About
Dalliance.net is Pre’s homepage, index of his projects, updates on his blog. That sort of thing. You can subscribe in various ways.
Projects
Blog
My blog, mostly monthly summaries of the Fediverse Account.
Visit at dalliance.net/blog
Or check out the categories index
Starship Schrödinger’s Destiny
Ongoing: An Interactive Sci-Fi story for Virtual Reality about the adventures of the crew of a flying saucer.
Visit at starshipsd.com
Wordcloud Tarot
Ongoing: My tarot decks have the meanings of the cards written on the card in a world-cloud. There’s also a video show with a reading about politics most weeks.
Visit at wordcloudtarot.com
Tentacles, After The End
A 30 minute animated movie about the last woman alive on a planet ravaged by tentacle monsters from outer space.
Tentacles is complete, visit the archive at tentacles.org.uk
Book: Do Dream Sheep Bleat?
A short story book about magic and memes and reality.
Dreamsheep is complete, you can buy a copy or read it online at dalliance.net/dreamsheep
Book: Yes, The Conspiracy Really Exists, And Furthermore It’s All Your Fault.
A long rant about how stupid humans screw up humanity.
The book is complete, you can buy a copy or read it online at dalliance.net/yes
Handsome Jack’s Showband
My punk cover’s band.
Despite some online-only gigs, the band didn’t make it though the pandemic, you can watch some old gig videos online at handsomejacks.co.uk
Bookshelf
An album of songs inspired by some of the best books on my bookshelf.
The album is complete, you can listen to the songs at dalliance.net/bookshelf
Joust Adventure
A little web-game I made back in 2011 with the hope people might pay me to make level 2.
I don’t think anyone ever finished level 1. Too hard.
Can you do it?
The project is abandoned, you can still play level one at dalliance.net/joustadventure. So far as I know, I’m the only person to ever complete the level. Let me know if you do!
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Diary
My diary from the Fediverse.Status at - Sat, 16 Nov 2024 12:06:05 +0000
Here's what I'm thinking now: holding my account data on my own server which is still reliant upon the master indexes doesn't really have much advantage over using their public data-stores.
Not enough advantage to be worth a fiver a month for yet another virtual-machine at Hetzner, certainly.
Especially when the account would be, at best, a mirror of some of the posts already stored and backed up here on my Mastodon server on Fedi.
Why would I need to duplicate that data-store in a different format just to push the content into their central index?
Seems like I can skip the PDS step and just inject it directly to their public systems.
If I wasn't already in control of my public microblog data I guess there might be more point to it. But, I already got a self-owned store and that one has a nicer front end that actually shows web-pages.
So this one PDS server lasted less than 24 hours. Gonna delete it now.
Status at - Fri, 15 Nov 2024 22:58:14 +0000
One of my test-accounts is tentacles.at.dalliance.social
But if you visit that as a URL you just see a error page:
This is an AT Protocol Personal Data Server (PDS): https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto
Most API routes are under /xrpc/
Which just seems deliberately obtuse.
Guess I I can redirect those kinds of requests to a profile page in the bluesky app. Maybe even a copy of it running on my hardware. Or probably just some local script to fetch the API result and format it for web?
Status at - Fri, 15 Nov 2024 22:34:29 +0000
I guess having a fedi instance like goto-social just seems more natural to me because to me the point of it all is to have a web-page that displays your posts.
Twitter used to do that, and goto-social or mastodon do that, but I'm an old fuddy-duddy web-head that doesn't understand the ways of the app that everyone likes these days.
So nobody cares if running a bluesky-server doesn't actually deliver web-pages that display your posts grandad! Everyone's using an app anyway.
Status at - Fri, 15 Nov 2024 22:16:08 +0000
People keep saying Bluesky is a centralized thing which doesn't federate.
But in fact you can run a personal-data-server.
I set one up to try and figure out how it works.
Not even hard to install really. Run the install script. It sets up 3 docker containers.
Then you have a API server that can talk to the bluesky network. It's doing so right away.
Which is a shame, I wanted to run it without connecting it to anything in test-mode or company-wide-mode first. Maybe there's ways to do that. Dunno.
Searching for the created user-handles in the web-app, even when logged in through my own server, does not show results.
Only way I could have my test accounts follow each other was to use the official web-app and paste in the profile URLs.
Since it's just an API server I can't really give out a profile URL, to have a page listing the account's posts.
I can see a way I could build one, but doesn't seem like anyone else has.
Just like a front-page to the hosted account? An actual public web-page that lists the user's μ-blog posts? Crazy talk!
The only web-apps are multi-column explorers.
Don't really understand to what extent the data on my bluesky personal-data-server is forwarded to the rest of the network. When "the rest of the network" is basically just one big blue-sky server, I guess just to one server is all there really is.
Would mine automatically see yours? Via bluesky's own server, or talking to each other independently?
Status at - Fri, 15 Nov 2024 00:34:52 +0000
Hummm.. Took a few tries and fixes but eventually it auto-updated.
It seems to be including thread-replies though, and not image-attachments.
Don't think I actually want either of those things but not sure about either so it'll do for now.
I forgot to mention in the backup-counting that the build puts a copy of the website in ./public before getting copied top the real website, so there's more than 15 copies. Maybe still less than 20.
Edit: Humm. I wonder if it will update with new edits?
Status at - Fri, 15 Nov 2024 00:13:28 +0000
I have been prompted to remember that I had yet to automate the rebuild of my homepage every few minutes after deleting Wordpress and turning it into a Hugo-built static site.
Which means with luck the index page will automatically update to include this post at some point very soon!
In order to automate it, without having to rely on my desktop machine doing the building, I decided that the server on which the built-website lives needs a copy of the whole Hugo-source-files.
Which means now that server has a "bare" git repository that stores the canonical source-code.
It also has a checked-out copy of that source-code.
It also of course needs the built copy of the website.
So that's 3 copies of the website on the server. 😬 Good thing storage is cheep.
And there's also the checked-out repository on the desktop machine, so I can edit it locally and push it to where it's periodically built.
On top of that the server gets backed up to my desktop machine each night, so that's another 3 copies of it in my desktop backup.
Four in total on the desktop drive.
The desktop machine gets backed up to BorgBackup archive on a separate hard-drive, so there's another 4 copies.
That borg-backup then gets encrypted and backed up to a object-storage system at a cloud host, so there's another 4 copies on top of that.
I seem to now need 15 copies of my website? Plus the entire future git-history for most of those?
I bet I still manage to lose all backups one day somehow.
Anyway: Test? Does this appear on my homepage in a few minutes? Hope so 🤞
Status at - Thu, 14 Nov 2024 23:18:15 +0000
Test-run for the Glasto ticket sale this evening. They release the coach-travel tickets Thursday night before general-release on Sunday morning.
The system has changed since previous years. No more mashing the reload button over and over again. Instead, randomly assigned queue-ids.
They imply that the selection between the queue-tickets is random, but also that reloading may lose your place in the queue.
There's a progress-bar on the page once the sale starts. I assumed showing number of tickets sold, but seems like it advances at a different rate on different machines.
The machine where I accidentally left two windows open never budged a pixel.
The machine where I'd used a VPN to connect via Moldova reached nearly the end before sold-out.
So seems possible this progress-bar isn't tracking tickets-sold but some kind of probability-of-being-chosen-next.
In which case: multiple reloads is actually diminishing your chances. The key is to get the page loaded and just wait.
Others in the group reckoned their progress bar never progressed at all, even though they did not have multiple windows or whatever.
Seems likely to be better than the old system, but still isn't just the auction/lottery combo I'd use if I had to dish the tickets out.
Failed to get through, but then there are fewer coach-travel tickets and they aren't ideal anyway, probably will own a micro-camper by the summer.
Good luck on Sunday everyone. You should all press reload all the time to increase my chances as I don't do that ;)
Status at - Thu, 14 Nov 2024 12:54:22 +0000
Stunned to learn the Polymarket CEO lives in America. New York of all places.
What on earth is he thinking? You can't live in Ameria and allow people to bet freely with their money. That kind of freedom is illegal in America.
So even though Polymarket claims not to support Americans, they've raided his house. Obviously.
I like prediction markets. Better than polling. I'd have made a small amount of money betting on Harris when she was at 30% and selling it when she hit 50% if it wasn't also illegal where I live.
Status at - Thu, 14 Nov 2024 01:42:35 +0000
Man, it is too easy on days when trying to write to do absolutely nothing whatsoever at all.
Not even really figure out what you're supposed to be writing.
But, after days of that, I finally got a draft of a script done mostly late at night as usual.
It's too long, it's too preachy, not enough action, and what action there is badly paced all focused at the end so not engaging enough from frame one. The dialog needs more characterisation. It didn't really go where I thought it was going to and will be more complex to make, but it flows okay, story progressing from circumstance how it oughta.
So there is a draft. At least something to stare at other than a blank page or the wall as I continue for the rest of the week.
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.Two Weeks in Beirut - Craig Murray - Thu, 14 Nov 2024 01:58:59 +0000
Craig Murray's diary of two weeks in Beirut. Sounds like war is mostly about bureaucracy and death.
Spain’s Climate Catastrophe – A Glimpse Into The Near Future – Media Lens - Mon, 11 Nov 2024 16:32:40 +0000
Media Lens on the Spanish floods and the press's pathetic response: "Unfortunately, the catastrophic floods in Valencia, Spain offer a
glimpse of how, in the absence of the kind of drastic action that is
currently nowhere on the horizon, human societies will ultimately be
dismantled and destroyed."
The End of US Democracy Was All Too Predictable by Jason Stanley - Project Syndicate - Mon, 11 Nov 2024 00:01:30 +0000
Jason Stanley describes how democracys fall: "As Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, democracy is at its most vulnerable
when inequality in a society has become entrenched and grown too
glaring. Deep social and economic disparities create the conditions for
demagogues to prey on people’s resentments, and for democracy ultimately
to fall in the way that Plato described."
AnarchoNinaWrites: "Went to bed outrageously pisse…" - jorts.horse - Fri, 08 Nov 2024 12:47:37 +0000
Anarcho Nina explains how to stop fascism. Don't deliberately fight cops, but if you put your body in the way of profit the cops will come and fight you: "There are people right now putting their bodies on the line to stop a genocide; join them. There are people right now putting their bodies on the line to stop banks boiling our kids like soup; join them. There are people right now putting their bodies on the line to stop weapons manufacturing; join them. There are people right now putting their bodies on the line to oppose police militarization and Cop Cities; join them. There are people risking violence to oppose fascist organization; JOIN THEM"
Project Gold - Blender Stylized Rendering Showcase - YouTube - Fri, 08 Nov 2024 03:01:43 +0000
Latest Blender showcase animation, looks slick.
It's time to stop buying into tooth-fairy politics. No one's bringing salvation - Wed, 06 Nov 2024 18:39:55 +0000
Johnathan Cook on why Trump won: "Kamala Harris didn't lose because she's a woman or because she's black. She
lost because, if your political and media system – rigged by donors –
limits the choice to two hardline neoliberal candidates, with anything
else denounced as “communism”, the most hardline, neoliberal candidate
has an edge. Over time, the system keeps moving further to the
hardline, neoliberal right."
Mantic Monday: Judgment Day - by Scott Alexander - Tue, 05 Nov 2024 13:10:54 +0000
Scott Alexander on #us #election #predictionMarkets: " Tomorrow - if we are so lucky - there will be a result. The great
function that has consumed us for so long will return 0 or 1. The
pundits who guessed 51-49 will be hailed as prophets; the pundits who
guessed 49-51 will get bullied out of public life. The winner’s campaign
operatives will be praised as world-historic geniuses, the loser’s
mocked forever as utter nincompoops. Thousands of lifelong public
servants who backed Mr. 49% will be tossed from DC like used toilet
paper and replaced with thousands of hacks who backed Mr. 51%. Funding
streams will go dry. Whole lands will turn to economic deserts. Fortunes
will be destroyed. A few people will make good on their exile and
suicide threats. Most won’t. The Union will either survive or not. If it
survives, we’ll do it all over again four years later."
voter analysis video from onion news network - Tue, 05 Nov 2024 02:00:16 +0000
ha. Very good. really rooting into the voting patterns
Zuckerberg: The AI Slop Will Continue Until Morale Improves - Sun, 03 Nov 2024 13:19:28 +0000
Zuckerberg explains the downfall of Facebook in an Investor Call: "“If you look at the big trends in Feeds over the history of the company,
it started off as friends, right?,” he said. “So all the updates that
were in there were basically from your friends posting things. And then
we went into this era where we added in creator content too, where now a
very large percent of the content on Instagram and Facebook is not from
your friends. It may not even be from people that you’re following
directly. It could just be recommended content from creators that we can
algorithmically determine is going to be interesting and engaging and
valuable to you.”" - Strangely he seems excited by it rather than thinking it of some kind of hellscape.
Pluralistic: Bluesky and enshittification (02 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow - Sat, 02 Nov 2024 14:02:41 +0000
Cory Doctorow: "
I don't know why Bluesky hasn't added the federation systems that
would enable freedom of exit to its service. Perhaps there are excellent
technical reasons to prioritize rolling out the other systems they've
created so far. Frankly, it doesn't matter. So long as Bluesky can be a trap, I won't let myself be tempted."