# 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 = 1 479
# self = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://hecanjog.com/twtxt.txt&offset=79
# next = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://hecanjog.com/twtxt.txt&offset=179
@jlj agreed...! makes me think of the intro to Helmholtz' *On the Sensations of Tone* where he points out that the book presents his findings as though he'd taken a straight path to the clear road while the actual research process looked more like spinning in circles and getting lost in the woods... also thanks for the rainbow video link, looks interesting!
Now playing: David Grubbs - The Coxcomb. Hell of a record.
It probably looks cool to present some info on social media or a personal wiki or etc with zero context... I really wish people would cite their sources more often though...
In life, triage is toughest.
Maybe I'll move to Alaska and become an unlicensed private investigator specializing in art and jewelry theft.
Went to the river to forget the internet for a minute, but it's so nice out I'm having picnic table office hours for a while now too. <3
I'm ready for the social media era to be over now.
Doing a bit of MIR literature review today, catching up with what's happened in the last few years. (At least the stuff I'm interested in right now!) Essentia is tempting although huge. Still might be the best fit for our use-case...
We got a little snow the other day, but the forecast has been calling for it so much there must be someone nearby buried in it. For now my window is open and I can hear the drain flow as it melts back into the river...
New life goal: play the rhodes part in the Bob James Taxi theme song with a Bob James cover band.
Kitty discovered my little stash of TRS cables hanging by the desk. Well, now it's half a stash hanging by the desk and half spread over the floor or in his mouth.
There aren't enough blankets in the world to smother me into sleep. ...but I'll take them all.
I need to start thinking smaller, maybe. Short term. Now. Sometimes I live in the future too much, maybe.
The new badges on the merveilles webring site are wonderfully useless fun. I'm looking forward to seeing more pop up & it's a nice choice to have them hosted remotely so I can keep tinkering on mine too. :-)
Communication in 2021 is surprisingly fucked. We've abandoned technologies that are totally fine (email, RSS, xmpp, even SMS and amazingly normal voice telephone calls..) for a mileau of closed bullshit platforms that don't interoperate. (slack, discord, iMessage, etc etc etc) This is not a novel observation but it drives me nuts.
DNA lounge emails have a clever method to get you to open them... they always begin with a joke, so you can just see the setup in your inbox... and have to click in for the punchline. Effective!
Someone just sent me a video they made for a song I did almost 20 years ago and it made me feel very happy.
I'm curious if gemini will survive. Maybe that doesn't matter or is the wrong way to think about it...
I can never remember the order of the potrace cli arguments for some reason.
Related: I didn't realize Kyma was originally written in smalltalk. The ACM paper linked in the scholar search above looks like an interesting read... "micro" for them in 1988 meant microcode...
I'm completely incapable of taking notes or brainstorming at a computer. I just tried it again and failed... notecards it is again then.
My nephew this weekend after we spent a few minutes on the phone trying to debug an issue with discord audio chat: "I suppose I could just call you with my telephone when we play..."
I had a dream that I accidentally posted something on the fediverse during my IRL break from it. I used to have dreams like that when I quit smoking.
I had a dream that I accidentally posted something on the fediverse during my IRL break from it. I used to have dreams like that.
I hope that with the new Apple ARM CPUs the current generation of mac-based generative art doesn't suffer the same fate it did in the transition from OS9 to OSX -- in other words: left to die except for those willing to maintain an OS emulator or possibly an ancient machine... but probably this is the fate of all mac and ios based software art...?
Is virtualbox kind of a pain in the ass to install or has it just been long enough that I forgot?
At some point today though I have an unscheduled play date with my nephew -- we're playing mario kart over the internet. I haven't played mario kart since it was on the nintendo 64 so this will be interesting!
Starting a second job today picking up some hours on the weekend helping an old client with a new project... I was worried I'd feel overwhelmed right away but it's actully a bit fun to be able to start on something fresh that has the promise to last for weeks, maybe months, but then that's it.
Starting a second job today picking up some hours on the weekend helping an old client with a new project... I was worried I'd feel overwhelmed right away but it's actually a bit fun to be able to start on something fresh that has the promise to last for weeks, maybe months, but then that's it.
Testing twtxt to mastodon cross-posting... not sure if this is a good idea.
I'm exploring the Cocteau Twins back catalog via two singles collections. Victorialand stands above all forever, but I'd like to hear more than the handful of EPs and misc I've encountered so far... surprising how much of an anomaly Victorialand is in their catalog, or so it seems...
Hm. I can't seem to view time.gov on textmode browsers I've tried. (just elinks & curl)
This internet thing is just a fad.
I just caught myself thinking a thought I'm sure I thought at work about 14 years ago. It was like being transported. I was back in that basement cube cursing the lack of strong typing in HTML forms... good time to get up and take a break. :)
A federated forum-like software based on read-only sqlite databases. Bring-your-own-client, like twtxt. That could be neat, maybe worth thinking beyond the headline idea... :)
I'm the oversleeping champion around these parts... says I to the nutso cat near me alternating between howls and a slow blink... I feel like I slept all day but I guess it's only 10-ish...
I deleted my account on a non-work slack server again... I hate it but it made me feel sad to login there. I don't know what it was. I like the people. Being too specific about what was posted that made me feel like that doesn't feel productive... but I finally admitted to myself I always came away from catching up with discussions feeling shitty about myself or the world, or something. So I'm venting about it here.
I deleted my account on a non-work slack server again... I hate it but it made me feel sad to login there. I don't know what it was. I like the people. Being too specific about what was posted that made me feel like that doesn't feel productive... but I finally admitted to myself I always came away from catching up with discussions feeling shitty about myself or the world, or something. So I did something about it, and now I'm venting about it here...
It's also a shame that the twtxt spec didn't enforce post order from the start. It would make clients slightly more complex to build (barely) but then you could just stream line-by-line new updates instead of downloading every post in every feed...
I wonder if email would be a reasonable way to enable interaction on twtxt... something like publishing an email address for replies in the preamble of your feed, then like twtxt the rest is up to you, but I could imagine a simple moderation queue that could be checked periodically allowing the admin to move approved comments into some public space... I keep thinking I'll add activitypub comments to my site but it seems more complex than I care for. Ironically because of available tooling email actually feels simpler for this... of course, there is spam...
Ohhh... OK. So the difference between /usr/local/include and /usr/include is just that the former is for headers installed from source, and the latter is for headers installed by system packages? (Except it sounds like homebrew on macos just symlinks /usr/local/include to /usr/include?)
Ahh Tetsu Inoue... where are you now? I'm playing some of his classic 90s hits today, like Slow and Low... #theStudio
In retrospect, parsing / adopting RTs formally into the platform was probably the beginning of the end for twitter. It sort of set the stage for the future: gradual erasure of unique community tricks like the dot-prefix become broken by the open convention becoming regulated as a platform feature, not to mention paving the way for quote-retweets which many seem to think contribute to the current one-sided shout match culture twitter is experiencing...
Passing thought: is there a connection between the rise of modular synthesis and the decline of people who know how to operate a general purpose computer?
Reading twtxt posts is so calming. I'm starting to feel a little overwhelmed by mastodon sometimes actually. I check it too often, probably. Pipe dream: a personal daily digest of blog headlines, mastodon & twtxt posts emailed from my server every morning. I could potentially then... just check email once a day and fuck off all other forum / post / news refreshing for the rest of the day... I'd miss the interactive parts of mastodon maybe? Then again, I could just reply to everything once at day too...
I've been having recurring dreams where my band gets back together (in a tacitly post-covid world) and we just argue a lot. I guess at least I'm thinking about them. <3 (Also I just realized I've never once had a dream involving covid in any way. Weird.)
Movies and TV don't show people watching movies and TV much.
Kitty says: you're finally awake, lets play dummy!
@prologic It's a catalog containing a partial listing of all my commerical and non-commerical offerings: listed, unlisted, imagined, manufactured, found, constructed. Enhanced with insight from psionic druids where appropriate to tailor the experience just to you. (Some EU countries may prohibit this.)
@prologic It's a catalog containing a partial listing of all my commercial and non-commercial offerings: listed, unlisted, imagined, manufactured, found, constructed. Enhanced with insight from psionic druids where appropriate to tailor the experience just to you. (Some EU countries may prohibit this.)
Sorry for flooding your timelines, if anyone is actually reading this.
On reflection, many of the projects that recently made me so overwhelmed that I put everything down for a while -- and down they've stayed mostly for more than a couple weeks at this point -- many of those projects were started or sparked somehow in the wake of that week off. For quite a while afterward even I kept that feeling of free exploration, and in the process knocked off a ton of things I'm still proud of now. Some kind of friction eventually caught up and pushed it all into the ground again though, and here I am totally unable to move the needle forward on anything outside of work. (And work has become tedious again...)
What is the feeling that makes this barrier every time I think of just doing these things I wish I could do all the time? Why is it that when I know I only have X number of hours until I need to return to some obligation, go back to work, etc that I feel unable to just exist as though those obligations aren't on the horizon? There is some kind of crisis of choice happening, maybe. When I took a week off from work earlier this year that all drained away after a couple days. I did all the things I dream of doing without feeling any anxiety about which I should choose first, or why I was doing this and not that. Is it possible to cultivate that feeling in the space of a few hours?
It's in situations like that when I do my best work anyway...
Seriously considering hibernation for the winter... for me I think that might just mean outside of work put all deadlines and obligations on hold... try to get into the habit of spending most of my time just reading, maybe take up solitare? :-/
Literally just got over some kind of bad cold and now I'm feeling round 2 approaching. This is pretty normal for me around this time, but it's a bit more stressful in plague times...
I did my one task for the day.
Today's task: travel two blocks to the grocery store. Today's accomplishments: some reading, playtime with cat, cat video watching with cat, petting cat.
I've been sick all week. Poor kitty hasn't played with his favorite toy all week (until today) and is currently giving me THE BUSINESS.
I'm checking my twtxt feed more often now that my stupid little client is pretty fast. More incentive to finish tinkering on my blog setup, maybe I'll write more. :-)
As predicted, I messed around with my site tonight. Maybe I'll do a bit more. It already feels really nice to be touchscreen-free. <3
So little drive to do anything today... days like this I usually end up tinkering on my website though... I just banished my tablet to a box on a shelf (waiting to be given away) so that feels like something accomplished for the day, anyway...
Looking at my firefox history, I made a list of the 21 sites I visit most often. Dreaming basically of pulling all the news-type sites into one static gemini page that updates every day... and seeing if there are CLI or other text-based alternatives for others. Some are hopeless -- like my bank's website... but I bet I could keep my web browser closed much more often if I put a little work into this...
I remember now why I stopped baking for a while. Because after I bake it, I eat it. Not as easy to dump most of my bakes off on friends during the pandemic, but I guess I'm going to try to drown my cousin in muffins so I don't eat em all.
I've been making a daily ritual to run a fan and open the windows to circulate the air in my apartment. It's lovely, even in 20 degree weather -- I'm curious if I'll be able to do it when it's negative 20 too.
OK, not too shabby. I just tried my first search with gemini and immediately found a delicious looking curry recipe. (Of course in beautiful plain text instead of 5 pages of ads and photos.)
I think I want to get into curries this winter.
Think I'll make another batch of hemp muffins today...
If there's a freshman 15, I think I've put on my pandemic 50.
2020 is all about yearning
Whoops! Fixing the timestamps in my feed thanks to a hat tip from @xandkar
Collaborative composition is tough. I think I tend to ruin things with ideas and plans. Lets hope I'm not doing it now!
Got my personal blog a little further along last night... trying to decide if I want to weave this twtxt feed directly into my site, too, or leave it as a little secret corner of the web...
At the same time I have to admit I've been more productive creatively this year than most years. I think that has more to do with Pippi getting fairly mature, enough at least that I need to spend far less time on Pippi itself, and far more time using it (and other things!) to make things.
Before the pandemic hit in March, I'd spent the year without TV or movies. It didn't last through the lockdown, but I think I'm finally through a very long hump where I let myself melt into some distractions. I don't regret these periods, I like TV and movies, they're not only distractions, they can also be great storytellers. Still, it's good to finally feel like I need a break and I can take the time for other things again... I usually go in waves, pick it up, put it down, but this was a long one.
Oh, OK that was actually really easy to set up. I can just run a MIDI playback script and end up with a local recording of an external module. Not super interesting but quite nice! :-)
I'm doing a thing that involves working with an external MIDI module (really, just another computer) for the first time in a long while. The realtime flow is weird, and makes want to set up some automated recording dealy so I can more easily fit everything into my usual workflow...
Happiness is a readable process list in htop
Capping off the evening with The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer From the Four Dreams of China.
Hm, I sorta want to re-read Foucault's Pendulum already.
@ twtxt via DNS TXT would be insane and fun.
I'm starting to doubt that I will ever finish Finnegans Wake, although I'm too stubborn to accept it yet. It's still fun to read aloud, and the language is beautiful, but it goes and goes and goes... anyway there's no rush to finish. I suppose I'll keep sipping from it as long as I like...
It's a bit comforting to post here. Even though it's in some sense extremely public, because barely anyone uses twtxt it feels a bit more like posting in a private journal. It would be nice to have mult-line posts, I suppose, but I can always start a clog. :-)
Back to using an old netbook as a text terminal connected to my work computer so I can hide the big monitor and feel like I'm blocking out the world for a little bit...
I don't think I'll drop mastodon soon, but I love that I could "join" a social network so to speak by writing a few dozen lines of code.
It's extremely basic but I like that I could cobble together a twtxt feed reader so easily. I'd like better formatting & mention support, but it's something!
Might cobble together a little personal twtxt timeline today...
There are lots of cool clients and tools for twtxt... but I think I'd rather play with rolling my own given how simple the format is for everything. I suppose that's the point. :-)