Many months ago, I made a goal to write at least one blog post a month on here. I thought it would do me good to practice writing, and to publish things that were useful to other people. I still think that, however I clearly haven’t acheived this goal recently. But where did I write that goal? And where else have I been writing? In lieu of a hard hitting technical blog post, I’ll give an overview of some other places I’ve been putting down my thoughts.| www.makeworld.space
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about trusted timestamping. Normally timestamping is very easy: simply adding a timestamp field to your metadata and calling time.Now() or similar. But trusted timestamping is concerned with proving that the provided timestamp is actually correct, and wasn’t forged after the fact.| www.makeworld.space
The Gemini protocol was a big part of my COVID-19 lockdown experience. Discovering this underground, small protocol, having long discussions on the mailing list, and most importantly for me, developing software. My terminal Gemini browser, Amfora, was my first public FOSS project, something actually intended for a wider audience to use. It succeeded beyond my expectations (but within my hopes), and I’m proud to say it now has thousands of downloads.| www.makeworld.space
Right this morning when I woke up, before I even had a glass of water, I started reading a blog post by Maya discussing a new protocol. I was immediately intrigued, and starting reading the original post, Specifying Spring ‘83. After reading through the blog post, I excitedly moved on to the actual spec draft. I was amazed. Possibly because it was the first thing my brain had processed all day, but still, I really loved the idea. What follows is some thoughts on the spec draft, to add to th...| www.makeworld.space
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Packaging a Python project into a standalone executable is often a struggle. Thankfully we have tools like PyInstaller to make this easier. Recently I ran into another struggle of my own, which was that it seemed impossible to “cross-compile” with PyInstaller. That is to say, run PyInstaller on one OS, and have it generate an executable for another. It was hinted at that Linux → Windows was possible using Wine, but I couldn’t find any guides on it.| www.makeworld.space
I just looove NFTs, don’t you?!! No problems or concerns, just the perfect way to share the value of art with everyone. And make some good honest money in the process!!| www.makeworld.space
makeworld’s website.| www.makeworld.space
Here in North America we vote for our politicians using plurality, also called First Past The Post (FPTP). It’s a bad system, mainly because of vote splitting. It’s been obvious for a long time that change is needed, but what voting system should we use instead?| www.makeworld.space
The biggest design mistake I made with Amfora, my first community open source project, was autogenerating config files. On startup, the application looks for a config file, and creates one if it doesn’t exist, full of all the application defaults. At the time, I thought this was great, as it documents all the existing options, and makes them very visible to the user in case they want to change them. In the end, this decision created a lot of headaches and is not something I’d ever do again.| www.makeworld.space
Last updated: Dec. 25, 2022| www.makeworld.space