@pixx @sotolf @rl_dane @fbievan

Momentarily hijacking this thread, but I can't let it go by without referencing how we need more "A1" in education.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/12/linda-mcmahon-a1-instead-of-ai/83059797007/

Which should be the CW for Nepal politics?

I’m utterly amazed and shocked by the news in Nepal. I honestly have no clue how I’m feeling about it but I think it’s mostly positive.

Nepal appoints its first female PM after historic week of deadly protests

Former chief justice Sushila Karki, who was nominated by gen Z representatives, to lead interim government

the Guardian (www.theguardian.com)

Just got a second. Google Classroom spam wave?

Just received a spam message via… Google Classroom invite? That's a new one.

I've got a new project idea I'm really excited about, but this one I'm gonna keep under my hat until I'm ready to launch it. Could be a month or two, but I think it'll be really cool (and will, for once, actually relate to my field of study).

I've got a mini project idea mostly as a thought experiment—

Imagine a wall with a thousand mailboxes on it, none of them locked. Anyone can leave a letter in any box, and anyone can read any letters that have been left. People can have one-on-one conversations if they know the same box number, or they can go to a commonly-chosen number like "1" and have big group discussions. No one has any real way of proving their identity, just social convention/pressure.

Maybe it's me being a COMM student and a nerd about this stuff, but I would be fascinated to see the community culture that would grow around this wall and what conventions would form.

I'm considering experimenting with making a small website version of this. Would be lightweight to code and host; the main time commitment would be moderation. (I'd have people make accounts for spam prevention and code of conduct enforcement reasons, but wouldn't show who posts in any public-facing way.)

Would others be interested in seeing what happens if I did this? (Also, does anyone have ideas of what to name such a project?)

Judging from my notifications (and the instances they're coming from), there are a lot of knitters in New Zealand and Australia online right now. A pleasure to meet you all! :)

Knitting is going well!

@daniel

I plead the third.

I've realized I'm really bad at keeping secrets.

Well, to be accurate, I'm good at not telling the secrets themselves, but it's very hard for me to keep from revealing that secrets exist about a certain topic. And after that point, people's curiosities tend to kick in and try to pry out the actual details, even if they're well-meaning.

I'm seriously considering writing my own static site generator, perhaps in Nim, rather than continue struggle on with Hugo.

My latest issue is that apparently Go time format strings simply cannot get the format I'm wanting in a couple cases, which led me to try and just fetch the date directly from the date command on my system, but I can't find a way to run OS commands from Hugo templates.

grid-template-areas is almost criminally easy to use. I love this. Using it i my website redesign now.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/grid-template-areas

Essentially you give each element in the layout a name, then just write out where each of those elements goes in the grid, all in pure CSS. Want a different layout on smaller screens? Just rewrite the grid-template-areas property in the media query and everything re-arranges itself.

Today in web crawler development:

• XHTML is now supported as a webpage type
• Links to blocked domains are properly skipped instead of throwing errors
• I rolled my own sitemap parser because the library I had used was slooooooow and just using lxml is so much faster, particularly with such a simple task

Only six TODO comments remaining on the crawler!

Finally sorted out the audio issues I'd been having since upgrading to Debian 12; FluidSynth was fighting with Pipewire (and, later, Pulseaudio when I tried switching to it to fix things) for control of my audio card.

@hollie @superball

@steffo should get in on this

@superball @hollie

Me too, friends, me too.

I blogged.

https://benjaminhollon.com/musings/edge-of-an-epiphany/

If you have thoughts on it, I'd love a reply via email rather than here. I know it's less convenient, but those replies do really make my day.

Eyyy, my Digital Authorship final project got perfect marks!

You can read it here, if you are interested: https://blog.clew.se/posts/secret-web/

@kytta

The problem is it would then federate your entire past toot backlog out to every server with someone following you, very quickly. I remember when calckey (they changed their name to firefish I believe) was testing a very similar feature and it ended up spamming the federated and hashtag timelines of other servers. I had several posts from years before showing up in my home timeline because they had a hashtag I was following. I heard it also caused performance issues for some servers.