The decentralized micro-Blogging Twitter™-like platform I created back in Aug 2020 of this year; jointwt/twtxt that powers Twtxt.net (see also JoinTwt); got posted and talked about on Reddit today! 😱

Twt.social Hacktober 2020

Come join us in hacking on Twt.social and Twtxt.net – A new way to social media without user tracking, advertising or any of that biased algorithmic based jazz! Twt.social is trying to be an open, decentralised, open-source, privacy focused social media! Come hack with us!

It’s that time of year!

For those that may not know (lets face is, I wasn’t aware myself until my first Hacktober event at Facebook where I worked from ~2015-2018!); is a time of year every October where many get together and hack on something cool or use this time let the creative juices flow and create new wonderful things!

I remember the first Hacktober event I participated in back in Oct 2015 my good friend and colleague at the time hacked on an idea using what was then the first version of the Oculus VR headset (the one before they improved the resolution!). He thought wouldn’t it be cool if we could develop a virtual reality desktop environment. We were both (still are) UNIX geeks/nerds and he ran some variant of Linux whilst I ran macOS. I watched him hack this thing out in a matter of days whilst I toyed with some other ideas. I helped him test his prototypes and provided feedback.

In the end what he came up with eventually caught the eye of Mark himself and eventually found its way into a new product at Facebook altogether and helped to develop a new set of products and way of communicating with others.

Fast forward to today in Oct 2020 and I am again reminded of this wonderful time of year where its a time of celebration and the hacker community has for a while now used this as an equal opportunity to get together and hack on and contribute to interesting ideas both new and old!

So… Without further ado I invite anyone that is interested to come hack with us here at Twt.social and help us build out and improve what we out to back in Aug 2020!

What we need help with?

We plan to release the first mobile app to the general public very soon, in fact in just a few days! We need your help to test the app of course and provide us feedback! It would also be very nice if we also had more Pod Owners (more on this later!).

We need developers to help us improve our API and Backend. Here is a list of things we want to achieve (in no particular order:

• Improved UI/UX around Feeds view
  • We want to improve the /feeds view such that it is more accessible and gives users an opportunity to easily identify interesting feeds they might be interested in. This relies on a list of configurable feed sources in the we-are-feeds.txt format which is just a TAB-delimited file where each line contains a feed name and URI. We want to extend the functionality around this to also display a feed description and logo or avatar for the feed and improve the presentation.
• Pod Description and Discoverability
  • We want to continue our work on Pod Discoverability, that is ways in which users across the Twt.social network can discover other pods and users/feeds on those pods more easily. We also want to continue to improve the Pod customisation work we started where Pod Owners can change the description, logo and other configuration parameters easily from the UI.
• Add OAuth Support for API and IndieAuth support
  • I’ve lumped two issues together here because its not specifically clear what should be done here, but what is clear is authentication and authorisation for the current API needs to be improved. Whats more (related) is what is really an “identity problem” and something we’d like to solve soon! It should be possible for a user on one pod to post to and carry their original identify around with them without requiring multiple accounts on different pods. We think IndueAuth can help here.
• Desktop App
  • Pretty straight forward! We’d love help to create.a Desktop App. Ideally one that is cross-platform. Perhaps it could be built with React using the very nice Twt.js library!
• Supporting custom domains
  • We want to support the notion of users having their own domain name that can be pointed at a pod that has their user account and for this to seamlessly work as if it were like a pod all of its own with a single user account.
• Integrating with Git
  • Today Twtxt / Twt.social pods are self-contained and a user’s feed is stored on the backend’s server in the twtxt.txt format. What would be really cool here is if we could offload or sync the user’s feed file itself from a Git source. It doesn’t really matter how this works as long as the end result is that a user can say, here’s where my feed file actually is, please either write to this and/or sync to/from this.

So as you can see we have some big/bold ideas and we need your help! This list is not conclusive and we have other projects you can hack on as well including:

• rss2twtxt – An RSS/Atom feed aggregation service that runs at feeds.twtxt.net that is one of the primary external feed sources for all Twt.social pods. This allows anyone to freely drop in any website, figures out whether ir has a valid RSS/Atom feed and turns that into a Twtxt feed! It also tries to find an appropriate avatar for it. What this is missing is some way to form a decent description of the feed (see above for the feeds view improvement).
• jointwt.org – This is the jointwt.org landing page! Any Web designers and/or content writers are more than welcome to help us flesh this out more and improve the UI/UX and content!
• Goryon – This is the iOS/Android App we intend to release to the general public very soon! This is built with Flutter and largely mirrors much of the functionality of the Web App. There are of course some things missing which we need help with such as Conversations View, Video Uploads and inline video player, Feeds and User Settings.
• Twt.js – Our Javascript library for the current APIv1 which is being used already by some bots and soon a Browser Extension.

We’ve developed all this quite quickly and to give you an overall idea of where we are today, here are some interesting tidbits-bits:

• The project was started in Aug 2020 and the first Pod twtxt.net launched ~20th July 2020. For a brief history read this blog post and for why this was created read this post.
• Since launch we quickly grew the user base and network to a point where today there are over ~150 registered users across Twt.social pods, hundreds more in the wider Twtxt.txt community. Twtxt.net the first inaugural pod now has thousands of visitors per day and millions of hits per month!
• We have a development team of 5 active developers and quite a few other contributes that regularly contribute.
• Today the Twtxt software/backend itself has received over 150+ Github stars!
• Since we started counting and archiving old Twts, whether it be from users or external feeds, globally the Twt.social network has now archived over 300k Twts!

So… Come hack with us! Come be a part of this exciting journey where we are trying to take back what we’ve given up so easily. Social media should be accessible to all without having to give up your digital data to large corporations that sell this to advertisers!

Let’s create a truely decentralised Social Media built on Web Technologies, in the Open that is Easy for all to use, self-host and hack on!

– James Mills / prologic

TL;DR: You should reconsider the social media platform you choose to use. Many of the large popular ones like F***B***, T******, T**T**, I*********, etc; are all based on exploiting their users ‘Digital Data’ ultimately to profit from by selling that Data to Advertisers.

Open and honest

It is more important than ever before to be open and honest with one another. We live in an ever increasingly complex world, what with confusing information being spread around like wildfire, various political agendas and now a world-wide crisis. Never before has it become more important to share openly and honestly with one another.

Twtxt.net and the Twt.social hosting platform aim to provide exactly that. A platform that you can either join, purchase or spin up yourself where you can be open and honest.

Decentralised

Did you know? When you use the “traditional” social media networks, you are effectively giving away a part of yourself, a part of your identity your story, your conversations, your thoughts and feelings away. For free! Every single day that you use other social media networks whose sole revenue stream is based on advertising, this is what you give to them! You are the product!

How is Twtxt.net and the Twt.social the hosting platform different you ask? That’s easy! Most of you that are not “tech savvy” are probably unfamiliar with the world “decentralisation”. Simply put it is the opposite of ‘centralisation,’ the opposite of “being central”. Traditional social media giants that we have all become used to and rely on every day of our lives for various reasons or another are “centralised” large-scale hosting platforms where you give them your content! Because they are centralised, it is very easy for these platforms to monetise you as the product be collecting and processing various bits of data about what you read, what you like, photos you share, what you are likely to engage in, etc. This so-called “Metadata” is then sold to advertisers where other companies that sell consumer products and services use this data to target you in their advertisements.

Not specifically you! This would be highly illegal and unethical. But they use this data nonetheless to target groups of people with similar “world views”, “ideals”, “behaviours”, and so on…

Here at Twtxt.net and the Twt.social we don’t do this. We will NEVER do this!

Why? Reas on…

Data Ownership

The author of the Twtxt.net softwatre and the Twt.social hosting platform believes in some very simple ideas:

• Data Ownership and Sovereignty
• Data Privacy
• Self-hosting
• Open source

What does this all mean for me? Well, this is easy! When you signup to Twtxt.net (one of the first Twt.social pods every launched) we don’t ask you for anything but a Username and Password (you are welcome to use any pseudonym you like), In fact we don’t even really require that you provide an Email Address. As long as you never forget your password, you’ll be fine! Otherwise put in an email address we can send an “Password Reset” token to in case you ever forget your password!

When you post on any Twt.social pod like Twtxt.net (we call these Twts) you own that piece of data! Its is yours! You are welcome to, Delete your Account, Download your feed file, or Continue enjoying the platform!

But stick around there’s more!

We also support what we call Twt Blogs where you can also enjoy longer-form writing and publish articles all with the same benefits of short-form Twt(s).

Again, the Data is yours! If you wish to go elsewhere, you are more than welcome to. If you want to run your own pod, take your data away from a Pod you were using that might belong to someone else or you puchased a hosted Pod from us, go for it! We don’t mind!

Privacy focused

Now this is a slight oxymoron, but we actually do respect your privacy! But because we also believe in openness and honesty, there is very little in the way of what the industry called PII or Personal Identifiable Information. Therefore we might even comply with FIPS-140! What this means for you is that we do not collect or store every much in the way of personal information about you! This is very important for several reasons:

• We are less likely to suffer from cyber threats and data breaches
• You are less likely to have your identity stolen or personal data leaked
• And…

Pluasabie deniability

Last but not least, you get to enjoy all of this whilst at the same time being confident that as you grow and mature as a person things you might have said once upon a time in short-form (remember we call these Twts) are eventually archived away! Just like human memories! Eventually the system “forgets” naturally over time (this is of course configurable on a per-Pod basis). The only written and visual works that remains more permanent are Twt Blogs! This is why when you write a Twt Blog the button changes to “Publish” as if to indicate to you that you are about to publish a more permanent article for the world to read and enjoy!

So… This means you can enjoy both aspects of writing, sharing, blogging, photo blogging (even video blogging one day) and be assured that as you mature as a person what things you said once or thought about cannot easily be held against you!

If you read this far, congratulations! And thank you! 🙇‍♂️ Please Join Twt and help grow our little community of Twt’er’s and Twt Bloggers! 🤗

twtxt v0.1.0 – 3 Pods, 100+ Users, 1500+ Posts, 1M hits! 🎉

twtxt v0.1.0 now officially released! 🎉

WOW! 😲 What a week it has been! We don’t seem to be increasing in user count (at least on the first pod twtxt.net) but that’s okay! We have exciting news! We’ve now launched our fully-managed 1-click pods. What’s a pod you say? Well we launched the first instance of prologic/twtxt a little over a month ago now over at twtxt.net (the first pod).

As of the 15th Aug 2020 we now offer hosted, fully managed 1-click pods. Check it out over at Twt.social. 🎉

We invite anyone to get in touch and become one of the first few to have their own pod, their own little place on the micro-Blogging Web 😎 This is invite-only at this time, but in the near future we will generally open this up for all. 🤗

On to the highlights!

Highlights

• NEW: WebMention! That’s right! We added support for WebMentions generically as well as between users across different pods. ＠ (more on this later)
• NEW: Configurable Timezone settings. You can now display the date/time of twts in your timeline in the timezone of your choice! ⏱
• NEW: Monitoring and Metrics! We. now have a /metrics endpoint for monitoring pods via Prometheus 🔢
• NEW: External feeds are now display inline as if they were any other normal feed. No more ugly “text” view! 📰
• NEW: Permalink(s)! You can now link to specific twts by their permalink (the date/time link)! ♾

Thanks!

• Thanks @aaadonai for continued hard work and effort on the iOS App!
• Thanks @dooven for the new README GIF and External Feeds view!
• Thanks @shahxeb for the contact/support page with captcha support.
• Thanks @fluffy-critter for helping with the IndieWeb and WebMention support!

If I missed anyone, please hit me up on twtxt.net and tag me @prologic 😛(or just reply here on Micro.blog! its cool I like it too!)

On WebMentions

Let’s talk briefly about what we did here with IndieWeb and WebMention integration…

So basically as of v0.1..0 prologic/twtxt the software that powers all Twt.social pods such as twtxt.net now support:

• Inbound WebMentions
• Outbound WebMentions

This has been built in such a way that it is actually generic enough to work in general. So if you see a Twt from the @twtxt feed saying WEBMENTION: … on a post of yours, then you’ll have been mentioned by some web page / user on the general Web. Cool huh! 😎

Internally between pods we also take advantage of the simplicity of WebMentions and when you @ mention a user from a different pod they get notified! Also cool right? 😀

It doesn’t really get much more complicated than this really, but if you discover or find any strange issues, bugs or find ways to improve this please let us know!

What’s next?

So now that we have the basics of pods and interoperability with the IndieWeb ecosystem, we can now focus on polishing what we have and improving the overall user experience.

Some ideas we have in store:

• Make it easier for users across pods to discover each other. We might borrow the ActivityPub URI syntax for this and define syntactic sugar in the form of @user@domain.tld that is translated to @<nick url> (the twtxt URI).
• Web and Desktop notifications. We plan to abstract away the details of the notifications you see today (which are just a special internal feed called twtxt).

Aside from the fact we’re busily hard at work with building a Flutter App, iOS Swift UI App and continuing to build out the API and CLI; we will continue to make further improvements to the experience.

As always we strive to stay true to the twtxt standard spec that was published by @buckket back in ~2016. Some new features we are planning including:

• CNAME support and custom domains. We think it should be possible to point your own domain name at any Pod whee you have an account and essentially get your https://domain.tld/ as your Twtxt home containing your feed, config and avatar. Under the hood we would just rewrite URIs for https://domain.tld/{twtxt.txt,avatar.ong,config.yml} etc to their appropriate internal handlers.
• Git integration. We think it should also be possible to have your twtxt.txt file hosted offline in a sense where you still get to benefit from the experience of what Twt.social pods provided like twtxt.net; but keeping the actual feed file (or multiple) on your own computer. Think of this as a “FREE” form of backup, or you just want the file on your own PC!

We look forward to the next 100 💯 users on the ever growing Twt community, and the next set of pods (today we have 3!). Thanks for all your support everyone so far and keep safe!

Happy Twt’ing!

🎉 ANN: Twt.social is now live!

Hey all! 👋 Just wanted to say a big thank you to all the Twt.social developers, @antonio, @dooven and @shazweb 🤗

We now have a 1-click fully hosted and managed offering for Twt.social Pods just like the one you see over at twtxt.net.

Now just in case you’re wondering; YES these are sophisticated Web Interfaces and multi-user clients for the twtxt specification and feeds are in fact regular UNIX text/plain files.

And no, we are NOT turning twtxt into a “centralised thing, quite the contrary. As of this announcement we are opening up the creation of new Pods to new Twt.social Pod Owners/operators that want their own space. This is FREE (as in beer 🍻) for the time being and this in “invite-only” for early adopters.

At a later stage we will offer these fully-managed hosted pods for as (hopefully) as little as $1.99 USD/month.

Join Twt.social today!

I had a very good chat with a good friend of mine about twtxt.net mostly around potential commercial opportunities.

The conversation started when I said I was thinking about starting a KickStarter or IndieGogo campaign.

Why do I want to do this?

Well… Its easy! I actually believe in the original goals I set out for twtxt.net:

• Make Twtxt accessible to more people in an easy to use way.
• Create a truly decentralised Social Media Platform that really gives people voice that is free of oppression, censorship and control.

The last part I especially feel quite passionate about as I’ve mentioned before in a previous post on twtxt

I believe people of all backgrounds, origin or nature are Entitled to their own opinions, no matter what that opinion is.

But I thought twtxt.net was going to be FREE?

Well yes it is and will be.

However the original commercial aspects were always going to be:

• Offer up public hosted instances for individuals and small communities.
• Offer up private hosted instances for individuals and small communities.

The differentiating factor here is that each instance is “owned” and not part of a larger SaaS / Cloud offering. If you as a customer, user and owner of your Twtxt instance and its feeds want to go somewhere else, you can!

Now… I don’t know if any of what I’ve built thus far is going to be enough to execute a successful Kickstart/Indiegogo campaign let along a successful post-campaign organisation (whatever that may be)…

But one can only try!

What do you think? Please comment or come join us on twtxt.net and follow me or get in touch if you want to have a private discussion!

Last Sunday the 19th July 2020 I launched twtxt.net, a Decentralised, Self-Hosted, Twitter™-like microBlogging Platform.

You can read about my previous Announcing twtxt.net post.

Today however I want to share more about twtxt.net and the software behind it prologic/twtxt; Why I’ve done all this, Why it is important to me and Why you should care.

——

Background Story

So before we go into the Why and How, let’s first of all talk about how we go here in the first place.

Back in ~2015 I got head hunted by Facebook™ and after turning them down twice (three was a bit much!) I accepted the offer and relocated my family to the Bay Area at the Menlo Park HQ ala Silicon Valley.

There I spent ~3.5yrs as a Production Engineer (Google it, or think DevOps/SRE if you’re unfamiliar, but not an apt description). Meanwhile, while I was trying to be good at my new found ay job, interesting developments were happening in the Social Media industry. Not only was Facebook copping flack for the Cambridge Analytics series of events, but Twitter™ was going through some changes as well…

Twitter (_allegedly, although I never really got into Twitter myself…)( was introducing new automated algorithms to change what users on their platform saw on their timeline. This has significant impact on usability of the original intended use of the platform. Naturally some users did not like this and sought out other avenues and solutinos.

One such avenue was bucket’s twtxt. As I understand it he created a very simple file format specification, a canonical client and unleashed this onto the world! 👏

This was all around ~2016. I was too busy at Facebook to notice :)

Present Day (2020)

Fast forward to ~2020 (20th July 2020 to be exact) and a few weeks earlier while I was on holidays I was up late one night just poking around on the Internet (as you do) and looking for “Decentralized Social Media” software. I found quite a few; here are some of the better known ones:

• Diaspore
• Mastodon

Some other not so well known ones:

• ScuttleButt
• GNU Social

This this very blog’s underlying platform Micro.blog where I now write and publish longer pieces like on my Blog

There’s even an article on Wired entitled Decentralised Social Networks Sound Great. Too Bad They’ll Never Work! Well I’m here to tell you I formally challenge this and am here to throw the gauntlet down! 🧤

By the way… I might have caught twtxt sooner back in ~2018 when I got back from the US, but I was also (at that time) too busy moving around, working and trying to get bak into our family home that was still being rented at the time.

twtxt.net – a new approach to social media

As I said I launched twtxt.net (the first of what I hope will be many instances) on Sunday the 19th July 2020. I wrote the software prologic/twtxt in just a few short weekends in my “spare time” and licensed it under the very permissive MIT license.

📕 If you haven’t already checked it out, created an account and played around. I would encourage you to do so! I run a freely available for anyone to use instance over at twtxt.net

If you are non-technical and read this far… Firstly congratulations I like you already! Second, don’t worry, twtxt.net is just a platform to voice/share your thoughts, wisdoms, rambling, short-form text or anything else you want. Think of it like a miniature Facebook or Twitter but without all the advertising or tracking.

I believe in this very simple analogy:

If you buy a diary and a Parker™ Pen. If you then write down your thoughts, wisdoms, experiences, rambling or whatever you want to and share this with others.

Who owns what you have written? The manufacturer of the paper? The manufacturer of the diary? The manufacturer of the pen?

🤔

So why? Why should I use twtxt.net?

You should use twtxt.net if you are the type of person that:

• Enjoys writing and sharing interesting things with others.
• Just have interesting things to say in general. Knowledge and Wisdom should be shared!
• Are tired of all the issues of all the BIG Social Media giants that now plague the f*, g* and t*.
• No longer wish to be the product of Facebook or Twitter and want to own your own posts and interactions.

See whilst twtxt.net is brand spanking new, there are a few principles that will always remain true even now and going forward:

• NO User behaviour tracking of any kind.
• NO Advertising anywhere of any kind.
• Absolutely must be capable of being self-hosted.
• Absolutely must allow users to take their data somewhere else and use another twtxt client

So how will you make any money?!

Good question! Glad you asked. I probably won’t! But one of my primary goals is for users to “Self Host”.

What does this mean?

Well it simply means that you run your own server instance of the software that is behind twtxt.net.

If you are a non-technical person (which would be true of most people as there are only about ~1M software developers in the world) then you’re probably asking yourself:

But how do I do this?! I don’t know anything about computers! I just use apps!

Well don’t worry. Even through (at the time of writing this) it’s really early days for twtxt.net there are plans for the following:

• A paid single-user instance of twtxt.net that is your very own, personalised to you, with your own domain name but with all the same features.
• A paid multi-user instance of twtxt.net with all the same features but more suitable to small communities, schools, villages, neighbourhoods, etc.

How much will this cost when it becomes available? Short answer is I don’t know. But I can tell you this, it will cost you less than what you are paying for Facebook and Twitter today (remember that even through the f*, t*, g* are all FREE, there is an implicit cost, which is to say that you are implicitly paying for it as you are their product!).

Let’s just say that once we’re ready to launch single-click hosted instances for the masses that it will cost you next to nothing. And if you can’t pay for your own instance, just use a friend’s instance or jump on any other instance you can find like twtxt.net!

twtxt.net Today

So let’s talk about what twtxt.net can do for you today.

Today you can:

• Signup as a new user at https://twtxt.net/register
• Login at https://twtx.net/login
• Make your first post by entering some prose of wisdom in the text box and hitting Submit!
• You can follow other feeds by entering a Nickname for the feed and their URL in https://twtxt.net/follow
• You can discover other users on the same instance as you by going to https://twtxt.net/discover
• You can find interesting external feeds and even external users outside of the instance you’re on by going to https://twtxt.net/feeds

And most of all. You can have engaging, fun and interesting interactions with all sorts of people! twtxt.net (at the time of writing this) is growing at a rate of ~2-3K requests per day and 3-5 new user signups per day. WOW! 😱

twtxt.net Tomorrow

Now there’s still loads more work to do and all of this is happening in “spare time”. No one is paying me or contributors to do any of this. We do this out of the love and kindness of our hearts 💚

Nevertheless progress will continue and here’s what we have planned already:

• a Native Mobile iPhone / iOS App! 🎉
• @mentions where you can easily see who has mentioned you in a post (we call them twts)
• #hashtag searching where you can see other similar posts that users tag.
• Always continuing to improve the UI/UX and overall user experience.
• Uploading images/photos! 📷 This will come pretty quickly actually because there is already a demand for this!
• Instance<->Instance interactions. Basically strengthening the first-class decentralised nature of twtxt.net. 👌

——

Conclusion

So twtxt.net is a FREE new type of Social Media that has a strong focus on Self-Hosting, Decentralisation without any of the bloat, tracking or advertising that we’ve all come to take for granted.

Join us today!

📕https://twtxt.net/register 📕

–James Mills / prologic

As of the 20th July 2020 twtxt.net is now ready for beta testing and general use. twtxt.net is a twtxt client in the form of a web application and free publically available service (Please read the Privacy Policy).

Really, what is this thing?

Quite a few years ago now (in factin ~2016) bucket created this thing called twtxt out of frustration and worry that Twitter was changing how it worked and there were growing concerns over its privacy model and data collection of its users.

Enter twtxt, a simplified micro-blogging specification and file format whereby each feed is a single file typically called twtxt.txt.

Each post is append to the file (this is preferred for a number of reasons and is more common) with the following format:

<timestamp>\t<text>\n

I missed all the fun becuase I was working at Facebook at the time and was too busy trying to be good at my day job :)

Enter 2020 and my new-found vision for a self-hosted Web

So now that I’m back home in Australia and have been busily working away at Self-hosted Apps, this is just another addition to my every growing list software, components and services I’m developing in my spare time to achieve my goals.

Why is this interesting? What’s the big deal?

So the big deal for me is this:

twtxt and thus the client and service I wrote is decentralized, self-hosted with no tracking whatsoever and no advertising.

The file format and specification itself is really simple and easy to work with and extend. The way you treat content is like you treat resources on the web (like it was always suppose to be, ie: ResTful).

I will likely continue to use mico.blog for long-posts like this and continue to support the Micro.blog community. However if you’re interested in helping me build out twtxt.net and the software behind it, please get in touch. I posted before on Micro.blog about whether it was possible to Self-host and unfortunately it wasn’t at the time and to my knowledge still isnt’.

Don’t get me wrong, Micro.blog is a great service and I pay for it and believe it is worth the value for money. But I feel very strongly opinionated about Data Sovereignty in a world where we constantly struggle with privacy over data, who owns what data and who controls it.

Came across a cool thing today twtxt – A decentralized self-hosted flat file micro-blogging CLI and specification. There was a community around this at one stage but sadly its a bit dead now (like Gopher 😛). There’s even a few “registries” (collections of known users/URLs to follow) such as twtxt.xyz amongst others.

Follow me feed here: prologic.github.io/twtxt.txt

😍

Tube is a great new way to share videos with your friends and family!

A few weekends ago I started on a new project. I call it Tube. I created it for my wife who needed a way to take videos with her iPhone and easily process and share them. This mean it had to do a few things:

• Automatically Transcode
• Upload from iPhone/Desktop
• Share via links

And so tube.mills.io was born. This is the public demo instance I run on my infrastructure, you may use this freely for whatever purpose you like for small videos.

However like all my Self-Hosted Apps you are encouraged to spin this up somewhere on your own server(s) or a Raspberry Pi or even just your local PC/Mac if you want!

It a time where we are forced to live in isolation from each other with our movements restricted (really we should all be self-isolating on our own free will); it has never been more important to have a diversified set of tools and platforms to share moments of laughter, joy, happiness and anything else live throws at us.

Please Enjoy! And don’t hesitate to reach out to me for any support, feature requests or bugs! You can file Github Issues on the Project Page or you may email me at prologic dot shortcircuit dot net dot au

I may as well say something about this madness that is COVID-19. People around the world that are panicking right now need to stop. Stop it! The numbers do not warrant this level of panic worldwide. I just doesn’t. Calm the fuck down.

For the rest of you that are complacent, obvious, apathetic and otherwise just not listening or paying attention. Wake up! If you want our politicians and governments to take away our freedoms and our rights you’d better start waking up and smell the roses. Stop being stupid about this. Don’t get into a Bus, Train, Boat or Plane. Don’t go to Shopping Malls. Don’t think you’re immune just because the numbers are low for young people. Stay home until this is over. Don’t make this into a forced issue. If you value your freedoms and rights as a human being on this god forsaken planet, Stay the fuck home!.

Let’s all let this stupid ass virus die a swift death and move on with our lives.

But most importantly of all:

Keep Calm and Storm on!

My Experience with Upwork in a time where we have to work from home (Thanks COVID-19 !)

Previously I posted about my new side-project Tube. You can see it in action with its Public Demo.

I needed some UI/UX work done to improve the really shitty Upload screen I created, which whilst worked just kind of sucks on Mobile especially.

I created a a job and within a few minutes I got a proposal from Darko who in about a day of elapsed time and ~5-6 hours of work/effort put up two PRs #2 and #1

Job done! 🎉

I paid Darko and also paid a bonus because the work was done quickly with a high level of professionalism and quality. I was quite pleased with the result and now the new UI/UX is now available at:

tube.mills.io

Enjoy! 😀

So here’s how to get started on using RNode on macOS (see my previous post about this).

Firstly you want to make sure your device works. Go plug it in to any USB port on your Mac. I have an iMac here so it has many ports :)

Next you want to run the rnodeconf utility provided by Mark which can be found here

Make sure you already have Homebrew installed. Ensure you also have Python installed along with pyenv and pyenv-virtualenv:

brew install pyenv-virtualenv`

Next install Python 2.7.16 with pyenv:

$ pyenv install 2.7.16

Now go and grab the source code to rnodeconf and setup the new virtualenv:

$ git clone [github.com/markqvist...](https://github.com/markqvist/rnodeconfigutil.git)
$ pyenv virtualenv 2.7.16 rnodeconf
$ pyenv activate rnodeconf

Install the required dependies:

$ pip install pyserial cryptography

And run rnodeconf and view information about your RNode that should be plugged in:

$ ./rnodeconf -i /dev/tty.usbserial-DN03X2YH
[2020-02-06 17:16:19] Opening serial port /dev/tty.usbserial-DN03X2YH...
[2020-02-06 17:16:21] Device connected
[2020-02-06 17:16:21] Firmware version: 1.11
[2020-02-06 17:16:21] Reading EEPROM...
[2020-02-06 17:16:22] EEPROM checksum correct
[2020-02-06 17:16:22] Board signature validated
[2020-02-06 17:16:22]
[2020-02-06 17:16:22] Board info:
[2020-02-06 17:16:22] 	Firmware version:	1.11
[2020-02-06 17:16:22] 	Product code:		03
[2020-02-06 17:16:22] 	Model code:		a9
[2020-02-06 17:16:22] 	Hardware revision:	0c
[2020-02-06 17:16:22] 	Serial number:		1a:00:00:c6
[2020-02-06 17:16:22] 	Frequency range:	820.0 MHz - 1020.0 MHz
[2020-02-06 17:16:22] 	Max TX power:		17 dBm
[2020-02-06 17:16:22] 	Manufactured:		2019-12-16 03:06:58
[2020-02-06 17:16:22] 	Device mode:		Normal (host-controlled)
[2020-02-06 17:16:22] 	Device signature:	Genuine board, vendor is unsigned.io

If you have trouble finding the exact device name look around in your /dev/* for something that looks similar.

Hope this helps anyone using Mark’s RNode from unsigned.io :D

Happy hacking!

Pretty happy with the new upgraded 100/40 Mbps NBN plan I’m no now. Almost getting what I’m paying for ✅

Only disappointing thing about NBN Co in general in Australia is that its become yet another inflexible and overpriced monopoly For example there is almost no way I can get 100/100 Mbps on a Residential/Business Plan 😢