Watching the ISS fade out in the sky as it moves into earth’s shadow remains one of the coolest things in the world.

I’ll likely take this down soonish as I think it’s pretty bad for usability, but as a fun hack, one of my weird side projects web pages now has monitor burn-in: http://txtpunk.com/index.html

It’ll track a bunch of finger(1) endpoints and let you see what’s new. Very early draft. Not actually a social network, more an anti-social network for ‘80s CompSci transplants. :-)

A read-only, finger(1)-based social network, maybe? http://txtpunk.com/fingers/

That’s the effect I’m after, but I want it not on my main browser. Turns out the Brave mobile app does this.

I want a browser for iOS that’s basically Mobile Safari but without JavaScript (or at least an easy toggle). Does such a thing exist?

I realized my twtxt client isn’t validating what it pulls once it gets a valid response when a domain started returning js-heavy parking pages for every URL. Oops. Weekend project, I guess. 🤦🏻

@adi@twtxt.net Also, I noticed you followed me on Twitter, but you might enjoy @anths if you want techie stuff instead of Oregon politics. 🤣

Lots of personal preference, but I disagree on Acme: it’s far and away my preferred editor on unix-like systems, too.

A “hunt group” is a phone number you can call which will ring some set of other phones and whoever answers first gets the call, and the others stop ringing.

Thanks, I’d forgotten about that. I’d rather avoid Google Voice, and I’m okay paying (reasonably). Looking like Twilio might have most of what I want natively.

Given that we don’t have a “home phone”, what’s the best way to create a “hunt group” for my partner’s and my cell phones? My first thought is Asterisk on a VPS, but my knowledge of such things is years out of date. Is there a better way?

Good weekend for random tech projects: this rackmount server I got free boots Plan 9 without issue, and my ttl adapters and wii nunchucks just arrived. Now where can I find a serial modem?

I have only just discovered this and need to dig in more, but so far it looks like a really nice reference for electronics pinouts: https://pinouts.org/

Okay, I’ve updated my examples page and shared the more complex ssh example. http://a.9srv.net/shortcuts

iOS has had a “Shortcuts” app for a while now which is very useful for scripting things on the device, and at some point grew the ability to run things via ssh, including piping input/output. It’s how I’ve done twtxt from my phone for a while now. I’ll clean up these two examples and post to the examples I’ve shared. http://a.9srv.net/shortcuts

Only 1 day of activity so far, but I’ve started a new project log for whatever the heck I end up doing to this Monroe 425 I got. http://a.9srv.net/monroe425

About two years late, but I finally finished setting up an iOS Shortcut so I can post to my blog via ssh. http://a.9srv.net/b/

Anyone seen a pixel-addressed display (any tech; lcd, eink, oled, whatever) in the range of 8”x1”?

I think y’all are missing something. I never used ftp as a schema; I’m saying the “ftp” hostname part with the “http” schema is amusing.

Check the raw file. ;-) Yes, “http colon slash slash ftp”.

I’m not sure! It feels similar to seeing “~username” in a URL. Part nostalgia, part… impressed at the persistence?

Seeing “http://ftp” in a URL makes me happy.

Nominally, my seen/read list for 2021, but I missed a lot of short readings. I may try to write more about these things this year. http://a.9srv.net/media/2021

Web3 being “democratic” makes perfect sense if you can’t tell the difference between a dollar and a person.

I just went to type the phrase “I avoid Linux like the plague” but then remembered that we’ve all learned that most people won’t actually go much out of their way to avoid the plague.

As a postmaster, Gmail remains the most irritating domain to send to. Soooo many false spam hits, such little information provided, so many hoops to jump through.

Agreed on “aggressive” — as a general rule, I don’t think most folks are acting like we’re in the kind of crisis we are.

There’s still an editing/proofreading pass to do before it becomes official, but the content is done.

It’s the (roughly) bi-annual platform convention. I think the new platform does a good job of holding to progressive values (even if I wish it went farther in places). I got an amendment in to improve our stance on encryption-related issues, which was nice.

Spent the weekend with the state Democrats at our platform convention. Good work and glad to have participated, but 20 hours of zoom over 60 hours is a lot of zoom.

Killing time in Goodwill, I picked up a desk calculator from a pile. Dude standing next to me goes “what’s that for?”. 😳💀

This pi will now boot directly to ed if the gpio pin is grounded at boot time. ed(1)term v1. :-) http://txtpunk.com/edterm/

I am not launching it with a specific file right now, but I’ll likely have it default to my daily work log shortly.

@lyse This was basically a trial/proof-of-concept for the real goal: a switch which, if on at boot time, causes the pi to boot straight to ed.

@lyse ed(1) is the standard editor. ;-)

I made a gpio button on my raspberry pi which opens a new window running ed. I screwed up while testing it and launched maaaaany ed windows.

I fork bombed my computer! With ed(1)!!! Haven’t done that in a while.

A 556 IC is functionally the same as two 555 ICs, but I’ve decided the 555 is better because search engines don’t confuse it for ammunition as much.

Uh, I think you are taking every line of that way too seriously.

Hah. It’s an edit of a “be gay do crimes” meme, in response to this: https://twitter.com/Cor3ntin/status/1460614695564496901

Use C do crime! https://cdn.masto.host/pdxsocial/media_attachments/files/107/294/565/215/390/680/original/1d29c85c0aa4c9a5.png

💉3️⃣✅ Thank you, Dolly Parton!

National Novel Writing Month; see https://nanowrimo.org/

I want NaNoWriMo but for tech writing.

Oh, me too: FreeBSD, macOS, and Solaris in server environments extensively, and Linux, AIX, HP/UX, Irix, probably others I’m forgetting. Plan 9 is a whole other class of thing.

Lots of downsides, too, but overall I still find it the most comfortable environment for anything that doesn’t need a web browser. :-)

Lots. 🤣 The system is small, coherent, and understandable in a way no modern unix is. The namespace operations remain incredibly powerful. And several of the tools built on it, like the way network listeners and the mail server are built, are just much nicer to use, modify, and build on.

Dug out my old usb audio device and now my Plan 9 raspberry pi can play music. 💯

This week I turned 16,000 days old.