#QOTD : If you could redesign a fundamental internet protocol from scratch, which one would you choose and how would you improve it?

@rrraksamam@twtxt.net I’m looking forward to my all-SSD Btrfs RAID5 NAS. I think it’ll be a while, though. I just paid $6.92/TB for a couple of used 12TB HDDs.

@prologic@twtxt.net They’re shutting down after 7 years. It was a great place to buy Monero with cash by mail. https://localmonero.co/nojs/blog/announcements/winding-down

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Nice. Compiling problematic software is my #1 use of containers on my PC. I use a handful of them on my server.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Same here. Where does it not work, @movq@www.uninformativ.de?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de People just don’t ask these questions. It’s really a serious privacy issue, and I don’t see it brought up very often. Not even in privacy-minded circles. If you’re using a proprietary operating system on any Internet-connected device, you need to assume that the vendor can see everything you do on it and maybe even what you do on other devices as well..

Actually, it looks like notifications using Google’s service can be encrypted end-to-end. I don’t know if this is used much in practice or if you can tell if the notifications on your device are encrypted. There seems to be some conflicting information out there.

Even if the content is encrypted, though, you’re still giving quite a bit of metadata to Google by using their notification service.

It looks like ntfy.sh can work either through the OS’s notification service or by maintaining its own connection to the server in the background. For privacy, you definitely want to use “Instant Delivery” and self-host the server.

https://docs.ntfy.sh/faq/#how-much-battery-does-the-android-app-use
https://docs.ntfy.sh/faq/#what-is-instant-delivery

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I haven’t done any app development, but I know notifications on phones are indeed dependent on cloud services run by the OS vendor which talk to servers run by the app vendor on your behalf. This is supposedly better on battery life, but it conveniently lets your OS vendor read all your notifications.

Mobile XMPP clients usually implement notifications using XEP-0537 and it goes like this:

Your XMPP server -> Client vendor's notification server -> Client OS notification server -> User's device

It’s not end-to-end encrypted so servers will usually just send a dummy message through (You received a message from juliet@capulet.lit!) so you have to open the app to see the (hopefully) encrypted message.
It’s a similar flow on both iOS and Android and I assume Matrix clients work the same way.

@prologic@twtxt.net I know, right? It’s a very elegant solution to the problem using standard command line utilities. It was too hard to find. I went through 3 or 4 Stack Exchange threads from my Web search before I found somebody linking to this answer. People were misunderstanding the question and suggesting all kinds of crazy methods including weird, proprietary, GUI Windows software.

How To Efficiently Copy Files To Multiple Destinations: https://mckinley.cc/notes/20240508-copy-multiple-destinations.xhtml

@prologic@twtxt.net I can’t recommend it enough.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de

$ units -t '500 gigabytes per 9 hours' 'megabytes per second'
15.432099

That’s a very unfortunate speed in the year 2024.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s no fun at all. I don’t like to throw away working hardware either, but I wouldn’t wait 7 hours (CPU-bound!) for my manual backup to complete if it could be done faster on a 10 year old laptop with AES-NI. How much data did you add?

Speaking of which @prologic@twtxt.net, have you heard from @ocdtrekkie@twtxt.net lately? He’s active on mastodon but I haven’t seen him around here in a long time.

@prologic@twtxt.net I agree with @movq@www.uninformativ.de. Good documentation is better than an interactive setup process. My difficulties (#isyb2aq) were because I was just doing it for testing and I wanted it running as quickly as possible. If I was running it in a production capacity, I would read through the documentation.

If you’re trying to make non-technical people set up their own Yarn pod, that’s probably (unfortunately) impossible. Management software like Sandstorm make it “as easy as installing apps on your phone” (direct quote from sandstorm.org) and most people still pay Google to store their photos.

I remember you were trying to do paid hosting for Yarn pods in the past. That could work, but as I’m sure you know it’s difficult to convince people to use this over X or Facebook, let alone host their own pod. I think it’s going to stay a small community of fairly technical people for the foreseeable future.

I did it again… #cm7e3ya #s4nbfta

I edited it because I started the line with 500., which the Markdown parser took as the start of an ordered list and made it number 1.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I do wonder that sometimes, but I try to take notes if I’m doing something complicated. Just a few lines in a text file with some context plus the command I used. ffmpeg.txt comes in very handy.

It’s 500. I never changed it, so that’s the default of either Bash or my distro. It’s fine for me.

@bender@twtxt.net That’s what I suspected. I compared the text, including the alt text for the image. I guess I didn’t read it carefully enough.

No worries @aelaraji@aelaraji.com, it happens to the best of us.

Why are there two threads for the same post? #2hhvp2a #kz5qjza

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com I’m definitely putting that in the list. I like tmux but I just can’t wrap my head around the controls. This looks more like a tiling window manager.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Is that a terminal multiplexer? If so, which one? I suspect it says at the top but I can’t quite read the text.

@bender@twtxt.net Fair point… :)

@prologic@twtxt.net Planning it ahead of time is all well and good if you have the money to buy 6 or 8 hard drives at once. I really don’t, and I want to mirror the whole thing offsite anyway. Mergerfs will let me do it now, and I’ll buy a drive each for SnapRAID in short order.

QOTD: Have you ever suffered significant data loss? If so, what went wrong?

@bender@twtxt.net Ha, we both looked it up at once. You win.

@bender@twtxt.net Synology uses single-volume Btrfs on software RAID, which seems to be pretty solid in my research but that’s less flexible than ZFS. https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/What_was_the_RAID_implementation_for_Btrfs_File_System_on_SynologyNAS

@bender@twtxt.net Exactly. It’s just not an option with warnings like that all over the place. Some people have had success, but I’m not risking it. https://lore.kernel.org/linux-btrfs/20200627032414.GX10769@hungrycats.org/

@prologic@twtxt.net ZFS is fine but it’s out-of-tree and extremely inflexible. If Btrfs RAID5/6 was reliable it would be fantastic. Add and remove drives at will, mix different sizes. I hear it’s mostly okay as long as you mirror the metadata (RAID1), scrub frequently, and don’t hammer it with too many random reads and writes. However, there are serious performance penalties when running scrubs on the full array and random reads and writes are the entire purpose of a filesystem.

Bcachefs has similar features (but not all of them, like sending/receiving) and it doesn’t have the giant scary warnings in the documentation. I hear it’s kind of slow and it was only merged into the kernel in version 6.7. I wouldn’t really trust it with my data.

I bought a couple more hard drives recently and I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to allocate them before badblocks completes. I have a few days to decide. :)

@bender@twtxt.net There’s stagit which generates static HTML files

@prologic@twtxt.net I remember running yarnd for testing on a couple of different occasions and both times I found all the required command line options to be annoying. If I remember correctly, running it with missing options would only tell you the first one that was missing and you’d have to keep running it and adding that option before it would work.

This was a couple of years ago, so I don’t know if anything’s changed since then. It’s really not a big problem, because it would be run with some kind of preset command line (systemd service, container entrypoint) in a production environment.

@bender@twtxt.net I avoid install scripts like the plague. This isn’t Windows and they’re usually poorly written. I think it’s better to prioritize native packages (or at least AUR, MPR, etc) and container images.

@prologic@twtxt.net That’s good advice. I don’t open any ports to the Internet if I can possibly avoid it. Everything is on Wireguard, even stuff that doesn’t really need to be. It’s super easy to set up on other people’s computers, too. Even on Windows.

@prologic@twtxt.net Both are very nice in my opinion. I don’t think you could make a mistake with either, at least when it comes to looks.

@prologic@twtxt.net I think this would be solved in the short to mid-term by fixing the mute function. Or, maybe, adding a “Hide this user from Discover” button.

@prologic@twtxt.net Picnic CSS is my favorite one on first glance.

@prologic@twtxt.net Are they changing unique IDs? I hate when people do that. If I ever do that with any of my feeds, feel free to mock me relentlessly.

@bender@twtxt.net Makes sense. We definitely need the ability to mute feeds from the Discover feed.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I remember your solution. It’s very simple, I like it.

Yes, my backup target is my home server. I have a hard drive dedicated to Restic repositories. It’s still not a real backup as I don’t have anything offsite but it’s better than my previous solution. I had two very old hard drives I kept plugged in to my desktop PC and I would (on very rare occasion) plug in another hard drive and copy all the files over to it. Luckily, I’ve never suffered any significant data loss and I would rather not start now. Once I have automated backups on each of my machines, the next project is getting those backups offsite.

@prologic@twtxt.net I think one-way feeds are okay and we shouldn’t discourage them so strongly. On the other hand, I think it’s the duty of a poderator to filter out feeds that are just noise from the Discover feed. I definitely consider a truckload of one-way posts mostly in another language to be noise. Did you get rid of Gopher Chat too? I’d call that noise, for sure.

@bender@twtxt.net Standard twtxt is a microblog in its purest form. A blog, but smaller. It’s just a list of posts to read, and that’s an echochamber in the same way my regular blog is an echochamber. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

@prologic@twtxt.net I support the delisting of ciberlandia.pt in the Discover feed due to the sheer volume of posts from there and the fact that most of them are in Portuguese with this being a predominantly English-language pod.

@prologic@twtxt.net Why do we need to avoid posting to the void? That’s pretty much what twtxt was made for. I don’t like the “Legacy feed” terminology, either. I support the delisting of ciberlandia.pt but I think this change is heading in a bad direction.

I like @sorenpeter@darch.dk ’s suggestion. It gives the users the information and lets them make their own decision instead of putting a big scary warning in their face. That’s what Microsoft does, and we shouldn’t be Microsoft.

@prologic@twtxt.net How do you manage multiple remotes? Do you just run restic backup for each one?

I wish there was a good GUI for Restic so I could have non-technical people using the same thing I do.

QOTD: How do you back up your files?

I asked this one almost a year ago and I started using Restic shortly after that. When I started, I was only backing up my home folder to the repository over NFS. Now, I’m backing up the entire root filesystem to a repository using the REST backend so I can run Restic as root without breaking the permissions.

I’m working on automating it now and I’m trying to come up with something using pinentry but my proof-of-concept is getting pretty obtuse. It will be spread out in a shell script, of course, but still.

systemd-inhibit --what=handle-lid-switch restic --password-command='su -c "printf '"'"'GETPIN\n\'"'"' | WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-1 pinentry-qt5 | grep ^D | sed '"'"'s/^D //'"'"'" mckinley' --repository-file /root/restic-repo backup --exclude-file /root/restic-excludes --exclude-caches --one-file-system /

I’m curious to see how everyone’s backup solutions have changed since last year.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com I’ve never had a use for Syncthing but I hope I get one at some point so I can see how it works. Do three-way merges work on Keepass database files?

I use KeePassXC because I really only use one device. I imagine it would be challenging to rsync the database around if I needed my passwords on more machines. It’s probably fine if you’re deliberate enough, but I don’t think it would take long before I’d lose a password by editing an outdated version of the repository and overwriting the main copy.

I like the simple architecture of Pass, and it would indeed lend itself well to a Git repository, but I don’t like that service names are visible on the filesystem. pass-tomb might mitigate this somewhat but it seems messy and I don’t know if it would work with Git without compromising the security of the tomb.

What’s so good about Bitwarden? Everyone seems to love it. I like that it can be self-hosted. I certainly wouldn’t want a third party in control of my password database.

@prologic@twtxt.net This seems like it would drive a wedge between Yarn.social and the people on regular old twtxt.

@prologic@twtxt.net I use LocalMonero (onion) to buy Monero with cash sent by mail. You can sell on there if you want to convert back to fiat. People also like Bisq, which is peer-to-peer software for buying and selling cryptocurrency.

To accept Monero, all you need is a wallet program. I recommend Feather Wallet. Create your wallet in there, then you’ll copy the wallet files into monero-wallet-rpc for use with MoneroPay, see docker-compose.yaml.

@prologic@twtxt.net Is it really banned? I thought the regulators just pressured the centralized exchanges to delist privacy coins without actually banning them outright.

@prologic@twtxt.net I concur. This little community of ours is here because of you, and I’m very grateful for that. :)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s very useful. I always start my music player in a tmux session so I can SSH in, attach it, and control the music from another computer. It’s also handy for letting long-running tasks on a remote machine continue in the background even if the SSH connection is broken.

@prologic@twtxt.net Monero has stayed a little more stable than Bitcoin but it’s still a cryptocurrency and it’s still going to fluctuate quite a bit. It also uses proof-of-work algorithm so it still consumes quite a bit of electricity. I think the value of being able to send any amount of money, any time of the day, to anyone on the planet in 20 minutes (appears in 2 minutes, spendable in 20) completely privately with near-zero transaction fees exceeds the drawbacks.

Unfortunately, the characteristics that make it useful as a global currency for day-to-day transactions also make it useful for people doing illicit things. Many exchanges, fearing regulatory action, won’t accept Monero for the same reason they won’t accept Bitcoin from a mixer.

Monero shouldn’t be banned just because people use it for bad things. It’s just a tool and it can be used for good or evil. It’s the same reason countries use when they ban or restrict Tor usage.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m in if you accept XMR

Actually, kyun.host might offer container hosting at some point.

On-demand Linux containers.
Run almost anything, without having to touch the command line.
Coming Soon

https://kyun.host/services

@prologic@twtxt.net That sounds great. The only other container-level hosting service I’ve heard of is PikaPods which seems much more managed than cas.run would be. It has customizable tier-based pricing and the minimum specs are ¼ of a CPU core, 256 MB of memory, and “about 100 MB” of storage for $1/mo which seems awfully steep compared to a low-cost VPS. I don’t know if PikaPods offers an IPv4 reverse proxy or not.

Monero uses cryptography to make transactions anonymous and the coins completely fungible. With most cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, the transactions associated with an address are public and you can trace those coins all the way back to their origin. This means that not all coins are the same. For example, some exchanges won’t accept Bitcoin that comes from a mixer because they assume you’re doing something untoward.

With Monero, it’s not possible to trace any transactions with just an address. People can’t see what you’re spending your money on or where your coins came from. Transaction fees using Monero are also very small. It’s less than the equivalent of 1 cent in USD.

Minuscule transaction fees and anonymity make it the best choice in my opinion for buying goods and services online. Monero is much more like “digital cash” than Bitcoin, which I think is better described as “digital gold”.

@prologic@twtxt.net I might have mentioned this already but you might want to look into MoneroPay for payment processing when you get to that point with cas.run. It’s a completely self-hosted backend service for receiving and tracking Monero payments and it’s written in Go.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de You could always keep it running in a detached tmux session and attach it when you see the spike. Processes that were recently using the netwotk stay in the list for 10 or 15 seconds after they’re finished so you don’t have to catch it in the act.

@prologic@twtxt.net $0.15 sounds great but you need to make money doing this. Is it still going to be use-based pricing or will there be tiers like conventional VPS providers?

You could get better value for money with a super cheap VPS without IPv4 connectivity but it wouldn’t be worth it if you didn’t need the extra resources as a VPS wouldn’t be practical with such low specs. It would also require significantly more effort on the part of the operator.

I would understand paying a small premium for using the lowest-cost tier, convenience, and especially if you operated a reverse proxy with IPv4 connectivity.

@prologic@twtxt.net $0.50/month seems reasonable. Is this for cas.run?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I use nethogs for this sort of thing: https://github.com/raboof/nethogs

@prologic@twtxt.net What is an mCore? 1/1000th of a core?

@prologic@twtxt.net Plexamp has some really cool features. It’s a shame it’s proprietary and dependent on central services.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Interesting. mpd + ncmpcpp seems to be a common setup among our type but I really like cmus. Whipper is my CD ripper of choice and it is excellent. It queries AccurateRip for checksums and MusicBrainz for metadata, and can encode to any format you want. It also creates a nice log file like EAC does (it can even create EAC-compatible logs with a plugin) so you can verify that it was ripped properly.

QOTD: How do you listen to your music?

I’ll start. I have a meticulously organized FLAC library stored locally on my laptop and played with cmus. Everything is manual but I have a collection of home-grown shell scripts that help me maintain folder structure, manage metadata, calculate information about the recording like dynamic range and spectrograms, and do transformations like cue splitting. Once an album has been processed, it goes into the music folder on my laptop with a duplicate copy stored on my server.

I have been thinking about letting beets do all of that boring stuff, but I’m not sure I can trust it to do it right. I also really want some kind of (self hosted) algorithm to pick songs for me. As it is, I can’t just shuffle my library or even genres because there are a lot of songs that don’t go well together as well as songs I just don’t like. I haven’t found anything that can do that.

Anyway, I’m curious to see how you guys do it.

@prologic@twtxt.net He didn’t like LibreOffice Writer? Is he used to Microsoft Word or Apple Pages? I’ve had success getting non-technical Office refugees on LibreOffice, specifically Writer. Most people don’t need any fancy features and most things are located close enough to their counterparts on Word.

I show them how to export their documents as PDF before they share them with others and I use the (somewhat) immutability of PDFs and their portability (bundled fonts, rigid formatting, etc) to sell it. Those are two real benefits, but the main reason is that I don’t trust other software to handle ODTs and I don’t trust LibreOffice to write DOCXes. Although, I don’t know if I really need to be worried about either of them with basic documents. It’s probably worth investigating.

@prologic@twtxt.net Nice. I hope he likes it.

@prologic@twtxt.net What does he use now?

@sorenpeter@darch.dk Done

@bender@anthony.buc.ci Check out https://darch.dk/timeline/, it’s an honest-to-goodness Yarn-like Web UI. Very impressive, @darch@neotxt.dk. Do you want it listed on groovy-twtxt?

@prologic@twtxt.net You’re right, but they’re not going to stop until people vote with their wallets.

@bender@twtxt.net I’m not suggesting that people should use an old Windows version to avoid this. I’m saying that Windows in general should be considered a legacy operating system, and continued usage will only make you subject to more of this tracking and unnecessary garbage.

In other words, the situation will never improve. It will only get worse from here, so you might as well get out now while there are still plenty of life boats. Otherwise, when they do something that’s really over the line, you either have to go along with it or dive right into the cold ocean.

Windows is only kept alive at this point by a lack of knowledge about the alternatives, apathy, fear, and some enterprise software and games with support in Wine improving by the day.

@prologic@twtxt.net Only if you stick with legacy operating systems

Cutting edge server monitoring from McKinley Labs: Detect when the heavy compute task on my server is done and play a sound on my laptop

ssh server 'while true; do test $(</proc/loadavg cut -d . -f 1) -lt 10 && break; sleep 10; done' && qmpv sound.opus

@bender@twtxt.net I also use the Discover tab and I do wish I could mute some of them that only post in Portugese. I just didn’t know they were on Mastodon.

Ah, the Ciberlandia people are on a Mastodon bridge. I thought we got rid of that.

@@villares@ciberlandia.pt Sounds like a great use for Monero: https://www.getmonero.org/

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Paper shopping lists are much better than phones. They don’t turn off every 30 seconds so you have to push a button and type in a code.

@xuu@txt.sour.is Nice. I’ve been thinking of doing something similar for my website so I can host more services at mckinley.cc.

@prologic@twtxt.net Usable? Impressive. You can fit a lot of ISOs in 22 TB. Are you doing ZFS?

@prologic@twtxt.net I looked up BurmillaOS and this is definitely one for my thread about unique Linux distributions. Very interesting.

Everything in BurmillaOS is a Docker container. We accomplish this by launching two instances of Docker. One is what we call System Docker and is the first process on the system. All other system services, like ntpd, syslog, and console, are running in Docker containers. System Docker replaces traditional init systems like systemd and is used to launch additional system services.

@eapl.me@eapl.me @movq@www.uninformativ.de I have an E1505 in my box of laptops and its keyboard is pretty great, especially by modern standards. I’d say it’s almost on par with that of a contemporary ThinkPad (T43).

@xuu@txt.sour.is Wow. txt.sour.is has IPv6, so are you hosting it on one of those VMs or is it a reverse proxy back home?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Maybe it’s just a cargo cult thing (pun intended) because it’s somehow an accepted way to install a piece of software.

@quark@ferengi.one Maybe 1.8 is a bit excessive. I’ll give 1.5 a try. Thanks!

Thank you @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org, that means a lot. :)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s possible for a Web server to detect whether or not you’re piping the output into a shell and change its output based on that, which makes curl | sh so much worse in my opinion.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240311094552/https://www.idontplaydarts.com/2016/04/detecting-curl-pipe-bash-server-side/

@bender@twtxt.net That’s fair and I understand if you don’t want to click through to another website just to get my thoughts on WYSIWYG website builders. However, my website is much better than a WYSIWYG one. It has absolutely no JavaScript or tracking (not even Web server access logs) and it will work on just about any browser that won’t die the moment it sees XHTML.

If I’m putting a lot of effort into a piece of writing, I’d rather have it on my website that I control rather than someone else’s. No offense @prologic@twtxt.net :)

@prologic@twtxt.net Wow. I didn’t know the Mills DC was that serious. How much storage do you have and how is it set up?

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no What kind of hashrate are you getting on that thing?

QOTD: What do you host on your home server? How do you host it? Are you using containers? VMs? Did you install any management interface or do you just SSH in? What OS does it run?

Mine runs Arch (btw) and hosts a handful of things using Docker. Adguard Home, http://mckinley2nxomherwpsff5w37zrl6fqetvlfayk2qjnenifxmw5i4wyd.onion/, a Monero node, and some others. NFS, Flexo, and Wireguard (peer and bounce server in my personal network) are outside Docker. I have a hotkey in my window manager that spawns a terminal on my server using SSH. It makes things very easy and I highly recommend it.

I am thinking about replacing Docker with Podman because the Common Wisdom seems to say it’s better. I don’t really know if it is or isn’t.

Also, how much of your personal infrastructure is on IPv6? I think all the software I use supports both, but I’ve mostly been using IPv4 because it’s easier to remember the addresses. I’ve been working for the last couple days on making it IPv6-only.

@bender@twtxt.net I don’t mind the character limit. If I hit it and I still have more to say, it’s a good reminder that I should probably write a note instead. I like to POSSE anything that might have value outside of the current conversation.

I can’t believe software developers are still trying to get people to do curl | sh. It’s easy to miss the problem if you’re still in the mindset of Windows software distribution, but these people are writing software on GNU/Linux, for GNU/Linux. You would think they’d realize that this is never a good idea.

@bender@twtxt.net Solo mining at 450 Gh/s, it’s a 1 in 8,765,713 chance per day of mining a block, so it would take roughly 24,000 years on average. Think of it like playing the lottery. It sounds kind of fun to me.

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no Neat. Are you going to try your luck solo mining?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think Browsh is fairly new but it doesn’t really count as it’s just a frontend for Firefox. I haven’t heard of any new, real, text-based browsers.

@shreyan@twtxt.net Yes. It uses the FreeBSD core tools. https://chimera-linux.org/about/#alternative-userland

@movq@www.uninformativ.de There’s nothing wrong with that. I just do it because I like well-defined standards and as a sort of protest against the “Living Standards”. I also take care to make my website look reasonable even when CSS isn’t available, especially in terminal browsers.