Recent content on Lainblog
The fediverse has been buzzing with talk about end-to-end encryption. In this (quite long) article, I’ll try to explain what E2EE is, what some common approaches to it are in the instant messaging space, and what I think would be the best way to use it on the fediverse. (Note: Pictures are just there to break up the boredom. A hotel bar.)
Last time, we talked about the magic trick to make your full text searches go fast. This time, I’ll tell you about another performance issue I encountered that probably also affects your performance, at least if you are using Ecto and PostgreSQL. Here’s the story of the interplay between Ecto, PostgreSQL and the PostgreSQL query planner.
Team Pleroma is back from FOSDEM and I finally got rid of most of my Tenshi stickers! The meetup was a lot of fun and we did learn a thing or two. One talk I went to see was this one on the state of full text search in current PostgreSQL. Sadly, it didn’t offer any new information to me, but it’s a good primer on the subject. Overall, it paints a very rosy picture of full text search…
After long months of doing only bugfix and security releases, we are finally releasing the long-awaited 1.0 release. No more nines!
Pretty much one year ago, we started fighting the typical Web 4.0 Javascript bloat by adding Gopher support . After a wildly successful 0.999 release , we heard your calls for more debloating. The biggest complaint with the gopher support was the inability to post. So today, we’re taking it a step further: Making Pleroma a BBS.
(Hey! Don’t know what Pleroma is? Check out this page!) The first commit in Pleroma happened 2016, on October 26th. Now it’s a few years and months later, and we are doing our first stable release! Are you still running develop ? That’s so 2018.
A lot of people join our support channel (#pleroma on freenode) with the same sentence: “I just set up Pleroma but federation isn’t working”. Usually, this is not actually true, they just have an empty timeline. What they don’t know is how posts actually get into your instance. This short post is about the mechanisms that can make a post use your instance. This is Pleroma…
As you may already know, Pleroma is high-performance and low-resource fediverse server mean to run even on small devices like a Raspberry Pi. Still, there is one part of Pleroma that is wasteful to the extreme… It’s true! Pleroma’s mother allowed it to have TWO frontends, but both are resource-hogging Javascript monstrosities. If you don’t have a ‘modern’…
Recently, there have been some shocking revelations. Facebook, a company in the business of selling your data to advertisers, had some of its data used illegally by a third party that used it to advertise to you. As people hate nothing more than getting their data misused without Facebook getting a cut, they are now up in arms and want to leave Facebook once and for all. Media eye seems to have…
In my last few posts I talked a bit about Pleroma . Since then, we had a lot of questions about what Pleroma is, how it is different from GNU Social and Mastodon, why you should use it and so on. This post will be an introduction to Pleroma, so read on if you are interested.
After some work , ActivityPub support will be merged into the develop branch of Pleroma in the next days. This change will add the following user facing features: Support for Mastodon’s visibility suggestion settings, like private posts and direct messages. Slightly faster federation Not too much for a few weeks of work. Anyway, here are my thoughts about the whole process.
I recently got a Sharp Twin Famicom for around 70€. This is rather cheap, they usually go for over 200€ in good condition. The Twin Famicom is a Famicom with a built-in Famicom Disk System drive. This was a floppy disk system for the Famicom that was only used in Japan. The one I got worked well with carts (at least with 8BIT MUSIC POWER FINAL), but disks wouldn’t read at all.
If you remember my post from a few days ago, you’ll know that I modded my PAL Mega Drive with a region switch. This works well for Mega Drive games, but Mega CD games have their own problems. The Mega CD bios is region locked and will display an error when you start it in the wrong region. There are a few ways to get other bios roms running on the system. One is to swap the EPROM on the Mega…
In my free time, I develop a free software social network server called Pleroma ( code ). It is compatible with GNU Social, Mastodon, Friendica, and any other server that implements the OStatus protocol. Recently, there has been some buzz about a new protocol for federated social networking: ActivityPub. This protocol is now a W3C Recommendation, which means that it’s a kind of…
If you want to get a Neo Geo, you should probably get the MVS (arcade) model instead of the AES (home) model. The games are much cheaper and 200-in-1 type cartridges are readily available. If you have an MVS board, you’ll need a way to power it and a way to connect controls and the screen. As the Neo Geo MVS uses the JAMMA arcade connector standard, there are many ready-made solutions that…
The PAL Mega Drive can rather easily be modded with a switch that enables switching between PAL, NTSC-J and NTSC-US. It doesn’t require much skill, if you can do basic soldering, this one is for you. For proper instructions, take a look at this site . Here’s a picture of my Mega Drive running at 50hz.
If you try running the Touhou games on newer PC98 machines like my PC-9821 Na12 laptop, you might run into issues. When I tried to start any of the games, they would just hang on initialization of the sound driver. This makes sense, because my system has an enhanced FM chip, that is not fully backwards compatible with the original FM chips of the PC98. Interestingly, this has never been a problem…
I have a PC-9821 laptop computer. This is a Japanese system that’s almost-but-not-quite IBM compatible, with the biggest differences being the graphics and sound system. It’s an interesting system, with a few thousand games that never came out in the west in any way, including the first five Touhou Project games.