April 2024

April Fools’ Day puzzle

On April Fools’ Day, the exozyme homepage was completely blank. Or was it? The puzzle is no longer up on that homepage, but you can still find it here. Good luck! The solution will be posted next month.

Over-Engineered Novel Crawler

In this post, @iacore talks about a prototype novel crawler built with PicoLisp to, as the name suggests, extract information on novel websites. What makes it different from other novel crawlers is that it comes with a task-agnostic planner. You can find the source code in its Codeberg repo.

Plasma 6 fingerprint bug

KDE Plasma 6 was finally released, but unfortunately nothing is perfect and it had some bugs, being one of them a fingerprint issue on the login screen. In this post, @a describes how to solve the problem after some trial and error and by exploring some obscure features of systemd.

RSS Combine

exozyme has an RSS aggregator to merge members’ feeds together into one stream that can be subscribed to (find it at feeds.exozy.me). However, the software being used was less than ideal. It would break often, run slowly, and spit out extremely large feeds. This necessitated a rewrite. @ersei found a project that was written in Go and 90% of the way there to what exozyme needed, forked it, and deployed it onto exozyme. Some growing pains later, the exozyme members’ feeds are now more reliable!

Yeah, I Skate(board)

@ersei describes their fractional-life-long experience of skateboarding.

Commentary by @iacore: As a sociologist, it is refreshing to see someone describe their suffering with so many flavours (“many” as in >=4). The article definitely taught me some life lessons (or lesions!), but I cannot figure out which are the lessons. Read the article to find out yourself.

Origami puzzle solutions

See this post by @a for the solutions to last month’s puzzle.

Discuss

If you want to discuss anything of this issue, feel free to join our Matrix space and chat with our community!