*banned 4 MarkDown love* @design_RG@qoto.org

@yantrajaal Just noticed the intriguing building in the picture. Very cool.

Thanks and success, Yantrajaal!

@users Over 4 Thousand. Adding 1K to previous 3K mark in about a week.

33% Growth. Wow. Welcome to new people! I think my arrival is somewhere near the left of the graph. It's been a fun week. 😎

@_lunawinters They had some huge smog days in London, I think just before WWII if my memory is right.

Pea soup air, and accidents happening.

Found it - Wikipedia has a page for the 1952 big one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog

@freemo @susi123 That's good or bad?

Nice new user avatar, Susi.

@jump_spider OMG, wonderful.

I barely glanced at the screen there, just startign the day here, but it looks clean, nice. And I see you added the intro content already. Well done, I will have to read it completely, first impressions only.

Need to find a home for a blog project too. Good morning!

"You are the master of your own Prana - the winds and
spirits inside the body. Work with the physical body,
slowly change the diet to plants only, slowly release
all muscle tension through stretching, movement and
acupressure, slowly deepen and extend the inhale
and exhale through subtle concentration, slowly.
Many knots arise in the solar plexus and navel and
can be easily manipulated through physical means.
Only through service to others and surrender to
God/Tao/Unity can you access the knots that block
the heart. we are here to serve. May we
use our lives to give life. May we never forget."

Author, unknown tome. Found on twitter, a screenshot, un-attributed.

https://twitter.com/aletheiamea/status/1194709815144198144/photo/1

@Full_marx @Incindia
I was thinking about you earlier today - saw a news bot item about Russia soon delivering one of their S400 ground to air missile systems to India.

And imagined how it will be seen in the White House, which is fuming about Turkey buying the same equipment and wanting to use it along with American F-35, the most advanced fighter they have.

(and they are very worried the Russians will use the experience to learn how to counteract and detect the F35)

@Full_marx @togs

Looking at the bottom of the Story of Mell post, I noticed the attibution, and that alone tells an interesting story.

"[Posted to Usenet by its author, Ed Nather <utastro!nather>, on 1983-05-21]. "

From that, we see it's quite an early post, 1983, and the Usenet already was active.

But what led me to post this extra message was the fun way his net address was noted -- it's what was called a Bang Path.

The Bang being "!", the exclamation mark, and the first part was the System address, "utastro".

Today we use username@machine.domainname which is reversed, and with the '@' symbol instead of the Bang.

Now you know what a Bang Path is. 😏

@Full_marx @togs Thanks for a great, thoughtful reply - it's important sometimes to take time out and be able to look at something freshly to be able to better understand it.

Yes, it was a wonderful thing. I remember passing by and seeing that big area all dedicated to the machine and it's servers - in this case, the servers were Human beings maintaining it up and running.

Exactly, we would have to come in and stand in a line, outside the data center, until we got near the front and were allowed to step into the data entry room, which was already heavily air conditioned, like the rest of the data center. People who worked there had sweaters on even in mid summer, since it was pretty cool temps.

I discovered that fact of the smooth reading of the deck, non-stop, being a sign of success by myself. Usually took three runs, more or less, as you could only fix one error at a time.

The job was aborted and stopped when it hit the first error. You grabbed the sad printout and left the area, now to read and try to figure out what went wrong.

An interesting thing too, we were very careful with the decks of cards. If you ever dropped them and they got out of order, ooops. Now you need to figure out which one goes where. 😈

There I was, and in awe at that machine. :)

The Apollo program only had small and quite weak computers on board the space ship and lunar module. It's amazing what they accomplished with that.

Memory and storage were precious!

I remember reading a real nice story - part of the Jargon File.

This was "The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer". These date to a time when a hacker was a highly skilled MIT computer scientist, working in low level languages and squeezing the most from anemic systems.

You got to read this -- but do it when you are rested, and enjoy, It's a great piece.

http://foldoc.org/The%20story%20of%20Mel,%20a%20Real%20Programmer

The whole Jargon File is great fun. I remember another story on it called the Magic switch, also wonderful reading.

Here's "A Story about Magic":

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

The formatting is not very pretty, but the story is.

The Complete Jargon File is one level above, at :

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html

or get it on PDF :

http://xy22y.tx0.org/jargon-4.4.7.zip

I fully agree that our attention span is suffering greatly, but it's not because of the Internet per se - but because of the bombardment of distractions, notifications, pop ups, sounds and flashing colour things. It's all very weary.

We do need to step back and cut stimulli when we feel overwhelmed.

Reading is important, and it's becoming harder to be able to concentrate, lay down with a good book and stay there for hours, fully entertained by the story as I have done so many times.

It's not a good thing.

@datatitian You are very welcome, thank you for developing something that is much needed. 😄

I made a long thread of posts, after playing with @GuppeGroups briefly.

Wanted to make sure I understood it, so that I could explain it to other people.

I think I got it - here is the thread, complete with lots of explanations and screenshots.

https://qoto.org/web/statuses/103139782690119630

I was an Architect, and later became a technology teacher at the high schools level. Now I am retired, and discoverign the fediverse was a nice thing to keep me busy and active thru the Winter. 😉

If I can help in any way, please let me know. Thanks, the software works well!

@qoto

Finally, here is the Notification screen -- Notice the origin of the post, clearly marked as Boosted, and by the Group name!

@qoto Pretty much instantly, I receive the message.

- Note that it will NOT show on the Local feed area, since I wanted it private.

- But it DOES show on your HOME feed, as well as in a Notification.

Yes!

@qoto Now let's send a message to our buddies.

- I enter a new toot message in the box. Include the Group name at the top, so the bot gets it.

- I am trying something here, remember we talked about PRIVATE group messages?

I think that changing the privacy selection to UNLISTED (open padlock icon), it will NOT show on our server's Local feed.

- So we selected Unlisted, type the message, hit Send Toot, and voila, it will go out to everyone.

@qoto OK!

Now that we searched for this New group we wanted to creat, pushed the button, Magic Happens. 😃

- a search is started, it will find the group we wanted, and now exists!

- and it shows a FOLLOW button for us to click on...

Push the button, and now the Group exists. Tell your friends to Search for the same group (show them this post) and they will see the group, and follow it too.

Done. 😄

- The Group now Exists, and anytime you tag it into a post, it will go to the bot;

- The bot then gets it Boosted, and Feeds it to everyone on it's group Followers list.

@qoto I hope the previous post made sense? It was already in fact Boosted and distributed to that usergroup (which could contain any number of users), everyone following it will get notified and see it. Cool.

- Oh, I want a Private group! 😄 Maybe in the future extra features will be added. For now, want a sec group? CREATE IT and DON'T tell anyone other than the intended users. Keep it hush hush and you get some privacy,

(I think; it might show up on the local feed possibly? This is all new to me too, here trying to explain it to you)

How About Creating a NEW Group?

- reading that same screen above (again, it's located at : https://gup.pe/u/guppegroups )
we see a reference to :

"Create other groups by searching for or tagging @yourGroupName"

OK - so say we want a new qoto-bikers group. We are all cyclists, and plan some rides, or maybe it's a motorbike group. Let's make it happen!

- What group name? You decide. Keep it Simple. Short. Memorable. Obvious if you can!

ok, how about qoto-bikers? 😄

Sure!

- This will be done from inside you own Home -- your own instance, in my case, this is qoto.org.

- We enter the new Group name we decided on into the SEARCH box, on the top Left corner of the web page (or in the search box in your mobile app)

On the screen below you can see the NEW @group_name@instance_name already typed in. Hit enter and it goes to work!

Will show the result in the next post.

If you open that link, you will land on a new tab and page, with some cryptic instructions (will explain then soon) and an input box.

What to do here?

- if you wanted to JOIN an EXISTING group, say QOTO's (which I created a few minutes ago), you would need to know the Group_name@Instance.name to enter it there. On my example, it would be : qoto@gup.pe

- Done that? It will redirect you to a page, where you will see the Group Bot profile. Click on the "FOLLOW"button, and you will be ADDED to this particular group.

- Any posts made anywhere in fediverse afterwards, and that include the @qoto attibution (username) will be Copied to the Bot there.

And the bot will Boost and send it out to ALL the people Following this particular list. 😄

Screenshot below shows this first entry point into Guppe. (I will describe How To Create a New Group on next post)

By sheer serendipity it seems, I have come accross a boosted post that mentioned someone working on a project that might help solve or improve one of the problems mentioned in the post above.

We can't keep trowing all the posts into one big pipe forever (and then trying to find what we need or want). As the number of users grown, the amount of data will also, and it will become unmanageable soon enough.

Facebook is terrible, in general, but we have to acknowledge they do support an mind blowing number of users 24/7.

One of the things they do fairly well is to have Groups for people with any kind of common interest; I participated in some, and they do reduce the spread of these posts to only a smaller number of users, who are interested in them. It is also easy for them to get to the group they want, post and move on.

FB Groups are NOT as good in my opinion as Forums (where posts can be finely organized by topics, and you can find things much more easily once you understand the logic and how it works).

But it's better than the pulsating Federated feed we currently have, which is like to grab a fish swimming down the Niagara river just above the falls. Yikes, the volume!

The post I refer to is here:

https://qoto.org/web/statuses/103139269483844935

Specifically, the post by Will mentioning the GuppeGroups.

https://gup.pe/u/guppegroups