@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz dmenu is such a great tool. So simple, yet so versatile.

@prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net That’s what I thought as well, sounds way too expensive to me. But I have no idea what the prices are over here. Probably also astronomical. Campers sit around most of the time, one really would need to use them a lot to justify spending so much money on them.

But yeah, each to their own (expensive) hobbies. :-) I, for example, burn my money on tools that I don’t really™ need. :-P

@prologic@twtxt.net Ah, I’m referring to software that’s similar to that of suckless.org: Small, minimal codebases, small tools, but still useful. dmenu is probably the best example and also farbfeld.

Here’s the author of Anubis talking about some of their experiences:

https://xeiaso.net/blog/why-i-use-suckless-tools-2020-06-05/

(You can skip the long config and keybinds part.)

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club This was an interesting read for sure! 👍 I don’t think it had anything I hadn’t already considered in terms of the ethical/moral points of view. I’m not sure where I stand myself either to be honest. I’ve forced myself to get familiar with the ecosystem and tooling, because in my line of work as a tech lead (staff engineer in sre) you don’t want to be that one guy that ya know 😉 Ethically/Morally though, I’m definitely with the sentiment of this post 😅 Much like the whole Crypto hype yaers back (if y’all remember?!) this is also one of the most energy hungry pieces of “tech” (if you can call it that?) in a while. Then there’s these other issues “stealing people’s work”, “reliance is causing humans to become cognitively weak and neural connections to shrink”, to name a few…

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I have to say, this sounds much worse than our stuff at work. 🫩 (We don’t use any Microsoft services, at least not for core tools.)

@bender@twtxt.net Maybe one day I’ll take back over my prologic.blog domain from µBlog and redoit with my handy zs tool with some nice CSS 🤣

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org oh it wouldn’t be very long, maybe that’d make for a fun blog post! i just used the same tool that the nerd font people use to add glyphs, but for a “custom glyph set” i just added. the whole noto font LMAO

@bender@twtxt.net Here’s a short-list:

• Simple, minimal syntax—master the core in hours, not months.
  
• CSP-style concurrency (goroutines & channels)—safe, scalable parallelism.
  
• Blazing-fast compiler & single-binary deploys—zero runtime dependencies.
  
• Rich stdlib & built-in tooling (gofmt, go test, modules).
  
• No heavy frameworks or hidden magic—unlike Java/C++/Python overhead.

@bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net Jokes aside, I don’t think that’s the right approach either. We had spell checkers, since I can remember, as well as other tools, like the smart image select, used mostly to remove backgrounds. These are tools, that just simplify the process of either opening up a dictionary and looking up a word, you can’t remember the spelling of, or the process of placing a billion little dots around the part of an image you want to select - none of these are creative or enjoyable tasks, we already had tools for them, decades before AI. I don’t think we need to go back to cave paintings, to be free of AIs influence on our creative work.

@bender@twtxt.net Yes, you right. But is premium for more than that.
I use a feature I love a lot: customising different searches with different themes or links.
It’s easy to understand with an example. I have a search with the name “Django”. I set sources: Django documentation, stack overflow, topic “programming” and so on. It’s very quick to find Django solutions.
I also have another way to find my stuff: search my blog and repositories.
I had problems paying for the first mouths, now it’s a working tool for me.

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!

I’m with @andros@twtxt.andros.dev and @eapl.me@eapl.me on this one. But I have also lost interest in twtxt lately and currently rethinking what digital tools truly add value to my life. So I will not spending my time on adding more complexity to Timeline. Still a big thanks to you @prologic@twtxt.net for all the great work you have done and all the nice conversations both here and on our video calls.

I also fundamentally do not believe in the notion that Twtxt should be readable and writable by humans. We’ve thrown this “argument” around in support of some of the proposals, and I just don’t buy it (sorry). As an analogy, nobody writes Email by hand and transmits them to mail servers vai SMTP by hand. We use tools to do this. Twtxt/Yarn should be the same IMO.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hahahaha 🤣 I mean it’s “okay” every now and then, but what’s the point of having good clients and tools if we don’t use ‘em 🤣

I would guess useragent tool does the trick, isn’t it?

Show HN: Empty Enter Expander – Type less in the terminal with this tool
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I Designed My LED Matrix PCB with Code Instead of Traditional EDA Tools
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Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979)
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io_uring based rootkit can bypass syscall-focused Linux security tools
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Inspiriert durch äußere Einflüsse habe ich mit litecanvas eine mobile Chooser-App nachgebaut: https://tools.uplegger.eu/mobile.tapChooser/
Jetzt muss ich nie wieder selbst Entscheidungen treffen!1elf 🤗

Ta, @prologic@twtxt.net! Assuming you mean 13, it’s just some old shed in an orchard. I reckon the owners keep some of their tools in there. They are all over the place around here. To me they look like they were all built like 50 odd years ago or maybe more, not sure. I could be completely wrong. I just like the look of them and actually wanted to capture the dark sky with the rolling in thunderstorm, but my camera had totally other plans. Didn’t work out at all.

@bender@twtxt.net I use it. It’s not the feature I use the most in the fediverse, but I communicate this way with several friends. For example, it’s the main way I talk to the original creator of the twtxt-el repository, the way people greet me for the first time or the way they notify me of some bugs in the software I maintain. I can even tell you that it’s the main way I talk to some maintainers of the Emacs community. If there are any of you reading my words, speak up!
Why not have the same? There are things I want to say to @prologic@twtxt.net in private, why should I have to send him an email or private IRC? Or an public twt.
Of course, here’s a topic we’ve already talked about: what is twtxt for you? For me it will always be a social network, in microblogging format, but an asynchronous way of communicating. And having a tool to control visibility is basic 😄
I look forward to hearing from you @eapl.me@eapl.me !

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz At the core, you need an ngircd.conf like this:

[Global]
    Name = your.irc.server.com
    Password = yourfancypassword
    Listen = 0.0.0.0
    Ports = 6667

    AdminInfo1 = Well, me.
    AdminInfo2 = Over here!
    AdminEMail = forget.it@example.invalid

[Options]
    Ident = no
    PAM = no

[SSL]
    CertFile = /etc/ssl/acme/your.irc.server.com.fullchain.pem
    KeyFile = /etc/ssl/acme/private/your.irc.server.com.key
    DHFile = /etc/ngircd/dhparam.pem
    Ports = 6669

Start it and then you can connect on port 6667. (The SSL cert/key must be managed by an external tool, probably something like certbot or acme-client.)

I’m assuming OpenBSD here. Haven’t tried it on Linux lately, let alone Docker. 😅

Seem like it’s a server-client thingy? 🤔 I much prefer tools in this case and defer the responsibility of storage to something else. I really like restic for that reason and the fact that it’s pretty rock solid. I have zero complaints 😅

Timeline of Evolution of Twtxt/Yarn.social:

• 2016 – Twtxt created by John Downey: plain text + HTTP = minimalist microblogging
  
• 2017–2019 – Community builds CLI tools, but adoption remains niche
  
• 2020 – Yarn.social launched by @prologic@twtxt.net with federation, threading, UI
  
• 2021–2023 – Pods sync, user mentions, blocking, search, and media support added
  
• 2024+ – Yarn.social becomes the reference Twtxt platform, with active federated pods

I do not agree with every decision the Internet Archive makes, but I consider it a very important tool, for Internet archival and preservation - to the point, it even influenced what licence I chose, for my media and websites.

Sadly they’re now facing another threat, in the form of litigious music labels, that they’re now trying to convince to stop, by collecting signatures here.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz pandoc is a joy! I haven’t used any Microsoft word processing tools since forever. They want a Word document? Pandoc to the rescue!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de there are many other similar backup tools. I would love to hear what will make you pick Borg above the rest.

What makes Slackware different?
I’m not entirely sure how to link to this properly, but what we have here is a simple, to-the-point text file describing some of the benefits of Slackware, the oldest still maintained Linux distribution. It’s still run by Patrick Volkerding, and focuses on conservative choices and simplicity over ease. I doubt I have to explain the benefits of Slackware to the average OSNews reader, but this simple little text file does serve as a great marketing tool. The fact it’s a … ⌘ Read more

Show HN: I made a tool to send a letter now people use it to just print
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@andros@twtxt.andros.dev how often do you send a private message on the Fediverse? How often do you send PGP/SMIME encrypted emails? Are there other tools that are more suitable for the task? If implementing direct/private messages on twtxt scratches an itch (you know, that hobbyist itch we all get from time to time), then don’t give up so easily. Worse comes to worse, and your feed becomes too noisy, people can simply unfollow/mute.

I really don’t care about direct messages here, but I might be on that bottom 1%!

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Ahh I see 👌

@prologic@twtxt.net Yes, it is a security hole. All dm-echo messages are readable. I intend it to be a debugging tool. Maybe I can include a warning message. If many of you see that it is a serious problem, I can remove the links.

@eapl.me@eapl.me When it is up and running, I promise to add it to the specification. I will also include some corrections.
The nature of twtxt does not allow us to selectively hide clients. It’s a problem not with DM, but with any extension.
@prologic@twtxt.net Yes, it is a security hole. All dm-echo messages are readable. I intend it to be a debugging tool. Maybe I can include a warning message. If many of you see that it is a serious problem, I can remove the links.
@xuu@txt.sour.is It’s already much better than Mastodon :P . Maybe we can remove the sender and receiver references with an intermediary register.

Fascinating read on the emerging Model Context Protocol — a new standard for integrating LLMs with agents and tools.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Just needed to update the version of the tool I packaged as an OCI image 🤣

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.

Add support for skipping backup if data is unchagned · 0cf9514e9e - backup-docker-volumes - Mills 👈 I just discovered today, when running backups, that this commit is why my backups stopped working for the last 4 months. It wasn’t that I was forgetting to do them every month, I broke the fucking tool 🤣 Fuck 🤦‍♂️

Show HN: Building better base images
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FreeDOS 1.4 released
With FreeDOS being, well, DOS, you’d think there wasn’t much point in putting out major releases and making big changes, and you’d mostly be right. However, being a DOS clone doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement within the confines of the various parts and tools that make up DOS, and that’s exactly where FreeDOS focuses its attention. FreeDOS 1.4 comes about three years after 1.2. This version includes an updated FreeCOM, Install program, and HTML Help system. This also includes i … ⌘ Read more

Show HN: I Built a Tool to Find Devs Based on Code, Not LinkedIn Titles
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Windows 9x QuickInstall simplifies installing Windows 98
If you’re elbow-deep in ’90s retrocomputing and maintain a fleet of your own personal seemingly identical but definitely completely different Windows 98 machines, Windows 9x QuickInstall is tailor-made just for you. It takes the root file system of an already installed Windows 98 system and packages it, whilst allowing drivers and tools to be slipstreamed at will. For the installer, it uses Linux as a base, paired with … ⌘ Read more

Hi, So i made a little MVP registry crawler tool for twtxt. It now has a basic UI to play with. It has a somewhat full history back to about 2018-ish. Plus some interesting bits that were timestamped to earlier.

Find it here: https://watcher.sour.is

Code base is found here: https://git.sour.is/sour-is/xt

Amazing! It is a good tool for reading feeds. What you used to calculate the hash?

Microsoft releases Windows 11 roadmap tool to help make sense of Windows 11’s development
I’ve complained about the utter inscrutability of the Windows release process for a long time, with Microsoft seemingly using channels, build numbers, code names, date-based version numbers, and so on interchangeably, making it incredibly hard to keep track of what is being released when. It turns out even Microsoft itself started losing track, because it … ⌘ Read more

Show HN: Dish: A lightweight HTTP and TCP socket monitoring tool written in Go
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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.

Blender releases their Oscar winning version tool
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Ironclad 0.6 released
It’s been a while, but there’s a new release of Ironclad, the formally verified, hard real-time capable kernel written in SPARK and Ada. Aside from the usual bugfixes, this release moves Ironclad from multiboot to Limine, adds x86_64 ACPI support for poweroff and reboot, improvements to PTY support, the VFS layer, and much more. The easiest way to try out Ironclad is to download Gloire, a distribution that uses Ironclad and the GNU tools. It can be installed in both a virtual machine an … ⌘ Read more

Iconography of the PuTTY tools
Ah, PuTTY. Good old reliable PuTTY. This little tool is one of those cornerstone applications in the toolbox of most of us, without any fuss, without any upsells or anti-user nonsense – it just does its job, and it has been doing its job for 30 years. Have you ever wondered, though, where PuTTY’s icons come from, how they were made, and how they evolved over time? PuTTY’s icon designs date from the late 1990s and early 2000s. They’ve never had a major stylistic redesign … ⌘ Read more

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev If something fits in a CSV file, it typically doesn’t require a database. I agree with that. Depending on the application, more complicated queries might benefit from a database, though. I don’t know awk very well, but I could imagine that grep, sed and cut reach their CSV processing limits rather quickly when you have to deal with escaped (multiline) fields.

I only very rarely have to deal with CSV files or databases in my day to day life. Maybe, these classic Unix tools offer some tricks I’m not aware of. When I have some more complicated CSV input, I generally reach for Python.