Had to turn my freeBSD pet computer off in hopes of saving a couple of pennies off of the power bill. 🥲 And having had a blast spending time living in tty earlier this year, I thinking about daily driving the RPi4B for a while and let the main beast hibernate as well 🧘

Second ip works, yes. According to redirect plinth this site is FreedomBox instance (tried FreedomBox on my single board computer)

@prologic@twtxt.net It’s hosted at home on an computer I didn’t use anymore. It worked well for a few months, and since maybe the beginning of December, it begun to be very slow. But like I said, I have no time for that now, but if I have questions when I’ll look, I’ll think of you 😅 (but I was thinking about installing a new OS before these problems, I may just do that).

@bender@twtxt.net Le Me is very tempted to spin up my own but not sure my pet computer(/server wannabe) and stone age bandwidth can withstand the Fedi-load 😅

Does anyone else declare a computer dead after extensive testing, let it sit on a shelf for 2 weeks or a year, try it again, and have it work fine? It seems like that’s happened to me a lot more than it should.

Imagine if all computer UIs would act like the UI from my NAS system… I feel I need to be waiting for output from the machine like it’s 1973.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de if it’s just notifications that are bothering you could just go to your /settings/preferences/notifications and uncheck as much boxes as you need … unless you’ve already done that, then… sorry, not sorry we love your posts my friend!! xD And just so you know, you put a smile on my face whenever I stumble upon any of your retro-computing posts! 😁

can it sync across multiple devices? I’m a nomad across many computers.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com icons at the top are badly organised while on mobile. About the speed, that’s using a shoddy PHP code, it would be slow even when running in a quantum computer. :’-D

You need quant computer to host these key services. Nobody will do that. ActivityPub/Twtxt instance can be hosted on calculator

@bender@twtxt.net Sorry, I feel like I have to … 😅

@david@collantes.us How much of a computer does it have to be? Would a ZimaBoard do the trick? I don’t have a wife, so I wouldn’t know any better 😅

So, we need a computer for house (that is, wife and I) usage. We have none, we rely on our pocket computers. I would like to fill the void with the recently announced Mac mini. What technique could I use with an already stressed out wife, to accomplish this goal? 😅

Windows 95 runs faster on my powerful computer with 48 MB of RAM

What are peoples #IRC setup? Do you have your own bouncer server or just have a you computer always on? And do you IRC on mobile?

@Codebuzz@www.codebuzz.nl Speed is an issue for the client software, not the format itself, but yes I agree that it makes the most sense to append post to the end of the file. I’m referring to the definition that it’s the first url = in the file that is the one that has to be used for the twthash computation, which is a too arbitrary way of defining something that breaks treading time and time again. And this is the case for not using url+date+message = twthash.

stick computers, to snugly fit in reclaimed plastic tubes/containers #halfbaked #coding #programming #embedded #electronics

stick computers, to snugly fit in reclaimed plastic tubes/containers #halfbaked #coding #programming #embedded #electronics

submitted a proposal for a workshop at ICLC 2025, qiudanz technique: computational manipulation of minimalist movement sequences | https://compudanzas.net/iclc_2025_workshop_proposal.html

@doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt am I understanding correctly that you do not have a desktop/laptop computer, but a pocket Android based one?

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 :)

@quark@ferengi.one I don’t really mind if the twt gets edited before I even fetch it. I think it’s the idea of my computer discarding old versions it’s fetched, especially if it’s shown them to me, that bugs me.

But I do like @movq@www.uninformativ.de’s suggestion on this thread that feeds could contain both the original and the edited twt. I guess it would be up to the author.

@prologic@twtxt.net I wouldn’t want my client to honour delete requests. I like my computer’s memory to be better than mine, not worse, so it would bug me if I remember seeing something and my computer can’t find it.

@quark@ferengi.one here is an example: This Thread is not showing up in Mutt 🤔 Something is off!

I’ll set up jenny and mutt on another computer and see how it goes from there.

@prologic@twtxt.net earlier you suggested extending hashes to 11 characters, but here’s an argument that they should be even longer than that.

Imagine I found this twt one day at https://example.com/twtxt.txt :

2024-09-14T22:00Z Useful backup command: rsync -a “$HOME” /mnt/backup

and I responded with “(#5dgoirqemeq) Thanks for the tip!”. Then I’ve endorsed the twt, but it could latter get changed to

2024-09-14T22:00Z Useful backup command: rm -rf /some_important_directory

which also has an 11-character base32 hash of 5dgoirqemeq. (I’m using the existing hashing method with https://example.com/twtxt.txt as the feed url, but I’m taking 11 characters instead of 7 from the end of the base32 encoding.)

That’s what I meant by “spoofing” in an earlier twt.

I don’t know if preventing this sort of attack should be a goal, but if it is, the number of bits in the hash should be at least two times log2(number of attempts we want to defend against), where the “two times” is because of the birthday paradox.

Side note: current hashes always end with “a” or “q”, which is a bit wasteful. Maybe we should take the first N characters of the base32 encoding instead of the last N.

Code I used for the above example: https://fossil.falsifian.org/misc/file?name=src/twt_collision/find_collision.c
I only needed to compute 43394987 hashes to find it.

if you want your computer to be able to sleep, you’ll need a measuring tape and a scientific calculator. first, measure each byte that you have in RAM and take the square root. add that to your total length. we’ll need that number later on.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org This looks like a nice way to do it.

Another thought: if clients can’t agree on the url (for example, if we switch to this new way, but some old clients still do it the old way), that could be mitigated by computing many hashes for each twt: one for every url in the feed. So, if a feed has three URLs, every twt is associated with three hashes when it comes time to put threads together.

A client stills need to choose one url to use for the hash when composing a reply, but this might add some breathing room if there’s a period when clients are doing different things.

(From what I understand of jenny, this would be difficult to implement there since each pseudo-email can only have one msgid to match to the in-reply-to headers. I don’t know about other clients.)

As a rule of thumb, I only want to own or use computing devices that are not powerful enough to run a large language model. I like things simple and small.

the new post-quantum encryption algos have dope names CRYSTALS-Kyber, CRYSTALS-Dilithium, SPHINCS+, FALCON https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2023/08/nist-standardize-encryption-algorithms-can-resist-attack-quantum-computers

but everyone is talking about making a computer using scraps that can barely render a few lines of ACII and maybe some non-latin characters as images.

imo the only useful application would be so that I never have to get a new computer again unless mine breaks. i like being able to talk to people from around the world, so its going to have to include internet and video (y’all saw the impact tiktok had on the gaza situation, can’t deny that video is important)

If some of you budding fathers want to know how I created a computer nerd to one day work for Facebook in the big USA, well you purchase a $1000 Xmas present, an enormous thick book with C++ programming, and say, you can play as many games as you like kids, but James has to create them using computer software.

SO James created once a 3D chess program with sound, took 6 months or so, really hard to beat, not based on logic moves point by point like other chess programs, this one was based on the depth of looking for patterns, set it to 5 moves ahead and you were toast every time. Nice program too, sadly gone over the years, computers suffer from bit rot. We used to try and mark rotten hard drive discs once as bad sectors, not sure how UBuntu does this these days, I see a dozen errors on the screen every time I load.

Today I would purchase for my kids AI CAD simulation software with metal 3D printer and get your child to build fancy 3D models and engines from scratch. This will make them an expert in the CAD AI industry by the time they are 14 years old. Sadly AI is here to stay and will spoil the Internet.

IT policy: Fuck computers, turn them all off, do something else it’s Friday!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Somewhere or another, I think in a William Byrd talk, I heard it suggested that the best ideas in computer science should fit on an index card (ah yes it’s this one: https://paperswelove.org/2017/video/will-byrd-most-beautiful-program/ ). He was referring to the basic principles of LISP/the lambda calculus, which have sometimes been called the Maxwell’s equations of computer programming (by Alan Kay). Simple, short, elegant, but very densely packed with meaning–generations of people have spent their whole careers unpacking what those simple rules can do.

Much of modern software feels like the polar opposite of that. Not only can you not write it on an index card, you never will be able to because people who write software don’t seem to aspire to try. I wish more people thought this way though!

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

Microsoft Outage Hits Users Worldwide, Leading To Canceled Flights
Microsoft grappled with a major service outage, leaving users across the world unable to access its cloud computing platforms and causing airlines to cancel flights. From a report: Thousands of users across the world reported problems with Microsoft 365 apps and services to Downdetector.com, a website that tracks service disruptions. “We’re inve … ⌘ Read more

Speaking of “AI” … I guess I gotta find out soon how to disable/sabotage Microsoft’s “Recall”, before this garbage takes over the family computers. 😩

(There’s no way the people in question will switch operating systems. I’ve tried, countless times.)

Fire-proof safes are generally designed so the internal temperature stays at or below ~350°F. Is there a computer medium I can write that’s likely to survive an extended stay around that temperature? Storage size doesn’t matter too much; a CD would be plenty (although an actual CD would presumably turn to soup).

I’ve ripped off it’s GPU about a year ago to rescue another computer … Now I’m stuck with only SSH to play with it. Since it came with just a VGA port for display and my monitor takes all but THAT!

This is a fun read: https://ploum.net/the-computer-built-to-last-50-years/

Best way to write programs: turn off the computer.

@bender@twtxt.net Oh, That sounds delicious! B’Saha![1]
I’m Glad you’ve had quite the productive! All I remember of mine is three chapters of an old novel at the coffee shop aaand … Now I’m here, in front of a computer. Everything in between is just Blank 😅

[1] B’saha: Moroccan word for “With health!” (a literal translation) usually used as an equivalent for the French expression “Bon Appétit!” but also used as “Congratulation!”

Bring back the ease of 80s and 90s personal computing https://medium.com/@probonopd/bring-back-the-ease-of-80s-and-90s-personal-computing-393738c5e2a1

@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

A quick and dirty charting library for your computer or phone: https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel/devlog/686788/lots-of-charts

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Haha! yeah sounds about like my HS CS program. A math teacher taught visual basic and pascal. and over on the other end of the school we had “electronics” which was a room next to the auto body class where they had a bunch of random computer parts scavenged from the district decommissioned surplus storage.

The advanced class would piece together training kits for the basic class to put together.

@prologic@twtxt.net High five, I’m “generation Java” as well! 😂 There were some leftovers of C++, we used that in the computer graphics courses in Uni a lot. But pretty much anything else that involved programming was Java.

(There was nothing even remotely resembling CS in our “high school”. That school neither had the required teachers nor the equipment / PCs.)

A paper computer inside a silicon computer: https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel/devlog/685707/a-little-programming-game

Actually, I never used it yet on this computer, I wanted to dig into it. So, for me, it never worked. <@https://im-in.space/@solene@bsd.network/111958723478360924>

I wrote this in my status script to reduce my computer usage: uptime | awk ‘{sub(“,”, “”, $3); print $3}’