early_riser

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

A wiki is probably what you want. I was going to suggest tvtropes, which is great for, say, a list of every superhero with X-ray vision, or every work of fiction containing dwarves, but I'm not sure that fits what you want.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I just checked this out. It's not quite what I'm looking for right now but it does answer my question as asked. I can see it coming in handy later.

 

I want to create, sort, filter, query, update, etc. hierarchical data like JSON or XML or YAML with the same ease as a spreadsheet. Does such a thing exist?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

When you say it like that, it sounds really mundane.

Ignoring the how of it all, here's how I imagine it working subjectively. They have a much wider visible spectrum compared to humans, but they can't perceive the whole thing all at once. They have four pairs of nictitating membranes that act like bandpass filters. Between the bandpass membranes and signal processing in the brain, they "tune" to different spectra, and can even narrow the bandwidth of the received signal. They can sense light polarization by aligning or misaligning their eyes to the direction of polarization, and because their eyes don't rely on focusing a light to a point, they can stare at the sun without harm or discomfort.

Subjectively, they have no fixed concept of color, as objects appear different depending on how their eyes are tuned. Their languages lack simple color words, and must rely on analogies to objects that are similarly colored, much like most (Western) languages have no simple terms to describe odors beyond relating them to their sources ("earthy", "fruity", "floral", etc).

The low-end of their eyes' frequency range isn't set, but they can at least see thermal radiation emitted by living bodies, and the high end is set at the threshold of ionizing radiation. Because their eyes work equally well during the day and at night, they and other species in their clade that share the same eye structure are neither nocturnal nor diurnal, and have active and rest periods that do not sync with the day-night cycle. Upon achieving sapience and developing a structured society with the concept of timekeeping, they do not use different time zones.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

This would be a receive-only biological system evolved by a species of alien critters to serve as eyes, so not for any IRL project.

 

tl;dr: if you could build a tiny array of nantennas, could you use it to form an image?

My inspiration for this idea comes from insect compound eyes as well as some uses of optical fiber like boroscopes and endoscopes, where light enters a dense array of optical fibers and emerges as an image on the other end.

The idea is that you have a densely packed array of nanoscopic antennas that are resonant at visible wavelengths, with each antenna connected to its own "feed line" which all in turn connect to a receiver that can collate the received signals from all the antennas into an image.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Does fldigi do SSTV now or am I not getting the joke?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Where possible I use an Anglish (YouTube Link) translation convention for alien words since their languages are unutterable by humans (and vice versa). As for how they sound, imagine the quiet yipping and growling made by a dreaming dog. The word in the OP is Romanized (if you can call it that) as GJbfrMr, and is pronounced /long rising weak growl, short rising strengthening whine, chuff, long low strong grunt, chuff/. The root word is the verb GJ meaning to work or to make and the suffix -bfr, which forms nouns from verbs or adjectives with a meaning of a software program or digital service described by the root. -Mr is an 3rd person proximal noun suffix roughly meaning "this..." or "this is a..."

I post my worldbuilding stuff mostly on the CBB conlanging forum, and there's a comprehensive grammar for Commonthroat--the most widely spoken alien language--on FrathWiki. Sometimes I put stuff on a worldbuilding community here on lemmy [email protected].

*edit: got my own grammar wrong.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Thanks! Here are a few more samples:

Part of the livery of a particular spacecraft, spelling out the craft's name, Dewfall.

The word for 'Mech hangar' (Every sci-fi setting needs some big ol' stompy walking war crimes).

Another attempt at a glowing CRT aesthetic. This is the name of the worldbuilding project as a whole "The Lonely Galaxy".

And here's what the writing system looks like when hand-written. The word is "egg eater", which is a very vulgar insult among these oviparous aliens. The aesthetic of the script leans toward the Brahmic writing systems of South and Southeast Asia.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

At the time of the OP I was testing federating two nodeBB instances. ActivityPub requires HTTPS AFAIK.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Upvote for the Dark Crystal reference.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Tiny furry human! The adults are quite striking as well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I searched for “monkeys” and this is the first post across all the instances I have access to that’s just a nice picture of a monkey and not a rant about NFTs or similar.

 

Bought a bed in a box from ~~Dr. Evil~~ Amazon. It's been expanding for about a day now. How long before I can sleep on it? Do I really even have to wait? I remember hearing you have to let it expand all the way.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

an ARES group in a neighboring county set up an AREDN network. They said it worked very well, with two caveats.

First was a jurisdiction issue. They couldn't send climbers up to replace or repair equipment on their own, they had to wait for another entity to do it, this lead to things going unrepaired for a long time, which leads to...

Second, WISP equipment, even outdoor-rated stuff, isn't as weatherproof as one would hope. Where I live (gulf coast US) we get a lot of wind and rain, so things broke down often. Combine this with the inability to replace and repair equipment as needed and you get a perpetually flaky network. I think it's no accident that the most active AREDN mesh is in SoCal where the weather is perpetually clement.

This is all second hand, of course, though I can vouch for the WISP gear not being exactly Ragnarok proof. It seems when it worked, it worked very well, but it often didn't work for the reasons above. If you can locate equipment in places you have access to, I think it'll be fine.

21
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

It seems my interest in ham radio was the result of ADHD hyperfixation that ended after a few years. I primarily played with CW and digital on HF, and satellites on VHF+. My interest petered out some time in 2023, and I want to get back in but can't find something that both captures my interest and doesn't require more purchases.

 

Here's a list of communities related to conlanging (the art of creating languages) and conworlding (worldbuilding for its own sake rather than for a book or game.) These communities are fairly quiet, since these hobbies are quite niche, but I thought I'd put this out there.

 

Maybe this is more of a home lab question, but I'm utterly clueless regarding PKI and HTTPS certs, despite taking more than one class that goes into some detail about how the system works. I've tried finding guides on how to set up your own CA, but my eyes glaze over after the third or fourth certificate you have to generate.

Anyway, I know you need a public DNS record for HTTPS to work, and it struck me recently that I do in fact own a domain name that I currently use as my DNS suffix on my LAN. Is there a way I can get Let's Encrypt to dole out a wildcard certificate I can use on the hosts in my LAN so I don't have to fiddle with every machine that uses every service I'm hosting? If so, is there a guide for the brain dead one could point me to? Maybe doing this will help me grock the whole PKI thing.

UPDATE:

Here's what I ended up doing:

  1. set up cloudflare as the DNS provider for my domain
  2. use certbot plus the cloudflare DNS plugin to create a wildcard cert. Because I want to use wildcard certs and because the web servers are on a NATed private LAN, HTTP-01 challenge cannot be used. Wildcard certs use a DNS challenge. From what I understand of the certbot docs, the HTTP challenge makes a certain HTTP resource available on the web server, then requests that resource, presumably via an external client, to verify that you own the domain. the DNS challenge works by temporarily placing a TXT record in your DNS server. This method requires your DNS provider to have an accessible API that allows the modification of resource records.
  3. Once the cert and key are generated, I place them on the servers I want to to make use of them and set up the web server accordingly.
  4. Visit the websites and confirm that HTTPS works.

There are some other hiccups that I'm guessing aren't related to HTTPS. Per My earlier question about self hosting, I'm experimenting with NodeBB. I cannot get the two test instances to federate, which I initially assumed was an issue with HTTPS. That's a question best asked elsewhere, though I thought it relevant to note because it was my initial purpose for setting up HTTPS.

77
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

I've wanted to do this for a long time. My current ADHD hyperfixation is NodeBB, but I think my questions fit most anything that you want to be available to the general public and not just yourself and your friends.

Basically, I want to host a NodeBB instance intended for the general public out of my house. What are the risks of doing this? In particular, what are the risks of doling out a web address that points to my personal IP address? Is this even a good idea? Or should I just rent a VPS? This is 80% me wanting to improve my sysadmin skills, and 20% me wanting to create a community.

I have a DMZ in place. Hosts in the DMZ cannot reach the LAN, but LAN hosts can reach the DMZ. If necessary, I can make sure DMZ hosts can't communicate with each other.

I have synchronous 1 Gb fiber internet. Based on the user traffic of similar forums, I don't anticipate a crush of people.

I know the basics of how to set up a NodeBB instance, and I've successfully backed up and restored an instance on another machine.

I'm not 100% on things like HTTPS certs. I can paste a certbot command from a tutorial, that's it.

Anything else I should know? Thanks!

EDIT:

I also have a domain, a couple of them, actually. They're like potato chips; you can't stop at just one.

I don't plan on self-hosting email used for forum registration and announcements. I'm not a masochist.

EDIT for future readers:

I think for now I'm not going to self host anything I intend to be accessed by the public. While I pay the internet bill, my name is on the account, and I own all the equipment, I'm not the only member of this household, so it would be somewhat inconsiderate of me to share our bandwidth with public traffic. In general I think those warning against self-hosting resources one intends to be accessed by the general public are pretty sound.

I tried the Cloudflare tunnel suggestion, but it doesn't seem to play nice with NodeBB. I can access the forum, even over HTTPS, but I can't log in. Some quick googling leads me to believe it has something to do with web sockets. The first fix I found involves exposing my IP, which defeats the purpose of using a cloudflare tunnel. There may be a way around it, but I frankly can't be bothered.

 

So I've seen these things mentioned around various ham related communities, and my immediate thought was why is this its own thing instead of an app/website/software? They go for nearly $500 at HRO. At that price it'd better cure cancer.

Yes I did recently learn geochrons used to be mechanical time displays and have been around for a long time, but in a vacuum I don't understand their utility when stuff like ham clock exists.

 

Some text from a constructed world I play around with that leans into an 80s tech aesthetic. FTL communication exists, but the data rate is comparable to a dial up modem. Vibrant multimedia experiences like we see on the modern web do exist, but isolated to planet-wide internetworks. Interplanetary communication is a purely text-based affair.

The text is read from right to left, and is just the word for operating system in one of my conlangs.

 

I absolutely love wiki walking through random obscure fan wikis, but I hate how most are on Fandom.

I think a federated wiki solution makes sense. I could see it as an evolution of the interwiki concept.

 

Here are some very beginner attempts at 3D art I made for a personal sci-fi worldbuilding project. I knew absolutely nothing about 3D art (art in general, really) until January of last year when I downloaded Blender on a lark and started poking around. Why not? It's free. Texturing and shading is proving quite daunting, so I've been sticking with a more primitive style. Kinda reminds me of the show ReBoot.

A star hearth (ceremonial fusion reactor)

Star Hearth

And another one.

And another one

Spaceship (Modeled in Plasticity but textured in Blender)

Spaceship

The planet Yih. It's kinda like Earth, 'cept it has a ring.

Kinda like Earth 'cept it has a ring

Wind fruit. It auto-ferments in your gut and makes you drunk.

Fruit that gets you drunk

Raw tailstone crystals, used for FTL communication

 

Just wandering around Lemmy looking for conlanging communities. Saw this one linked in the sidebar of [email protected] .

I happen to be partial to xenolangs, and the above is a sample of Commonthroat, a language inspired by the sounds my dog makes when he's dreaming. The "Romanization", if you can call it that, is rCFqKqmqn, pronounced /chuff, long rising strong whine, huff, long high strong growl, huff, short low strong grunt, huff, short high weak grunt/, and means egg eater.

The script is read from right to left, and as the phrase reverse abjad implies, the letters are vowels (whines, growls, or grunts) and the diacritics are consonants (huffs, chuffs, or yips). Both tone and volume are significant in vowels.

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