RE: https://ecscw.eusset.eu/2026/2026/03/02/825/
Ever considered being part of an academic conference as a student volunteer? I'm coordinating the SV call for #ECSCW2026 and we're looking for people.
I'd say “please apply if you're interested,” but knowing who follows me, “please forward this to your students” is statistically more fitting. 😄
RE: https://ecscw.eusset.eu/2026/2026/02/20/789/
This conference paper template overhaul for @ecscw2026 was a huge (by my standards) LaTeX project.
Love and respect to Saturnino Luz, the author of the 2006 template, which remained untouched up to 2025. A revamp was overdue. The new template uses current-decade LaTeX features to make document metadata more accessible and searchable, add alt text to figures, and integrate services like @ORCID_Org.
The @ecscw2026 account will probably post about more of these improvements over time.
FEP drafting: Am I using “side effects” here the same way as other ActivityPub developers? I've seen the term used a bunch in casual conversation, but my personal understanding of it is kinda fuzzy.
I try not to make “indistinct complaining about the state of technology” a habit, but it is perturbing how I've had a year-old monitor stop working over Christmas and the two (!) subsequent factory-new replacements each arrived with obvious manufacturing defects.
I don't even need super accurate colors or anything, I just want a working screen. 😭
I'm co-organizing #ECSCW2026, an academic conference on how people use technology to work together. (Because I don't have enough to do yet, ha.)
One of the things I'm handling is social media, so if you do #CSCW, #HCI or related research, feel free to follow and/or share! 🙂
I forgot to post about it, but last month I got the #ArtBook for “Slay the Princess” by @blacktabbygames, a 2023 game which btw is on sale right now: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1989270/Slay_the_Princess__The_Pristine_Cut/
The book is styled like a 250+ page choose your own adventure thing, with nearly all the artwork from the game plus WIP stuff and behind the scenes info. Great fun! 👍
This was a long preorder, but the second print run is still available: https://store.serenityforge.com/products/the-art-of-slay-the-princess-the-pristine-cut-reprint-release
For a dive deeper into the past, I recommend “The Secret History of Hypertext” by Alex Wright: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/in-search-of-the-proto-memex/371385/
@ricmac correctly notes that the story of the academic work that led to the first commercial PCs is not often acknowledged. Something something, societal value of research funding.
As Wright points out, Bush's sources and inspirations are cited even less.
One wonders, especially seeing they were all European and North American men, what inspirations *they* never acknowledged.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@ricmac/115691254009259024
Engelbart's demo is well worth checking out. SRI has a nice 5 minute highlight cut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6rKUf9DWRI
Xerox PARC developers cite him as a direct inspiration for the Xerox Star (http://toastytech.com/guis/star.html) and Alto, which in turn famously inspired Apple and Microsoft.
In the other direction, the chain goes to Vannevar Bush's Memex (https://history-computer.com/products/memex-guide/), and from there to early 20th century concepts such as Paul Otlet's Répertoire bibliographique universel: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9pertoire_bibliographique_universel
I recently gave a makeover to the project page for the first video game I ever made: https://fietkau.media/revelation_mentis
The game itself is a small adventure/exploration game for DOS. It's not much to look at. But I touched up the game itself and the web-based player to make it a lot more approachable:
- Full English translation
- Nicer menu navigation
- Touch controls on mobile! 🤯
- A cute little optional CRT filter
- Updated #DOSBox and #emscripten, it no longer hangs the page on load for a second
As a European, I have nothing to do with American Thanksgiving, but the timing of the holiday coincides with a hardware donation I just sent off to @computertruhe (after checking with them which parts they'd want). I feel like that kinda matches the spirit of the thing. 😄 They use them to refurbish PCs for people who can't afford new ones.
If you're a PC tinkerer in or near Germany and you have unused components collecting dust, consider sending them a message: https://computertruhe.de/spenden/sachspenden/
I've been taking a bit of time away from all the noise lately, but there's also still good stuff happening. 🙂 As of today, my first journal paper is out:
https://fietkau.science/body_tracking_longitudinal_ambient_display_studies
It's essentially a project report covering much of my work from 2021 to 2024. Took us (me and co-authors Jan and @SD) a while to finish.
A funny feeling, publishing an academic article without any auxiliary media at all. No video, no presentation slides, not even a poster.
New publication: “Exploring body tracking sensors in longitudinal ambient display studies in the wild”
:fietkau_science: https://fietkau.science/body_tracking_longitudinal_ambient_display_studies
Jan Schwarzer, Julian Fietkau, Susanne Draheim
i-com
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/icom-2025-0038
ISSN: 2196-6826
One Encyclia alpha tester asked about a situation where making a trivial change to an old publication would insert it at the top of the followers' feeds.
This appears to have been an unintended behavior in Mastodon, where a federated update to an old object would appear as new if the object was not known to the Mastodon server beforehand.
Going by the below Mastodon code change, this problem should be fixed in Mastodon 4.6.
I have added Mastodon-style (FEP-044f) quote post compatibility to my @DailyRucks bot. You can now quote post the daily voice lines as much as you want! 🥳
This would be noteworthy on its own if there weren't already a bunch of non-Mastodon implementations, but I'm actually late to the party. WordPress, Bonfire, micro.blog, dotmakeup, and ActivityBot all got there before I did.
However, I think my approach is novel for being *stateless*. Thread incoming.
🧵 1/6
I haven't posted about my QR code generator in a while: https://fietkau.software/qr Check it out if you need QR codes, it has cool customization options and lots of fedi project logos.
An exchange with @yaarur and @ai6yr reminded me of an idea I had a while back. I've added a function (under “Advanced options”) that lets you download an offline/rehostable copy of the QR code generator, in case my website ever vanishes. You can keep it as a local HTML file or put it on your own web server! Have fun!
Over the past few days we added a couple of small features to the Encyclia website:
1. The home page at https://encyclia.pub now has a little statistics blurb about people following Encyclia accounts.
2. The profile text box on the interstitial account pages has gained a “Follow” button to make it a bit easier to interact.
Alpha testers can now see short interaction statistics about their own account after signing in.
The work continues! 🏗️
By the way:
As a consumer of the public ORCID API, Encyclia is not allowed to generate revenue. To be on the safe side, we don't accept donations either. However, we are happy to be making a modest contribution out of our private pockets to @fedify on @opencollective here: https://opencollective.com/fedify
If you'd like to donate some money to improve Encyclia's functionality and reliability, @fedify is the best place to do so! 🙂
Dear @gotosocial users: we see you, even though you can't see us! 🥲
Well, you can see this account. But any accounts hosted on https://encyclia.pub aren't visible to you.
The way we use @fedify, the ActivityPub framework that powers our connections, uncovers some issues in the code. Curious fedi developers can find details here: https://github.com/fedify-dev/fedify/issues/473
Attempts at workarounds have sadly been fruitless, so please join us in waiting for a fix in Fedify. ❤️🩹
The direct cause of the server lag has been fixed and Encyclia has been stable for the past 12h. The speed isn't where it should be yet, but you should be able to look up accounts, follow them, and visit the website without timeouts or error messages. 😀
The next thing we're working on are improvements for interoperability edge cases, which will be invisible for most of you. But making sure other servers can properly talk to us reduces the technical burden for everyone involved.
Ah, found the culprit. It was one of the spots where I told the program to do nothing later. Turns out my wording was slightly off.
Before:
return new Promise(() => {});
After:
return Promise.resolve(null);
The number of concurrent connections looks negligible now, and no more timeouts either. Calling it a success for tonight, we'll see how things look in the morning. 🥱
As underwhelming as the cause is, that journey might deserve a blog post if I find the time!