Brent - lesser daemon (Page 4)

03

Oct

Setting Up Your Own PDS Is Frighteningly Easy

A PDS, or Personal Data Server, is kind of the core thing behind atproto. The idea is that it's a server that stores all your atproto data and cryptographic keys. Most people just use Bluesky's PDS right now, but this is probably the most commonly self-hosted part of the ecosystem: you can store all your data for any atproto-compliant app on your own server which, in theory, keeps it from getting walled off in an adversarial scenario.

I'm not quite ready to risk moving my own data off of Bluesky's PDS, but I figured today I'd take the first step

5 min read

02

Oct

Getting Collections From The Bluesky API

Yesterday almost immediately gave me pause about spending a month learning more about ATProto. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is having a bit of an ongoing crashout about moderation and the general culture of Bluesky, in this case about the mods' ongoing work to appeal to right-wingers and alienate trans and other marginalized users. To some degree I'm sympathetic to the broader culture problems that Graber takes issue with. Bluesky is full of the type of people who are willing to leave Twitter for moral reasons, which results in a lot of people getting into each other's mentions being upset or

4 min read

02

Oct

Fixing NPM permissions errors on WSL

Saving this one for posterity since I seem to run into something like this once every couple of months. Really gotta get a Mac for my next dev machine.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

# Since you mention that you have set your user to be root:
sudo sh -c 'echo "[user]\ndefault=root" > /etc/wsl.conf'

wsl.exe -l -v
# Confirm your distribution name for the following command:
wsl.exe --terminate Ubuntu

Credit to this StackOverflow answer.

01

Oct

ATProto Statusphere Setup In WSL, Pulling Records from Bluesky

For today, the first day of my 30 Days of Protocols, I'm just following the ATProto Quickstart Guide. It's a fun opportunity to work with JS after largely living in Python land for the last few months.

This is probably pretty easy and straightforward if you're not a Windows idiot like me (the general consensus from ATProto devs seems to be that Macs are superior, which I don't disagree with. However, I am stuck in Windows land for the foreseeable future, so I have to live like this regardless).

It seems easy and straightforward on WSL until you get past

7 min read

01

Oct

30(ish) Days of Protocols

I have been doing 100 days projects once or twice a year since 2022, with varying degrees of success. I've written about the value of this practice so I won't go too deeply into it here other than to say that it remains the most effective method I've tried of "just getting things done". You commit to something and you do it every day, whether it's for 5 minutes or four hours.

So why am I doing a shorter version? Mostly because my last two attempts at a 100 days project failed. Both were writing, one private (journaling every day)

6 min read