It still works!
Two years ago, when my girlfriend and I moved together, I rented a VDSL router, a FRITZ!Box 7590 AX. In my second flat, I still had a FRITZ!Box 7490. But one and a half years later, I replaced the wired Internet connection in the second flat with a cellular based one, and the 7490 had no use anymore. ⌘ Read more

@wbknl@twtxt.net I have thought of getting one. I wish there were easier tools for it than direwolf

Kissimmee - Long run: 7.25 miles, 00:09:55 average pace, 01:11:52 duration
fun long run while we were at universal studios for a friends birthday. google maps thought there were some cut-throughs but was obviously wrong so just kind of winged it. was able to run around some of the “pioneer village” which was a good change in scenery.
#running

ProcessOne: Thoughts on Improving Messaging Protocols — Part 2, Matrix

Image

In the first part of this blog post, I explained how the Matrix protocol works, contrasted its design philosophy with XMPP, and discussed why these differences lead to … ⌘ Read more

Prosodical Thoughts: New server, new sponsor
It shouldn’t surprise you, but here we have an obsession for self-hosting. We
fought off many requests to migrate our hosting to Github (even before it was
cool to hate Github - Prosody and Github were both founded in the same year!).

As a result, we self-host our XMPP service (of course), our website, our code
repos, our issue tracker, package repository and our CI and build system.

This is not always easy - our project has always been a rather informal
collaboration of in … ⌘ Read more

It’s been seven years since my father passed, taken from us far too soon at the age of 51. I was only 18 then, and while time has softened some of the pain, his influence remains a constant part of me. He was a person full of curiosity and passion, qualities I feel he passed down to me in his own way. ⌘ Read more

Pinellas County - Tempo: 4.31 miles, 00:09:21 average pace, 00:40:16 duration
pretty good even though it was exhausting. kept the tempo pace at what i thought it would be (between 8:30 - 8:45) and the heart rate stayed mainly aerobic but within the range i had hoped for (171 - 179).
#running

Hiking in the Alps?
As my girlfriend finally finished her last exams last week, and now we have time for enjoyable activities again, we used yesterday to do another hike in the surrounding area. ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net so much rain. a lot of us thought we were non-flooding (or non-evac and zone x) but still had water come in the houses in pinellas. been an interesting past month!

[WTS] [EU] [0.2+ XMR] Monero Stickers 250pcs

Decorate your neighbourhood with these disruptive and thought provoking stickers. The 4 new designs are inspired from the original ‘Anonymous Money’ design which has been around for some years already. Choose from the 5 different designs in batches of 50pcs.

Link: https://xmrbazaar.com/listing/TCs3/

ChadXMR (XMRBazaar) ⌘ Read more

IndieWeb Carnival: multilingualism in a global Web
This is my first entry to an IndieWeb Carnival, and the topic this time is especially interesting: multilingualism in a global Web. ⌘ Read more

ProcessOne: Matrix and XMPP: Thoughts on Improving Messaging Protocols – Part 1
For over two decades, ProcessOne has been developing large-scale messaging platforms, powering some of the largest services in the world. Our mission is to build the best messaging back-ends imaginable–an exciting yet complex challenge.

We began with XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), but the need for interoperability and support for a variety of use cases led us to implemen … ⌘ Read more

My first passkeys implementation 🔑
Something I wanted to implement already for a long time, but always seemed too complicated for the occasional programming session here or there, was support for WebAuthn or Passkeys for GoBlog. I noted it down two years ago and also already started to work on the implementation, but never got around to finish it. ⌘ Read more

More thoughts about changes to twtxt (as if we haven’t had enough thoughts):

1. There are lots of great ideas here! Is there a benefit to putting them all into one document? Seems to me this could more easily be a bunch of separate efforts that can progress at their own pace:
   

1a. Better and longer hashes.

1b. New possibly-controversial ideas like edit: and delete: and location-based references as an alternative to hashes.

1c. Best practices, e.g. Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

1d. Stuff already described at dev.twtxt.net that doesn’t need any changes.

1. We won’t know what will and won’t work until we try them. So I’m inclined to think of this as a bunch of draft ideas. Maybe later when we’ve seen it play out it could make sense to define a group of recommended twtxt extensions and give them a name.

2. Another reason for 1 (above) is: I like the current situation where all you need to get started is these two short and simple documents:
   https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/twtxtfile.html
   https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/discoverability.html
   and everything else is an extension for anyone interested. (Deprecating non-UTC times seems reasonable to me, though.) Having a big long “twtxt v2” document seems less inviting to people looking for something simple. (@prologic@twtxt.net you mentioned an anonymous comment “you’ve ruined twtxt” and while I don’t completely agree with that commenter’s sentiment, I would feel like twtxt had lost something if it moved away from having a super-simple core.)

3. All that being said, these are just my opinions, and I’m not doing the work of writing software or drafting proposals. Maybe I will at some point, but until then, if you’re actually implementing things, you’re in charge of what you decide to make, and I’m grateful for the work.

On removing content
I recently read this short post by Kev Quirk. It’s about removing content from the web. While Manuel Moreale is against deleting content from the web, Kev thinks he would probably delete things if he feels bad about them. ⌘ Read more

A weekend with my family
This past weekend, I visited my family in the south of Germany. I wasn’t there for quite some time. On one day, we went to Biel in Switzerland, walking through the Taubenloch (“pigeonhole”, a canyon right next to the city) and sitting on a boat that took us across Lake Biel. It was quite picturesque. ⌘ Read more

2024 Docker State of Application Development Survey: Share Your Thoughts on Development
Take the 2024 Docker State of Application Development Survey now. The survey is open from September 23rd, 2024 (7AM PST) to November 20, 2024 (11:59PM PST). ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Thanks for writing that up!

I hope it can remain a living document (or sequence of draft revisions) for a good long time while we figure out how this stuff works in practice.

I am not sure how I feel about all this being done at once, vs. letting conventions arise.

For example, even today I could reply to twt abc1234 with “(#abc1234) Edit: …” and I think all you humans would understand it as an edit to (#abc1234). Maybe eventually it would become a common enough convention that clients would start to support it explicitly.

Similarly we could just start using 11-digit hashes. We should iron out whether it’s sha256 or whatever but there’s no need get all the other stuff right at the same time.

I have similar thoughts about how some users could try out location-based replies in a backward-compatible way (append the replyto: stuff after the legacy (#hash) style).

However I recognize that I’m not the one implementing this stuff, and it’s less work to just have everything determined up front.

Misc comments (I haven’t read the whole thing):

• Did you mean to make hashes hexadecimal? You lose 11 bits that way compared to base32. I’d suggest gaining 11 bits with base64 instead.

• “Clients MUST preserve the original hash” — do you mean they MUST preserve the original twt?

• Thanks for phrasing the bit about deletions so neutrally.

• I don’t like the MUST in “Clients MUST follow the chain of reply-to references…”. If someone writes a client as a 40-line shell script that requires the user to piece together the threading themselves, IMO we shouldn’t declare the client non-conforming just because they didn’t get to all the bells and whistles.

• Similarly I don’t like the MUST for user agents. For one thing, you might want to fetch a feed without revealing your identty. Also, it raises the bar for a minimal implementation (I’m again thinking again of the 40-line shell script).

• For “who follows” lists: why must the long, random tokens be only valid for a limited time? Do you have a scenario in mind where they could leak?

• Why can’t feeds be served over HTTP/1.0? Again, thinking about simple software. I recently tried implementing HTTP/1.1 and it wasn’t too bad, but 1.0 would have been slightly simpler.

• Why get into the nitty-gritty about caching headers? This seems like generic advice for HTTP servers and clients.

• I’m a little sad about other protocols being not recommended.

• I don’t know how I feel about including markdown. I don’t mind too much that yarn users emit twts full of markdown, but I’m more of a plain text kind of person. Also it adds to the length. I wonder if putting a separate document would make more sense; that would also help with the length.

@prologic@twtxt.net I have no specifics, only hopes. (I have seen some articles explaining the GDPR doesn’t apply to a “purely personal or household activity” but I don’t really know what that means.)

I don’t know if it’s worth giving much thought to the issue unless either you expect to get big enough for the GDPR to matter a lot (I imagine making money is a prerequisite) or someone specifically brings it up. Unless you enjoy thinking through this sort of thing, of course.

isn’t the benefit of blake2b that it is a more efficient algo than sha1 and has the same or similar entropy to sha3? i thought we had partially solved this with some type of expanding hash size? additionally we could increase bit density by using base36 or base64/url-safe…

Another weekend with a bike focus
The cycling season is not over yet. ⌘ Read more

Another weekend with a bike focus
The cycling season is not over yet. ⌘ Read more

Things to do in Salt Lake City
With KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024 just a few months away we thought it would be fun to ask our ambassadors and other locals about where to go and what to do while we’re all in Salt… ⌘ Read more

Monocaster
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@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org This looks like a nice way to do it.

Another thought: if clients can’t agree on the url (for example, if we switch to this new way, but some old clients still do it the old way), that could be mitigated by computing many hashes for each twt: one for every url in the feed. So, if a feed has three URLs, every twt is associated with three hashes when it comes time to put threads together.

A client stills need to choose one url to use for the hash when composing a reply, but this might add some breathing room if there’s a period when clients are doing different things.

(From what I understand of jenny, this would be difficult to implement there since each pseudo-email can only have one msgid to match to the in-reply-to headers. I don’t know about other clients.)

@prologic@twtxt.net I guess I thought they were search engines. Anyway, the registry API looks like a decent one for searching for tweets. Could/should yarn.social pods implement the same API?

** Constants, variable assignment, and pointers **
After reading my last post, a friend asked an interesting question that I thought would also be fun to write about!

They noted that in the reshape function I declared the variable result as a constant. They asked if this was a mistake? Because I was resigning the value iteratively, shouldn’t it be declared using let?

What is happening there is that the constant is being declared as an array, so the reference … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ha, sweet thanks for this! For some reason I thought you had to do this with an environmental variable or command-line option and I didn’t think to check the settings. 🤦‍♂

After work bike tour
I admit it, I should rename the subtitle of my blog from “Thoughts of an IT expert” to “My bike tour log”. Even though it was 29° C outside today, I wanted to do another bike tour after work. 42 km through the surrounding area of my hometown. I discovered new places and noticed that it actually feels colder next to trees. It was much fun! ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I thought “stochastic parrot” meant a complete lack of understanding.

Lowlands bike tour
On Thursday, I made another bike tour. Not in the low mountains, but in the south of the North German Plain. With more distance compared to the last time, I had way less incline and that makes a big difference. ⌘ Read more

Telegram worries
Telegram was always my favorite messenger, as it provided a fast and user-friendly experience on multiple devices. But one and a half years ago, I already started doubting my decision to rely on Telegram. ⌘ Read more

Watch Steve Jobs Speak at the 1983 International Design Conference
The Steve Jobs Archive, which was launched by Laurene Powell Jobs, Tim Cook, and Jony Ive, has shared an hour-long video of a then 28 year old Steve Jobs speaking in Aspen at the 1983 International Design Conference, as well as some thoughts from Jony Ive, and a nice collection of old photographs and Apple … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2024/07/27/watch-steve-jobs-speak-at-the-1983-international-d … ⌘ Read more

GoBlog can show GPX tracks as SVG now
After my bike tour on Monday, I first felt the usual exhaustion, but later that evening and night, more symptoms joined and showed me, that I, again (third time already this year), caught some infection. Nothing too bad, but it forced me to relax and recover the last two days. ⌘ Read more

Post-vacation bike tour
Today was my first workday after summer vacation, and with the weather being pleasant – not too hot, and no rain – I decided to finish work a bit early and go for a 39-kilometer bike tour through the surrounding area. ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Somewhere or another, I think in a William Byrd talk, I heard it suggested that the best ideas in computer science should fit on an index card (ah yes it’s this one: https://paperswelove.org/2017/video/will-byrd-most-beautiful-program/ ). He was referring to the basic principles of LISP/the lambda calculus, which have sometimes been called the Maxwell’s equations of computer programming (by Alan Kay). Simple, short, elegant, but very densely packed with meaning–generations of people have spent their whole careers unpacking what those simple rules can do.

Much of modern software feels like the polar opposite of that. Not only can you not write it on an index card, you never will be able to because people who write software don’t seem to aspire to try. I wish more people thought this way though!

It took me so long to find the cause of a memory leak in GoBlog. I thought it was smart to use a cache for prepared database statements. But I didn’t read the documentation and didn’t know that prepared statements need to be closed when they are no longer needed to free up the allocated resources. 🤦‍♂️ I finally fixed it by removing the prepared statement cache altogether. Less code, fewer problems in the future, and the cache wasn’t much of an improvement anyway. I also learned about the usefulness of memory profil … ⌘ Read more

Pinellas County - Base: 7.01 miles, 00:10:30 average pace, 01:13:38 duration
nailed the base portion of it. took a walk break and then a “cool down” to top it off. thought it would be nice outside with some rain but it was barely sprinkling when i was out until after the run.
#running

I have a question for the IndieWeb community: What can we do against Webmention spam, except filter it out, when it fails validation? I receive hundreds of invalid Webmentions a day, and even using a filtering DNS server doesn’t seem to help much. But I also don’t want to waste network traffic to access all those spam sites. Is there any good block list I can check first before doing the request for validation? I thought about Akismet, but the API has no such option to only check the submitted URL. ⌘ Read more

Another day, another bike tour 🚴
Another day, another bike tour. Today’s tour is on the same route as my planned tour between my two apartments. The first half of the tour was easy regarding elevation, the second parts challenging. But I made it, and I didn’t even have to get off the bike to walk instead of biking. 💪 ⌘ Read more

Another day, another bike tour 🚴
Another day, another bike tour. Today’s tour is the first part of my planned trip between my both flats. The first half of the tour was easy regarding elevation, the second parts challenging. But I made it, and I didn’t even have to get off the bike to walk instead of biking. 💪 ⌘ Read more

** One trip to the beach inspired me to make two programs this weekend **
This weekend we traveled 20 minutes to a sort of secret beach. It was a grey, overcast day, and we timed our trip to line up with low tide so that we could walk waaaaaaay far out into the ocean all the way to some little islands. It was fun, and we saw some neat birds, including an Oyster Catcher. While on this adventure I took a picture. Later at home I thought“it’d be nice to dither this!” I usually reach for [Dit … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net haha, thanks! my wife definitely thought i was crazy for even thinking of it.

Bad Map Projection: Exterior Kansas
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First tour with my new bike
Yesterday, I finally took my new bike for a longer ride. Instead of 30 km like the last time, this time I chose another way about 36 km the other way along the river. And instead of getting on the train back home, I went both directions with pure muscle power. ⌘ Read more

Why I have a minimal website theme
Wouter Groeneveld wrote about his new website theme. His old one was too minimal for his taste, and so he decided on a more fancy theme. ⌘ Read more

The New Stack: “A Chat With CloudNativeSecurityCon North America 2024 Co-chairs”
Conference leaders share their thoughts on the latest trends and challenges in cloud native security, and the sessions they are most looking forward to. ⌘ Read more

🚭
One of the things I hate, yes, I really hate it, is cigarette smoke. I get angry when I smell the smoke of the neighbors who are smoking directly in front of the entrance door of our apartment build, while we are trying to let fresh air in. But situations like smelling smoke at train stations or bus stops make me feel really uncomfortable as well. ⌘ Read more

My fluctuating interests
It seems like my interests fluctuate a lot. I have a topic that interests me, do a lot of research, learn many new things, get excited. And then suddenly another topic pops up, which at the same time reduces my interest in the previous topics. ⌘ Read more

Adding more context to my blogroll
The hosted Miniflux finally contains my newly contributed feature to save descriptions for feeds. The exported OPML also contains them, and that’s why I’m finally able to show some context on my blogroll. ⌘ Read more