# I am the Watcher. I am your guide through this vast new twtiverse.
#
# Usage:
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/users View list of users and latest twt date.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/twt View all twts.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/mentions?uri=:uri View all mentions for uri.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/conv/:hash View all twts for a conversation subject.
#
# Options:
# uri Filter to show a specific users twts.
# offset Start index for quey.
# limit Count of items to return (going back in time).
#
# twt range = 1 204
# self = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://www.uninformativ.de/twtxt.txt.utf-8&offset=104
# prev = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://www.uninformativ.de/twtxt.txt.utf-8&offset=4
@prologic Ohhh, is that a wild parrot? I envy you Australians! (But you can keep the spiders.) There are wild parrots in my city, too, but they’re way too afraid to get close to humans. 😥 
Every time my neighbor starts practicing “Für Elise” on her piano, I respond with “Seven Nation Army” on my bass. 🎸 (Awww, too bad I’m using headphones, eh. 🥴)
Supporting family IT got so much easier thanks to Jitsi. People can now hold their phone into the camera of their laptop, so I can finally see what they see. 👍 Yeah, smartphones are *so easy* to use. 🙄 😩
@prologic (Haha, my client has stored ~6100 twts at the moment and they use up 25 MB on disk – but only because each twt is an individual file, so the file system allocates 4k, even if it’s just 90 bytes. The real total size is 2.4 MB … 🙄)~
@prologic Sometimes the solution is simple, right? 😁 1.7 GB is a lot of stuff, though, is all that database overhead? Oof!
In the process of ripping out some of the "bigger" tools out of my ~/bin-pub and putting them into individual repos. git filter-branch to the rescue. 🥰~
Friendly reminder to clean your computer’s fans. Dust. So much dust.
@prologic Still my own client. Yeah, I don’t have a “reply” function yet. That concept didn’t exist in buckket’s twtxt spec, as you know. It’s still all done manually. I’m not annoyed enough to implement it … yet. ;) btw, did you get around to creating a “formal spec” of all your twtxt extensions?
@prologic Damn, sorry, I missed an “a” in that conversation hashtag. 🤦
@prologic That number is surprisingly low. My l ~/bin ~/bin-pub | wc -l shows 531. 😱️
A ~/bin-pub repository is a bad idea. It’s an invitation to put *every* script and tool in there. It’s a mess.~
The intro of iZombie is the only intro I never skip. 🧟♀️️
@lucidiot Oh god dammit. Plus, the redirect breaks -mentions. Let’s see what we can do about that … Thanks for letting me know!
My DVR is connected via HDMI to my TV. Now audio stopped working: The DVR is dead silent. So, I connected it via SCART (!) again, ta-dah, got audio again. Well, well, well.
So, I’ve been told by @uxgch that my twtxt feed was a little bit broken in some clients: It needed “charset=utf-8” in the HTTP content type header. As a workaround, https://www.uninformativ.de/twtxt.txt.utf-8 now exists. Maybe I’ll set up a redirect … not sure yet.
I can finally control this special LED on my keyboard on Linux. And guess what: No hackery required, the manufacturer told me which USB packets to send! What a pleasant experience! 😎️ Blog post with details soon-ish.
enotty.dk slowly discontinuing all their feeds, even “we-are-twtxt”. :( Why, what’s going on?
I want a private sauna. While we’re at it, I want a Mökki in Finland. With high-speed internet. And no gnats. On Mars.
Hallo! Ich bin Experimentalinformatiker. Ich klopfe irgendwo auf Bits drauf und gucke, was passiert. Was anderes fällt mir im Zeitalter von hyperkomplexen Systemen oder am besten noch Cloud-Blackboxen nicht mehr ein. #thankgoditsfriday
Turns out, there’s another problem with using ancient browsers in 2020 (aside from the fact that they don’t support today’s SSL ciphers), that I completely forgot about: They don’t support HTTP/1.1. Only 1.0. Meaning, they can’t select a VHost. Meh.
Why did I give up on fractals and 3D rendering again? This is so much fun to play with.
sysupgrade(8) is a blessing. Long overdue. 🐡️
@prologic That won’t be very pleasent in the long run (no hardware volume control), but it’ll do for a quick test. 👍️
@prologic Yup, everything appears to work. Except for the sound card; that, I don't know. I don't have any spare speakers. 🙉️
@deadguy Hmmmmmm, I wouldn’t even know what to put in the german version, if I kept them separate. :D I rarely have single-language content. (Although the OS/2 stuff might actually qualify, since all the screenshots are german.)
Speaking of blogging. I’m thinking about pausing the german version of my blog. It’s just a lot of work: I write the english version first and then translate it back to german. This takes a surprisingly long time …
So it finally happened to me: Published a *draft* of a blog post. Oh well. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯_
Watching “Rings” (2017). Samara has such great hardware compatibility. Cell phones, land lines, LCD TVs, CRT TVs, it all just works. Even copying a file breaks the curse. Whoa.
@prologic Totally. And let's not forget that the original floppy disks still work! 🤯️
@deadguy Current twtxt setup works pretty well. Only thing that's missing is a "reply to this twt" feature directly from mutt. I was too lazy for that.
@deadguy I'll post plenty of screenshots once it's running. :-)
We threw away our Warp 4 box a long time ago, because "nobody needs this anymore". Yes, it still hurts. (Plus, this sells from 15€ to 200€ today, depending on the condition. Ugh.)
@prologic Right, no mobile app here. Not a fan of smartphones. :-)
@prologic Oof. I don't know. Honestly, why not keep using e-mail for that?
@prologic Nah, not your notice. But basically every other notice out there. YouTube is super annoying: Video starts, then gets interrupted by *two* popups after a few seconds, then the video stops and rewinds.
As someone without persistent cookie storage: These. Damn. Cookie. Popups. Every. Single. Time. What a mess.
@prologic I can only see one other planet and a lens flare. Should be Mars. :) If in doubt: stellarium.org
Nothing better than a hot shower on a cold day. And some coffee. ☕️
@deadguy hi :) The notion of "followings" is very weak here. If you fetch someone's feed regularly, then you're following them. That's it. To find out who is following you, you have to grep through your webserver's logs for those special user agents.
@deadguy AFAIK, you mention someone by typing their “handle”, like I just did. Only thing is, they will only notice that if they’re following you.
And here I am, adjusting all my radio controlled clocks manually, because reception appeared to have been bad last night. #firstworldproblems
End of daylight saving time in Europe. Now, "noon" is at noon again. 🎉️
@prologic The hoster says the box has a gigabit ethernet card, but that's all they specify. Well, it's cheap, so I won't complain. Here in Germany, I get about 200 MBit/s, which has to be good enough.
@prologic Hey, it’s on the other side of the globe! ;)
I still wonder why twtxt quickly died out in ~2016-2017. The usual “oh, a new toy, let's play with it! […] I'm bored.”?~
@prologic ${witty_comment_about_using_regexes_for_HTML} :)
@z3bra Oh, alright, sorry, misunderstood you. :)
@prologic It’s fiddly indeed. But there’s nothing regex can’t do, right? Right?
So ... our stores are running out of toilet paper. Again. I don’t know what to say.
@z3bra Yeah. It's probably not intentional, though. HTTP is the only thing that exists in most people's mind. Not sure anyone's to blame. :) We can only try to improve it. (My client doesn't support gemini either, because curl doesn't support it ...)
@prologic Yeah, I can see the new user agent now. Very nice. Again, thanks a lot! 👍️
@z3bra One advantage of using HTTP for twtxt is easy discovery of other people: You can see who follows you be evaluating their user agent. How could we translate that to Gopher? Add a search parameter?
Huh, gdb now has colors. That’s nice.
Solitaire is a really inefficient and buggy sorting algorithm.
@prologic Yeah, agreed. Plus, once it has reached a certain size, a directory is pointless anyway: You can use it to find people you *already know*, but not new ones, ’cause there are just way too many options.
@prologic I do follow you, but not from within twtxt.net, just my client on my workstation. The "vain" account on twtxt.net was just me getting to know the platform. :)
PSA: If you use OpenBSD httpd, use "log style combined". The manpage doesn't mention it, but it will log User Agents, so you can see other twtxt users following you. 🎉️
Will now read some of OpenBSD httpd’s code to see if there isn’t a way to log User Agents after all.
Well, here’s a thing: I find out about most new twtxt users, because @prologic sends them a welcome message. 🤔️ A directory of twtxt users in human form.
@prologic I added some details to the blog post above. Pretty standard PC from that era. Nothing special, just old. :)
@prologic Yep. Every time I turn it on, I'm surprised and delighted to see that it still works. 😍️
Now. Out of coffee. Have to go out, slash through the herds, and get some new. 🧟️😷️ #TheWalkingCovids
@prologic Exactly. How will we ever be able to tell? No emojis in his text! 😱️
PSA: Nice view of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars these days. (I need better gear for photos.)
@prologic Ah, you probably only fetch all links *once* with a generic UA, even if two users follow the same external source?
OpenBSD httpd can't log user agents, which makes one of the "discover" features of twtxt a bit difficult. Meh. (Or can it?)
TIL: ^Wgf over a HTTP URL in Vim fetches that URL and shows the content in a new tab. Neat.
@prologic Before I maybe write another blog post, I need more experience with twtxt. :) I'll keep experimenting.
Alright, I like this twtxt thingy. I think it'll stay.
I wonder if writing a twtxt client in the form of a weechat plugin would make sense. Well, maybe some other day.
Making progress with my text-only twtxt client. Reminds me that avatars are *really* useful: They make skimming through a large amount of messages much easier. Hmm.
@prologic: Thanks for the hint, I added my usual avatar.png and it shows up nicely. :)
Thought I could get away with writing a shell script as twtxt client. Turns out, some feeds are huge (8 MB) and shell is too slow. Hmm ...