n8   Doesn't follow you    @n8@mastodon.social

ꜱʜᴏᴡ ʟᴇꜱꜱ

Statement of digital principles:
- When you buy a physical book you should get the ebook free too
- When you buy a house you should get the 3D model free too
- You should also get a cardboard model for that matter
- When you meet a person you should get a free foam puppet of them

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts based around people running home-brew RPG systems (or totally customized ones), specifically where folks use that to develop stories having nothing to do with D&D/fantasy/combat stuff. (It's research. Get off my back.)

Anyway, it's suuuper depressing how many of these folks create their support-art materials in, you guessed it, MS Paint....

If anyone feels like spinning up a useful GIMP or Inkscape tutorial: that's a real need. And an unserved audience.

Academic mentor during university meeting: "be careful not to fall into the rabbit hole of writing software".

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high-powered shot

Seriously considering whether I oughta stand up a web service that helps all US residents file & start a C Corp in their state/territory. Point being to drive home the point that one of the political parties cares zero about human beings but will literally do anything to provide financial benefits to a C Corp.

The only thing holding this project up is that I'm not certain that the point would come across, to the people who actually need to get it.

So. You have to run a local script to scrape & convert GitHub notifications (such as issues that you have commented on) into an RSS feed. That's annoying.

OTOH, at least it's possible. GitLab does not even offer a URI for you to get such notifications at all, so you cannot scrape the non-existent HTML to begin with.

Trying out "toot", an ncurses mastodonning interface. So far, it works rather well, but it doesn't seem to support a "notifications view" or "mentions view" or anything like that. So, I guess, if this post bothers you ... you'd might as well keep that to yourself, since I'm not going to find out.

** lifts _weights_. According to the late-night-talk-show-comedy–industrial complex, he uses shoe lifts.

* ill-gotten financial gains. I don't know if he lifts.

So. Apparently, the vast wall of text-mode monitors I've subconsciously been imagining, with terminal panes for htop/glances/nmon for every device plus all kinds of other frivolity is actually called a "bloomberg terminal" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal — which is disappointing. Because it's Bloomberg.

But the fact that that's how Bloomberg amassed all his ill-gotten gains is a fresh reminder that being a middleman is always the best business strategy.

But, hey, why work on that when you could reinvent yet another Slack Clone, amirite?

Irregardless*, there's no real need for Magic Link software to be standardized across platforms. In fact, that's kind of the point. Sadly, when I discussed this with Don, he said he's unaware of any active implementations. There is a "passwordless" module for Flask Security — https://flask-security-too.readthedocs.io/en/stable/configuration.html#passwordless — but it's marked as soon-to-be-replaced.

* that's "unregardless" for those of you in Canada and the UK

Speaking of making commenting easier rather than harder, Don Marti has written about this topic, in particular noting that the "magic link" model is almost the sole option for letting people verify their existence but not burden them with another password ( https://blog.zgp.org/passwords ).

Magic Link is essentially what Mozilla's Persona (original blend; later "BrowserID") was, but like most ideas Moz axed it when theycouldn't persuade Twitter/Google to use it. Why that was the goal? I dunno.

I'm following this evolving thread with interest. That said, it's straight up disturbing how many people's reply is "I don't care about comments" or "I'm only connecting comments to the social-media-network-bubble that I already spend all of my time dwelling in". Me, I want people to be able to comment. And to be able to do it without jumping through eight hoops to register an account on some third-party service. Regardless of that service's source-code availability or underlying protocol.🤨

Historically I'm not a big terminal user (meaning that the stuff I did was primarily in other apps, not that I object to or don't like CLIs), but I increasingly use byobu to juggle sessions where I need to run several weird font-testing utilities in python venvs & localhost web-service-apps while also doing the "real" stuff in a pane. Without multiplexing? That would SUCK...

Big props to Tmux for actually working, and to Dustin Kirkland for making it pleasant with the byobu UI layer.

Here's a terrible idea for all of you who are working on a FOSS project: have "docs.yoursite" web site that has no links anywhere on it to the normal "yoursite" with all the other stuff. Thank me later!

Follow-up thought: there could very well be known, proven solutions to all four of these and still none of them would ever be implemented in bash.

The Four Great unsolved problems in computer science:

• P vs NP
• The Barendregt–Geuvers–Klop conjecture
• Generalized star-height question
• Having shell history work with two terminals

Hey, I'm a big fan of paper, but don't kid yourself that it's "archival" — intrinsically or statistically. A tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiny fraction of the world's paper documents have survived to the present day. Hell, even today, you have to go intentionally out of your way to buy paper, ink/toner, and binding that doesn't degrade, and that's in the era when we "know" what to "do" about it.

I believe I have now successfully recovered a bitcoin wallet file from a backup drive from 2010; regrettably its contents do not reveal me to be a secret millionaire. Still, the exercise was entertaining in its own right.

In unrelated news, I started reading William Gibson this week. So be prepared for a lot of outdated punk references and CYBER STYLEZ.