mbirth 🇬🇧

What I did when starting out with Python: I’ve bought a book similar to the O’Reilly Pocket Reference and read it cover to cover to get an overview of the structure, syntax, and available objects and methods. Then started piecing my tools together by looking at other people’s code and copying the bits I could use. If you want some inspiration, have a look at my Python projects.

Meshtastic is good for local mesh nets with a limited number of participants. If you rather want to connect to larger meshes, Meshcore is the better choice as it’s far more reliable in larger nets.

Not much to expand. Some German left-wing politicians “ordered” a report on the German right-wing party. That report was deemed “secret”, so nobody was supposed to see it. Left-wing politicians told everyone that this secret report is the ultimate proof the right-wing party is extremist and can finally be forbidden and banned. Which is the part I said I doubt until there’s a way for everyone to see the actual report and verify the findings. (I’ve compared that to “Sure, I did my homework. But then my dog ate it.”)

Someone reported me with the note “supports <name of Germany’s right-wing party>”. And that’s that. Shadowban for life. No way to contest it or explain myself as support auto-responds with “we only answer to actual members of <instance>”.

(And yes, that “report” leaked later and turned out to be just a collection of quotes from social media from party members. Nothing against the law and lots of quotes were taken far out of context. It was great stuff for the media for a week or two but that’s it. Nothing ever came out of it.)

I’d use ImageMagick, but if you want to do it in plain* Python, here’s an example: https://stackoverflow.com/a/79683407

* Well, you’ll need pyAPNG.

I’ve earned a lifelong shadowban on the largest Mastodon instance just because I doubted a political paper (which later turned out to be as unsubstantial as I said it would be). And there’s no way to contact support as support only answers to actual members, not people from a different instance. So, ever since, whenever I reply to someone from there, they need to approve my comment before anyone else from that instance can see it. Same for when I want to follow someone new from there. It’s ridiculous.

Ligatures, slashed zeros, clearly distinguishable Il1/O0, not too big of a gap between lines, and maybe script-like italics. My current main monospace font is IosevkaTerm Nerd Font.

I also find the idea of using retro pixel fonts interesting, but so far couldn’t get myself to actually try some of the fonts mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47708411 .

Yes, besides Gopher and Gemini, “small web” usually includes traditionally coded HTML+simple CSS+handmade/small JS websites. I.e. websites that are not using a big JS framework or huge amounts of CSS.

There’s also XPenology - a hacked Synology software to run on non-Synology systems. Awesome when you’ve got it running, can be somewhat adventurous and/or nerve-wrecking when a major update is due.

This is your sign to find a smaller instance and support that one instead. Or, maybe even go the selfhosting route and setup a GotoSocial instance for yourself.

“Do you have natural freckles or did you use that shoulder-mounted guided missile prototype again?”

The main problem here is persistance. Most users are on machines that get turned off.

This! It only works if you have a server that’s online 24/7. Can be a VPS in a data centre, can be some Raspberry Pi running at your home with a DNS name pointing to it.

If you are not a Gitea customer, you are not being informed of security updates in a timely manner

I don’t need a notification of issues, I need a notification of when there’s a new version to roll out. And that can be solved by using things like WatchTower or setting up release notifications on GitHub.

And, of course, a comparison hosted on ForgeJo’s webpage will make it out that they’re “the better choice”.

Also, ForgeJo was promising federation which is still a WIP several years later.

Oh no, it doesn’t do the big feature™. I guess it’s unusable now.

Well, that was the one big distinguishing thing between the two, back when ForgeJo was the new kid on the block. ForgeJo wanted to make it a priority to implement federation.

And I never said it’s unusable - it’s just that I, personally, don’t see any reason to switch from Gitea to ForgeJo.

I’m staying with Gitea. They’ve created the Ltd. so they can sell professional support as most businesses will want a proper invoice. I don’t see anything wrong with that. Also, ForgeJo was promising federation which is still a WIP several years later. And, the one time I’ve tried ForgeJo it shit itself when I’ve added an emoji to my username. For some reason Gitea didn’t have any problem with that.

It works in both directions. I’ve been shadowbanned from mastodon.social because one user misinterpreted my comment about something political (related to Germany), reported me and apparently their (German) mod was either lazy or followed the same misinterpretation and shadowbanned me - for life.

And there’s no way to object this as their support only answers to members. Which I am not.

Meshtastic has issues with all those repeated status messages eating up airtime. Meshcore seems more reliable. And there’s also Reticulum.