@ (I would not object to someone wanting to throw FFRDC-class money at P9F, if you've got a lead! ☺)

@ No, thinking much bigger than that at the moment: http://a.9srv.net/b/us-osqi

Just over here writing my Senator's office to see if we can get a new Federally Funded R&D Center created. 😳🤞

Also, incredibly excited that XOXO is coming back, even if just for one more year: https://2024.xoxofest.com

I wrote up a lab report on my daily to-do tracking "system", mostly so I could stop thinking about it. The report is at http://a.9srv.net/reports/daily.pdf and the referenced code is at http://txtpunk.com/daily/index.html.

FOR SOME REASON I'm now archiving my plan files (as shown via 'finger a@9srv.net') at http://a.9srv.net/plans

Well crap. I think I just realized that if my profile photo was a person it could vote in this year’s election. Probably time for a new default one.

I've added myself to the registries at registry.twtxt.org and twtxt.tilde.institute. I wonder if there's a list of registries. #meta

Huh. At some point, my twtxt-via-ssh shortcut from my phone stopped working. It does again now! I've changed nothing. Yay black boxes! 🤷🏻

First task of 2024: renew an expired cert. I like that it's calendar-themed.

Spent a few hours the last two evenings fighting with tftpd. Party like it's 1999!

TIL my high school publishes its own research journal. https://www.pingry.org/our-community/students/pingry-community-research-pcr-journal

I needed something to help with a morning schedule for two kiddos. It highlights the current 5-minute block as it goes. I think this was my first time reaching for JavaScript for a personal project. https://sidequest.club/stages.html

One of the frustrating parts of using twtxt for conversations is the URLs are, well... ugly. Anyone (like y'all yarn folks) looked at using webfinger for translating user@domain accounts to URLs?

I was just reminded of this interpreter for an APL/J-like language by Arthur Whitney, the absolute weirdest bit of C code I've actually gotten something out of, and thought I'd share: https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum

TIL there's a Director's Cut of Miley Cyrus's Wrecking Ball video and it's much better than the original.

If I have an image that has clearly been naïvely upscaled, is there a program that can reasonably reliably tell me what the "true" size is?

No, I wasn't set up for it. I wasn't expecting to see the ISS at all, and you never know when an orbit will do the fade out thing.

Watching the ISS fade out in the sky as it moves into earth's shadow remains one of the coolest things in the world.

I'll likely take this down soonish as I think it's pretty bad for usability, but as a fun hack, one of my weird side projects web pages now has monitor burn-in: http://txtpunk.com/index.html

It'll track a bunch of finger(1) endpoints and let you see what's new. Very early draft. Not actually a social network, more an anti-social network for ‘80s CompSci transplants. :-)

A read-only, finger(1)-based social network, maybe? http://txtpunk.com/fingers/

That's the effect I'm after, but I want it not on my main browser. Turns out the Brave mobile app does this.

I want a browser for iOS that's basically Mobile Safari but without JavaScript (or at least an easy toggle). Does such a thing exist?

I realized my twtxt client isn't validating what it pulls once it gets a valid response when a domain started returning js-heavy parking pages for every URL. Oops. Weekend project, I guess. 🤦🏻

@ Also, I noticed you followed me on Twitter, but you might enjoy @anths if you want techie stuff instead of Oregon politics. 🤣

Lots of personal preference, but I disagree on Acme: it's far and away my preferred editor on unix-like systems, too.

A "hunt group" is a phone number you can call which will ring some set of other phones and whoever answers first gets the call, and the others stop ringing.

Thanks, I'd forgotten about that. I'd rather avoid Google Voice, and I'm okay paying (reasonably). Looking like Twilio might have most of what I want natively.

Given that we don't have a "home phone", what's the best way to create a "hunt group" for my partner's and my cell phones? My first thought is Asterisk on a VPS, but my knowledge of such things is years out of date. Is there a better way?

Good weekend for random tech projects: this rackmount server I got free boots Plan 9 without issue, and my ttl adapters and wii nunchucks just arrived. Now where can I find a serial modem?

I have only just discovered this and need to dig in more, but so far it looks like a really nice reference for electronics pinouts: https://pinouts.org/

Okay, I've updated my examples page and shared the more complex ssh example. http://a.9srv.net/shortcuts

iOS has had a "Shortcuts" app for a while now which is very useful for scripting things on the device, and at some point grew the ability to run things via ssh, including piping input/output. It's how I've done twtxt from my phone for a while now. I'll clean up these two examples and post to the examples I've shared. http://a.9srv.net/shortcuts

Only 1 day of activity so far, but I've started a new project log for whatever the heck I end up doing to this Monroe 425 I got. http://a.9srv.net/monroe425

About two years late, but I finally finished setting up an iOS Shortcut so I can post to my blog via ssh. http://a.9srv.net/b/

Anyone seen a pixel-addressed display (any tech; lcd, eink, oled, whatever) in the range of 8"x1"?

I think y'all are missing something. I never used ftp as a schema; I'm saying the "ftp" hostname part with the "http" schema is amusing.

Check the raw file. ;-) Yes, "http colon slash slash ftp".

I'm not sure! It feels similar to seeing "~username" in a URL. Part nostalgia, part... impressed at the persistence?

Seeing "http://ftp" in a URL makes me happy.

Nominally, my seen/read list for 2021, but I missed a *lot* of short readings. I may try to write more about these things this year. http://a.9srv.net/media/2021

Web3 being "democratic" makes perfect sense if you can't tell the difference between a dollar and a person.

I just went to type the phrase "I avoid Linux like the plague" but then remembered that we've all learned that most people won't actually go much out of their way to avoid the plague.

As a postmaster, Gmail remains the most irritating domain to send to. Soooo many false spam hits, such little information provided, so many hoops to jump through.

Agreed on "aggressive" — as a general rule, I don't think most folks are acting like we're in the kind of crisis we are.

There's still an editing/proofreading pass to do before it becomes official, but the content is done.

It's the (roughly) bi-annual platform convention. I think the new platform does a good job of holding to progressive values (even if I wish it went farther in places). I got an amendment in to improve our stance on encryption-related issues, which was nice.

Spent the weekend with the state Democrats at our platform convention. Good work and glad to have participated, but 20 hours of zoom over 60 hours is a lot of zoom.

Killing time in Goodwill, I picked up a desk calculator from a pile. Dude standing next to me goes "what's that for?". 😳💀

This pi will now boot directly to ed if the gpio pin is grounded at boot time. ed(1)term v1. :-) http://txtpunk.com/edterm/

I am not launching it with a specific file right now, but I'll likely have it default to my daily work log shortly.

@lyse This was basically a trial/proof-of-concept for the real goal: a switch which, if on at boot time, causes the pi to boot straight to ed.

@lyse ed(1) is the standard editor. ;-)

I made a gpio button on my raspberry pi which opens a new window running ed. I screwed up while testing it and launched maaaaany ed windows.

I fork bombed my computer! With ed(1)!!! Haven't done that in a while.

A 556 IC is functionally the same as two 555 ICs, but I've decided the 555 is better because search engines don't confuse it for ammunition as much.

Uh, I think you are taking every line of that *way* too seriously.

Hah. It's an edit of a "be gay do crimes" meme, in response to this: https://twitter.com/Cor3ntin/status/1460614695564496901

Use C do crime! https://cdn.masto.host/pdxsocial/media_attachments/files/107/294/565/215/390/680/original/1d29c85c0aa4c9a5.png

💉3️⃣✅ Thank you, Dolly Parton!

National Novel Writing Month; see https://nanowrimo.org/

I want NaNoWriMo but for tech writing.

Oh, me too: FreeBSD, macOS, and Solaris in server environments extensively, and Linux, AIX, HP/UX, Irix, probably others I'm forgetting. Plan 9 is a whole other class of thing.

Lots of downsides, too, but overall I still find it the most comfortable environment for anything that doesn't need a web browser. :-)

Lots. 🤣 The system is small, coherent, and understandable in a way no modern unix is. The namespace operations remain incredibly powerful. And several of the tools built on it, like the way network listeners and the mail server are built, are just much nicer to use, modify, and build on.

Dug out my old usb audio device and now my Plan 9 raspberry pi can play music. 💯

This week I turned 16,000 days old.

To be clear, it isn't that it doesn't provide a valuable service; it's just that there are more convenient ways of doing it. But screw convenience!

Yup, and my answer's the same: very little. But it's fun! Have fun with computers!

It seems like something *especially* all the tilde-inspired things should have on.

You need better pen test scripts. :-) Seriously, the protocol is absurdly simple. Turn it on! Don't trust any of the implementations? Write your own!

@ I like your website's look, but i was disappointed to find that 'finger' doesn't seem to actually work. ;-)

I think I was some many years ago? They are neat and so some good stuff.

Based on spam logs, I am (again) considering banning a bunch of TLDs at the server level. Has anyone ever gotten legitimate email from a .work, .casa, or .today domain, for example?

His argument hung on Soviet-era experiments with centrally-planned farming. 🙄 The man did not seem well.

I was on a call this evening discussing various redistricting proposals. Some dude seriously asserted that over-representation by Multnomah county in regional politics might lead to... *genocide*. 😳

“I’m afraid I don’t have time at the moment to defend positions you’ve made up for me. Have a nice day.”

Yesterday's surprising find: a little Gochu Jang (~tsp) does a nice job of improving uninspiring Italian tomato sauce. Nothing dramatic, but good.

Whole lot of false statements here. The vaccines are well-tested & well-studied, and are safe and effective. Breakthrough cases exist with every vaccine. If you are able and the vaccine is approved for you, choosing not to get it puts everyone around you at risk, including risk of additional variants developing.

Get vaccinated if you are able. At this point, if you are able and choosing not to, you are being incredibly selfish, full stop.

Well I'm happy to accept patches to linebanner if you'd like to add characters. :-) http://txtpunk.com/banner/index.html

"ç", I think. Anything above 7-bit ASCII would've done it, though.

And yes, I was able to reproduce the "test" input. It wasn't a complicated test, she just beat me to it.

Move your code. Copilot is just one more reason. I maintain an account to work with other projects, but won't host my stuff there.

It did! And I fixed the bug last night. And now I'm curious how your pod deals with spam. 👆🏼

My kid just uncovered a bug in a program I wrote by grabbing my laptop and smacking the keyboard a bunch. Biological input fuzzing; a real-life chaos monkey.

No, I'm still doing them manually. 🤣🤦🏻 But I do think they are a good idea and will be adding them, I just haven't gotten around to finding a compatible implementation of the hash yet.

I feel like this could be borderline useful if I stuck a web UI on it. 🤔

Cleaned up a bit, with installation instructions for Plan 9 and p9p, tiny character tweaks, and a change log.

I wrote a 'banner'-like program for Plan 9 (and p9p) that uses the Unicode box drawing characters: http://txtpunk.com/banner/index.html

Potentially. What environment/language(s) are you working in? I'd dump fuse for 9p, personally :-)

As of about an hour ago, I'm the chair of the Columbia County Democrats. 😳🎉😱

Yeah, what'd you have in mind?

Today I swapped out our water heater for a new hybrid one. It took twice as long as it should have and 3 extra trips to the hardware store, but it doesn't seem to be leaking and is producing hot water, so 🎉🎊🎇

Honestly, probably not directly, but that's mostly because of my weird environment. I'd love to see it as a reference!

First pass at sticking my twtxt in a web page. It's not escaping all the html properly, and generally needs work, but it's a start: http://a.9srv.net/tw/following.html

My toddler just figured out "hey Siri".

i'm not really advocating that anybody should be on *more* networks, but FWIW libera.chat has been very nice, the staff has been doing a great job, and it's the nearest "spiritual successor" to what we all liked about Freenode.

Yes, this all matches my experience as someone connected to "classic" Freenode, right up until they killed the server (after the last step that page describes).

You've basically already left, whether you know it or not. Yesterday they nuked their services database. I'd been there ~20 years, but it's dead. Libera.chat has been lovely.

[20:22:00] -tower.freenode.net- Server Terminating. Received SIGTERM

Entirely sensible, & no reason for file storage to match the wire format. I'm just really curious what's going on on macOS! I can test on hfs+ later.

macOS doesn't care, at least on apfs; just tested. How are you hitting this?

Why can't you have : in file names? What file system is this?

Fixed another bug in my finger client: rfc1288 says lines have to end with crlf, but I was just sending lf.

Indeed! I think the first "network protocol client" I ever wrote was something that just did the PING/PONG part and passed everything else raw.

Looking at raw IRC traffic streams to debug a client issue and it's 1997 again.

Fixed a bug. Found a new bug in yesterday's work. Fixed that bug.

Plan 9 got three slots in GSoC; we'll be working on an updated Japanese input method, updating edwood, and getting Oauth2 support. 🎉🐇

“Remember: the internet didn't have to be like this. A better world is possible.” I love this. telnet issue1.anewsession.com

Unrelated: my first response shows a rendering bug on your site: it's dropping a backslash. Hard to mix markdown and genuine plain text.

For sure. The pi progresses normally until it prints that it's initializing the keyboard, at which point the keyboard spends ~30 seconds beeping.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It's a funky mechanical thing running QMK, but I have two others that fit that description which don't behave like this.

I just timed it: 59 seconds for my Raspberry Pi to boot, 33 of which is waiting for my keyboard firmware to initialize. That's just absurd.

I've published my silly finger implementation: http://txtpunk.com/finger

Then finger is for the straight-up shut-ins.

Or maybe that's old-school twtxt, and twtxt.net is those people who're constantly trying to coax the introverts out. ;-)

Pinboard describes itself as "Social bookmarking for introverts". Maybe txtxt is social networking for introverts.

Good idea. Plan 9 sets $NPROC on boot to the number of cores, so other things can use it. mk will dispatch things in just that way.

Dynamic linking was a mistake.

Think of it like buying a signed print of a photo, instead of the photo itself, but the "signature" is an entry in a database and that's all you get. Still dumb.

Anyone (preferably in the PDX area) have a way to read QIC-80 tapes?

Just over a week left to apply to Summer of Code. Plan 9 is in there, and ~200 other good orgs. Go apply and tell students you know. https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/

Nobody's saying he can't write code any more (I mean, I think his code is crap and wish he'd stop, but that's another issue). But he should not be on any board, should not be in any leadership position, should not be held up as a role model or even vaguely okay.

I can't believe it's controversial to say "somebody with a 30+ year history making women uncomfortable shouldn't be in a leadership position". That's not "cancel culture", it's just friggin' obvious.

What a terrible video. "Cancel culture" is not a thing, and when you hear someone complaining about it, 99% of the time they just don't want consequences for bad behavior.

Sure. I think search, if it's going to exist, should be the client's responsibility. But I also value the readability of the raw twtxt file a lot more than y'all do.

He's fine with gender-neutral pronouns when he gets to pick them, but insists on policing others'. The open letter calling for his removal has references.

I actually haven't yet, it's just easy enough to manually prepend the subject for now, if I skip the search URL. 🤣 I'll do it properly eventually.

This is an awful take. The issue isn't that he's cantankerous and rigid; it's that he's sexist, misogynistic, ableist, transphobic, and has a decades-long history of making women feel unsafe. This isn't "cancel culture", it's "consequences" (as is usually the case with that term).

Not even a little. So pumped. https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tf20bce89ef96d4b6-M63f81768e4ffdfa4df402ec5/transfer-of-plan-9-to-the-plan-9-foundation

Bell Labs has now transferred Plan 9 to the Plan 9 Foundation, who has in turn re-released all releases under the MIT license. I am *very* excited about this. 🐇🎉

I am very excited for tomorrow.

Someone brought us pie for Pi Day. 💯

We welcome prospective students to submit their own ideas, but we've got a page full of suggestions: http://p9f.org/wiki/gsoc-2021-ideas/index.html

At some point, for reasons I do not understand, my feed reader replaced cabinporn dot com with freecabinporn dot com, which is *not* the same thing.

Plan 9 is GSoC! 🎉🐇 I've missed participating this program. https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Ta35cde1382617430-M32af07f289087f227189b74f/plan-9-in-summer-of-code

@ I am not. :-)

I've got it running on a pair of commercial kvm providers right now (vultr and ramnode). It works on many, but edge cases can cause some issues.

Oh no, so much better than that. Worth checking out.

Hrm, that would've been csh probably, or tcsh if you were lucky. But Plan 9 uses rc, which is so lovely I use it everywhere.

Hey, from my perspective on Plan 9, all these linuxes are the same junk.

Thanks! According to /etc/os-releases, it's Fedora 32.

uname; I have an account. I just don't know how to differentiate linux especially.

@ Some linux; how does one tell which?

Plan 9 doesn't really do text-mode pseudo-graphics at all, or even cursor addressing, on philosophical grounds.

This is a good morning. 🚀🐇

I am very excited about this, and it seems like something the twtxt crowd might enjoy: https://anewsession.com/

Yup, 1997 to... 2000 or 2001.

Huh. In my feed, there is (correctly) a backslash before that . in the sed command, but twtxt.net is stripping it.

Ah, no; and there we have a good example of finger's poor discoverability! It matches my email address, though: echo a.9srv.net | sed 's/\./@/'

I don't think the pod would have to be large. Even on tilde.club and the like, with a few dozen active users, it adds to the fun.

@ Bug in your profile links: it's repeating a segment. For example, your face tries to get to https://twtxt.net/user/https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt

No, totally not useful. 🤣 I mean, the finger protocol is pretty trivial, and it'd be fun to add, but doesn't replace anything you're doing.

I like finger, but outside of a shared system, the complete lack of discoverability is pretty fatal.

With the finger server specifically? No idea, it's a toy. I'd honestly forgotten I had it on until someone mentioned finger.farm and I was inspired to poke at it again.

My finger server now includes the last post from tw that doesn't have a subject. 'finger a@9srv.net'

I just made the decision to allow a domain I own to expire. Personal growth is possible!

This was macOS. I don't really use gnu. Of course, it's also not on Plan 9, the system I know best.

I was reading dd(1), where it is mentioned in passing, obliquely. Then stty(1) has more info.

I have been using Unix for 25+ years and I just learned about the status character in shells (often ^T). Huh.

Fixed the race in tw. Mostly; now it's just while tw/r is running. Close enough.

The GSoC application period is closed, and Plan 9's is in. Now the waiting.

Ooo, tw has a race condition between tw/r and pull/mktl, in the case you /r after a new post but before pull & mktl have run. Oops.

Plan 9's GSoC application is now in. 🎉

I want read-only iOS client that just does the simplest model: pull a list of feeds, make a timeline.

Pushed small updates to tw. Next: make discoverability optional.

@ Saw your oldish note about wanting an offline/async twtxt workflow. Do you have something that works for you? My (very young!) client was designed with that in mind.

I agree clients should present things better (part of why I'm writing one!). But that should be additive. There's a reason we're not passing json around.

@ Exactly, but that reduces the argument for URLs in the post. The client should figure out how to search based on the hashtag.

@ Yup, several. My favorite is RFC 1149, another that's since been implemented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_Request_for_Comments

@ You may be interested in https://github.com/u-root/u-root (I work with a contributor).

@ It was totally an April Fools' joke; the IETF has a bunch of those. But! It has also been implemented. And 418 is my favorite error code.

I'm unclear if I'm going to do the twtxt.net discovery protocol; neither my web server nor Plan 9's default capture agent strings. :-/

@ Looks like twtxt.net is already happy with it, so that's good! I'm just going to aim for that.

My silly Plan 9 rc twtxt client now has a web page: http://txtpunk.com/tw/index.html

@For example, this should work (no idea if it does).

(#) @Yes, I think tags should just be #foo, and let the client figure out searching if it cares.

(#) @ Yes, I often read the raw messages. But more to the point, the simplicity of the format is the bulk of the appeal.

(#) @ No argument that threading is an improvement. But I think (#hash) does that, and I think figuring out how to search should mostly be up to the client.

(#) I don't have any issue with the (foo) subjects, it's the proliferation of the (foo url) tags. They're just too long and ugly.

Hah... my silly twtxt client now has "stories" mode.☺

I don't think I'm implementing twtxt.net-style hashtags (for now?). The "" is bad enough for nicks, but they just make the plain text unreadable.

@ (#) I've just never had it be a rewarding experience.

@ (#) rc, the Plan 9 shell.

I ran fortune for something to stick in a text-centric side project, and it said "You can't build a bomb at 300 baud." which is just about perfect.

Announcing the Plan 9 Foundation — http://p9f.org/ — https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T973ff41a99053355/plan-9-foundation

Last night I spent about 30 minutes putting together the bare framework for a dumb project I want to do. I'm so excited to work on it, I keep checking the website to see if I've posted anything new.

Today, out of the blue, somebody thanked me for some minor tech work I did in 2008. That felt pretty nice.

One of these days I will learn not to argue with the bitcoin bros.

Started the #gsoc application for Plan 9 yesterday morning; spun up a new cpu server last night; poking at it today. I miss being able to spend more time on this.

My daughter grabbed my mouse and started smacking it arouond and managed to do things I didn't know you could do with my WM with a mouse... nor how to undo them.

Documentation on i2c devices is so-so. Lots of good documentation on higher-level APIs, but not a lot of "this register does this" stuff.

On the up side: I got my first successful comunication over i2c on Plan 9 on a Raspberry Pi today! Looking forward to playing with that more.

I have ~10 different kinds of USB cables/adaptors, and I can't make the conversion I need.😞

Thanks to a pointer from Richard Miller, got screen rotation working on my Pi 4s. Makes this absurdly wide display more practical.

Wrote a man page for this thing. I miss writing man pages.

Well, my twtxt reader is a bit *too* simple; drops who actually wrote the message before it's printed. 🤦🏻

Okay, a bit better: it now preserves the author, although it prints a hash right now. Tomorrow's problem.

Okay, my #twtxt reader works-ish. Need to properly deal with timezones (and, um, maybe do *any* error checking).

I have a working model for the reader portion of what I want this twtxt client to do.

Okay, well, if we're being all txtpunk, I want troff macros for zines.

Apparently I did something for this like three years ago, and can't find it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hello, world.

Made something because my head was on sideways all day.