Tim's blog

Vim Knowledge Management

Tim Chase — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 19:06:39 GMT

Another installment of @hyde's "Vim Carnival", this time asking, "How do you use Neovim/Vim to build your knowledge management?"

Unstructured Data

While boring, I dump all my unstructured "knowledge" data in a simple notes.txt file within my "personal data/text files" repo stored in git for syncing between machines.

This file contains a host of random thoughts and web-clippings. Disambiguations between words/spellings, URLs to interesting things with minor annotations, notes about VPS specs/pricing, book recommendations, some favorite jokes, short poetry-snippets I've composed, whatever…all tossed together with timestamps.

Typically I'll either grep -3 for things in the file (including 3 lines of context) or I'll open it in any $EDITOR to search for things.

I also have a keyboard shortcut in my window-manager (Fluxbox) to launch a shell-script that uses zenity to prompt me for a description, then appends the current date+time, the one-line description, and the contents of the clipboard (using xsel) to this file.

Structured Data

Depending on the nature of the structured usually specific tooling gets used to manipulate it.

Address book

I keep my personal address book in GNU RecUtils format. This plain-text database format easily lets me add new fields as I have need.

# people
id: davesmith
household: smith
last: Smith
first: David
nickname: Dave
mother: alicesmith
father: bobsmith
dob: Apr 1 2015
note: in 5th grade class with S

id: alicesmith
household: smith
last: Smith
first: Alice
spouse: bobsmith
phone: 972.555.1212 (c)
phone: 817.555.1234 (h)
email: alice@example.net

⋮

# households
hid: smith
anniversary: Jun 10 2006
street: 3141 Oak St.
city: Anytown
state: PA
zip: 31415

a sample addressbook.txt excerpt

Most of the time, I find it easiest to just open the file in my $EDITOR and search for things there when I need to look someone up. But I have a few canned queries for doing things like generating the email contact list for our Christmas email letter.

Calendar

I use Remind for calendar-related data. Thanks to recsel and a little awk scripting, I can generate remind entries for birthdays, anniversaries, adoptions, memorials, etc. Then remind can INCLUDE the resulting files.

For other appointments, they go directly into the corresponding reminder files — one for me, one for my wife, one for each kid individually, one for the kids combined, one for the whole household, one for work, one for church, …

I have a cron job that sends each day's remind output to my email, so I have a copy of the day's reminders and todo items.

Finances

I track these as plain-text accounting plain-text which allows me to manage my finances using ledger.

Todos

For a long time I kept todo items in todo.txt format, and had a symlink for my ~/.plan so I could use finger(1) from other machines to fetch my current todo list.

That said, since remind has grown todo-tracking functionality, most of my todo items have moved into a todo.rem reminder file. And I can express repeating todo-items a lot more easily now.

Closing

But the best part of all of this? It's all plain text. I store it in git and can edit it with any editor, whether vim, vi, ed(1), or even (as noted above) generated by shell commands.

If interested, here's the shell-script

#!/bin/sh
SAVE_FILE="$HOME/notes.txt"
DESC="$(zenity --title 'Enter description' --entry --text 'Enter description of clipboard contents')"
if [ -n "${DESC}" ]
then
 echo  $SAVE_FILE
 date +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M"  $SAVE_FILE
 echo "${DESC}"  $SAVE_FILE
 xclip -o -selection clipboard  $SAVE_FILE
 echo  $SAVE_FILE
fi

Vim Carnival: Motion

Tim Chase — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 18:25:24 GMT

@hyde over on Mastodon issued a call for "Vim Carnival" posts, with this month's topic suggesting the vim motion that changed everything.

Buckle up, because you get not one but multiple motions that changed things.

The Boring Motion(s)

While boring, you get 6 motions for the price of one: f/F/t/T jump forward/backward landing on (or immediately short of) a target character; and ,/;. to repeat that motion in either the same or opposite direction. I use these all. the. time. And when I find myself using other $EDITORs that lack this functionality, it feels so slow moving around horizontally.

The Epiphany Motion

While simple, the H/L motions hold a special place in my vim-learning path. Not so much the raw motions themselves (which I had used quite regularly), but because they represent a step in vim intuition. At one point I wanted to jump a couple lines below the top line on the screen. Without knowing whether they accepted a {count} I instinctively issued something like 4H and to my delight, it worked exactly as I had hoped/expected. So rather than search or use relative line-numbers (which tend to get a bit laggy over a slow or high-latency SSH connection) I often find it easier to make a coarse jump to an estimated line near the top/bottom of the screen and adjust up/down a line or two if needed.

Unlocking secondary disks on OpenBSD

Tim Chase — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 18:14:54 GMT

In a recent conversation, the topic of encrypted disks on OpenBSD came up, and how to have multiple FDE disks while only needing to enter a passphrase once. If you install to a FDE root, and then follow the official instructions for setting up FDE on your additional drive(s), you'll likely end up needing to enter your passphrase multiple times during boot, once for each drive or provide a key-disk. Thus began the quest to document how to unlock the root disk with a single passphrase and then have the other disk(s) unlock automatically.

This assumes you've already configured the first boot-drive with FDE using the installer.

Get a quiesced system

To begin with, make sure that all drives are attached and you have rebooted into the system to ensure drive-naming quiesces. I found that using a USB drive as my $ENCRYPTED_DISK led to it being "sd2" after initially plugging it in, but "sd0" upon rebooting. You want to ensure stable naming.

Initial setup

To make the following instructions easy to adapt, we'll set some initial variables that you can change to suit your needs:

root@openbsd# KEYFILE=/root/keyfile
root@openbsd# ENCRYPTED_DISK=sd2
root@openbsd# DEST=/mnt/data

Helpful environment variables

The $KEYFILE points to the password/passphrase file owned by the "root" user, and with 0600 permissions ("-rwx------", which can be done by temporarily setting a umask of "077") that we need to generate with high-quality random gibberish:

root@openbsd# OLD_UMASK=$(umask)
root@openbsd# umask 077
root@openbsd# tr -dc a-zA-Z0-9 < /dev/urandom |
fold -256 |
head -1 > $KEYFILE
root@openbsd# umask $OLD_UMASK

Creating the keyfile

Disk setup

WARNING: this will destroy the data on $ENCRYPTED_DISK!

Use fdisk and disklabel to create a full-disk-spanning "a" partition of type "RAID":

root@openbsd# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/r${ENCRYPTED_DISK}c bs=1m
root@openbsd# fdisk -iy $ENCRYPTED_DISK
root@openbsd# disklabel -E $ENCRYPTED_DISK
sd2>  a
partition to add: [a]
offset: [64]
size: […]
FS type: [4.2BSD] RAID 
sd2*>  q
Write new label?: [y]

Setting up the target disk

Next, create the encrypted drive ("sd3" here as reported from bioctl output):

root@openbsd# bioctl -c C -p ${KEYFILE} -l ${ENCRYPTED_DISK}a softraid0
softraid0: CRYPTO volume attached as sd3

Setting up the encrypted device

Now let's prepare that resulting disk for usage. You can use disklabel to partition it however you want, but for the example here, we'll just create a single big "a" partition.

root@openbsd# DECRYPTED_DISK=sd3
root@openbsd# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/r${DECRYPTED_DISK}c bs=1m count=1
root@openbsd# fdisk -iy $DECRYPTED_DISK
root@openbsd# disklabel -E $DECRYPTED_DISK
sd3> a
partition to add: [a]
offset: [64]
size: […]
FS type: [4.2BSD]
sd3*>  q
Write new label?: [y]
root@openbsd# newfs ${DECRYPTED_DISK}a

Formatting the encrypted disk

Repeat the newfs for other partitions if you created any.

Reproducing it on reboot

To re-engage things upon rebooting, we need to obtain the disk-id:

root@openbsd# DUID="$(disklabel $DECRYPTED_DISK | awk '$1 == "duid:"{print $2}')"
root@openbsd# echo $DUID
c001ba1dc0dedad5

Determining the Disk ID

With that, we can create entries in /etc/fstab:

root@openbsd# echo "${DUID}.a $DEST ffs rw,noauto,nodev,nosuid 0 0" >> /etc/fstab

Creating a /etc/fstab entry

You can remove the "nodev" and "nosuid" if you need those. Add additional entries if you created and formatted other partitions. At this point, you should be able to mount the decrypted drive:

root@openbsd# mount $DEST

Mounting the encrypted partition

Finally, add commands in /etc/rc.local to create the crypto device, and mount it at boot:

root@openbsd# cat >> /etc/rc.local <<EOF
bioctl -c C -p ${KEYFILE} -l ${ENCRYPTED_DISK}a softraid0
mount "$DEST"
EOF

Adding commands to /etc/rc.local

If you have other partitions and fstab(5) entries, you can add additional mount(8) directives.

Finally you should be able to reboot into the new system, enter your main/root drive's password/passphrase, and yet have your second drive also unlocked during the boot process without needing to provide a second password/passphrase.

You can back up the $KEYFILE file by copying it to a USB drive, sending it to a remote machine, or using whatever backup methods you're currently using. Just ensure that you keep it secure. Otherwise, if your main/root drive goes down, you'll lose access to the second drive, too.

Why BSDs?

Tim Chase — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 18:10:03 GMT

Every week or two, a post seems to pop up on one of the BSD-related sub-reddits where I hang out (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, & BSD) asking why folks would choose a BSD over a Linux distribution. Having answered the same question multiple times, I figured the time had come to post my "why" here.

Skip the history and jump to the push/pull

Early Unix experiences (1987–1994)

I'd grown up on Apple DOS 3.3 & ProDOS, then moved to MS-DOS 4.x and following. But then I had taste of Unix via our local college's dial-in shell servers and Unix labs. Using a Unix command-line felt similar, but as if crafted with design and intent. Pieces played together nicely. Programs multitasked in ways that made sense (and I could never do on DOS). Countless late nights via 1200 baud dial-up. I became hooked.

Initial installation & exploration (1995–1996 school year)

After downloading umpty-gazillion 3½" floppies and schlepping them back to my dorm, an older CompSci classmate helped me install Slackware on my computer. That powerhouse 486DX/100 with 32MB of RAM and two 512MB hard-drives (a whole GIGABYTE, baby!). To this day, I still have a dislike of Emacs that might stem from the E-series Slackware floppies getting corrupted, driving me back to the lab to download and write fresh disks just so Emacs would install.

Meanwhile, my favorite campus computer lab held networked DEC Ultrix workstations running X at mind-blowing resolutions and color-depth compared to the 800x600 SVGA graphics on my personal computer. A real Unix.

While I enjoyed having Slackware, the lack of internet access in the dorm room made it a challenge to make productive use of it. DOS (with Windows 3.1 on demand) at least let me write papers in WordPerfect 5.1 and take the files to labs to print them out. But then I discovered HTML. It felt like WordPerfect's Reveal Codes functionality, letting me clearly see what my document contained under the hood. No hidden stray markup, causing images to misalign or change the spacing or bold/italicize/underline the wrong thing. I could also write it in a normal text editor, whether on DOS, in Windows, or in my Slackware install (modulo line-ending concerns), letting it become more useful. In addition to those benefits, while the computer labs charged $0.07 per page to print, I discovered that the college library let me print "web resources" for free. Guess who could point the web-browser at his paper on the floppy drive, open it as a "web resource" and print it for free?

College experimentation

As college progressed, I tried installing and reinstalling other flavors of Linux. Red Hat 8 ("Psyche") & Mandrake had a great install experience, but RPM had issues that required me to manually install package dependencies. Download the .rpm file, try to install it, discover missing dependencies, download those .rpm files, install, rinse, repeat until things finally installed.

I also tried installing FreeBSD (Walnut Creek CD-ROMs, around version 2.x) in this time-frame. However I failed to figure out the installer. With the benefit of hindsight, I know the primary issue stemmed from "partition" meaning one thing in DOS & Linux, while meaning a different thing in FreeBSD (where "slices" referred to what I knew as MBR "partitions" in DOS, while FreeBSD referred to subdivisions of one of those "slices" as "partitions"). Had I understood the differing terminology at the time, I might have successfully installed FreeBSD.

Post college Linux

Now out of college and married, we ordered a new Gateway Solo 1200 laptop. An 800MHz Celeron processor, 128MB of RAM, and 10GB of disk-space! It came with Windows ME, a horrible OS, but with WinModem drivers that worked where Knoppix and other attempts at Linux refused to get online. Once we had a DSL connection in the apartment, I maxed out the RAM to 320MB, swapped in a 120GB hard-drive, and installed Debian which served us well for many years.

Curious about Apple hardware & operating systems, we picked up an Apple iBook G4, the last of their PPC line, running at 1.3GHz, maxed out with 1.5GB of RAM, and a 30GB hard-drive.

The Mac drove me bonkers.

I imagine that folks exist who think the way Apple does. And I imagine that OSX works fabulously for them. I am not such a person. Without support for new OS versions (PPC support stopped with 10.4 or 10.5), the laptop rapidly became a useless brick, unsafe to use on the open internet.

I found a good deal on some Lenovo laptops at (the now-defunct) Fry's. I installed Debian on mine, and Ubuntu on my sweetheart's. They served us fairly well for years of web-browsing, email, light gaming, remoting into machines at work, and software development for me.

The Push: the slow decline of Linux

However, grey clouds started rolling in. Debian started introducing changes that drifted farther and farther from the Unix I started with, and I did not care for it.

Sound systems churned leading to frustration. I lived through OSS, libao, ESD, aRTS, ALSA, Pulse, Jack, and now Pipewire. Each one promised to fix all the problems of the previous standards. Similarly, I lived through a plurality of firewall tech.

Then programs I'd used for years/decades began to issue deprecation warnings. "Don't use ifconfig to manage your wireless connection use iwconfig, and to manage your bridge devices use brctl, except don't use either of those, use ip instead. Fresh installs of most popular distributions lacked ed(1) in the base system, so when things went sideways, you might not have a $EDITOR to rescue your system.

I would open a man page to read documentation, only to find a useless placeholder stub redirecting me to a GNU info page where you had to navigate to different parts to see them, and you couldn't read the whole thing in one place. I've since learned to use info program | less to force info to render the entire document into less where I can comfortably read the whole thing.

I'd reach for netstat only to hear that I should use ss instead. Or that I should stop using nslookup that I'd used for years on *nix and Windows and instead use host or dig/drill. EDIT: A note from author Michael W. Lucas informs me that the developers of nslookup deprecated their own application, not Linux distro-builders mandating change.

Then came the big ones: systemd and the threat of Wayland replacing Xorg. systemd broke detaching in tmux and rudely expected the tmux team to fix the problems that systemd had caused. I would issue shutdown/reboot commands with the power of root (sudo shutdown -r now) only to have systemd balk and refuse to actually shutdown/reboot, hanging indefinitely on some process over which I had no control. Thank goodness for the ability to hold down the power-button and kill it properly. No choice whether I wanted systemd vs some other init system. I could no longer grep my log files because systemd kept them in binary formats.

Meanwhile, I've heard strong rumblings that Xorg will get supplanted by Wayland in most Linux distributions. My window-manager of preference (fluxbox) does not work in Wayland. Many of the GUI applications that I use do not work in Wayland. I continue to hear that a lot of things don't currently work in Wayland. Maybe it will meet my needs someday, but not any time in the imminent future.

The Pull: the BSDs (2012–)

Meanwhile, amid all those pushes in the Linux world I found myself drawn to features that FreeBSD & OpenBSD offered.

While FreeBSD does offer several firewalls, those choices include pf which quickly became my favorite firewall syntax. Originating in OpenBSD, it gives me one sensible syntax to manage my firewalls on all my machines.

ZFS frees me from getting locked into a particular partition layout, pooling my available storage and making it available to all datasets. It checksums my data before writing and after reading to ensure that my data hasn't bitrotted. It gives me transparent compression. I can do instant snapshots of my data. I can clone datasets and send/receive that data efficiently across to other machines for backup. Copy-on-write meant that even if my system experienced abrupt power-loss the file-system remained consistent and didn't require a fsck upon reboot.

FreeBSD gives me jails which make a lot more sense to me than containerization in Linux-land. As an added benefit, FreeBSD has offered jails far longer (March of 2000) than Linux containers, giving them more time to bake.

Meanwhile, OpenBSD gives me a system that feels good. Applications and services play well together like dhcpd talking to pf, unbound, or relayd. And it includes xenodm/xenocara with a base install, and includes three window managers: fvwm (the default), twm (old school), and cwm (my favorite of the three).

Finally switching from Debian to FreeBSD/OpenBSD (2019)

The final nail in the coffin came from a Debian upgrade where systemd took down my audio subsystem completely and started having problems booting reliably.

I backed up my data to an external drive along with a list of the major software I use, sent a copy to my VPS, and installed FreeBSD on my daily driver. I copied all my data back, installed the major software on FreeBSD, and went on with life largely as I had before.

I also set up some other junker laptops with OpenBSD, including that now-dead Gateway Solo 1200, and that iBook G4, as well as my writer-deck, a Dell Mini10 netbook. Additionally, my VPS instances run a mix of FreeBSD & OpenBSD.

Epilogue

Is everything perfect? I still experience minor issues, most notably the audio on FreeBSD doesn't automatically cut over between speakers and headphones when I plug/unplug headphones.

But it feels like the Unix I grew up using.

It feels like home.

A few such sample posts: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Assorted less(1) tips

Tim Chase — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 15:28:50 GMT

"word to your moms, I came to drop bombs, I've got more less tips than the Bible's got Psalms."

In a recent discussion on Reddit I shared a number of tips about the common utility less(1) that others found helpful so I figured I'd aggregate some of those tips here.

Operating on multiple files

While most folks invoke less at the tail of a pipeline like

$  command | less

Invoking less in a pipeline

you can directly provide one or more files to open

$  less README.txt file.c *.md

Invoking less directly

Adding files after starting

When reading a document, sometimes you want to view another file, adding it to the file list. Perhaps while reading some C source code you want to also look over the corresponding header-file. You can add that header-file to the argument list with :e file.h

Navigating multiple files

You can navigate between multiple files using :n to go to the next file in the argument-list, and :p for the previous file. You can also use :x to rewind to the first file in the argument-list similar to how :rewind behaves in vi/vim.

Removing files after starting

While I rarely feel the need to, if you have finished with a file and want to keep your argument list clean, you can use :d to delete the current file from the argument-list.

Navigating

Jumping to a particular line-number

Use «count»G to jump to a particular line-number. So using 3141G will jump to line 3141. It helps to display line numbers.

Jumping to a particular percentage-offset

Similarly, using «count»% jumps to that percentage-offset of the file. So if you want to go to ¾ of the way through the file, you can type 75% to jump right there.

Searching

While many folks know you can search forward with /«pattern» and some people know you can use ?«pattern» to search backwards, or use n/N to search again for the next/previous match, less provides modifiers you can specify before the pattern to modify its behavior:

!: Find the next line that doesn't match the pattern
*: search across multiple files, starting from the current location in the current file
@: rewind to the first file and search from there
@*: rewind to the first file and search from there across multiple files

Thus you would use /@*«pattern» to search for "pattern" starting with the first file.

Filtering lines

Using & lets you specify a pattern and filter the displayed lines to only those matching the pattern, much like an internal grep command. If you modify it with !, so it will display only those lines that do not match the pattern, like &!«pattern». I find this particularly helpful for browsing log-files.

Bookmarking

You can bookmark points in a file with m followed by a letter, then jump back to that bookmark with ' followed by the same letter. These apply globally across all open files, so if you ma in the third file, then navigate away to other files, using 'a will take you back to the marked location in that third file. I use marks most when reading man-pages, dropping one mark at the OPTIONS section such as mo, and another at the EXAMPLES section, such as me, then bounce back and forth between them with 'o and 'e. While you can use any of the 26 lowercase or uppercase letters (for a total of 52 marks), I rarely use more than two or three either in alphabetical order ("a", "b", "c"), or assigning mnemonics like in the man-page example above.

Bracket matching

If the first line on the screen contains a (, [, or {, typing that character will jump to the matching/closing character, putting it on the bottom line of the screen. Similarly, if a closing ), ], or }, character appears on the last line, typing that closing character will jump to the matching/opening character, putting it at the top of the screen. I find it a little disorienting if they fall less than a screen-height apart because what feels like a forward motion to find the next matching close-bracket might actually result in shifting the screen down rather than up which feels backwards.

While I don't use it much, you can also specify match-pairs using alt+ctrl+f or alt+ctrl+b followed by the opening/closing pair of characters such as alt+ctrl+f<> to define a "<"…">" pair and jump between them in a manner similar to the (/), [/], and {/) motions.

Toggling options without restarting

While the man-page documents many flags you can pass on the command-line, you can also toggle boolean options from inside less. I find this particularly helpful when I've fed the output of a long-running process to less and don't want to re-run it because it will take a long time. Instead of quitting, you can type a literal - followed by the option you want to change. I most commonly want to toggle word-wrap for long lines, so instead of quitting and adding -S at the end of my pipeline, I can type -S directly in less. Options I commonly toggle:

-S: word-wrap (mnemonic "splitting long lines")
-G: search-highlighting
-i/-I: smart-case/case-sensitivity for searches
-R: ANSI-color escaping
-N/-n: show/hide line-numbers

Running external commands

The ! lets you invoke an external command. I don't do this often, but occasionally I want some simple reference like the current date (!date) or to do some simple math (!bc).

Default options with `$LESS`

You might find yourself regularly setting a common group of options so you can put those in your environment (usually in your shell startup file like ~/.bashrc) like LESS="-RNe" if you want to show ANSI colors, show line-numbers, and exit automatically when you reach the end of the file.

Other misc

less has a few other corners that I've never really used, but figured I'd document here:

Editing the current document

The v command will open your $VISUAL editor on the current document.

"Log" output

less lets you redirect the output it has gathered from stdin to a file using the o command (or the O command to overwrite an existing file). This might come in handy because less won't let you edit stdin in an external editor but you can write it directly to a file.

Blog Question Challenge 2025

Tim Chase — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 11:51:33 GMT

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

Part of me wants to just record my thought-process and solidify my thinking.

Another part like sharing things I learn in case they help others.

And sometimes I just want to rant.

What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why do you use it

In the late 90s, I wrote raw HTML files and just posted them on the RedHat web-server that my college CS department offered. Good ol' table-based layout and all that.

Once I got my own domain, I looked around at Static Site Generators (SSGs) and Nikola, topped my list. I wanted an SSG that

could ingest pure HTML fragments (which I prefer) rather than forcing me to use something like Markdown or AsciiDoc. I don't mind using them for casual prose (like this) but for technical work, I prefer the markup-control that I get from raw HTML
was written in Python (which I use as part of $DAYJOB, so I felt more comfortable poking under the hood)
ran on all the platforms I used (Linux at the time, now FreeBSD, and OpenBSD
had metadata features that fit my requirements
had a built-in web-server for viewing the site locally
was easy to create an rsync deploy hook to send my files up to my web-server

However, Nikola has a lot of churn, meaning I frequently have to revisit my configuration files or regularly suffer the wrath of warnings and errors at every upgrade. It also processes my HTML source through lxml which in turn mangles certain cromulent markup, meaning my input doesn't show up in output. And system upgrades of Python seem to throw my virtual-env into a bit of a frenzy.

So I've started a Makefile-based SSG that largely sticks to BSD make and POSIX awk. Stay tuned when that comes to fruition.

How do you write your posts?

A plain ol' text editor.

Sometimes vi/vim, sometimes ed(1).

Do you normally publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit?

Most posts take me a while to compose, so those get set to Draft status, and the publishing process uploads the static files but doesn't include them in indexing or the RSS feed. This allows me to read them on my site (optionally sharing the pre-release URL with others) and revise them accordingly. However, once I feel it's done, I go ahead and remove the Draft status to publish it.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

If you count "microblogging", then I've blogged on Twitter/X and have largely moved my microblogging participation to Mastodon.

However, for the most part, it's just been my own site/blog.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

A couple triggers:

I'm working through something complex and want to document it for myself
I've found a fun little shell trick and want to share it
I've experienced some frustration and just need to rant

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

Probably my post on using remind. However, it's starting to show its age, so I should revisit the article and update it.

Any future plans for the blog?

Keep on emitting a steady trickle of whatever interests me.

The fall of the User Agent

Tim Chase — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 16:30:00 GMT

In the beginning

Similar to some Mail User Agents (MUAs) and NNTP clients, the specification for HTTP since at least version 0.9 have included User-Agent headers that still exist in modern HTTP standards.

This header lets the server know what software made the request. But it also provides a reminder that the software existed to act on behalf of the user.

Abuse

Sadly, server-side software started to abuse the User-Agent header. Based on the value, a web-server would respond with different output depending on what it thought the other side could handle. By accommodating a broken client and making presumptions about how it would behave, this User-Agent sniffing led to a fractured web.

Lowe's rant

Tim Chase — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 19:14:30 GMT

Sigh. Lowe's doesn't seem to be able to competently ship a part that still shows as in-stock on their site. Rant documenting the drama follows.

tl;dr order online, they cancel. order online again, they cancel. Call support, get told to place the order with the local store. Call local store, get told they can't. Call support, get told to physically go into the store to order. Order gets placed. Order arrives, installer notes it's missing parts. Call support, get told they'll rush out a replacement. Replacement arrives. Check box, still missing same parts. Call support, rush delivery of another replacement with notes for the shipper to check the contents. Third order arrives with the same contents as the previous two. To be continued…

Round 1

2024-06-02 at 20:10

Great. They have the faucet we want on their website. Stainless steel finish, high-arc, with sprayer. While the brushed-nickel finish shows as out-of-stock, this one isn't. Order it for $172.10 plus tax. Receive order confirmation email.

2024-06-03 at 16:12

Your order has been canceled. You won't be charged. Questions? Call customer care at 1-800-445-6937 email from Lowe's

Round 2

2024-06-03 at 20:57

Strange. Something must have gone wrong. But glad we weren't charged. Back to the website. Still available, still in-stock, still everything we need. Okay, fine. Reorder it for $172.10 plus tax.

2024-06-04 at 08:50

Your order has been canceled. You won't be charged. Questions? Call customer care at 1-800-445-6937 email from Lowe's

Okay, this is annoying. Time to call customer service.

Round 3

Lowe's customer service phone-call

Hey, my online order keeps getting cancelled. me

That is strange. It shows as in-stock, but my system won't let me place this order, so you'll have to talk to your local store and have them order the part because they use a different ordering system. Lowe's

Strange. Okay, I'll call them. me

Call with our local Lowe's

Hey, [recounts saga thus far] I was told I needed to have my local store place this order because of some system issue. me

I'm sorry, we can't order that over the phone. You'll have to order it online. Lowe's

But they told me I had to talk to you! me

I'm sorry, you'll have to call them back then. Lowe's

Fine. me

Lowe's corporate customer service phone-call

[recounts saga thus far] me

Ah, you need to go in person to the local store to place the order, not over the phone. They can place the order and get a manager-override if needed. Lowe's

That's…disappointing. Thanks, I'll do that. me

Local Lowe's customer service desk in person

[recounts saga thus far] Can we order this part me

Sure! [confirms part-number, description, and other details] That will be $169. Lowe's

Thanks, and that's less than what it was when I tried to order online. At least there's some sunshine here. me

A few days later, the box shows up on time. I send the details to our handiman and schedule him to come out after we've returned from a family trip.

2024-07-12

Our handiman comes out, does a quick check that we have our new basin & faucet, and starts replacing them as requested. He goes to install the faucet, raises an eyebrow, asking if I'd ordered one with a sprayer like we'd discussed. I check my order confirmation email. Yep, faucet & sprayer in stainless steel. He shows me the contents of the box. No sprayer, no sprayer hook-up line coming from the faucet assembly. Looks like it's a brushed nickel finish, too, not the stainless steel finish we'd ordered. Sigh. We agree to install the faucet that we do have just so we're not without a kitchen sink indefinitely.

Time to contact Lowe's customer support again.

Lowe's customer service

[recounts saga thus far, providing the order number] me

Great, I have that order pulled up. It looks like it was for a stainless steel high-arc faucet with sprayer. Lowe's

Funny you should read that description to me because what was shipped did not include a sprayer, and appears to be a brushed nickel faucet. me

That's not good, I'm sorry, that must be frustrating. You can return that one to your local store, and I'll ship out a replacement. If you'll provide your credit-card info, that will be $153.90 [yet a 3rd price?] Lowe's

Okay, that's additional frustration, because now I have two faucets purchased, but I can't return the first one until the second one arrives. But at least it's still cheaper than previous attempts.
Let's go ahead. [provides CC details] me

The shipment arrives in a mere two days, on a Sunday at that. So I open it to check, only to find that it's exactly the same kit I received previously. No sprayer, no sprayer hookup and wrong finish. Immediately back on the phone with customer support.

Round 4

Lowe's customer service

[recounts saga thus far, providing the most recent order number] me

Great, I have that order pulled up. It looks like it was for a stainless steel high-arc faucet with sprayer. Lowe's

Funny you should read that description to me because what was shipped did not include a sprayer, and appears to be a brushed nickel faucet. And this is the second time this has happened. me

That's really not good, I'm sorry, that must be frustrating. You can return that one to your local store, and I'll ship out a replacement. I'll also place a note in the shipping instructions to have them verify that it has the sprayer, hookups, and is the right finish Lowe's

Thanks so much. me

Pleasantly surprised they didn't seem to charge me yet again for this round. We shall see.

2024-07-17

The shipment arrives. I open it up. SURPRISE! No, not really. It's the same item. I now have three of the same hardware kit. Time to go back to the store in person, return these two wrong bits, get my money back, and obtain some degree of competency in the matter.

To be continued…

Exploring ActivityPub/ActivityStreams

Tim Chase — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 19:35:08 GMT

Overview

Wanting to dig into ActivityPub / ActivityStreams for a while I figured I'd read the specs and dive in. Having read plenty of RFC specs before, I figured this wouldn't take too long. Boy was I wrong.

This article is currently a WIP so it may get updated multiple times as I learn more and read deeper into the various specs/RFCs and their sub-dependencies.

The whole family of specs feels like the authors wanted a grab-bag of front-end features rather than detailing the protocols with the precision of engineers that write RFCs. The observations that follow document some of my frustrations along the way. Sorry if this comes across a little more ranty & grumbling compared to my usual posts.

On top of all the standardized mess, Mastodon adds its own layer of non-standardized attributes that other ActivityPub software is expected to understand.

ActivityPub (part 1)

Upon embarking, the first thing I learned was that Mastodon, GoToSocial, Pleroma, PixelFed, PeerTube, and other distributed-web services all run on a backbone of ActivityPub so I figured I'd start there.

The ActivityPub spec clocks in at about 36 pages when printed. Pretty manageable.

The very first thing you read there?

The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format. It provides a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and content.

Okay, I guess I need to read the ActivityStreams spec first.

ActivityStreams (part 1)

Okay, the ActivityStreams spec adds roughly another 46 pages of reading.

ActivityStreams consist of JSON data, formally defined as an RFC-7159. Fortunately, I'm reasonably familiar with JSON so I won't go into that here.

However, barely into the second section and we discover that we need to learn about JSON-LD (another roughly 200 pages).

JSON-LD part 1

Based on the spec, the web-server should serve JSON-LD documents with a MIME type of application/json.

And one of the first things we learn? There's a relationship with RDF so time to take a detour to learn about RDF concepts.

RDF (part 1?)

Goody, another 41 pages of reading. With cross-references to othe things like RDF-Schema. I'll defer digging into that for now.

The general gist is that RDF specifies things in terms of Subject→Predicate→Object. The Subject may be an IRI, or a "blank node" (but not a literal). The Object may be an IRI, a "blank node", or a literal. See further documentation. Why can an Object be any of them, but a Subject can't be a Literal? Kinda glossed over.

ActivityStreams (part 2)

Popping from the stack, we return to ActivityStreams. Note that JSON-LD has a MIME type of application/json while ActivityStreams specifies application/activity+json so we already have conflicting information.

However, before getting a paragraph into Serialization we learn the spec defines an entire ActivityStreams vocabulary so time for another detour.

ActivityStreams Vocabulary (part 1)

The vocabulary definition clocks in at roughly another 54 pages. For those playing along at home, we're up to 200+36+46+54=336 pages without counting JSON specifications or the FoaF & Relationship specs referenced by the ActivityPub Vocabulary document.

Looking over this document, the particulars will require knowing more about ActivityPub/ActivityStreams so I'll return to this later.

ActivityStreams (part 3)

The Good

Encoding: The specification clearly states that all data gets serialized as UTF-8. This is good. I've encountered too many file-formats where this doesn't get defined and I have to guess the encoding. It's nice to be able to identify non-UTF8 text and reject malformed requests without having to retry some other encoding.
Date formats: Additionally, the spec clearly defines date formats according to RFC-3339. However, I find the "time-offset isn't a time-zone" mildly annoying.

The Bad

Context data-type

What is the data-type of a @context's value? According to the JSON-LD spec

…the value of a term definition can either be a simple String, mapping the term to an IRI, or a map.

In the case of an ActivityStream, the String form has the fixed URI value of "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams". In the case of an object/map value, the document's type resides in the @vocab sub-node along with other attributes such as the @language or namespace definitions.

Except when it's a list. Wait, the JSON-LD spec clearly said a simple String…or a map. Nothing about a list. Yet the JSON-LD spec itself uses lists as values for the @context.

Fine. It can be a list. Is it a list of homogeneous elements? Of course not. Each element can be either a fixed String or a JSON object/mapping.

So how do you find the document type? Maybe it's the URI String found at .@context or at .@context.@vocab or at .@context[0] or at .@context[0].@vocab or maybe someplace else. Could it be .@context[1] instead? The specs don't have much to say about that.

But the specs could have mandated a single way to do it, declaring that it's a list of objects, each object with a @vocab property, and that the first one is the document-type. One place to look. But no.

What type of value should you expect?

According to section 4.1

In addition to the global identifier (expressed as an absolute IRI using the id property) and an "object type" (expressed using the type property), all instances of the Object type share a common set of properties

Okay, so Actors & Objects should have a mapping as a value, and that mapping should contain at least id & type attributes. Except they don't have to:

All properties are optional (including the id & type).

Would it hurt to make those required? But even worse, according to Example 4 it looks like those values can be strings instead of maps/objects. They appear to be URIs but it's not documented. So if you get a String here, all bets are off.

Links suffer the same value-type issue

Similar to above, a Link like an image can have a String as the value, an Object as the value, or a list. And the list can be composed of heterogeneous types, strings, objects, and maybe lists? Who knows? It's not clearly defined anywhere. This could have been defined once as a list of objects, and everything would fit. But no.

Hierarchy inversion

An IntransitiveActivity has an Actor but no Object. But the ActivityStreams spec defines defines an IntransitiveActivity as

specializations of the Activity type that represent intransitive actions.

This means from an object-oriented perspective an IntransitiveActivity is a sub-class of an Activity. However this means that Activity objects have an Object, but their IntransitiveActivity sub-classes don't.

Type of type

Normally an object has a single type value, a String representing the type of the object. Cool. But sometimes instead of a String, the type can be a list of types. Again, are the entries in the list homogeneous? Nope. Composed of strings and objects. Can a list-entry be another list? Who knows. Check out Example 22 to see this abomination in play. And with disjoint types, you can end up with redundant data, the same value in multiple keys. It's not like this is a specification requiring precision or anything.

How big is a Collection?

A Collection and its sub-classes (OrderedCollection, CollectionPage, and OrderedCollectionPage) have both a totalItems property and an items property. But there are no requirements that these be disjoint. This means that you can have both properties and they can conflict. You could have a list of items with 5 elements in it, yet have the totalItems report 3 or 7 elements. Which should be displayed? It's not in the spec.

Pagination of an (unordered) Collection

If a collection is unordered, pagination through it makes zero sense. Pagination requires ordering.

Should you expect a String vs. a map?

The spec describes natural language values as a way to detect whether you should expect a String-value or a map-value. So if you use the name attribute, you get a String; and if you use the nameMap attribute, you get a map/object. Not too bad. But why not keep that consistent across all the fields (above) that are sometimes a String and sometimes a map? Like that @context attribute. Why not a @contextMap then? But why start with consistency now?

Which language wins?

If you specify the @context as an object, you can include a @language property to specify the default language of the object. Alternatively, you can specify various languages in certain *Map attributes such as Example 15. However, it also specifies

The special language tag "und" [undefined] can be used within the object form to explicitly identify a value whose language is unknown or undetermined.

So if you've specified a default language using @language, what language should "und" text be rendered as?

Markup? What flavor is it?

Some values contain markup. Some values don't. The content & summary do; the name doesn't. Which other fields do? Who knows. It's not well documented. What markup flavor? There are hints that markup in the content field is HTML, But is that explicitly required? And if it is, what DocType? HTML5? HTML4.01? XHTML? Why not use Markdown?

As we'll discover later, ActivityPub specifies a source attribute/extension that can have any flavor of source markup contingent on the mediaType attribute. That then gets converted to the markup in the name (or whatever other fields support markup). But that's a level higher than ActivityStreams which we're reading about here.

HTML markup part Ⅱ

Additionally, if the content is HTML, this makes it easy to bypass user-agent filters. If I want to filter out posts containing "emacs" but someone posts em<span>a</span>cs, a simple filter can't find "emacs" in there.

HTML markup part Ⅲ

Furthermore, inline CSS can trigger strange effects if not sanitized. A content value containing something like <span style="position:absolute; left:0; top:0; width:100vw; height:100vh; background-color:black; color:red">Hah!</span> can throw off the rendering of the whole interface.

HTML markup part Ⅳ

How about other markup concerns like <form> input in your posts? Should this be allowed? How should it be sanitized? 🤷

HTML markup part Ⅴ

If we're sticking arbitrary blobs of HTML in fields such as the name what security considerations have been taken into effect? What happens if some <script>nefarious code<script> shows up in a field's value? If improperly sanitized, it can still allow <script> tags through. The spec is notably silent on these issues.

Security handwaving

In the section on Security Considerations, the spec advises consumers to take care with malicious user-input and when re-emitting ingested content. What sort of care? 🦗 And the exhortation to beware of potential spoofing attacks? What assurances does the spec have for determining the integrity of an ActivityStreams? None. We'll revisit this when we get to ActivityPub where there's some effort here, but it hasn't been standardized.

Privacy handwaving

Similar to the Security issue, the Privacy Considerations section does a lot of handwaving. There's no standardization of users or audience-groups vs. public vs. private postings. The spec talks of "opting in" to disclosure of posts, but doesn't detail how.

HTML markup part Ⅲ

If we're sticking arbitrary blobs of HTML in fields such as the name what security considerations have been taken into effect? What happens if some <script>nefarious code</script> shows up in a field's value? If improperly sanitized, it can still allow <script> tags through.

Security handwaving

In the section on Security Considerations, the spec advises consumers to take care with malicious user-input and when re-emitting ingested content. What sort of care? :crickets: And the exhortation to beware of potential spoofing attacks? What assurances does the spec have for determining the integrity of an ActivityStreams? None. We'll revisit this when we get to ActivityPub where there's some effort here, but it hasn't been standardized.

Privacy handwaving

Namespaces vs. things in that namespace

A @context can have a map as a value, including attributes that don't begin with an @ mapping to a URI. According to Example 3 we have css defined as a URI and then used directly as "css" in the object. However in Example 3 the same syntax defines gr as a namespace, and it then gets used as gr:catgegory further down, rather than using just gr. When is it a stand-alone attribute, and when is it a namespace-prefix? From the context it looks like something comes after the # in the URI. But it doesn't appear to be explicitly documented from what I can tell.

Compact URI namespaces are a nightmare

While this is a JSON-LD thing, it make it particularly challenging to re-serialize an Object.

So an ActivityStream consists of maybe an action with an Actor and an optional object, or maybe it's just an object. And the id might be present or it might not, and properties might be strings or objects or lists, and some might have external schema links with corresponding namespaces, or they use properties from those namespaces directly without a namespace prefix, and sometimes values consist of mappings from language-to-(possibly-unknown-)value, where those values might have some sort of undefined markup (that might or might not have unspecified security or privacy concerns), and to find the @context, you have to look in multiple place.

Got it. That's ActivityStreams.

Except we should investigate the ActivityStreams vocabulary before we return to ActivityPub.

ActivityStreams Vocabulary (part 2)

The Good

The vocabulary seem to cover a reasonable range of activities and objects, and the attributes mostly make sense.

We also get a bit of clarification here. All those "it can be a String, or it can be an Object, or it could be a List" confusions in the ActivityStreams spec get clarified here.

Properties marked as being "Functional" can have only one value. Items not marked as "Functional" can have multiple values.

If a "Functional" attribute has a String as the value and the type allows for a Link, it will be a URI, otherwise the String will be the particular value (such as the latitude or radius). If an attribute is not labeled as "Functional", it can be a heterogeneous list of Links, Objects, and Strings (where String values are usually URIs). Mildly annoying to have to deal with all three possible value-types for most attributes. But at least this makes a bit more sense.

The Bad

Okay, this is a bit of a disaster.

Alphabetization

There are several large tables here consisting of object-types and properties. But the tables aren't sorted alphabetically. This makes it next to impossible to find things in my print-outs. Sure, they have internal HTML links but that's useless on paper. I get that they're grouped by similar functionality, but that doesn't make it any easier to find things because you have to know the groupings a priori to know where to find them.

Same issues with ActivityStreams

Again we see the hierarchy-inversion of Activity and IntransitiveActivity,

Handling out-of-spec items

The spec declares that a Question may have a oneOf or an anyOf, but not both. However, if a malformed activity provides both, what is the correct response? Reject the activity? Choose one arbitrarily? There were a couple other places where such requirements left open-ended the handling of errors and non-conformance.

Simple carelessness/inconsistency?

Sometimes the Vocabulary spec declares attributes as Object/Link and other times it Link/Object. Does the order matter? Why are they different?

Similarly, why are items explicitly called out to accept a List?

As cited above, if an attribute is not labeled as "Functional" (the items attribute isn't), it can take a List of values. Yet the spec for items explicitly spells out that it can take a List of Object/Link. What makes this special? Why not annotate that every non-Functional attribute can take a List?

Speaking of redundant attributes, how about the url?

The spec defines a url as accepting a Link or an xsd:anyURI. But based on everything I've seen in the spec, any Link can just be a String containing the URI. Why the redundancy?

Codify ambiguity

Reading about the context attribute,

The notion of "context" used is intentionally vague. The intended function is to serve as a means of grouping objects and activities that share a common organizing context or purpose.

If your spec says something is intentionally vague, the spec has issues.

Is HTML allowed in String values?

A content and summary attributes state that the data defaults to HTML markup. However, the name can also contain text, but the spec explicitly disallows HTML. This feels irrationally inconsistent.

Some attributes take a "Map" suffix, others don't

If you have a content, name, or summary attribute, and you want to specify multiple languages, you use the contentMap, nameMap, and summaryMap variants. It feels like this should have been used across the board. Use one attribute-name for a String value, a different name for an Object value, and yet a third different name for a a List value.

However, the ActivityStreams vocabulary specification doesn't detail these *Map fields beyond a passing reference to Natural Language Values. The only reference to "Natural Language Values" in the ActivityStreams Vocabulary is the summary/summaryMap and nothing is mentioned regarding name/nameMap or content/contentMap being "Natural Language Vocabulary". They only allude to nameMap and contentMap without documenting why/how.

Additionally, can an object have both the single version and the Map version? The spec only shows the exclusive cases, but the doesn't say whether an object can have both a name and a nameMap attribute.

Start a new Relationship wit' you

The Relationship attribute accepts multiple (and semi-arbitrary) values, some from the FoaF spec, and some from the Relationship spec (side rant: the vocab.org site does a redirect and requires JavaScript enabled just to view the spec; A spec is a ████ text document). Are those the only values? What happens if they conflict or overlap? It's just kinda handwavey here. Yet more specs to read, I guess.

In a Relationship? Says who?

The documentation for modeling a friend request references four different actors:

the actor offering the friend-request
the target receiving the friend-request
the object.subject (the person seeking friendship)
the object.object (the friend-to-be)

However, nothing in this example requires that the actor & object.subject be the same; nor does anything require that the target & object.object be the same. This means that Alice could send a request to Bob asking if Dave would accept Carol's relationship. Or Mallory could ask Bob if Bob would like to accept a relationship with Alice. This seems fraught with potential concerns that the spec leaves unaddressed.

Random acct: prefix

Continuing with the modeling a friend request, all four of those accounts use a acct: prefix on a username. Why? Where is this defined? Not in the ActivityPub, ActivityStreams, ActivityStreams-Vocabulary, or the JSON-LD spec. Digging a bit, it looks like RFC-7565 defines this acct: but none of the ActivityPub-related specs reference this scheme.

Just like, Like and Unlike?

The vocabulary only defines a Like/Dislike activity. A post might elicit a whole range of reactions beyond like/dislike. It might make me laugh, or cry, or angry, or high-five, or any of a number of other emotions/emoji. As swell as it is to Like/Dislike things, it really needs a generic React action.

I reject your answers and substitute my own

When responding to a Question it's entirely possible to provide an inReplyTo with a name (answer to the survey) that doesn't correspond to any of the answers in the original Question. What should happen in this case? Reject the answer/reply? Add the answer/reply to the list of existing answers?

Survey-respondent privacy?

Looking at the result of a Question appears to return each vote along with the ID of everyone who cast each vote leaked in the attributedTo attribute. Is this expected? Is this required, lest folks want their answers kept private?

ActivityPub (part 3)

Okay, now we can finally return to ActivityPub.

Naked Objects/Links

If you submit a naked Object/Link (one that doesn't have an activity associated with it) the server is supposed to automatically convert it into a Create activity.

However, if the message has been cryptographically signed for authentication, changing from a naked Object to an Activity also changes the message's cryptographic signature.

Additionally, having two source fields (the Create.actor and the Create.object.attributedTo) leaves room for a bad actor to create objects with mis-attribution. E.g. Mallory publishes a Create action of Bob picking his nose, and attributes it to Alice, causing Bob to get mad at Alice rather than Mallory. The spec acknowledges this as a possible issue

it should dereference the id both to ensure that it exists and is a valid object, and that it is not misrepresenting the object. (In this example [Example 7], Mallory could be spoofing an object allegedly posted by Alice).

However, the spec doesn't detail how to secure against this. Dereferencing the ID only checks that something exists at that URI. Unless it's exactly the same Object content (which can likely change since we're already munging with objects, normalizing things, etc) it means we can't likely do an exact-match comparison. Furthermore, because objects can be Links and Links can consist of a URI, that means that the linked object-ID could be some protocol other than HTTP or HTTPS. Does my dereference the id code need to support gopher:, ftp:, git:, svn:, imap:, smtp:, irc:, ldap:, smb:, or whatever scheme? Maybe the object refers to other URIs/resources that exist, but aren't properly attributed. Determining if something is misrepresenting the object seems handwavey.

Security/authentication/authorization

Standards, schmandards.

ActivityPub uses authentication for two purposes; first, to authenticate clients to servers, and secondly in federated implementations to authenticate servers to each other. Unfortunately at the time of standardization, there are no strongly agreed upon mechanisms for authentication.

(source) Couldn't have made this part of the initial requirements? Security is best left for an afterthought…

Serve it as what MIME-type now?

The JSON-LD spec says to serve as application/json while the ActivityStreams spec calls for application/activity+json so just to be ornery, the ActivityPub spec mandates application/ld+json;profile="https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams" as the MIME-type. Sure, you can accept other types, but why not make the spec consistent to begin with?

ActivityPub (part 4)

So how do you go about starting the whole process? You use WebFinger (which the ActivityPub, ActivityStreams, ActivityStreams Vocabulary, and JSON-LD specs don't mention). You start by hitting a well-known URL like https://example.com/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct%3Ausername%40example.com. This should return an initial JSON object describing the person, including their name, id (URI), Inbox, Outbox, cryptographic public keys, as well as various other properties. And for what it's worth, because we haven't already had enough MIME-types for ActivityPub data from other specs, WebFinger returns as application/jrd+json, yet one more.

Additionally, because the well-known WebFinger URL must be rooted at /.well-known/webfinger, it prevents the ActivityPub server from being rooted in some subdirectory. So either the ActivityPub server needs to largely control the web-root; or it needs two distinct processes, one listening for the WebFinger request, and another one rooted off a name-spacing sub-resource.

Authentication, authorization, and signing

There's some discussion of Authentication and Authorization but only descriptive aspects in the context of "this is what Mastodon does," not a prescriptive "this is how everybody should do it."

TODO: WIP

Planning the day on the CLI with tsort

Tim Chase — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 12:48:08 GMT

I had a bunch of items on the todo list for the day and wanted to arrange them in order, but I needed to certain items before others:

Drop donations off at the resale store, but can't do that before 10:00 when they open
Get the daughter ready for soccer camp before dropping her off
Drop the daughter off at camp before taking paperwork up to her school
cut the son's hair before he takes a shower and cleans his bathroom
pick up daughter at camp after she's started camp (duh) and before 10:45
take the kids to the library after picking up daughter at camp
for obvious reasons, 8:30 → 8:45 → 9:00 → 10:00 → 10:30 → 10:45

So I expressed this in a file where each row contains "X needs to come before Y":

$ cat todo.txt
10:00 resale
resale 10:30
sunblock take_to_camp
pack_snack take_to_camp
pack_water take_to_camp
pack_towel take_to_camp
take_to_camp 8:30
8:30 soccer_camp
soccer_camp 8:45 
soccer_camp paperwork
8:45 home
home 9:00
paperwork home
home cut_hair
home clean_bathroom
home shower
cut_hair shower
cut_hair pick_up
shower pick_up
clean_bathroom pick_up
cut_hair clean_bathroom
clean_bathroom 10:00
10:45 pick_up
8:30 8:45 
8:45 9:00 
9:00 10:00 
10:00 10:30 
10:30 10:45 
pick_up library

Now it just became a matter of passing these requirements to tsort

$ tsort todo.txt
pack_towel
pack_water
pack_snack
sunblock
take_to_camp
8:30
soccer_camp
paperwork
8:45
home
cut_hair
9:00
shower
clean_bathroom
10:00
resale
10:30
10:45
pick_up
library

to sift them into the required order of my todo list for the day.

Tim's blog

Vim Knowledge Management

Unstructured Data

Structured Data

Address book

Calendar

Finances

Todos

Closing

Vim Carnival: Motion

The Boring Motion(s)

The Epiphany Motion

Unlocking secondary disks on OpenBSD

Get a quiesced system

Initial setup

Disk setup

Reproducing it on reboot

Why BSDs?

Early Unix experiences (1987–1994)

Initial installation & exploration (1995–1996 school year)

College experimentation

Post college Linux

The Push: the slow decline of Linux

The Pull: the BSDs (2012–)

Finally switching from Debian to FreeBSD/OpenBSD (2019)

Epilogue

Assorted less(1) tips

Operating on multiple files

Adding files after starting

Navigating multiple files

Removing files after starting

Navigating

Jumping to a particular line-number

Jumping to a particular percentage-offset

Searching

Filtering lines

Bookmarking

Bracket matching

Toggling options without restarting

Running external commands

Default options with $LESS

Other misc

Tags

Editing the current document

"Log" output

Blog Question Challenge 2025

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why do you use it

How do you write your posts?

Do you normally publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit?

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

When do you feel most inspired to write?

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

Any future plans for the blog?

The fall of the User Agent

In the beginning

Abuse

Lowe's rant

Round 1

2024-06-02 at 20:10

2024-06-03 at 16:12

Round 2

2024-06-03 at 20:57

2024-06-04 at 08:50

Round 3

2024-07-12

Round 4

2024-07-17

Exploring ActivityPub/ActivityStreams

Overview

ActivityPub (part 1)

ActivityStreams (part 1)

JSON-LD part 1

RDF (part 1?)

ActivityStreams (part 2)

ActivityStreams Vocabulary (part 1)

ActivityStreams (part 3)

The Good

The Bad

ActivityStreams Vocabulary (part 2)

Default options with `$LESS`