MC's journal

Status 2025-07-21

Morning, computer! Spending my days off trying to figure things out. Some of them will occur in this post. I think best when I'm writing, after all.

Intro

I'm back from a short vacation since a couple of weeks. I'm still going to take a few days off every week for a while. I need the break. It's been way too many 12-16 hour workdays. I'm nominally working 80% (~6 hour days), so I figure I've been working a lot for free.

Yeah, well, I like the TKey project to succeed. The ideas behind it have implications for the future of trustworthy computing. It's more important than just the TKey itself.

I also feel guilty every time I don't meet my own expectations or just sit and stare with anxiety, unable to start anything. Then I hyperfocus in the evenings. ADHD much? Yes. Of course it's not healthy in the long run.

Vacation was… short. I didn't do much. No travels, except to the cottage and to nearby towns. I did manage to meet some dear friends.

Especially grateful to meet R since I'm not going to the US for the foreseeable future because… *gestures at everything*. I got a beautiful patch by him "I want to leave" in the form of the X-Files classic "I want to believe" poster. It's probably going on one of my black denim jackets soon, along with the cone studs I bought for me and #3 to decorate our jackets with.

Dayjob

Dayjob has launched new web pages for the main page and the bugbounty page. There are even .onion addresses!

They're both now static pages generated by Hugo, but there are unfortunately still a lot of JS scripts, even third-party JS. And no, the links are not yet underlined! Obligatory t-shirt.

A PR agency did heroic work to change the stylesheet to the company theme while we were busy continuing working on Castor. I really am grateful they were willing to take on a Hugo theme.

I'm glad that we can now more easily help update the web pages by just writing Markdown in a repo. It's a little thing, perhaps, but it feels… comfortable?

Work on the TKey continues to be a little crazy, but I'm trying to deal with that. There's an alpha tag on the actual platform repo for the next generation, like I wrote in the last post, but there's still a lot to do, not least with the FIDO2 app.

Isolation

For MH- reasons I have sort of withdrawn a little. I'm no longer active on many of the chat rooms and forums I used to be active in. I also took a little break from Fedi. The self-hatred is strong, but sort of manageable. I have a pin I sometimes wear which says "Walking disaster". Not wearing it right now. That's something.

It's been said of chat rooms that they are "an all day meeting with no agenda"? I've contributed a lot myself both in my free time and at work. Dammit. I'm a chatty guy. I'm sorry. It's useful for building community, though, I'll give it that.

You'll have to excuse me for a while.

Of course, this means I feel even more lonely than usual. Not sure what to do, really.

I've also been spending time in the cottage which, well, is obviously more isolated than a flat in the city. Then again, if I don't leave the flat? Yeah.

Fedi woes

A post I made in Fedi went slightly viral. It was just an image of a t-shirt I like with a print on it saying "What's more punk than the public library?".

You can buy the original t-shirt here and support the Mt. Pleasant branch of the DC public library (which just happens to be the location of a huge punk archive):

https://mtpfriends.bigcartel.com/product/what-s-more-punk-adult-t-shirt

Or here, if you're not in the US:

https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/what-s-more-punk-than-a-public-library-by-veronikamar/118277789.IJ6L0

…but that won't support the library.

Here's an interesting article about the campaign:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/09/04/dc-library-punk-shirt/

I got hundreds of likes and boosts by just posting this photo which, I guess, is basically a good thing. I also got some really stupid comments and unwelcome DMs. For posting a photo of a shirt!? I can only imagine what someone with 10x, 100x or 1000x the exposure gets. Whoa!

Some ways of handling it, besides taking a Fedi break, is to hide notifications for favourites and boosts and consider hiding notifications for mentions as well, at least until it blows over. I also hide boosts and replies in my home timeline, but I did that since forever.

Apparently I didn't remember to change the visibility of my posts when hackers.town changed to the new Masto instance. It's now changed to "private" (followers only) and "unlisted". Also set my profile to require follow requests and changed the autodelete to two weeks.

I'm not interested in "maximizing reach". I'm interested in reading what all you wonderful crazy people are doing, and in reaching the people who follow me, especially mutuals where some people seem to be turning into… friends?

About that… Chatted with an old friend recently and he seems to miss most of my posts, probably because we're not active at the same time. It's really much too easy to miss posts from the people you follow.

I don't think I like the ActivityPub protocol or any of the Mastodon API clients much. tut is OK, mastodon.el, too, but I haven't had the time to fix the problems I see with it (mainly that it can't filter boosts, and that is has some problems when you're running it in an Emacs with no image libraries).

My friend also entirely missed both the original Radio Free Fedi (RIP!) and the current Radio Free Fedi Fest 25, which might be an indication that we follow completely different people, of course. He also missed my plugs for it. The current event is here:

https://party.radiofreefedi.net/

There's something playing almost every day in July!

I would like to have some other kind of "social" "media", perhaps targeted around subjects instead like, I don't know…, Usenet (but with better spam protection)? Oh, and if we're really doing this microblogging thing I would like to see every post from the people I follow, please.

Yes, I know about the .rss suffix trick to get an RSS feed from at least the people who uses Mastodon, a fork, or some other server that supports that, but it doesn't give full feeds and it breaks down when people have followers-only on their posts. I guess it would be possible to generate specific RSS URLs for every follower?

I would love a client that shows all unread posts, tracking what I've already read, shows things in chronological order, and hides threads unless expanded. But I guess ActivityPub might be a lost cause, anyway, for many reasons.

Here's a tut config which gives me three panes: the home timeline, notifications, and mentions. It has boosts and replies hidden in the home timeline. Notifications about favourites and boosts are not shown. This is what I live with right now when not taking a Fedi pause. 

[general]
notifications-to-hide=["favorite", "boost", "mention"]

[[general.timelines]]
name="home"
type="home"
hide-boosts=true
hide-replies=true
keys=["0"]

[[general.timelines]]
name="Notifications"
type="notifications"
keys=["n", "N"]
on-creation-closed="new-pane"
on-focus="focus-self"

[[general.timelines]]
name="Mentions"
type="mentions"
keys=["1", "1"]
on-creation-closed="new-pane"
on-focus="focus-self"

Pride

As usual, I went to the Malmö Pride parade. I thought it might still be important to go, even in Sweden. I usually go with #3 but she didn't want to go this time. She said something like "People!" and hissed like a cat. I understand. I really do.

Naturally, I joined the pink/black bloc at the end of the parade. Didn't know if they would even be there or do their own parade or what. Online information was scarce. The only information I found was about a year old.

The pink/black block is made up of mostly libertarian socialists who want to bring back more politics to Pride. For many years it's been the largest bloc in the parade in Malmö.

A woman, perhaps in her early 40s, waving a bi flag, struck up a conversation, was very open about her mental health problems and turned out to be an interesting person to talk to during the parade. Someone else recognized me as "a hacker from C3". I also waved to some people I know watching the parade.

Besides the usual slogans there was a lot of shouting about Palestine. There was also lot of hate against the police. The organizers didn't think this through very well, I think, because the LBTQ uniformed police was marching just before the pink/blac bloc… No, Swedish police is nothing like US police, but there are still problems, especially if you're not looking like and behaving like everyone else.

The pink/black bloc broke off from the main parade and arrived at its own destination. There were some talks and spectacles, with a lone police car in attendance. Wisely, the police stayed in their car.

I left feeling sad and very lonely, isolated from "my" political movements. I have to think about this. Also thinking about what Emma Goldman wrote:

"What I believe" is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods and governments, not for the human intellect.

(From "What I believe" in New York World, July 19, 1908.)

I was also sad to note that the local newspaper totally ignored to report on what was probably the largest bloc in the parade in their cover of the Pride parade.

I was just exhausted afterwards. Like I wrote on Fedi: "I know it's not even eight pm yet, but I'm going to bed. Too many people today. Necessary, but very tiring."

Infra

Turned off the mailing list manager for hack.org. I can't handle it anymore, for several reasons.

Don't get me wrong. I like mailing lists as a medium. I'm still subscribed to way more than is really healthy, even though traffic has been dwindling for many years.

The reason is mainly a lack of spoons. The software I've been using is old and probably insecure and need replacement. I would have to learn how to handle a new mailing list manager. Then there's all the rewriting-from-shenanighans going on. I think it's dead, Jim.

While most (all?) lists hosted by list.hack.org were closed in some way, at least only allowing posts by subscribers, there is also the problem with spam reputation. Big Mail, like Google and Microsoft, have often opaque reasons for dropping mail into a spam folder. Sending mail through a mailing list manager from the same IP address as your regular mail is probably one of them.

I'm also trying to remove more and more forwarding aliases, also a sure way of being reputed to send spam. I'm down to a couple addresses. Trying to find people and arrange IMAP/POP/SMTP accounts for them if they are interested in keeping their address.

This will probably help the rumour of the IP address of my mail server.

I'm in the process of moving the mail server and it will probably have a new IP address, at least for a while, so it's kind of important to get a good spam reputation at once.

With both the XMPP server and the mailing list manager turned off I don't have many services left to move. I'm mostly sad about the XMPP server, really. Might have to revisit that one later. Meanwhile, I'm at xmpp:mc@lysator.liu.se, as I've mentioned earlier. See Contact information for OMEMO.

Web and Gemini servers have already moved away from the main server. That was easy, in comparison. In the process I changed the web server from nginx to Caddy. Setting up Caddy was remarkably easy and I turned on old school tilde expansion for users like I wrote in a previous post: The return of the tilde.

Some recent media

Written by MC on Boomtime, the 56 day of Confusion in the YOLD 3191 ().