Material Files has good SFTP support.

“I’m already apart of the Fediverse” 🥲

What are you moving away to? I’m assuming you’re still keeping your VPNs and DNS ad-blockers etc?

Stars are perhaps even more common in written text for highlights and annotations than typed text, at least around here. I can draw a star much faster than three asterisks. But it wouldn’t be very easily distinguishable as the Fediverse star. And that’s the same between the regular sharp and pointy star and the rounded outline one.

Now, if we could get the Unicode Consortium to add the graphical logo, I’d be sold. But if we must pick an existing character, I for one prefer the outlined star (⚝) much more than either the asterism (⁂) or the pentagram (⛧).

Unlike the pentagram, it aligns a lot better with inline text and looks nice and smooth. It’s also far less commonly used or overloaded with existing readings.

The asterism would be easier to unambiguously read or write by hand though! That’s its one pro.

Phtn.app, on the web

For a while I was seeing people use the asterism symbol (⁂) around my Mastodon feed. Wonder what happened to that movement.

Those rumours about moonlit orgies can’t all be wrong. They are the f-druids after all…

The ability to post a video to multiple co-authors’ channels.

Link to the quoted article: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/01/a-nasa-astronaut-may-have-just-taken-the-best-photo-from-space-ever/

For me, trying to read the actual protocol or even tutorials that try to explain the protocol in a more approachable manner, didn’t help at all. It’s no understatement that ActivityPub itself is a mess.

But reading the Fedify documentation and describing “activities” with the library helped a lot more!

Even if you don’t plan on writing Js/Ts, I recommend the Fedify tutorial.

Ironically, because there’s no UDP in browsers, we can’t actually get proper p2p on the web. WebRTC through centralized coordination servers at best. Protocol Labs has all but given up on this use-case in favor of using some bootstrapped selection of remote helper nodes.

IPFS has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Ethereum, or indeed any blockchain. It is a protocol for storing distributing and addressing data by hashes of the content over a peer to peer network.

There is however an initiative to create a commercial market for “pinning*”, which is blockchain based. It still has nothing to do with Ethereum, and is a distinct project that uses IPFS rather than being part of the protocol, thankfully. It is also not a “proof of work” sort of waste, but built around proving content that was promised to be stored is actually stored.

Pinning in IPFS is effectively “hosting” data permanently. IPFS is inherently peer to peer: content you access gets added to your local cache and gets served to any peer near you asking for it—like BitTorrent—until it that cache is cleared to make space for new content you access. If nobody keeps a copy of some data you want others to access when your machines are offline, IPFS wouldn’t be particularly useful as a CDN. So peers on the network can choose to pin some data, making them exempt from being cleared with cache. It is perfectly possible to offer pinning services that have nothing to do with Filecoin or the blockchain, and those exist already. But the organization developing IPFS wanted an independent blockchain based solution simply because they felt it would scale better and give them a potential way to sustain themselves.

Frankly, it was a bad idea then, as crypto grift was already becoming obvious. And it didn’t really take off. But since Filecoin has always been a completely separate thing to IPFS, it doesn’t affect how IPFS works in any way, which it continues to do so.

There are many aspects of IPFS the actual protocol that could stand to be improved. But in a lot of ways, it does do many of the things a Fediverse “CDN” should. But that’s just the storage layer. Getting even the popular AP servers to agree to implement IPFS is going to be almost as realistic an expectation as getting federated identity working on AP. A personal pessimistic view.

I use Penpot for every personal project that I can. The new(ish) grid layout is just beautiful. Figma can’t do that, can it!

Unfortunately, there’s a lot more Penpot can’t do that Figma can. And for any reasonably complex project, or commercial ones, I have to go back to it.

Hopefully Penpot catches up soon! My biggest showstopper right now is variable fonts. If it was possible to manually set CSS somehow, maybe that would help bridge the gap a lot!

Finally, ~/Templates support!!

Friday Night Fuckin’ as well, then

Doesn’t have an entry for monads 🙃

As an EXR elitist I deeply resent Google’s blatant sabotage of JXL.

(And also laugh at the PNG elitists, as is custom.)

Yeah, as pinned tabbed. Very much so. I actually like them specifically because I can forget about them. I use them like someone would use a napkin in that classic Hollywood trope sense! Just to work something out and then forgetting about it, except, if needed, I can open up the tab again and copy over stuff to my actual notes later!

I use it almost daily when in bed and thinking of some project or the other—I like to think in text—but don’t want to bring up my notetaker and getting even more distracted.

And I often get friends and family open one up while troubleshooting their problems. What else would I use, Notepad?

Ultimately, why not? Why do people make little standalone tools like this? For fun, probably. Or because they can. As a learning exercise? And when it has no cost to the developer to maintain, or the user to use. Why would I even try to second-guess their motivation?