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Todd Sundsted
toddsundsted@epiktistes.comBetter dead than bored.
toddsundsted@epiktistes.comBetter dead than bored.
| Introduction | https://epiktistes.com/introduction |
|---|---|
| GitHub | https://github.com/toddsundsted/ktistec |
| Pronouns | he/him |
| 🌎 | Sector 001 |
Todd Sundsted posted Dec 2, 2020
Running Ktistec the First Time
One of Ktistec's design goals is to make installation and configuration as easy as possible. Rather than multiple supporting data store services, Ktistec uses Sqlite. The database, along with uploaded images, are stored on disk, for easy setup (and, more importantly, backup).
When you run Ktistec the first time, you'll set up the instance, and then you'll set up the primary account.
Ktistec needs to know the name of its permanent home on the internet. The host name is part of the identity of every account on the instance. My identity is "toddsundsted@epiktistes.com"—other federated hosts, and users, send messages and other content to me at "epiktistes.com". (This means you'll need a domain of your own, too.) Give the instance a site name and submit.
Once you name the instance, you create the primary account. Ktistec current supports only one account. This is intentional—another one of Ktistec's design goals is to promote a more fully distributed fediverse. A fediverse with a handful of large, multiuser services isn't a whole lot better than the world we had before, imo. (But don't worry—secondary accounts are on the roadmap.)
At a minimum, you need to specify the username and the password of the account. You can use a single character for the username, but you'll need six characters that include both letters, numbers and symbols for the password. Display name and summary are optional.
Once those two steps are done, you're online!
Todd Sundsted posted Dec 2, 2020
Todd Sundsted posted Nov 28, 2020
Todd Sundsted posted Nov 25, 2020
the strangest looking weather i’ve seen in a while.
Todd Sundsted posted Nov 25, 2020
a fistful of improvements to ktistec
- 6d1925b track a recent mastodon change that requires a signed digest on http posts
annoying—epiktistes wasn't successfully federating with mastodon servers for days—but breaking compatibility in the interest of better security is an acceptable excuse (but don't get me started). - bd6fb4d log encountered uncached external contexts
ktistec parses and caches the contexts it cares about and ignores everything else. this change drops a message in the log when the server encounters contexts it doesn't know about. - 1661226 wire in post reply and delete buttons
posting is de rigueur for membership in the fediverse. deleting is just a good idea.
Todd Sundsted posted Nov 21, 2020
reading: the busy beaver frontier
https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/bb.pdf
from wikipedia: "[The] busy beaver function can be shown to grow faster asymptotically than any computable function."
Todd Sundsted posted Nov 16, 2020
i put the finishing touches on content editing and presentation.
because i want to support long form content, one of my goals was inline images that present as attachments on other implementations like mastodon. my choice of editor, trix, handles image uploads, which is nice, but the generated markup is verbose and suboptimal (trix uses br instead of p tags to break up text into paragraphs, for example).
Todd Sundsted posted Nov 15, 2020
with open source software, things break but you can get in under the hood to investigate and fix. a recent, breaking change to signatures in mastodon recently broke ktistec federation. a few hours and a few commits later, things were working again. of course, i would have been happier if it hadn't been a breaking change... 😐
Todd Sundsted posted Nov 12, 2020
About the name "Epiktistes"...
R. A. Lafferty is an amazing writer. Some people say he writes science fiction. I think he writes contemporary tall tales—so, of course they are going to be about computers and space explorers and other planets...
His style is impossible to mistake. I remember the first words I read in a story of his about the end of (or maybe the resumption of) the human race:
"I’m going to read my paper tonight, Dismas," Dr. Minden said, "and they’ll hoot me out of the hall. The thought of it almost makes the hair walk off my head."
Ginny Wrapped in the Sun
Characters frequently reappear in Lafferty’s stories (the eminent scientists Velikof Vonk, Arpad Arkabaranan and Willy McGilly) (the entire race of the Camiroi). Epiktistes, the Ktistec machine, with a sea-serpent head and the delivery of a vaudeville comedian, is a favorite of mine.
Epikt was a comic to his last para-DNA relay when he rested his huge, boggle-eyed, crested head on the table there and smoked the biggest stogies ever born.
Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne
If you’re a fan and want more, there’s the annual Laffcon and the zine Feast of Laughter, though you probably already know of both if you know of R. A. Lafferty...
Todd Sundsted posted Nov 9, 2020
24 hours later