applications, but not all logs are created equal. While most logs follow a simple line-by-line format, others span multiple lines to… ⌘ Read more

Hello, i want to present my new revolution twtxt v3 format - twjson
That’s why you should use it:

1. It’s easy to to parse
   
2. It’s easy to read (in formatted mode :D)
   
3. It used actually \n for newlines, you don’t need unprintable symbols
   
4. Forget about hash collisions because using full hash
   Here is my twjson feed: https://doesnm.p.psf.lt/twjson.json
   And twtxt2json converter: https://doesnm.p.psf.lt/twjson.js

Registry format is its own thing. It takes the regular feed and appends nick \t uri \t to it. Its something that existed before yarn got big. There is still a bit of work but I will put together a ui for it to make it easier to view and navigate.

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

True. Though if the idea turns out to be better.. then community will adopt it.

if you look at the subject for that twt you will see that it uses the extended hash format to include a URL address.

** mkv no more **
My previous post included a video. I made that video with OBS which outputs .mkv video files.

I wanted to do my best to ensure that folks with a variety of devices and browsers would be able to watch the video if they wanted to, so, I converted it into a few different formats.

Here’s the bash script I wrote to do that. It relies on ffmpeg.

”`hljs bash
#!/bin/bash

if ! command -v ffmpeg &> /dev/null; then

echo "ffmpeg  ... ⌘ [Read more](https://eli.li/mkv-no-more)```

Some satisfying icicle-breaking in our backyard: photos.falsifian.org/video/sM7G3vfS6yuc/VID_20250217_203250.mp4

I couldn’t resist taking home a prize:

Image

Image

It’s been snowy here in #Toronto.

Image

(I tried formatting the images in markdown for the benefit of yarn and any other clients that understand it.)

#photo #photos #winter

UNIX man pages
What might be somewhat more surprising though considering its research origins is that Unix almost since the very beginning had a comprehensive set of online reference documentation for all its commands, system calls, file formats, etc. These are the the manual- or man-pages. On Unix systems used interactively, the man-pages have historically always been installed, space permitting. The way the manual pages have evolved and how they are used has changed over the decades. This set of posts is intended … ⌘ Read more

trying to keep it simple but.. perhaps it can be extended to fix timestamp formats like using " " instead of "T"

m2049r releases Monerujo v4.1.6 with Exolix fixes
m2049r1 has released Monerujo2 patch version 4.1.63 with minor fixes - including for the Exolix 4 exchange integration - and various other changes and updates:

Minimum weblate requirements
Add Arabic Translation
Updated Swedish translation
Update Turkish and French translations
fix toolbar under notification bar
make node parsing and formatting ipv6-friendly
Update default nodes
update exolix ... ⌘ [Read more](https://monero.observer/monerujo-v4.1.6-released-exolix-fixes/)

Run Linux inside a PDF file via a RISC-V emulator
You might expect PDF files to only be comprised of static documents, but surprisingly, the PDF file format supports Javascript with its own separate standard library. Modern browsers (Chromium, Firefox) implement this as part of their PDF engines. However, the APIs that are available in the browser are much more limited. The full specfication for the JS in PDFs was only ever implemented by Adobe Acrobat, and it contains some ridicul … ⌘ Read more

Reviving a dead audio format: the return of ZZM
Long-time readers will know that my first video game love was the text-mode video game slash creation studio ZZT. One feature of this game is the ability to play simple music through the PC speaker, and back in the day, I remember that the format “ZZM” existed, so you could enjoy the square wave tunes outside of the games. But imagine my surprise in 2025 to find that, while the Museum of ZZT does have a ZZM Audio section, it recommends t … ⌘ Read more

i recorded my first camcorder video!!!! it’s just me practicing guitar after sooo long of not playing it. my acoustic, to be specific (well, it’s an electric acoustic thing but i can play it without plugging it in lol, i do have a stratocaster though). it’s capped at ~30 minutes because i used one mini DVD for it and decided i wasn’t gonna use another one to extend the run time. so yeah. it was super fun! i hope i can share it soon, i’m ripping the disc with make MKV right now, then i’ll re-encode to a web friendly format, and upload to my site and hope that works well

Today’s date, 24.12.24 (using the German date format, DD.MM.YY), is special in a quirky mathematical way! Notice how 12 (the month) is exactly half of 24 (the day and the year). This symmetry adds an extra layer of charm to an already magical time of the year. It’s a rare alignment that makes this Christmas Eve uniquely memorable. ⌘ Read more

Great to see another user @aelaraji@aelaraji.com - And I can confirm that my #webmentions works from your server

Image

@eapl.me@eapl.me here are my replies (somewhat similar to Lyse’s and James’)

1. Metadata in twts: Key=value is too complicated for non-hackers and hard to write by hand. So if there is a need then we should just use #NSFS or the alt-text file in markdown image syntax ![NSFW](url.to/image.jpg) if something is NSFW

2. IDs besides datetime. When you edit a twt then you should preserve the datetime if location-based addressing should have any advantages over content-based addressing. If you change the timestamp the its a new post. Just like any other blog cms.

3. Caching, Yes all good ideas, but that is more a task for the clients not the serving of the twtxt.txt files.

4. Discovery: User-agent for discovery can become better. I’m working on a wrapper script in PHP, so you don’t need to go to Apaches log-files to see who fetches your feed. But for other Gemini and gopher you need to relay on something else. That could be using my webmentions for twtxt suggestion, or simply defining an email metadata field for letting a person know you follow their feed. Interesting read about why WebMetions might be a bad idea. Twtxt being much simple that a full featured IndieWeb sites, then a lot of the concerns does not apply here. But that’s the issue with any open inbox. This is hard to solve without some form of (centralized or community) spam moderation.

5. Support more protocols besides http/s. Yes why not, if we can make clients that merge or diffident between the same feed server by multiples URLs

6. Languages: If the need is big then make a separate feed. I don’t mind seeing stuff in other langues as it is low. You got translating tool if you need to know whats going on. And again when there is a need for easier switching between posting to several feeds, then it’s about building clients with a UI that makes it easy. No something that should takes up space in the format/protocol.

7. Emojis: I’m not sure what this is about. Do you want to use emojis as avatar in CLI clients or it just about rendering emojis?

So, @prologic@twtxt.net, Yarn isn’t rendering the metadata as described on the format documentation. That is, ux2028 is ignored when Yarn renders the description metadata.

@Codebuzz@www.codebuzz.nl I use Jenny to add to a local copy of my twtxt.txt file, and then manually push it to my web servers. I prefer timestamps to end with “Z” rather than “+00:00” so I modified Jenny to use that format. I mostly follow conversations using Jenny, but sometimes I check twtxt.net, which could catch twts I missed.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m not a yarnd user, so it doesn’t matter a whole lot to me, but FWIW I’m not especially keen on changing how I format my twts to work around yarnd’s quirks.

I wonder if this kind of postprocessing would fit better between composing (via yarnd’s UI) and publishing. So, if a yarnd user types ¼, it could get changed to ¼ in the twtxt.txt file for everyone to see, not just people reading through yarnd. But when I type ¼, meaning first out of four, as a non-yarnd user, the meaning wouldn’t get corrupted. I can always type ¼ directly if that’s what I really intend.

(This twt might be easier to understand if you read it without any transformations :-P)

Anyway, again, I’m not a yarnd user, so do what you will, just know you might not be seeing exactly what I meant.

@prologic@twtxt.net One could argue twtxt.net’s display formatting is a little over-eager here.

@Codebuzz@www.codebuzz.nl Speed is an issue for the client software, not the format itself, but yes I agree that it makes the most sense to append post to the end of the file. I’m referring to the definition that it’s the first url = in the file that is the one that has to be used for the twthash computation, which is a too arbitrary way of defining something that breaks treading time and time again. And this is the case for not using url+date+message = twthash.

https://strftime.org/ date format

[ANN] Understanding Jamtis: A New Addressing Scheme for Monero

By simplifying how addresses are shared, speeding up wallet synchronization, and ensuring more reliable output detection, Jamtis represents a big leap forward in usability—without sacrificing Monero’s commitment to privacy and security.

Link: https://kewbit.org/understanding-jamtis-a-new-address-format-for-monero/

KewbitXMR (Github) ⌘ Read more

Idk about other pubnixes but i can freely edit caddy config (or change webserver and use other config format)

twet display twts in raw format with some formatting (sadly no newlines). And for reply messages i just seen (#hash). But which text hidden on hash? currenly im open twtxt.net/twt/hash to see this

why can we both have a format that you can write by hand and better clients?

Some more arguments for a local-based treading model over a content-based one:

1. The format: (#<DATE URL>) or (@<DATE URL>) both makes sense: # as prefix is for a hashtag like we allredy got with the (#twthash) and @ as prefix denotes that this is mention of a specific post in a feed, and not just the feed in general. Using either can make implementation easier, since most clients already got this kind of filtering.

2. Having something like (#<DATE URL>) will also make mentions via webmetions for twtxt easier to implement, since there is no need for looking up the #twthash. This will also make it possible to make 3th part twt-mentions services.

3. Supporting twt/webmentions will also increase discoverability as a way to know about both replies and feed mentions from feeds that you don’t follow.

I wrote some code to try out non-hash reply subjects formatted as (replyto ), while keeping the ability to use the existing hash style.

I don’t think we need to decide all at once. If clients add support for a new method then people can use it if they like. The downside of course is that this costs developer time, so I decided to invest a few hours of my own time into a proof of concept.

With apologies to @movq@www.uninformativ.de for corrupting jenny’s beautiful code. I don’t write this expecting you to incorporate the patch, because it does complicate things and might not be a direction you want to go in. But if you like any part of this approach feel free to use bits of it; I release the patch under jenny’s current LICENCE.

Supporting both kinds of reply in jenny was complicated because each email can only have one Message-Id, and because it’s possible the target twt will not be seen until after the twt referencing it. The following patch uses an sqlite database to keep track of known (url, timestamp) pairs, as well as a separate table of (url, timestamp) pairs that haven’t been seen yet but are wanted. When one of those “wanted” twts is finally seen, the mail file gets rewritten to include the appropriate In-Reply-To header.

Patch based on jenny commit 73a5ea81.

https://www.falsifian.org/a/oDtr/patch0.txt

Not implemented:

• Composing twts using the (replyto …) format.
  
• Probably other important things I’m forgetting.

i feel like we should isolate a subset of markdown that makes sense and built it into lextwt. it already has support for links and images. maybe basic formatting bold, italic. possibly block quote and bullet lists. no tables or footnotes

@prologic@twtxt.net Wikipedia claims sha1 is vulnerable to a “chosen-prefix attack”, which I gather means I can write any two twts I like, and then cause them to have the exact same sha1 hash by appending something. I guess a twt ending in random junk might look suspcious, but perhaps the junk could be worked into an image URL like

Image

git only uses sha1 because they’re stuck with it: migrating is very hard. There was an effort to move git to sha256 but I don’t know its status. I think there is progress being made with Game Of Trees, a git clone that uses the same on-disk format.

I can’t imagine any benefit to using sha1, except that maybe some very old software might support sha1 but not sha256.

Hey, @movq@www.uninformativ.de, a tiny thing to add to jenny, a -v switch. That way when you twtxt “That’s an older format that was used before jenny version v23.04”, I can go and run jenny -v, and “duh!” myself on the way to a git pull. :-D

@movq@www.uninformativ.de alright, fair, and interesting. I was expecting them to be all the same (format wise), but it doesn’t matter, for sure, as it works just fine. Thanks!