I have been responsible for the MediaWiki installation on https://wiki.openttd.org/ from ~2005 till 2020. One thing became clear: it is very difficult to keep it up-to-date and to find quality extensions that live for more than a few years.

So, we set out to find an alternative. With the experience we have had with for example BaNaNaS we ideally would like to store all the data in git. This is mostly as data in git is easier for more people to maintain, then a database where very few people have access to. Also, the wiki of OpenTTD was not big enough (~5000 pages) to really need a database to support it. As extra bonus, we would favour any system that could easily be cached.

The software closest to this is gollum. Although gollum appears to do exactly what we want, especially as wikitext is supported via WikiCloth, reality turned out to be something else. Although it does support wikitext, or a subset thereof, it does not support templates. This is a huge issue for any real wiki, as templates make a wiki of any decent size possible. Initially we did hack in support for templates, but as it is written in Ruby, not a language any of the people involved knew sufficiently to make any decent contribution, it only added more issues than it resolved. In the end, it was decided this was not a road to go.

A friendly programming language from the future.

The big idea behind Unison is that its functions are hashed and content-addressed.

Semiconductors are not sustainable, we need mechanical relays for a truly sustainable computer.

Здесь я решил собрать свои свежие мысли о продлении жизни, подходах к нему, перспективных с моей точки зрения направлениях исследований, и всяких смежных темах.

Гришка отказывается умирать.

A programming language by Douglas Crockford

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of U.S. copyright restrictions, and free of cost.

Автор разбирается в устройстве Gravity Defied и запускает её на своём компьютере, дописав несколько системных классов, всё-таки Ява. Прикольно.

Алекс Хайтек пишет про дирижабли. Хороший экскурс.

Лидер арктической станции поменял на ней часовой пояс и просит tzdb обновить информацию за несколько часов до смены пояса. Выясняется, что там десять лет неправильная информация была до этого. Также он говорит, почему они не перешли на московское время: новости во время обеда не будут стримить.

The coolest thing I've seen today!

Краткое сравнение операционных систем для мобильных устройств. Основные различия, особенности.

Прикольно такое читать. Статья старая, если что. Говорят про Пальм и Симбиан, а айфон там новинка.

In the early days of Android, a friend of mine got an Android phone & was showing it off to me. He showed me Google Calendar, very proud.

"Oh. Huh. Does it support screening?"

"Screening? Probably – what is that?"

So I showed him what my Palm Pilot's calendar can do: with a single click, all of my calendar entries are converted to textless color-coded blocks, so I can literally hand my device to someone else so they can look at my calendar and see my schedule, but not be privy to any of the confidential information specific to events on it.

🧵

A beautiful life in a remote cabin in a forest is a luxury, not available to everyone. We can't just return to the past.

Introduction
This document contains the release notes for the interactive C++ interpreter Cling, release 1.0. Cling is built on top of Clang and LLVM compiler infrastructure. Here we describe the s...

Reposted from gauntlet

The 16th-century “Florentine Codex” offers a Mexican Indigenous perspective that is often missing from historical accounts of the period.

Data classes are containers for your data—not behavior

What we learned from our 2023 H2 developer survey

Another unfortunate Fediverse developer shares their woes.

The author doesn't like how modern UI:s are designed. Gives good examples.

A funky keyboard with literal knobs and whistles. Comes with whopping 16 MB of on-board memory, which is thousand times more than on a Pro Micro.

hk allows temporary X11 hotkeys to be set

This site is best viewed in Lynx. In other browsers, it tries its best to simulate that experience.

This is a small website for inhabitants of the Town of Merveilles to share their locations with each other, to help with organizing events and such. It's built with Go, and uses a very simple database (read: a csv file) to store locations.

In favor of endless configuration.

gesture - handwriting algorithm with implementation for linux touchscreens injecting keys into a tty.

CETI is a nonprofit organization applying advanced machine learning and state-of-the-art robotics to listen to and translate the communication of sperm whales.

Гришаев завёл себе пет-проект на Яве и отчитывается, что современная Ява вообще-то классная! Я тоже это подозревал, поэтому решил попробовать её в Бетулоптиконе.

This is the codebase for castling.club, an ActivityPub server with a single
hardcoded 'King' service actor that acts as a chess arbiter.

To my projects only paid hosting seems applicable.

У Куприна в «Молохе» есть превосходный, пророческий отрывок. Я выделил одну фразу, но он хорош целиком, особенно про всё растущую стоимость времени

Hardware electronics projects.

A tiny volumetric display!

See 953 for a video.

A simple but satisfying design. 5 min video.

I conclude that it is impossible to build a new web browser. The complexity of the web is obscene. The creation of a new web browser would be comparable in effort to the Apollo program or the Manhattan project.

A classic read.

Safari is holding back the web. It is the new IE, after all. In contrast, Chrome is pushing the web forward so hard that it’s starting to break. Meanwhile web developers do nothing except moan and complain. The only thing left to do is to pick our poison.

This is actually why I prefer Safari.

Be they nestable or not nestable, they fail.

Айтишники и учёные соберутся в баре и будут обсуждать опен-сорс. А знаете, кто там будет?! Там будет Данила! А знаете, про что он будет там говорить??? Про Бетулу!!! Питерские, давайте быстренько записывайтесь.

Somehow, longer functions are good.

So the author says. They say, the right metaphor is songs! This is non-sensical, documents are the right metaphor, and we should do our best to preserve it.

The author of the website claims to know a bit about hypertext, and they do, but look at this URL! How to fix it? UPD. From the computer I managed to close the extra tabs on the page which were not visible on the phone and fix the URL.

Illich’s fundamental thesis in these three books - and throughout all of his work - is that the institutionalisation of competencies diminishes the individual’s ability to acquire them. Thus the institutionalisation of school diminishes our ability to learn, the institutionalisation of technology diminishes our ability to master tools, and the institutionalisation of medicine diminishes our ability to heal and to care for ourselves and others.

Wheelchairs are beautiful, a marvel of technology. They are mech suits, cybernetic enhancements, they are machines that we join with in a nourishing symbiotic relationship. They are not prisons; wheelchairs are liberation. They are freedom, they are a walk in the park, they are the sunlight on my face after years in dark tunnels.

A short text zine.

A study from Carnegie Mellon University finds that everyone learns at the same rate, although some students have a head start.

Hi, I'm Redowan Delowar—a wandering sciolist with a flair for ones and zeros. I learn, write, and tweet about Python, Go, SQL, and the broader landscape of software in general.

1. Use a better algorithm.

2. Use a better data-structure.

3. Use a lower-level system.

4. Accept a less precise solution.

Pick the simplest solution.

Игорь рассказывает, как делает заметки.

Вложенные теги не нужны

Do not try to create a hierarchy (taxonomy) for your notes. It is not scalable and only works for narrow domain. Prefer tags.

Не понимал, зачем раскрашивать буквы в книжках, но Игорь пишет, что это полезно, когда есть комментарии

It is not useful to highlight without commenting. Writing summary is mandatory, highlighting is optional 1.

Greta on wikis.

Opt-in Fediverse search. Users individually can join too.

Convert Evernote .enex files to Markdown.

🗃 Open source self-hosted web archiving. Takes URLs/browser history/bookmarks/Pocket/Pinboard/etc., saves HTML, JS, PDFs, media, and more…

Цвета из нашей палитры везде будут отображаться правильным образом и без искажений. Любой из 216 цветов «безопасной» палитры может быть использован для графики, текста и фонов.

Ограниченный список цветов. Поможет, когда важна совместимость с плохими экранами. Почти всегда, то есть.

Apart from that I rely very much on how browsers present my site, from the default font and size to the paragraph distance and the emoji set used. HTML was actually made to be responsive. It's a reflowing format that theoretically works on any screen size. But of course that won't be the case when there's things like sidebars or banners and stuff. And there pretty much always is.

The truth is, if you want to build the most-accessible product possible, you need to use both pixels and ems/rems. It's not an either/or situation. There are circumstances where rems are more accessible, and other circumstances where pixels are more accessible.

Practical CSS and design tips that helps in building future-proof user interfaces.

An exploration of the evolution and meaning of the Forth programming language and its context in history.

A long long article about Forth. One probably already knows most of stuff there, but it's fun nevertheless.