Daily Journal 📓 September 2023

Short dated entries, links, and microblog-style notes.

Sep 20231:00am
  • Fear of Oozification vgr

    • Oozification is a process that makes the technological future visibly *illegible, *especially to those closest to it and working hardest to make it happen, and this fear is the temporal analog of high-modernist fear of illegibility.

Sep 20231:00am
  • curl now has merged in support for the #ipfs protocol, so I wanted to test it
    • The curl daily snapshots only has binary builds for Windows and Arch Linux and I’m on #MacOS, but you can install HEAD using Homebrew
    • Via Mark Gaiser who finally landed this patch into curl, here’s a one liner: 
      • /opt/homebrew/opt/curl/bin/curl ipfs://bafybeigagd5nmnn2iys2f3doro7ydrevyr2mzarwidgadawmamiteydbzi | ffplay
      • That should fetch the Big Buck Bunny movie encoded as #webm video, using a local IPFS gateway
      • I didn’t alias curl over system curl, so that’s the full path of where the HEAD version of curl is installed for me using #Homebrew
    • Here’s the step by step of what I did
      • I used brew install curl --HEAD to get the newest curl, installed at /opt/homebrew/opt/curl/bin/curl
      • I used IPFS Desktop to run a local IPFS node
      • I ran this one liner, which will download the hash representing and output it to a file named bigbuckbunny.webm in the directory where you run the command 
        • /opt/homebrew/opt/curl/bin/curl ipfs://bafybeigagd5nmnn2iys2f3doro7ydrevyr2mzarwidgadawmamiteydbzi --output bigbuckbunny.webm
        • You’ll see a progress bar in your terminal
          • Terminal screenshot of Curl using IPFS
        • And if we look, you’ll see incoming bandwith to IPFS Desktop
          • IPFS Desktop Screenshot of incoming bandwidth while using curl
        • On MacOS, double clicking the file will open and play it in a browser like Chrome which has webm video support
        • You’ve just tested IPFS support in curl!
      • Exploring Big Buck Bunny with IPFS Desktop
        • It’s also available in your local IPFS node now, so if you paste in the hash into IPFS Desktop bafybeigagd5nmnn2iys2f3doro7ydrevyr2mzarwidgadawmamiteydbzi and hit browse, it will prompt you to open it with your local gateway
        • IPFS Desktop Big Buck Bunny - Screenshot
        • Your local gateway link is this: http://bafybeigagd5nmnn2iys2f3doro7ydrevyr2mzarwidgadawmamiteydbzi.ipfs.localhost:8080/ — and it will play directly in your browser
        • Local gateway path to Big Buck Bunny - Screenshot{:height 334, :width 554}
        • If you select the “More” button, you get a drop down of options
        • IPFS Desktop More button - Screen Shot
        • I picked “Set pinning” so that I can help keep Big Buck Bunny online. The next time someone fetches it, my desktop might be helping to serve up the bits
        • IPFS Desktop Pinning Screenshot
        • I’ve got this 160MB file saved locally, and I also sent it to Web3Storage
    • Did you know that ffmpeg also has #ipfs support? That was also contributed by Mark Gaiser, so this also works: 
      • fplay ipfs://bafybeigagd5nmnn2iys2f3doro7ydrevyr2mzarwidgadawmamiteydbzi
      • On #MacOS, you’ll need to use brew or similar to install ffmpeg for that to work
      • And Mark had one more for me:
      • mpv ipfs://bafybeigagd5nmnn2iys2f3doro7ydrevyr2mzarwidgadawmamiteydbzi

        • mpv also just works. There you see the power of re-using implementations. mpv knows nothing about it besides white-listing ipfs and ipns, it uses ffmpeg internally and just forwards it. https://mpv.io/

          it also has a mac version https://mpv.io/installation/

Sep 20231:00am
  • John Carmack #Twitter #DecentSocial

    • Several people I follow are actively trying to move users from Twitter/X to alternatives, but I don’t hear about exciting new features, and I do hear about them being kind of dead. Fragmenting the networks seems value-destructive for the world; is it really just to spite Elon? https://x.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1699060703272010047