Explore local activities
@mavnn will you write my linkedin posts for me? that’s talent
@[email protected] No I strongly suspect that would rapidly cause me permanent damage. But for a small, small, fee of 1 billion dollars I will produce something I like to call a "vegan human rights free brain alternative" that will turn anything you desire into LinkedIn posts with only minor side effects to people who mostly aren't me (such as the collapse of copyright law, psychosis, etc, etc)
im in bed chilling during work hours. do i feel guilty? not at all! i’ve found the perfect excuse. I’m Background Processing!
@[email protected] "I was employing somnambulant value provision from my horizontal economic person desk"
@mavnn I power @openbenches using my ActivityBot.
I have a small Python script that looks for new RSS entries every 20 minutes and then posts them that way.
@[email protected] I finally got around to doing something about this, and wanted to say thanks for the discussion and pointing me to activitybot; it lead to a much simpler solution than I'd originally thought of, even if it ended up going in a different direction to activitybot (I'm federating rss by running an ap client rather than an ap server)
Fediverss
Read this post in its full formatted glory at https://blog.mavnn.eu/2026/04/10/fediverss_release.html
You might have noticed that this blog has suddenly acquired a comments section at the end of the articles. I've tried some work arounds in the past - in a previous version of the blog using an external service, or manually linking to fediverse posts made about the blog post - it never sat quite right.
For this version of the blog, I didn't want to force people to create a log in for "my blog" or run a bunch of dedicated comment receiving infrastructure, but I also didn't the comments to be controlled by a third party service with all the archival and privacy concerns that implied.
So I've now built fediverss. This is a program designed to sit on the same server as a static blog automate the process of keep that blog on "the fediverse" via its rss feed. It is very much pre-release quality at the moment, but I'd very much like to polish it up so that it can be deployed easily by non-coders and in environments where running it on the same server as the blog isn't practical. That shouldn't be impossible, especially given that all the dependencies are already managed in Nix, so much this space for future developments.
And, you know, leave a comment via the fediverse if this seems interesting!
@blog In case you're browsing over to the blog because you're curious what the comments look like... they look like this.
bonfire.mavnn.eu/pub/objects...
So this is very much a work in progress (see me having to quote the post to add the hashtags...), but meet fediverss - a simple F# program that puts your static blog rss in the fediverse. #activitypub #fsharp #blog
@mavnn One long-ago employer released a brochure that had a mis-spelling right on the cover. Someone at COMDEX visiting our booth spotted it. To be fair, the font was a modern, stretched-out one that made it hard to spot that "multimedia" was spelled "MULITMEDIA."
But, yikes!
Happy for that security guard.
@[email protected] ah yes, a close relative of the famous glance behind you at the 4 metre high projection of your slides at a conference while talking and spot the spelling mistake moment.
@[email protected] I... both do, and very much do not, want to know where they get the rest of their discourse.
@[email protected] I worked in desktop publishing for a while in a large bank in the UK, producing things like product leftlets and terms and conditions sheets (exciting, I know).
The bank and a printing company jointly paid one contract night security guard a significant amount of money as a thank you after he happened to spot at the beginning of his shift that one of the pages of a 70+ page full colour brouchure was upside down, an error missed by the people at both the bank and the print house. All because he got bored enough to flick through the test print left lying around before the overnight run started.
@[email protected] The bank had around 2,000 branches and we were due to ship multiple copies to all of them, to give a sense of scale. Full colour printing in 1999 wasn't cheap, either.
I was a hardware & software QA person for about 20 years, making sure problems didn't get out the door.
I feel professional pride in reporting this problem so that camera company can fix things.
Boy, I imagine some people are in deep shit over this fuckup. A really bad oversight.
@[email protected] I worked in desktop publishing for a while in a large bank in the UK, producing things like product leftlets and terms and conditions sheets (exciting, I know).
The bank and a printing company jointly paid one contract night security guard a significant amount of money as a thank you after he happened to spot at the beginning of his shift that one of the pages of a 70+ page full colour brouchure was upside down, an error missed by the people at both the bank and the print house. All because he got bored enough to flick through the test print left lying around before the overnight run started.
@[email protected] @[email protected] I'm not a fan in general for a lot of other reasons, but the fact that TypeScript types only exist at compile time (and you can tell the compiler to ignore them) does make things like strongly typed IDs easier to deal with. Generated code can just throw the types away, while user facing code gets type safety (for the value of safety TS allows at the best of times) on ID types without run time impact. Haskell allows alias types that have similar properties.
It's not really the kind of thing the dotnet type system is set up to deal with gracefully though.
@[email protected] @[email protected] Case in point: I use strong IDs in my TypeScript and Haskell projects, but I don't in my F# project that uses Marten. And it isn't because of Marten's support for them or not; it's the amount of hassle it causes in other places and the annoying nagging feeling of taking a run time overhead for code that is less pleasant to work with.
@simoncropp Only if there was a VB-esque concept in the language itself as the types being automatically convertible.
Honestly, I doubt it.
@[email protected] @[email protected] I'm not a fan in general for a lot of other reasons, but the fact that TypeScript types only exist at compile time (and you can tell the compiler to ignore them) does make things like strongly typed IDs easier to deal with. Generated code can just throw the types away, while user facing code gets type safety (for the value of safety TS allows at the best of times) on ID types without run time impact. Haskell allows alias types that have similar properties.
It's not really the kind of thing the dotnet type system is set up to deal with gracefully though.
@[email protected] @[email protected] we did some changes to improve feed performance, you can find the edit button in "advanced" - after opening the 3 vertical dots more menu
@[email protected] @[email protected] hmm. I don't seem to have an advanced option. Am I looking in the right place?
It's that time again! A new half term means a new round of "Coding Games with a Story", our 5 week live online course for under 18s on building a visual novel with Ink.
What's a visual novel? Excellent question! It's the point where the novel (a text based story) intersects with the sceenplay (scenes, character visuals, and soundtrack) and the computer game (the reader can make choices that change the story).
Sounds interesting? Find out more about the instructor and the courses at thinkersmeetup.com/scholars/... , or get a look at the style of what we'll be building at visualink.mavnn.eu/ #homeed #gamedev #visualnovel #interactivefiction
It's that time again! A new half term means a new round of "Coding Games with a Story", our 5 week live online course for under 18s on building a visual novel with Ink.
What's a visual novel? Excellent question! It's the point where the novel (a text based story) intersects with the sceenplay (scenes, character visuals, and soundtrack) and the computer game (the reader can make choices that change the story).
Sounds interesting? Find out more about the instructor and the courses at thinkersmeetup.com/scholars/..., or get a look at the style of what we'll be building at visualink.mavnn.eu/ #visualnovel #creativewriting #homeed #gamedev
@SJohnRoss They help to strain out the tea leaves.
@[email protected] @[email protected] Don't forget the stirring counter clockwise and reflected light of the new moon. It adds a faint aroma of catnip and cinnamon to the brew, and an inexplicable sense of satisfaction when sitting in small boxes for days after drinking.
Coding more games with more stories
Read this post in its full formatted glory at https://blog.mavnn.eu/2026/04/08/coding_games_with_a_story.html
It's that time again! If you know somebody who's 12-18 who likes the idea of writing interactive fiction in the form of visual novels, you can sign up for my five week starter course by browsing over to ThinkersMeetup.
I'm also thinking of expanding the course out for a further five weeks with more advanced techniques and time to actually build the stories, rather than just looking at how to build them so I'll post an update in a few weeks about that as well.
If you have no idea at all what I'm talking about, wonder over to VisualInk and try the example story linked on the home page.
Aaaaaand... on a final note, I'm also looking at two other options. One is an introduction to Godot as an intensive course over the summer to teach real time game development, and the other is interactive fiction courses aimed at adults. If you have any interest in either, let me know. I'm especially if you're an adult interested in expanding creative writing into writing interactive fiction to hear what format works best for you: once a week at lunch time for an hour, weekend courses, several afternoons during a single week as an intensive block with writing time in between? Adult schedules are always interesting to manage.
@blog tagging for some visibility for #creativewriting, #homeed, and #interactivefiction.
I'm going to have a moment of personal satisfaction. Adding a comment system running on my own infrastructure has revealed that my blog post introducing TypeScript developers to the Effect library (blog.mavnn.eu/2024/09/16/int...) has at least one person who just has it open basically all of the time.
Which means people are still finding it helpful enough to reference frequently 18 months after I wrote it, which gives me the warm fuzzies.
Okay, this post is aimed at people I've either worked with or known for a while. I have a friend of a friend looking for a #wordpress expert to help with a project that is mostly completed but has had to be dropped by the original developer. Spec looks good and detailed, requirements seem sane. I need to know you well enough to be able to genuinely recommend you, and you need to know WordPress well enough to deal with several largish plugins that include some bespoke tweaks.
Anyone interested?
Nearly there with the rss -> activitypub script first cut, but slightly hampered by the fact that it seems like there's a bug (github.com/bonfire-networks/...) in the handling of Update activities in Bonfire's client to server #activitypub API. Either that or I'm holding it wrong, which is entirely possible given it is the first time I'm using the API!
As an aside, I'm quite liking the ActivityPub APIs so far, although ld-json does leave me feeling like there's a fair jump from "script that works" to "actually does everything the spec would theoretically allow".
Hmm. That said, I also seem to have lost the ability to update posts via the UI on #bonfire 1.0.2. I didn't spot exactly when the option disappeared from the menu.
Nearly there with the rss -> activitypub script first cut, but slightly hampered by the fact that it seems like there's a bug (github.com/bonfire-networks/...) in the handling of Update activities in Bonfire's client to server #activitypub API. Either that or I'm holding it wrong, which is entirely possible given it is the first time I'm using the API!
As an aside, I'm quite liking the ActivityPub APIs so far, although ld-json does leave me feeling like there's a fair jump from "script that works" to "actually does everything the spec would theoretically allow".
Install bonfire.mavnn.eu
Get the full app experience
