Tod Robbins @todrobbins@digipres.club

🎶🎶🎶
I'm a Stitch, I'm a Lilo
I'm a Rey, I'm a Kylo
I'm a Bucky I'm a Steve
I'm Disney-owned IP
🎶🎶🎶

oh NO

"Most narratives about connectivity -- often pitched by Big Tech -- use slogans like: “Connecting the next billion”, “Bringing access worldwide”, “Connecting the unconnected”, and so on. Those projects are mostly one-size-fits-all. The basic difference to community networks’ approach is that we work within communities’ realities, instead of delivering top-down, ready-made solutions."

-Bruna Zanolli on community networks, https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/why-do-people-communities-need-connectivity/

On this dreary Monday morning, please enjoy My First Browser Extension, now available for Firefox Add-ons (Chrome review pending)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/you-re-normal/

This is an early Christmas gift built on request, but let it be a beacon for everyone struggling with self-doubt

(Also I will post the code shortly, when able, but I don't want to ruin the surprise and I promise there is literally no JavaScript included)

Can't even read fiction in peace anymore

I'm proud of my contribution to RFC-270. It was written on 1/1/1972, but the canonical version published online was missing about 80% of the original content. I discovered the full document in a museum archive and worked with the RFC series to get it published. More on this here:

https://write.as/365-rfcs/rfc-270

Lois Haibt was the only woman on the IBM FORTRAN development team in the 1970s.

She started there in 1955, before they had a "Programmer" title -- she was "Mathematician". It was two years before the first production-ready compiler would be invented. "Assemblers were fairly new—just getting off the primitive stage."

You can read a very long interview with her at the Engineering and Technology History Wiki: https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Lois_Haibt

I'm pleased to announce the v1.0.0 release of Hometown, my Mastodon fork! It's up to date with Mastodon v2.9.3, and unique features include:

- Local only posting
- Full support for rendering incoming `Article` posts from federated blogs like Write.As
- "Exclusive" lists that let you follow someone without clogging up your home timeline

For more info, including rationale for each new feature, check out our wiki:

https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/wiki

And the release itself is here:

https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/releases/tag/v1.0.0%2B2.9.3

Going though my Computer History Museum photos and I found the original copy of this 1971 Telnet system diagram from RFC 158. Now you can compare the charming pencil on lined notebook paper to the official scanned version that's been the only one available for decades.

I love this stuff, it reminds me that the internet was invented by humans jotting things down on whatever paper was at hand and not godlike programmers planning everything exquisitely.

https://write.as/365-rfcs/rfc-158

Every couple of months I like to share with new people or people on new instances how to add #Mastodon timelines into #rss feeds:
https://mastodon.sdf.org/@cosullivan.atom

Roll your own: https://[federated.instance]/@[userid].atom

Could be worth trying if your favourite accounts are 8-16hrs away, or if you detect spotty synchronization issues between instances. #Mastodon101 #rss

I spent some time this weekend putting together a small Python program that drives a browser to collect a citation network from Google Scholar, and writes it out as a Gephi file:

https://inkdroid.org/2018/03/18/etudier/

It was a little bit hairy because of all the CAPTCHAs that Google throw at you while the collection is running. But having the browser be non-headless means a person can intervene to identify cars and signs when necessary, afterwhich the program resumes.