I’m surprised the average kid has the nous to set up a VPN, honestly. Doing it has always seemed like a proper faff.
Really? you can just download an app on your phone (like ProtonVPN) and it just works, where's the faff?
Readit Newsjohtso commented on End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs theregister.com/2025/08/1... · Posted by u/rntn
johtso commented on Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library openculture.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/Anon84
Ironic that your Internet Archive Book Images is also just an online gallery rather than something you can download.
All 7ishTB of images are also available on the internet archive, Flickr was a collaboration that allowed browsing them in a vaguely user friendly way. I guess serving over 5 million images isn't trivial and it made sense as a way to help with discovery.
johtso commented on Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library openculture.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/Anon84
Anybody find a license for their online catalogue? Searching for license found one "resultaten" that was a link that 404's, and no hits for "licentie."
Along those lines, though, this: https://www.veradekok.nl/en/2015/08/introducing-the-dememori...
will let you download full page images. and I think this: https://github.com/lovasoa/dezoomify/issues/209
Should work, also. I don't know Dutch law, but I would think books this old would have to be public domain.
Yes, the dezoomify extension will get you individual pages, quite neat seeing the image getting put together client-side in a canvas.. shame it's even necessary though.
johtso commented on Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library openculture.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/Anon84
Hermetically open? Where's the download link?
It really frustrates me that fantastic projects like this end up only being made available via some "online catalogue" with tiled zooming and no option to download.
Just stick it on the internet archive, and then voila, the data is actually open, everything gets automatically OCRed, and then we can do fun transformative things like the Internet Archive Book Images project..
https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/
https://ia804508.us.archive.org/21/items/vrr-texts-imageryof...
https://ia804508.us.archive.org/21/items/vrr-texts-imageryof...
Pinned comment on their Youtube video 6 years ago "There is no option to download them. We will let you know if one day that will come!"
johtso commented on Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library openculture.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/Anon84
Hermetically open? Where's the download link?
It really frustrates me that fantastic projects like this end up only being made available via some "online catalogue" with tiled zooming and no option to download.
Just stick it on the internet archive, and then voila, the data is actually open, everything gets automatically OCRed, and then we can do fun transformative things like the Internet Archive Book Images project..
https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/
https://ia804508.us.archive.org/21/items/vrr-texts-imageryof...
https://ia804508.us.archive.org/21/items/vrr-texts-imageryof...
johtso commented on Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library openculture.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/Anon84
I love the art aesthetic of occult texts, but browsing through all these books just to find any hidden gems or interesting artwork seems really tedious. At least browsing through the list with the title pages visible shows a few interesting designs. Can't really get much more out of this because most of the texts are unreadable to me. This might be a good use case for agentic AI, to browse through the books and highlight any artwork that's hidden beyond the first page.
For alchemy, I was recently learning about alchemical symbols and sigils, but quickly found out that pretty much all the interesting material from this era and category has been preserved, while all the ugly or uninteresting variants tend to get dropped. Unicode has a category for alchemical symbols and they just preserved what seems to be the best parts. Shout-out to U+1F756, the Alchemical Symbol for Horse Dung 🝖.
Whenever I visit a major news publication with dedicated artists handling the creation of hero images, I often end up taking a bit of time to contemplate each design decision and exploring any symbolic interpretation. The best publications have a way of perfectly communicating the underlying tone and message of an article just from the hero image. The Atlantic tends to have the most creative hero images, while The Economist has the most interesting cover designs. And yet, despite this expertise, I never see people remark on those little delights, which in a way makes it occult while hiding in plain sight. It feels a bit connected, seeing the artwork in the first page of these books; maybe an invitation with the whispers of the kind of message the authors wished to convey.
johtso commented on A gentle introduction to anchor positioning webkit.org/blog/17240/a-g... · Posted by u/feross
I need a tooltip, with a pointer; but it seems that the current state of the spec does not allow for pointers; and most explainers studiously avoid this use case, as if this isn't a lion's share of what people do with anchored floating boxes.
Think a common approach is to just display a triangular svg beneath the tooltip:
https://react-spectrum.adobe.com/react-aria/Tooltip.html#exa...
johtso commented on Enlisting in the Fight Against Link Rot jszym.com/blog/archiving_... · Posted by u/jszymborski
The project dashboard is great, you can see all the work that's being done in real-time: https://tracker.archiveteam.org:1338/
johtso commented on Build durable workflows with Postgres dbos.dev/blog/why-postgre... · Posted by u/KraftyOne
Recently moved some of the background jobs from graphile worker to DBOS. Really recommend for the simplicity. Took me half an hour.
I evaluated temporal, trigger, cloudflare workflows (highly not recommended), etc and this was the easiest to implement incrementally. Didn't need to change our infrastructure at all. Just plugged the worker where I had graphile worker.
The hosted service UX and frontend can use a lot of work though but it's not necessary for someone to use. OTEL support was there.
Why would you not recommend Cloudflare workflows? Was thinking of using them in my current project..
johtso commented on Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords blog.danielh.cc/blog/pass... · Posted by u/max__dev
Magic links can be used to authorize the session rather than the device. That is, starting the sign in process on your laptop and clicking the link on your phone would authorize your laptop's sign in request rather than your phone's browser. It requires a bit more effort but it's not especially difficult to do.
Wouldn't that be incredibly insecure? Attacker would just need to initiate a login, and if the user happens to click the link they've just given the attacker access to their account..
The reason why magic links don't usually work across devices/browsers is to be sure that _whoever clicks the link_ is given access, and not necessarily whoever initiated the login process (who could be a bad actor)