exozine

April 2023

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 19:00:02 GMT

Stuff happened.

February 2023

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 19:00:00 GMT

So... exozine was supposed to be a monthly thing, but then I kinda forgot about it... oops. Well, don't worry, here's the February issue, only 4 months late!

January 2023

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Hi! This is the first issue of exozine, a monthly magazine about all the cool stuff that our exozyme community has been doing

June 2023

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 17:00:00 GMT

Not very many blog posts this month, but we made some interesting websites!

March 2023

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 19:00:01 GMT

Here's the March issue of exozine, only 3 months late!

May 2023

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 19:00:03 GMT

More stuff happened.

April 2024

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 21:53:26 GMT

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.

August 2024

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 11:54:47 GMT

Introduction to software-defined radio

@dragongoose wrote an extensive post about creating and listening to radio signals using IQ components as the first entry in their DIY SDR transceiver series. There's a lot of acronyms and terms to get used to, but fortunately there's a helpful guide at the beginning. There's also lots of fun math!

Farewell Gradience

AdwCustomizer, later renamed to Gradience, is a graphical application that allowed users to recolor their libadwaita and GTK3 apps. This article documents the history of the project and the author's experience with maintaining it. At the end, the author hints at the project's future.

Using a dumb phone

"Dumb phones" are becoming increasingly popular nowadays as a way to reduce screen time while being somewhat useful on a daily basis. On this post @daudix talks about broken phones and especially about the experience of switching for a while to an old Nokia 100 from 2011.

"Fast food" content

In this post @daudix talks about "fast food" content, comparing it to old content that is forgotten by people and recommendation algorithms, no matter how much effort is put into it.

@cloudyy: There's the canonical event of YouTube randomly recommending a video from 15 years ago late at night that makes you realize how much content has changed from small and passion-driven to mass-produced and greedy. Recommendation algorithms will recommend what people watch the most and younger generations don't seem to care much about quality (I feel like I'm 80 years old after saying it like that).

An Ubuntu rant

@nvpie wrote a rant about Ubuntu so I guess avoid it if you don't want some negativity to ruin your day. Still, it makes some interesting points about stable vs rolling releases and the future of Linux packaging.

@a: I think the root of these problems is that Ubuntu is an enterprise distro. Sure, it started out as "Linux for human beings", but nowadays their website is plastered full of cloud and Kubernetes stuff. And companies (and some ordinary people) need stability. Ubuntu can't just go around CrowdStriking the world, right? So for software to be stable and not break all the time, it can't change much. And Ubuntu can't include every odd app in the world since they're committed to maintaining everything in their repos. Now sometimes you need a newer version of some software in the Ubuntu repos or some obscure app, which you can install with Flatpak or Nix or whatever. Now before you scream 800 MB, the fact is that most modern software has a lot of dependencies. You might not normally notice this when installing packages from your distro's repos since you probably already have some of the big dependencies like Mesa drivers and stuff already installed. However, when installing newer software using those alternative methods, newer software needs newer dependencies so the 800 MB is unavoidable. Lastly, there's no such thing as the best distro since everyone's needs and requirements are different. If you're a company, maybe Ubuntu is best. If you're a developer or power user who likes bleeding edge software, maybe Arch is the best. But also, distros are complicated and maybe it's not even a one-dimensional scale.

Faster Epilepsend

Back in June, we covered SWANTV/Epilepsend, a project for sharing data using a giant, colorful animated QR code. This time @a has made some further improvements by addressing some performance issues, making it 7% faster and capable of transferring data at up to 2.242 mbps. Now your Bad Apple!! QR Code takes only 70 seconds to decode, instead of the previous 180!

December 2024

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 17:26:05 GMT

End of the server

Due to last month's SSD failure and being too busy to properly maintain the exozyme server, @a decided to discontinue the server on 2024-12-20. Actually, as of 12-12, the exozyme server is down due to unknown reasons, but @a will make sure it boots up one last time before 12-20 so people can migrate their data off of the server.

But, don't feel sad... the exozyme community and domain name are still alive and doing just fine! Seriously, just look at our Matrix and voice calls. SSD failures can kill machines, but they can't kill communities. Or at least, not this one. Anyways, our repos and sites are now hosted on Codeberg.

Playing Bad Apple over RSS

@ersei is back with another fun post about playing Bad Apple over RSS. The idea is simple: make an RSS feed (technically Atom) that returns a new frame every time it's requested. But now you need an RSS reader that can smoothly refresh 30 times a second, which @ersei implemented using an existing RSS reader written in JavaScript after many hours of blood and tears.

@a: One of my IRL friends is working on a project to convert Bad Apple into an audio signal that both sounds like the song and shows the outline of the music video when displayed on an oscilloscope. Doing either one by itself is easy, but we'll see if he figures out how to do both at the same time! I also did a computer vision project involving Bad Apple a few months ago. (And technically the song's name is "Bad Apple!!" with two exclamation points, but whatever.)

Moving from Codeberg pages to Vercel

@daudix moved his website from Codeberg pages to Vercel and made a informative post about the process.

@cloudyy: @daudix's website looks amazing. Maybe we should get him to redesign exozine.

@ersei: I have a strong urge to redo my website now...

My Blog Workflow

It's @daudix's blogging workflow. About creation of new blog posts. DeepL Write is mentioned.

@a's new domain!

@a has a new domain that is fun and much more pronounceable than to a.exozy.me: unnamed.website! (Don't forget to update the RSS feed URL if you're follow it using one.)

Distracting news

@d-rens wrote a post about consuming news via RSS but only forming shallow opinions and being distracted by it, so they stopped using RSS for now.

@a: For me, I mostly just follow a bunch of blogs in my RSS reader. I don't read much news, not even tech news, other than the low-volume "In the news" section of Wikipedia's home page. I'm from the US, so it's nice that Wikipedia's "In the news" features a lot of global news instead of just US stuff. I can understand the value in being well-informed in world events, but I also agree with @d-rens's "For the most part I really don't care about what is happening and then I don't need to feed my brain with stimulating opinions and things to worry about that I can not realistically influence."

Colemak

Congrats to @vnpower for learning Colemak!

@a: Originally, the post mistakenly only contained a title and no other text so I thought, there's definitely some irony in making a post so short that I could also probably type it in a minute if you secretly switched my keyboard to Colemak... although I'm sure @vnpower did actually learn Colemak and might expand the post in the future.

February 2024

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 17:29:47 GMT

First off, thanks @cloudyy for reviving exozine and giving it an amazing new design! The feed is now at https://zine.exozy.me/rss.xml instead of https://zine.exozy.me, so you will have to add the new feed if you already have exozine in your feed reader.

The previous issue of exozine was in June 2023, and we've done a lot of cool stuff since then. Here are some nice blog posts written by our community members:

Asian Bayesian by @a: Puns, game theory, and the loss of precision
Dead Pixels by @a: A nice algorithms problem
Spelling Reform is Hard, NP-Hard by @a: How to prove problems are NP-hard and why you should care
The Self-Hosting Barrier to Entry by @ersei
Mirroring Sourcehut to GitHub by @ersei
Representing Concepts with Linked Linked-Data Links by @iacore
Why philosophy should be part of the education system by @aryak
Using my phone as a webcam with just scrcpy and ADB by @aryak
Website 2.0 by @daudix: The long-awaited website rewrite using the new static site generator - Zola

We've created several new projects:

Status by @iacore, @dragongoose, @vnpower, @xtex, @daudix, and others: A status page in Go
Twineo by @cloudyy: Alternative front-end to Twitch
LiteXiv by @peaksol: A free frontend for Pixiv that is simple yet sufficient
Dumb physics engine by @a: A dumb physics engine written in JavaScript
星布 by @iacore: File-based concept quad store

We're also hosting several new services:

CyberChef maintained by @nvpie: The Cyber Swiss Army Knife
Navidrome maintained by @vnpower: Modern music server and streamer
Redlib maintained by @x: Private front-end for Reddit
Priviblur maintained by @x: A privacy-focused frontend to Tumblr
Memos maintained by @x: A privacy-first, lightweight note-taking service
YT Local maintained by @nvpie: Browser-based client for watching YouTube anonymously without forcing Javascript

And finally, the exozyme server had a few technical changes:

We upgraded our storage from a 500GB SSD and 500GB HDD to a single 4TB SSD
We changed our filesystem from ext4 to Btrfs for faster backups and so you can access old copies of your data in /.snapshots
Woodpecker CI now clones repos to ~/.cache/woodpecker instead of /tmp for persistent caching
Website sockets should now be placed in /srv/http instead of /srv/http/pages

July 2024

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 16:34:56 GMT

@daudix does the 100 Days to Offload challenge!

You'll probably soon notice that @daudix is the real star of this show in this issue, and that's because they are doing the 100 Days to Offload challenge, AKA write 100 blog posts in a year. Well, I guess future exozine issues will have no shortage of blog posts to talk about!

@a: I have a friend who is an extremely prolific blogger, with a goal of writing not just 100 but 200 posts this year. He's currently badly behind schedule but I guess he still has half of a year left to reach his goal. Earlier this year, his nonstop blogging had the side effect of making me blog more too, but we haven't talked as much this summer and my blogging output has gone down too. Personally, I don't think I could do 100 Days to Offload since I have high quality standards for my blog, so maybe I should set up a second blog and do the challenge there instead. Or I guess I could write and not publish 100 posts, but maybe that defeats the purpose of the challenge since its whole philosophy is to just write and not care about what other people think.

Old hardware in 2024

@daudix made two posts talking about using two older laptops in 2024, a 2011 MacBook Pro and a 2017 Dell Latitude E7470, demonstrating that they can still be capable machines up to this day with modern Linux distros.

@cloudyy: There is a lot of old hardware that is more than powerful for everyday tasks but is doomed to become obsolete due to lack of software support. Here's my advice: try to find an old laptop, restore it, put a Linux distro on it and enjoy a good machine for less than half the original price (and help to reduce e-waste a little).

@a: I have an old blog post about reviving a 2012 laptop with Linux. Looking back, my writing style has changed quite a bit and my past self seems a bit stupid in some places. Of course you have to mark a partition as bootable! (Although it's strange that the installer didn't handle that.) I guess in retrospect everything is obvious, and maybe I wouldn't be much smarter if this situation happened today.

One Little Domain

Congrats to @daudix, who finally bought a domain name for their website! For anyone contemplating buying a domain, try it out! It's definitely worth the investment, and you gain more flexibility in switching your hosting provider. And yeah, Porkbun is pretty nice. Just avoid free domain names, sinc you will have problems down the line.

Secure Memory Vulnerabilites

In this post, @iacore explores the hypothesis that the "state of the art software security is to inflict the maximum psychological damage on the enemy." The basic idea is that vulnerabilities are fine as long as they are sandboxed, so attackers get stuck in your vulnerability tar pits. The post also provides a fun example program using this idea. Is this actually practical though? @iacore mentions social engineering as a powerful attack against any technical security defense, including sandboxing. However, sandboxing still has a lot of importance in today's world. A lot of modern software like the Linux kernel have absolutely astronomical attack surfaces, so there will be vulnerabilities and you will need sandboxing. There's an old joke in machine learning that you can do anything simply by stacking more layers and more data, so maybe adding more layers of sandboxing everywhere isn't as crazy and impractical as it sounds. I'm not a ~~lawyer~~ security expert so don't take this as ~~legal~~ security advice.

True Cloud Native Computing

Using Google Drive as a Linux root filesystem, on real hardware. Yes, seriously. Welcome to the future of cloud native computing!

June 2024

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 15:56:39 GMT

It's a clickbait title, but: "Bad Apple!! But It's An Animated QR Code of Bad Apple!!"

If something exists, Bad Apple!! will be played on it. In this post, @a talks about SWANTV/Epilepsend, a project for sharing data without a network using a giant animated colorful QR code. Additionally, it demonstrates that this data transmission scheme works under severe noise, for example, having the Bad Apple contour imposed on the image.

The intricacies of POSIX user management

The exozyme server recently switched from LDAP to PAM for user management, so both @a and @iacore wrote articles about some of the subtleties of the standard user management systems on Linux and other Unix-like OSes. On Linux, PAM authentication by default requires being root or having access to the password hashes in /etc/passwd, but @a found that it's possible to use a tool called SSSD to get around that for better security. @iacore's article, among other things, discusses how it's legal for a UID to have more than one username and its the cursed consequences. I can't really think of legitimate use cases for that, so I guess this is one example where POSIX has too much flexibility. Another prime example is how only the null character and slashes are forbidden in filenames. That opens up filenames to a whole host of sketchy characters like control characters and newlines that have no business being in filenames and just cause bugs.

Static site hosting providers

If you are thinking about hosting a static site, in this post @iacore covers 3 static site hosting providers and the experience using them.

Executable toki pona

@iacore was so bored that it made an interpreter for a dialect of toki pona and wrote a simplified version of the game 2048 in that language. You will have to read its source code to understand the potency of this one.

Hackathon! Hackathons!

After a long hiatus, exozyme hackathons are back! On June 2nd, we hosted a hackathon and did code golf and status page fixes. (Last month, @a and @iacore also implented HTTP basic auth and increased the timeout for the status page.)

If you missed the last hackathon, don't worry, since we'll have another one coming up on 06-16 at 15:00 UTC. We'll have the same options as last time (code golf, status page) but this time we'll also have a blogathon. If you don't have a blog, we can help you get one set up.

Puzzle of the month is back!

We sadly didn't have a puzzle last month, so to make up for that, you get several puzzles this time! Go to our Golfathon repo and try out the problems. Have fun!

Modulating signals in Python

@dragongoose has been learning some DSP (digital signal processing) for an SDR (software-defined radio) project (sorry for the acronym dump) and shared their progress on Matrix:

Nothing more than just my laptop, the python script loads audio or text then modulates it (only AM, BPSK and QPSK right now) and exports the real and imaginary components into an IQ file, then SDR++ shows the FFT of those IQ signals and gives the tools needed to interact and demodulate the given signals

Pretty much the script is generating the signals that would otherwise come from an actual radio, and theoretically I could play the IQ components through the sound card and mix them to actual RF frequencies and have a very rudimentary SDR transmitter

@dragongoose began with Python (which is surprisingly fast for this) in order to learn the concepts and prototype, but will switch to C soon.

Licensing exozine and the status page

We recently noticed that both exozine and the status page didn't have licenses, so we chose CC BY-SA 4.0 for exozine and AGPL for the status page. However, it's not so simple: to license or relicense software, you have to ask all the contributors to agree to the new license! The two projects have four and seven contributors respectively, so it took two days to ask everyone. Fortunately, everyone agreed! For much larger projects, relicensing can be a major headache, such as the Dolphin emulator going from GPLv2 to GPLv2+.

@nvpie's Linux desktop workflow

In this post, @nvpie goes through all the components in their Linux desktop workflow, so check it out if you enjoy tiling window managers and customizing software. The post also mentions some cool CLI software.

@a: I have to admit that as a huge KDE fan, I've never been patient enough to configure a window manager, and I love how KDE just works out-of-the-box. Still, I can understand the appeal of WMs, such as being able to bend the software to exactly how you want it and make it look really cool if you want. So, there's no correct answer to the DE vs WM debate, but rather we should focus on more important debates like Vim vs Emacs... just kidding. (Although I have to agree with @nvpie on Vim vs Emacs.)

Syncthing to sync all things

@nvpie wrote a blog post all about Syncthing a handy tool to synchronize files across devices.

@a: I recently switched from Nextcloud to Syncthing for file sync and the difference has been night and day. @nvpie's post says Syncthing uses "magic" which is honestly a pretty accurate description (in reality, it sends to the IPv4 broadcast address to discover devices in the LAN and uses UPnP, UDP hole-punching or a relay server for NAT traversal because NAT is evil). Honestly, Nextcloud is an amazing piece of software, but its scope is just too wide and their developers are stretched thin. File sync should be their core feature, but instead there's one guy maintaining their Android file sync app, which often breaks with each update. They definitely need many people polishing on their main features rather than adding "AI integration" or dozens of other tangential features that no one will ever use. Nextcloud has the potential to be great, but in the meantime I'll just use Syncthing.

Website rewriting adventures

@daudix made a cool blog post about rewriting their Neocities website, sharing their experience of the rewriting procees.

@untrusem: Neocities have given a space for people to come up with all sorts of cool and weird websites, so I recommend you to experiment with it.

Short story series

A group of friends play Gartic Phone with words, the constraint being, every article can only use the words that appeared in the previous article. Words are counted individually.

The result might look like a summary of the previous article at first, but when you look closer, it's not.

March 2024

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 17:29:15 GMT

The tragedy of a typo

We have a website, exofeeds with our members' RSS feeds merged into one giant megafeed, and it's awesome... except it doesn't work. The megafeed hadn't been updated since the end of September, which is suspiciously around the same time as our migration to a new SSD. Turns out that migration broke the hard link between the output of the feed merger script and the feed file being served by nginx. @ersei made the script output directly to the folder served by nginx, so we'll never run into this hard link problem ever again.

That was January. But something was still off. The feed was now eternally stuck at January, never changing again. This time, after countless minutes of debugging, @ersei finally found the culprit: The WorkingDirectory of the systemd service for the feed merger script was wrong! And once that was fixed... exofeeds was still broken!

What else could we blame? The script works, the systemd service works... what about the systemd timer? So systemd has a handy command systemd-analyze calendar for checking cron strings, and it told us that the timer's string *-*-* *:*/30:00 was invalid! There's a typo! It should actually be *-*-* *:00/30:00 or even shorter, *:0/30. And finally, finally, exofeeds is back, and this time it actually works!

Floats are weird

Floating-point arithmetic is weird, but why? Why does using smaller numbers results in even more inaccurate results? In this post, @a goes a little bit deeper into explaining why this happens and what you can do to get more accurate results without sacrificing performance.

Using PulseAudio as a key-value database (yes, seriously)

When you are holding data, everything looks like a database. @a introduces PulseAudioDB, a lost relative to MangoDB.

Ersei server updates

In this post @ersei tells us about their new server (an actual rack-mounted one!) and their long journey through BIOS problems and broken networks.

Programmatic Caddy

Caddy is an awesome web server written in Go (exozyme uses nginx though, since some of the services we host have official nginx configuration files but no Caddyfiles). But did you know that you can also embed Caddy into another Go program? @iacore wrote a blog post about this, including example code. It's actually very simple and only around 30 lines of code.

Weblate is back!

Weblate is a web-based translation tool that integrates with Git. We have a Weblate instance, but it's been down lately since exozyme now serves websites from /srv/http, not /srv/http/pages. @dragongoose and @a fixed this in the Weblate docker-compose.yml, so our instance is back up now! @dragongoose will also be updating Weblate to the latest version soon, so stay tuned.

No more explore page chaos

The exozyme explore page used to be a chaotic jumble of hosted services, projects, and personal websites. @nvpie, @a, @iacore, and @codedotjs redesigned the page to be sorted into categories and formatted with an HTML table, so it should be easier on your eyes and brain now. Since some of our members have personal websites hosted on other servers, the personal websites section now lists those as well, so go check them out!

Monthly puzzle: Origami

Let's say you have a square piece of paper (so yes, you should obtain a square piece of paper right now). It's pretty easy to fold the paper in half: bring one side of the square to the opposite side and make a crease down the middle of the paper. It's also easy to fold the paper into fourths: fold the side over so that it lines up with the crease you just made in the middle. You can repeat this process to divide a square into any power of two. But what about folding the paper into thirds? Obviously, you aren't allowed to use a ruler, but you can and should use your brain!

Here's your next task. Squares are great and all, but triangles are cool too. Try folding an equilateral triangle starting from a square piece of paper. In fact, origami is more powerful than traditional compass and straightedge constructions, and you can fold any regular n-gon out of a square piece of paper, but let's just keep it simple for now and fold a triangle.

And finally, if you managed to survive those previous tasks, try folding a 3-4-5 right triangle. Good luck! The solutions will be published in next month's issue.

May 2024

Sat, 04 May 2024 21:31:10 GMT

Shutdown of Nextcloud and PeerTube instances

As @a stated in our announcements channel on matrix, the Nexcloud and PeerTube instances will be shut down, as they require more maintenance and few people use them. They will be available until at least May 14 so users could export their data, after that all remaining files on Nextcloud will be moved to the home directory of each user.

April Fools' day puzzle code

@a has released the source code for the April Fools puzzle, which is quite interesting and includes some more explanations about the puzzle.

Avoiding Confusion for Smarter Exploration

In this post, @iacore describes an algorithm for smarter exploration by picking actions wisely to avoid confusion instead of using the brute force approach.

A solar eclipse

In this post, @a reviews the total eclipse visible across the eastern US, including photos and almost a 5 hour trip.

Rules of Self Expression

@iacore wrote a post about representing concepts and self-expression using tuples, drawing inspiration from Lojban, Toki Pona, and RDF. RDF (which uses 3-tuples) is infamously arcane and not ergonomic, so it's interesting that using 4-tuples instead can make a big difference.

Replacing LDAP with PAM on exozyme

The day is nigh: LDAP will soon be vanquished to its shadowy lair, never to be seen again! More seriously though, in a few weeks, exozyme will be switching our user management system from LDAP to Linux PAM since LDAP is a huge nightmare. This won't cause any user-facing changes, other than that you can now use commands like chsh and chfn instead of ldapvi.

November 2024

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 15:59:45 GMT

CATASTROPHIC SSD FAILURE 😭

From @a on Matrix:

exozyme is finally back again after a 487-hour long outage! 🎉😸 However... I'm verry sorry to say that there was some data loss, namely /home which only had a backup from one year ago. My big mistake was buying a 4TB drive that was way too big since our data expands to fill the available space and it's just too unwieldy to back up that entire drive. Welp, that 4TB drive is now completely dead and I'm gonna try recovering files from it but don't count on that. Anyways, that was my first-ever SSD failure and it was awful so I hope I've learned something from it and the exozyme server is now using two 1TB drives in RAID1 (more details at https://git.exozy.me/exozyme/exozyme/wiki/Storage). The other (much less important) lost directories were /opt /var/log /nix. I'm also gonna be working on reducing the disk I/O on the server, for instance by limiting the size of Matrix rooms that you can join (I'll take exceptions for this by request).

No IP? No Problem!

@ersei wrote a useful blog post about using Wireguard to tunnel a server to a VPS with a public IPv4 address.

@a: I have a free VPS sitting around doing nothing, so I might follow this guide to put it to good use!

@daudix's blog name

@daudix's blog now has a new name!

@untrusem's new website!

@untrusem finally has a website at untrusem.codeberg.page! Congrats! They also have an RSS feed and two blog posts, including this one about conquering their fear of regex.

@a: If you want more regex fun, check out Regex Crossword.

An Obscure Chinese OS Saved My Computer From Saddam Hussein's LinkedIn

A whimsical and mostly true post by @a about Firefox, Saddam Hussein's LinkedIn, and a random Chinese Linux distribution. Kind of an ominous prelude to the SSD failure later this month.

@daudix:

It can't sort, or can it?

@a made a short post talking about the "ICan'tBelieveItCanSort" algorithm with a visualization of how it works.

October 2024

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:13:01 GMT

KDE virtual keyboard stuff.

It's @a solving a problem: calling into DBus to switch IME on Wayland. It is interesting to read about DBus's type system. It looks like messagepack.

Update on @daudix's break

Life update from @daudix. Is essentially a list of things they did.

Weekly voice calls!

exozyme had a hackthon on September 22. This time around 5 to 6 people joined and people talked about many subjects and it was overall a cozy talk session.

@untrusem: I had fun, I mean emacs is the best editor...

@iacore: ha! "hackathon"

We tried something similar on October 12 and decided to make this a new weekly thing which you can read more about here.

Happy birthday @daudix!

You can read all about it here. There's even a nice triangle/staircase pattern!

Breaking up geometric shapes for a gentler viewing experience

In this post, @iacore hypothesizes that human brains are not optimized for clean, geometric shapes, and rather for jagged, stacked shapes. Thus, fonts should "make you think of grass" rather than being more geometric, and the post uses one such font to demonstrate.

@a: I don't really prefer the font in this post to the site's usual font, so maybe this depends on the person.

Popular culture terms and mathematical terms

@iacore wrote about popular culture and mathematical terms for the same concepts.

@iacore's self introduction

It's a self introduction by @iacore.

@a: There's so much fascinating stuff in here, but my favorite section is the one about the importance of being able to go up and down the abstraction ladder. And maybe individuals don't necessarily need to be good at this skill, but we can put people comfortable with differing levels of abstraction together into a team?

Server announcements

We blocked xrdp's port 3389 in the firewall to stop bots from spamming that port, so if you're using a RDP client, first forward port 3389 over SSH. We also discontinued JupyterHub.

Remote music library with WebDAV and MPD

In this post @vnpower shows a very interesting and creative way of sharing a music library with WebDAV and MPD for playing it back anywhere.

Puzzle of the month

@vnpower wrote a puzzle on the wiki page for Navidrome. It's a nice puzzle!

Random unrelated news

For whatever reason, the week of October 7th had a lot of major releases, including Ubuntu, Python, Mastodon, and KDE Plasma. The Python 3.13 release has two fascinating experimental features: a GIL-free mode and a JIT. These features don't make Python much faster currently, but hopefully they'll get a lot better in future releases, cause Python is just so... freaking.. slow... sometimes.

September 2024

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 14:50:54 GMT

Downloading deleted Unsplash photos

@daudix made a short post about downloading deleted images from Unsplash, with a little help from the Wayback Machine, in the original quality.

Taking a Short Break

@daudix explains their plans to take a short break from various internet things.

@a: I think that's a great idea. I took a break from email and chats and stuff during my two week vacation and I definitely don't regret that.

More Vacation Photos

@a wrote a post with some photos from a recent vacation, with lots of foxes and cats. There are other photos too, but of course the cute small mammals are the real star of the show.

Reaching consensus with gossip and pruning semi-lattice

Two well-known methods for collaborative editing are the operational transformation (OT) and the conflict-free replicated data type (CRDT), but what if you could have the advantages of both? @iacore wrote a post about the sync9 algorithm which is kind of like a CRDT+OT and uses the antimatter algorithm to prune history. The post also explains some other cool ideas for consensus and collaborative editing.

1+2-3*4/5=22

@vnpower wrote about a seemingly straightforward puzzle and how they solved it.

@a: I found a different solution but it's slightly cheating: -1²²÷2×4+5=3

Return of puzzle of the month!

Thanks to @vnpower, we have a new puzzle for this month!

April 2025

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 01:11:56 GMT

exocon25!

At the end of March, we had a virtual conference, exocon!

Passing integers on 64-bits machines

Many modern computers use 64-bit architectures with 64-bit registers, but languages like C have 32-bit ints. So what do the other 32 bits contain when you load a 32-bit into a 64-bit register? @xtex explains this and more in a blog post.

@a: RISC-V was mentioned, yay!

The Only Correct Way to Open Bananas (100% Reliable Confirmed)

It's a silly guide for how to open bananas by @a.

We need an LLVM project for browser engines

Web browsers are insanely complicated. Sure, there's dozens of different web browsers out there, but they're mostly all just Chrome in disguise, using the Blink browser engine underneath. @slightknack proposes we need an LLVM project for browser engines, since LLVM democratized writing compilers by providing components and tools to do a lot of the heavy lifting. What if we had something similar for browsers?

@a: This is a bit of a tangent, but Chawan is a browser with a custom engine that runs in a terminal (and can even display images)! Sure, it doesn't support lots of modern web features, but hey this website at least works in Chawan!

GUIX OS!!

@untrusem wrote a short post about switching to Guix OS, which is kinda like NixOS but using Guile Scheme instead.

@a: I switched to NixOS recently and I'm now a huge fan of atomic updates (I've accidentally broken two Linux machines by interrupting them during updates) and rollback (for something as important as my OS, it's really nice to be able to undo changes). And yeah as @untrusem said, it's really cool to have my entire OS configuration defined in just a few files.

February 2025

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 20:41:13 GMT

Reasoning models

@slightknack wrote a blog post experimenting with applying the DeepSeek-R1 techniques to the open weights Llama 3.2 model, specifically using it to solve Project Euler problems.

Restaurant review

@a wrote a blog post reviewing a restaurant in Boston called Ali's Uyghur Kitchen, which serves Uyghur cuisine, a blend of Chinese, Islamic, and Central Asian styles.

@cloudyy: reading this post before dinner was not a good idea... If I am ever near Boston, I would definitely go to this restaurant.

Book reviews

@a wrote two blog posts reviewing two interesting books. One contains every single Unicode character and the other is about a manga that teaches the basics of SQL databases.

@cloudyy: I had heard about this manga series in the past, but I had no idea that it was actually a real thing.

Self-hosting and moving from sr.ht to a small VPS

@d-rens wrote a blog post talking about the move from sr.ht pages to a small Hetzner VPS and using nginx.

Online accounts stuff

Several of our members wrote posts about various online account-related stuff: @daudix, @vnpower and @xtex.

Why have goals

@iacore wrote a pretty philosophical short post about why we have goals and dreams and recommends the ancient Chinese book 道德經 (Dao De Jing).

@a: I also like 道德經 but I personally think the book 莊子 (Zhuangzi) is even better. Same genre and time period, but it has lots of funny parables, talking animals, and deep philosophy.

January 2025

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 21:02:24 GMT

exozyme year in review

@ersei: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. This year was certainly hectic for exozyme. Despite the death of the server, catastrophic data loss, and our members' priority shifts, the community is stronger than ever. Exozyme wasn't just a pubnix, but it's a community, and I'm glad to be a part of it.

@untrusem: I joined exozyme this year, and It has been a awesome experience since then, the Community helped me make my website and I am learning a great amount from them, Heck! I even wrote a post I never published. Even Though the server is no more but as @iacore says "i feel like, where we end up matters less than the friends we made along the way"

Backup Considerations

@d-rens wrote a post about backing up their laptop so that it can be replicated in 30 minutes if in case they lose or damage it.

@a: Do you have backups? You should! I learned that hard way. I also recently lost my phone, but luckily I have proper backups now (and I found my phone again in the end anyways). I also wrote a short post about my backup strategy.

One day with Zig, Raylib, and jj

@slightknack spent his winter break writing a simple game with Zig and raylib and also used the Jujutsu version control system instead of (or more accurately on top of) Git.

@a: To be honest I spent way too long trying to figure out how to play the Scrabble demo before realizing it's just a board and not actually a game.

exozyme branded power supply

A while back @dragongoose designed a guitar pedal power supply and showed how easy and cheap it is to make one compared to buying one off the shelf.

@ersei's December updates

@ersei wrote a blog post about a bunch of other miscellaneous and smaller projects that didn't have their own posts, such as server RAM upgrades, DoH with Unboud behind Nginx, and more.

Year 2025 Resolutions

@vnpower published a list of the things they want to achieve or do in future, be it getting better at Japanese or reading more books, coding more or quitting Discord and Youtube.

@untrusem: I quit discord 2 years ago and I am very happy with that decision.

Quitting caffeine

@d-rens wrote a blog post about quitting caffeine, whether in coffee or tea, and shared the experience of how they felt without it for a few days.

@a: I occasionally drink bubble tea and it always messed up my sleep schedule, so yeah, it's probably a good thing to not consume too much caffeine. Or maybe it depends on the person.

Fenwick Trees are Awesome!

@a wrote a post about a data structure called Fenwick trees and some cool things you can do with it.

July 2025

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 22:30:42 GMT

"Bad Apple!!" But It's a Lean Tactic

Did you know that Lean is a programming language whose language server allows you to play Bad Apple in your editor? It achieves this by ... lagging really hard. But @a has a performance fix! You should try out Lean for this very reason.

Networked tuple set with authenticated elements

In this post, @iacore explores some interesting ideas for solving one of the core problems of federated protocols, namely graph data replication, using tuples with authenticated elements.

@daudix's New Era

@daudix recently made some changes to their website, including a new theme and hosting provider. It's a "new era" for their site!

@a: Since this is the exozyme magazine, you could similarly divide exozyme into eras based on homepage's lore section, such as the very beginning of exozyme, when people from around the world started joining, and after the Great SSD Disaster of 2024 and discontinuation of the exozyme server. The dividing line between the second and third eras is very clear but the line between the first and second is very fuzzy and more of a gradient, so maybe eras isn't quite the right way to think about the history of some things.

Learning the Toki Pona language

Toki Pona is a (spoken) language with only ~120 words and very simple grammar. In this post, @haydenwu shares how they learned the language in two weeks.

June 2025

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 14:06:44 GMT

@vnpower's software list v2

It's a sequel to @vnpower's original list.

Compiling a Neural Net to C for a 1,744x speedup

In this post, @slightknack trained a logic-gate-based neural network to learn Conway's Game of Life. But since logic gates are just boolean functions, they can be translated to C and 64 bits can be packed into an integer to parallelize the network. The speedup? An incredible 1744x!

Types as relations

@iacore created a relational logic system and formalized it that is somewhat similar to lambda calculus and interaction nets.

The compose key

Ever had trouble typing accented characters or diacritics? @d-rens wrote a [post about using a compose key] for this on Linux.

@a: I love compose keys (ever since I tried out WinCompose back in 2018)! Mine is currently set to caps lock. I use it sometimes for typing pīnyīn (ex: Compose+c"u for ǚ) and random symbols (ex: Compose+? for ☭). Also, I didn't know about :dig in Vim!

@ersei: I found compose keys to be kinda restrictive so I'm using keyd to do that instead.

Gewissenhaftigkeit

Ah yes, the joy of crazy compound words in German. Find out what that word means in this post by @d-rens.

March 2025

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 04:55:45 GMT

Restaurant review, part 2 and 3

@a tried all the items on the Ali's menu and wrote about it here and here.

Codeberg's most popular users

@vnpower wrote a blog post about experimenting with the Forgejo API to organize users based on their follower count, which showed some pretty interesting results and unfortunately a lot of bots.

@cloudyy: The number one on the list is a Brazilian who offers some programming and shell courses, some for free. I didn't know him, but maybe I should check him out in my spare time.

@a: YAAAYYY I'M IN THE TOP 25! Whatever. Anyways, I was worried at first that this program would overwhelm Codeberg, which has been pretty flaky lately, but if it's spaced over 6 hours it should be OK.

Exploring formal verification

@a has been playing around with the Dafny verification language and proved a toy sorting program, a mathematical monstrosity, and a flash cards app.

@xtex: Is there a programming language that combines the concept of ownership/lifetime from Rust, the type as first-level citizen and powerful compile-time evaluation of Zig and the verification awareness from Lean? 🤔

@a: You might be interested in Dafny, where the verification (basically compile-time) and runtime code are written using the same syntax except that verification-related computation is marked with the ghost keyword, which avoids the statics-dynamics biformity problem.

A short post to praise NixOS

Yet another exozyme member has switched over to NixOS, this time @vnpower!

@a: Oh noooo now I'm gonna feel peer-pressured to switch as well...

Managing a troop of repositories

@xtex wrote a post about forking multi-repo software projects such as MediaWiki. There are a bunch of different options for doing this using some fancy Git features.

@a: "Troop" is a fun word, usually used for groups of monkeys! It's kinda ridiculous though that English has so many words for groups of animals (collective nouns) although no one will complain if you say "a group of monkeys" or "a group of fish" rather than "troop" and "school" respectively.

Securing a Pi-hole instance

@cloudyy was running an open DNS resolver using Pi-hole which kept getting slammed by bots. So, their solution was to blacklist all clients by default and they wrote a Rust program to use a password and the Pi-hole API to whitelist devices.

The Future is Niri

There's a new Wayland window manager in town, Niri, and it's not a tiling window manager but rather a new innovative design! @ersei gave it a try and liked it a lot more than Sway.

@a: I've a huge KDE fan so I've never really gotten into standalone window managers (although I have tried using only KWin without the rest of KDE). Niri however sounds like a cool new paradigm so maybe I should give it a try sometime? @ersei said their laptop's battery life increased by an incredible two hours so that's another reason to try it. Anecdotally I think my laptop's battery life lasts longer if I close Firefox when I'm not using it instead of leaving it in the background, but it's not as extreme as 2 hours.

Review: The Sun Also Rises

@d-rens wrote a review of Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises.

@a: It sounds pretty interesting, so I really should read more books.

Fixing the exozine CI

The Codeberg team finally figured out why our CI is failing! Thanks!

May 2025

Thu, 01 May 2025 15:05:12 GMT

Fish

@daniel recommends the Fish shell after a year of use.

@a: You should try Fish too! It's awesome.

Implementing site-wide search using Aider and MiniLM

@iacore wrote a search tool using text embeddings for their website and described the whole development process in a blog post. Featuring vibe coding, function-as-a-service, Cloudflare, and other modern stuff.

@a: Is this the future of coding? I hope not. At least the final product is nice. It even works using my website's sitemap!

planar-incr-embed concepts deep dive

@fogti has been working on the routing backend for Topola, a topological router for PCBs, and wrote an in-depth introduction to the concepts and algorithms that they developed. It's nice to see Voronoi diagrams used for a cool practical application!

Fixing our CI (again)

Once again... the CI for the exozyme repos broke. Fortunately, the Codeberg team was as helpful as always and found the problem.