Wack Playstation Sup! 🙊 🇮🇸 🍏 @HerraBRE@mastodon.xyz

Hello friends!

If you and I have exchanged messages here on the Fediverse about collaborating on #Mailpile or #PageKite - please e-mail me a quick reminder.

Not only am I scatterbrained, I am finding it impossible to find old exchanges on here and I haven't yet set up my own independent archives.

My e-mails are bre(at)pagekite.net and at mailpile.is.

Oh, hi new followers! Maybe now is a good time for #introductions?

I'm an Icelandic geek who sometimes lives in Italy.

I mostly toot about #parenthood, #Italy, #Iceland, #FreeSoftware (or #OpenSource), #privacy, #infosec and my work: #mailpile and #pagekite.

Sometimes my account is taken over by Mr. Tradomat, a bot who posts confused rants about #cryptocurrency arbitrage.

I'm not always serious, but it can be hard to tell.

A principle I like:

"Be the change you want to see in this world."

Less fond of it's little sibling:

"Berate people about the change you want to see in this world."

Confession: I think the beach is boring.

Trying to not get sunburnt, trying to not get sand in places it shouldn't be. The water is too salty for proper swimming. It's too bright to look at a screen, which for me, precludes doing anything creative.

People watching can be fun, but I don't want to be the creepy guy who stares. Or the cynic who judges.

But... the daughter LOVED IT.

The beach became a bit less boring when I joined her in jumping up and down in puddles. Peppa Pig is not wrong.

Tried that antihistamine again last night; "fexofenadina cloridrato"

Woke up a bit groggy, cranky again.

It could be caused by the long day of chasing a 2 year old outdoors in the sun yesterday, or just infernal mood swings.

But still, that's two potential strikes against this stuff. The side effects list includes a bunch of brain-related things (headaches, tiredness, etc.) so that's not promising.

At least it does a good job stopping the sniffles!

Pancake day is RUINED.

We're going to the beach.

Me connecting dots...

What's this Discord thing people keep talking about?

*googles*

Ah! A proprietary voice and text chat thing targeting gamers! I see!

Makes sense, my Fediverse does have a lot of gamers [and streamers] in it. That subculture wasn't even on my radar back in Twitterstan...

💡

Oh!

Are y'all Gamergate refugees?

Cuz apparently Twitter sucked hard on that one. I just read the feminist back-scatter.

(This may be an example of over-fitting, but it does... fit.)

Moving box label: Music+Love '18

For those unfamiliar with network-walk based proofs of work, the concept is simple:

Instead of asking a peer to solve a hard math problem, you ask a peer to "go for a walk" around the network and then prove they did so.

A proof-of-work scheme needs to be asymmetric in that it's a lot of work (expensive) to solve the problem, but easy (cheap) to verify a solution is correct.

Network walks, asking Tor hidden services to sign a payload, ticks the boxes.

My brain's long-running background process has been thinking about hashcash-like (proof-of-work) strategies for reducing spam in a peer-to-peer e-mail (SMTP over Tor).

I'm mostly interested in network-walk based proofs of work, since the speed of light is universal: a more expensive computer gives no advantage.

This morning something clicked: proving you've contacted a host on The Internet is hard. On Tor, it is easy*, because .onion addresses are keys! Ah-HA! 💡

*) Assuming cooperating hosts.

My girly glittery fabulous phone cover wants me to buy a purse^Wman-bag.

It's really too big for my pocket.

This is escalating.

It's sort of packing time; getting ready for our move to Iceland. Most of The Stuff is going into a storage unit.

I don't have much Stuff. Most of the things here belong to the wife or daughter, and the wifey has Opinions. As a result I find myself relatively useless for packing. I assembled some boxes. Packed the printer.

Toot, toot!

The blender is sort of mine! I think I'll make myself a smoothie before I pack it. My sweet, sweet blender. ❤️

... I also need to go through every single one of the demos and check for breakage.

Yes, translations can break things.

Yes, that is quite annoying.

Chinese appears to break the Javascript, for example. But hey, it's still super cool to see the UI in Chinese! And cool that it gracefully degrades in spite of the breakage.

Welp, I finally got around to relaunching the #Mailpile live demos: https://demo.mailpile.is/

So if you're wondering what exactly I'm always talking about, that's a quick intro...

Once I'm confident they are mostly behaving well, I need to update the website to link to them again, tweet about it, and let the i18n community know that they can use the demos to see the outcome of their work.

And yes, I know the language list should be in the languages themselves. It's not yet perfect!

Incidentally, this (previous toot) is a great example of why software is hard and takes forever to write.

Someone had to think about every single thing you see on the screen, and even more about all the things that are invisible.

Just thinking about flags and languages could easily trigger an hour or two of discussion with an entire team of people - and good results are in no way guaranteed!

LMGTFY: http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/best-practice-for-presenting-languages/

So, I'm aware that using flags to represent languages is Wrong and Bad.

What I don't know, is whether there is a nice alternative for when people want to spice up their language selection UIs with pretty pictures?

Is the answer just "don't do that?"

Maybe if I just use national flags anyway, but use the Trans flag for American English and the Pride flag for Russia, to pre-emptively offend as many people as possible...? 😜

Wife and I are having a sneaky cuddle, while daughter is in the next room watching TV.

*sound of little running feet*

Daughter: HA HA HA!

*wet nappy lands on bed*

*sound of little running feet*

Daughter, in the distance: HA HA HA! HA HA ha! ha haha, hahaha, ...

Maybe this whole drinking wine with meals thing is misguided. 🍷

If I drink the exact same amount right after dinner, then I get to feel a lil' bit tipsy. And there's no food distracting from the flavour of the wine.

Hmmm... 🧐

Ooah!

Tongue found a piece of chili stuck between my teeth!

Exciting! 🌶️