Getting the firmware of a VTech/LeapFrog LeapStart/Magibook
This is a very small blog post about my first reverse engineering project, in which I don’t really reverse engineer anything yet, but I am just getting started! A family member asked me to add additional book data to the LeapStart he bought for his son, this is the starting point here. ↫ leloubil’s blog We’ve all seen toy, child-focused computers like these, and I always find them deeply fascinating. I’m not buyi … ⌘ Read more
Remote Work’s Long-Term Effects: Why Dell and Amazon Are Bringing Employees Back
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Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebrations tainted by the company’s role in the genocide in Gaza
Microsoft is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and in honour of this milestone, Bill Gates has published a blog post about the first code the company ever wrote. In 1975, Paul Allen and I created Microsoft because we believed in our vision of a computer on every desk and in every home. Five decades later, Microsoft continues to innovate new way … ⌘ Read more
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@bender I taught the whole ecosystem 😁
@prologic @eapl.me The question I was asked the most was: How do I discover people?
Someone came up with a fantastic idea, instead of adding the new twt at the end of the feed, do it at the beginning. So you can paginate by cutting the request every few lines.
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Twtxt was made for nerds, by nerds.
I’d like to change that. It’s by nerds/hackers, for nerds/hackers and friends of these. It doesn’t have to be hacky all the time, as you don’t need to be a nerd to have a blog.
But, for that to happen, someone has to build the tools to improve UX.by design there really is no way to easily discovers others
Yeah, I agree, and although there are directories of email addresses, usually you don’t want that, unless you are a ‘public figure’.
I couldn’t say that a microblogging is a “social network” by default, as a blog is not either. At the same time, people would expect to find new people and conversations, as you’d do in a forum.
I think of two features on top of the current spec:
- Clients showing a few posts of what your following are watching but you don’t, so perhaps you find something interesting to follow next. Or that feature of “Your ‘followings’ are following these accounts/people”. (Hard to explain in english, but I hope you get the idea)
- Sharing your .txt into some directory, saying “Hey, I have this twtxt URL, I want to be discovered”. I’m thinking of something like the Federated tab on Mastodon.
Netlify deploys hundreds of thousands of Next.js sites – here’s what challenging
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Wow, phishing is just around the corner 👀
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2 is a great idea, you should suggest it in that blog post.
About 1, well, I think anyone has an email address and only about 5% use a Feed, so it makes sense to offer what most people use 🤔
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Wow, phishing is just around the corner 👀
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@eapl.me@eapl.me Interesting! Two points stood right out to me:
Why the hell are e-mail newsletters considered a valid option in the first place? Just offer an Atom feed and be done with it! Especially for a blog of this very type. This doesn’t even involve a third party service. Although, in addition he also links to Feedburner, what the fuck!? No e-mail address or the like is needed and subject to being disclosed.
When these spam mailers want to prevent resubscribing, then for fuck’s sake, why don’t they use a hash of the e-mail address (I saw that in yarnd) for that purpose? Storing the e-mail address in clear text after unsubscribing is illegal in my book.
Bypassing Detections with Command-Line Obfuscation https://www.wietzebeukema.nl/blog/bypassing-detections-with-command-line-obfuscation
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My twtxt feed is now also available at gemini://roccodrom.de/twtxt.txt
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well, I assume by syntax you mean Gemtext (which I like a lot, my personal blog is built on top of it), so I think it might work for twtxt clients…
I knew of twtxt in Gemini Antenna, so at least the 2017 spec might work on that protocol. I think the main issue with extensions is that they weren’t designed with many URLs and protocols in mind.
Also I have to admit that the Gemini community significantly reduced in the last few years. I don’t know how worth it is to add support for Gemini now.
thinking about deploying anubis (https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/anubis/) for superlove bc i doubt robots.txt is doing anything lmao
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twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers.
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it seems to be “an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts)” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog#History
KDE splits KWin into kwin_x11 and kwin_wayland
One of the biggest behind-the-scenes changes in the upcoming Plasma 6.4 release is the split of kwin_x11 and kwin_wayland codebases. With this blog post, I would like to delve in what led us to making such a decision and what it means for the future of kwin_x11. ↫ Vlad Zahorodnii For the most part, this change won’t mean much for users of KWin on either Wayland or X11, at least for now. At least for the remainder of the Plasma 6.x life … ⌘ Read more
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twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers.
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well (insert stubborn emoji here) 😛, word blog comes from weblog, and microblogging could derivate from ‘smaller weblog’. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Microblogging
I’d differentiate it from sharing status updates as it was done with ‘finger’ or even a BBS. For example, being able to reply; create new threads and sharing them on a URL is something we could expect from ‘Twitter’, the most popular microbloging model (citation needed)
I like to discuss it, since conversations usually are improved if we sync on what we understand for the same words.
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twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers.
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I’d need to think about it deeply, but at a first sight, nanoblogging would be a simple text (like the original twtxt spec, aimed for TUIs), and microblogging (like Twitter was a few years ago), would be about sharing texts, images, videos, GIFs, links, and perhaps Markdown styling.
Why? You have shorter messages than in a blog, but you may add almost anything you could do in a blog.
Buuut… who knows?
I just learned about a few to me unknown git settings: https://blog.gitbutler.com/how-git-core-devs-configure-git/ Let’s see how quickly I can’t live without them anymore. ;-)
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I read a lot about Clean Code, SOLID, TDD, DDD... now I'm discovering «A Philosophy of Software Design»... but nobody talks about the importance of the project architecture. Do we depend on the framework to do the work for us?
You know I'm a big fan of Clean Architecture, but I feel alone when I share my thoughts on social media or at work.
You have to think outside the framework.
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I agree. finding good writings on architecture is hard to find. I used to read architecture reviews over on the high scalability blog. i suspect the reason why is that the arch is how the big tech companies can build moats around their bases. I know in AWS world it only goes as far as how to nickle and dime you to death.
I have the books but they don’t grow much more past interview level.
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(#cwfxolq) @movq / @ well, I was wrong. It doesn't merit congratulations. Boy, that 2032 asteroid is starting to look quite appealing...
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@bender@twtxt.net Sorry to disappoint (again): https://blogs.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/2025/02/24/latest-calculations-conclude-asteroid-2024-yr4-now-poses-no-significant-threat-to-earth-in-2032-and-beyond/
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I'm in an article in Quanta Magazine! It's about the bizarre world of algorithms that re-use memory that's already full. https://www.quantamagazine.org/catalytic-computing-taps-the-full-power-of-a-full-hard-drive-20250218/ I'm the one with all the snow in the background.
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@falsifian@www.falsifian.org Neat, I got the principle, so mission accomplished. :-)
I have configured my vim to use a tab width of four. So, I noticed that especially https://www.falsifian.org/blog/2021/06/04/catalytic/reachability_with_stack.cc (but also partially the other C++ file) mixes tabs and spaces for indentation. :-)
Chromium Ozone/Wayland: the last mile stretch
Lets start with some context, the project consists of implementing, shipping and maintaining native Wayland support in the Chromium project. Our team at Igalia has been leading the effort since it was first merged upstream back in 2016. For more historical context, there are a few blog posts and this amazing talk, by my colleagues Antonio Gomes and Max Ihlenfeldt, presented at last year’s Web Engines Hackfest. Especially due to the Lacros pr … ⌘ Read more
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I'm in an article in Quanta Magazine! It's about the bizarre world of algorithms that re-use memory that's already full. https://www.quantamagazine.org/catalytic-computing-taps-the-full-power-of-a-full-hard-drive-20250218/ I'm the one with all the snow in the background.
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@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I am a big fan of “obvious” math facts that turn out to be wrong. If you want to understand how reusing space actually works, you are mostly stuck reading complexity theory papers right now. Ian wrote a good survey: https://iuuk.mff.cuni.cz/~iwmertz/papers/m23.reusing_space.pdf . It’s written for complexity theorists, but some of will make sense to programmers comfortable with math. Alternatively, I wrote an essay a few years ago explaining one technique, with (math-loving) programmers as the intended audience: https://www.falsifian.org/blog/2021/06/04/catalytic/ .
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@eapl.me Read flags are so simple, yet powerful in my opinion. I really don't understand why this is not a thing in most twtxt clients. It's completely natural in e-mail programs and feed readers, but it hasn't made the jump over to this domain.
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that’s a fair point.
Perhaps, since Twitter in 2006 never implemented read flags, every derivative microblogging system never saw that as an expected feature. This is curious because Twitter started with SMS, where on our phones we can mark messages as read or unread.
I think it all comes from the difference between reading an email (directed to you) vs. reading public posts (like a blog or a ‘wall,’ where you don’t mark posts as read). It’s not necessary to mark it as ‘read’, you just jump over it.
Reading microblogging posts in an email program is not common, I think, and I haven’t really used it, so I cannot say how it works, and whether it would be better for me or not.
However, I’ve used Thunderbird as a feed reader, and I understand the advantages when reading blog posts.
About read flags being simple, well… we just had a discussion this morning about how tracking read messages would require a lot of rethinking for clients such as timeline where no state is stored. Even considering some kind of ‘notification of unread messages or mentions’ is not expected for those minimalist client, so it’s an interesting compromise to think about.
Linear feeds are a dark pattern - A proposal for Mastodon
https://tilde.town/~dzwdz/blog/feeds.html
I’ve polished the CSS style a bit, you can try it here: https://eapl.me/treed/