Letters from the TildeVerse

An especially delightful manifesto for the small web was just shared in the #ctrl-c channel of tilde.chat:

The good internet was never clean. It had broken images, dead mirrors, wrong clocks, handles with no faces, and pages that looked like they were assembled in a hurry by someone who cared more about the contents than the packaging. It was not frictionless. That was the point. Friction filtered tourists from operators.

Food for thought. Just saying.

We do know how to build good software. We have in the past. Tech developed to keep Mars rovers semi-autonomous is now in every drone. We know exactly what to do but reject the idea, because step 1 is to limit scope. As for step 2? It's to buckle down and do it right, whether you apply engineering principles or good old craftsmanship. Then again, the "move fast and break things" attitude wasn't invented in the software industry. Capitalism fundamentally works that way.

On top of that, we still get the concept of intelligence wrong. In what sense are people "intelligent" when we fall for scams and con schemes so easily? I've come to the conclusion that being conned a couple of times makes you more immune not because you learn to see the trick (you literally can't, just like with stage magic) but because it humbles you. It makes you realize just how easily your oh-so-smart brain will fall for it every time.

It's been almost two years, but JourNote 2.0 is out, with one major change: now it runs in a system-wide directory by default, so you can access your journal and notes no matter what you're working on at the moment. Oh, and it has explicit Haiku support now!

(No, it didn't take me two years to do this. Just to get in the mood again.)

It's been more than half a year since my last update here. To make up for it, I added a whole new section to the site. It's a mirror, but fits in especially well here. As the old saying goes: Linux is a friendly operating system; it just chooses its friends well.

When connecting to a tilde server, it can be pretty helpful to use a terminal multiplexer. Much easier than having to connect twice, and juggle with multiple tabs or panes in my terminal emulator (for that matter, it can be useful to run a multiplexer locally, too). Conveniently, on Ctrl-C we have a full suite: Screen and tmux, plus the byobu front-end. I tried the latter first, because it has that fancy colorful status line, and uses the function keys. But that turned out to interfere with Midnight Commander, and from Android it's tricky to use function keys at all. Pretty sure there were other issues too, like with scrolling in certain apps.

For a while I just gave up, figuring that in case of need I can use Micro or NeoVim, both of which have built-in terminal emulators and window management. But seriously? There must be a better way. Sure enough, the old Screen is now much more capable than I remembered it, and it still has more intuitive keyboard shortcuts than the competition. Definitely worth another try. Note to self: check out known apps again from time to time, and don't just settle for doing things the hard way.

Okay, it's more like this month, but in the same spirit: did you know that here on Ctrl-C.club we have alternatives to all the usual applications? For example Vim and NeoVim, or Mutt and NeoMutt. So you can try both and see which you like best. It matters: for example vim works well in ConnectBot, nvim not so much. Both are fine in other terminal emulators.

In tangential news, it turns out Lynx comes bundled with comprehensive documentation that it displays if you start it without arguments, so you can learn a lot about it without even going online. Edit: by the way, did you know Lynx has a nice file manager built in? I keep forgetting. You can see it by passing a directory name on the command line.

For the past few years I've been working on a series of desktop tools. Naturally, I made some experiments with UI design. Let me tell you something.

You know the typical window with File / Edit / View / Help menus and a toolbar with icons? It exists for a reason. People who knew what they were doing refined it over many years. And then... a bunch of kiddies thought they were smarter. They started fooling around with hamburger menus. It's been downhill since.

Don't be like them. Want to experiment? Great. But start from the tried-and-true.

In order to use Clinklog on Ctrl-C.club, I had to make a new, modified version. This is because Clinklog 2 generates a ton of web pages (easily dozens or hundreds once you have enough data), and here on the server we have a script called newstuff that checks what's new and updated in everyone's public directories. So many files at once would thoroughly swamp its feed, ruining things for everyone. Please use the Lite edition instead; documentation and everything coming soon.