It turns out my ISP supports ipv6. After 4-5 months with only ipv4, I thought to ask customer support, and they told me how to turn it on. (I'm pretty happy with ebox so far. Low-priced fibre with no issues so far. Though all my traffic goes through Montreal, 500km away from me in Toronto, which adds a few ms to network latency.)
James Cook. Time-space trader and software hipster.
@andros Sorry I missed your messages to #twtxt on IRC. There are people there, but it can take several hours to get a response. E.g. I check it every day or two. I recommend using an IRC bouncer. To answer your question about registries, I used a couple of registries when I first started out, to try to find feeds to follow, but haven't since then. I don't remember which ones, but they were easy to find with web searches.
I installed GrapheneOS for the first time on Wednesday last week on a used Pixel 7a, and I'm impressed. Installation was almost seamless, and I was able to do it from another Android phone. I've run into very few wrinkles, even using Google's proprietary apps with GrapheneOS's "sandboxed" version of Google Play Services. The main problems I've noticed: I can't cast, and Google Timeline doesn't seem to work (though I imagine the intersection between people keen to use GrapheneOS and keen to have Google log their location history is pretty small).
Inversion by Aric McBay was another random library pick. Like The Fall of Io, it's the most recent in a series, though I think this series is pretty loosely connected. In contrast, the villain in this book is simple and cartoonishly evil. The book presents a design for utopia which was interesting but a little cloying. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to want to live there, but I don't think I do. I enjoyed the book as easy reading, and might try the others in the series some time. (4/4)
I read Starter Villain by John Scalzi. Enjoyable, like his other books that I've read. Somewhat sillier. (3/4)
I'm enjoying Wesley Chu's Tao and Io series. Spies, action, ancient aliens. Some funny parts, some interesting world-building parts, some action-filled parts. I picked up The Fall of Io at random from a library a few weeks ago, and it turned out to be the last in a series of six (technically two series), so after finishing that I read the first and am partway through the second. Usually I try to read series in order, but this way is interesting. One thing I liked about The Fall of Io was that it it followed many points of view with somewhat conflicting interests, some more evil than others, and I felt sympathy for most of them. (I was kind of hoping it would be about Jupiter's moon Io, but it wasn't, but I'm satisfied with what I ended up with.) (2/4)
Diving into mblaze, I think I've nearly* reached peek email geek.
Just a bunch of shell commands I can pipe together to search, list, view and reply to email (after syncing it to a local Maildir).
EXAMPLES at https://git.vuxu.org/mblaze/tree/README
So far I'm using most of the tools directly from the command line, but I might take inspiration from https://sr.ht/~rakoo/omail/ to make my workflow a bit more efficient.
*To get any closer, I think I'd have to hand-craft my own SMTP client or something.
Recent #fiction #scifi #reading:
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The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa. Lovely writing. Very understated; reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro. Sort of like Nineteen Eighty-Four but not. (I first heard it recommended in comparison to that work.)
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Subcutanean by Aaron Reed; https://subcutanean.textories.com/ . Every copy of the book is different, which is a cool idea. I read two of them (one from the library, actually not different from the other printed copies, and one personalized e-book). I don't read much horror so managed to be a little creeped out by it, which was fun.
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The Wind from Nowhere, a 1962 novel by J. G. Ballard. A random pick from the sci-fi section; I think I picked it up because it made me imagine some weird 4-dimensional effect ("from nowhere" meaning not in a normal direction) but actually (spoiler) it was just about a lot of wind for no reason. The book was moderately entertaining but there was nothing special about it.
Currently reading Scale by Greg Egan and Inversion by Aric McBay.
More thoughts about changes to twtxt (as if we haven't had enough thoughts):
- There are lots of great ideas here! Is there a benefit to putting them all into one document? Seems to me this could more easily be a bunch of separate efforts that can progress at their own pace:
1a. Better and longer hashes.
1b. New possibly-controversial ideas like edit: and delete: and location-based references as an alternative to hashes.
1c. Best practices, e.g. Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
1d. Stuff already described at dev.twtxt.net that doesn't need any changes.
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We won't know what will and won't work until we try them. So I'm inclined to think of this as a bunch of draft ideas. Maybe later when we've seen it play out it could make sense to define a group of recommended twtxt extensions and give them a name.
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Another reason for 1 (above) is: I like the current situation where all you need to get started is these two short and simple documents:
#fzf is the new emacs: a tool with a simple purpose that has evolved to include an #email client. https://sr.ht/~rakoo/omail/
I'm being a little silly, of course. fzf doesn't actually check your email, but it appears to be basically the whole user interface for that mail program, with #mblaze wrangling the emails.
I've been thinking about how I handle my email, and am tempted to make something similar. (When I originally saw this linked the author was presenting it as an example tweaked to their own needs, encouraging people to make their own.)
This approach could surely also be combined with #jenny, taking the place of (neo)mutt. For example mblaze's mthread tool presents a threaded discussion with indentation.
I wrote some code to try out non-hash reply subjects formatted as (replyto
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 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.
(replyto http://darch.dk/twtxt.txt 2024-09-15T12:50:17Z) Hmm, but yarnd also isn't showing these twts as being part of a thread. @prologic you said yarnd respects customs subjects. Shouldn't these twts count as having a custom subject, and get threaded together?
(replyto http://darch.dk/twtxt.txt 2024-09-15T12:50:17Z) yarnd just doesn't render the subject. Fair enough. It's (replyto http://darch.dk/twtxt.txt 2024-09-15T12:50:17Z), and if you don't want to go on a hunt, the twt hash is weadxga: https://twtxt.net/twt/weadxga
(replyto http://darch.dk/twtxt.txt 2024-09-15T12:50:17Z) @sorenpeter I like this idea. Just for fun, I'm using a variant in this twt. (Also because I'm curious how it non-hash subjects appear in jenny and yarn.)
URLs can contain commas so I suggest a different character to separate the url from the date. Is this twt I've used space (also after "replyto", for symmetry).
I think this solves:
- Changing feed identities: although @mckinley points out URLs can change, I think this syntax should be okay as long as the feed at that URL can be fetched, and as long as the current canonical URL for the feed lists this one as an alternate.
- editing, if you don't care about message integrity
- finding the root of a thread, if you're not following the author
An optional hash could be added if message integrity is desired. (E.g. if you don't trust the feed author not to make a misleading edit.) Other recent suggestions about how to deal with edits and hashes might be applicable then.
People publishing multiple twts per second should include sub-second precision in their timestamps. As you suggested, the timestamp could just be copied verbatim.
@prologic 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
@movq Is there a good way to get jenny to do a one-off fetch of a feed, for when you want to fill in missing parts of a thread? I just added @slashdot to my private follow file just because @prologic keeps responding to the feed :-P and I want to know what he's commenting on even though I don't want to see every new slashdot twt.
Morphotrophic by Greg Egan is built around an idea for how life on Earth could have worked out differently. It gets increasingly strange and interesting as the story progresses. My partner and I finished it last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. The beginning is free online: https://gregegan.net/MORPHOTROPHIC/00/MorphotrophicExcerpt.html #scifi #reading
Does anyone care about the 140-char limit recommended by the #twtxt spec? I have been trying to respect it but wonder if it's wasted effort.
I learned a #Toronto #hex club just started! I've played since '98 or '99, but rarely in person. https://www.hexwiki.net/index.php/Hex_clubs
Hello twtxt! I'm James (or @falsifian). I live in Toronto. Recent interests include space complexity, simple software, and science fiction.