2024 was a funny year: The year begins and ends with calendar week 1:

The one in January being 2024-W01 and the one in December 2025-W01.

🤓

(Hmmm, my printed LaTeX calendar using tikz-kalender gets it wrong or uses different week definitions. It shows next week as 53. 🤔)

I’ve been making a little toy operating system for the 8086 in the last few days. Now that was a lot of fun!

I don’t plan on making that code public. This is purely a learning project for myself. I think going for real-mode 8086 + BIOS is a good idea as a first step. I am well aware that this isn’t going anywhere – but now I’ve gained some experience and learned a ton of stuff, so maybe 32 bit or even 64 bit mode might be doable in the future? We’ll see.

It provides a syscall interface, can launch processes, read/write files (in a very simple filesystem).

Here’s a video where I run it natively on my old Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop (and Warp 3 later in the video, because why not):

https://movq.de/v/893daaa548/los86-p133-warp3.mp4

(Sorry for the skewed video. It’s a glossy display and super hard to film this.)

It starts with the laptop’s boot menu and then boots into the kernel and launches a shell as PID 1. From there, I can launch other processes (anything I enter is a new process, except for the exit at the end) and they return the shell afterwards.

And a screenshot running in QEMU:

Props to you if you can easily spot the scrollbar in this picture:

https://movq.de/v/a6dc0491a9/s.png

People doing Advent of Code in this language is the craziest thing I’ve seen: https://www.uiua.org/

As I was typing my password, I hit Tab and expected it to auto-complete. 🤦

I was today years old when I learned that Firefox supports custom per-domain CSS. Is this new? I thought I had tried a while ago and it only worked globally. 🤔

@-moz-document domain(movq.de)
{
    div { border: 1px solid red; }
}

Either way, I love that I don’t need a plugin for that. 🥳

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com This is an Intel i7-3770 from 2013 with an integrated GPU (HD 4000).

Looks like FreeCAD works fine and I think this is a more appropriate program anyway. 😊

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ooohh, nice and long vacation! 😃

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Mostly small and simple stuff, like cable management, headphone rests, pill dispensers (that I didn’t end up using), … The most elaborate thing I made was that contraption for my keyboard, which is a bit hard to explain right now, so here’s some photos:

I didn’t end up using that, either. 🥴

In general, I print very little. So little that some of my supplies have simply gone bad, like that “3D LAC” (sprayable glue).

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Yeah, I saw that when googling the issue. I’m on Linux, there are no DLLs to swap. I could use an older version indeed. 🤔 Let’s see if I can find some better alternative first. (Let’s face it, Blender is hard to use.)

Goodbye Blender, I guess? 🤔

A bit annoying, but not much of a problem. The only thing I did with Blender was make some very simple 3D-printable objects.

I’ll have a look at the alternatives out there. Worst case is I go back to Art of Illusion, which I used heavily ~15 years ago.

@sorenpeter@darch.dk

“A minimalist social network powered by plain text files”

My brain keeps shortening this to “a socialist network …” and then jumps to “uhh, large parts of the US won’t like this” … 🤦🤪

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org (Semicolon! 🤘)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

But then, why just block IPv4 and not also IPv6?

I’ll take “what’s the most overlooked thing in corporate networks” for 200. 😅

I’m on vacation now. First order of business: Sit in the armchair for “a few minutes” (= sleep tight for 3 hours straight). 😴

@bender@twtxt.net Well, so far, I’m using the standard web client. Haven’t found a great client yet. 🫤 Mastodon/Fediverse is also very different from twtxt, there are way more images/videos that I’d like to see – a TUI client like toot wouldn’t work for me.

Dunno, maybe I’ll make some changes in this area after christmas. Try self-hosting again or something like that …

A cold and foggy day. 🥶

I’ve been using Mastodon too much lately. The constant notifications are becoming too stressful. I really do prefer slow communication, like twtxt. ✌️

Yarn spoiler test:

! foo

So, who’s doing Advent of Code? Had some fun this morning:

And how should we handle spoilers here on twtxt? base64? 😅

It’s been so rainy and windy and cold these last few days, I hardly left the house. 😩

I didn’t realize that the queens of our very common black ants are huge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjbAsdiE7ZI

twtxt.net lost its dark mode? It’s glaringly bright now. 😎

@prologic@twtxt.net Nah. twtxt + Mastodon is enough social media for me. 😅

Numbers are hard. I just almost accidentally sent 33k€ to someone via bank transfer, because the banking website interpreted 334.90 as 33490,00. 😬 This is germany, so it wants a comma, not a dot …

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Regarding section 4 about feed discovery: Yeah, non-HTTP transport protocols are an issue as they do not have User-Agent headers. How exactly do you envision the discovery_url to work, though?

This is from a twt of mine from January 2022:

https://www.uninformativ.de/files/twtxt/2022%2D01%2D22%2D%2Dfollow%2Dendpoint.md

(This idea gets lost all the time, so I put it into a file now. 😅)

Not sure if this is what @eapl.me@eapl.me had in mind, obviously.

@bender@twtxt.net I’m so deeply concerned we even have to discuss the orange clown. 😩 All voodoo dolls up and running. ✅

Funny wobbly moon sets:

https://movq.de/v/4bba078992/moon1.ff.jpg

I also tried to do a little stacked thingy, not too happy with it:

https://movq.de/v/4bba078992/stack.ff.jpg

So, I’m forced to use WhatsApp now. Someone told me: “Hey, I’ve been doing $thing, check my status!” Okay, fine, I open that and it shows a photo.

Then, while looking at that photo, it’s suddenly gone. No, not gone – there are several photos and it switched automatically to the next one. The timeout appears to be four seconds.

JFC, I’m getting too old for this. Let me look at the damn photo! Don’t rush me! 😂

I’m seeing strange lights in the sky. None of my cameras are sensitive enough to make a video.

It’s probably one of two things:

1. A ship on the nearby river with a lightshow going. It’s rare but it happens.
   
2. A steap hill nearby, cars driving “upwards”, and since super bright LED lights are normal nowadays, they reflect from the clouds.
   

Either way, looks fancy.

@doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt May I ask which hardware you have? SSD or HDD? How much RAM?

I might be spoiled and very privileged here. Even though my PC is almost 12 years old now, it does have an SSD and tons of RAM (i.e., lots of I/O cache), so starting mutt and opening the mailbox takes about 1-2 seconds here. I hardly even notice it. But I understand that not everybody has fast machines like that. 🫤

That was a nice 12km walk today. Got home just in time before all the Halloweenies got out. 😅

Time to put up the christmas decoration, I guess. 🤷✨

I think it could be yarnd’s avatar caching. That’s why my avatar field has a #20240102 at the end: To trick yarnd into reloading it.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com … this made me realize that I don’t really know anymore which commands I use. It’s all muscle memory by now. 🤔

TIL: The word “eldritch”, as in “eldritch horror”, does not refer to some small village in England. 🥴 https://www.etymonline.com/word/eldritch

There’s this rumor that you can create a WhatsApp account with a burner phone, then link the phone to a browser on your desktop PC (web.whatsapp.com) and never have to use the phone again. This just doesn’t work. Every ~2 weeks, the session in the browser will time out and you have to re-link again. 🙄

I hope you guys in the US get safely through the next storm. 😳

@3r1c@3r1c.net I think I’m gonna like that blog. 😅 https://unixdigest.com/articles/is-the-madness-ever-going-to-end.html

There’s a lot more activity in Geminispace than I realized: gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m sure you can somehow install something that calculates blake2b on OpenBSD. But it’s not part of the base system as a standalone CLI tool, there only appear to be Perl modules for it. The other SHA tools do exist.

@prologic@twtxt.net I wanted to wait for things to settle down. It’s still unclear to me in which direction we’re going – and if that new/different stuff is even possible to implement in jenny. That said, I’ve been really busy with private stuff these last few days, I’ve lost track of most of what you’re discussing. 🥴

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com rsync -zaXAP is what I use all the time. But that’s all – for the rest, I have to consult the manual. 😅

@xuu@txt.sour.is I think it is more tricky than that.

https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/reform/rules-business-and-organisations/application-regulation/who-does-data-protection-law-apply_en

“A company or entity …”

Also, as I understand it, “personal or household activity” (as you called it) is rather strict: An example could be you uploading photos to a webspace behind HTTP basic auth and sending that link to a friend. So, yes, a webserver is involved and you process your friend’s data (e.g., when did he access your files), but it’s just between you and him. But if you were to publish these photos publicly on a webserver that anyone can access, then it’s a different story – even though you could say that “this is just my personal hobby, not related to any job or money”.

If you operate a public Yarn pod and if you accept registrations from other users, then I’m pretty sure the GDPR applies. 🤔 You process personal data and you don’t really know these people. It’s not a personal/private thing anymore.

Had to build a list of all feeds (that I follow) and all twts in them and there are two collisions already:

$ ./stats
Saw 58263 hashes
7fqcxaa
  https://twtxt.net/user/justamoment/twtxt.txt
  https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt
ntnakqa
  https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt
  https://twtxt.net/user/thecanine/twtxt.txt

Namely:

$ jenny -D https://twtxt.net/user/justamoment/twtxt.txt | grep 7fqcxaa

[7fqcxaa] [2022-12-28 04:53:30+00:00] [(#pmuqoca) @prologic@twtxt.net I checked the GitHub discussion, it became a request to join forces.

Do you plan on having them join?

Also for the name, how about:

• “progit” or “prologit” (prologic official hard fork)
  
• “git-stance” (git instance)
  
• “GitTree” (Gitea inspired, maybe to related)
  
• “Gitomata” (git automata)
  
• “Git.Source”
  
• “Forgor” (forgit is taken so I forgor) 🤣
  
• “SweetGit” (as salty chat)
  
• “Pepper Git” (other ingredients) 😉
  
• “GitHeart” (core of git with a GitHub sounding name)
  
• “GitTaka” (With music in mind)
  

Ok, enough fun… Hope this helps sprout some ideas from others if nothing is to your taste.]

$ jenny -D https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt/5 | grep 7fqcxaa

[7fqcxaa] [2022-02-25 21:14:45+00:00] [(#bqq6fxq) It’s handled by blue Monday]

And:

$ jenny -D https://twtxt.net/user/thecanine/twtxt.txt | grep ntnakqa
[ntnakqa] [2022-01-23 10:24:09+00:00] [(#2wh7r4q) <a href="https://yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz/external?uri=https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt">@prologic<em>@twtxt.net</em></a> I know, I was just hoping it might have also gotten fixed by that change, by some kind of backend miracles. 😂]

$ jenny -D https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt/1 | grep ntnakqa
[ntnakqa] [2024-02-27 05:51:50+00:00] [(#otuupfq) <a href="https://yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz/external?uri=https://twtxt.net/user/shreyan/twtxt.txt">@shreyan<em>@twtxt.net</em></a>  Ahh 👌]

I’m still more in favor of (replyto:…). It’s easier to implement and the whole edits-breaking-threads thing resolves itself in a “natural” way without the need to add stuff to the protocol.

I’d love to try this out in practice to see how well it performs. 🤔 It’s all very theoretical at the moment.

Alright, before I go and watch Formula 1 😅, I made two PRs regarding the two “competing” ideas:

• https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn/pulls/1179 – (replyto:…)
  
• https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn/pulls/1180 – (edit:…) and (delete:…)
  

As a first step, this summarizes my current understanding. Please comment! 😊

One distinct disadvantage of (replyto:…) over (edit:#): (replyto:…) relies on clients always processing the entire feed – otherwise they wouldn’t even notice when a twt gets updated. a) This is more expensive, b) you cannot edit twts once they get rotated into an archived feed, because there is nothing signalling clients that they have to re-fetch that archived feed.

I guess neither matters that much in practice. It’s still a disadvantage.

I’m bad with faces, I know that. But I’m having a really hard time recognizing Linus in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WCTGycBceg

Basically a different person to me. Is it just me or has he really changed that much? 😳

I’m not advocating in either direction, btw. I haven’t made up my mind yet. 😅 Just braindumping here.

The (replyto:…) proposal is definitely more in the spirit of twtxt, I’d say. It’s much simpler, anyone can use it even with the simplest tools, no need for any client code. That is certainly a great property, if you ask me, and it’s things like that that brought me to twtxt in the first place.

I’d also say that in our tiny little community, message integrity simply doesn’t matter. Signed feeds don’t matter. I signed my feed for a while using GPG, someone else did the same, but in the end, nobody cares. The community is so tiny, there’s enough “implicit trust” or whatever you want to call it.

If twtxt/Yarn was to grow bigger, then this would become a concern again. But even Mastodon allows editing, so how much of a problem can it really be? 😅

I do have to “admit”, though, that hashes feel better. It feels good to know that we can clearly identify a certain twt. It feels more correct and stable.

Hm.

I suspect that the (replyto:…) proposal would work just as well in practice.

Regarding jenny development: There have been enough changes in the last few weeks, imo. I want to let things settle for a while (potential bugfixes aside) and then I’m going to cut a new release.

And I guess the release after that is going to include all the threading/hashing stuff – if we can decide on one of the proposals. 😂