Ric / is on Nostr

Proprietor of QWeb Ltd and Bouche Chocolate. A software and game programmer since 1996, these days I mostly make #websites and #chocolate, manage #Linux servers, and drink #whisky. But #gamedev is still my big love.

Currently very slowly working on Argentauria (in #Godot ), an open-world MMORPG inspired by medieval life, tools, and architecture. Devlog at https://ko-fi.com/dev_ric

Web & game development: https://www.qweb.co.uk
Solar2D plugins & game assets: https://www.solar2dplugins.com
FOSS scripts & libraries: https://github.com/qwebltd
Data APIs: https://apis.qweb.co.uk

Last Notes

2024-11-29 14:55:40

I'm not saying that we have a ghost, or even that ghosts exist, but if we do have a ghost I'd appreciate it if they'd stop throwing my boxes across the floor and trying to open doors please 👍
(I'm being dramatic - we probably don't actually have a ghost...)
👀

2024-08-16 23:44:07

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a month or so ago, I stopped receiving notifications on Android, but clearing cache and data, and then logging back in again re-prompted the permissions approval thing and fixed it.
About a week later though, my notifications stopped clearing themselves when I open the notifications tab. Still have this problem, but I'd assumed it was the app rather than a Fosstodon thing... 🤷‍♂️

2024-07-06 08:23:34

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KDE has this too, for all apps. Anywhere that you can drag to select text, if you hold ctrl it'll select whole words instead of single characters. Super useful to not have to be precise with where you start/end a selection.
Also holding ctrl while deleting strips one word at a time instead of one character, and ctrl + arrow keys moves the caret by whole words.
Honestly love the productivity features KDE has. 😁

2024-07-01 11:56:02

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it's probably the processing needed rather than the data storage. I.e. if they have a script sitting somewhere that gets probed every time a page is hit, giving it the data needed to process and store, then a website hitting that script maybe once every few minutes is going to use fewer resources than a website hitting it hundreds of times a second.
It's basically the same issue you were having with Mastodon hammering your site every time you posted a link to it.

2024-06-24 13:45:57

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technically true, but in my experience they tend not to. At the end of the day, the people building these scrapers genuinely think that they're doing a good thing, they're not consciously trying to be malicious players, so they're mostly quite open about what their bots are.

2024-06-24 13:34:47

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hopefully useful to people: It's actually pretty easy to block these scrapers by their UA strings. Just add this to a .htaccess file in the root (assuming you run an Apache server), adding whatever UAs you need to block between the paranthesis, separated by pipes:
SetEnvIfNoCase ^User-Agent$ .*(ClaudeBot|GoogleOther|GPTBot) BADBOTHAMMER
Deny from env=BADBOTHAMMER
I'm planning to at some point collate all the known AI bot UAs into a public list. There's obviously way more than these three!

2024-06-24 13:34:47

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2024-06-22 10:10:30

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oh that's just gross 😶

2024-06-18 01:37:48

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I've a 2013 iPad which sits on a stand in the kitchen. Originally bought it for testing websites in iOS, and now literally only used for a recipe organiser I built around the same time and still, after all these years, haven't gotten around to making a proper UI for. So it's a really ugly web based tool with no CSS basically, on a chunky old iPad that doesn't even pull software updates any more, and I don't even like iOS. But it does the job. 🤷‍♂️

2024-06-15 00:34:47

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this is basically the entire reason why I joined Mastodon. I'd tried Twitter for a stint and gave up on it quickly - way before the Elon saga - because I couldn't grasp the idea of refreshing my feed 2 seconds after opening it, and not knowing what I'd missed in those 2 seconds. I can't cope with feeling like I've missed out on posts. This is also why I just don't follow a huge number of people. I'm selective, because I don't want bombarding but I do want to see everything from my follows.

2024-06-09 22:15:42

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yeah that would be weird. Although, not uncommon... when we lived in Huddersfield there were loads of public footpaths that continued on up driveways to a sort of side gate to enter their fields through. The first couple of times we came across them it felt super awkward, but then you just get used to it and very respectful that you're walking on somebody else's land.
Not sure that I'd be comfortable as a landowner inviting people up my drive mind. Just the field is one thing, but... 😬

2024-06-09 16:22:21

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dot a few picnic benches around, grab some public liability insurance (not expensive), and set up a coffee stand at the entrance. You could totally earn a few quid just letting people wander around 👍
We've literally paid entrance fees before, to just walk around a field full of sunflowers.