Linux-Fan (u/Linux-Fan)

Linux-Fan commented on The 512KB Club 512kb.club/... · Posted by u/lr0

There’s basically nothing on that list lol. Is there a list of all these N-KB Club sites?

Linux-Fan · 2 months ago

I don't know of any list, but I know at least of the following “clubs” pages:

size-related

- <https://14kbclub.com/> - only learned about it today but I am not sure if my site would qualify (it is only ~12 KiB, but does multiple requests...)

- <https://250kb.club/>

- <https://512kb.club> - my site got removed as “ulta minimal” :(

- <https://1mb.club/>

not specifically size-related

- <https://no-js.club/members/>

- <https://xhtml.club/>

- <https://textonly.website/> - my site got removed (I guess because it has a logo and this makes it not text-only...)

There used to be also a 10 KB club and per its rules my site would have qualified except for the requirement to be featured on HN or otherwise be a “noteworthy site” if I recall correctly. However, 10KB club seems to be offline for some time already...

In general the issue with these kinds of pages is mostly that they only check _one_ page (typically the homepage but sometimes I see people submit a special “reduced version” of their homepage, too...). Of course if _all_ pages were to be relevant I think even my (pretty miminmalist) page wouldn't qualify because some pages have high-resolution images I guess...

Linux-Fan commented on Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why? · Posted by u/ofalkaed

Linux-Fan · 2 months ago

The signature function of the German ID card (“neuer Personalausweis”).

Its 2025 and we still haven't solved secure online identification and we are still not using end-to-end encryption for e-mail, most e-mail is not even signed.

Interaction with state agencies is still mostly via paper-based mail. The only successfully deployed online offer of the german state administration seems to be the online portal for tax filings “elster.de”.

The use of a private key on the national ID card would have been able to provide all this and more using standard protocols.

At least for identification, there is an expensive effort to re-design something similar in a smartphone-centric way and with less security and not based on standard approaches called “EUDI wallets”.

For encrypted communication the agreed-on standard seems to be “log in to our portal with HTTPS and use our proprietary interfaces to send and receive messages”...

Why did it die: Too expensive (~30€/year for certificate, >100€ for reader one time) and too complicated to use. Not enough positve PR. Acceptance at state-provided sites was added too late. In modern times, everything must be done with the smartphone, handling of physical cards is considered backwards hence this is probably not going to come back...

Edit: Anothther simiarly advanced technoloy that also seems to have been replaced by inferiror substitute smartphone: HBCI banking (a standard...) using your actual bank card + reader device to authenticate transactions... replaced by proprietary app on proprietary smartphone OS...

Linux-Fan commented on Debian 13 “Trixie” debian.org/News/2025/2025... · Posted by u/ducktective

yjftsjthsd-h · 4 months ago

In the abstract I'm a big fan of supporting me old machines forever, but I have to ask out of curiosity - what hardware is practical to run these days and only has a 32-bit processor?

Linux-Fan · 4 months ago

I have a few old PCs (towers) here which don't support amd64 mostly Pentium 4-based.

They all still have DVD reader drives and are nice for ripping CDs. Despite the fact that the drives are nearing 20 years of age (machines are from ~2005) they still perform better than most “new” external drives. Of course one could also move the drives to a newer machine but many of them use the IDE connector which is not commonly found on modern systems. Also, modern cases typically don't account for (multiple) 5.25" drives.

The other use case is to flash microcontrollers. When fiddeling around with electronics there is always a risk of a short circuit or other error that could in worst case kill the attached PC's mainboard. I feel much safer attaching my self-built electronics to an old machine than to my amd64 workstation.

Due to their age, I think the old machines may not live much longer -- I fear not even 10 more years, some of my old 32-bit laptops have already failed. Hence even for me it does not make sense to try keeping up the software support. Maybe I switch them to a BSD or other Linux distribution if they live long enough but for now the machines run OK with Debian Bookworm (newly oldstable), too.

Linux-Fan commented on Debian 13 “Trixie” debian.org/News/2025/2025... · Posted by u/ducktective

rbanffy · 4 months ago

The only thing I can say against Debian is that it tends to start new server software immediately after install, before I have a chance to configure it properly. Defaults are sane for most packages, but, still, it scares me a little. In that I like the Red Hat approach of installing and leaving it off until I decide to turn it on.

Linux-Fan · 4 months ago

It is a well-known issue with probably less well-known solutions, cf. <https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/723675/debian-ubunt...>

  echo exit 101 > /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
  chmod +x /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d

I think this is the recommended way to avoid autostarting services on Debian.

Linux-Fan commented on Nnd – a TUI debugger alternative to GDB, LLDB github.com/al13n321/nnd... · Posted by u/zX41ZdbW

tw600040 · 7 months ago

Not related to this post, but why in the world is anyone using TUI. Either go with GUI or go with commandline. This no man's land in the middle is the worst of both worlds..

Linux-Fan · 7 months ago

I wrote about it extensively here: <https://masysma.net/37/why_terminal.xhtml>.

Short summary: No animations, No symbols, No touch optimization, no responsive design and I do most of the other stuff in the Terminal anyways so TUI is better "integration" YMMV :)

Linux-Fan commented on Why can't HTML alone do includes? frontendmasters.com/blog/... · Posted by u/susam

LegionMammal978 · 8 months ago

As it happens, the major browsers still can do XML 'includes' to some extent, since by some miracle they haven't torn out their support for XSLT 1.0. E.g. this outputs "FizzBuzz" on Firefox:

  <!-- fizz.xml -->
  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <?xml-stylesheet type="application/xslt+xml" href="style.xslt"?>
  <fizz>Fizz<buzz/></fizz>
  
  <!-- style.xslt -->
  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:template match="buzz">
      <xsl:value-of select="document('buzz.xml')"/>
    </xsl:template>
  </xsl:stylesheet>
  
  <!-- buzz.xml -->
  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <buzz>Buzz</buzz>

You can even use XSLT for HTML5 output, if you're careful. But YMMV with which XML processors will support stylesheets.

Linux-Fan · 8 months ago

Nice, didn't think of that approach and It should work very well for the purposes of static headers and footers.

Linux-Fan commented on Minimum Viable Blog ostwilkens.se/blog/settin... · Posted by u/jlundberg

tomalaci · 8 months ago

I've been wondering what is the benefit of putting up your own web server or scripts to serve your static content when you could put it in a Github repo or serve from something like S3?

The nice thing about latter is that the bandwidth, DDoS or other load-related issues aren't that much of a problem. Server maintenance also isn't a problem as you don't have any.

Linux-Fan · 8 months ago

One key benefit of putting up an own server is that there are no limitations on file types and much fewer restrictions on what kind of content you can create.

For serving static files, I can (and have) lived a long time with one of the "free hoster" sites -- from times before Github Pages or S3 were a thing I guess, today I'd go for Github Pages.

A key advantage of moving to an own server was that I can enable the odd feature or technology any time. E.g. most recently I wanted to have some "private" subspace with fancy authentication and it was easy to add with proper access to the server config.

Linux-Fan commented on Why can't HTML alone do includes? frontendmasters.com/blog/... · Posted by u/susam

austin-cheney · 8 months ago

So, HTML did have includes and they fell out of favor.

The actual term include is an XML feature and it’s that feature the article is hoping for. HTML had an alternate approach that came into existence before XML. That approach was frames. Frames did much more than XML includes and so HTML never gained that feature. Frames lost favor due to misuse, security, accessibility, and variety of other concerns.

Linux-Fan · 8 months ago

Unlike Framesets I think XML includes were never really supported in many browsers (or even any major browsers)?

I still like to use them occasionally but it incurs a "compilation" step to evaluate them prior to handing the result of this compilation to the users/browsers.

Linux-Fan commented on Why can't HTML alone do includes? frontendmasters.com/blog/... · Posted by u/susam

johannes1234321 · 8 months ago

Issue with frame set was way more fundamental: No deep linking, thus people coming via bookmarks or Google (or predecessor) were left on a page without navigation, which people then tried working around with JavaScript, which never gave it a good experience.

Linux-Fan · 8 months ago

Nowdays it is sometimes the other way around: Pages are all JavaScript so no good experience in the first place. I have encountered difficulty trying to get a proper “link” to something multiple times. Also, given that Browsers love to reduce/hide the address bar I wonder if it is really still that important a feature.

Of course "back then" this was an important feature and one of the reasons for getting rid of frames :)

Linux-Fan commented on Why can't HTML alone do includes? frontendmasters.com/blog/... · Posted by u/susam

Linux-Fan · 8 months ago

Isn't this what proper framesets (not iframes) were supposed to do a long time ago (HTML 4?). At least they autoexpanded just fine and the user could even adjust the size to their preference.

There was a lot of criticism for frames [1] but still they were successfully deployed for useful stuff like Java API documentation [2].

In my opinion the whole thing didn't stay mostly because of too little flexibility for designer: Framesets were probably well enough for useful information pages but didn't account for all the designers' needs with their bulky scrollbars and limited number of subspaces on the screen. Today it is too late to revive them because framesets as-is wouldn't probably work well on mobile...

[1] <https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-frames-suck-most-of-the...> - I love how much of it is not applicable anymore and all of these problems mentioned with frames are present in today's web in an even nastier way?

[2] <https://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~ee553/ee402notes/html/figures/JavaD...>