Hello world
again

I seem to be quite consistent being inconsistently present around here :)

https://cloudappreciationsociety.org/

Not a devops place.

Just wanted to post here that the wedding & honeymoon were awesome!

The wedding and preparations were a true challenge. when we visited the tax office to get the green light to get married in sweden (hindersprövning) (yes you go to the tax office for that around here). They suggested we'd wait 4-8 weeks for our wedding permit, since Vera's a Ukrainian citizen. But low and behold; they cut the line short to just a few hours on a saturday as soon as we had all the documents send in, which is bit of a miracle considering the nature of paper based Swedish bureaucracy.

Our honeymoon was to Gotland & Visby, where we spend almost a week exploring the city and the island around it. It was so nice.
For those that have seen "Kiki's Delivery Service"; Visby (and elements from the old city in Stockholm) was the main inspiration for the movi. You can actually visit many of the landmarks presented in the movie :)

Kiki's bakery, which was inspired by a little house in the very center of Visby

Ryska Gården

We managed to find most the places and tunnels :)
Here is a map if you ever make the journey yourself!

courtesy https://www.chinkaiseki.com/ghibli/

The rest of the island was stunning too!

I wrote this about 3 weeks ago, but held off on posting it
#2023SoFar

Hey there, it’s been a while!
I knew SSB existed in the back of my head, but I never really took the time to go back to it. It’s time to do a sit down and just think about the end of 2022 and what has happened in 2023 so far.

Now is the perfect time, I’m just sitting in front of the laser cutter in our workshop looking at the laser head toiling away trying to make a welcome sign to our wedding in Acrylic.
It’s a bit stinky, but the result seems to come together nicely.

So what has happened since I last wrote…

In May last year I met a fantastic person on “Norrlands Hawaii”, just off the coast of my city up here in Sweden. She’s awesome and absolutely amazing!
After a trip to the big cliff in Sarek last fall she even became my Fiancé! Better yet; we’re getting married in a few weeks! Organising the wedding has been a challenge, but we’re getting there :)

Development-wise; just before I dropped off on this platform I started a new project in Germany (while working remote in Sweden).
it’s been a blast so far with a lot of green-fielding in React and lots of machine- and simulated data that needs to be processed In to graphs and dashboards. Basically Every Dribbble-designer’s dream.
It’s been fun; even though I will probably never agree with the composition of the tech stack and the “databases” that were chosen to host our relational data.

Last year has been bit of a mixed bag. I got to learn a lot of new stuff about React just by working on it every day for a couple of months and I’ve been able to dip my toes in to some Next.JS stuff, server-side rendering, jsonForms (which is really cool… once you override their hideous index-key-based state-context machine) and just a bunch of stuff in Typescript, Lua, Ruby and Elixir spaces!

Back in November I finally brought my entire NVIM configuration to be Lua-first instead of vim script with Lua tags. You can check out my trials and tribulations at https://git.hendrikpeter.net/hendrikpeter/pico-vim (I switched to a white theme last weekend, so I can write code without killing my eyes while sitting out in the garden; so be careful if you pull it down, it’s bright).

Challenges ahead of me (and us) in general before the end of the year

The wedding

Obviously the wedding and the trip afterward. I’m really looking forward to both, Vera is awesome!

Podcasting

I ran https://patraden.knightec.se/ for a few episodes with my colleagues Kim & Jeger. The recording, editing and the reception from listeners was just an awesome experience. I’m looking for folks around me in the office to pick that back up.. but in English or maybe a combo between 1 pod in Swedish every month and then an English one bi-weekly… I don’t know yet, but it’s point 1 on the agenda after the wedding.

Upgrade housing-wise

A 1.5-er is nice, but I’d love to put a 3d printer and my SO’s machines and work equipment in a dedicated room for creativity. We both really like this side of the city and whenever we get back from traveling to our little home-town between the mountains. I mean we both just instantly click into that mode of truly being home. So it would need to be somewhere around here I suppose.

The future and the next thing for me

It’s been a blast to work at my office and swim in the world of med-tech with the biggest players in that space, but I don’t know; while I get to teach on my current job and at our customers I’d love to do that more in an official capacity as a tech lead or (coding) team coach.

Back to monoliths,

I’m done with all this CDK stuff and pushing every little action off into separate lambdas. Holding multi-stack infrastructures up feels more like sheep-herding with extra steps than coding beautiful systems when your entire product is maintained by a handful of developers.

The major lesson I’ve confirmed for myself is that it’s just soooo nice to start with a simple monolith and then branch of into micro-services and lambdas when that starts to make sense (growing customer-base, growing team, growing product or dealing with things other languages and frameworks are just much better at).
But please not the other way around; creating a product with micro-services, lambdas and micro-transactions that can hold tens of thousands of users in a space where you expect at most a handful of early adopters with a tiny development team is just awful. especially if every little element developed is hand-crafted an not off the shelf. we could have at least gone with serverless or something of the likes instead of writing our own hand-crafted CDK system.
Yeah google, Amazon and friends do micro-services and stuff and they are great companies raking in billions, but they are huge companies that have grown over time.

Embrace: Special snowflakes are not worth it.

Go flame me in the comments, but goodness. I’ve been in a few situations now where people around me chose to spend weeks and sometimes even months of development (and then years of maintaining it) on something that could have been fixed in 5 minutes. Sometimes you gotta get to bend UX a bit if the trade-off is -100+ hours of work and double that in maintenance down the road really worth not having a little extra button?

more SSB & More DWeb

It’s highly time I got back in the seat. But I’ll continue to be around as just a user & tinkerer. also where are all the Crab meets at?

Learn and get ahead of the “Proomting” game (formerly known as googling things)

It’s probably just a temporary thing, but I think we entered the next “Napster” moment where internet, things on the internet and development arrives at a pivotal point. Co-pilot has been creeping me out at times with its suggestions and I figure that's only going to get better.
We had a presentation back in 2019 when I first started at my current gig. The presenter (Dr. Kjell A Nordström) told how all of the knowledge we have in our society is on a pile and that the power of arriving at some conclusion first, but that that IP will at some point end up on that pile. Well that pile just became insanely easy to query with the sudden spike of interest in LLMs.

Bee keeping.

I’ve been holding off on that since I moved from the Netherlands, but it’s gotta be time at some point, not this year though as I should have started worrying about that back in March. So that’s going to be a thing for 2024.

Git worktrees & Nvim

I got sucked into that today and goodness it’s a nice rabbit hole

Get my fiancé a public key on this platform

This place is nice, gardens itself well and I don’t know, It’s fun in a slower and different way than other social media platforms are. You should try it Vera :)

Hi I'm back. been offline from SSB for a few months.
How are y'all doing?

I'll write how I'm doing ASAP with some kind of "my 2023" or something.

I run a pihole on docker at home frrom my NAS-like device and have been doing so for nearly 2 years now. (I ran a pi before, that but the constant heat of my small army of aurora bots, house automations, SSB stuff and other things got to the pi and made it burn out). It has worked really well so far!

The only thing you have to remember is to log in every now and then and update the docker image.

The first results on google (those paid ones) will no longer work, but other than that it works great!

don't connect to pubs and take it easy on whom to follow (I would be a bad first person to follow considering how many messages I have and how big the network around me is ;)

I would recommend getting started with one of the manyverse clients and connecting to a friendly neighborhood SSB Room (https://picoroom.hendrikpeter.net being an excellent first choice).

It's probably best to set the replication hops to 2, so you don't blow up your database if you (or a friend of a friend) connects with an SSB-celeb.

and from there go where your friend wants to go ^_^

your router might have some settings for custom DNS routes.. so if you can figure out what your TV is talking to you could just route those to a non existing localhost address

alternatively feel free to use my Pihole config:

On your router

On your router assign any Linux/Mac machine (or a pi or windows, but i have no experience running a pihole in windows) a reserved IP address that matches the Ip-address scheme of the rest of your devices (192.168.0.200 in my case) and reboot the router and the linux/Mac. that way they'll re-register to the network with all the right flags.

On your pi-hole computer of choice (with docker-compose)

Install Docker on your machine.
On ubuntu: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/ and https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/linux-postinstall/#manage-docker-as-a-non-root-user
On mac: download Docker Desktop from docker.com.

open a terminal and make a new "pihole" directory somewhere in your user directory. in it insert the file below:

docker-compose.yml

version: "3"
services:
  pihole:
    container_name: pihole
    hostname: HomeNuc
    image: pihole/pihole:latest
    ports:
      - "192.168.0.200:53:53/tcp"
      - "192.168.0.200:53:53/udp"
      - "192.168.0.200:67:67/udp"
      - "0.0.0.0:5000:80/tcp"
    environment:
      TZ: 'Europe/Stockholm'
      WEBPASSWORD: 'INSERTYOURPASSHERE'
      ServerIP: "192.168.0.200"
      PIHOLE_DNS_: "1.1.1.1;1.0.0.1"
    volumes:
      - './etc-pihole/:/etc/pihole/'
      - './etc-dnsmasq.d/:/etc/dnsmasq.d/'
    restart: unless-stopped

Make sure to insert your Time-zone on TZ, your web interface password of choice as well as the serverIp of the pi-hole itself. also make sure to fill in the network address of your pi-hole as the expose-to interface in your port list.

port 53 and 67 are for DNS requests, port 80->5000 is for the web interface

once done type "docker-compose up".

If you get port reserved errors you might need to disable the system built-in DNS server:

On mac: https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/docker-unable-to-bind-to-port-53/45082/8
on Ubuntu: https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/run-pihole-in-docker-on-ubuntu-with-reverse-proxy/ (step 1 in that guide, just do the 2 systemctl commands, no need to edit your resolve files or remove anything).

You might need to open some ports using sudo ufw allow 53 67 80 && sudo ufw reload if you are using the UFW firewall.

visit http://your-network-ip:5000 and verify that everything is up and running

Back on your router

go to "Prefered DNS settings" on your router and plug in the IP address of your pi-hole linux box without any ports, wait for devices to reconnect to your wifi and they should automatically pick up the preferred DNS.

You're done ;)

the pi-hole will report domains that you visit in its admin interface, if your TV adverts are still there, then find the domain in the log list for your TV and block it ;)

I tried out cross country skiing for the first time a few weeks ago, It's sooo much fun!

I always shrugged the "sport" off as "walking with extra steps", but it's actually pretty awesome to shuffle around the tracks through the forest, got my first pair of ski's fitted 2 weeks ago and I've been spending lunch-breaks, afternoons and weekends exploring the fast network of tracks starting just 2 minutes away from my front-door in Sundsvall (we have about 300km of semi-connected trails around town).

PDF map of the trails

I did a trail yesterday going from LV5 to Södraberget followed by the Scout stuga, fågelbergssutga and Sidsjö to then end up at Sallyhil and it was just such a blast!

I can really recommend trying the sport out if you ever get the chance.

That said getting the right equipment for your body-length and weight is super important. the center of the ski's will have some kind of material on them to give you grip when you press your ski down on the mountain (by lifting the other foot or by putting pressure on your toes). you won't glide if your ski's are too stiff and you won't get grip if the ski's are too flexible.

https://thehackernews.com/2022/01/german-court-rules-websites-embedding.html
Uh oh, FYI for everyone using Google fonts on their websites (with the easy embed tags)

First fines are dropping!

Woah, MTG, that's actually a good while ago!
I'v got such good memories of my student friends and me doing kube-drafting & commander matches while sipping home-brewn beers years ago

(bleeping some faces away for the sake of privacy)

Heh,

*minimizes window with LUA script in OSX-Hammerspoon automater
*Opens NVIM -- running exclusively on LUA scripts -- to work on some code

Supernova eh? https://github.com/gbaptista/supernova man that's just supercool!

Those rainbow colours :O, how'd you do that?
overall format reminds me of git log! but that's probably good!

Pro-tip if your intake fans have filters on them (5 euros at any corner store):

Setup your cooling in the BIOS in such a way that you pump more air into the machine than you suck from the machine (essentially creating a little bit of pressure inside if you will). that way air will always blow out of the little holes in your machine rather than suck air + dust in. that way the only thing you'll ever need to vacuum are the filters.

I actually normally put either 2 kinds of washing stuff in my travel kits these days.

Some bio-degradable soap for the hikes, so I can get away with having just 1 spare-shirt and some undies in my hiking-bag.

Regular powder in a double zipper bag (that I can open up and close again, since they always pick it out at airports, which is also the reason I always put it in hand-luggage) for any trips to Africa and Arabic countries. The presence of machines and infrastructure is spotty at best and not to be trusted anyway.

But other than that I love the laundry room I have here (shared between tenants), but I know a lot of people around Sweden that have their laundry-machine sitting in their little bathrooms with a regular pretty sink (for make-up & tooth-brushing and the likes) next to it.

@andrestaltz , how do I get rid of all the pubs automatically connecting with my client? could that be a side-effect of migrating instead of creating a new profile?

I think it's safe to post now ;)

My day so far, working on some Legacy RSPEC/JEST tests:

svendsolar-2021.hendrikpeter.net/ straight of my NAS enjoy ;)

ow yeah, first time for me flying over water was absolutely nerve-racking, scariest thing in my life.

These days I actually prefer it; water (especially the cold water here up north) is about the only place where I don't have to worry about people/buildings/vehicles/etc and go full-throttle.

I kinda wanna upgrade my mavic pro now, it's a significant feature & quality patch.

But oof that price-tag has quadrupled (5k euro for the full cine kit) in comparison with the Mavic 2 Pro (1.2k euro) 3 years ago :(

guess I got a target to save for for a few months now.

and it's affordable too
oh my

there is a .rocks top-domain?

Heh nice!

On a side-note (I don't mind, but it makes stuff a bit cleaner), the chats below this one in the main thread would have been perfect candidates for a thread-fork ;)

Not yet I believe, there are some people working on it though

Man playing around with orgmode is fun!

I had set out installing orgmode in neovim last week (%wO5lqC3+JMcfr/QJVh0HD+pRrCtn5qCoQC4o29BdzXY=.sha256).

I've moved my entire calendar over now, got tasks from Jira syncing in org-formatting to a slack bot (with description, deadline, sprint-end as scheduled and hours as properties:Effort) so I can copy-paste items over from there right into my project files.

then Tonight I reworded the notifications plugin a little bit to make it output notifications to my tmux-powerline:

Next up: move language servers and linters over from coc.nvim to the new lua language server plugin.

yeah the hyper system had somehow hung itself, a restart fixed it.

true, we only really good northern lights at 00:45 CET and by that time I was fast asleep (and mist had taken over our area anyway). Turns out it was quite the spectacle though as folks in Scotland & Terschelling (the netherlands) managed to see the lights too with their eyes and subsequently make pics of them

https://www.nu.nl/binnenland/6165193/noorderlicht-was-op-een-paar-plekken-te-zien-maar-niet-altijd-met-het-blote-oog.html

Red northern lights are hard to spot though.

That said, a little tail in the wake of the CME flared some nice lights last night and I was able to shoot some nice pics from my apartment window:

Nothing extreme though, My warning system's pretty good now; I might make a quick trip to Abisko/Kiruna if a warning like this comes early again :)

For those without Beaker or other hyper-protocol based browsers:

https://svendsolar-2021.hendrikpeter.net/

Using the hyper link is preferred though, the video files in the link above are served straight from my NAS at home.

the hypderdrive itself is a node lib that can be executed, but it's probably not going to be useful in your situation as you just want to browse through a website; I'll put an HTTP link in the main thread.

Might throw the sessions in an S3 alike thing at some point if it turns out this kills my internet @ home (everything's hosted on my NAS at home)

#aurora #auroranorthern-lights #aurora-alert

There's a very high chance of seeing Aurora's on Sat Okt 30 from 17:00 UTC towards Sun Okt 31 02:00 AM; with the Epicenter being roughly around 18:00-19:00 UTC.

Want to stay in the loop?

• Use my free APIs over at https://aurora.hendrikpeter.net/
• Connect to my fancy map with live data points on https://aurora-map.hendrikpeter.net/
• check https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/ or https://spaceweather.com/ or https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/space-weather-enthusiasts.

NOAA and satellite maintainers are calling this CME the biggest so far in the New solar cycle; so we're in for a fun ride!

It's #svendsolar sessions from #svendborg!

Were you not able to join us in Svendborg for Svendsolar?
Go watch or listen to the different sessions!

hyper://a337acab1fb4b6bb1b05b28c4937c5218f6c86fd0dace628d8faaac85f82273b/

I'm still working the kinks out of one last session, so that'll come online later; but go watch & listen to beautiful stories of awesome people!

(I'd love some hyper peers btw, but only if you have bandwith to spare ofc!)

Are you somewhere where you can't use Dat/Hyper? Lemme know and I'll send you an alto HTTP link ;)

nice, are you on manyverse or patchwork? manyverse should integrate more natively and not require pasting an invite anywhere :p

https://picoroom.hendrikpeter.net/ welcome on board sir!
;)

I figure that's caused by 0-400 not being so big of a difference when compared to the 20k some of the pubs have :/. I'll make a new graph that generalizes a bit more from 700+ onward

True, I did remove the logs of some bigger pubs that had gotten in to my system after I blocked them though, then proceeded to block new pubs that started connecting to me (effectively stopping them from sending me who had "befriended them" from the point when I blocked them onward; so most of the planetary pubs if they still have a presence in future graphs will not have growing relation bubbles anymore.

Other view of the same graph:

Blue dots: no new activity (in my log) for at least a year-ish
Red dots: activity in the last year-ish

High res: https://filedump.hendrikpeter.net/ssb/graph-2021-10-25-last-active.jpg

I should have an SVG somewhere...
https://filedump.hendrikpeter.net/ssb/full-network-2021-10-25.svg

or this lower-ress picture... the pic has a lot of clompexity and colours though, so scaling it down to sub-700kb makes it pretty bad

sure, feel free to print it or use it as album cover :p

Pretty cool to see that PicoPub (which I closed down about 1.5 years ago) has slowly crawled back into the main network graph (meaning that a fair amount of users that connected to the pub has integrated strongly into the greater community around me; pretty cool! the active users weren't alienated to a corner of the network when i shut the pub down). the pub also connects to a lot of users that are either as old as the pub itself or up to 2 years younger (pretty much till the day invite-codes became a secret).

not sure if I can draw conculsions from that, but PicoPub probably onboarded a fair few users :).

It's sad but also pretty cool that we'll probably never get stats on the performance of rooms (since rooms don't create relations, follow people, etc in the same way).

I'll dive a bit into making Gephi files when ssbdb2 comes out to see if I/we can detect more "islands" in the SSB-room era ;)

Thanks Andre for making such an amazingly cool tool allowing me to make these fancy graphs!

I thought I had blocked and subsequently wiped most of your pubs from my ssb-log (I don't really agree with the Mastadonian approach of central super pubs and I was afraid it was going to inject a lot of data into my log), but it seems planetary01 and planetary03 have some references.

https://filedump.hendrikpeter.net/ssb/rabble-2021-10-25.jpg is the graph with your @Rabble profile, I've marked the 2 pubs on the map along with some other giants and bubble-out-points.

SSB network graph (from my database) edition 2021-10-25

I made a new dump of my entire SSB DB in terms of users (nodes) and their relationships (the lines aka edges) and plotted them to a "map" of sorts using @andrestaltz's graphml plugin and Gephi.

When I did my post last year I was sitting at 16k users (or nodes) (visible from where I was).
After making that graph I scaled my replication down to "2" (so friends and friends of friends) and started blocking major pubs.

This new graph now sits at 32.691 users (or nodes). There has been "some" growth visible from where I'm standing (notice I don't have the entire network on my own computer. I select what and who I want to follow.

Something not visible in this graph is the growing number of solo-users (users that most likely connected to me on wifi/room that I decided to load some data from, but not follow). These solo-users ended up being spread out over a huge 100x100k pixel range far beyond the active center... I decided to cut them away as to not have to deal with a huuuuge picture, just ask and I'll give you the full-size svg though ;)

Colour

New users (less than one year old) are blue, users that have been around for 1-4 years are yellowish, users that are as old as SSB are marked in red.

The black dot is me (the account posting this message)

Node size

The more connections (follow/being followed) the bigger

Links

Full-size image of the graph:
https://filedump.hendrikpeter.net/ssb/graph-2021-10-25.jpg (warning 60mb)

Legenda of some major points on the graph:
https://filedump.hendrikpeter.net/ssb/graph-2021-10-25-legenda.jpg (also around 60mb)

Want to find yourself in my graph? reply below and I'll find you!

vim users (as far as I can tell) spend far less time constantly messing with their config

are you sure? (types this message on patchwork using his home-written full-os-vim-keybindings in Hammerspoon, while listening to spotify music playing in a VIM buffer).

I've done it.
I'm transitioning from coc.nvim to neovim's native language server with the help of nvim-lspconfig. I guess i'll slowly move my language servers over.

But while doing that I'm also dipping my toes in to orgmode now (which is what sparked all of this kinda). https://github.com/kristijanhusak/orgmode.nvim/blob/tree-sitter is where I'm going from.

I'm really enjoying throwing myself into something completely new and weird this way I've seen orgmode being used years ago on a colleagues computer but thought at the time that my normal calendar and the 3 different note apps I was using were better. Let's see where I end up with this :p

https://github.com/kristijanhusak/orgmode.nvim/tree/tree-sitter
Is this what they call a gateway-drug?

this is awesome! I'm digging the bebop jazzy vibes right off the bat!

I see an Ed reference I ❤️

Surprise Autumn flying day #2 and it was amazing!
I'll share the aerial pics as soon as Swedish gov thinks there aren't any secret things on them.

Also tried my hands at a first serious Brenizer composites using a tele-lens on a normal camera, which resulted in a set of stunning 200 megapixel pics kicking in at 1.3gb of raw files per pic.

Smaller size of one of the pics here:

Full size (compressed) JPG: https://transfer.sh/IxmGgG/IMG_3669-Pano.jpg (warning 135mb download)

I put two of them at increased resolution on https://unsplash.com/hendrikpeter for those that want to download some wallpaper materials

Day 1 is fully mixed together, I'm just listening through everything now; making sure there aren't weird sound peaks & things like people filling in passwords and such that shouldn't be in the films.

Tomorrow the last bits of day 2 and then off to a dat:// it goes

#svendsolar

Autumn vibes up in the air

We were looking for the last of the berries for this season last week. I'd already collected a lot so I decided to bring along the drone instead and make some pictures of the area instead.

Norrland is a pretty place when the sun's out.

The compression on these ones is quite rough, I had to size everything down and compress a bit to get the huge 12-15k pixel widths under 1mb. All of them are Brenizer composites (lotsa zoomed in pics stitched together horizontally and vertically)

Might upload some to my Unsplash; might put some of them elsewhere, I'll see

#autumn #norrland #sweden #photography #aerial

mixing the last bits and bops!

#vegan-junkfood

forgot the onion. 1 or 2 red onions go in halfway through the meat baking process.

I normally go completely overboard with garlic/onions/lemon juice/tomato and the likes...
but I went the easy route last saturday.

ingredients:

• Your default coop/ica kit of taco mix (sorry southern americans who read this chat later :p)
• half a lemon
• 3-5 cloves of garlic
• vegetable oil (or light olive oil, extra verge becomes tangy when cooked and should only be used for salads imho)
• a few sliced tomatoes or half a can of "Mutti pulpa" (or just 5 sek ICA stuff honestly)
• Vegofärs (the peas stuff is the best)
• Paprica powder, little bit of cayenne if you have it, pinch of Cumin, some parsly and other herbs to taste, salt and black pepper.
• a plant of cilantro/coriander

Prep:

• fry chopped or mashed garlic in 2 or 3 tablespoons of oil (it needs to swim, but just) with a pinch of salt (just to draw the flavour out of the garlic) till the garlic starts to turn yellowish
• Fry the meat/vegofärs at its perscribed time
• Add the tomato juices and have them bake along for 20-30 seconds. they'll caramelize internally slightly evening the taste out
• Add the tex mix with its perscribed bit of water. add a little bit extra water if you have vegofärs as it can be a bit dry
• add the rest of the herbs and spices, not the coriander though
• Add the tomato paste and squeeze half a lemon in

serve, top of with coriander first (if you like that taste) and then proceed to toppings below.

toppings:

• whatever you can get your hands on honestly. If you get eggplant then make sure to slice it up, salt it extensively and have it sweat out its bitter taste in a 200 deg oven for 10 minutes (rinse the salt & sadness off and then pad dry afterward to get perfect umami taste).
• Cheddar cheese, lots of it. the stinkier the better
• Some creme freche or grädfill

There is actually a really good episode online somewhere if you want to go the actual Mexican clean way... or rather there are 2 really awesome recipes that describe the mexican/cuban kitchen really well when it comes to making things good with tomato and chorizo spiced meats:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzF2yJRCfss (Cuban Frita burger by George Motz, gets you right into the tomato, garlic traditions and chorizo traditions)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0G5Y2SOW0c (Quesadillas by Babbish)

Docker-desktop becomes a paid service (if you work for a company with 250+ employees & 10m revenue).

It's super sad so see docker slowly becoming a locked down paid service with their line of 300 requests per day to dockerhub limit, needing to make an account to access docker-hub, paying for docker-desktop and the likes.

If you are on OSX and You'd like to try something else that doesn't include diving into hardcore containerd shenanigans, then feel free to check out my 1-click-ish install of podman for Mac (with vagrant)

https://git.hendrikpeter.net/hendrikpeter/osx-podfiles

(mirror for issue-tracking: https://github.com/HendrikPetertje/OSX-Podfiles)

also cool to try with podman:
https://github.com/containers/podman-compose

meanwhile I'm trying to get cabal-cli to work. Seems I can't add new channels from within cabal, when done outside I can not assign "display names" somehow :( investigation continues

looks like a pub

Late post of #svendsolar #svendborg day 3
I ended up sleeping through most of yesterday, so the pics from Sunday are late™.

Sunday was just so awesome. I really enjoyed the talks by @cblgh, [@andrestaltz], Arj, (@QlCTpvY7p9ty2yOFrv1WU1AE88aoQc4Y7wYal7PFc+w=.ed25519), @Laatikainen and the session hosted by @Jacob!

Some pics of the day

pre-breakfast

First talk by Arj

Sami presenting his Moderator

Ow look its me, listening to the talk while recording

Wakest listening in on the presentation from the comfort of the couch

it's zelf!

\o/

All these local peers :D (and more, but my connections kept resetting under the preasure)

ping @emmi bevensee, thanks for joining!

#Svendsolar #svendborg day 2.

Such an amazing day. awesome talks by @cryptix, @cblgh, @andrestaltz, @arj and myself ;)
Great foods, beers, ciders and snacks (Tacos are just the best things for these kind of activities)
Organising by @zelf & @Laatikainen!
And thanks @mixmix && Emmi Bevensee for joining and dancing in the corner of the room!

\o/ Maynverse Desktop looks epic!

I'll be mixing video & audio on the train and then post the talks of today to a nice place ;)

Some random pics of the day

First chats of the day after breakfast

Putting talks on paper

Cryptix hitting the day off making todo-lists for ssb with the group

André & Wakest looking at things

Chill talk with Arj

Music with André

Random room chats

Mix & Emmi join the chat and dance in the corner of the room `^^`_

pin @zelf

Vegan food stuff recipes inspired by the Arab (mostly Jordan) kitchen ;)

Photo by Tom Hermans

They are recipes where you aren't really replacing meats with things that look like meat but instead just good and cheap recipes that dive into bit of a new (old) way to go about vegetarian/vegan foods ;)

Foul Sudanee

This is best described as bit of a pasty stuff (a little bit more pasty than hummus) that goes perfect on bread in little wraps or as a side-dish. most ingredients can be found for dead cheap at local arab corner shops all over the planet ;)

Ingredients

• 2 cans of "foul" or "vava beans"
• 2 tomatoes
• graded White cheese or vegan cheese flakes
• salt
• Cumin
• An onion

Preparation

• Open the cans of beans and pour the contents in a deep pan. use a fork or something pan friendly to mash the beans up. don't throw out the liquids but mash them along.
• softly boil the beans for a few minutes
• If at this point the mixture is very liquidish, pour a little bit out
• Add 2 tomatoes that have been cut up, a few tablespoons of the cheese a pinch of alt, a pinch of cumin a little bit of vegetable oil and if you want a little extra bite half or a hole chopped onion.

Put the mixture on bread, rolls or other constructions with a pinch of salt to taste.

Muluchia broth

Muluchia is a bit like spinach but a lot "looser" its great as an ingredient in broths, soups and the likes.

Ingredients

• a package of muluchia leaves (they are frozen, just like spinach in most arab stores), you could go with powder, but leaves are better and cheaper.
• Some garlic
• 600 ml of vegetable stock or a tab of bouillon with 600- 700 ml water.
• Pinch of salt
• 3-4 tablespoons of vegetable oil

Preparation

• Allow the muluchia to melt a little bit if you bought it in a frozen condition
• Boil the muluchia in the stock or bouillon with water. the mixture should boil at least 5-10 minutes for all the tastes to get to know each other.
• Fry 2 pressed/mashed cloves of garlic in some oil till the garlic starts to colour yellow and releases its smell
• add the garlic with the oil to the stock and add salt to taste.

Peanut soup

Ingredients

• 500-700 ml stock or alternatively bouillon with 500-700 ml water
• 5-6 table spoons of peanut butter (or alternatively something else from the arab store I have in my fridge... forgot the name will post that in the comments soon!)
• 1 table spoon of flour
• 100 ml of milk or almond milk

Preparation

• Boil the stock or make broth from the bouillon and water
• To a separate bowl add the peanut butter, the flour and the milk and mix together
• slowly add small table spoons of broth to the peanut butter mixture until you have a smooth mixture.
• Add the bowl of peanut butter into the rest of the warm broth.
• bring the whole mixture to a soft boil.
• Serve and optionally garnish with a little bit of lemon juice.

I'd love to get more awesome vegan/vegetarian recipes in the comments to this message!

#Svendsolar #svendborg day 1 (or 0-ish?).

Basically everyone arrived at the venue through biking, walking, cars, busses and the likes and we ate vegan snacks & pizza.

Some highlights picture-wise

vegan snacks at "The Little Local"

Getting our bikes at cykeltutten

Discussions on game night #1

Heya @Mix Android I have microphone pucks and DSLRs & webcams in my bag so I'll happily livestream important bits of the event over a video-chat app of choice

I'll drop video conference links once I know what kind of internet we're talking at the venue!

ah here is the thread!
I'll take a shirt. I can wait till after the event so don't go out of your way!

My second vaccine dose will go in the arm the day before the event and Sweden might go "orange" at the start of next week, so I might not be able to make it to Denmark without having to spend 5 days in quarantine. so I'll give the final go no go next week.

here's to hoping that Sweden remains green according to https://coronasmitte.dk/raad-og-regler/emner/rejser-til-eller-via-danmark/kategorisering-af-lande

How are you other Swedes going to the event?

It's Elixir! 🤩

Sweet, I'm drinking a Chai latte less today.

hello there, looks like your post is working ;)

Bubble tea needs to become a thing up here

A tad more busy today. Sundsvall's a nice place

SUP footoshoot #1

Managed to get some photos shot for the paddel company a friend is starting in between the showers yesterday. second shot's tonight, with the sun out I expect to get much better footage today.

Then there's planning to do and things to look at. Next destination in my life seems to be Stockholm; how and when, no idea. Feels good to have a goal to work towards again though.
Job's lined up (can stick with my current employer who has their main office there), Family's closer, I have some friends in town and I can dive straight into Loungehack, scouting and the likes over there it seems.

Any of you butts in or near Stockholm?

Permission is in, photos are up at https://unsplash.com/@hendrikpeter

so much green :D

I can reset your password if you want. The not setting a password when you create an account is bit of a bug.
normally when you have an account (and the settings of the room are set to community access only) tthen you can go in and create invites for your friends & family and see room statistics. It's not really relevant for picoroom though since pico-room's access has been set to open (everyone can create accounts and connect)

to your first part:
pubs will never let you directly connect to other connected clients, so the possible connections you have are coming from people lurking on your WIFI network or in the rooms you connect to.

then to your second question.. I believe I made comment about that in the home-page for the room server a while ago (it's a bit sad that you don't see the signup manually link from the get-go... kinda sucks, but there are bigger fires to put out in the code-base before that cosmetic issue gets dealt with)

Screenshot 2021-06-11 at 15.41.49.png

Good luck!

I scaled it down and scrambled some things out of the way. the original pic sits at 40mb (allowing you to see individual cars driving on the other side of the valley. I'll not post those pics till I get the green light.

https://www.lantmateriet.se/en/webb/permit-for-dissemination-of-geographical-data/
lotsa fun.

The late spring has been extremely nice here in Norrland. I really love the color back on everything after the long winter we had up here.

The little city of Sundsvall at 23:00 last monday

Heading back from the lake last Sunday

I'll post links to high-res pics as soon as the local gov here approves of the aerial pics I took with lotsa horizon in them.

@Tycho, You won't have to befriend the room (the Pubkey attached to the room doesn't actually send or receive any gossip). once the room shows up as online in your client list (in your app of choice after you've gone through the steps described on the home-page of my room) You should see other people (also connected to that room) that you can connect to:

Screenshot 2021-06-10 at 14.50.50.png

While updating and working on my docker-compose pull request for ssb-rooms I managed to accidentally wipe the volume on my server containing Picoroom V2's secret and database :(

If you connected to the room before and would like to continue doing so, then please follow the instructions on the home-page of picoroom.

I apologise for the inconvenience.

On the bright side: pull request is updated now ;)

oww that sounds awesome! how would I got about making the docker image ARM compatible?
Right now I'm building from GO on alpine..

Would I need to include some kind of x64 & arm compatible image first and then manually install GO on top of that?

that interface looks clean!

other advantage of docker-compose that I haven't taken advantage off is "restart: always" which will automatically boot the docker image back up if the process crashes.

We should probably merge one of the 2.
Given the fact that most implementations of rooms so far have only seen a Dockerfile and not a docker-compose.yml I don't see any issues with just merging the Pull req you opened @cryptix apart from the thing with the double
FROM with a reference to another Dockerfile out of our control doing magical things.

and the one I opened adds a few more customization options (both if you just use the Docker file or the docker-compose combo). (but we could just move the start.sh over to your pull.

either pull req works for me, the one that doesn't make it can still be referenced for future people to see how to setup compose and the likes (and I'll probably continue to use compose so I have something to reference my helm charts to.

If you do go with Digital ocean you could use this dirty trick to get some extra ram
https://gist.github.com/hendrikpetertje/7986434
(I tend to inject about the same amount of already allocated RAM into swap)

I can not recommend this if you do this on your own private physically owned SSD or a raspberry pi SD card.

I just managed to run the whole thing on a pi (moved the thing over to an INTEL NUC now, since my heavy use of PI cpus & SDcards keeps burning them out), so I would assume that you could get away with hosting the whole thing on a cheap 5 dollar DigitalOcean (or something local to you with comparable prices) server and have a few hundered people connecting to your room without too many problems.

Room V1 was running on a pi4 for a year and saw 70 people connecting to it at the same time from time to time without breaking a sweat.
That while running my aurora-bot, my personal marvin voice assistant backend and a bunch of random sites & projects)

Rooms V2 runs on rust which compiles straight down to C, so it "should" be faster and lighter even ;)

Works for me ^_^

I would love to get together! and I'll happily hop on the train with you if you take the train down from Lule to wherever the event is @@ ;)

Prety nice music, bit weird I figure its right up your street @@.

Was able to grab the spotify link to the artist, but the morse makes it hard to find the artist in search machines.

https://open.spotify.com/track/26trS5IUeIbXrKAuFMdzWT?si=7e396a0d350b4167

I would like to emphasize that you should probably read the prequel after book 5.
that way you won't be spoiled in book 1-5 while the context of the prequel is good to know in book 6 and onward.

ow wow That's really pretty artwork. I got the softcovers in English & Swedish here at home.

Agreed @nanomonkey!, I can't wait till that last book drops.

I wanted to lift out something I really like about Rothfus way of writing but realize that it's a huge spoiler, so until I figure out how spoiler tags work around here, I'll keep that to myself ;)

Meanwhile though while you're waiting, I can really recommend "The wheel of time" series the first book is "The Eye of the World" You could read book 0 "New Spring" first, but I'd recommend starting with the actual first book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheel_of_Time

How does one do Spoiler tags here?
haven't used them in ages :(

I'm doing some bughunting on the server, so it can be offline for a bit here and there

I figure you tried signing in after creating an account (by manually providing your @public-key). I had that too when i connected to hermies. (right now there isn't a mechanism to give yourself a password when you create a public key that way).

I'll pop you a private message with a password reset link

Thanks to the the amazing work of the #ngi-pointer team there is now a Rooms V2. You can find all info about that in @andrestaltz's post %qEzQaWh....

I was able to pop up a brand new Room server using the easy instructions provided on https://github.com/ssb-ngi-pointer/go-ssb-roo (I'm not using sub-sub domains though, so that won't work on my server).

For now the sign-up is open. As soon as we achieve critical mass I'll make it "community".
So go sign up while the invites last!

Location:
https://picoroom.hendrikpeter.net

Soo many people online, so nice!

Sounds like something we should whip together during a code-jam session sometime!

Hey @andrestaltz, One of my colleagues is going completely insane over some new kind of front-end framework called "Tauri" which runs on Rust. it seems that Tauri is much less resource hungry than Electron is and the base application size sits at around 500kb if you build a fairly clean hello world instance (in stark contrast with Electron which will eat about half a hundred of megs).

Website with info:
https://tauri.studio/en/

We actually talk about this in one of our podcasts
https://patraden.knightec.se/podcast/2021/04/25/apropa-git.html (that's in Swedish though)

In an attempt to learn some "Audition", brush up on my Swedish and have some fun at the office (from home mostly) I started a podcast with some friends

You can find it here:
https://patraden.knightec.se/

The silly jingle is an old recording of a small orchestra tuning, and the illustrations were made by me on a rainy night in the old house.

Nice @andrestaltz! Looking forward to the update on my phone :D

https://github.com/ssbc/ssb-first-aid-kit

I ran SSB First aid kit, removed my indexes and things seem to be working again.

I just installed the latest version of Patchwork, the client is telling me "I'm not following anyone"
has anyone else experienced this?

I'm getting your message, so I think you might be good there!

That website looks epic, thanks for sharing!

sidenote: I absolutely adore how robust and efficient async in Erlang/Elixir is (when Supervisors are setup correctly) and that it's totally fine to just spawn x-thousand processes across processor cores or even different machines to deal with stuff!

spawn a process each to populate

Watch out with your DB-pool if populating includes writing back to the database ;)
the spawned processes will all run async and lock your DB up (unless you have some kind of hard-coded pool-size & queue on your ORM)

Killed some databases this way while running AWS-Lambdas once :p

BC link: https://kraaksmaak.bandcamp.com/track/twilight-feat-izo-fitzroy

Found a song this morning that I've been having on repeat for most of the day.
It's just sooo nice!

Not the worst view to wake up to!
Did a quick fly-over town after waking up this morning.

Working half the day, then off to the mountains skiing.

@Tycho, only the organizer needs to create an account. It seems that Email and Password are fairly decoupled though as that self-same password can be used by any visitor to change the background image, assume the group-presenter role, etc. without having to provide the email address.

That's a weird move. I've never really seen any debian based distro just updating the sources.plist, let alone add new gpg keys after performing an apt-get update (not to be confused with apt do-release-upgrade where bumping gpg keys is pretty standard, since you're bumping distro versions).

This sounds pretty shady and I'd rather seen them popping a yes/no/compare changes error during an actual apt upgrade. All of this has probably something to do with Microsoft's licenses and the fact that they've included visual studio in their new Raspi pico guides.

Relevant NixCraft article on this matter:
https://www.cyberciti.biz/linux-news/heads-up-microsoft-repo-secretly-installed-on-all-raspberry-pis-linux-os/

Nice snow! we have just a tiny bitt less here in Sundsvall ;)

Those are some pretty amazing mountain ranges there!
and then those concrete buildings as big slabs in the foreground; Looks awesome!

than=then.

We had a season start for Loungehack yesterday (https://www.meetup.com/Sundsvall-Lounge-Hackers/events/275767372), prior to the event one of the people from the stockholm gang came with the idea to use wonder.me

wonder.me creates a virtual 2d space, where organizers can put down some markers, people can then chat with each other by standing near each other creating a cricle . Other people can than join in on that circle if the circle isn't set to private conversation and basically chit chat away, share computer screens, etc.

We ended up spending an evening of talking about development, life, geeky stuff and what not with about 30 or so people (drinking beers, having fun) and it was a real blast!

can really recommend this as a tool for meetups!
https://www.wonder.me/

then one of the others came with "ramb.ly" which worked too, but was a bit more messy.

nice @Giulio Prisco!

would be good to specifically add HTTP and HTTPS (80/tcp and 443/tcp respectively) I think Nginx is mostly for the maintenance ports (if there are any), but I can be wrong.

I fix most who goes and redirects where problems by assigning sub-domains to the DNS settings on my host and then do things per incoming sub-domain.. and then "proxy-pass" the HTML bits and bops to port 80 for that domain.

as an example (with real slightly altered config)

server {
  server_name picoroom.hendrikpeter.net;

  access_log /var/log/nginx/ssb-room-access.log;
  error_log /var/log/nginx/ssbg-room-error.log;

  location / {
    proxy_intercept_errors on;
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8007;
  }

  error_page 502 @offline;

  location @offline {
    root /home/serveruser/Sites/nothing-to-see-pages/;
    try_files /502.html 502;
  }

   listen [::]:80
   listen 80
}

the proxy-pass bits here tell the incoming port 80 loop to the internal port 8007 for any requested internet address called "picoroom.hendrikpter.net" (on port 80). so people can just visit http://picoroom.hendrikpeter.net:80 or http://picoroom.hendrikpeter.net for short.

Then as a bonus you can serve custom error pages for error statusses from another folder with static html files.

This bit of config is also compatible with certbot (an automated bot from letsencrypt that automagically upgrades the http bits to https)

Put the config in, change your server_name to the sub-domain you chose for your room pages and then install certbot and execute:

sudo certbot --nginx -d subdomain.domain.org

follow the instructions and voila, your room is now HTTPS ;)

wow, welcome to Scuttlebutt @Htial - Patch!

Forking out with a general tip when it comes to VPCs and root users.

Feel free to ignore this @Giulio Prisco if you already know this :p

I don't see you using sudo in any of your commands, I'd recommend creating a new user once you get access to a VPS that needs to elevate with sudo before being able to run root commands. This to prevent shell scripts and other pieces of code from running as root by default. you can do this like so:

useradd <username> -m --group sudo

where you replace <username> with some inconspicuous username.

passwd <username>

To give your <username> user a password. and then:

sudo chsh -s /bin/bash <username>

To allow your user to login to a bash shell.

(Next step if you connected to the root user using your SSH keys)
You then allow yourself to connect to the new user using ssh by public-key-login by logging in to that user

# Login to that user
su <username> 
# Generate SSH keypair and .ssh folder
ssh-keygen -t rsa
# open the authorized keys file
nano ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

and paste in the public key that sits in ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub on your own local computer.
(end of special logic that you should do if you logged in to the root user using your public key)

Open up a new terminal tab and see if you can ssh to your brand-spanking new user using:

ssh <username>@<ip-address>

if that succeeds, block people from accessing the root account by going through the following steps:

• sudo nano in to the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file on your server and make sure to set "permit root login" to "no",
• Expire the password of your root account (system accounts that have no password can't be logged in to) by executing: sudo passwd -e root

Update your VPS and then restart it for all the changes to take effect ;)

Hey @Giulio Prisco!

I persuaded the room to work by brute-force

that sounds rather extreme now doesn't it ;).

I assume you executed

ufw default deny

Which blocks all traffic through the "uncomplicated firewall" that isn't specifically whitelisted. (if you haven't than that's probably a good idea. it will keep baddies out of postgres/redis/telnet/etc services that you have installed on the machine unless you open those up)

you then executed

ufw allow 8007
ufw allow 8008

to whitelist those specific ports.

Now if you want to white-list http traffic, https traffic as well as SSH access to your server you can simply just:

ufw allow http
ufw allow https
ufw allow ssh

http, https, and ssh are ufw TCP template presets. if you run ssh on another port than 22 (I'd recommended this to make it harder for baddies to get in), then you need to allow that specific port using ufw allow [your-custom-port-number]/tcp (so as an example ufw allow 5001/tcp

You would also do this for all other services you are running on your machine that you'd like to expose.

As soon as you have set all your rules you can type ufw enable or ufw reload to activate or reload ufw with the new configuration.

You can check all your rules (when the firewall is enabled) by executing:

ufw status

Here's a full list and handy guide on how to use the UFW firewall.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UFW

Rough update morning this morning.
Had to upgrade a whole bunch of machines to deal with CVE-2021-3156

@andrestaltz, @Henning Jacobs and other pub/room hosters:
probably not a bad idea to update your DO machines or check if you have UnattendedUpgrades enabled ;)

if you go with a cloudbox, go with the cheapest you can find imho.
Before I moved picoroom into my house it ran on a 5 dollar digital ocean ubuntu box (and I ran 2 or 3 nginx sites on that box too).

if you want to play on the save side (and you don't care too much that your cloudbox provider has to swap out hard drives from time to time) you could follow this guide i wrote long long ago to add some swap to your linux box for extra memory.

Swap isn't too healthy for SSDs (lotsa rewrites), and I would recommend you never do this on physical SSD drives you own :p.

ssb-room isn't too hard on your system, so you could try without first!

I'm running my room on a raspberry pi and it has been doing great so far ;)

Haven't started graphing or statting #picoroom yet ;)
My room floats between 12-34 users during the daytime between 09:00 and 20:00 UTC.

No idea what happens at night #picoroom.

34 users connected doesn't mean that all those 34 people interact with each other. I normally have 2-3 (with some spikes to 4) active connections when I have my client open. 90% of the connections are people that I already follow and the other 10% are people that I don't know that decided to hit the connect button on me ;).

disclaimer: Rough estimates

I'm liking it a lot, apparently it can (after a patch) execute (a slightly stripped down version) of python; opening up the way for a lot of support for sensors/GPIO already used with full-fledged pies.

Then there is the really neat ribbling going on on the side, allowing the board to be soldered to other boards sitting directly next to it and share GPIO bridges (or even just having cables, etc soldered to its side instead of top/bottom. I'd love to see that practice ported over to Arduionos!

I need to get my hands on one of these and start messing around with it (after I've found a proper use-case that is :p).

It was really really cold (outside) when I got home last night, I might need to get a thermometer that can indicate temperatures lower than -25°C at some point ^_^.

It's at times like this that I miss the fireplace my old place in Huljen had.
The new place does have a chimney, I should look into it soon.

While it's good to have these discussions, I feel a lot of perhaps unnecessary forming heat in being suggestively pushed to a corner myself where my "behaviour" is being compared to causing violences and genocides in the world... and Nurmberg on top of that. I'm sure that wasn't your intention.

That said. I stand by my point that diversity shouldn't just be standardized, but also celebrated; it shows to the rest of the world that the standardization of diversity (be it sex, race, LGBTQ, etc.) works and is a good thing to strive towards. I do however agree that tokenism is something we should probably avoid as it in my opinion just fakes it all.

I'm here!

Indeed, apart from the beautiful posts by majesty @the Queen of England official 👑 it's a quiet Monday of gossip on my end.

I think that you're making a very valid point; especially when looking at the "cartoons" using the glasses of being accepting, open and welcoming to and for anyone.

it's super important (especially for the tech sector that I seem to find myself in and especially in a tech sector where we build community and contact) to not only welcome diversity, but celebrate it!

My sincere apologies to anyone in this thread and anyone else that finds this thread in the future and feels played down or belittled by my earlier post, that was absolutely not my intention.

Thanks for pointing me to my silly mistake @mnin!

I did moderate my pub lightly back in the day of pubs yes (blocking folks that were objectively breaching the Contrib Code of conduct.

When it comes to the next generation of pubs (rooms), we're still figuring out how to best do moderation, there aren't any official methods of "blocking" people with ill intend yet, as rooms don't behave like full fledged identities and they can't publish "gossip".

Just doing a clean-up right now. there's quite the amount of people that I'm following that have been offline for quite some time or people that I don't really know anyomre that already have so many "x friends in common" that I'll keep replicating their posts anyway ;)

No real value in following rooms servers (they're empty-shell private/public keys anyway)

They probably reached out to you in hopes of getting some quotable/sound-bite-able material to publish along with the basic info about "Secure Scuttlebutt".

I'm not all to worried that SSB didn't get a bigger pedestal in the article, right now is probably not the best time for decentralized self-governing platforms to promote themselves ;).

You opened up some very good tracks over the last couple of days when it comes to making sure that people with Ill intend don't grow too much of an (unwilling) audience.
SSB as a protocol is free to use, but in many places, pub/rooms sites and download pages; SSB developers put up notes and notices that people should adhere to the contributor covenant when using the tools that access SSB. The shard I've been sitting on in this network has so far gardened itself well to be a welcoming, kind, fun and mostly responsible group of awesome people!

I think we're on the right track and I've really come to like the weird, fun and interesting stuff that has been taken up around here!

Snow shoe walking is loads of fun!

Some friends and I got in a car this morning to visit one of the summer trails south of where I live, just for the fun of it.
These are those moments I really like the fact that I moved to Sweden.

Making pictures from the sky is cheating... but even on the ground this country is just amazing!

I'll git commit amend some things yes! ;)

you're welcome I guess :p

The website looks pretty dope though!

And the new site too
https://gitlab.com/ssbc/ssb-website-2.0/-/merge_requests/17

@cel I see you are one of the maintainers for this, can you give the pull reqs a look-see and merge them if you agree?

Thanks @many cryptix. Pull request is up:
https://gitlab.com/ssbc/scuttlebutt.nz/-/merge_requests/12

I don't know who to tag here (@Jacob?), but could the text in step 3 on https://scuttlebutt.nz/get-started/#step-3-get-connected be changed to:

Since Scuttlebutt is a decentralized, peer-to-peer network, it’s up to you to decide what content to download and share.

The easiest way to try it all out is to join an online Room; ask someone you know for a room invite! You can also follow friends directly by exchanging keys.

Go to the list of Room servers, and get an invite code from one.

I'll happily open a pull-req if this site has a Github repo ;)

Rooms seem to be a tad more onboard-friendly then pubs are (initial sync wise) so probably not a bad idea to point new users there instead of to pubs.

welcome to Scuttlebutt!

There's quite a few peeps around here ;)
connect to a friendly room picoroom is pretty rad if you're a contrib coventant accepting techie kind of person ;)

I like the Vim regex you're giving me there @adz

thanks will fix!

This must be some kind of new record :D

Rooms act as Wifi hotspots of sorts. they allow you to actually connect to other people.

You connect to a room and announce your identity there. it returns you a peer list of everyone else connected to that room, you then choose who you want to connect to.

Need to connect to a room (or find someone else on the same physical Wifi Hotspot with you) before you can actually connect to other people over the internet.

More info about rooms here

Reminds me of "Git the princess"

sauce: https://toggl.com/track/programming-princess/

I absolutely love those keyswitches! reminds me a bit of https://drop.com/buy/gmk-carbon-custom-keycap-set

To expand on

Andre was pointing towards bit of a special feature in a post he made last week to check out the profile of a room peer without puffing up your own local DB.

...another solution is that when you open this anonymous account, a prompt shows on your SSB app saying “do you want to temporarily view this account’s content?”. If you press yes, it performs replication of that feed (possible because you’re directly connected to them, so no gossip), but stores the replicated content in /tmp or something, and let’s you view their content. If you don’t follow them, the content would be automatically deleted later.

That idea is not implemented yet though

the first connection one makes is bit of a gamble yes. most people hovering in the room that I have up (picoroom) have some kind of relation to each other, so you connect to one and it will pull the names and details of most other people in the room.

I should probably include an instruction on mine to point people at "connect to this guy when you join the room to fetch some initial information". thanks for pointing that out!

@farewellutopia, I agree with @Powersource here.
Rooms are also a much much better onboarding tool for new users in general (since they won't be bomb-shelled by the huge amounts of data present on pubs in the onboarding pub list.

https://github.com/ssbc/ssb-server/wiki/%23ssbrooms is the place

This reminds me of the good old Cockatrice days. When I moved to Sweden myself and some friends in the home country digitalized our MTG decks in cockatrice so we could play over the internet.

the software didn't really have any rules, you basically had/have a "hand", some stages on a table-top and markers/counters that you can create on top or in relation to cards and "dice". players still enforce the rules so to speak, so you're more or less forced to have voice comms or chat to the side.

Your game looks pretty advanced and cool!

Great ideas!

So to make this silly config idea visual.

I don't believe we should come up with automated solutions to ensure tens of thousands (or maybe even millions) of people can all sit in the same room with each other.
Right now SSB works a lot like that. If I visualize my graph there are tens of thousands of connections all snugly next to each other creating a very tight web.

We should instead encourage people to step out and spread out. it takes (if not less) 6 degrees of seperation to know everyone on planet earth.

SSB has a default hop count of 3 right now, I am not interested in knowing (or even having the file contents) of half the worlds (or SSB's) population. As a human I can mentally only deal with 50 connections anyway.

at 1 hop count, your friends need to explicitly introduce you to their friends, I dont really want that either.

at 2 hops I can see my friends and I can see my friends friends without needing them to introduce my physically, so 2 sounds fairly reasonable!

The issue would be polarized matters wouldn’t it? If any popular/heated political issue comes up for example and some people would block each other then all of a sudden your algorithm starts filtering away those you would disagree with but also people you’d potentially agree with.

Then there is the issue of the nature of me and others blocking people from time to time. Most of the time I don't block people because they are bad, but because they are too great hubs of links, relations, etc for my poor 64gb iPhone to deal with. These people aren’t bad and probably don’t deserve being “canceled” by automated algorithms. I very much like that this platform is gardened by humans right now.

I do however think that SSB has passed an important turning point and that we need to adjust some things. Right now SSB clients will try to connect to whatever they can connect to. My Patchwork client automatically connects to any pubs it can find (by default i can choose to turn this off in config), when I’m on WiFi or a shared VPN it’ll automatically download data from WiFi peers, etc.

All of this made sense before. “The network” was small and a fair amount of people would rejoice over each new connection that popped up (I did).
SSB has grown and matured a little bit since I connected for the first time (or maybe I just became old.. I don't know).
Maybe it’s time to no longer connect to new nodes by default (unless configured) and allow people to choose who they want to connect to (turning the default around, much like Manyverse already does and how Rooms have worked so far).
And then while we’re at it change default hops from 3 to 2 (Find your friends and their friends).

That way the stuff you see in your feeds is more curated by the people around you that you have chosen to trust.

That brings me to a problem however. Ever since I've been more careful and ever since I'm no longer connected to pubs anymore I've noticed a fair amount of "possible connections" to have become @UnReAdbleCiphers123. I'm no longer pulling everything that my client can see and as such I don't know who people are. I'd love to steal the idea @andrestaltz had in his rooms implementation and set some kind of master "name" in config that can be used to identify another peer before you decide to connect to them.

The idea in OP is quite big and would require a shift in how major parts of SSB actually function. I'd much rather take smaller steps and allow the network to grow along with it.
Change default program behaviors now, deal with the challenges they introduce (like the example I gave with the names) and then if we need to go into the direction @andre is pointing; arrive there not because it's a neat idea, but because "user experience" brought us there.

That's probably also easier™. Changing connection behavior "defaults" will probably be a small config change in ssb-conn, ssb-handshake or wherever its configured, but It'll require lots of work in all those implementations of SSB and its clients out in the wild.

A bigger change that would make sense in my mind: "Trace-routes". How/why are messages from person X (and their extreme left/right buddies) arriving to me? Right now you can follow/block people and if there are no bridges of friendship in between you'd get a message warning "none of your followers follow this person". I'd love to have a "breadcrumb-trail" under user names to indicate to me why they are connecting to me and block their messages and messages from new "baddies" to reach me by blocking the person that keeps following them and creating links.

sorry for the </rant> ;)

Pre-move hurdle out of the way!

I have to live on "broadband 4G" for a while until the new place gets access to fiber. The move is this Saturday, but my army of little NUC & Pie projects is successfully switching from the broadband internet 150mbit cable connection at the old place to the 150mbit 4G broadband and so far its all working fine!

aurora.hendrikpeter.net as well as @PicoRoom are live and feel just a little bit more "IoT" than before ;).

the VPN in the middle (to get around not having a static IP) adds a few ms to server ping, but that problem is going to fix itself when I switch that from DO to a local Banhof server later this month.

I'll make pics of the new setup when I'm all settled!

Feast your eyes on the review I once left on pickpack (the post office down the street here in Sundsvall). Postal services -- especially drop-off points -- are a pain in the ass when done infrequently.

All the good pics are up for grabs in high res right here now:
https://unsplash.com/collections/20352685/mountains-in-december

On day 3 I joined up with 2 other hikers that wanted to explore the area and ended up going all the way through Abisko to look back at it from the other side. My feet still hurt from the 36 km-ish track, but gosh the views and the lake walks were pretty frickin epic. Managed to get the drone up just past in between the parks to make some shots.

I made these pics just north of Kiruna near Abisko ;)

I'm loving this small break from sitting in the living room :D

could even combine that with a LoRa GPIO module to create a 20-50km loraWAN network link between the raspberries.

I need to really stop geeking now and focus on my christmas baking things, but this is super cool!

This is so super cool!

About that pub idea.

It could be super awesome to put a solar powered headless Raspberrypi 3b (are 15 bucks these days) somewhere that when it boots activates:

• An ssb-pub to collect data and be a "central" identity in a village (probably better than a room in this case, since most people tend to be out of range).
• A small nginx module with port 80 broadcasting an invite page and a catch-all for all http traffic (should automatically redirect "login to public wifi" pop ups on mobile phones)
• A wifi hotspot

then you basically put that somewhere central or in the house of someone trustworthy
And boom you have an "SSB Townhall" with gossip for people to hook into!

I'll put a raspberry ROM together after the festivities today/tomorrow!

Suprise northern lights last night (mostly behind the clouds but still)!

Makes me really look forward to being deep in the polar circle doing the last hike of the year in Abisko (with expected Kp4) next week!

to that last point:
you could always have set up an ssb-room for yourself with some kind of invite in system and had some kind of customer support profile online there 24/7 for people to reach out to ;)

I wonder, hasn't the damage already been done?

unfollowing people is just "another message" that will queue up to be received after all the "follow messages" are received. so until someone new connecting to Sebastian downloads all these new unfollow messages they might already start downloading contact messages, etc.

It's quite an achievement however that you managed to follow twice as many people as my pub did back in the day.

I agree with many of the people above and forking out, what is the use of following so many people. it's not really manageable anymore, your feeds must be flooding and the only advantage would really be automated data mining of some sorts.

Following someone doesn't give you more spread in the network either, it just concentrates the network to you for you. So if you are doing this in an effort to be present for people that have questions about your SSB app, then that's not really how things work, it would require lots of people to follow you to give you reach instead of the other way around.

This is so awesome :D

The radio data is a super awesome datapoint for solar weather. I have however not really dipped my toes into this kind of data since it causes way too many false positives. These kind of metrics catch both the initial flare/x-ray that come with the coronal mass ejection (low auroral accuracy in general) as well as the plasma spewed towards earth at lower speeds (very high auroral accuracy)

The data is however instrumental to protect important radio signals, electric infrastructure on earth and (more importantly) satellites, since auroras are pretty much just a side effect of much bigger forces.

If you want to dive deeper into this, then you should totally check out http://www2.irf.se//Observatory/?link=Ionosondes and https://geo.phys.uit.no/ionosonde/. Both universities behind these sensors have a super awesome staff, I gave them a call last year and have been using the live text-data directly from their sensors in my hobby projects ever since :).

https://sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/1626403 is pretty awesome/interesting too If you know your way around the Swedish language and want to dive deeper into solar storms and its effects. I don't really know of any good podcasts in english that take up the subject of solar weather and its impact on earth sadly.

Tried planetary just now.
I think I'm going to stick with Manyverse for now.

The app looks and feels good, is fast and responsive (That's by no means a jab at manyverse as I have seen Manyverse improve a lot lately); but it seems it follows a bunch of old fashioned pubs right when you start up the app for the first time and I don't really feel like blowing my desktop's database (or anyone's database for that matter) up with everyone that follows that pub. I can unfollow the pubs in the app, but the damage is already done. It doesn't look like Rooms or local discovery work either.

Looking forward to what Planetary comes up with though!

Thanks for the post @kas. turns out the download link was sat in my spambox!

The IOS version is downloadable?
I signed up for the newsletter but never got a link of any kind ;) (even though I should probably be called an Apple Fanboy at this point)

Checking my inbox now!

... messed that up @cel-desktop
completely forgot to mention you in my answer ;)

@cel ^

SSH

So I started of by just reverse-tunneling in SSH.

You basically put a random VPS somewhere in the cloud, toggle GatewayPorts yes in /etc/ssh/sshd_config and then:

ssh -R 3001:localhost:3001 -R 3002:localhost:3002  user@server

The downside of using reverse tunnels is that SSH is TCP-only. So all my UDP toys remained offline.

OpenVPN

I ended up installing openVPN using the git.io/vpn script, which is super well described in this article by Vivek Gite.

There are some things you need to do after the installation (before rebooting the server):
As long as you use each client certificate on one connected client (so make different certificates by re-executing the setup script for each different connected client) that client will always have the same IP-address assigned to them.

Connect your first client, then with that client connected execute sudo systemctl stop openvpn@server on the VPN server. ending the server process will create a file /etc/openvpn/server/ipp.txt which contains (and locks) whatever clients were connected to that IP-Address.

Toggle port-forwarding on on the VPN server by executing

sudo sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward

Reconnect your first VPN client and add your first port-forwarding rule (make sure to put all the port forwarding rules in a txt file somewhere since you need to execute the exact same command (replacing the -A with -D) to remove these forwarding rules later.

sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -d "your-vpn-public-ip" --dport 80 -j DNAT --to-destination 10.8.0.2:80
sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -d "your-vpn-public-ip" --dport 443 -j DNAT --to-destination 10.8.0.2:443
sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -d "your-vpn-public-ip" --dport 8008 -j DNAT --to-destination 10.8.0.2:8008
sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p udp -d "your-vpn-public-ip" --dport 8008 -j DNAT --to-destination 10.8.0.2:8008

(where 10.8.0.2 is the default address of the first connected client)

The first 2 on this list are your default port 80 and 443 web ports, the last 2 are an example for ssb-rooms
then if you want to add a port-range to your VPN-client MOSH server you can add (where port 1875 is the example ssh port of your client):

sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -d "your-vpn-public-ip" --dport 1875 -j DNAT --to-destination 10.8.0.2:22
sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p udp -d "your-vpn-public-ip --dport 60000:61000 -j DNAT --to-destination 10.8.0.2:60000-61000

After you've added your Port forwarding rules make sure to store the basic-vpn rules that were added in the installation as well as your custom port forwarding rules in a permanent store (iptables are wiped between reboots):

sudo apt-get install iptables-persistent
sudo -i
/sbin/iptables-save > /etc/iptables/rules.v4
exit

From here you can go 2 paths when it comes to "masquerading" each option here has its advantages and disadvantages:

If you want the client that connects to the VPN to download data and connect to the internet outside of the VPN (so browse the internet, download data and system updates without tunneling it all through the VPN) then you can execute:

sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -j MASQUERADE
sudo -i
/sbin/iptables-save > /etc/iptables/rules.v4
exit

If you do this, then all incoming packages of internet traffic get rewritten to have the source-ip of your VPN server.

Then on the client-side open the certificate and add the following 2 rows:

This first line will turn all traffic tunneling off and then the second line will emit all traffic from the VPN internal network back into the VPN internal network.

There are 2 drawbacks with this solution:

• Since package headers are rewritten all traffic sources are 10.8.0.1. This will hurt if you rate-limit (ssh access for example) by ip-address.
• If you port-forward 80 and 443 and turn on MASQUERADE on, then the VPN server itself won't be able to download stuff anymore. so you need to turn masquerade off (and hit your connected clients with extra down-time) every time you want to perform system updates.

If you're okay with routing all client traffic through the VPN

then do nothing or turn POSTROUTING -j MASQUERADE off and revert the changes to your client config.

The drawback here is that everything your client does on the internet will add some extra strain on your VPN connection and system updates on the client side will be a bit slower since you're dealing with the extra hop.
(I've chosen this option for my VPN, since I do like to rate-limit ssh attempts, etc.)

Le Sigh

It's just one of those gray days today where things just jab at me.

• I'm kinda lonely.
• Christmas will probably end up sucking this year (since my parents can't travel out of Jordan and I'm pretty much barred from traveling to the rest of the family across the border in the Netherlands anyway).
• The weather is gray and the sun isn't rising.
• The moving date to my new place was moved from the 19th of December to the 9th of January (since the previous tenants plan to move out just before Christmas).
• Global Code is pretty stagnant right now with no-one knowing if we can even travel to Ghana this summer.
• and the walls of my bedroom/living-room/office-combo are starting to become as bland as my daily routines at this point.

So I decided to flex out from my job for an afternoon, grab my coat and walk to my little spot at the docks here in town. Just to scream at nothing in particular, get back to my senses and just reset I guess. It was nice! (though I hope I didn't give anyone living in the new apartments across the bay a scare).

I ended up reflecting on myself and discovered that the main reason I'm feeling down is that I don't actually have a target or goal right now. I've either met all my current targets, can't meet them or don't feel like meeting them.
So that's something I need to work on over the next couple of days; decide what I want to dive into and learn, where I want to see myself in 12 months and pick the threads back up!

So my plan:

• Find a fun place to celebrate Christmas
• MSTeams meetup with the gang of trainees & interns that I'm getting next quarter and get myself (and them) pumped up for the next quarter (that was already in my planning for tomorrow).
• Set up and figure out new development goals for the product I'm working on with my customer before Christmas
• Get serious with cross-country skiing, which is a fairly socially distanced outdoor sport here in North Sweden as soon as the snow falls.
• Take a few days off between Christmas and the new year and jump on a train to Abisko with my hiking skis and charge my batterie in the wild outdoors
• Decide on fun activities to learn and do in 2021
• Meet at least 15 new people monthly for the next few months
• Figure out how one does "dating" with the ongoing restrictions & advices.
• and perhaps take a lead on the Global Code initiative and organize an online meetup programme for this summer.

</reflectory-rant>

I feel ya @Henning Jacobs,

I'm really not a fan of AWS for private stuff (out of nowhere bills and accidentally leftover assets sitting in far away forgotten regions i never check)

I'm sticking with the DigitalOcean IP relay for now. I created a bunch of VPSes and noticed that the ping and speed differences were minimal between them (a 5ms difference).

I actually really love the 5 or so raspberry pi's and the nuc sitting in a drawer here at home keeping most of my sites & infrastructure running. It's bit more of an investment, but I really love the tinkering aspect (especially the northern-lights-sensors kind of tinkering)

(I'm normally quite okay with 1 day of TTL, but since I'm moving soon and I'm playing around with vpn-ip-relays I'm bumping all times down so i can make quick changes to my infrastructure)

The server is once again online and will remain that way for some time to come.

I had to switch DNS records from my home-router to my Public-ip-relay while doing that I noticed that I'd given the murmur.hendrikpeter.net sub-domain a whopping 1 day of DNS cache (meaning that it will take up to a day for murmur.hendrikpeter.net to point to the actual Nuc running the new mumble server).

So if you really want to connect in the next 24 hours you can do so via: murmur-temp.hendrikpeter.net with otherwise the same credentials; ports and settings as described near the bottom of OP.

Hey @patcon sorry, the server has been offline for the last 2 days as I had to travel around to get work related stuff done.

I'm popping the mumble server over to another pi that isn't my on-the-go server right now, I'll pop a message here when that's done!

Mumble server's down for a few minutes. I need to take the device the server is on with me to a customer to hook into some hardware.

I'll see if I can hang the mumble server on my vpn...

*VPS
I'm re-designing some networks on AWS for a client today.. only natural to start mixing VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) with VPS (Virtual Private Server) after a while :p

@inoas they had data-centers in frankfurt long before they started building infrastructure in the Netherlands.

and I figure they are GDPR compliant.
It's of course up to the owners of the VPC's to make the software they host on their VPC GDPR compliant.

It's done, I'm not super happy with it though. I went the easy route and deployed a Digital Ocean instance in Frankfurt (since that's the closest thing to Sweden they have.
Download speeds and latency are pretty appalling though.

I'm torn between going for a "small" local hosting provider like Banhof, which means keeping track of yet another company that hosts my stuff or throwing the whole thing on an AWS EC2 instance in Stockholm...
I'll go and install a few servers and see what performs best I guess ;)

TL;DR: moving soon, Picoroom and other SSB things I keep online will be gone for a few minutes.

Since I'm moving in a few days to a brand spanking new place on the other side of town I need to make some mods to my pi-servers sitting here at home.

The new place doesn't have fixed IP meaning that whenever the router re-connects the IP address for all my sites changes.
I've considered DynDNS, but using that would imply that the websites/services that I host from home will be offline for a few seconds or even minutes whenever the IP address changes.

So I instead parked a small VPS box with a VPN module somewhere and I'm port forwarding all of my sites to the connected client (works pretty neatly!!).

I'm going to change DNS for @PicoRoom and other sites now, so stuff might be offline for a few minutes. sorry for the inconvenience.

hop in on picoroom ;)

https://picoroom.hendrikpeter.net/

Hey @DeedleFake (silver) ,

I actually run my room server on a pi (in my drawer here at home) without the need for docker to be there. If its impossible to serve static assets (though that should be possible with the existing folder structure) you could alternatively route sub-paths to a folder on a machine in your apache/nginx config!

I proxy-pass all routes to an other port, but it's possible to define "paths" that instead route to static files.

I'll gladly help you out on a call to help you with whatever you're combatting on your room server! I need to restock, but I'll happily drop in on a shared screen session / call at 15:00-20:00 UTC tomorrow (Saturday) or any time during office hours, just pop up in on %NFlGh0j... or send me a PM here (or any of my social profiles)!

https://github.com/planetary-social/planetary-ios/pull/197

Making a pull req for that on the IOS app now ;)

wow okay! that sounds super cool (always good to have a choice between apps :D)

does "planetary" hook into SSB and the SSB db or is it decoupled?

can't really figure out what planetary is from looking at the organization page either :(

Would it be possible to add some kind of "Don't panic get started|learn more here" link to the top of the readme in that repo?
It's incredibly hard to actually understand what:

• Planetary is from looking at the repo
• What the repo actually does

hihi, I went the other way, from youcompleteme to coc.nvim (mostly because of typescript)

It looks like Lua might bring a new fresh generation of bells and whistles to the table. I'm going to keep holding on to coc.nvim and keep an eye on Lua settling in the Vim eco-system.

Stuff just looks just so much prettier when its misty; from up in the sky that is!
If conditions allow it (enough visibility to see the drone), then I'm definitely going to do this more often

There's an entire city (sundsvall) hidden below the clouds in the valley!

Higher res and other pictures made in the mist are up on my Unsplash, so download away!
I also made a short movie from the b-roll i shot between making these pictures. enjoy!

ECM=CME (Coronal Mass Ejections)
I keep messing that up sorry

Aurora update

Tonight at around 22:00-23:30 UTC
Last Saturday there was a fairly strong coronal mass ejection on the sun (same strength as the one that we had in 2012), the cloud of doom isn’t pointed at the earth, but it will “side-swipe” our planet tonight triggering a mild g1 storm. So keep an eye on this channel, I’ll send a ping here when the arctic sensors go bananas.

December 5 (early prediction)
A new crafty CME exploded out of the sun today at around 9:00 UTC.

The ECM should collide with the stuff coming out of the coronal hole that made our skies light up about 2 weeks ago close at our planet. Collisions of that kind are messy and produce a fair amount of turbulence on the earth’s magnetic field.

If it pans out as NOAA (source of the images above) predicts, then it's really going to be worth it being outside in the dark on the 5th of this month; that is if you live up north. I'll put comments in the thread of this post when other sources start confirming this CME.

Just connected, i heard some weird sounds from you, then mostly just silence ;)

• Mumla and WiMic are nice apps if you're on android (make sure to give the apps rights to use microphone/recording from your android settings)
• Mumblefy is pretty neat if you're on an IOS device (same same on the right to use microphone there)

More clients and stuff:
https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/3rd_Party_Applications

This things looks incredibly pretty, thanks for sharing!

Some bonus-aerial footage of our "stuga" (cabin):

Hacknext 2020 was a blast!

My roommate and some close friends set out last Thursday (after quarantining ourselves for 1.5 weeks) to go for a 4-day code-retreat. no office coding, no work related stuff; just tinkering with things, making good food and playing board-games.

I managed to rebuilt my entire Aurora bot, integrating it with a hand-full of new data sources (since my old and only data-source is being worked on at the Kiruna Institute). I even managed to make a nice interactive map representing the data!

As well as a fancy looking tmux-powerline widget

Then the perfect opportunity presented itself on Saturday with the sky actually lighting up, triggering pretty much all my alarms, bells and whistles.

The next steps now are going to be to re-add multi-day predictive systems and include and add more data-points and then tweaking the timers and clocks in such a way that they send aurora alerts to different time-zones.

Anyway, the project is up on https://aurora.hendrikpeter.net/. enjoy!

Nothing big going on here. I'm just filtering pubs from my active connections in Patchwork, since the 10 or so room connections I have at all times apparently already do a much better job of feeding/seeding my local DB with relevant info than the pubs do.

Wish there was a button to turn pub discovery off, might make one myself next week during H> and open a pull-req.. who knows.

welcome back!

%o/fHqng... has links to bigger quality pics of that area including the pic from original post ;)

@Entropy, that's quite interesting! I use Manyverse on an iphone with a relatively small capacity (64gb) and I very much like Manyverse not pulling in everything, connecting to everyone around and just replicating super broadly.

I'm also a huge fan of the new rooms idea (and the fact that it is now super stable under higher capacity after last weeks bug fixes to it). The whole point that SSB advertises itself on is to be "decentralized". Pubs tend to become central data-warehouses over time PicoPub sat at 40gb at the end of its life, that was with blops cleaning turned all the way up), while rooms and choosing to connect to people in rooms is more in the spirit of friends/followers directly connecting to each other.

I'm personally starting to regard pubs to be previous-class citizens. We still need to have pubs around for those communities and groups/flocks of users that just like it for its convenience, but Rooms are pretty much Pubs 2.0 in my head. My question would actually be "Is it possible to turn the pesky auto-discovery of pubs off in patchwork?". It's quite annoying to have to block em all one by one in order for them to not connect to me.

I'm just blocking a bunch of SSB-pubs that patchwork connects to automatically, so nothing actually bad with the pub. just cleaning up stuff now that rooms are becoming stable!

Forking out of %vK/West...

Halfway through tomorrow (the 14th of October) #picoroom @PicoRoom will move from

https://ssb-room.picodevelopment.nl

to

https://picoroom.hendrikpeter.net

I don't live in the netherlands anymore and pico reclame/development has been a closed business for 5 years now, so I'm moving most of the sub-domains linked to it including the room out.

If you were connected to Picoroom, then make sure to visit either of the above linked addresses tomorrow the room dissapears from your connections to grab the new connection-keys.

have a great day!

also It's so cool to see all these room-peers all connected and stable!

*even

I'll happily help you out on a call with screen sharing if need be!

I'ts alive! Just updated rooms with the find from "Marine master" and the fix from @andrestaltz, Thanks both (and others that have been scratching their heads on this one for weeks or eve months)!

on that note, to everyone involved with picoroom:

Picoroom will move out of the picodevelopment space into a new domain. It's past time I started to remove and unwind the picodevelopment domain as I closed the company affiniated to it about 5 years ago now. I still love the Pico-name for these kind of things however so:

From tomorrow (2020-10-14) onward Picoroom will be available via "picoroom.hendrikpeter.net"

Wow nice! I'm updating my room straight away!

woah that's so nice. I kinda miss proper beaches up north :)

This and other pics are available for free here btw:
https://unsplash.com/photos/4jJ9dzUd4zg
https://unsplash.com/photos/M6YvAQbt85g
https://unsplash.com/photos/TpMwNge8Xxg

I've been doing it more often lately @glyph. The local railway company replaced all trains going from Sundsvall to Åre and back with trains that have dedicated bike-sheds in them.

So I tend to pop the bike into the train, lift a long for a few stations go biking for half a day and then back to the station. Has been a ton of fun so far!

Spent a nice Saturday biking on the trails just outside Stöde. Fall was already really pretty on the ground, but throwing the drone up in the air revealed a stunning colorful view!

we're all butts!

@cryPhone📱
Oops

I went over the Toughtworks Tech radar with a customer this morning and suddenly noticed that both "Data mesh" and "Decentralized identity" are part of the "asses" section in the Techniques radar now.

Pretty awesome to see DWeb slowly taking its place in "normal everyday" mainstream software development!

Info: https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques

@Wouter Moraal GOED BEZIG!
Looking forward to the exciting things you bring to Manyverse!

There we go, back to Sundsvall after a crazy-good weekend! thanks @andrestaltz, @hoodownr, @crowsnest, @cblgh, [@keks], @cryptix, (@YXkE3TikkY4GFMX3lzXUllRkNTbj5E+604AkaO1xbz8=.ed25519), Mehgan and all others that dropped by!

It was super duper fun to see your faces, the different efforts around other programming languages, the presentations on Manyverse, the super fun ideas and raw energy to start devving on existing and new stuff around the group and the graffiti!

My development goals after #extrasolar

• Look at brining ssb-rooms to rust, or fix the current JS one so it can keep up when more than 5 people connect
• Reboot #tightbeam, but rethink some of the big stuff in it.
• Start thinking about bit of an "SSB starter kit" in either Rust or Elixir (it's about time SSB met with some telecom-legacy) with a basic project setup (bit like rails new or create-react-app does by creating a base folder and file structure and taking some of the bootstrapping out of the way in the spirit of omakase though I'll keep that on a lower fire for now until I can chat with other butts about it a bit more)

Future Meetups

• I heard someone talking about doing another tech/coding session on the southern side of Sweden towards the spring (Covid-19 dependent).
• Code-retreat in either Hassela or one of the other (more reachable) ski-parks in Sweden (I'll get back on this in when I'm back home)

Random awesomeness

@hoodownr drew me and I own "an authentic hoodownr" now!

#extrasolar is pretty rad so far ;)

The first #extrasolar day was a blast! I figured all other attendees are already posting pictures of them sitting on porches and in meeting rooms, So I figured to give bit of an impression of the place we're at by going birds-eye view.

Most of the event is happening in a really cozy youth-activities room right in the middle of the little island that is the city of Tornio. Sweden and Finland are separated by a river (and the baltic sea), Tornio is bit like an island separating the river before it ends in the baltic sea.

And then there is Merja.'s backyard were we ended the day with a fantastic BBQ in a BBQ hut! I need one of those myself, it's a sauna, but the sauna bit is a bbq!

it's not meeeee

Okidoki. I'll go with the last option, then deal with shenanigans as they come on the way.
Thanks for the tips on masks @cblgh m... I'll see if i can find some here in town!

Tagging some important people to the event & swedes: @hoodownr, @cryptix, @cblgh.

So we're now two days away from #extrasolar and I find myself on the #swedish side of the border.

On Monday The Finnish gov went out with updated rules for those entering the country, their updated scopes for essential travel aren’t looking too good. I had hoped that Northern Finland & Sweden would open up a little more near the end of the summer back when I initially signed up, but it doesn't look like that's happening this week.

As fun as having a meetup is; meetups (and speaking at meetups) is in no way considered "essential" by either the Swedish or Finnish gov right now. That goes for personal and business meetups. The Swedish & Finnish gov as well as the WHO have gone out with advices to either cancel meetups/conferences or have them online and for good reason.

I could convince border patrol that this meetup is super duper important, but with what conscience would I do that I wonder.

Then there's the aspect of how this would reflect on SSB as a community, I'm not that big of a fry when it comes to SSB and its development, but being "that person that brought a case of covid into finland by visiting an alto-social media gathering" would undoubtably reflect badly on the platform that we love so much.

My employer is also being doubtful on how smart all of this is and how this would reflect on them if I were to become harmed or harm others for a conference abroad. Even though I can probably get away by working from home for a few days, their argumentation makes sense.

Quite some odds.

So from where I stand here in Sweden I see 3 and a half ways forward:

• A miracle happens; all borders open up and traveling over them is not only safe but also socially acceptable all of a sudden.
• The Swedish side of the meetup meets at a café or the local library in Happaranda and rings in on the Tornio side, then we do a photo-op with everyone “on the border”.
• I jump on the train to Abisko from Luleå, request a UAV permit for Sweden’s national parks and hike/fly around in the mountains for a few days.
• I’ll step over the border anyway, dabbling & doubting

What do you extrasolars think?

could call it a meetup yeah, conference does sound like hundreds of people meeting up in my head.

getting adjusted to the manjana-vibe of northern finland pisses me off.

Could move to Sweden and get traumatized by "we should have a groop discussion about this" instead ;)

O, completely forgot; we're well within the polar circle. It's still a tad early in the season to see auroras (it's still a tad to light at the 22-23 prime-time. The magnetic field is also still a bit too strong, it becomes much better in the 2 weeks leading to and month after the Equinox.

That said, I'll post some reports from my space-weather bots as we get closer to the event next week ;)

it’s only a against-all odds mad covid 19 suicide mission led by a guy who draws nude pandas thats all =)

that's pretty cool though. the coolest things are made from simple junk ;)

Welcome back in the Nordics, I take it you had a save trip!

Grand @hoodownr!
I'll probably end up prepping 2 presentations and pick one based on the composition of people at the event ;)

If you're in to runes you should really visit "Näsåker" when the Finnish-Swedish border opens back up. The town is littered with Runes and drawings from (pre-)viking times. They got a yearly music festival around there too, though that was canceled this year due to the COVID-shenanigans.

picture I made some years ago during Urkult (the festival)

Does owning a named lamp instead of plant count?

sounds good! could do that straight on the event right?
probably easiest for people to find ;)

I've been listening to Olafur Arnalds (friend of Nils Frahm) "Islands full film" since lunch for the neat music and the relaxing language ;)

Sweet, thanks for all the work you're putting into this!

1. Could install a raspberry pi with a fairly easy user and password.
2. then create a "Sites" folder in the home directory
3. sudo apt-get install nginx
4. change /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default to:

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server;
        server_name _;

    location / {
                root /home/your-pi-user/Sites;
        index index.html;
                autoindex on;
    }

}

Then have them put their sites as their own "name" in that folder using visual studio's ssh enabled file tree.

That's all a bit hard and probably a bad idea. Plus actually dragging sites directly to servers rarely ever happens in real life situations. So here are some "better" options that I commonly use:

• Have them create a free account on Heroku. Heroku is a host that allows you to git push to it. this easy article goes over the details.. basically you'd have to rename index.html to "home.html", then create an index.php with <?php include_once(“home.html”); ?> + a composer.js file with {} (this will make heroku trigger the simple-php built-stack). From there you can just heroku create 'your-app-name and git push heroku master
• Install the beaker browser and create a new site project. once they're done they can share their unique hash around.
• Github pages: https://pages.github.com/

There are a lot of github options up there. The first thing we normally do on our bootcamp at global code after they get their pi and having them personalize the wallpaper of their desktop) is teaching students how to open a terminal, cd & use git & github, because it's just such an essential thing.

I just called the "Finnish border service" they had this to say:

Crossing the border for (work related) conferences & meets (within the limitations of group sizes for those meetings) or family is ok-ish. The border security deals with requests on a case-by-case base as they arrive at the border up in Tornio.
the vague description I got off the lady taking my call suggested that it's pretty much just up to how an individual border security person feels about it that day.

The lady talking to me advised me to get some kind of letter/invitation/description of the meet from the organizing party, explaining why we'd need to cross the border. not necessarily as a requirement, but it would make crossing a tad easier.

She also mentioned that a new set of rules with either more or less restrictions might be released to the public this Friday and that we should probably contact them again (or watch online press releases) closer to the actual event date.

No big clear answer, but sounds like getting some paperwork sounds like a good idea @hoodownr.
Are you up to writing it or shall I write a letter that we distribute to people that have RSVPd for the event?
I have to write those invitation letters all the time when we fly volunteers over into Ghana... In that case they tend to be Visa request letters, but the same principle would apply for border crossing in this case ;).

That's a brilliant question! I would assume that Tornio & Haparanda follow the same rules as the rest of Finland towards Sweden which according to raja.fi:

Those wishing to cross the internal border must use border crossing points where border control has been reinstated. Crossing the border in other places is not permitted without a border crossing permit. Self-quarantine is recommended for those arriving in Finland from countries subject to internal border control.

I'm not entirely sure if Haparanda & Tornio are among the places where crossing has been made possible again. I'll give the Turnio tourist service a call tomorrow to double check it! Worst case for me if the borders are closed at the end of the month:

• Organize something Swedish and wave to the non-swedes across the canal from either Haparanda or crab in another Swedish city if need be. (I rarely get to see all you Malmö & Danish butts)
• I rebook the last leg of the trip (Luleå -> Haparanda) to one of the national parks instead and go hiking for a weekend.

That would suck though... Really hope we can make Turnio work. I'll make the call tomorrow and get back on this.

Just remember I should probably do that ;)
I'll PM you my contact details in case you need anything done on the Swedish / Lapland side of things.
Feel free to link this travel-thread in your gathering if you think that's a good idea.

@Hendrik Peter:

My train trips:
Screenshot 2020-08-03 at 15.05.01.png

I'm staying at "Camping Tornio" from the 27th to the 30th on a camping spot, booking for the camping isn't necessary according to the owners.

I was about to make a thread for that. I suggest we create a seperate event for travel (so the folks on both the finish & swedish site can sync their travels). I'll draw up a "gathering now"

Looks pretty cool @hoodownr!
can you actually make the hop from JP to Finland with all borders being closed and what not?

I'll be at the venue ;)

I'll happily take 1 shirt in L off your hands ;)
Paying with PP now.

Tornio though... that's only a small train trip from where i live!

(with an eye on COVID19)

That sounds super cool. Me joining will depend a bit on how much Finland likes Swedes to cross their border.

Looks awesome!

toasty!

Hey @andrestaltz, go ahead with sharing!
Thanks for pointing me to the AXPL info. I'm branching out in my fork, so "all changes" are visible in a single diff-page. I'll make sure to update the footer with correct info ASAP.

@kas, It's been quite okay! we're currently up at 17 C here in Sundsvall. When I took the pic about 2 weeks ago we were up at 30 with a water temp of 24 C.

The nice thing is that it has been raining in between the very sunny days, so we don't really have to worry about the forest fires this year (which is much better when contrasted against last year).

*late..
I blame my keyboard

Lae afternoon shot with the drone - Summer is in full bloom up here in Northern Sweden and I love it!

Changes to @PicoPub - ssb-pub.picodevelopment.nl

A late morning back in Illustrator.

Now that I got a little bit of time on my hands to make some changes, develop some small things and just not think about work for a few hours (deadlines suck); I've decided to make @PicoPub - ssb-pub.picodevelopment.nl read only starting today. Even though I'm happy to host it, the pub isn't a viable solution to its original purpose anymore.

The purpose of this pub was to invite and welcome new butts into a neat corner of the SSB network and so it did! But being online for little under two years now; the Database is getting out of hand.
It is quite manageable from a data-perspective, but new people trying out Scuttlebutt and onboarding themselves using the pub were faced with an incredible amount of data to sync down. This caused ssb-clients to freeze for long amounts of time. Which let's be honest is not the experience I'd wish upon anyone, let alone people having their very first experience with this network. Thousands of people relying on a central point for their communications wasn't really the spirit of SSB either.

That doesn't mean that I'm no longer passionate about inviting and welcoming new people on board of this network though, the funky little Marvin character that I drew up as one of my first experiences with digital illustrations will live on as a Room!

Rooms allow new and old people on this network to connect to other people, much like my pub would. But instead of having a bartender with gossip; people entering the room will need to connect with each other and sync up when others are around.

Check out my full PSA over on Picopub's onboarding site and connect to PicoRoom if you feel like it ;)

I put an EOL date for the pub on the onboarding site, I haven't made up my mind if I really pull the plug or maybe just scale it down a bit. We'll see where the road goes from here!

to @andrestaltz, thanks a lot for putting all the work you've done so far on rooms as well as the plugins to connect to them present in my favorite SSB clients!

The stickers came in, Thanks @cel!

Hey there! coming through loud and clear ;)

SSO or Single Sign On. "are those buttons" you click when you log into a service that allows you to login with your google, facebook or twitter account.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_sign-on

I tried googling for good videos/descriptions on the matter, but they're all kinda dry and boring. I'll happily show how it works though ;)

(fork)
Disclaimer: this is for an online game where players join alliance and corporations. The link @zelf mentions here is an older version of the software we use to verify in-game user names with a password they set through an auth interface (my alliance uses auth.w4rp.space). I'll happily give a demo of the (newer) whole thing in action.

on a side-note:
I should research creating SSO with SSB. that would be super cool!

I'll happily take some if you still have a few. Will PM my address!

Demo-site:
http://sound-test.picoreclame.nl/

Code:
https://git.picodevelopment.nl/hendrikpeter/sound-site-demo

I'd probably end up creating DB records myself to allow custom file names and such, but this is a low effort approach.

sec, uploading a quick coding example now ;)

was just duckduck-go-ing how to set up a react-native app that has 2 seperate javascript processes. Low and behold a fellow chap on scuttle-butt had already made it! Thanks @andrestaltz!

i know you depcrecated yours in favor of https://code.janeasystems.com/nodejs-mobile/, but still you keep popping up in my JavaScript searches ;)

procrastinating in style with @zelf and @asymmetric

I think we all just discovered Mumble's new UI at roughly the same time

get well soon!

I'll be back tomorrow ;) too many meetings today.

we're still going ;)

ah, missed the forked thread. sorry

are there credentials for solarpunk.network or do i need to login using a special user-name?

hey thanks @mixmix!

Hey there!

HIIII

My NAS is free and I'd argue decentralized enough. It's mainly just that I write my blog on the go when I'm out of the country, traveling around and such (I'm in Ghana quite often). I don't want to deal with either downloading or having to seed big files from my laptop more than once (and with that having to run to shady stores to get new data cards all the time)

Some of the files are sitting on my private NAS. I was mirroring my blog via hashbase and they don't really like 50+mb images.

The photos are free to use, go wild. I'll write the bits and bops about the edges and edge-networks in the graph tomorrow

Jep, A room is basically a pub (though you don't necessarily subscribe to it by "becoming friends"). The main difference between a room and a pub is that a room doesn't store messages.

• So the room doesn't have to deal with slowly becoming a data-farm, which is a common problem with Pubs.
• The room serves less of an important role as its only function is to introduce peer-to-peer users to each other.

A negative effect is:

• You don't receive new messages until at least 2 people are online
• There is not an initial database of messages that you can grab real fast when setting up your SSB anew

The positive effect is:

• Decreased role of centralized solutions
• potentially a less explosively growing database for people that want to connect over the internet without getting big databases really fast
• on Initial sync (after setting up SSB for the first time) you can specifically pick what other people in the room you want to download data from as the old-fashioned WiFi way of communication applies. This means that you will potentially not download 7 GB of data and freeze your entire client (unless you follow SSB celebs or people with huge friend-lists).

That's just my understanding of it though.

jep, to my understanding Manyverse and Patchwork were the first 2 to implement them (which is awesome I might add)

Tad early here, and a tad late for the talk but hi from Sweden ;)

fun fact, the position of your pub is actually exactly like how my pub looked shortly after i released it, pubs slowly crawl their way towards the center of the graph, but never to the dead-center as pubs tend to keep some distance to each other. Probably in order to not become just a copy of each other following the exact same segment of the network.

Or the pub's relation to others are jsut not visible to me. These are the relations I'm seeing:

forking %rdPNmU7....

@Ace, Jep here it is:

(feel free to use them for anything really)

I uploaded some graphs of how we were connected. all the blew is "my network", while the red is everything that you have a 3 level deep relation with as seen from my perspective.

Before we followed each other we were related through a 2nd-line relation via @ssb.learningsocieties.org (we both follow that pub) and a 3rd line on the @ssb.organicdesign.pub (you follow a friend via that follows the pub). then we have a common friend @The Weekly that has done some broadcasting too.

Files are on my webdav:

• https://ssb.picoreclame.nl/Martin/HP-and-martin.png
• https://ssb.picoreclame.nl/Martin/explained.png

yeah, I can alarm-clock. are you using a room or some pub for comms?

Wow hey there, Happy birthday @punkmonk. Hope you're having an awesome day on your side!

(that's dat://blog.picodevelopment.nl/2020-01-15-relations-as-a-graph.html. sorry)

So I'm writing an article based on the data in my graph. It's still very much a Work in progress (I barely scratched the surface here) but here's a sneak-peak start:
http://blog.picodevelopment.nl/2020-01-15-relations-as-a-graph.html

List of mentioned SSB profiles (as nodes)

• @Bp5Z5TQ...
• @QlCTpvY...
• @aKEgZNf...
• @aKEgZNf...
• @ye+QM09...
• @m3qRhYb...
• @J+0DGLg...
• @uRECWB4...
• @L+nPFTM...
• @q/lX5Wb...
• @FJDMuAT...
• @XgC5wDA...
• @UFDjYpD...
• @+COav7r...

If your cypher-handle is mentioned here and you don't want me to write about you as a node, then just reach out in a PM and I scrub you from the article!

Again the article is still in writing, I'm currently typing down some of the "edge-cases" (nodes and flocks outside the main inter-connected "blob")

Hey there!

@elavoie go ahead, you actually @The Weekly actually mentioned them when i came out with the images little over half a year ago ;)

credits for this go to @andrestaltz, as he build the ssb-to-graphml package.

I'll do a write-up in a bit about the meaning of different colours as well as what different edges are doing! (need to finish some meetings IRL ;) )

Ever since #manyverse for IOS came out I've been noticing a spike in new connections on my pub @PicoPub - ssb-pub.picodevelopment.nl (I'm working on bringing a room online).
Decided to make a new export of the SSB network stored on this machince. It looks quite cool!

Tools used:

• https://www.npmjs.com/package/ssb-to-graphml
• Gephi
• Sketch

All images in high quality:
https://ssb.picoreclame.nl/

after you remove your flume as well as your gossip database (leaving you with a secret only) You might need to hop in a room, pub or wifi-link with someone that has your data, which means re-subbing to that data-source.

@moid is pretty right. there are a good bunch of sources in your network with blobs, so you can harmlessly remove some old ones. when you end up re-visiting a view in Patchwork or Patchbay that contains a refference to that blob, your client will just re-download it.

Hey there!
@kas made a post about cleaning up blobs from pub servers a while ago %xVgKaRs....

Blobs take up most data in my .ssb-folder and the @PicoPub - ssb-pub.picodevelopment.nl folder for that matter.

So basically there are message types out there called "blob", they contain a refference to a file. When your client loads and sees inline-links to these files it will try to fetch them for you (loading images) from anyone that is connected to you at that moment. After that they will be stored on your machine to be spread out to people reading that same message via you.

It needs to be said that some desktop clients (not sure which) as well as clients tailored to mobiles like ManyVerse and Tightbeam clean up blobs automatically. I've been online for well over 1.5 years now, followed a bunch of people and my desktop database sits at 8gb, so it's not actually that bad.

exactly @Rômulo Alves.

There are 2 problems with sharing the same key across multiple devices:

The unique keys are used to identify you when you are "online" (which we call gossiping). Devices in the network will get confused if they suddenly see 2 devices identifying themselves with the same key at the same time.

There's also the risk of breaking your own index of messages. Each message you create receives the id of the previous item in your database and a time-stamp. If you post a message on device 1 and then post a second message on device 2 (before it has a chance to download message number 1) you'll suddenly end up with a newer message containing an older time-stamp.

I (and most multi-platform users) use 2 separate identities that are "linked" to each other via their bios. I for example have @Hendrik Peter and @Hendrik Peter (Mobile) .

I believe @andrestaltz made the ssb-keys-mnemonic plugin ;)

Gratz!!!!

when I saw the site my first thought was duck-hunt.
Looks like a lot of fun! looks like the camp end just before midsommar here in Sweden too, I might join!

Got the Mavic Pro i've been wanting to buy for some time now. and gosh, it rocks in photography!

I'm sharing some of the pics made by it for free (as they get greened by the Swedish authorities) over at https://unsplash.com/@hendrikpeter.

Really adds a new layer to the hikes & skiing trips in the coming few weeks!

anyway enjoy the pics.

welcome back!

Sorry, how could I leave you out @SoapDog

wow hey there @Piet, that sounds pretty awesome! I don't live in the Netherlands anymore, but if you're around the place you should really check out the islands (Schiermonikoog being the prettiest).

You're always welcome up in Sweden. I'll happily take you on a tour through a national park too if you desire so (Skuleskogen & Vålådalen are the prettiest things in the early swedish autumn).

It might however be a bit more practical to visit Denmark or Skåne (south of sweden) instead. Kopenhagen, Malmö or Gothenburg are easy places for people like @zelf, @Powersource, and @kas to get to. It's also just a small trip over the pond plus a train trip ride away from @andrestaltz. I'll happily eat the bullet of sitting on the train for a few hours.

I believe you have my contact details already, so feel free to drop me a message anytime

#globalcode

Ghana Week one

A week with David and Barry

Global code at Ghana in week number 1.
I'm loving this! This week was so incredibly awesome!

Preparing for school

In the weekend leading to the big first day with class we got to meet a bunch of
cool people. The teams going to other cities all had to fly through Accra.
Meeting all the volunteers, lamp-lighters (last year students now working as
teachers themselves) and people around the project. We got to see the city,
check out the different bits around the campus and just prepared for those first
lessons.

rain, monitors, keyboards and fun!

And then came day one. The lights-on moment. Like most things in life, not
everything ran the way we hoped it to be.

Shortly after we walked in to the classroom at around 08:30 the sky opened up
and surprised us with the heaviest rain I'd ever seen. Streets started filling
with water so there wasn't really a way for most students to reach the
classroom. Something as it turned out was pretty good as our raspberries
hadn't come in either and we only had 6 or so functioning monitors to work with.

So much rain!

This problem was (mostly) swiftly fixed and the first group of 10 students could
start to learn the first few bits of Raspbian (the OS that comes with the Pis)
and Linux. We pretty much continued to do that through the first two days.
On the second day however we did have a lot more students.

Once the raspberries were working, the energy got down a bit. Not everything was
perfect. Some of the screens didn't really work that well, we lacked a few
keyboards and raspberries don't like VGA cables. Normally the small machines are
connected to HDMI from which they eat a little bit of extra energy. The VGA
cables that we wired in (using VGA - HDMI adapters) were however taking energy
from the raspberries instead causing a shortage of energy and a whole lot of
shenanigans.

If I can change two things next year I'd take a bit more powerful power-adapter
(the 2A adapters we had were not keeping up) as well as a practical thing. Once
the background is set that "lights on" (this little small credit card machine is
a computer realization) is gone. Building a quick html page and pushing it to
Heroku is just such a big motivator of "wow, I'm building my own stuff now!"

Anyway, the lessons were on their way and Michael Soli -- one of the people
working at the uni, running a software company in town -- was an amazing guy
setting us up with better equipment as well as loads of help in and outside the
class (thanks Michael!)

Once most of the students were done setting up their machines and doing the
bash-crash course we continued with STICKERS!. I had taken along an envelope
full of stickers from some book-stores in Sweden. The class went bananas with
them, dressing up their new Raspberry Pi cases.

Stickers maketh personal

And that brings me to day three; the day we started
python development. Sure there were still some new faces, but the classes and
labs were now on their way. Barry took the first two days and explained the ins
and outs of the Python programming language with Me and David running around
fixing the small little typo's here and there. Barry did a stellar job
explaining the different things with an amazing depth into the "why's of
things".

These days were a bit tough as students needed to dig through all kinds of
theory, learn loops, etc. Halfway through day 4 we renewed most of that energy
with an assignment.

Working on the assignment

On day four the students had to choose to make their own weather app, news app,
distance helper, etc. in small groups. They presented the results with much
pride on Thursday morning, after which we did a few more lessons in which we
went over version control through Git.

After the theoretical material on Thursday it was about time to start doing some
weird coding again. The subject: Make sound and (traffic) lights using Python
and the small GPIO pins on the raspberry pi. The results were awesome!
We had students programming beeping machines, traffic lights, discos, you name
it. Thursday and Friday were probably the hardest days to get people out of the
room (they would also sneak into the class early so they could start coding
already).

Making traffic lights

The weekend

And with that our classes ended for the week. Time to explore town. We started
at Sam's place in Osu and slowly made our way to Jamestown, visiting monuments,
markets, coconut places and cafés on the way. Accra is a living city and amazing
to be around in. After our long walk we made our way to a small restaurant in
town called Zen garden, had a beer, bit of a goodbye and off we went to the
airport were Barry would hop onto an airplane (after eating a pizza).

Last pic at Jamestown

Sunday, the last day I'll cover in this weekly was nice. It was a bit weird to
no longer have Barry around, but the breakfast with Sam & James (a guy that had
arrived as Barry left) was nice and the Meetup I had with Emerald (one of the
lamp-lighters) after just incredibly awesome.
It was nice to be able to drop some of the books, notes and
resources I had for front-end development on someone else. She was (and is)
just incredibly experienced with Adobe XD; something I haven't really tried yet.
Plus she's a really nice person to be around with. Thanks Emerald!

Up to the next week with Athena, A Morgan Stanley employee and volunteer sharing
the teacher role with us next week!

#globalcode

Ghana week 0

Global code at Ghana in week number 0.
What an incredible half week already. It's unbelievable to think that just 4 or
so days ago I was sitting in the office dubbing on ad-code... And now I'm here!

Travel days

Let's just go from the beginning.

Shortly after work on Thursday I closed the door on Malmövägen to head out to
the train-station. The cat was safely at my good friend Alve and most of the
plants I'd like to keep were forming a small jungle on the desk of one of my
colleagues. So the home-front is taken care of.

The plan from here was to travel to Arlanda by train at 7pm and then just hang
around Arlanda until the plane would go at 7-something. All of that just went
super well, with me even getting a nice 3 hour long nap!

The first flight was pretty okay everything on time, nice people around, the
perfect conditions really for any flight. And then came the airport in
Istanbul. Wow, they redid that place since I last visited. The airport just
looked amazing!

From here it pretty much went Africa style. I need to be honest here and say
that no public transportation option has ever been on time for me in any of my
trips to the African continent. This was no exception. The plane took a good
extra hour to land and get checked out before we could get on board. It was also
a bit more messy. But hey, good spirits.

The plane went up, some kids in the back started to throw up,
the stewards rushed in and did a stellar job and from there it was pretty good
actually. I've never really flown over the Mediterranean nor the Sahara
during the day and going through the trip I got to see some truly amazing views.

Some of the shots:

Malta

The north side of the Sahara

The south of the sahara during a sand-storm.

Halfway through the trip (somewhere between the last two pictures) One of the
passengers of the plane became unwell. The cabin-crew started to call for
doctors and it turned out we had a surgeon on board. Things started to solve, but
throughout the process the plane windows started to warm up from the intense
heat and it seemed that the air-conditioning in the Boeing wasn't really keeping
up with the Sahara sun pressing down on us. More people became thirsty, got
headaches and the plane became bit of a mess. I really appreciated the
professionalism of the crew there.

Long story short, We landed at the airport, I got my passport looked at (while
listening to a guy with a piano in the middle of the arrival hall singing a song
about my airline), finger-prints scanned (only took them 30 tries) and then
discovered that the strap around my bag had gone (everything was still in the
bag). So lots of imprecisions there.

At the exit Sam had sat down in a corner and ordered a good old cold beer. Which
was pretty much magic after all the flying. And from there my adventure in Ghana
began.

During the last few days we've mainly been driving around, meeting people,
checking things out and we got to know the crew.

My cribs

In my first week I'll get to work with Barry (a nice guy from the states),
Michael (a developer from Accra and personality within the university) and David
(The student I've been coaching for the last couple of months).

We set up the room today and I'm really really looking forward to tomorrow when
we get to greet the students!

The classroom

I'll try to report a bit halfway through the week.
Until then make sure to follow my over on Instagram
or at Global code

What am I writing. sorry that first line needs to be

case  :file.pread(io_device, offset, bytes) do

ofc... sorry 'bout that

ah you're right @dinoƧ𝔸Ⓤᖇ. neat bit of code there there @punkmonk!

You could potentially make it a tad more tolerant by dealing with the {:error, reason} and hinting your supervisor how to act (depends on how you set up the supervisor)

so

case {:ok, contents} = :file.pread(io_device, offset, bytes) do
  {:ok, contents } -> IO.puts contents
  {:error, reason  } -> raise "oops", reason
end

nice!
The offset file will be a json file so you could potentially read it like this:

{:ok, body} = File.read(log.offset)

Then you should be able to decode the body with the Jason library.

While testing this for myself I noticed that my computer had a lot of issues reading the huge file however.
Alternatively you could execute a command on your file-system instead (through a .sh script) with grep and sed to grab strings from your offset. You can see an example of sed here:

https://git.picodevelopment.nl/hendrikpeter/tmux-mac/blob/master/segments/weather.sh#L61 (I'm reading "icon": "someicon" in that line there)

hey!

what is it you're trying to do exactly?
you want to read and write files or would you like to create random bits of information?

I've never seen or heard of IPFS, thanks for pointing me to it @SoapDog!

Thanks for the call! These were some really interesting topics, questions and thought processes!

I might actually drop in on this one if it's okay.
I'll be having my office daily standup at 08:40, so I might need to drop out a bit earlier, but whatever ;)

Hey there big welcome to all the gossip!

love the pic you made for this and Soapygate.. well played

or as I said earlier, to make sure that there is a standard and testing a message that comes in if it's supported by the running instance of ssb. if not skip. I think this message object shouldn't be stopped from being saved in the database (as I could just have an outdated version of ssb), but it should be filtered out of any front-end as early in the stack as possible.

sure thing. only problem is, that this message is now out in the wild and could randomly kill any client that comes in contact with it. But i'll remove it on my side for now

I just found this one by searching around in patchwork:
https://github.com/fraction/flumedb-delete/#usage

Should do the trick. I guess the feedId is your user id

I'm trying to find that script now. got any pointer on where I can find it?

So the entire error seems to be coming from a test post by @SoapDog's surface go.

I've posted my full details here:
https://github.com/ssbc/ssb-msgs/pull/11/files#r299367419

So somehow one of the mentions is actually just a null object.
Since this is a pub server, what is the best way of reseting my database and how can i make sure this broken message doesn't end up back in my DB?

Okidoki. yeah sure then I'll test around in a bit.
I guess nothing will be official or rollable to other pubs until pull 11 does its merge.

Other related question for you @SoapDog (since you're the author of ssb-msgs) and @mixmix (since you're quite knowledgeable on the subject).

Is there some kind of "spec" of how messages should look? something that checks the content of a messages before it goes further into the ssb-msgs system (and ssb for that sake)?

I could see an abuse case here where you could essentially send a malformed object-type in a (private) message to someone (no-one on the way would be able to see that the message was malformed in case of private) and then have targeted peoples ssb-clients go belly up through runtime errors, "banning" them from using their favorite ssb-client.

The fact that a malformed mentions object popped up might be a nice pointer into the direction that we might wanna have specifications of how different message-types should look or take a look at them.

@SoapDog thoughts?

I'm looking at how to test this without essentially shooting myself and others in the legs. If I were to patch my pub (and get it back up running) it would start sending the "broken" message forward to everyone connected. are #patchwork, #patchbay and #manyverse (among others) able to deal with the same flume issues it in their current state?

I'm sitting in the office right now, I would need to rebuild ssb-server, ssb-pub and then the pub docker image to test this which will take some time (and I'll probably run into other issues caused by things that got updated). I'll try it in a few hours!

hey @SoapDog, It's happening on my pub server, it happened after it fetched a message from someone else. I nuked my flume, but during the re-creation of links (by pulling messages from the network) the problem resurfaces.

cool! you cross-posted the same findings.
I've been posting invites to my pub to friends and family that want to follow me on my Ghana-trip, but I can go dat-blog only for now for them

aha, just found this https://github.com/ssbc/ssb-msgs/pull/11
seems to be the problem

@dinoƧ𝔸Ⓤᖇ
I seem to be running into this weird quirk on my ssb-pub:

2019-07-01T07:49:47.698406542Z ssb-friends: stream legacy api used
2019-07-01T07:49:49.042806447Z /home/node/.npm-global/lib/node_modules/ssb-server/node_modules/ssb-msgs/index.js:75
2019-07-01T07:49:49.042842233Z     var r = (typeof obj == 'string') ? obj : obj.link
2019-07-01T07:49:49.042846314Z                                                  ^
2019-07-01T07:49:49.042849070Z
2019-07-01T07:49:49.042851609Z TypeError: Cannot read property 'link' of null
2019-07-01T07:49:49.042854226Z     at /home/node/.npm-global/lib/node_modules/ssb-server/node_modules/ssb-msgs/index.js:75:50
2019-07-01T07:49:49.042859275Z     at /home/node/.npm-global/lib/node_modules/ssb-server/node_modules/ssb-msgs/index.js:50:9
2019-07-01T07:49:49.042861865Z     at Array.forEach (<anonymous>)
2019-07-01T07:49:49.042864665Z     at traverse (/home/node/.npm-global/lib/node_modules/ssb-server/node_modules/ssb-msgs/index.js:49:11)
2019-07-01T07:49:49.042867148Z     at Object.exports.indexLinks (/home/node/.npm-global/lib/node_modules/ssb-server/node_modules/ssb-msgs/index.js:72:3)
2019-07-01T07:49:49.042869622Z     at module.exports (/home/node/.npm-global/lib/node_modules/ssb-server/node_modules/ssb-links/links.js:20:8)
2019-07-01T07:49:49.042872137Z     at /home/node/.npm-global/lib/node_modules/ssb-server/node_modules/flumeview-query/links.js:37:5
2019-07-01T07:49:49.042874546Z     at reduce (/home/node/.npm-global/lib/node_modules/ssb-server/node_modules/flumeview-level/index.js:90:25)
2019-07-01T07:49:49.042877063Z     at /home/node/.npm-global/lib/node_modules/ssb-server/node_modules/pull-write/index.js:35:23
2019-07-01T07:49:49.042879506Z     at /home/node/.npm-global/lib/node_modules/ssb-server/node_modules/pull-write/index.js:41:13

The line in question that is failing here seems to be ssb-msgs/index.js:

var r = (typeof obj == 'string') ? obj : obj.link

Could it be a corrupt message of some kind that managed to sneak in and can I do something to fix it myself?

#globalcode

Ghana day -4

In just a few days I'll be flying out to #Ghana (Accra to be precise)!
Together with a team of awesome people from all corners of the planet We'll be teaching a bunch of students at different universities the ropes of software development.

I'll be using SSB & my Dat blog to report the silly things I do, see and go through down there.
I'm placed as a teacher over at The University of Ghana in Accra. Reach out if you happen to live in the neighbourhood, I'd love a fancy crab meet down there!

Interesting links:

• Global Code
• Photo-log
• Blog
• Podcast: Sam, the organizer talking about the project on Giant Robots

all your magical messages fly all over the internet and we get to see & reply to them ;)!

Hey there. That's a good question. every connecting computer has its own little database (you can find it in ´~/.ssb`), so you won't be downloading everything from every user ever. as you follow more people and post more things yourself you'll start growing your database, that's true. The solution for some people (using desktop clients) has been to remove old files from their blobs folder from time to time. the blobs folder is a collection of attachments and files that your computer requested from the network after receiving messages containing them.

Some others prefer lower hops counts. In Patchbay you can set the number of hops (explanation here). The default in most cases is 3.

I've been fairly active, follow a nice bunch of people and post regularly. Including cached content my database is currently 9gb. I have not ever wiped blobs or truncated things in any way. So I guess it's okay so far ;)

Hey there!

Wow hey there and welcome! It's often not that bad of an idea to tag a post #new-people and explain a bit about yourself, that way others with the same interests can find you and vice versa ;)

the discussion over at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20209597 is a grain salt to some of the "assumptions" made in the essay.

I found the essay of observations on Wikipedia behavior by long-time admin #Antandrus that just popped up in Hacker News a really really good read. It reflects at least a few topics that I've personally seen while working on comment sections for news websites. I wonder how much of it overlaps into platforms like SSB.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Antandrus/observations_on_Wikipedia_behavior

#tightbeam

The last few weeks have been incredibly busy with me being out on hikes and all the preparations for the teaching I'm going to do in Ghana in 2 weeks (wow, that's actually that close now!)

During the small moments here and there I've been messing around with blobs and getting them working in the app.
Below a small video of markdown being parsed with blobs served (and cached) from the hub (using auth headers I might add):

https://youtu.be/GSPMsh-hNoQ

On the design/development table for this weekend and the free moments before and during my trip:

• The ability to post normal and private messages as well as the ability to join a pub (to get some initial flow in)
• Longer caching and better error handling on the graph responses.

Yeah kinda, love the good beats while crunching code. how about you?

I see you're quite new (or i've just not replicated that many messages of you yet, who knows!) Make sure to write something about yourself and tag it #new-people. There's also the option to follow different (musical) topics If you're on Patchwork or Patchbay ofc.

Hey there and welcome!!

o/

Jep, you popped up for me too through PicoPub. Welcome to the network!
A good way to get started around here is to post a bit about yourself and your interests and tagging that message with #new-people ;)

The picture above reminded me of classicprogrammerpaintins somehow ;).

That's absolutely fine @📱 Christian Bundy , it wasn't actually that bad of a thing to be forced into actually reading the actual implementations and tests (where available). The code you wrote was quite straight forward and clean!

I do find it somewhat interesting that a lot of SSB-related repos I've been seeing lately have no actual README on what they actually do. I scratched my head quite hard on base plugins for ssb-server (like ssb-onion and ssb-master to give some examples). is it okay if I add a "this repo solves problem x" or "purpose" pull-request to the readme of "bay of plenty" that links to- or quotes %mfL1dl4...?

I'm noticing a new term here. Can someone link me "Bay of plenty"? I tried googling DuckDuckgo-ing, but I keep ending up with New Zealand based beach resorts

haha @UncleCJ, I don't know if I would qualify as a Mensa, but sure I'd love to talk if there's a tech aspect, presence or interest among the organizers!

or this one from @mixmix including nest logic:
https://github.com/ssbc/patchbay/blob/patchql/app/sync/initialise/patchql.js

check out this query @rabble:
https://git.picodevelopment.nl/ssbc/tightbeam-hub/blob/master/TightbeamHubNode/patchql.js#L9

I was quite lucky that I was in the early alphas and got my key dumped to a file when we went from alpha to beta.
But you could always try to just download manyverse from gitlab, build it and push a dev-env version to your phone.

From there you can just console.log the credentials (make sure to adb backup Manyverse before you do though, just in case of accidental storage wipes).

I see an ssb-server refference here. did you run this with ssb-server invite.create 1 or sbot invite.create 1? You could try installing sbot using npm install -g sbot and trying it that way..............

(there's also the issue that some commands only work by executing sbot and some commands only work by executing the CLI command ssb-server.. so you could try swapping commands)

aha! lemme log in to mine and take a peak at the pub config file (within docker) ;)

{
  "connections": {
    "incoming": {
      "net": [
        {
          "scope": "public",
          "host": "0.0.0.0",
          "external": ["ssb-pub.picodevelopment.nl"],
          "transform": "shs",
          "port": 8008
        }
      ]
    },
    "outgoing": {
      "net": [
        {
          "transform": "shs"
        }
      ]
    }
  },
  "friends": {
    "hops": 2
  }
}

Seems to be my config, so that's all nice and dandy, no weird extra plugins used in the .ssb/node_modules folder.

What you can do... is to download docker on your local machine, then pull down https://github.com/ahdinosaur/ssb-pub follow the instructions on getting the image on your computer, then walk around in the image and see what it's doing (docker exec -it sbot bash after starting docker with ./create-sbot)

I got a meeting then.. are you running your pub in docker?

needing to load deps in different places depends entirely on what you're trying to do. I need to mingle with a colleague real quick (in a discussion about using \n vs <br> ), but I can drop into some screen-sharing with you in a bit if you want!

cb == callback. that means some function is expecting a callback. Are you loading your stuff as a ssb-module? (cloned to ~/.ssb/node_modules and a refference in ~/.ssb/config) or are you rocking a full app?

hah it's no problem really, Sbot was on the edge of a community otherwise completely detached from me. so your follow actually folded 2 bubbles together ;)

Just ran a simulation in gephi on my existing local database.
Seems I mostly just got small loose unconnected bits of posts and a small batch of new users into my network just before the block started working ;) I picked up a total of 1200 new accounts in my database.

Pic of sbot (and you @Andrei Cociuba)

Just made the same misstake, followed @Andrei Cociuba and my client blew up. I'm trying to block Sbot, but that message is on a queue far away.

Gonna be interesting to see what happens with my visual network graph after this.

Hey sorry for the late response, packing for a hike here.

Nice! so that would mean that patchql doesn't jsut add to the stack, but actually replaces something. That is good news! I agree with your concerns, even though the hub in it's current state (depending on the kind of machine of course) can only run a small batch. Spinning up a kubernettes to go large scale is incredibly expensive and not worth it.

I'm going to perfect some small things in the little time I can actually spend coding this week and read up a bit on stuff Piet and the others posted while dissecting a few libraries from Sunrise choir that I still need to spit thorugh and taking a peak at how you did your "back-end in the front-end" on Manyverse.

I’m going to research ssb-gossip and the inner-workings of ssb-server a bit better to understand it more and see if I can divide tasks between devices. Alternatively I just go to the approach of doing everything client side and using the server-side as a blobs-dump.

Is starting to sound good ;)

@gwil @ home

What if ssb-patchql could be provided these in a header of a HTTPS request from the client, store them in the request’s context, and use that to return the appropriate results when resolving the query?

That introduces 2 small problems:

1. The wire: It's much safer to send temporary tokens through the air. If tokens leak, they are going to be valid for a limited time anyway so damage is containable. They are used to authorize you agasinst something, If you send the private key over the network and it leaks you're in an entirely different can of worms, the private key is in some sense "you".

2. The database problem. The location of the private key defines the place where all posts are signed and hashed to the database (correct me if I'm wrong), so if the key is on the phone, the phone needs to gather new posts.

I'm going to research ssb-gossip and the inner-workings of ssb-server a bit better to understand it more and see if I can divide tasks between devices. Alternatively I just go to the approach of doing everything client side and using the server-side as a blobs-dump.

@Piet , thanks I'll read through that, once again you present me with really tangible stuff!

as a foot-note: I'm flexible enough really to go into many directions from here and there's no clock ticking either I wanna do this "right". Right doesn't mean that everyone is happy all the time though, silver bullets don't exist.

precisely @Rabble, @Piet and @mixmix.

When I did experiments with the existing ssb-server I noticed that all content going in to the database (so not only my posts, but pretty much everything that gets stored) has to go through signing using the keys. I outlined that in my previous weekly. This essentially means that I have to download a post to the phone (or sniff it up from wifi), request the previous data-set from the server-side (since we hash new records from the previous record in storage), sign it on the client side, then send the new record back. at which point 1 piece of gossip caused 2 pieces go over the wire for a a total number of 3 times.

I learned a lot of new things last week though. Between hosting a pub, dissecting ssb-server, ssb-master and pretty much every module I came across in detail. (Without too much confidence) there seem to be 3 paths that I could take from here with the private key concerns:

1. Lowest hanging fruit: Keep it as it is and limit the backend that I wrote this week to only being able to deal with 3 or so ssb-servers. This is actually already the case as spawning more ssb-servers in the contraption I made is super inefficient in terms of storage, CPU and Memory use. With this the product lives as intended: you have small hubs (NAS machines or private VPS boxes) serving 3 or so accounts in a house-hold, but yes they hold the keys.

2. beefier effort: Follow in the tracks of @andrestaltz and get ssb-server working natively on IOS and android. Serving a built-in ssb-server and bridging external non-java/swift/Objective C & JS into working IOS and Android modules. Then offloading old blobs (which after dissecting much of what I've seen so far is the biggest storage-eater) to a connected backend. My focus here is on IOS, I want to get that working; Users can already choose an android app with Manyverse out there. Apple is however incredibly picky in their reviews, so concessions will be made.

3. Over the top Rocket science: Rewrite ssb-server and it's modules to go for a more softer approach in signing, But doing that will effectively make private keys worthless, so that's not an option. or dive deeper into how messages are signed. does hashing messages really require the private keys? and could I instead sign my message on the phone, then have the server-side backend add the hash to link it into the chain?

Since I have Andre's attention here (sorry that I keep tagging you into things).
I think integrating patchql into mobile apps (doing things client side) is a bad idea, unless a full sunrise choir backend is included. It's super inefficient to run an ssb-server, have a patchql server make requests to that ssb-server for content, caching that and then serving it forward. Apart from the amount of moving parts (and what could go wrong), there is the phone-battery, I already see my battery-indicator tick away like the seconds notation on a digital clock when having Manyverse open in its current state. I don't think that will improve with patchql joining the mix, unless it replaces existing moving parts.

Tightbeam - Week 2

This week went fast and much happened in terms of Tightbeam development. If you're just here for the new feature list, scroll to the bottom. for the novel, continue reading.

This week pretty much started with the continuation of my REST api -- a small ssb-plugin -- that could be used to query messages, likes and replies from a running ssb-server. It was super basic, but the POC got the job done. You can find the (now old) backend service here. If you ever feel like building something simple, take the code ;)

I managed to get markdown working too in the app itself, which was pretty nice!

And then Thursday happened.

After @mix had put out his Patchbay patchqll branch I had to try. It went south fast with new features and functionality exploding into the app.

All of a sudden I had access to pagination, threads, private messages, the whole shebang! I pretty much spend the next few days after that integrating graphQL queries and data until I was forced into some refactoring on Saturday.
It was then I realised that I needed some extra stuff. Stuff like being able to pull images from the server and making actual posts. So I left Patchbay behind and started working on an "improved POC" of "Tightbeam Hub". This hub would need to do 3 things to begin with:

• Host one or more SSB servers with PatchQL for the posts & a REST api for the rest.
• Be able to proxy incoming signals to the right ssb-server (added bonus: token based "authentication").
• Combine the ports of the Graphql end-point and the REST end-points into a single HTTPS signal for convenience.

on the other side, the hub would need to be

• Inneficient enough to not advertise big ammounts of people all "creating accounts" on a single provider, we're DWEB here.

So the "hub" sketch ended up to be something like this:

I put the code for the new hub on my gitlab server. It works pretty decently, but it obviously needs a better (JWT-based) authentication system as tokens are pretty unsafe. It's also just a POC. If you roll this anywhere, make sure your firewall is up, when calling for the service from a distance, setup HTTPS (instructions not included in the readme of the repo).

So that wraps this week up.

On the list of things that now started working:

On the hub

• Fetching posts, threads, likes, private messages, private threads and profile information through graphQL on POST http://localhost:4000/graphQL
• Creating new Messages (posts, votes, abouts, private posts, etc.) through a REST end-point on POST http://localhost:4000/posts/

On the phone app

• Start page with latest markdown parsed posts, with dates, likes, etc. paginating to infinity (or the end of your database).
• Thread views upon clicking on a post.
• Private message list with pagination ofc.
• Threads upon clicking on a private message.
• Working web-links (internal links, references and pictures aren't working yet).
• Ability to set the server-address of your hub as well as pasting in a token.

DEMO VIDEO

Other random videos created earlier this week:

• first patchql shenanigans
• thread are rad (IOS baby!)
• Music + code + vim = life (random older video)

Todo list for the coming week.

• Get blobs working.
• Fiddle around with the settings to allow continuous functioning of the app after changing server and token (need to restart now).
• Start using the already integrated feature on the hub side to post messages and go from a read-only app to a full blown app.
• fetch threads when clicking on post references in the markdown content of posts.
• Continue to research good practices and strategies to keep data-sets on the device for offline access.
• Cool things I didn't account for yet that will somehow be awesome and make me code all night.

Longer-term

• Profile pages & the ability to change one's profile information.
• Integrate features from desktop clients into the app (Who doesn't want to play chess "the nerd way" on the bus?).

Thanking some people

• The people behind #sunrisechoir. You folks are rock(et)stars!
• @piet and @mixmix for the amazing graphql stuff, code examples and pointers!

Hey there and welcome! Just in the network and already looking at hosting stuff. Awesome!

If you're looking into making new pubs and stuff and you want to do something awesome development-wise... then you should perhaps take a peak at internet p2p. There are different ideas spreading around right now to have people connect to each other or pubs more directly.

A thread that has some devs with different ideas %t7betL4... .

Staltz actually build some super cool stuff into the ManyVerse to have people connect directly to each other using hash-tables (which is bit of a mix between centralized and decentralized I guess), you can find his project Repo here: https://gitlab.com/staltz/manyverse

Thanks for that @andrestaltz_phone, it took some time yesterday to figure out what other plugins were needed but it works now! I'll post the repo with my weekly notes

But first let's open up a pull-request at ssb-server to fix that small suggestion ;)

o/

Aha. there seems to have been some chitchat about this in an old pull-request %25lzjhJD%2B8k0erNM213c4%2Bc3tTKm4%2Bs8kfrw2YxUhTtFg%3D.sha256

So I guess we don't need that bit anymore then :p always good to remove code

#ssb-server
Scratching my head on this. according to the readme over at ssb-server I should require ssb-server/plugins/master. When however doing that (after npm install ssb-server I might add) I get the error below. What does this sub-module do?

node > require('ssb-server/plugins/master')
Thrown:
{ Error: Cannot find module 'ssb-server/plugins/master'
    at Function.Module._resolveFilename (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:668:15)
    at Function.Module._load (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:591:27)
    at Module.require (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:723:19)
    at require (internal/modules/cjs/helpers.js:14:16) code: 'MODULE_NOT_FOUND' }

my first shard!

\o/

I was planning to do some naive cache invalidation

yeah, I need to restart the app now (haven't made that deep of a dive into caching in GraphQL yet), there isn't too much happening on my side when new messages come in on the backend.

01:25 AM already huh? Whoops, Time flies when I'm having fun.

After refactoring the general components code today I stood before a crossroad:

• Start writing REST Api's to create new posts & fetch profile pictures + blops
• Think about semi-permanent storage thingies for offline usage
• Private messages.

It became the latter, which was pretty straight forward (including the new navigation-features and @piet 's awesome graphql end-points).

Video demo of the app so far (demo'd on a galaxy S8. IOS hardware device builds work too):
https://youtu.be/0BPMawVG58k
The yellow warning is something that should disappear over the next couple of days. The developers of react-navigation are working on updating their code to use the new community based ViewPagerAndroid functionality.

To cover everything I think I'll focus on the REST bits tomorrow. That is after the gardens outside are in some kind of acceptable shape. The snow is finally gone here now in the north, so it's time to get the vegetables out ;).

GN

with the code provided above I was able to get "pagination" to work too. It took some time until the dots connected in my head (the value of the endCursor can be used post(before: "HERE")) but then getting pagination to work was quite easy.

Crude sketch of my query (there's probably a cleaner way to insert things)

function fetchLatestMessages(cursor) {
  const before = cursor ? `, before: "${cursor}"` : '';
  return apolloClient
    .query({
      query: gql`
        {
          posts(last: 100, orderBy: ASSERTED${before}) {
            pageInfo {
              endCursor
              hasNextPage
            },
            edges {
              node {
                id,
                author {
                  name,
                  id
                },
                likesCount,
                text,
                assertedTimestamp,
                rootKey
              }
            }
          }
        }
      `,
    })

thanks for the samples and the AWESOME sidebar documentation on localhost:8080!

aha! that explains it. Thanks!

I would actually consider it a niche feature to turn "likes" off in my project. One of the strong reasons I stopped actively using Facebook was, that I had some kind of weird quirk to spend way too much of my time "like-watching". what a breeze it would be to not have likes or half-baked confirmation of the success of my existance through what I post on social media at all.

</rant>

I see it crashing sometimes when the phone screen has been off (and android q forces system & apps into low-performance mode), or the app gone to the background but still running.
I just close the app and restart. there was this one time where restarting would crash it, but that fixed itself after a cache-wipe from system settings.

Having programmed a bit on ssb-clients myself now I really really appreciate the subtle and good design of the Manyverse app. hats off to you @andré and CO for such an amazing app!

@piet

There’s and env var LISTEN which you can set, eg: LISTEN=0.0.0.0:8080

I tried this both like this:

export LISTEN=0.0.0.0:8080
npm start

in Patchbay and

export LISTEN=0.0.0.0:8080
npm install

The above don't really work, this is probably because let host = env::var("LISTEN").unwrap_or_else(|_| "localhost:8080".to_owned())8; in ssb-patchql is evaluated on compile-time (and not function()-run-time), so all builds on the build page (downloaded in jsbot-patchql) are locked to localhost. But that's super fine for now!

Now that is a nice example of a query... guess I can eat my lunch at the desk later today.

Are likes { } limited in some way? if so, I’ll probably go with x, y, z and [likeCount - 3] others.

My question was if asking for names to likes is limited somehow, as to not get an infinite list when 1k people "like" a post. It doesn't matter to much for now though ^_^.

I noticed I’m only getting 10 messages at a time
There must be a bug with the number of results getting returned. That has been working fine but I changed some things very recently that must have broken it. Or, it might be your query, so can you show me the query you’re using?

        {
          posts(last: 100, orderBy: ASSERTED) {
            edges {
              node {
                id,
                author {
                  name,
                  id
                },
                likesCount,
                text,
                assertedTimestamp,
                rootKey
              }
            }
          }
        }
      `

Not really, I chose a name that would be most familiar to someone coming from outside. Likes are straight outta facebook. And also that’s the naming that’s used all through the patchwork code.

I’m actually leaning towards not doing this. My preference is to not opinionate this api too early. I’d much rather have a bunch of example queries that you can copy paste. Like, “here’s a query to build a public feed like patchwork”.

Sounds awesome!

Thread between @mix, @Piet and me forking to public.

@Hendrik Peter writes
I really love the stuff you (and others in the #sunrisechoir) put together!
Some thoughts from my side after playing with the API’s:

I noticed I’m only getting 10 messages at a time, It’s a nice number that I can probably paginate with, but it would be nice to bump that a bit to say 20-30. the chances of 10 items all being visible in 1 interface view are quite big (triggering instant pagination).
Are likes { } limited in some way? if so, I’ll probably go with x, y, z and [likeCount - 3] others. In other ssb related interfaces & services likes are often revered to as votes, was there a reason to differ from the standard?
I love the “posts” and “public” (aka “public” & “extended network” in Patchwork) lists. I suspect that everyone trying to build apps will at some point try to get these lists working. Would it be possible to pre-cache this data and make it a posts(last: 100, orderBy: ASSERTED, template: PUBLIC) template?
Far away future thingy
The target of my Hub will be to (maybe slightly against ssb’s credo) run from a “server”, is it possible to assert tokens in the graphQL query headers for increased security?

Small OSX bug:
ssb-patchql doesn’t quit when patchbay & the ssb-server behind patchbay do. I need to open my process-monitor and FC them manually. this may be on my side as I do see

    function stop () {
      if (childProcess) {
        childProcess.kill()
      }
    }

@mix replies
’m not in sunrise choir but I can take a stab at answering some of these:

Are likes { } limited in some way? if so, I’ll probably go with x, y, z and [likeCount - 3] others.

I didn’t quite understand this question or that follow up bit. Can you explain more.

likes are often revered to as votes, was there a reason to differ from the standard

I would “guess” that the average consumer of this doesn’t need to know about the background message types too closely. Likes is a lot more accessible. There are a few legacy weird naming things in scuttlebutt. It’s really difficult knowing when others need burdening with those details or when we can just make things easier. IMO this feels like a clear and safe win.

Would it be possible to pre-cache this data and make it a posts(last: 100, orderBy: ASSERTED, template: PUBLIC) template?

Yes, everything is possible! At the moment as I understand it, the sunrise-choir are working to get a minimal set to production. This work here is the culmination of 6 months. So more features will likely come (or can be added), and, probably not until we’ve figured out how to build installers, documented everything that’s already there really well, started using some of what’s already been made in e.g. patchbay to see what it’s like, gathered lots of feedback from people like you to see what’s hurting most and needs love.

@mix continues
Closing the rust server needs to be done by hooking server.close e.g. https://github.com/ssbc/ssb-suggest/blob/master/index.js#L24-L27

so something like:

  server.close.hook(function (fn, args) {
    // a command that closes the graphql server

    return fn.apply(this, args)
})

Here you go ! https://github.com/sunrise-choir/jsbot-patchql/pull/4

@piet replies

I noticed I’m only getting 10 messages at a time

There must be a bug with the number of results getting returned. That has been working fine but I changed some things very recently that must have broken it. Or, it might be your query, so can you show me the query you’re using?

often revered to as votes, was there a reason to differ from the standard?

Not really, I chose a name that would be most familiar to someone coming from outside. Likes are straight outta facebook. And also that’s the naming that’s used all through the patchwork code.

I suspect that everyone trying to build apps will at some point try to get these lists working. Would it be possible to pre-cache this data and make it a posts(last: 100, orderBy: ASSERTED, template: PUBLIC) template?

As @mixmix says, anything is possible.

I’m actually leaning towards not doing this. My preference is to not opinionate this api too early. I’d much rather have a bunch of example queries that you can copy paste. Like, “here’s a query to build a public feed like patchwork”.

@mix chips in

Or, it might be your query, so can you show me the query you’re using?

@Hendrik Peter let’s fork our learning into the open. That way people can see it’s ok to ask, and they can learn graphql at the same time. Can you re-ask the question in public in #ssb-patchql or #ssb-learning and include your query?

I’m actually leaning towards not doing this. My preference is to not opinionate this api too early. I’d much rather have a bunch of example queries that you can copy paste. Like, “here’s a query to build a public feed like patchwork”.

Heck yes, I agree with this !

@Piet , wow nice, I'll try that when I wake up tomorrow!

psst, threads work too
https://youtu.be/FkhHMLOmWHg

• "too awesome"

I shouldn't spoil to much before my weekly recap, but this graphql stuff built by @piet & co is just to awesome!

Preview of a public list and threads running locally using the implementation done in %2OmtLqg... on an Iphone virtual device (I only have android hardware right now):
https://youtu.be/FkhHMLOmWHg