happy free comic book day! my store was out of freebies but i got some of my pulls and also a trade of one of my favorite reads last year!

that said, and reading to @sorenpeter@darch.dk and @andros@twtxt.andros.dev I have new thoughts. I assume that this won’t change anyone’s opinions or priorities, so it makes no harm sharing them.

It’s always tempting to use something that already exists (like X, Masto, Bsky, etc.) rather that building anything through effort and disagreement until reaching to something useful and valuable together. A ‘social service’ is only useful if people is using it.

I’ll add that I haven’t lost interest on the ‘hacky’ part of twtxt about developing tools, protocols, and extensions as a community. It’s the appealing part! It’s a nice hobby to have, shared with random people across the world.
But this is not the right way for me, and makes me feel that I’m unwelcome to propose something different (after watching replies to my previous twt). Feels like “If you don’t agree, you are free to leave, we’ll miss you.” Naah, not cool. I’ve lived that many times before, and nowadays I don’t have enough spare time and energy for a hobby like that.

Let’s see what happens next with the micro-community!

CNCF tells main NATS contributor Synadia that it’s free to fork off
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AI Goes to College for the Free Money
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@prologic@twtxt.net Exactly, @bender@twtxt.net! :-D This is at the entrance of a veggie farm (11 & 12) where there are free-ranging kids playing on the road, so people should slow down when driving there to buy some supplies. I also wondered why the sign says “Halt!” instead of “Langsam fahren!” (Drive slowly!) or something like that. On second thought, maybe to actually park there on the street right at the property line.

I actually never walked on that road before and discovered that this was a dead end. There’s usually at the very least a foot path on which to continue when passing a farm. Not this time, though. I didn’t want to stamp down the high grass to cut across country, so I had to walk back maybe 150 meters. Not too bad.

@prologic@twtxt.net pinging the involved (@andros@twtxt.andros.dev, @abucci@anthony.buc.ci, @eapl.me@eapl.me, @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org, @movq@www.uninformativ.de, @sorenpeter@darch.dk), just in case. I might have forgotten someone, please feel free to ping them.

@javivf@adn.org.es Go for it! You’re free to use it.
It’s been a community adventure to explore the whole DM/encryption thing. So the community can do with it whatever they want. 😎

Show HN: I made a web-based, free alternative to Screen Studio
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A tuition-free school created by Zuckerberg and Chan will shutter next year
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Four Views on Free Will (2nd edition): https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/four-views-on-free-will-2nd-edition/

WikiTree: The Free Family Tree
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Voilà, je ferme mon abonnement freebox pour retourner chez ovh. Maintenant, c’est free mobile que je veux remplacer, reste à trouver un fournisseur pas trop mal

Ça y est, je suis éligible à la fibre chez OVH! J’ai très envie de quitter free!!!

99% Effective: First Hormone-Free Male Birth Control Pill Enters Human Trials
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Free high-performance cross-platform game engine
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@movq@www.uninformativ.de HELP THIS IS GENUINELY SO SWEET THANK YOU ;_; omg i felt so nervous posting this because i was like what if i get something wrong but then i did it anyway and i felt so free… like woah i did all of this

Cloud-free connection of ESP32-based air purifier to Home Assistant (2024)
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AI problems, top to bottom:

1: Open AI nerds, believe fine tuning a language model algorithm, will eventually produce an AGI god.

2: Subpar artists and techbros who can’t code, convinced AI image bashing and vibe coding, will help convince the dumber parts of Internet, they are a real deal.

3: Parasites, using AI to scam people, because they just want passive income, selling crap, made by an automated process.

Side: Adobe&co, killing Flash/old web, pricing new artists and developers out, to face learning curves of free tools, or use AI, peddled as solution.

@bender@twtxt.net Did you see the Singaporian president’s speech on this whole nonsense?! 😂 (trade wards, tariffs, free markets, etc)

@prologic@twtxt.net in this case it isn’t vendor lock-in. I believe they do it because the carrier “eats” the costs (the interest part of the instalments). The phones are fully unlocked.

I will return the two we got for parents, and re-buy them again, this time on an instalment plan. Why pay $2,000 up front when you can split the cost in convenient monthly payments, all interest free, right?

One was able to purchase iPhones on instalments (and interest free), whether they were associated with a carrier, or not. The only way to buy them on instalments now is if the are associated with a carrier; otherwise one gets charged the full amount up front.

So, yeah, going to return a couple of those this weekend.

FreeDOS: history, legacy, and a valuable resource for old machines
FreeDOS is a free and open‐source operating system designed to be compatible with MS‑DOS. Developed to keep the DOS experience alive even after Microsoft ended support for MS‑DOS, FreeDOS has grown into a complete environment that not only preserves classic DOS functionality but also introduces modern enhancements. Its simplicity and low resource requirements have made it a cherished resource for retro … ⌘ Read more

well, there is a whole book about piracy, DRM and selling stuff on the internet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Doesn%27t_Want_to_Be_Free

So I won’t add much to the topic, what I can say is that this is about being pragmatic. There is some people who’s gonna spend their money on books but it requires publicity (polemic topic) and subsidizing creativity with our own money (another controversial one).

Otherwise it’s a difficult discipline /profession /industry

@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 🤣

Image

@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 :

Image

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.