Notices by Stuart Langridge (sil@mastodon.social)

Just before his head died, he said:

Death is but a door
Time is but a window
I’ll be back!

(@8none1 is a hero)

@jwz what's most worrying? amusing? realistic? about this is that if you just click somewhere, not on any of the things, half of it collapses anyway

I couldn't believe that PC Gamer headline was a proper reflection of what was said, but... it was.
The thing which most annoys me is that they seem to believe they have a right to do a damaging thing (which they acknowledge is damaging) in the hope that they might find something impactful to do with it (which they acknowledge they haven't, yet) because there's currently a lot of hype about it, and the only time limit on this is "find something before the hype runs out".

Tonight’s game: name people who thought they were bigger than the band they were in and so bailed, and then they were right. (You get a pass if you were as big as the band you were in.) That is: you’re arrogant and the arrogance was justified. There aren’t that many! Lots more thought it and were wrong. Our thoughts: Robbie Williams, Diana Ross, Cher, Tina Turner, Belinda Carlisle, Suzi Quattro. Currently arguing about Joan Jett.

I wish people would stop saying "JavaScript was written in 10 days" with the subtle implication that this is somehow shoddy or half-arsed. GvR wrote the first version of Python in a month in December 1989; the first bit of C was made out of B and NB in a month or two in ~1970. Every single bit of software you've ever used that isn't some enterprise nightmare was first a proof of concept hacked together in a couple of weeks by whoever first did it. This is entirely normal; it's not a bad thing!

@gamingonlinux I am honestly a bit surprised to hear that the Steam Deck is such a big seller and yet it’s still such a small percentage! Makes you think just how many people there are with PS5s or Switches or whatever

well, that was a pleasant surprise. The plex app on my phone complained that my plexmediaserver was so old that the app now refused to talk to it. This is annoying (backwards compatibility, do you speak it?) but fair play, it hasn't been updated for years. So I thought: I bet updating this is misery, I'll have to upgrade the OS on my microserver, probably I'll have to manually download some new thing, maybe I sack off plex. But no. Upgrading was: apt upgrade. Well done, Plex team.

@ross a url handler being a custom url scheme? so you can link to ross://hello and have it open in your pwa? The magic phrase you want for searches is "URL protocol handler": see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/registerProtocolHandler for details. In particular, it's pretty much Chromium-based browsers only, and iOS Safari does not support it as far as I'm aware, and MDN agrees

I wanted to put a video on my website, but I wanted it to adapt to the viewer's bandwidth and screen (you know, how YouTube does, where you get the narrow 240p version if you're on a rubbish mobile connection, but you still get the video). After a bit of research, I worked out how (thank you to Scott Jehl about responsive video via CSS, and mux.com for HLS and ffmpeg instructions) and wrote a quick note in case anybody else needs the same.
https://www.kryogenix.org/days/2025/04/16/serving-streaming-video-that-adapts-to-bandwidth-from-your-own-website/

this evening's fun discovery: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/TreeWalker
A very convenient way to walk a DOM tree from JS, built in to the platform. I had no idea this existed. Nice one MDN for making it clear.

@jwz The Mother Superior murmured: “Is he then an unhappy man?”
Poirot said: “So unhappy that he has forgotten what happiness means. So unhappy that he does not know he is unhappy.”
The nun said softly: “Ah, a rich man. . . .”
Hercule Poirot said nothing—for he knew there was nothing to say.

The thing here is that "these decisions that are making MacOS increasingly annoying" do so because they're violating an important but unstated assumption: that your computer is yours. The third possibility for why this is happening, which isn't mentioned in the piece, is that OS makers are increasingly leaning in the direction that your computer (pocket or desk) isn't yours, it's theirs. What they think should be doable with it is more important than what you think.
https://social.vivaldi.net/@brucelawson/113316262017803991

@SolusSpider @tuxjam @kevie @mcnalu @thelovebug @mralc clearly @popey is the correct choice :-)

"we push the web back towards the wonderful, beautiful, joyful place it ought to be" - @molly0xfff, https://www.citationneeded.news/fighting-for-our-web/
"A rewilded internet will be a more interesting, usable, stable and enjoyable place to be" - @mariafarrell, @robin, https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/
"this web we made together is the biggest and best collection of information and exhibitions and joy that the world has ever known" - me, https://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/the-mazy-web/

A recurring theme of the web we want: joy. Bring back the joy.

This weekend's project: get a data dump from a Fandom wiki (all of them have this: check out the page Special:Statistics) and turn it into an offline version (a .zim file, readable with software such as Kiwix, on many platforms) via a (surprisingly short) Python script. This is a very useful thing to have -- a complete offline copy of something like the Forgotten Realms wiki for reference when the internet is slow! #DnD

@anildash @robinwhittleton if the answer is "yeah, that's not really what Fastly is for, don't publish your whole big static website in compute@edge, and we don't do static hosting, so publish it somewhere else and then use our CDN to front it, our CDN's great" then I'm fine with that answer; what I don't know is whether that really is the answer or if there is a different or better way that I don't know about. I know nobody likes to say they're not best at a thing, though :-)

@anildash @robinwhittleton Thank you! My basic question is: can I use Fastly to publish a static website, the same way I might use, say, surge? That is, not publish it somewhere else and put Fastly's CDN in front of it; do it with just a Fastly account. As far as I can tell, deploying it as a big wasm binary to compute@edge is the suggested way to do that, but... at least the local server fails on moderately-sized static sites (and I fear publishing would charge for memory use and be expensive!)

OK, confirmation at least that all this wasm stuff is invisible server hosting; it does not appear to actual users. So instead of copying your files to a web server, you instead use their tools to compile an application which embeds all your files, and then deploy that compiled binary application on Fastly's infrastructure. That seems complex, but it maybe works (at least, on trivially small static sites). This makes problem diagnosis sound hard to me, but maybe it's OK, if complicated.

It seems to compile a big WASM blob? Unsure about this. In particular, if it serves out the HTML that I actually wrote, then.... OK, I suppose? This seems a very complicated way to go about things, but whatever, it's invisible, so I'm testing it. If it serves all that wasm to the actual users then it's going straight in the bin. But... currently, the server doesn't seem to be able to even serve this wasm monstrosity it creates, so maybe it only works for a one page website. All seems v complex!

Looking at Fastly for hosting static websites, which https://www.fastly.com/blog/no-origin-static-websites-at-the-edge/ claims it can do with "compute@edge", and I have fallen at the first hurdle. I dropped a reasonable-sized static site into a public folder and ran "fastly compute serve" and... "memory index 0 has a minimum page size of 3075 which exceeds the limit of 2048". This seems to be some sort of hardcoded limit in "viceroy", the server; someone talks in a bug about recompiling it. Do I know any fastly peeps? @devs maybe?