@cuaxolotl@sunshinegardens.org Ah, thanks for reporting back! Okay, so you’re basically manually “crawling” feeds right now. 🤔 What do you think about the idea of adding something like # follow_notify = gemini://foo/bar to your feed’s metadata, so that clients who follow you can ping that URL every now and then? How would you even notice that, do you regularly read your gemini logs? 🤔

And the bonus read is also interesting:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20211129-00/?p=105979

Confession: I completely forgot that Alt+Tab existed in text mode. 🤦 It’s not even a hidden feature, it’s advertised right when you start a fullscreen dos box. Well, Alt+Tab wasn’t a thing I did regularly anyway – it was usually Ctrl+Esc to open the window list (which also worked in OS/2). 🤔 I think I only started using Alt+Tab when Windows 95 removed Ctrl+Esc (because it had no use anymore, it essentially got replaced by the tasklist).

Interesting read about the Windows 95 bluescreen by Raymond Chen:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20240903-00/?p=110205

All this Virtual Machine Manager stuff went completely over my head back then … 🤯

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Quick! Play the lottery! HURRY!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

But maybe with the climate getting hotter and hotter, they migrate north to me, too.

And a lot of other nasty stuff with it, bugs, spiders, you name it. Didn’t we migrate all this way up north to be free from such Ungeziefer? 😅

There was a time when WebKit (I think it was WebKit) stored metadata of downloads in extended attributes. Like the URL you were downloading it from.

https://movq.de/v/f79b94485a/s.png

This was really useful. 🤔 Chromium also did it for a while and then they removed it due to privacy concerns. Now none of the popular browsers do it anymore. 🫤

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665531
  
• https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/a9b4fb70b4318b220deee0da7b1693d16b8ed071
  
• https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260778

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com He … slapped you? 😂 Typical for a cat! 😂

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Well, I guess that goes to show how completely irrelevant it was to Computer History. 😅

@prologic There’s another thing to consider: I have a feeling that (some/most/many?) Gopher/Gemini users wouldn’t even want that. I’ve heard them say a couple of times: “If you follow me, just drop me an e-mail.” 🤔 I don’t know if this is a widespread opinion or not, but I do feel the need to first gather some feedback from them, before we start drafting a spec. 😅

@prologic Ahh, found it, there were some ideas in this thread from January 2022: https://twtxt.net/twt/ansuy4a I haven’t read all of it yet.

@prologic So a new metadata field like this?

# follow_notify = gopher://foo/bar

And we ping that every now and then? 🤔

@prologic You mean a way of letting them know that someone is following them? 🤔 I guess that’s gonna be hard (I think we discussed stuff like that a few years ago), but I’m open for suggestions. 😅

This would have been a lovely morning, wind softly rustling in the trees. If it wasn’t for the constant droning of the air planes. 🫤

I also saw a string of starlink satellites passing by. What a strange sight that was.

@prologic I don’t think so, no. Judging by their web site, they appear to be primarily a Gemini user (no concept of a “user agent” there). This also works:

gemini://sunshinegardens.org/users/xj9/twtxt/tw.txt

But there are nick, url, and description metadata headers in the feed, even an avatar. 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That is one flat snake. 🫤 Looks quite pretty, what’s left of it anyway.

What’s going on with the frogs? I guess they can’t properly see in the dark? 🤔

That large “individual” towards the would have freaked me out. Was it at least furry? Or was it a huge spider? 🤪

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m not surprised, it’s pretty archaic. It’s the only browser readily available on OS/2 Warp 3 and 4, though. 😅

@prologic In a collection of (old) wallpapers that I downloaded a while ago. The source appears to be this:

http://www.avernus.com/desktop-textures/copyright.html

But the following addendum does not exist yet in the COPYRIGHT file on my disk. 😅

This restriction does not apply to use in World-Wide Web pages served from or viewed on Windows machines.

Lest we forget Mosaic: https://movq.de/v/f85fd317b3/mosaic.jpg

In the process of tweaking my little static HTML index/thumbnail creator so that it a) properly supports dark/ligh mode and, more importantly, b) gracefully degrades on ancient browsers.

Why? Because I often exchange data via HTTP with old systems and my tooling automatically invokes that indexer/thumbnailer script. 🥴 It’s really annoying when I just see garbage in Netscape 2 or IE5.

Screenshots and videos: https://movq.de/v/348819c482

Found this in an old copyright notice from 1993:

These images are not for use with the Microsoft Windows environment. Using these patterns in a Windows environment consitutes a copyright violation.

Someone clearly didn’t like Windows.

@quark@ferengi.one

I think you are worrying about a non-issue.

That’s what I do best. 😏

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com @quark@ferengi.one Yep, I like it as well. 😅

There’s another situation that I’m not quite happy with.

Suppose there’s a twt like this:

2024-08-28T19:57:58Z    <a href="https://twtxt.net/external?uri=https://foo.example.com/tw.txt&nick=person_a">@person_a<em>@foo.example.com</em></a> <a href="https://twtxt.net/external?uri=gemini://a.b.c/tw.txt&nick=person_b">@person_b<em>@a.b.c</em></a> Hey! 👋

There’s no hash, so --fetch-context won’t do anything at the moment.

Option A: jenny asks interactively to fetch those feeds once.

No thread hash found
Do you want to fetch the entire feed https://foo.example.com/tw.txt? [Y/n] y
Do you want to fetch the entire feed gemini://a.b.c/tw.txt? [Y/n] n

(Bonus points for skipping feeds that you already follow.)

Option B: There could be an external/third-party tool that scans a twt for all mentions and asks the user if they want to follow them (permanently). Why an external tool? The thing is, the follow file has been completely user-managed so far and I kind of want to keep it that way. And if this is an external tool, then users can do all kinds of fancy stuff, like using fzf or whatever. Or it could allow the user to preview the feed before following it. I don’t want to have stuff like that in the core program, it depends too much on users’ preferences.

To “implement” option B, I’d only add some hints to the docs, maybe an example.

I think I’m leaning towards option B at the moment. 🤔

@prologic The equator is your enemy. Stay away from it, as far as you can! 😱

(I just looked it up, your “winter” is barely cooler than our “summer”, according to those fancy climate diagrams and my rough understanding of them. 😅)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh my goodness…! 🤣

@quark@ferengi.one Oh dear, 87% humidity probably don’t feel great, either. 🥴 That’s what I have in the bathroom after leaving the shower. 😂

I am ready for our winter too, you know, that whole week

lol 😅