Thinking about what the next larger daily source reading is going to be.

#OpenBSD
#FreeBsD

I am not the only one who is excited about Craighill videos, right? They are pretty cool, like fun everyday invisible engineering not-super-deep dives, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txoZacPFLZg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Avey2WP8zDY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFDt3lUzVPc

A handy guide for designers working at Apple

What a strange time. I just read this sentence in an article about an HTTP client:

"Lightweight : Just 157~ KB in size"

Sorry but 157 KB is NOT lightweight. Especially for an alternative to "fetch".

#WebDev #JavaScript #TypeScript

Alt...

Lightweight: Just 157~ KB in size.

The early Web had a quality that has been lost ever since: it was *simple*

Download #httpd , #netscape write some #html by hand and boom, the concept of a networked digital society is born.

It first started going pear shaped with #LAMP . The complexity of a full blown database was not justified for most use cases. As proven decades later by the popularity of #sqlite and #ssg approaches.

The final blow was when #bigtech got into the act. Immense complexity for the simplest things became a moat

@whynothugo one of the reasons I still do stuff in Perl. 20 year old scripts still run fine.

What do you run as a firewall? If “Other” put in the comments. Please #boost #linux #freebsd #openbsd

Wondering if #PhanpySocial users know that the composer can be minimized or popped out as a separate window (only on desktop)? 🤔

#PhanpyProTip

We should all get used to no longer saying "GitHub" but "Microsoft AI GitHub" just so it's clearer where your code lies and for what purpose.

There are a few nicer feelings than being emailed by someone whose blog you read that tells you that they read your blog as well. I love the #indieweb.

@eclecticpassions

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=183169#p @mayazimmerman@gamedev.lgbt https://gamedev.lgbt/users/mayazimmerman/statuses/116053644566856190

i’ve been training since the end of 2019, first with a trainer for over two years, when i switched to my home gym: consistency plummeted and minor injuries happened more often hindering my progress :)

5x5 is my current favorite, but i’d love to explore and try new things.

estonian forests and swamps are amazing 🤩 it's so good i don't want to leave my homestead.

for me the hardest thing with lifting is consistency. two main obstacles in the recent past:

⁃ progressing too fast and getting injured (tendons are adopting much slower than muscles)

⁃ traveling or some other interruptions (hard to get back after skipping a week)

the first addressed by adjusting my program to much slower progression.

the second—by switching from two long workouts per week to two very short workouts per day. same volume per week, just more often. (basic home gym setup helps). i still skip workouts but skipping one doesn't feel so bad 😅

good luck with your moving and stay hard 💪

I'm so unbelievably addicted to the #Indieweb / #smallweb.

To feed my addiction, I have found yet another search machine that finds non-commercial sites. Send help! https://marginalia-search.com/explore

All your personal sites are SO COOL. Drop yours below, please! twitch twitch

Why is the menu on your website not just a page with links?

Learning raycasting. This feels like another one of those game dev milestones. #picotron as ever

also please boost and/or recommend any cool capsules ❤️

🦾 Can my SPARC server host a website? // Darko Mesaroš,

｢ TL;DR: I’m hosting a website on a 25-year-old Sun Netra X1 SPARC server running OpenBSD 7.8. The setup includes: Noctua fan mods for quiet operation, httpd serving static HTML/CSS, OpenBSD’s pf firewall with default-deny rules, and Cloudflare tunnels to expose it safely without port forwarding. The server pulls ~55MB of RAM and serves pages from my garage ｣

https://rup12.net/posts/can-my-sparc-server-host-my-website/

#sparc #openbsd

It's so weird that a lot of people think the quality of software is measured in how often it gets updated—it's literally the opposite.

falling into a rabbit hole…
at least my html pages mostly text and easy to convert to #gemini

It feels like developers are currently split into two groups that do not really understand what the other group is talking about:
One group tries to reduce their dependency on Big Tech by switching to alternative search engines, code forges, map providers, operating systems…
And the other group is trying to increase their dependency on Big Tech by adopting agentic and/or vibe coding.

i want to ditch @signalapp and i am looking into @delta / @arcanechat , but there is no cli. can i just use mutt (have my own mailserver with wkd)?

Oh, did I say that those 2 hours of 200 requests per seconds, unnoticed from a user perspective, landed on an #OpenBSD VPS running on an OpenBSD host using OpenBSD virtualization program?

And they say OpenBSD is slow… But I’m biaised.

Nifty #picoCAD2 timelapse. Coming soon to Steam!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-WUDnNH3rQ

#lowpoly #pixelart

I've just published Snk on itch.io for Playdate owners. For free. If you play, tell me about your experience, or if you have any problems, I'll be happy to help.

You can download it here: https://gunbolt.itch.io/snk

#playdate #lua

Alt...

Screenshot for Snk, a snake game clone running on Playdate with isometric perspective.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/116040934611280426

Btw you can literally throw a PHP page on a web server and it will work.

Nothing about web development has actually changed that much except that it’s much easier to make eloborate designs with less CSS than ever and also you probably don’t need any 3rd party libraries to do pretty stunning interactivity stuff.

Being Left Behind Enjoyer » 🌐 2026-02-09 / 2026-02-09
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

"But I need an LLM for code generation, programming environments are so complex and have so many layers these days!"

I wish people would think for like more than a minute about what solution they choose when they correctly identify the problem.

You know, a glass teletype. That toy that kids keep calling a "monitor," even though we all know monitors are reference speakers used in audio production.

I had the privilege of penning an article for the latest issue of Good Internet Magazine!

It is all about the process of making and experiencing art and how friction and inefficiency needn’t be dirty procurances to avoid and evade.

https://goodinternetmagazine.com/rebelling-against-efficiency/

If you enjoy this article, you might consider picking up the physical print copy of the magazine, which you can buy on the site. A proper palpable paper printing of passionate prose for your pleasant perusal.

#IndieWeb #SmallWeb #PersonalWebsites #GoodInternetMagazine

> "Many personal website owners
deliberately choose inefficient methods
for updating their sites. They write
HTML by hand, upload files directly
via FTP, or maintain static sites that
require manual intervention for even
simple changes. These choices would
be considered backwards in a
professional context, but they serve
important psychological and creative
functions"

by @vale, in the current #GoodInternet issue.

me and my #hugo #ssg site deployed via #ftp feel very seen

#smallWeb #indieWeb

unix should be fun 🚀
#unix #openbsd #bubbleuniverse

i try to push shell as far as it reasonably goes. for most tasks, sh, find, grep, sed, and cut is more than enough. only when things become truly complex or painfully slow do i reach for another language.

i used to care a lot about strict portability, but in practice i only run my scripts on macos and #openbsd. that simplifies things: if shellcheck is happy, i'm happy. i'm 99% sure my scripts work on other unix-like systems, but i don't feel the need to check.

what really draws me to shell is that it's always there. it's part of the base system, requires no extra installation, and the runtime has been stable for decades. that stability translates directly into confidence: shell scripts feel future-proof.

i know i can run something like ssg.sh ten years from now and it will still work --- certainly on #openbsd, and hopefully on macos too. there's no dependency churn, no worrying about the "right" version of python or ruby, and no hoping the ecosystem hasn't moved on.

it just runs.

Alt...

built with /bin/sh

This is very slow. And that's not caused by the old CPU. Hopefully a new ssd + ide>sata adapter will arrive soon.

i'm thinking how to make smallest possible backups...

html_count: 5
html_size: 1102841
ico_count: 1
ico_size: 1218
id_count: 2
id_size: 10
idx_count: 10416
idx_size: 633369
json_count: 12490
json_size: 50926543
lst_count: 1
lst_size: 33
pid_count: 1
pid_size: 6
png_count: 9
png_size: 557101
tag_count: 2180
tag_size: 21400
txt_count: 7
txt_size: 88
other_count: 669
other_size: 257034

*_size in bytes

but over 30% of nodes have >1 hardlinks

#snac2 is very unixy :)

• 12 posts
• 60 following
• over 9000 files (sic!)

$ du -hd0 /var/snac && find /var/snac | wc -l
61.8M	/var/snac
    9532
$

$ curl -s https://romanzolotarev.com/pub/hi.rss | wc -c
    9999

i use shell scripts to configure and deploy a few #openbsd servers:

• generate configuration files locally for each server (sshd, httpd, relayd, acme-client, nsd, and now #snac2)
• deploy with ssh or rsync (set permissions, time)
• clean up if needed
• run health checks that all configurations applied correctly (testing with nc, dig, curl, etc)

@h3artbl33d @opentechfan rdist rocks! when you don't screw it up.

At the moment we use it sync our 4 DNS VMs. In the past we also managed a cluster of relayd VMs.

https://openbsd.amsterdam/blog/rdist-1-when-ansible-is-too-much.html

$ cat data/queue/1770399482.863468.json
{
    "type": "output",
    "message": {
        "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
        "type": "Follow",
        "id": "https://[redacted]/pub/relay/d/1770399362.561994/Follow",
        "actor": "https://[redacted]/pub/relay",
        "object": "https://fedi-relay.gyptazy.com/actor"
    },
    "retries": 1,
    "ntid": "1770399482.863468",
    "p_status": 500,
    "inbox": "https://fedi-relay.gyptazy.com/inbox",
    "keyid": "https://[redacted]/pub/relay",
...

Feb  6 17:37:47 [redacted] snac[82302]: 17:37:47 queue not yet time for ~/queue/1770399482.863468.json [1770399467]
Feb  6 17:37:50 [redacted] snac[82302]: 17:37:50 queue not yet time for ~/queue/1770399482.863468.json [1770399470]

Thank you very much for your awesome work, @grunfink@comam.es 🙂

Full Moon

#textmode #1bit #pixelart

Alt...

Text mode base Full Moon drawn with black and white semigraphic characters. Moon is on the center of the picture surrounded by a starry sky. A shooting start is passing by on the left.

The time is probably right.

Back in 2022, when I was still using iOS, I wasn’t completely happy with the Fediverse apps that were available. I was mostly using Akkoma, and the interface I liked the most was actually its web UI, even on mobile. So I started playing with Xcode and put together the foundations of an app tailored to my needs.

A lot has changed since then and today we have great alternatives like IceCubes, Mona, Ivory, etc. Each one has strengths and weaknesses though, so I picked up my old project again and kept pushing it forward.

So I’m happy to announce that my app will finally see the light: I’ve been using it for the past few days and, in my spare time, I’m fixing bugs and adding missing features. I’m building it around my own needs, so it doesn’t have to “appeal to everyone”. I wouldn’t call it opinionated, but it’s definitely targeted.

The app will have one key trait: #snac2 support will be a first-class feature, not an incidental one. Many apps, especially on iOS, support snac as a side effect, but the experience is often not optimal. In this case, the choice is deliberate and it strictly follows the Mastodon API support implemented by snac. So snac will work properly (within the limits of the platform, of course).

Among the features already implemented: the app is minimal and lightweight (under 10 MB, including debug code), easy on RAM, and privacy-first (for example it strips EXIF data from media before posting, so the server will never see it). On snac it also cleans up the "Boosted by Aoderelay" messages that appear when using a relay, removes the character limit, and supports posting in Markdown.

I also added support for Apple Intelligence to generate alt text, both for the media I post and for media posted by others that is missing alt text.

Everything is processed locally through Apple APIs and only on supported devices. The results aren't amazing, Apple Intelligence is extremely limited, but in my opinion it's the only privacy-friendly and ethical way to approach it. And of course, you can disable it.

On Mastodon it supports all the main features: lists, quote posts, granular notifications (you can choose what you want for each category), notification grouping, multi-account support, and it works.

It's still missing a few things (block, etc.) and has some bugs, which I’m spotting as I keep using it.
As soon as it's stable enough, I'll invite a few people to test it. I still haven't fully decided how I'll distribute it: an Apple Developer account has a yearly cost, and I hope to reuse it for other projects too. So this app might be paid, with a trial period, but if possible (I still need to check what’s feasible) I'd like it to be free if you connect to one of the BSD Cafe instances, illumos Cafe, or any snac instance, including your own.

I don't know how long it will take before it's ready... but I can already tell you what it will be called.
It already has a name, and it's... MastoBlaster.

This name was chosen for personal reasons, and also because of its similarity to Master Blaster by Stevie Wonder, which even today feels relevant and fitting for the Fediverse.

Stay tuned!

#MastoBlaster #Fediverse #Mastodon #iOS #FediverseApp #Announcement #Apple #snac #snac2 #BSDCafe #illumosCafe

Alt...

MastoBlaster, showing my profile on my phone

see also
https://comam.es/snac-doc/snac.5.html

# rcctl stop snac 
# cd /var/snac
# tar -cpf /tmp/snac data
# rcctl start snac

# rcctl stop snac 
# cd /var/snac
# tar -xpf /tmp/snac.tgz
# rcctl start snac

any plans to use sqlite or some other database?

also thank you for creating #snac2. i love it!

We have spun up 5 new VMs during the last 48 hours. Some were booked by known friends of ours, some booked by new friends we have never met before. Welcome on board!

#git #hosting #gameoftrees #openbsd

like/favorite if this appears in your feed please :)

#selfhosting #snac2 #openbsd

Finally got my lazy ass up and started my blog up again. Not much in there currently, but trying to force myself to write more: https://blog.wollwage.com/