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My IRC Setup

I use IRC every day. I use it to speak to people at my local hackerspace and to fellow Debian or Tor Project developers. My set up is a little complex but every part serves a purpose.

Connection diagram for my IRC setup

Connection diagram for my IRC setup

The service that actually performs the connections to IRC servers is ZNC, an IRC bouncer. The main features this provides are aggressively remaining connected to ensure that I’m not missing anything and also to authenticate to NickServ automatically in the case of a disconnect. Other features from ZNC I use are the keepnick plugin (to keep trying for my primary nick) and the chansaver plugin to keep track of which channels I’m in.

Tor Relays on Twitter

A while ago I played with a Twitter bot that would track radio amateurs using a packet radio position reporting system, tweet their location and a picture from Flickr that was taken near to their location and a link to their packet radio activity on aprs.fi. It’s really not that hard to put these things together and they can be a lot of fun. The tweets looked like this:

[tweet missing]

This isn’t about building a system that serves any critical purpose, it’s about fun. As the radio stations were chosen essentially at random, there could be some cool things showing up that you wouldn’t otherwise have seen. Maybe you’d spot a callsign of a station you’ve spoken to before on HF or perhaps you’d see stations in areas near you or in cool places.

Twitter for Websites

In yesterday’s post, I tried out the Hugo shortcode for embedding tweets from Twitter.

After having gone to some effort to remove external assets from my website, it’s not great that this shortcode will automatically include JavaScript from the Twitter website. The way that Twitter for Websites seems to work is that the JavaScript provides enhancement but the JavaScript is not required for the content to work. This is great, as it means that content still works when syndicated on planets or viewed in an RSS reader or through a text-only browser.

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