Recently I spent some time exploring Reticulum . Here are some of my brief thoughts on it, and a dump of links and notes I gathered that might be useful to others! Reticulum is a new "cryptography-based networking stack" developed by Mark Qvist. In practice Reticulum is not just a networking stack specification, but a reference implementation written in Python, and several functional but proof of…
This past year I built a site with Eleventy using Ghost as a headless CMS. Ghost provides a nice backend for users to log in and author/edit posts but I wanted a static site front-end to have something faster, less resource heavy and more customizable. Ghost provides a nice starter repo for this which I used to get started. The starter repo is set up with automated site deployment to Netlify.…
Daniel Dennett died. He was a philosophy of mind/cognitive science thinker who listened closely to scientists. I definitely found his writing pretty influential when I was younger and getting really interested in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, etc. I still have my copy of The Mind's I co-edited by Dennett. I wondered what, if anything, he had said about the current "AI" wave.…
Gancio is an excellent shared calendar that federates using ActivityPub. It uses relatively few resources. I hosted a gancio calendar on a small VPS and wanted to host a few more instances for different purposes. I used these steps to install multiple instances of gancio alongside one another on the same VPS to save costs. These instructions can be iterated to run multiple instances on the same…
I prepared some rough slides to convene a session about this at the March 2024 Fediforum . This post is based on those slides. My goal is to encourage developers to pursue a line of development that will lead to a Fediverse-connected self-hostable alternate to Bandcamp (let's call it " Fedicamp "). I have opinions about how this should be done, informed selfishly by what I want, but also the…
An assortment of somewhat curated links from my bookmarks. My collection of 'Bottomless Links' Bartosz Ciechanowski blog Electronix and more Xah Code The Geocities Gallery Dangerous Laboratories sandspiel Colin Church's Railway Pages CD.TEXTFILES.COM wiby Interconnected Blogroll JS&A Catalogs Starring The Computer Internet Movie Firearms Database Processed World Zine (Digital) Art…
I recently completed the OffSec PWK/Pen-200 course and passed the associated OffSec Certified Professional exam. Here are my thoughts/advice/review for any friends considering doing the same course and exam. I did the version of the course which was overhauled and updated in May 2023. I passed my exam in November 2023 on the first attempt. The course I found the course materials…
I have a friend who is currently doing an online AI business school program at MIT. This is the counter-curriculum I wanted him to read. I'm posting it here so he has no excuse not to consult it, and so it's on-hand in case I want to share it with others. I'll probably continue to update/add to it. Resisting AI (2022) by Dan McQuillan What if the current AI trend is not only…
A small update on my previous post about scraping the unstoppable Terminal Escape mp3 blog. I've settled into a monthly-ish schedule of scrapping the newest posts and then uploading them to the collection on archive.org . I have thought about making the process fully automated, which would be a fun exercise, but I don't want to accidentally mass-upload a bunch of garbage to archive.org.…
Summary I used python to scrape a long-running blog that rips and posts cassette tapes, and then uploaded everything to a collection at the Internet Archive . Currently 3600+ tapes and counting (the blog is still going and I'm still scraping!). Terminal Escape Terminal Escape is a blog that has been posting a new rip of a cassette tape every day since mid 2009. The nearly 5000 posts by the…
This is similar to installing Cwtch in a debian-11-minimal template. A minimal template provides a smaller attack surface, which is good since attacks on Signal users via malicious messages are possible. It also means a dedicated qube running Signal will have a smaller memory footprint. Finally it makes it easier to run multiple instances of Signal if you have different accounts. For how to…
Install Cwtch using a debian-11-minimal template in Qubes OS . Advantage of using a minimal template is a smaller attack surface, and a lighter resource load. This will give you a dedicated app qube, based on debian-11-minimal just for running Cwtch. For how to install the debian-11-minimal template, check the Qubes documentation . FYI, the command to run in dom0 to install the debian-11-minimal…
I am relatively new to spending a lot of time in the terminal and using something like tmux to manage my terminal life. There are lots of work-arounds out there to handle copy-pasting with tmux, whether to get stuff in and out of tmux and the system clipboard, or between different terminal programs inside a tmux session or whatever... most of the recommended solutions for this involve installing…
TLDR This is a step by step guide to install Mastodon (or Hometown) from source, using a Linode VPS, Linode S3 Object Storage with nginx cache proxy, Mailgun for e-mail and porkbun for domain registration. It is complete, it is meant for beginners, and it should be suitable for complete beginners. If you are just here for the recipe, and want to skip over the cooking-blog backstory, jump to first…