I wrote about making Glenda’s Joy Division cover (with updated colors and a link to source): http://a.9srv.net/b/2024-11-23

Wow! Just Wow! 😮 Discovered this whilst trying to debug why my Youtube frontend no longer works:

$ youtube-dl 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpiK1FMy2Mg'
[youtube] YpiK1FMy2Mg: Downloading webpage
WARNING: unable to extract uploader id; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; see  https://yt-dl.org/update  on how to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
ERROR: unable to download video data: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

@prologic@twtxt.net Just gave this one a try to update my twtxt.txt file with a proper # follow = ... list! 🙏

gemini calls the request-response cycle a transaction in the spec. since trasactions are not cached, we have this problem where we can’t tell if anything was updated without fetching it and we can’t indicate how often a client should expect the content to be valid. the most common solution right now to just to keep requesting the resource until it changes or stops existing, which isn’t ideal. this sort of update notification model is interesting because it re-frames your thinking into something more like event sourcing. you end up needing to add an event queue and dispatch to the server, which is a bit more complex on the server side than plain static files, but the client stays the same. i’m curious to see what kind of systems could be built on this gemini message queue concept.

Did Apple Just Kill Social Apps?
Apple’s iOS 18 update has introduced changes to contact sharing that could significantly impact social app developers. The new feature allows users to selectively share contacts with apps, rather than granting access to their entire address book. While Apple touts this as a privacy enhancement, developers warn it may hinder the growth of new social platforms. Nikita Bier, a start-up founder, called it “the en … ⌘ Read more

@off_grid_living@twtxt.net is it locked because of a DRM thing or something else?

Otherwise you can check if you already have the pdftotext command that comes with the poppler-utils package, try converting converting the pdf into a text file and copy to your heart’s content. I have just tried it myself.

If you don’t have it already here’s what you can do on Ubuntu or any Debian based distribution of Linux:

• Update and upgrade your packages:
  > sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
  
• Install the poppler-utils package
  > sudo apt install poppler-utils
  
• Now you can convert your pdf to txt file with:
  > pdftotxt -layout -enc UTF-8 name_of_source_file.pdf name_of_destination_file.txt
  

You can always do a pdftotxt --help to see the rest of possible options.
Hope this helps.

@sorenpeter@darch.dk Points 2 & 3 aren’t really applicable here in the discussion of the threading model really I’m afraid. WebMentions is completely orthogonal to the discussion. Further, no-one that uses Twtxt really uses WebMentions, whilst yarnd supports the use of WebMentions, it’s very rarely used in practise (if ever) – In fact I should just drop the feature entirely.

The use of WebSub OTOH is far more useful and is used by every single yarnd pod everywhere (no that there’s that many around these days) to subscribe to feed updates in ~near real-time without having the poll constantly.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com This is one of the reasons why yarnd has a couple of settings with some sensible/sane defaults:

I could already imagine a couple of extreme cases where, somewhere, in this peaceful world one’s exercise of freedom of speech could get them in Real trouble (if not danger) if found out, it wouldn’t necessarily have to involve something to do with Law or legal authorities. So, If someone asks, and maybe fearing fearing for… let’s just say ‘Their well being’, would it heart if a pod just purged their content if it’s serving it publicly (maybe relay the info to other pods) and call it a day? It doesn’t have to be about some law/convention somewhere … 🤷 I know! Too extreme, but I’ve seen news of people who’d gone to jail or got their lives ruined for as little as a silly joke. And it doesn’t even have to be about any of this.

There are two settings:

$ ./yarnd --help 2>&1 | grep max-cache
      --max-cache-fetchers int        set maximum numnber of fetchers to use for feed cache updates (default 10)
  -I, --max-cache-items int           maximum cache items (per feed source) of cached twts in memory (default 150)
  -C, --max-cache-ttl duration        maximum cache ttl (time-to-live) of cached twts in memory (default 336h0m0s)

So yarnd pods by default are designed to only keep Twts around publicly visible on either the anonymous Frontpage or Discover View or your Timeline or the feed’s Timeline for up to 2 weeks with a maximum of 150 items, whichever get exceeded first. Any Twts over this are considered “old” and drop off the active cache.

It’s a feature that my old man @off_grid_living@twtxt.net was very strongly in support of, as was I back in the day of yarnd’s design (nothing particularly to do with Twtxt per se) that I’ve to this day stuck by – Even though there are some 😉 that have different views on this 🤣

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.

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org this one hits hard, as jenny was just updated today. :‘-(

@bender@twtxt.net Does it have to. To my understanding, all you have to do is to add in a claim to your Twtxt feed link into your key, update your profile and post one of These Identity formats to your Twtxt file/Profile…

Give me a couple of minutes, I’ll give it a try myself 😉

So this is a great thread. I have been thinking about this too.. and what if we are coming at it from the wrong direction? Identity being tied to a given URL has always been a pain point. If i get a new URL its almost as if i have a new identity because not only am I serving at a new location but all my previous communications are broken because the hashes are all wrong.

What if instead we used this idea of signatures to thread the URLs together into one identity? We keep the URL to Hash in place. Changing that now is basically a no go. But we can create a signature chain that can link identities together. So if i move to a new URL i update the chain hosted by my primary identity to include the new URL. If i have an archived feed that the old URL is now dead, we can point to where it is now hosted and use the current convention of hashing based on the first url:

The signature chain can also be used to rotate to new keys over time. Just sign in a new key or revoke an old one. The prior signatures remain valid within the scope of time the signatures were made and the keys were active.

The signature file can be hosted anywhere as long as it can be fetched by a reasonable protocol. So say we could use a webfinger that directs to the signature file? you have an identity like frank@beans.co that will discover a feed at some URL and a signature chain at another URL. Maybe even include the most recent signing key?

From there the client can auto discover old feeds to link them together into one complete timeline. And the signatures can validate that its all correct.

I like the idea of maybe putting the chain in the feed preamble and keeping the single self contained file.. but wonder if that would cause lots of clutter? The signature chain would be something like a log with what is changing (new key, revoke, add url) and a signature of the change + the previous signature.

# chain: ADDKEY kex14zwrx68cfkg28kjdstvcw4pslazwtgyeueqlg6z7y3f85h29crjsgfmu0w 
# sig: BEGIN SALTPACK SIGNED MESSAGE. ... 
# chain: ADDURL https://txt.sour.is/user/xuu
# sig: BEGIN SALTPACK SIGNED MESSAGE. ...
# chain: REVKEY kex14zwrx68cfkg28kjdstvcw4pslazwtgyeueqlg6z7y3f85h29crjsgfmu0w
# sig: ...

I wonder if bento has slightly missed the key to being a total genius approach to host management. ok hear me out. each node periodically pulls configuration from a coordination node that hosts a binary cache. the admin may make changes and pre-build them maybe kick off an update task manually if they want, but the point is there’s an automated checkin. for my case, the device I have available for coordination isn’t really capable of hosting a binary cache for any of my other machines. the nix store for my dev machine is larger than the entire disk of the coordinator! and due to the yearly heat my best machine can’t be reliably powered on all the time. so i started thinking to myself, “self, what if instead of having a central coordinator we fetched configuration from a reliable git mirror (maybe git+torrent some day) and consume it as a flake. the source could even be swapped out using a flake registry (so you don’t even have to commit to self-hosting anything other than a json file). then managed hosts only have to be setup to consume the registry and the shared flake (which registers the update agent) and DONE?”

@movq@www.uninformativ.de pretty cool! Switched, and pulled. Nice update on README!

OK. @quark@ferengi.one did not see this update, but should see this reply now, as broken.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m not sure what this update does, but

https://twtxt.net/external?uri=https://google.com&nick=lovetocode999

still exhibits the same problem, on your pod and on mine, after the latest update.

@prologic@twtxt.net OK, I just updated to commit 77d527, which looks to be the same one you’re running right now. I forgot to blow away my cache before restarting, so I just deleted the cache file and restarted.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci appreciate it if you find the time to update again 🙏

@prologic@twtxt.net What? I compiled, updated, and restarted. If you check what my pod reports, it gives that 7a… SHA. I don’t know what that other screenshot is showing but it seems to be out of date. That was the SHA I was running before this update.

@prologic@twtxt.net This does not seem to fix the problem for me, or I’ve done something wrong. I did the following:

1. Pull the latest version from git (I have commit 7ad848, same as on twtxt.net I believe).
   
2. make build and make install
   
3. Restart yarnd
   
4. Refresh cache in Poderator Settings
   

Yet I still see these bogus /external things on my pod when I hit URLs like the one I sent you recently. When I hit such a URL with curl I think it’s giving an error? But in a web browser, the (buggy) response is the same as it was before I updated.

So, this problem is not fixed for me.

@prologic@twtxt.net Aha, now it gives an error. OK I’m updating to this to see if it fixes the issue on my pod! Thank you.

@prologic@twtxt.net I think there’s more to it than that. I’ve updated, yet hundreds of gigabytes of junk is still accumulating.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m still getting this crap:

abucci@buc:~/yarnd/yarn$ ls -lh /tmp/yarnd-avatar-*
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci 863M Jul 25 14:19 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-1594499680
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci 7.8G Jul 25 14:19 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-2144295337
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci 9.8G Jul 25 14:19 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-2334738193
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci  10G Jul 25 14:14 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-2494107777
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci 9.5G Jul 25 13:59 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-2619243454
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci  11G Jul 25 14:04 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-2922187513
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci 7.5G Jul 25 14:14 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-349775570
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci  10G Jul 25 14:09 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-3640724243
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci 901M Jul 25 14:19 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-3921595598
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci 9.5G Jul 25 13:59 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-609094539
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci 9.3G Jul 25 14:04 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-755173392
-rw------- 1 abucci abucci 7.9G Jul 25 14:09 /tmp/yarnd-avatar-984061000

Something like 100 Gbytes of this junk has accumulated since I updated and re-started the server. I’m now running the latest version of yarnd, so the update did not fix the problem. Something else is going wrong.

How are temporary files growing to 10 Gbytes in size? The name of the file is “yarn-avatar”, but why would avatars be so large?

@prologic@twtxt.net Aha, got it. Thanks for looking into it. I’m updating now and we’ll see if that stops it.

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net It’s insane that a single botched software update can have worldwide impact. We’ve messed up badly.

Windows computers around the world are failing in a major outage
An update to a piece of software called CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor appears to be negatively impacting Windows computers worldwide, with banks, airports, broadcasters and more finding that devices display a “blue screen of death” instead of booting up ⌘ Read more

So updated. Seems to duplicate here in the ui. And what is this “Read More” on every twt now?

@prologic@twtxt.net Well ain’t that grand? I’ll get it updated.

@prologic@twtxt.net Well ain’t that grand? I’ll get it updated

@prologic@twtxt.net cool, i’ll update shortly!

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com great find! i’ll update that :)

update: #jedeteste le covid

I think it is a good addition. Similar to how the Fraidycat RSS reader works. Fraidyc.at also support twtxt, but have not seen any updates since 2021…

Holly insert inappropriate word here ! 🤣 I have finally done it !!!

FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE (GENERIC) #0 releng/14.0-n265380-f9716eee8ab4: Fri Nov 10 05:57:23 UTC 2023

Welcome to FreeBSD!

% pkg update
The package management tool is not yet installed on your system.
Do you want to fetch and install it now? [y/N]:

A freshly installed #FreeBSD Over SSH, thanks to mfsBSD !

Going to have to reinstall my Yunohost server one of these days as the packages no longer seem to be updateable.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org its a hierarchy key value format. I designed it for the network peering tools i use.. I can grant access to different parts of the tree to other users.. kinda like directory permissions. a basic example of the format is:

@namespace
# multi
# line
# comment
root :value

# example space comment
@namespace.name space-tag 

# attribute comments
attribute attr-tag  :value for attribute

# attribute with multiple 
# lines of values
foo :bar
      :bin
      :baz

repeated :value1
repeated :value2

each @ starts the definition of a namespace kinda like [name] in ini format. It can have comments that show up before. then each attribute is key :value and can have their own # comment lines.
Values can be multi line.. and also repeated..

the namespaces and values can also have little meta data tags added to them.

the service can define webhooks/mqtt topics to be notified when the configs are updated. That way it can deploy the changes out when they are updated.

I have a habit of running system updates on my work laptop before going out for coffee. Like some kind of ritual to prepare to go into the world fully patched.

George Lewis’ update to Voyager: Forager

I love everything about this. #nowplaying

Update on my Fibre to the Premise upgrade (FTTP). NBN installer came out last week to install the NTD and Utility box, after some umming and arring, we figured out the best place to install it. However this mean he wasn’t able to look it up to the Fibre in the pit, and required a 2nd team to come up and trench a new trench and conduit and use that to feed Fibre from the pit to the utility box.

I rang up my ISP to find out when this 2nd team was booked, only to discover to my horror and the horror of my ISP that this was booked a month out on the 2rd Feb 2024! 😱

After a nice small note from my provider to NBN, suddenly I get a phone call and message from an NBN team that do trenching to say it would be done on Saturday (today). That got completed today (despite the heavy rain).

Now all that’s left is a final NBN tech to come and hook the two fibre pieces together and “light it up”! 🥳

So now that I have a basic Twtxt form, I can also update my feed even when I am not on my PC.

By using scp I can see just how fast my updates are published to the WWW.

Anyone else keeping personal .log files updated through basic shell commands?

@adi@twtxt.net I think it is, and one benefit they have is that you can add third-party repositories to the F-Droid app as you discover them. So, for instance, if you know of a developer who pushes builds to an F-Droid compatible repository, you can add that to your F-Droid app and start tracking updates like you would for any other app in there. Can’t do that with Google Play!

F-Droid tends to focus on open source applications that can be built in a reproducible way, which limits the inventory (though of course tends to mean the apps are safer and don’t spy on you). There are non-free apps in there as well but they come with warnings so you’re informed about what you might be sacrificing by using them.

That said if you have a favorite app you get through Google Play, there’s a decent chance it won’t be in F-Droid. Many “big corporate” apps aren’t, and vendor-specific apps tend not to be either. But for most of the major functions you might want, like email clients, calendar apps, weather apps, etc etc, there are very good substitutes now in F-Droid. You’re definitely making a trade-off though.

What I did was go through the apps I had installed on my last phone, found as many substitutes in F-Droid as I could, started using those instead to see how they worked, and bit by bit replaced as much as I could from Google Play with a comparable app from F-Droid. I still have a few apps (mostly vendor-specific things that don’t have substitutes) that come from Google Play but I’m aiming to be rid of those before I need to replace this phone.

GnuCOBOL 3.2 Released After 2+ Years In Development
For those fond of the COBOL programming language and continuing to make use of it in new development efforts, GnuCOBOL 3.2 was released on Friday as the latest feature update for this 21+ year old free software effort around being an open-source COBOL implementation… ⌘ Read more

My home ISP has had a few prefixes allocated. They haven’t rolled of out yet because their custom CRM system needs to be updated to be able to allocate/bill for it. Along other reasons they gave when I asked last.

Friends… I’ve moved my twtxt in english to
https://eapl.me/twtxt.txt

Please update your following list!

Google Says It’ll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI

Google updated its privacy policy over the weekend, explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools.

Google can eat shit.

Funny.. I would never buy an iPhone again. My wife switched back this last phone update and I can’t stand the interface.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de

twtxt, as I believe it was originally intended, are short little status updates – that’s it.

So, basically a .plan file for finger. But, on the web. like a *web*finger. We have come full circle on this loop!

@xuu@txt.sour.is @prologic@twtxt.net Yarn.social without threading (as it would be the case in a “truncated” feed) does not make sense to me.

Put another way: Yarn.social is not twtxt. The content that we all have in our feeds really is much closer to a web forum or usenet or whatever. It’s threaded conversations. twtxt, as I believe it was originally intended, are short little status updates – that’s it. The formats of Yarn.social and twtxt might be very similar, but the content is vastly different and, in a way, incompatible. (As such, I think I understand very well that the original twtxt crowd is disgruntled.)

That proposed truncated feed doesn’t really provide any value, if you ask me. 🤔 It’d just be chaotic.