@prologic@twtxt.net Fully agreed. I’m far more likely to buy such mediums when DRM-free. I never go near Amazon eBooks etc because of their lock-in, and I have a Kobo eReader which needs to have the books side loaded unless directly from the Kobo store. I prefer DRM-free files every time.

Show HN: An Almost Free, Open Source TURN Server
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US government’s attack on free speech, science, and research is causing a brain drain
How do you create a brain drain and lose your status as eminent destination for scientists and researchers? The United States seems to be sending out questionnaires to researchers at universities and research institutes outside of the United States, asking them about their political leanings. Dutch universities are strongly advising Dutch researches not to respond … ⌘ Read more

Hi! For anyone following the Request for Comments on an improved syntax for replies and threads, I’ve made a comparative spreadsheet with the 4 proposals so far. It shows a syntax example, and top pros and cons I’ve found:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KOUqJ2rNl_jZ4KBVTsR-4QmG1zAdKNo7QXJS1uogQVo/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Feel free to propose another collaborative platform (for those without a G account), and also share your comments and analysis in the spreadsheet or in Gitea.

I think I should try self-hosting some Mastodon thingy again.

The “export data” feature on the Mastodon instance I’m using seems to be broken. I’ve contacted the admins but we couldn’t find the issue – yet. I don’t want to bother them too much, it’s a free service after all.

But this means that everything I post over there is very, very volatile. It could all be gone in 5 minutes and I’ll have no way to restore it. Hmm.

Blender-Rendered Movie ‘Flow’ Wins Oscar for Best Animated Feature, Beating Pixar
It’s a feature-length film “rendered on a free and open-source software platform called Blender,” reports Reuters. And it just won the Oscar for best animated feature film, beating movies from major studios like Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks.

In January Blender.org called Flow “the manifestation of Blender’s mission, … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft is paywalling features in Notepad and Paint
There’s some bad news for Windows users who want to use all of the built-in features of the operating system and its integrated apps. Going forward, Microsoft is restricting features in two iconic apps, which you’ll need to unlock with a paid subscription. The two apps in question? Notepad and Paint. Windows Insiders were previously able to use these app features free of charge. However, Microsoft is now making it necessary … ⌘ Read more

Cassette: a POSIX application framework featuring a retro-futurist GUI toolkit
Cassette is a GUI application framework written in C11, with a UI inspired by the cassette-futurism aesthetic. Built for modern POSIX systems, it’s made out of three libraries: CGUI, CCFG and COBJ. Cassette is free and open-source software, licensed under the LGPL-3.0. ↫ Cassette GitHub page Upon first reading this description, you might wonder what a “cassette-futurism aesthe … ⌘ Read more

If people just wrote error free code to begin with, there would be no need for error handling! :-P

No, honestly, I don’t think that there is anything wrong with the current approach. I don’t see any wins of any of the proposals I’ve come across.

@prologic@twtxt.net @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org First, please leave me your comments on the repository! Even if it’s just to give your opinion on what shouldn’t be included. The more variety, the better.

Second, I’m going to try to do tests with Elliptic keys and base64. Thanks for the advice @eapl@eapl.me

Finally, I’d like to give my opinion. Secure direct messages are a feature that ActivityPub and Mastodon don’t have, to give an example. By including it as an extension, we’re already taking a significant leap forward from the competition. Does it make sense to include it in a public feed? In fact, we’re already doing that. When we reply to a user, mentioning them at the beginning of the message, it’s already a direct message. The message is within a thread, perhaps breaking the conversation. Direct messages would help isolate conversations between 2 users, as well as keeping a thread cleaner and maintaining privacy. I insist, it’s optional, it doesn’t break compatibility with any client and implementing it isn’t complex. If you don’t like it, you’re free to not use it. If you don’t have a public key, no one can send you direct messages.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I approve! That’s how I learned HTML (version 4 at the time and XHTML shortly after) and making websites, too. Some of them are still made like this to this day. Hand-written HTML. Hardly any <div> and class nonsense. I can’t remember with which editor I started out with, but I upgraded to Webweaver (later renamed to Webcraft) quickly. Yeah, this were the times when there was just a single computer for the whole family.

Free hosting on Arcor, Freenet and I don’t know anymore how they were all called. Like this author, I uploaded everything via FTP. Oh dear, when was the last time I used that? And I had registered plenty of free .de.vu domains.

Being on Windows at the time, everything was ISO-8859-1 for me. No UTF-8, I don’t think I’ve heard about it back then.

Later, I wrote my own CMSes in PHP. Man, were they bad in retrospect. :-D Of course, MySQL databases were used as backends. I still exactly know the moment I read the first time about SQL injections. I tried it on my own CMS login and was shocked when I could just break in. The very next thing I did was to lock down everything with an .htaccess until I actually fixed my broken PHP code. Hahaha, good memories.

I swear by Atom or RSS feeds. Many of my sites offer them. I daily consume feeds, they’re just great.

@prologic@twtxt.net It’s opensource. You can run the software in your localhost or server. Cloud service is a free option.

Thanks 😀! @aelaraji@aelaraji.com I am working on a fork now because the new version will break the current code. Therefore, I will upgrade the current repository (https://codeberg.org/deadblackclover/twtxt-el). The original author is helping me with reviews. I am sorry for my long development, I am working in my free time and it is scarce. I will report back to you all. 😋

Hey this could be good news for self-hosters and folks that want to run their own yarnd? 🤔 Vultr is offering 1 vCPU, 500MB Memory and 10GB Storage for FREE! That’s right $0.00 🤣

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh! no need to be sorry and feel free to keep at it if it helps, I don’t mind. It’s just that I’m always on the lookout for corpo-bots and crawlers slipping through the cracks (a fun little game of sorts) 😅 the only thing I let them see is a robots.txt telling them to :diffoff

Also, I’m curious about the invalid lines in my feed. is it something I should lookout for in future?

You can’t use vultr free tier? Also does anyone tried?

An inspiring book on making a life around IT security

Troy Hunt: “Pwned”, The Book, Is Now Available for Free
https://www.troyhunt.com/pwned-the-book-is-now-available-for-free/

@prologic@twtxt.net sure! I don’t know if this is what you need but, let me give it a try.

• I have Timeline installed, which has an endpoint to process #webmentions. Mine for example is https://aelaraji.com/timeline/webmention which you can find by querying https://aelaraji.com/.well-known/webfinger.
  
• If you mention someone from #Timeline itself, it takes care of querying that and sending in the mention for you.
  
• Otherwise (what I personally do) you could just:
  

curl -i -d 'source=https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt#:~:text=2024-12-09T01:22:37Z' -d 'target=https://aelaraji.com/twtxt.txt' https://aelaraji.com/timeline/webmention

basically what @sorenpeter@darch.dk mentioned in his article Here.

Afterwards, the mentions are stored in their own mentions.txt feed. The one from the example above looks like this on my Timeline :

Feel free to spam my endpoint if you’d like to give things a try. 👍

[P.S: personally, I don’t seem to get the mentions if I add the Text fragment part to my target]

Arctic could see first ice-free day by 2027 + 3 more stories
Macron and Saudi Crown Prince to co-chair a conference for Palestinian state; UN investigates Venezuela’s election fraud; new UN aid chief prioritizes funding; study predicts ice-free Arctic by 2027 ⌘ Read more

its important to see clearly: the rejection of mastodon for bluesky is not a rejection of the desire to be free of our corporate overlords; its a rejection of white bros controlling digital spaces. sit with that

eugen and his interlocutors have had immense power with which to challenge twitter but their racial and cultural and ideological insularity prevented them from using it https://alaskan.social/@seachanger/113500023546622076

Toujours pas d’internet revenu. #free est au courant. Ça va vite devenir compliqué pour bosser, j’ai besoin d’entrer toutes mes notes :s

IRCCloud is shareware and proprietary :(. Free period only two weeks and after your connection disabled after two hours of inactivity. Maybe Quassel or TheLounge is better?

Wells
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@bender@twtxt.net Well Matt should definitely get better Lawyers/PR people who could slap em’ on the wrest and tell “NO!” before he does something childish and effs things up. As for WPE, I believe a billion dollar company should be able to afford investing in their own infrastructure, hosting their resources, deploying their own CDNs and what not instead of leaching on Wordpress (’s infrastructure) for free (as in free coffee) + The Stripe thing they did is so disgusting given the circumstances, I don’t even want to talk about it.

Things could/should’ve been handled better, now it’s just another sh…rimp show.

Finally weekend. Time to relax a bit. And today I finally have some time for my computer in my free time. Wish you all a great weekend! Take care of your self and those around you :)

I ended up installing Headscale on my little VPS. Just in case the collide, I turned off WireGuard. Turning that one off (which ran on a container) also frees some memory. Headscale is running quite well! Indeed, I have struggled getting any web management console to work, but it really isn’t needed. Everything needed to commandeer the server is available through the CLI.

I wrote some code to try out non-hash reply subjects formatted as (replyto ), while keeping the ability to use the existing hash style.

I don’t think we need to decide all at once. If clients add support for a new method then people can use it if they like. The downside of course is that this costs developer time, so I decided to invest a few hours of my own time into a proof of concept.

With apologies to @movq@www.uninformativ.de for corrupting jenny’s beautiful code. I don’t write this expecting you to incorporate the patch, because it does complicate things and might not be a direction you want to go in. But if you like any part of this approach feel free to use bits of it; I release the patch under jenny’s current LICENCE.

Supporting both kinds of reply in jenny was complicated because each email can only have one Message-Id, and because it’s possible the target twt will not be seen until after the twt referencing it. The following patch uses an sqlite database to keep track of known (url, timestamp) pairs, as well as a separate table of (url, timestamp) pairs that haven’t been seen yet but are wanted. When one of those “wanted” twts is finally seen, the mail file gets rewritten to include the appropriate In-Reply-To header.

Patch based on jenny commit 73a5ea81.

https://www.falsifian.org/a/oDtr/patch0.txt

Not implemented:

• Composing twts using the (replyto …) format.
  
• Probably other important things I’m forgetting.

Speaking of AI tech (sorry!); Just came across this really cool tool built by some engineers at Google™ (currently completely free to use without any signup) called NotebookLM 👌 Looks really good for summarizing and talking to document 📃

Tectonic Surfing
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i’m over here thinking about how to get free internet to millions of people and keeping the system requirements as low as possible.

some day, you’ll be able to download nix-on-android from f-droid and nix run git+https://git.cyb.red/pkgs/free-internet.flake and join the no se vende mesh collective.. something like that

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, haven’t seeing the @yarn_police@twtxt.net for a while. I often wonder if we are, finally, crime free. :-D

Morphotrophic by Greg Egan is built around an idea for how life on Earth could have worked out differently. It gets increasingly strange and interesting as the story progresses. My partner and I finished it last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. The beginning is free online: https://gregegan.net/MORPHOTROPHIC/00/MorphotrophicExcerpt.html #scifi #reading

first steps towards free internet for everyone https://git.ix.cyb.red/IX/No-Se-Vende-Mesh

If you want to talk about (self) hosting with #OpenBSD, fell free to join the mailing list I just made: https://si3t.ch/log/2024-05-10-ah-mailing-list.txt #selfhost

@dfaria@twtxt.net the difference is that these other servers does not post several times a day with content that are not informative/interesting to people outside your academic context, which can be perceived as noise.

What @prologic@twtxt.net have done is what I would call curation of the service he offers to the world for free (as in beer). It’s no one right to have their posts syndicated to the frontpage of twtxt.net, it’s simply a gift he gives to the world and he is free (as in speak) to wrap is anyway he sees fit.

@dfaria.eu@dfaria.eu I hope you stay around 🌞

@sorenpeter@darch.dk a poem about me giving Odo a free bucket:

A glint in his eye, a sly, Ferengi grin,
Quark crossed the promenade, a curious thing within.
No jeweled trinket, no weapon so grand,
But a simple pail held tight in his hand.

Odo, the Constable, with a brow raised high,
“A bucket, Quark? What trickery do you try?”
The Ferengi huckster, with a salesman’s flair,
“A gift, my friend, a constable’s rare!”

“For those late-night spills, a morphing mishap,
This bucket, dear Odo, will catch every scrap.
And should a suspect turn to goop and flee,
This pail’s the answer, a guarantor, you see!”

Odo’s lips twitched, a hint of a smile,
At Quark’s twisted logic, his mercantile style.
“Perhaps,” he conceded, the bucket held tight,
“A useful addition, in the pursuit of right.”

So Quark made his sale, with a wink and a nod,
A bucket for Odo, a Ferengi oddity, odd.
But on Deep Space Nine, where chaos takes hold,
Even a pail can be worth more than gold.

About the account, thanks, but I already have way too many. :-D

in the matter of political voice in the US money is speech and therefore companies use their “free speech” to donate and gain access to politicians. Therefore companies are people. Thanks a lot “citizens united”

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained?ref=foreverwars.ghost.io

@movq@www.uninformativ.de For syncing notes between computers and phones I’ve been very happy with Simple Text - w Dropbox sync for some year, but transitioned to Joplin around new year. Both sync via Dropbox and for Joplin there are also more free options. I guess you could even use something like Syncthing

I finally found the NASM assembler.

https://nasm.us/index.php

I had heard that name before, many times, but somehow never looked into it. Weird. 🤨🤔

This is the kind of program I was looking for.

1. It is free software. Especially in the DOS ecosystem, free/libre software is a very scarce resource.
   
2. It’s a small command line program, not a huge behemoth.
   
3. Documentation appears to be well written.
   
4. It can even cross-compile DOS binaries from Linux.

It’s awfully distracting trying to get distraction-free, sometimes.

Found a nicely-resonant wine glass in a free box on my way home.

Feedback on why I didn’t choose Mattermost (lack of OIDC) · mattermost/mattermost · Discussion – My discussions/feedback on Mattermost’s decision to have certain useful and IMO should be standard features as paid-for features on a per-seat licensed basis. My primary argument is that if you offer a self-host(able) product and require additional features the free version does not have, you should not have to pay for a per-seat license for something you are footing the bill for in terms of Hardware/Compute and Maintenance/Support (havintg to operate it).

@slashdot@feeds.twtxt.net I feel like this is a bit of a common pattern? Company builds an awesome product, makes it free for a lot of users, then create additional features and paid plans, makes a tonne of money. But then later decide they need to make more money, so focus on converting the free users to paid users. Hmmm 🤔 Surely this can’t be the only viable business model? 🤔

Evernote Pushes Users To Upgrade
After making steep cuts to personnel earlier this year, Evernote’s Milan-based owner Bending Spoons is now experimenting with a new plan that would push more users to upgrade to paid versions of its service. From a report: The company confirmed to TechCrunch it’s been running a small test that placed limits on the number of notes free users could create, but said the new plan is not yet finalized. TechCrunch was al … ⌘ Read more

Someone at Philips Hue or Amazon Alexa screwed up something, as it seems. My lamps stopped responding to Alexa some days ago and I am not the only one experiencing issues. I guess we can say we enjoyed the (partial free) ride for as long as it lasted. https://www.amazon.com/Philips-Hue/dp/B01LWAGUG7

Date Line
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my thoughts are free

jellyfin is also a good alternative with free apps for your phone.

I’m telling ya guys 😅 plex.tv had way better shit™, Get it installed on your own server, get access to free content + your own + whatever and no stupid tracking and bullshit 🤣