Show HN: I built an app to stop me doomscrolling by touching grass
i wanted to change the habit of reaching for my phone in the morning and doomscrolling away an hour so i built an app to help me. now i have to literally touch grass before accessing my most distracting apps

the app is built in swiftui, uses the screen time apis provided by apple and google vision to recognise grass or not

i’d love to get your thoughts on the concept.

Comments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43158660](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43 … ⌘ Read more

** Skwaking Week Notes **
I’d never thought about adding playlists to my website, but then I did it and now I wanna add more. While I wait to put together another playlist, here’s the song that I’m listening to right now — Lady Lamb’s“Crane Your Neck.”

We had a few big snows, so the kids spent extra time at home and we’ve done a fair bit of sledding and shoveling. There was a bunch of frozen rain after one of the snow storms, so the snow had a crunch … ⌘ Read more

oh dang.. i thought i had parsing for !tag from back when someone was using it for his wiki pages.
i guess i left it out. though shouldnt be to hard to add it back in

@prologic@twtxt.net Those aren’t actually serving anything public-facing. I’ve thought about it, but for now I’m sticking with VPSs, partly because I don’t relish the risk of weeks of downtime if something goes wrong while I’m travelling.

I thought hCaptcha was getting off the rails. Try making an X account using a VPN service!

Adoption center just said shorthairs but a friend of mine swears they are Russian blues. Thoughts? ⌘ Read more

Dipped in weed killer, sprayed with gas — what’s in your supermarket bouquet?
Toxic chemicals and cheap imports — your supermarket bouquet for Valentine’s Day might not be the bargain you thought it was. ⌘ Read more

What’s minimalism?
We live in a world where buying and owning stuff is the default. New clothes? Sure. Another gadget? Why not? ⌘ Read more

Self-hosting my emails again
After three years with Purelymail, I’m back at self-hosting my mail server. Not because it’s cheaper (it’s actually much pricier to pay for a VPS), but because my mails are now hosted in Europe (who knows what happens next in the USA), I have more control to configure things how I want, and I can comply with GDPR. ⌘ Read more

Software development topics I’ve changed my mind on
Article URL: https://chriskiehl.com/article/thoughts-after-10-years

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42946281

Points: 502

# Comments: 514 ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I’d stumbled upon #FrankenPHP while reading through #Caddy stuff and thought maybe it’s bit overkill for what i need it for but then again, it will be just a “One container in for two out”, that’s win in my book 😆

4000 km with my pedelec
Today, after a short evening shift in the old/new apartment, I reached 4000 km total distance with my Pedelec (the only legal option for an electric bicycle without insurance in Germany – up to 25 km/h is supported by a motor when pedaling). ⌘ Read more

Pinellas County - Long Run: 8.50 miles, 00:09:50 average pace, 01:23:31 duration
garmin gps really fucked this one up. it thought i ran a half marathon at like a 7:00 pace or something.

the run was okay. it was a bit warmer and humid this morning, but really i am just a bit worn out i think. it was a bit boring so i turned on the podcast “telepathy tapes” and that was at least background noise.
#running

@prologic@twtxt.net i thought i was going insane when i saw blank posts on my TL i was like is noscript fucking with me again but no it’s you guys fucking around LOLLLL

i thought about making a chill little vlog putting together my new pi4 for KVM purposes but unless i make it go fast somehow i’d probably quickly exceed the 30 mins on the last mini DVD i have for recording lol

changing my video site’s logo to this silly no thoughts head empty tux clip art. because i can. https://openclipart.org/detail/103855/tux-the-penguin

It turns out my ISP supports ipv6. After 4-5 months with only ipv4, I thought to ask customer support, and they told me how to turn it on. (I’m pretty happy with ebox so far. Low-priced fibre with no issues so far. Though all my traffic goes through Montreal, 500km away from me in Toronto, which adds a few ms to network latency.)

Any idea What’s this "twtxtfeevalidator/0.0.1" UA about? I thought I could ask before throwing a 1000GB file at it 🪤 could it be the same ‘xt’ thing @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org was talking about the other day?

asciinema is really cool. thought about self hosting my own upload site which they have docs for but i don’t need to host everything even if it’d be a fun project. the default/main site is fine enough for me when i won’t be uploading a whole lot.

Prosodical Thoughts: Prosody 0.12.5 released
We are pleased to announce a new minor release from our stable branch.

Hope everyone has had a good 2024, and you’re looking forward to a better 2025!

We’re ending this year with a bugfix release for our stable 0.12 branch. This
brings some general polish and a collection of fixes for various small issues
people have reported in the past months.

A notable behaviour change in this release is that Prosody will no longer send
delivery errors to people you have blocked. Inste … ⌘ Read more

** Neon **
I was bemoaning the lack of color at my desk and a friend sent me this link to a place that makes custom neon signs. I am likely much to indecisive, and faaaar too cheap to actually order one, but I keep having intrusive thoughts about what I’d get if I were to get one.

I think the Yiddish phrase“zol er krenken un gedenken” would be funny. It means“let him suffer and remember” which is very melodramatic, but totally rife with so much meaning. ⌘ Read more

It’s not a winter wonderland out here, but with Christmas and winter coming soon, maybe a little snow on my blog isn’t a bad idea. I’ve just programmed a snow animation for another project and thought I could reuse the code in the form of a simple GoBlog plugin. ❄❄❄ ⌘ Read more

Why I’d never switch to an 🍎 iPhone
Recently, Kev announced he’s switching back to Android, and judging by his first impressions, he seems to be enjoying it. Coincidentally, I came across a video from Linus Tech Tips, where Linus shared his thoughts after using an iPhone for 30 days – and let’s just say, he wasn’t impressed. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Just that people thought twtxt sounded cool and maybe want to set it up themself

This is so neat.

https://emilyliu.me/blog/open-network

When yarn used to have blogs I thought something like this would be a great feature. Having the blog comments tied to a twtxt subject for the blog post.

Initial thoughts about Bluesky
There’s a lot of noise about Bluesky recently, it seems like they passed 20 million users, with more than 1 million new users daily recently. ⌘ Read more

My next Fediverse migration?
I currently use GoToSocial (with my numeronym domain) next to my blog, but it always confuses me where to post what. That’s why I want to move to my blog as my sole Fediverse identity. But before that, I wanted to implement another Fediverse feature in GoBlog: support for the new fediverse:creator meta tag. ⌘ Read more

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