# 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 2172
# self = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://twtxt.net/user/mckinley/twtxt.txt&offset=972
# next = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://twtxt.net/user/mckinley/twtxt.txt&offset=1072
# prev = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://twtxt.net/user/mckinley/twtxt.txt&offset=872
I realized that the original video is H.264, here's an H.265 version. Same dimensions, comparable quality, but a third of the size! Oh, the joys of modern technology. :)

[Windows 11 in a Nutshell (H.265)](https://files.catbox.moe/brhtyx.mp4) [33.1 MiB]\n[33.1 MiB]\n[33.1 MiB]\n[33.1 MiB]\n
I realized that the original video is H.264, here's an H.265 version. Same dimensions, comparable quality, but a third of the size! Oh, the joys of modern technology. :)

[Windows 11 in a Nutshell (H.265)](https://files.catbox.moe/brhtyx.mp4) [33.1 MiB]
I realized that the original video is H.264, here's an H.265 version. Same dimensions, comparable quality, but a third of the size! Oh, the joys of modern technology. :)

[Windows 11 in a Nutshell (H.265)](https://files.catbox.moe/brhtyx.mp4) \n\n\n\n
@prologic I tried to use tube.mills.io to upload that video, but I kept getting an error:

error transcoding video: cmd.CombinedOutput error: signal: killed


I uploaded it to a regular file host instead. Windows 11 in a Nutshell \n\n\n\n
@prologic I tried to use tube.mills.io to upload that video, but I kept getting an error:

error transcoding video: cmd.CombinedOutput error: signal: killed


I uploaded it to a regular file host instead. Windows 11 in a Nutshell \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
@prologic I tried to use tube.mills.io to upload that video, but I kept getting an error:

error transcoding video: cmd.CombinedOutput error: signal: killed


I uploaded it to a regular file host instead. Windows 11 in a Nutshell \n\n
@prologic I tried to use tube.mills.io to upload that video, but I kept getting an error:

error transcoding video: cmd.CombinedOutput error: signal: killed


I uploaded it to a regular file host instead. Windows 11 in a Nutshell [93.8 MiB][93.8 MiB=][93.8 MiB][93.8 MiB=][93.8 MiB][93.8 MiB=][93.8 MiB][93.8 MiB=]
@prologic I tried to use tube.mills.io to upload that video, but I kept getting an error:

error transcoding video: cmd.CombinedOutput error: signal: killed


I uploaded it to a regular file host instead. Windows 11 in a Nutshell [93.8 MiB]\n[93.8 MiB]\n[93.8 MiB]\n[93.8 MiB]\n
@prologic I tried to use tube.mills.io to upload that video, but I kept getting an error:

error transcoding video: cmd.CombinedOutput error: signal: killed


I uploaded it to a regular file host instead. Windows 11 in a Nutshell [93.8 MiB][93.8 MiB][93.8 MiB][93.8 MiB][93.8 MiB][93.8 MiB][93.8 MiB][93.8 MiB]
@prologic I tried to use tube.mills.io to upload that video, but I kept getting an error:

error transcoding video: cmd.CombinedOutput error: signal: killed


I uploaded it to a regular file host instead. Windows 11 in a Nutshell
@prologic I tried to use tube.mills.io to upload that video, but I kept getting an error:
error transcoding video: cmd.CombinedOutput error: signal: killed

I uploaded it to a regular file host instead. Windows 11 in a Nutshell
@prologic I tried to use tube.mills.io to upload that video, but I kept getting an error:

error transcoding video: cmd.CombinedOutput error: signal: killed


I uploaded it to a regular file host instead. Windows 11 in a Nutshell [93.8 MiB][93.8 MiB=]=
@prologic I tried to use tube.mills.io to upload that video, but I kept getting an error:

error transcoding video: cmd.CombinedOutput error: signal: killed


I uploaded it to a regular file host instead. Windows 11 in a Nutshell [93.8 MiB]
@screem Whether you like the design or not, the User eXperience, I think, has gotten even worse in comparison to 10. The trend of the industry (read: Windows, Mac OS, and default Ubuntu to an extent) is to make everything beyond opening the (default) Web browser more difficult.

Want to create a shortcut in Windows 11? It used to be right there in the Explorer right click menu. Now, it's only accessible in the old menu accessed from clicking an option in the new right click menu. What are you making shortcuts for, peasant? You're lucky they let you do advanced things like "making shortcuts" and "installing software from outside the walled garden" at all.
@movq Virtual desktops are standard since at least 10. I doubt it's ever used by 99% of Windows users. Taskbar window grouping is the default. PowerToys are still around, adding things like window tiling and a bulk file rename utility. I think some of the PowerToys features from 10 were made standard in 11.
@novaburst Wow, that's really cool!
@prologic It is absolutely not just you. I found a nice video of someone going through Microsoft's efforts to make you use Edge on Windows 11. Is it okay if I upload it to tube.mills.io? It's 93.8 MiB.
@prologic I checked it out too and had the exact same thought.
Great chat tonight with @prologic and @ocdtrekkie. Some things we talked about:
* @ocdtrekkie's new Craigslist pickups
* Kubernetes woes
* The SourceHut-Go-Google-DDoS situation (https://drewdevault.com/2022/05/25/Google-has-been-DDoSing-sourcehut.html)
* @prologic's GoNix project (#cy4gccq) (#spaxqka) (#eqxx4nq)
* @ocdtrekkie's in-car computer system
* DNS level ad/tracker blocking
* Corporate computer "security" policies
* Adding a captcha to the registration form of Yarn pods (issue #962) (#vqxz62q)
Great chat tonight with @prologic and @ocdtrekkie. Some things we talked about:
* @ocdtrekkie's new Craigslist pickups
* Kubernetes woes
* The SourceHut-Go-Google-DDoS situation (blog post)
* @prologic's GoNix project (#cy4gccq) (#spaxqka) (#eqxx4nq)
* @ocdtrekkie's in-car computer system
* DNS level ad/tracker blocking
* Corporate computer "security" policies
* Adding a captcha to the registration form of Yarn pods (issue #962) (#vqxz62q)
@lyse No worries. Have a good night, man.
@prologic I won't forget this week, I set an alarm on my watch. :)
@lyse Thank you! I didn't make the ASCII art of the flag. JGS are (presumably) the initials of the person who did. I found it on this website and tweaked it a bit to add color.

The stars are open to interpretation. If I made the background blue and the colons white, it didn't look right, so I made the colons blue. Perhaps the stars are invisible, or if the stars are blue, perhaps it's the 48 star flag in use from 1912 until 1959, when Alaska joined the union. :)
@tkanos I'm sorry to hear that, friend. I wish you and your family the best.

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            H A P P Y             # # # #::::::
 I N D E P E N D E N C E   D A Y  # # # # # # #
             F R O M              # # # # # # #
    M C K I N L E Y   L A B S     # # # # # # #
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@prologic Sorry, it totally slipped my mind. I'll be there next week.
@retrocrash We used the meet.mills.io Peer Calls instance, and I didn't run into any problems. I used Ungoogled Chromium. How was it for you @ocdtrekkie?
@ocdtrekkie I usually take notes during the call, but today I just went back and skimmed my messages after you hung up.
Great conversation with @ocdtrekkie tonight. Some things we talked about:
* Goryon being taken off the Google Play Store
* The woes of uppercase ls and Iowercase Ls
* De-Googling Android
* The Google Glass and how it forced you into the walled garden
* iOS and privacy
* Privacy legislation and the extent to which people know about the spying
* Creepy Amazon stores
* The new issue of Lab6 (https://lab6.com/3)
@prologic Interesting...
@prologic No, I haven't. mckinley.cc points to a web host that wouldn't let me host a broker. I've got a VPS and some other domains, I just haven't done it.

I couldn't figure out the client, anyway. I couldn't see my messages, and when I run salty-chat read I only got one message at a time. I haven't touched it in a long time, though, so maybe things improved.
@prologic No worries. I'll host if anyone is interested. https://meet.mills.io/call/Yarn.social, 5 AM UTC
@prologic uLinux?
@prologic Count me in!
@adi Hey, long time no see. How've you been?
@kt84 How long does the battery last? I'm skeptical of electric yard equipment like that. I had to borrow an electric string trimmer a few weeks ago. Piece of garbage! It struggled to cut through anything, and the battery died in less than 20 minutes. I don't think it was a real inexpensive one, either.

I'll have my real gas one (that would cut your leg off) running by the time the weeds come back.
Sounds familiar... https://farside.link/nitter/TwitterWrite/status/1539640956915290112
Sounds familiar... https://farside.link/twitter/TwitterWrite/status/1539640956915290112
@prologic Oh, that's refreshing.
@prologic Oh, that's refreshing. From your reply, I was thinking it was both.
@prologic Heh. Cloudflare was down too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31820635
Aw man, Cloudflare's back up.
I think this is the first time I've seen Yarn.social mentioned in the wild. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31789501
@movq Bookmarked! I thought the page layout looked familiar.
@movq
>These items will expire on 2022-06-25 07:23:16 +0200.

Interesting. A simple, expiring, JavaScript-free image hosting system. Did you make it? Is the source available?
@movq >These items will expire on 2022-06-25 07:23:16 +0200.

Interesting. A simple, expiring, JavaScript-free image hosting system. Did you make it? Is the source available?
Meeting notes for tonight. Definitely an interesting talk. I think Yarn.social might have come up once or twice. :)
* ISP shenanigans, including
\t* Port restrictions
\t* IPv6 adoption
\t* Reliability
* Sandstorm, the self-hosting system @ocdtrekkie is working on
* Consuming social media via e-mail
* Programming languages as an indicator of program quality
* Pine{Time,Phone}
* "Sideloading"*
Meeting notes for tonight. Definitely an interesting talk tonight with @prologic and @ocdtrekkie. I think Yarn.social might have come up once or twice. :)
* ISP shenanigans, including
\t* Port restrictions
\t* IPv6 adoption
\t* Reliability
* Sandstorm, the self-hosting system @ocdtrekkie is working on
* Consuming social media via e-mail
* Programming languages as an indicator of program quality
* Pine{Time,Phone}
* "Sideloading"*
Meeting notes for tonight. Definitely an interesting talk tonight with @prologic and @ocdtrekkie. I think Yarn.social might have come up once or twice. :)
* ISP shenanigans, including
* Port restrictions
* IPv6 adoption
* Reliability
* Sandstorm, the self-hosting system @ocdtrekkie is working on
* Consuming social media via e-mail
* Programming languages as an indicator of program quality
* Pine{Time,Phone}
* "Sideloading"*
@prologic I'll be there.
Context Menu Hell: A lesson on how not to design user interfaces with Microsoft
@movq I like that ASCII art at the root of your gopherhole. :)
@darch I like it!
@prologic They can be more secure or not. It depends on how long it is, just like a string of random characters. You can also add some random special characters into the passphrase to throw off an attacker.

The main benefit of a passphrase is the relative ease at which it is memorized. A good, long passphrase with a couple of special characters thrown in is quite secure. The list of words that you made your passphrase out of might be public, but the attacker probably doesn't know which one you used unless you tell him.
Defining a Favicon for a Bookmarklet: https://mckinley.cc/blog/20220611.html
@eaplmx I would argue that it went to email newsletters, *then* social media. I don't think many people read email newsletters anymore.
@movq That's a great point. I remember this RSS feed that uses an XSLT stylesheet to make it presentable to newcomers. It links to https://aboutfeeds.com/, which is okay but I personally disagree with some of the wording and software choices. It also uses some unnecessary JavaScript served from Cloudflare's CDN.

If I agreed with that website a little more, I might add a link to it on my blog's index page next to the RSS feed. Perhaps I'll write something similar myself.

> Do they do that in the first place or do they just consume what someone else posted on Twitter?

For a lot of folks, it's 100% social media. If they don't see it there, they don't see it. They only see what their preferred social media services want them to see.
@movq Oh no! I wasn't subscribed to your Atom feed! I'll fix the problem now.
A great chat after a couple of weeks off tonight with @prologic, @lyse, and @mearaj. Some things we talked about:
* Making Goryon available on F-Droid yarnsocial/app #132
* COVID measures, including working from home
* The garbage being churned out by the software industry
* Domain name choices ;)
* The state of Salty IM, specifically the app*
LibreWolf, all the way.

Obligatory links to Spyware Watchdog for all the browsers mentioned so far:
- Brave: High
- Opera: EXTREMELY HIGH
- Chrome: EXTREMELY HIGH
- Edge: Unrated (but come on, what do you expect it to be?)
- Firefox: High
- Librewolf: Low but Librewolf is honest about what the connections are and why they are made
LibreWolf all the way.

Obligatory links to Spyware Watchdog for all the browsers mentioned so far:
- Brave: High
- Opera: EXTREMELY HIGH
- Chrome: EXTREMELY HIGH
- Edge: Unrated (but come on, what do you expect it to be?)
- Firefox: High
- LibreWolf: Low but the documentation is honest about what the connections are and why they are made
Is the weekly video call on for tomorrow? I missed it last week.
@rrraksamam I would recommend staying on 10 for as long as possible. 11 feels more like a toy operating system in which you're not supposed to do anything more complicated than web browsing. It's a pattern that's been going on since Windows 8.
@rrraksamam I've only used recent versions for a short time, and it's pretty terrible. The right click menu in the file browser is what really got me. It has been reduced to just a few options. Most of the things you would actually want to do have been moved to tiny, hard to understand icons with no labels that are hard to differentiate from one another because they use the same few colors. The rest of the menu is an extra click away, like you're not supposed to do anything more complicated. The Windows file manager is now worse than Finder, in my opinion. At least Finder has labels for the right click functions.
@rrraksamam I believe there is a domain whitelist for inline images that is set on a per-pod basis. Welcome to Yarn, by the way.
If you choose to switch, you will run into bugs and other problems. But, if you're willing to seek them out, the fixes are likely available online. The best advice I can give you is to keep backups of your important files.
@off_grid_living Android has a lot of abstraction and security features to prevent access to certain things, but there's always an exploit to get around some of it.

Switching to a Linux based operating system like Ubuntu is not a guarantee that you won't get malware. The only security advantage you get is the fact that you're using a very uncommon system. Security through obscurity isn't real security. That said, it is more profitable to target systems that are used by more people.

The most difficult thing about switching to GNU/Linux is finding replacements for the software you use on Windows. If you want to look into it further, I would recommend Linux Mint instead of Ubuntu. The default user interface would be more familiar to you as a Windows user, and the parent company behind Ubuntu has introduced "features" that spied on their users in the past. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ubuntu-spyware.en.html
@prologic Monitors and TVs, especially CRTs, can show a ghost image of an object if it was left on the screen too long. Here's an example. The CNN logo is partially visible in the corner of a TV that constantly played CNN, even during a commercial. Burn-in isn't as much of a problem on modern LCDs, though.

@anth's website shows a man page and some source code, partially transparent, behind the main text, like those were burned in to the display.
@anth That's an interesting effect. It could be made usable on modern graphical browsers with a few CSS tweaks. I don't know if it could be done without adding a bunch of irrelevant garbage at the bottom of the page for simpler browsers, though.
@off_grid_living An Android phone is just a computer, and any computer can get malware. The damage that can be caused depends entirely on the level of access that the malware has. It is not all created equal.

Windows' S Mode is an attempt by Microsoft to condition their users into thinking that the manufacturer of their operating system should control what software they are and are not allowed to run. Like Apple and iOS.

If you must use Windows, it is always worth it in my opinion, S Mode or not, to obliterate the default install (and the PC manufacturer's partition containing all *their* spyware) and install the real version from scratch. With Windows 10, the embedded license key for S Mode was valid for the real OS too. I'm not sure if the same is true for 11.
This one isn't as technical as some of my posts can be. I hope this will be the opener of a series about bookmarklets. I have at least 2 more post ideas for it.
An Acceptable Use for JavaScript: https://mckinley.cc/blog/20220602.html
@prologic I dug around in the code and it looks like Medium has a GraphQL API that is used by Scribe. See /src/clients/medium_client.cr. Scribe takes the JSON returned by the API and turns it into HTML.

/src/clients/local_client.cr includes a cURL command that queries the API in a similar way to Scribe. The ID is the unique looking alphanumeric string in the URL. For this post, it's aad7095d70a.
@prologic Scribe bypasses this BS and all the tracking and spyware as well. The official instance is scribe.rip.
@prologic Here's my full bug report. I hope it can be of use. https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn/issues/957
@prologic Test again
@prologic test
@Rob asdf
@maya test
@mckinley asdf
@tkanos asdf
@slashdot asdf
@off_grid_living test
@Rob test
@lyse asdf
@Rob sadf
@mckinley Test
@mckinley test
@prologic I'm writing up my findings in a Git issue. I want to see if logging out and logging back in fixes it. Before I do that, is there anything else I should test while I'm in this state?
It seems to be isolated to the /conv/ page.
Test post from /twt/tbw5boq
I was able to upload the image from the timeline. I seem to be stuck in the Bad Request state. I'm unable to post from /conv/ pages, but I can post from the timeline and from Discover. Is there anything I can do while I'm in this state that might help squash this bug? @prologic
Excerpt from the UNIX-Haters Handbook: Sendmail Mangled Headers
I tried to upload an image from that thread's /conv/ page and I got an alert(): An error occurred uploading your media: 400 Bad Request. The error persisted after a hard reload. Could be related.

I also couldn't post this twt from this conversation's /conv/ page. I had to go back to the timeline.
@prologic @darch I was in the #4ab7fcq conversation sending that reply to you and I got the "Bad Request" error we were talking about.

I pressed the back button on my browser, because I was at https://twtxt.net/post instead of the conversation page. My message was still in the reply box. I copied the text to the clipboard, pressed Ctrl+Shift+R (to reload with a clear cache), and tried to send the message again. Same error. I went to my timeline at the root of the pod, clicked "Reply" on your twt, pasted the message in, and it worked as normal. I'm using LibreWolf 100.0.2, which should be analogous to Firefox 100.0.2
@prologic It's from the UNIX-HATERS Handbook (pdf). It's a hilarious read, I can't recommend it enough.
Excerpt from the UNIX-HATERS Handbook: Sex, Drugs, and Unix
@marado That's a great idea, and I don't think you're overengineering too badly. There's already a Gitea issue with ideas for a potential browser extension. I put the idea in that thread. Feel free to comment on it if you have something to add.
@marado That's a great idea, and I don't think you're overengineering too badly. There's already a Gitea issue with ideas for a potential browser extension. I put the idea in that thread. Feel free to comment on it if you have something to add.
@maya PSA: Don't use Spotify. https://stallman.org/spotify.html