Oh, and I forgot (because I thought it was obvious, my bad), set a nick, and a url at the very minimum on your feed. See “Metadata Extension”.

@tilde.club@tilde.club unwritten etiquette (by me, and for me, but one can hope, right?).

• Proper grammar (in any language).
  
• Correct capitalisation, and punctuation.
  
• Subject extension support.
  

Anything else doesn’t matter. ☺️

PR to clean up some unwanted specs and cleanup some invalid/bad references. 🙏

#catsoftwtxt

-¿Y… sueles acurrucarte mucho por aquí?-
#catsoftwtxt

Disfraz de Halloween 🎃 : ojos flotantes
#catsoftwtxt

¡Feliz Halloween 🎃 🧛!
#catsoftwtxt

Nuevo Post: https://dev1ls.deno.dev/yggdrasil-la-red-mesh-ipv6-descentralizada #NixOS #ipv6 #yggdrasil #Dev

Nuevos Proyectos, Nueva imagen, nuevo todo! #BCN #logo #Tech #Dev

GTK2 about to be removed from the official Arch repos: https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-dev-public@lists.archlinux.org/thread/2BDHYLEFSYQBDTMUOZT5J6AFTA5M3FO6/

It’ll probably all be dropped to the AUR, so I can build this myself, because I still have some stuff that depends on it (and will never receive further updates).

@movq@www.uninformativ.de My impression also is that good sysadmins are missing. No wonder if they all get laid off because they’re “not doing anything” and developers can just operate their shit themselves. Or so the bosses and plenty devs think. Sadly, that’s the general view.

Hell no, devops is bullshit in my opinion. Most developers (including myself) are rather bad at administrating. A good sysadmin offers other skills. Great admins appear to just sit around, but they’re much more proactively working than programmers who also operate the same stuff. The latter have a waaay more reactive work model in comparison. When things have already gone south. The sysadmin, on the other hand, would have noticed and thus prevented the vast majority very early on when it was far from becoming a problem in the future.

At least that’s my personal experience in all those years in different projects and what my mates tell me from their companies. Sure, skills can be learned, but it’s just not happening (enough). And obviously, there are people out there who excel in both disciplines, but they are rare. Most fall in one of the categories. Not to forget, plenty are just bad at everything. :-)

mask : gemi.dev get attack,errors or maintenance!?? huuft.. now can’t open waffle news and chilli weather 😑 mybe must build backup data on other host or do other option to get solutions…

@important_dev_news@n8n.andros.dev Fuxk me decision makers are fuxking stupid sometimes 🤣

Color negro brillante e irresistible.
#catsoftwtxt

@important_dev_news@n8n.andros.dev Thank fuxk 🤣

• ¿Te gusta el nuevo pienso? Es bajo en calorías. -
  #catsoftwtxt

@bender@twtxt.net The first format use the subject extension while the other is a new format that is inspired by mentions format, the first one should be compatible but I’m not sure, if it’s used verbatim by the client it would work, but if we consider the new proposal for it to have an optional part it wont work on clients without changes.

@zvava@twtxt.net Going to have to hard disagree here I’m sorry. a) no-one reads the raw/plain twtxt.txt files, the only time you do is to debug something, or have a stick beak at the comments which most clients will strip out and ignore and b) I’m sorry you’ve completely lost me! I’m old enough to pre-date before Linux became popular, so I’m not sure what UNIX principles you think are being broken or violated by having a Twt Subject (Subject) whose contents is a cryptographic content-addressable hash of the “thing”™ you’re replying to and forming a chain of other replies (a thread).

I’m sorry, but the simplest thing to do is to make the smallest number of changes to the Spec as possible and all agree on a “Magic Date” for which our clients use the modified function(s).

@prologic@twtxt.net thanks, I already follow @important_dev_news@n8n.andros.dev too.

BTW, the feed on https://feeds.twtxt.net/ seem down? It says it’s in maintenance.

@bender@twtxt.net https://andros.dev/texudus.txt, its url doesn’t correspond to the feed either

@zvava@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m not entirely sure about the spaces, but maybe they were omitted to simplify parsing of mentions in the form of @<nick url>. If the next token after the @<nick does not look like a URL, it’s not a mention but regular text. This is just wild guessing, though.

Looking at the regex and tests in the original twtxt reference implementation seems to confirm that theory in the sense as it relies on whitespace as the delimiter:

https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/screenshot-2025-09-17-21-30-25.png

Another thing about nicks is that the original twtxt reference implementation converts nicks to all lowercase:

https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/screenshot-2025-09-17-21-20-39.png

You probably know this already, the original twtxt file format specification can be found here: https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/twtxtfile.html

As for extensions, I don’t know of anything outside of twtxt.dev that has actually been (partially) implemented. However, there is also the issue tracker of the official reference implementation. You might wanna dig through that. For example, there is an alternative suggestions of multiline messages: https://github.com/buckket/twtxt/issues/157

@zvava@twtxt.net Good question. This is the spec, I think:

https://twtxt.dev/exts/metadata.html#nick

It doesn’t say much. 🤔

In the wild, I’ve only seen “traditional” nick names, i.e. ASCII 0x21 thru 0x7E.

My client removes anything but r'[a-zA-Z0-9]' from nick names.

is there consensus on what characters should(n’t) be allowed in nicks? i remember reading somewhere whitespace should not be allowed, but i don’t see it in the spec on twtxt.dev — in fact, are there any other resources on twtxt extensions outside of twtxt.dev?

@thecanine@twtxt.net Id like that too, it just can’t come from me, because native mobile dev just isn’t my thing 😢

@zvava@twtxt.net Herw you go: https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/twtxt.dev/pulls/28

Dear dev.alessandrocutolo.it, do you really need to fetch my twtxt feed every 20-30 seconds? 😅 Not that it’s posing a problem, but I feel like this could be optimized. For example, how about using the if-modified-since request header: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Headers/If-Modified-Since

@important_dev_news@n8n.andros.dev This feels like a decision that punishes Mozilla and Apple, way more than it punishes Google.

@dce@hashnix.club No worries 😌 It’s all documented in our soecs, it’s not such a common thing that we’ve felt the great need to really solve, we’re aware folks want to sometimes have their feed on several protocols, and that’s totally fine™ 😅

@bender@twtxt.net This one: https://n8n.andros.dev/webhook/f0cfd6a6-60c8-4183-a26d-120bbd25a046

Evitando que mi humano trabaje para darme mimitos.
#catsoftwtxt

🚀 BCN #nix #dev #ygg

Soy el detective Baldo. Aún recuerdo cuando esa gatita salvaje entró en mi caja contoneando su cola. Le habían robado el cascabel de oro. Acepté el caso sin dudarlo, quería meter los bigotes en ese caso. Olía a pescado podrido.
#catsoftwtxt

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz On the one hand, all these programs have a very long history and the technology behind manpages is actually very powerful – you can use it to write books:

https://www.troff.org/pubs.html

I have two books from that list, for example “The UNIX programming environment”:

https://movq.de/v/c3dab75c97/upe.jpg

It’s a bit older, of course, but it looks and feels like a normal book, and it uses the same tech as manpages – which I think is really cool. 😎

It’s comparable to LaTeX (just harder/different to use) but much faster than LaTeX. You can also do stuff like render manpages as a PDF (man -Tpdf cp >cp.pdf) or as an HTML file (man -Thtml cp >cp.html). I think I once made slides for a talk this way.

On the other hand, traditional manpages (i.e., ones that are not written in mandoc) do not use semantic markup. They literally say, “this text is bold, that text over here is italics”, and so on.

So when you run man foo, it has no other choice but to show it in black, white, bold, underline – showing it in color would be wrong, because that’s not what the source code of that manpage says.

Colorizing them is a hack, to be honest. You’re not meant to do this. (The devs actually broke this by accident recently. They themselves aren’t really aware that people use colors.)

If mandoc and semantic markup was more commonly used, I think it would be easier to convince the devs to add proper customizable colors.

-¡Deja de estudiar y hazme caso!-
#catsoftwtxt

i signed up for omg.lol and i’m really liking it. such a cozy and fun little community with a suite of fun web things. i wish the financial barrier to entry was a bit lower though (maybe like $5 for a few months on it or something) just so i could recommend it to my broke friends more, but i totally get why it’s priced the way it is (solo dev!!!)

In 1996, they came up with the X11 “SECURITY” extension:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4w548u/what_is_up_with_the_x11_security_extension/

This is what could have (eventually) solved the security issues that we’re currently seeing with X11. Those issues are cited as one of the reasons for switching to Wayland.

That extension never took off. The person on reddit wonders why – I think it’s simple: Containers and sandboxes weren’t a thing in 1996. It hardly mattered if X11 was “insecure”. If you could run an X11 client, you probably already had access to the machine and could just do all kinds of other nasty things.

Today, sandboxing is a thing. Today, this matters.

I’ve heard so many times that “X11 is beyond fixable, it’s hopeless.” I don’t believe that. I believe that these problems are solveable with X11 and some devs have said “yeah, we could have kept working on it”. It’s that people don’t want to do it:

Why not extend the X server?

Because for the first time we have a realistic chance of not having to do that.

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html

I’m not in a position to judge the devs. Maybe the X.Org code really is so bad that you want to run away, screaming in horror. I don’t know.

But all this was a choice. I don’t buy the argument that we never would have gotten rid of things like core fonts.

All the toolkits and programs had to be ported to Wayland. A huge, still unfinished effort. If that was an acceptable thing to do, then it would have been acceptable to make an “X12” that keeps all the good things about X11, remains compatible where feasible, eliminates the problems, and requires some clients to be adjusted. (You could have still made “X11X12” like “XWayland” for actual legacy programs.)

@important_dev_news@n8n.andros.dev Oh gawd, is the EU doing this “age verification” bullshit too!? Not just Australia?! 🇦🇺 Farrrrk!!!!! Help!!!!

#catsoftwtxt

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, huh, maybe it was just my GNOME 2 themes back then that didn’t show the icon. 🤔

I like the looks of your window manager. That’s using Wayland, right?

Oh, no. It’s still X11. All my recent Wayland comments resulted from me trying to switch, but I think it’s still too early. Being unable to use QEMU (because it can’t capture the mouse pointer) is a pretty big blocker for me. This is completely broken, it just happens to be unnoticeable with modern guest OSes, so it’s probably not a priority for devs.

(Not to mention that I would have to fork and substantially extend dwl in order to “replicate” my X11 WM. And then, after having done that, I’d have to follow upstream Wayland development, for which I don’t have the resources. Things would need to slow down before I can do that.)

all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1

Heh. I’ve been using tiling WMs for ~15 years now, so it’s actually kind of refreshing to see something different for a change. 😅

Probably close to the older Windowses.

That particular theme is a ripoff of OS/2 Warp 3: https://movq.de/v/6c2a948882/s.png 😅

We ran some similar brownish color scheme (don’t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98

Oh god. Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of those, either. 🥴

Only figured this out yesterday:

pinentry, which is used to safely enter a password on Linux, has several frontends. There’s a GTK one, a Qt one, even an ncurses one, and so on.

GnuPG also uses pinentry. And you can configure your frontend of choice here in gpg-agent.conf.

But what happens when you don’t configure it? What’s the default?

Turns out, pinentry is a shellscript wrapper and it’s not even that long. Here it is in full:

#!/bin/bash

# Run user-defined and site-defined pre-exec hooks.
[[ -r "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec ]] && \
        . "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec
[[ -r /etc/pinentry/preexec ]] && . /etc/pinentry/preexec

# Guess preferred backend based on environment.
backends=(curses tty)
if [[ -n "$DISPLAY" || -n "$WAYLAND_DISPLAY" ]]; then
        case "$XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP" in
        KDE|LXQT|LXQt)
                backends=(qt qt5 gnome3 gtk curses tty)
                ;;
        *)
                backends=(gnome3 gtk qt qt5 curses tty)
                ;;
        esac
fi

for backend in "${backends[@]}"
do
        lddout=$(ldd "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" 2>/dev/null) || continue
        [[ "$lddout" == *'not found'* ]] && continue
        exec "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" "$@"
done

exit 1

Preexec, okay, then some auto-detection to use a toolkit matching your desktop environment …

… and then it invokes ldd? To find out if all the required libraries are installed for the auto-detected frontend?

Oof. I was sitting here wondering why it would use pinentry-gtk on one machine and pinentry-gnome3 on another, when both machines had the exact same configs. Yeah, but different libraries were installed. One machine was missing gcr, which is needed for pinentry-gnome3, so that machine (and that one alone) spawned pinentry-gtk …

-Me gusta mi nueva cestita-
#catsoftwtxt

Se ha ido la colonia que había fuera y el “jefe” que me pegaba. ¡Ya puedo subir otra vez!
#catsoftwtxt

Yin-cat
#catsoftwtxt

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I do my timetracking in a little Python script, locally. Every now and then, I push the data to our actual service. Problem solved – but it’s a completely unpopular approach, they all want to use the web site. I don’t get it. Then, of course, when it’s down, shit hits the fan. (Luckily, our timetracking software is neither developed nor run by us anymore. It’s a silly cloud service, but the upside is that I’m not responsible anymore. 🤷)

Some of our oldschool devs tried to roll out local timetracking once, about 15 years ago. I don’t remember anymore why they failed …

This is developed inhouse, I’m just so glad that we’re not a software engineering company. Oh wait. How embarrassing.

Oh to be anonymous on the internet. That must be nice. 😅

Mejorando sus técnicas de camuflaje para cazar moscas
#catsoftwtxt

Fresquito
#catsoftwtxt

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Interesting internal education sessions are way too infrequent here as well. There are a bunch of “knowledge transfer” meetings actually, but 90% of the topics already sound totally boring to me. The other 9% talks turned out to be underwhelming, sadly. I only attended a single one where it was delivered what has been promised. They’re all talks, not real hands-on trainings like you did.

Once a year the security guys organize a really great hacking event, though. Teams can volunteer to hand in their software dev instances and all workmates are invited to hack them and report security vulnerabilities. That’s a lot of fun, but also gets frustrating towards the end when you don’t make any progress. :-) There’s also some actual hands-on training in advance for preparation of the two days. Unfortunately, I missed the last event due to my own project being very stressful at the time.

When I had a Do What You Want Day I also show my direct teammates what I learned in the hopes of this being interesting to them as well. I’m the only one in my team using this opportunity, sadly.

I did a “lecture”/“workshop” about this at work today. 16-bit DOS, real mode. 💾 Pretty cool and the audience (devs and sysadmins) seemed quite interested. 🥳

• People used the Intel docs to figure out the instruction encodings.
  
• Then they wrote a little DOS program that exits with a return code and they used uhex in DOSBox to do that. Yes, we wrote a COM file manually, no Assembler involved. (Many of them had never used DOS before.)
  
• DEBUG from FreeDOS was used to single-step through the program, showing what it does.
  
• This gets tedious rather quickly, so we switched to SVED from SvarDOS for writing the rest of the program in Assembly language. nasm worked great for us.
  
• At the end, we switched to BIOS calls instead of DOS syscalls to demonstrate that the same binary COM file works on another OS. Also a good opportunity to talk about bootloaders a little bit.
  
• (I think they even understood the basics of segmentation in the end.)
  

The 8086 / 16-bit real-mode DOS is a great platform to explain a lot of the fundamentals without having to deal with OS semantics or executable file formats.

Now that was a lot of fun. 🥳 It’s very rare that we do something like this, sadly. I love doing this kind of low-level stuff.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Oh, that’s great! I haven’t heard about any of them before either. There’s also a caveat though, that I ran right into the very first time I tried this in zsh:

$ ls > /dev/null
$ echo $_
--color=tty

Yeah, exactly what you think:

$ which ls
ls: aliased to ls --color=tty

Alt+. is going to be my favorite one! In the above, it would also give me /dev/null, which might be probably more what I would expect.

Batdo
#catsoftwtxt