Threads for dcreemer
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I recently moved into an apartment with symmetrical 1 Gbps fiber internet so acquired an older (but still punchy!) intel NUC off ebay to sit in the fiber closet and host things. It would be fun (?) to host my own mastodon instance, but I wonder whether standing up an instance and federating with others actually makes things worse for those instances, resource-wise, compared to just setting up an account on one of them.
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You could also try one of the lighter-weight alternatives. I’ve been running a GotoSocial node out of my home for a few months and it’s only used around 100MB compared to 4GB for Mastodon. Much easier to set up too, since it’s just one self-contained binary.
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I’ve got a gotosocial up and the main thing I’ve noticed is that it seems to have weird federation / follow / etc. glitches - probably because whilst ActivityPub is a nominal standard, people seem to have implemented things differently (basically “implement the Mastodon API”). e.g. I can’t find one of my Pleroma accounts from the gotosocial one; the follow I have to a Mastodon server doesn’t show any posts on the gotosocial one. But they’re aware of these issues and seem to be actively working on fixing things.
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I have only seen one bug so far, in the rate limiting system. I’m behind two layers of NAT so the client IP address identification is not reliable. Disabling rate limiting didn’t work; I had to raise the limit to 999999 instead. The maintainers have been very responsive so far, so I believe it will be fixed soon.
There are not that many bugs but a lot of missing features. I have a PR open here to make them clearer so people know what they’re getting into: https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/pull/1086
The most annoying is the lack of backfill; sometimes you have to rely on permalinks to read conversations that your server isn’t fully aware of.
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I used to run Pleroma on my Raspberry Pi (in fact I have implemented new features for it: https://technomancy.us/191) but I can no longer recommend that project due to its association with certain high-profile bigots. I am watching the Akkoma project with interest, which forked the Pleroma codebase and has a more sensible maintainer, but it’s still early days.
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run on a RaspberryPi
And there’s PleromaPi for that.
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I mean, it can, but federation is also sort of the point of them existing, and owning your own domain is a substantial advantage.
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I don’t think it’s obviously better for the big instance to handle a new local account compared to a new remote instance.
With the remote instance, they only have to send you events once for each activity of some of the people with accounts there. If you start an account there on the other hand, they have to start listening to and storing data from anyone you follow.
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I don’t think it’s obviously better for the big instance to handle a new local account compared to a new remote instance.
I don’t think it is but, if I understand the moderation model correctly, it is easier for them to handle a new user on a remote server than a new remote server. In all cases, if the new user is benign then it’s fairly easy. There’s a bit more c2s traffic if the new user is local and s2s if the new user is remote and communicates with local users (follows in either direction, direct messages, and so on). For a malicious user, it’s different:
- A local account needs the local admin to do something, to either close the account or educate the user.
- A remote account on an existing server will be handled by the moderator(s) on that server. If they don’t do anything, then you can block their server and the problem goes away.
- A new user on a new remote server requires handling in the same way as a new federated server with malicious users.
I don’t know how scalable the server block lists are, but the Mastodon instances that I’ve seen are typically blocking 2-3 servers and list them publicly. If ActivityPub becomes as popular as Twitter, then the easiest thing for a spammer will be creating a new server and then following a load of accounts and then sending them spam. If the only way that this is handled is by every single server needing to manually block the server, then I don’t see any way that this doesn’t turn into a massive problem.
The alternative is generally some form of reputation system. For example, I allow any messages from server A until someone on my server or someone on a server I trust follows someone from A (or until some number of people do). That would work, but provides some friction for new servers: you either know someone who is running one and ask them to trust you at the start, or you need to communicate that you have good people out of band and then have people on other servers follow them. I don’t know if existing Fediverse servers have anything like this.
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The alternative is generally some form of reputation system. […] That would work, but provides some friction for new servers: you either know someone who is running one and ask them to trust you at the start, or you need to communicate that you have good people out of band and then have people on other servers follow them.
So basically the same issue as with SMTP servers, then.
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following a load of accounts and then sending them spam.
Pleroma, at least, offers you a “following-only” timeline view - a spammer following me couldn’t get any spam in front of me. I could also write a filter which hides/content-warnings posts from previously unseen or “I am not following anyone on” instances using the MRF system.
I don’t know if existing Fediverse servers have anything like this.
I’ve not seen anything regarding “reputation” - but yeah, it would be exceedingly handy to have the ability to assign scores for posts / accounts / instances (+10 for mutual follow, +5 for I am following, -10 for a new instance I am not following anyone on, -100 for “account posts every 5 seconds bloody hell” etc.) much like SMTP spam scores.
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Pleroma, at least, offers you a “following-only” timeline view - a spammer following me couldn’t get any spam in front of me
Does that prevent them from being able to send you direct messages? I guess that’s fine for some uses, but it means that people that follow you can’t reach you via the Fediverse.
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Done some testing - looks like people you don’t follow can’t send to you, either public or direct posts. Which definitely cuts down on the spam angle. But yes, it does limit interaction from people you don’t follow.
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adamcstephens
1 year ago
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Helix 22.03 released. A modal, terminal based, text editor written in Rust
It always disappoints me when a News page on site doesn’t have an RSS feed.
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It does have an Atom feed : https://helix-editor.com/atom.xml
Unfortunately web sites often only advertise their feeds in the source. I’ve taken the habit of letting my feed reader discover them, or directly read the source.
It’s in the HTML
<head>by the way:<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom" href="https://helix-editor.com/atom.xml">-
Firefox and others long ago removed the RSS button. I use this extension to add it back
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Unfortunately web sites often only advertise their feeds in the source
That is the correct choice. Users shouldn’t be burdened with technical details like “atom feed URL” just let them subscribe to the URL they can see and let the feed be autodetected.
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Odd, I swear I checked the source but apparently I must have mistyped when searching.
Thanks!
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Not ideal, but will this do?
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thanks for the article. Minor point to author:
if value < 0.0 ...– positive usually means >0, so should this beif value <= 0.0 or?-
Fixed, thanks!
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I used Hammerspoon for a very long time. Then I discovered that Alfred could do most of what I wanted and needed without much fuss and never really looked back. I do remember the Lua bindings to macOS internals being great, however.
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dcreemer
1 year ago
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Rethinking Software Testing: Perspectives from the world of Hardware
Excellent article. The discussion of randomness could be enhanced with pointers to tools like QuickCheck and comparable tools for other languages (I use Hypothesis in Python).
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Destroying the notion of “fighting the compiler” was one of my biggest steps forward. I started to view the type checker as a pair programming buddy. One that doesn’t get tired, only states facts based on information it has, and will always update its assumptions based on new information, unlike most of us. ;)
So basically “type systems”, but only after a necessary perspective shift. Well, that and being exposed to what modern type systems can actually do. Instead of the limited assumption that they only catch errors like: “That’s not an Int!”.
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Python 3.x doesn’t have type hints/annotations?
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I’m a Java developer working with Python to automate some things. It seems like when the program is more than a few lines of code (1K) and needs to be maintained by a team, the desire for type systems grows strong.
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I’ve been porting a large Python 2.x code-base to Python 3. Adding type annotations (https://mypy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/cheat_sheet.html) has been hugely helpful. The type system is quite expressive and mypy’s reporting is pretty good. After spending some time with Rust – which i really like – I appreciate the flexibility of Python’s approach.
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Wow. I’ve been using hammerspoon for a few years, but today I learned about URLDispatcher. That’s going to save me so many browser tabs with Zoom meetings!
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Fixed link
The Chrome profile logic is awesome!
I’ve combined that with URLDispatcher, and it looks like this.
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(responding to myself) – and after searching a bit more I find this – https://github.com/agzam/spacehammer which is amazing if a bit more complex to understand.
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Never heard of Hammerspoon before. This is great! Thanks for sharing. Also go fennel-lang!
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What (web) apps for browser and Android are you using?
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There are a couple great RSS feed readers for Android in the F-droid ‘store’ that I use/used in the past: Feeder, Handy News Reader. My current favorite is Handy, since it allows you to download the entire article, which works pretty well in most cases.
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I use Newsblur. It’s open source and can be self hosted, but I just use the hosted one because I am lazy. They have an Android app which is quite good, although nothing flashy.
I used to sync feeds locally with newsboat among others, but it would just take too long with hundreds of them. It really sucks on low bandwidth so I much prefer having a server now.
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Read all the reply and setup feed2toot (https://gitlab.com/chaica/feed2toot/) to get RSS in my fedi timeline.
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I use https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Rss2email and email feed updates to myself. My email is the only “rss reader” that makes it easy to read feeds from mobile, emacs, web browser, etc, without a bunch of additional setup work and (flaky) synchronization
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Love RSS too. Pro-tip for Flipboard – any feed you can read in in a web browser will have an RSS feed – just add
/rssto the end. E.g. https://flipboard.com/@dzc/flipbooks-mc76pk0fy has https://flipboard.com/@dzc/flipbooks-mc76pk0fy/rss
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hoistbypetard
3 years ago
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jann - Configuration deployment utility (alternative to GNU Stow)
I like GNU stow. A lot. One of the things I like about it is that if I edit the config file using whatever the usual mechanism is for the app, it shows up in my dotfiles repo as a change that needs to be resolved. I don’t think that would happen (organically) with a copy based system.
The one thing I wish GNU stow could do is merge different sources of truth for a single target. By that I mean, I might want to keep most of my config data in a single repo for all my systems, and have a second repo that’s machine-specific that gets merged in somehow.
Does jann have an answer for either of these? i.e. if I edit ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf using my text editor, will jann detect that and show me that I need to sync it to my dotfiles repo? And does it offer some way to have system-specific mods to my main dotfiles?
(I hope neither question sounds pointed… they are absolutely not meant that way… the right answer to the second one might make me want to switch if the answer to the first is livable.)
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I built my own tool to solve these problems as well – https://github.com/dcreemer/wsup ; it uses the concept of layers – I add my generic personal dotfiles on most hosts, then add in a couple layers for machine or project specific configs. All files are symlinked back to the layer git repo.
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Yes, you are correct. I wanted each “layer” to be a mirror of the home directory structure for ease of understanding. In this way, my “personal-private” layer can include files from
~/.ssh/as can my “work1-private” layer. They both integrate into the “real”~/.ssh/directory.
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I like that scheme. Nice. Thanks for posting that. I’m tempted to adapt it to sit on top of stow.
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The one thing I wish GNU stow could do is merge different sources of truth for a single target. By that I mean, I might want to keep most of my config data in a single repo for all my systems, and have a second repo that’s machine-specific that gets merged in somehow.
yadm offers machine-specific files. It doesn’t provide a templating or inclusion system, but I don’t often need one.
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that was exactly the motivating factor for https://github.com/dcreemer/wsup .
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That looks really interesting. Thanks for the pointer.
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Thanks for your interest in the project :-)
if I edit ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf using my text editor, will jann detect that and show me that I need to sync it to my dotfiles repo
janndoes not have this feature. That said, some sort ofjann --diffmight be a really good addition. I must admit, since I edit virtually all the dotfiles that matter to me from a text-editor, I had not considered the case of application-modified files.And does it offer some way to have system-specific mods to my main dotfiles?
No, but I want it to in the future. I have thought quite a lot about introducing some sort of patch-based system to
jannto allow this sort of functionality, but it’s not present at the moment (I would really like any suggestions anyone has on how to do this elegantly!). A lot of applications offer the option to put multiple config files in a /config.d/ directory - so for Sway, I put my machine specific config in there, and just letjannmanage the main config. Another more hacky, but workable solution, would be something like the following (note the slightly confusing paths are becausejannenters a./deploydirectory when it executes - I may in future pre-populate the symbol table with BUNDLE and DEPLOY global variables to make this sort of scripting more readable).Edit: I have added the BUNDLE variable. DEPLOY is a little more complicated for technical reasons.
deploy { $ cat {{BUNDLE}}/general.config ~/setup/machine.config > specific.config deploy/specific.config >> ~/.config/app/config }-
I don’t know much about rust and its ecosystem, so just dismiss me if I’m suggesting something that doesn’t fit the model you’re working with. But I’ve been tempted before to solve the problem using some templating engine. (ecosystem aside, after that, I start to feel like I’m rewriting puppet and slink back into my symlink-laden cave.)
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Rust does, from what I understand, have some decent templating libraries. I know there is one that is a rough port of
jinjawhich is rather nice. However, were I to implement templating - which sounds like it could be a worthwhile avenue - I would probably do it myself. Yes, I know that’s NIH syndrome, but it’s something I would enjoy doing and I’d be lying if I said that 40% of the reason for buildingjannwasn’t just a desire to write another parser :-)Your comment about Puppet is very amusing to me, because another significant part of the reason why I built
jannwas being intimidated by Puppet, Ansible, et. al. The prospect of installing a huge program with the website tagline ‘DevOps automation for a multi-cloud world’ to manage a dozen text files on my laptop seemed a textbook case of cracking a nut with a hundred-tonne steam hammer! I am eager to ensure thatjannstrikes a good balance between covering people’s use-cases and remaining a small, reasonably elegant binary that ‘does one thing well’.-
The idea of avoiding “(XYZ overkill thing) to manage a dozen text files on my laptop” resonates. I think I occupy an odd middle zone in what I want from this kind of utility.
Mostly because my dozen config files are used in different ways across the three relatively disposable laptops I have to touch regularly. There’s my “daily driver” thinkpad, my “I need to mod my iOS app on the road” macbook and my “I need to cross a foreign border or go someplace it’ll probably get stolen” 10 year-old thinkpad with almost no personal data on it.
I want slightly different dots for all of these :)
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chezmoi has templating for configs that differ between machines; sounds like it might fulfill your requirements. I only started using it recently as a replacement for my manually-managed symlinks but like it so far.
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I’m kinda starting to work on Yet Another™ “Dotfiles Manager” (though I want to use it to manage whole machines eventually, kinda poor man’s NixOS-inspired way). A crucial for me feature is that it should detect any changes between previous “deploy” and the current one, clearly show the diffs, and only be able to re-deploy after they’re resolved (it’s going to be copy-based).
I wanted to use CUE as the config language, but it showed up to be somewhat too early-stage for my liking (mainly through poor error messages), so now I intend to use Lua instead (which I know pretty well). You’re welcome to watch the repo if only for releases if you like, though usual disclaimer that I don’t promise any kind of a timeline/ETA.
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In the article, the author included a picture with his login cookies digitally blacked out. Just an FYI if you ever do this, certain image formats like bitmap can trivially remove the black mark while keeping the data it’s obfuscating intact. Look up bitmap watermarking if you want to know more!
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Surely no one does it this way though? You just open the image in a photo editor, paintbrush over the top, export the result.
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Yeah most people use compressed formats, but it’s something to be wary of if you are posting credentials online. And with PDFs many programs let you draw over the pdf if you want to hide specific info, but when you open that pdf somewhere else, the drawing is gone. This isn’t something to do with bitmaps, but something worth noting.
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keep your existing email account
make a new email account with whatever service provider you want
sign up for new accounts with your new email
whenever you have to log in to an existing service with your current email, if you have time, switch it to your new email
repeat until in a couple years everything is eventually switched over to your new one
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This. No need to delete your gmail account.
I moved to Fastmail a year ago, and have been happy with it.
Everytime I get an email on gmail, I spend a few minutes updating the email in whatever service sent me.
The reason for not deleting is: There are emails you might only get once a year, like from the tax guys, MOT/TV license (here in the UK). You might have to react quickly, and sometimes its just easier to reply from gmail, and update the address later
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Not to mention missed opportunities with people that only know your Gmail account.
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Absolutely agree with this. I switched to Fastmail with my own domain something like 5 years ago and I still have my Gmail address. I have it set to forward to my “new” address, as well, so that I don’t even have to log in to Gmail. When I noticed that an email I care about originally came into my Gmail address I update it (or tell the person who sent it).
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Great advice. I was going to say this, but was pleasantly surprised to find it was already the top response. I will add: Your old account is still attack surface for anything that’s linked to it. Don’t get lax on the security just because you no longer use it every day.
With gmail, if you delete your account, nobody else can ever register that username. This is a very important precaution since it prevents people from impersonating you. It is not necessarily the case with other email services. So, if you are applying this advice to migrate away from a mail service that isn’t gmail, look into whether it has that protection. If not, strongly consider never deleting the account.
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Same that I did, I moved to protonmail and just check my gmail once in a blue moon at this point in case someone forgot I had updated it. I’ve had my gmail since the early invite-only beta days and it gets bombarded with spam and garbage almost constantly as well as a lot of people using my email address to sign up for things in the states that apparently don’t do email verification…
I also used to get emails addressed to someone working at NVidia, got a medical insurance claim form at one point I think, as well as an invite to a wedding…
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No. But I did reply to the invite saying o wouldn’t be able to make it.
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I’ve been doing this, along with having Gmail forward all my email to my new account. I did that so I’d have copies of all my emails. I also did a dump and then import of all my previous emails too.
Honestly, it’s been fine. I’ve also unsubscribed from a lot of things and deleted a few accounts.
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Like may of us, I built my own (git-based) solution for this as well – WSUP. In my case, I have several computers, and change to new ones fairly often. I wanted version controlled dotfiles, with the ability to install different “layers” depending on the use or sharing needs. I have a layer for work, one for personal configs, one for just emacs, one for private files, etc.
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This is great – thanks! Gives me lots of ideas!
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This is an excellent article: clear, thorough, and directly applicable. Thanks for sharing it.
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I do this with Emacs and org-mode. I have one dedicated file -
journal.org, and I create an entry per day. Despite ‘setup’ and configuration costs (which isn’t really that bad if you look at getting started with Spacemacs or Doom-Emacs), I’ve yet to come across anything that’s as frictionless whilst at the same time retaining the ultimate in flexibility.It might be worth a look at org-journal, but personally I’ve found the above to be pretty much all I need.
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Another +1 for org-mode. I keep an
inbox.orgthat has a top level heading for each day. So it might look something like this.* March 19 - Tuesday ** 1:1 w/ boss - some 1:1 notes - more notes *** TODO a task from the 1:1 ** A coding task [ 0 / 3 ] - [ ] write the code - [ ] write the tests - [ ] make a PRorg-mode has built in tools to manage the TODO items and the checkboxes for you. You can pull a list of all todos, or see what things were checked off what days. The check boxes give a nice overview when the subtasks are folded. All of this gets folded up by org-mode so I can see a nice summary of the day without needing to dig into each sub item.
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org-mode has built in tools to manage the TODO items and the checkboxes for you.
The dates, too: ‘C-c .’ AKA ‘org-time-stamp’ inserts <2019-03-19 Tue> and S-leftarrow goes back one day, etc.
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Same here with org-mode, but I also have a capture template that allows me to create a journal entry from anywhere with very little effort.
The following in my emacs config file allows me to type
C-c c jto open a buffer where I can record my entry, which then gets saved to~/org/journal.orgunder theJournalheading.(global-set-key (kbd "C-c c") 'org-capture) (setq org-capture-templates '(("j" "Journal" entry (file+olp+datetree "~/org/journal.org" "Journal") "* %?\n %i\n %a\n"))) -
I do this as well. I have a file: labbook.org with one entry per day. For me I was getting lost trying to come up with good methods of organizing my content (todo.org, $project.org, $person.org) and finally decided to simplify with chronological ordering.
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Because I came to realize that much of Org’s power, much like the rest of emacs’s power, is more than I need and ends up being a bright shiny distraction that I end up futzing with endlessly rather than actually getting work done :)
Plain old Markdown files have served me very well for work stuff, and Evernote for personal stuff.
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ugly keyboard
similar raspberry pi as developer machine ;) not for normal working.
Good keyboard have psion https://jm.iq.pl/psion-5mx-z-linuxem-na-pokladzie/ but too slow processor. Meybe in future when folding screen will be popular
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Do you know about the Gemeni and Cosmo from Planet Computers ? I’d love to see one up close.
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yes, and GOLE1 and similar I’m from Poland I need AltGr key for my language chars. Gemini,cosmo planet not have
This is very ugly keyboard for non latin writers (developers too) Ideal keyboard = https://klawiatura.wordpress.com/ ;) but is too big for me
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iCloud Photo Library with my main MacBook Pro set to sync all content locally, then Arq backs it up into Backblaze b2. (Along with the rest of the machine, including iCloud Drive.)
How does this work? Does it have to go through iCloud to get to your MBP? And if so, are you constrained on iCloud capacity (we’re paying for 200GB and we’re already hitting that cap). If not, do you have to plug in a USB, or does it work automatically via the network?
Syncs through iCloud yes. We have the family “everything” plan (Apple Premier?) so get 2TB cloud storage to use between us. Think my photo library is just over 300GB so far.
If I had to plug the phone in, I’d never sync it.
This is precisely what I do. I did recently switch from Backblaze B2 to MS OneDrive, as I needed the MS365 subscription for other (family) reasons, and it comes with 6 x 1TB Onedrive accounts. Two are used for backups.
I’m curious why you use Backblaze B2 and not the Backblaze Personal Backup?
I used to use their personal backup years ago when it first came out, switched to using Arq against One Drive and S3 I think it was, then switched to b2 because it’s cheaper (and easier to setup.) Stopped using One Drive when I left my previous job as it was the corporate account.
I found backblaze personal backup didn’t backup system paths, which included homebrew (vague memory, might have been macports?) and I couldn’t restore a database I’d overwritten locally because it hadn’t been backed up. I understand why the client doesn’t do that, but it was a dealbreaker for me at the time. Arq also does client side encryption and multiple locations for me.