RSRSSS curated feeds

RSRSSS
Nothing better to start off an RSS feed about RSS feeds than to make itself its first item.

Regular Flolloping
A blog from a friend on the fediverse with a rather low post frequency, but that often presents the issues of technology, of capitalism, or just of having a life using unusual approaches, often full of metaphors.

javapool updates
All the topic changes on an IRC channel hosted on tilde.town's internal IRC server, in which we roleplay being in a Java-related hot tub. The channel has a town wiki page if you want to learn about the lore.

Things of Interest
I think I found this blog through tilde.news or lobste.rs, but I couldn't really find the source. I can't find out much about the blog's creator, other than them being a prominent SCP writer.

This feed indeed has some interesting things, related to SCP, sci-fi (especially time traveling), or programming. I bookmarked the Perl introduction, if I ever want to learn Perl and scare my fellow Python developers at work.

Shameless Self Promotion
A blog from a kind friend of mine that has been running for nearly 18 years, mostly covering electronics and software along with books and personal things. I don't know much about electronics but it is fascinating for me to see things being done with that anyway.

OPML now available
I added yet another XSLT stylesheet and there is now an OPML subscriptions file available if you are feeling lazy and want to add all the feeds I talk about here. It is built by hand using a Makefile—I need to remember to run it on every new feed…

sandcats
An RSS feed from a tilde friend that I randomly stumbled upon a few weeks ago, probably on IRC or Mastodon. If you feel like you need some cute sandcat breaks in the middle of your tons of blogs in your feed reader, well there you have it!

Directory of directories of directories
I was looking at directories of RSS feeds because I wanted to find more original feeds that I might not find easily from just browsing my friends' blogs or the rest of my small corner of the internet, then I found a few pages that listed directories of RSS feeds, so I made a directory of those directories of RSS feed directories as an OPML file. Those aren't either OPML or RSS files so they use the link outline type which you will probably not be able to use unless you have an outline editor.

fridaypostcard
This is one of my earliest attempts at a PSP-compatible RSS feed: a feed for the #fridaypostcard tradition on tilde.town's IRC channel, where every Friday you can post a link to an image with this tag and a cron job picks it up. This feed does not keep track of any history at all and is cleared on every Friday. Despite my attempts, most of the images in this feed cannot be displayed on a PSP. Most image links use Imgur, which requires HTTPS, and the PSP's RSS reader does not support HTTPS at all.

XKCD
Quite the classic feed here, but the only criteria for me to feature a feed on here is that it exists, because I want to see both more feed producers and consumers. If you have no idea what XKCD is, well, you are probably missing out on a lot of developer jokes.

coolguy.website
A friend of a friend, with a nice-looking website. Their site has some random zines and articles on various topics. Not updated that often, but that's okay, that's a smol personal website and that's the kind of websites I want to see more often.

The Daily WTF
While browsing the blog to learn a bit more and have something to say here, I found something that is worth posting there; its forum had a weird French translation, displaying "Il y a 3 ans later" (Three years ago later). Unfortunately, from past experience, I know they tend to filter submissions rather hard, so it did not make it to their articles.

9 Eyes
Unfortunately not as active as it used to be. This Tumblr blog shares strange, usually funny, pictures found in Google Street View.

Brainshit
This is the RSS feed of my own French blog. I often post about various technical shenanginans that you won't see in my other sites, as well as other non-technical content that I don't put anywhere else either.

netscape_navigator
A good friend that I share a passion for the 16-bit Windows era with. This particular feed is a web version of their Secure Scuttlebutt logs, and although it has not been updated for a while, I still want to share it because I really dig the design of that website. The images use 216 colors, aka the netscape-compatible color palette, which inspired me to do the same for every image on all of my websites, because that color style is amazing.

n-gate
A blog that is now well-known for its "webshit weekly", which makes fun of the top posts on Hackernews and their comments. It includes whole article contents in the RSS items, so you can read that feed without ever leaving your feed reader.

#fridaypostcard
A feed of my own creation which assembles the #fridaypostcards from tilde.town.

Friday postcards are a concept made by ~jumblesale on tilde.town in which you share a URL to an image along with "#fridaypostcard" (and optionally a comment) on IRC, and a bot picks it up and builds an HTML page every Friday.

An archive gets generated each week too, but there was no easy way to get postcards in my RSS reader and I had found multiple issues in the way URLs were handled, causing some Imgur URLs to not work among other things. I at first had copy-pasted the original script, but then rewrote it to handle those errors and get every single postcard ever made into one W3C-valid RSS feed.

You can browse the script that generates this feed on tildegit.

Pedestrian Observations
A public transit researcher that mostly talks about the many issues in public transit. The most common trend you will quickly notice if you start reading regularly is that every American transit planner is either an idiot or forced to make bad decisions by politicians or other idiots, that construction costs are insanely high, and that cars are going to keep their supremacy for a long while. This just reinforces the idea that I should stay in Eurasia and never ever try to go to North America.

netscape_navigator's news feed
I stopped reading technology news from aggregators like Hacker News or lobste.rs, due to their numerous issues as highlighted by n-gate, and I do not read from mainstream tech websites either because 99% of what they publish does not interest me. Additionally, most publications will just wake up my resent for modern technology since it ignores most of its own issues, so I keep my anger at bay by not reading anything.

A few months ago, ~netscape_navigator showed me his "recent reading" list, for which I requested an RSS feed. He uses it in an interesting process to feed on the news while driving using text-to-speech, and just decided to publish his curated news feed. I now generally see this feed as my "wholesome news" feed, because most articles on there are about interesting scientific discoveries, hacking projects, tech history podcasts and articles, etc. There still are some bad news but they are much less related to current politics or other issues of the tech industry like e-waste, america-centrism or racism.

You could probably argue this is kind of a circle jerk, since I am only reading the news from my friends who are more likely to share the same opinions as me; but this feed does not really have that many news, and I am already well aware of the most important issues in tech since I will still see them being discussed on IRC, tilde.news, Misskey, or at the workplace. They are discussed enough for me to just not want them to pollute my RSS reader as well, a place where I can go with the expectation to either relax or learn things. Having this feed here helps me get more interesting articles from lesser-known English-speaking news websites that I simply never heard of in France, such as Scientific American, or discover new blogs.

You can also view the articles in a browser, but why would you do that when you have an RSS reader?

500mile.email
Have you heard about the 500-mile email story? If not, do go read it, it is a classic for nerds. Someone made a website listing various other interesting troubleshooting stories like those, and there is an RSS feed!

Updates are pretty rare, but it still an interesting feed to have; on the rare occasion that a new article gets there, you know you're in for an great read.

m455's blog
Yet another of my friend's blogs. Can you feel that my presence in their social circle influences their decision to provide RSS or Atom feeds?

This good friend has built his own static site generator, and built a few more, and we sometimes joke that all that he does is build site generators instead of writing actual blog content. But his feed (and thus his blog) sometimes fill up with some interesting articles anyway. You can in particular get some great examples of well written documentation if you want some inspiration to make this often overlooked part of software development a little nicer in your own projects.

Escargot Today
Did you know that Windows Messenger, MSN Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, Messenger Plus! Live, Yahoo Messenger and Mercury Messenger all have not died at all, and that people loved them so much that there is now a Python FOSS server to replace Microsoft's and Yahoo's servers?

Escargot is a project to revive all of those clients and extra tools, and bring them back into 2021. It is already currently possible to talk between MSN and Yahoo Messenger, and there are plans to maybe, in the long term, support Matrix, XMPP, IRC, or AIM (which already has a server from another project called NINA), to really bring together all of those messaging services.

As I have been occasionally using a Windows XP laptop as my daily driver for a few days each time, I have kept a MSN Messenger 7.5 instance running. Just one friend got in touch with me using it, but I just like to see it being online in my notification area anyway. I also have installed Mercury Messenger on my phone so I can really stay online on MSN all the damn time. If you want to reach me there, and somehow manage to get an Escargot account and a compatible client installed, you can find my Escargot ID on my contact page.

I just discovered today that Escargot has an RSS feed for its recent news, Escargot Today. And it does not just include the last 5 or 10 posts like most blogs do, this feed just has every single news entry since 2017, which is neat. There are not that many updates since most of the project's true activity is on their GitLab repo, but if you plan on playing with this client, this feed will make sure you don't miss out on any breaking changes they might make. You can also access that page on newer versions of MSN since they changed the MSN Today URL to point at their site.

Space Impact
Here is an RSS feed generated by Substack, a service that I have very regularly seen recently due to everyone using it to create paid newsletters. I absolutely despise e-mail newsletters, but they dealt with that problem by adding an RSS 2.0 feed for each newsletter at /feed. As Substack really scares me due to this e-mail part, I have never tried paying for one of those newsletters, so I do not know if that RSS feed would be available too for paid subscribers, maybe with a token. That would make it a very rare kind of paid RSS feeds, something which I know exists as I have seen it in a specification for the PlayStation Portable but that I have never seen in the wild before.

This particular feed is a free newsletter about space exploration from an Indian writer. He initially had two newsletters, Space Impact and Moon Monday, but they got merged into one. I initially discovered this blog through Moon Monday, a weekly report of everything that is happening related to our exploration of the Moon. The goal of this weekly report is to show that exploring the Moon is still on the table and that we still have a lot to learn about it. Things happen quickly enough that posting once a week is indeed necessary.

The reporting is generally pretty comprehensive, despite a noticeable bias against ISRO; the author regularly criticizes his own country's space program as it is often opaque or makes bad decisions. I would like to see more of this critical thinking applied to all the other reported events (which are usually only shown as facts, without much commentary), as there are a lot of issues with Artemis, the American lunar base program, and with ILRS, the Russian and Chinese project.

NASA going fully commercial on the base, all the way to calling for proposals on spacesuits, vehicles that transport astronauts between their training building to the launch pad, rovers, communication satellites, etc., and potentially allowing companies to mine the Moon, means NASA is bringing capitalism to space along with all its issues. Roscosmos' space budget is being slashed by Putin, because they did not achieve their set objectives in time—obviously, less budget will mean they can do more next year. And China's space program had a lot of issues, since rocket parts sometimes fall onto inhabitants (a huge no for absolutely everyone else), and most of what we know about the program comes from leaks.

But I would never have learned about all of these issues without having this blog as a starting point, teaching me about the current state of the space industry and scientific community, which have been completely transformed in the last few years. So if you are interested in learning more about space and what we're planning about it, I cannot recommend it enough.

rachelbythebay
Some interesting tales from a sysadmin, mostly of incidents in production and their mismanagement. It is an interesting read for me sometimes since I do not have any experience in larger companies. The mismanagement part really makes me realize how lucky I am to not have said experience.

WIN98SE
If you look for "aesthetic" pictures on Tumblr, and you filter out all the stuff with a synthwave pink and blue palette or the photoshopped stuff, you'll probably find a lot of Windows 9x screenshots. I found this aptly named blog, full of screenshots, and it's a pretty nice source of inspiration for when I want to do things on my Windows 98 SE virtual machine.

With those screenshots, I had found some software a few months ago called PlantStudio and it is impressive. There are some screenshots I haven't really exploited yet, mostly of Japanese software. I really am fond of exploring the Japanese web, be it through some of their attempts at creating internet standards like HINA or through the software they created.

Speaking of, It makes me a little sad that Japanese websites are slowly switching to the more "modern" designs we see now, like flat design, and are not keeping the condensed, efficient looks they had before. I used to browse Pixiv regularly, and while its new design is a bit more useful to English speakers, I had gotten used to knowing from memory what each link was in Japanese in the old design and the new one made me lose a ton of features. I wish we could just all go back in time and destroy JavaScript to prevent all of this.

It's Pro Toad and Superb Owl
A plaintext webcomic made by a friend of mine who coined the term Rsszard of Syndication to describe me and seems me as a monster feeding on feeds. Many comics are inspired by conversations we have on IRC, so they share the same kind of weird humor.

The feed is currently broken due to improper XML quoting, and the repo is being moved from another Gitea instance that has had serious technical issues for a while, so it is a bit messy. I opened an issue to get it resolved.

365 RFCs
This is a very interesting blog that ran in 2019 with one post a day. Each post studied one RFC at once, starting from the very first one, and its author went as far as visiting the Computer History Museum to get access to the original RFCs as they were before they got poorly transcribed into their current online forms, as they included handwritten diagrams. That blog is now dead, but if you want to learn about the history of the Internet, this is a very good resource. This taught me among other things that Telnet is older than the Internet itself.

computers are bad
You know you just can't go wrong with a name like that.

This feed is from a newsletter than also offers an RSS feed and fax delivery. Its author mostly focuses on the history of technology on various subjects, and has taught me as many things as the previously mentioned 365 RFCs project.

Kerbal Space Agency
This feed shows you what happens when a Kerbal Space Program player wants to play realistically. The Kerbal Space Agency is a fictional space agency that tries to play in real Earth time and starts from the very beginning with weather balloons or sounding rockets. The project has been going on for a few years and is mostly active on Twitter, with the website providing summaries, off-character commentary, and a mission tracker that fetches data straight from the save file.

The project has been much more silent since the pandemic, and there have been no news at all on whether or not it will be coming back, so for now this feed is quite inactive. However, the history there is pretty interesting to read still.

Since this is a WordPress blog, you can also get the Atom feed or the RDF Site Summary feed.

Requests for Comments
The RFC Editor, where the RFCs that define Internet protocols are published, provides many ways to retrieve the over nine thousand documents. Among them are rsync modules, which I had never heard of before. But most importantly, there is an RSS feed and an Atom feed!

I guess having that Atom feed was quite predictable, considering that Atom has been standardized in RFC 4287. Also note that RFCs should now be written using a specific XML format, also defined in another RFC; RFC 7991 being the current version. It feels quite strange to me to see such "high-level" formats in an RFC; I am more used to seeing RFCs about lower-level protocols like TCP/IP or BGP.

Emojipedia Blog
Another proof that Unicode probably goes too far: there is enough to say about emojis that an entire blog is dedicated to them. This is an RSS feed that has been sent to me by a friend, and this feed will definitely not make it into my RSS reader. I am posting this from a PuTTY session on a Windows XP laptop; I can't see any emojis there, so it is completely irrelevant.

linkbudz
A new project of ~m455 involves an IRC bot that listens to the !post command on his private IRC server to let a user post a link with some title to a webpage. The project kicked off nicely by not having any HTML sanitization, so the trolls (and QA engineers I guess) that we are on this IRC server sent tons of JavaScript, CSS overrides, iframes, background music, etc. That broke the RSS feed, but the sanitization is now properly in place and the feed is usable. If you are curious to see what our little corner of the internet finds on other corners of the internet, feel free to look around and subscribe to the feed.

Free Steam games
I have an account on a Misskey instance. Misskey is some japanese fediverse software with what is probably the heaviest JavaScript frontend of them all and it is full of interesting features. The one feature relevant to this post is called antennas: you can create timelines that will look for any post known to this server that matches a list of words or regular expressions. I used that to look for anything that mentions RSS, to potentially catch some interesting conversations or be able to give some answers to people's questions without having to scroll through every post on the fediverse for hours.

Most posts are just random automated posts made by bots that were created to convert RSS feeds to ActivityPub, but sometimes I can find some nice things. I got the opportunity to mention HINA at some point, and this week I found a new feed to add to my reader, Grab Free Games. The website's goal is pretty simple: tell you about any Steam games that are temporarily available for free, so that you can add them immediately to your Steam library and them prompty forget about them and never play them. Truly an amazing tool!

cosmic.voyage
A whole tilde has its own global RSS feed! cosmic.voyage is a tilde whose members publish logs from spaceships, outposts, etc. in a sci-fi universe; a large writing project, similarly to the SCP foundation. I keep on telling myself I'll have to read some of it someday, but it just gets added to my long pile of things to read—books, blog posts, magazines, random web pages, etc.

If you are more of an IETF fan, you can also get an Atom feed.

tilde whirl
~dozens has started a podcast with tildeverse citizens as its guests. Since podcasts are fully backed by RSS, well there is an RSS feed available. I helped him iron out some details on the feed, since I had never toyed with RSS feeds for podcasts before and wanted to look at them a bit more in-depth. Maybe if I get enough experience helping casakhstan people set up their podcast feeds, I will write about it here…

The Plain Text Project
The Plain Text Project is a blog initiated by Scott Nesbitt, a writer that has been Linux full-time for a while while not considering himself a techie, as in a power user. He shows various ways text files can be used, and includes tutorials on using tools such as pandoc. While the regular touting of Markdown as if it was the most perfect markup ever in most of the links shared on this blog annoys me, the suggestions can be inspiring to build your own plain text systems, and the author encourages using RSS feeds. You can get featured in it as well, by getting a quick interview over email on how you use plaintext.

tinyapps.org
tinyapps.org is a website I found through my binging of every single article of the previously featured Plain Text Project. It features an interesting selection of old and very small Windows and Mac software that perform tasks that could seem to be impossible in such a small size, such as a mail client or a web browser. I might have a deeper look through the selection and use some of the tools in my Windows XP setup…

dozens of ~dozens' books
~dozens, who never ceases to feed the monster feeding on feeds that I am, had allowed me a year ago to add an RSS feed generator script to his books repository.

This Git repo hosts a CSV file exported from dozens' Calibre library. The file is also converted to a recfile, and with my help to an RSS feed. This was set up after dozens shared some of his collection with the casakhstan, and we got interested in it and any new additions to it.

If you are interested in a book found within this library, feel free to contact ~dozens to request one of the ebooks. You wouldn't download an ebook, wouldn't you?

Astronomy Picture of the Day
Here's a pretty well-known feed of pretty images that are pretty great. Since 1995-06-16, every day, APoD gives you a new cool space pic. It's one of those nice, simple feeds that I like to have in my feedreader; I block out an hour of time to read through many posts in my reader, and will start with APoD among others to warm up.

LSL scripts from Outworldz
I have a list of over a hundred ideas for posts on this feed, and had the next post already planned out, but then I stumbled upon a feed that I clearly couldn't expect. I was trying to find the correct word for the servers that regroup other servers hosting virtual worlds, all compatible with Second Life. Those servers are called hypergrids, and each server grouped within them is called a grid. Each grid contains tiles, also called regions, which are one square kilometer of virtual world. All of this has existed long before companies tried to get involved in the metaverse, and long before cryptocurrency even began to exist. Those worlds are still active, although probably not as much as during Second Life's peak.

While looking for some sort of authoritative source for the definition of a hypergrid, I found Outworldz, a website full of resources related to OpenSimulator, the server software that runs all of those worlds. Its name seems to be a pun on InWorldz, one of the largest commercial OpenSimulator grids, which has existed from 2010 to 2018 before shutting down and seemingly starting from scratch.

I am quite curious about those old virtual worlds, especially now with all this metaverse bullshit. I browsed around a bit and realized they provide an RSS feed of the LSL scripts shared on this website. LSL, or the Linden Scripting Language, is the scripting language made by Linden Lab for Second Life. Scripting is how most of the virtual worlds come to life; be it enabling automatic transactions, sending messages, embedding YouTube videos to create movie theaters, etc., LSL can become important quite fast if you want to do interesting things in OpenSim. So here it is, a feed that genuinely surprised me, full of interesting content for a community that sounds inactive today, but still definitely exists.

~lucidiot's ideas
I have a lot of ideas, and a lot of projects. I feel like it is a waste to never act on those ideas, even though they are not that useful or motivating to me, and I struggle to end projects that are not completed because of the sunk cost fallacy. to lighten the weight of giving up on some ideas or some projects, I started an ideas page, in which I list the ideas I had, and sometimes mention some research I made on them or a project that I abandoned, and why I gave up. It caught the interest of some tilde.town members and I now advocate for everyone to have their own ideas page. To follow the trend of the /now page or /uses page, this could become the /ideas page on your personal website.

I made my ideas page into an RSS feed after I rewrote the page so it would be generated from a recfile, so here it is. If you have made your own ideas page, feel free to let me know and I'll feature you in the section at the bottom of the webpage.

NASA Earth Observatory
The NASA Earth Observatory is a website meant to share various satellites images of the Earth that NASA collects, especially to raise awareness about climate change or show the extend of large-scale events such as wildfires and droughts. You get to see a whole bunch of pretty pictures, and then realize that most of this just highlights the disaster that we just keep on causing. What a great thing to have in my feedreader!

There are a few more specific feeds if you want just one category of their posts.

dozens dreams
When the COVID–19 pandemic hit, ~dozens started to get different dreams than usual, and started to log them in a blog. The about page has some interesting information on the why and the how of this blog.

I have been logging my dreams on and off for multiple years in my notebooks. I had intially started that as a quest to do lucid dreaming, a quest that I gave up on because reality checks are a really difficult routine to get into and they weren't bringing much of a result. The lucid in lucid dreaming was the original inspiration for my nickname. I kept on logging my dreams after that because I was still interested in remembering my dreams, and I nowadays also use this as an excuse to write at least one line a day in a notebook, since that is a habit I want to keep; when I do not remember a dream, I will still write I did not remember my dreams.

Getting those random dreams in my feedreader is what got me started in posting my own dream logs on my wiki. I might end up separating them at some point, as I am slowly working my way through all the dreams I have logged over the years in many notebooks, translating them and obfuscating them for public consumption.

My dreams almost always involve me with some family members or friends in a very bizarre situation, but still in keeping with most of the laws of physics, whereas dozens' dreams appear to have a much more malleable world. That might be related to me being much less exposed to fantasy or RPGs and having much less creativity.

The Old New Thing
This is the only Microsoft-related blog that I currently subscribe to: a nearly 20 years old blog from Raymond Chen, a software engineer working on Windows. The Old New Thing has nearly-daily posts, some sharing key learnings from replying to customer support requests, some forming long series describing entire CPU architectures, and some just general C++ or Windows related tips. Considering that I do not do any assembly code or C++, the more interesting content for me is either when some bits of Windows history are inserted into the post, or some complex programming concept that I rarely get to meet in my usual programming gets explained. Those posts are still posts that I usually skim through without understanding half of them anyway.

This blog is mostly known for its random posts on Microsoft jargon (which Chen calls Microspeak) or various pieces of Windows trivia, such as why Pinball was removed from Windows, and why it cannot come back even though they want to. More recently, a post on a song that made hard drives crash resulted in a vulnerability being reported.

NASA Image of the Day
The last of the three NASA feeds I currently have in my RSS reader: a more general feed of images related to NASA's various activities. It mostly mentions space, but there are mentions of aeronautics, or various bits of NASA-related events of history. I find it interesting to get random reminders that NASA isn't just about space.

COOELST CAT COMCIX
Quite a few webcomics out there are using Tumblr, sometimes behind custom domains. This one is a pretty simple webcomic that someone made and that I somehow stumbled upon one day, possibly just by seeing a link to one of the posts on the Fediverse. It is intentionally poorly drawn and written and that just adds to the jokes, and usually talks about topics related to the queer community or to neurodivergent people, which is what you commonly find on Tumblr. It posts quite irregularly, but it is nice to see a simple and funny post from time to time in my feedreader, and the intentional low quality does remind you that you do not have to make something that's perfect for it to be enjoyable or interesting.

status.cafe
Through the endless treasure trove of feeds that is dozens, I am guaranteed not to ever be running out of feeds to post about on here. Thanks to him, I discovered status.cafe, a place to share your current status in 140 characters or less. Basically Twitter, but without a concept of notifications or following others; this is a lot more about publishing content than receiving it.

Each status includes an emoji to summarize your current mood or state, and if you know how to use the browser's developer tools, you can make it use any Unicode character you want. You can show off your current status emoji using a badge, and I have put mine among the many others on my tilde.town page.

status.cafe provides a whole bunch of Atom feeds; you can subscribe to a feed of everyone at once or the specific feed of each user as https://status.cafe/users/[username].atom. For example, here is mine.

While exploring the information superhighway to learn more about other feeds I wanted to post about on here, I also stumbled upon imood, which possibly was a source of inspiration for status.cafe. Statuses are called moods, and have both a personal mood (some sentence that the user writes) and a base mood selected from a set. There are no feeds on this one though, so status.cafe is clearly superior.

Hundred Rabbits
Rek Bell and Devine Lu Linvega are two artists living together on a sailboat called Pino, forming the artist collective known as Hundred Rabbits, often abbreviated 100r. They publish their sailing experiences and show a particularly minimalist aesthetic in their various artistic projects, and got quite popular. They have a monthly newsletter where they report updates on their various projects and on the boat, and this newsletter has an RSS feed.

I have known about 100r for a while, but only follow them by reading this feed because their creations and ideas are often incompatible with my life; I do not live on a boat and do not really enjoy the kind of very minimalist, colorless aesthetic that they follow. Getting those quick monthly reminders of the existence of the concept of permacomputing, and taking a few minutes to watch those people living in what looks like an alternate universe completely separate from mine, can still be interesting in small doses.

dozens css art
Here is another random project that ~dozens made. As always with every single thing he makes, there's an RSS feed for it! This one has a few webpages showing some art made with CSS properties, with said properties changing every few seconds so you can stare at them for a little while.

forum.status.cafe
I mentioned status.cafe before on this feed, but not its forum. It runs a homemade message board system called vpub which is quite simple and provides Atom feeds:

Every single post

All posts in one topic

All posts in one board

It could also have feeds for all posts by a user or all posts within a forum (a group of boards), but having the option of following this messageboard using a feedreader is still quite neat.

There also used to be a vpub instance dedicated to vpub itself at vpub.miso.town, but it appears to be offline now. m15o, vpub's creator, said they are not working on it as well.

Foxes in Love
Since I recently joined Tumblr again, I do not really need those feeds much, but I still do follow some Tumblr blogs in my feedreader. Among them is this pretty well-known comic involving two foxes being adorable or funny. Just like the other comics, it makes for a nice break after reading longer articles in Liferea.

From the Pen Cup
Here's one of the few blogs I started following when I was looking for more blogs on handwriting. This blog focuses mostly on fountain pens, which I do not use, but also includes posts about writing in general, about notebooks, etc. I also like that this blog is managed by someone older than most of the bloggers in my feedreader, as this brings some more interesting thoughts.

Lin.ear th.inking
Dealing with polygons on images at work has made me discover the world of GIS, and that's how I ended up discovering this blog. This is the blog of Martin Davis, the creator of the Java Topology Suite (JTS).

The JTS and its C++ port called GEOS power pretty much every geographical information system under the sun. I don't understand much about the math behind GIS stuff, but this blog showcases some of the new features in the JTS with some simple examples. It can help me suggest improvements at work, or get new ideas for weird projects since I like playing with maps now.

This feed is also available as an Atom feed.

You wouldn't download a planet
There are a whole lot of feeds for OpenStreetMap, and since I like both OpenStreetMap and, of course, feeds, I will be talking about a bunch of them over multiple posts. To start with, here's a feed of torrents that you can put into any BitTorrent client that supports feeds, like Deluge, to automatically download a weekly export of the entire map. That would be over 1.7 terabyte of OpenStreetMap XML data, but they provide a better format called PBF based on protobuf, that reduces this down to about 70 gigabytes.

Multiple RSS feeds are available, to get the PBF version, the BZ2-compressed XML version, or the entire history of the map and not just its current state. Those are documented on the OSM wiki.

I really like the name of this thing. Planet. You can just… download the whole planet. This is how far we've come as a society. Why stop at downloading a car when you can download a planet?

piclog
From the author of status.cafe and vpub, piclog.blue is a new service to share pics, embed them into a website, and get RSS feeds from them. Interestingly, unlike all of m15o's other projects up until now, this project provides RSS and not Atom feeds.

Probably the most exotic part of this image sharing service is that every image is highly compressed: no more than 400×400 pixels in size, and saved as JPEG with a quality of 5%. This probably makes hosting this service a lot easier in terms of bandwidth and storage space, and makes the images look blurry or less detailed. Most piclog users are status.cafe users, so it's interesting to see the photographic equivalent of the things I see fellow status.cafe users post regularly.

While you can get a feed of every photo from everyone, you can also get feeds for each user, with https://piclog.blue/user-feed.php?id= followed by the integer ID of the relevant user. You can get this ID by opening their profile, since the same ID will be in the profile URL. Here's m15o's feed for example.

As of posting this, the feeds unfortunately do not use Media RSS or embed the image into the description as an <img> tag, so you will have to open each item in your browser to view the image with most feedreaders.

NTSB
I already mentioned ITSB multiple times in this feed, my project that generates hundreds of feeds for transport accident investigation reports. But this particular feed is worth a post in itself.

The NTSB is the one investigation agency I really must have in ITSB. It might just be the largest agency for transportation safety investigations worldwide, and anyone who ever watched a Mayday documentary or looked into plane crashes has heard of it. They produce the largest amount of reports out of all the agencies I found through ITSB.

Fortunately, they provided an official RSS feed for their released investigation reports. I'm using the past tense though, because they unfortunately decided to shut it down. The feeds were still available for a little while, but they would be completely empty. I have yet to see anyone ever sunsetting a feed properly, by adding a post to warn everyone for a few days before just killing the feed completely, so this issue went unnoticed for a while.

To generate a feed when there is no official one available, I usually just run curl on a webpage that lists investigation reports, then use pup to select some HTML elements and convert them to a JSON structure, then mess around with said JSON with jq, and finally convert that back into XML using xmltodict. But after looking around on the NTSB's website, I went for a much weirder method.

The NTSB provides a service called CAROL, a tool to search through all the investigation reports and safety recommendations the NTSB ever published. Getting a lot of structured data sounds a lot more interesting than having to parse the scant details I can get from unnecessarily complex HTML pages, so I wanted to use that as my source for my custom feed.

After a lot of experimenting, I ended up writing a separate script that exports 1 year of completed investigation reports as a large JSON file. I could have exported 10 or more years of reports, but that resulted in an extremely large RSS feed that would make most feedreaders blow up, so I only got one year.

I then use a 671 lines long jq script to process this JSON file into an RSS feed, including as much information as I can within the <description> so that you sometimes do not need to read the PDF report at all.

This mess results in a feed that is far, far better than any other feed I have in ITSB, especially any official feed. If every webmaster wants to remove RSS and replace it with newsletters, since that's what I gathered from my few attempts at reaching out to those agencies, maybe the real solution is to push for more open data instead. Let the people who know and use RSS make proper RSS feeds without scraping your website…

The Cramped
As I had mentioned before in this feed, when I look over my over two hundred feeds in my reader, I regularly get the feeling I should have less technology-related blogs in there, and more feeds related to my other interests such as writing. I will probably have some cleaning to do soon to reduce the share of tech blogs that no longer spark joy.

A while ago, I tried to look for more blogs related to stationery, handwriting, etc., and I found The Cramped. This blog evolved a bit over time, and nowadays the author occasionally shares other people's posts related to writing, notebooks, writing in notebooks, personal knowledge management, etc. This kind of feed is nice to have if I want to discover more blogs! I subscribed to maybe two or three already thanks to it.

International Institute of Food-Related Protocols
Possibly inspired by IP over Burrito Carriers, the IIFRP is a project with little activity where RFCs get published to standardize food in a manner similar to Internet standards. They provide a few feeds to feed standard food to your feedreader, all listed on their feeds page:

Their blog posts, of which there currently are none;

All RFCs in any state;

Only the adopted RFCs;

Only the drafts and proposed RFCs.

A coworker suggested that maybe we should have a standard for french tacos, since many places selling french tacos commit blasphemy by adding veggies in them, sometimes even adding them by default without warning you. I have some experience writing joke RFCs, so that's something to consider.

The Olognion
A mix between The Onion and O(log n), this website is pretty much The Onion for developers. The satirical news reports are published much less often than before but do make me smile a little each time, before the usual existential dread sets back in.

National Hurricane Center and Central Pacific Hurricane Center
The NOAA's National Hurricane Center and Central Pacific Hurricane Center are two distinct official bodies responsible for watching out for cyclones around North America. There used to also be an Eastern Pacific Hurricane Center, with the NHC being solely responsible for the Atlantic side of things, but those two got merged. The CPHC's website got merged with the NHC's, but they remain distinct entities, perhaps for redundancy if one of them loses to a cyclone.

The NHC provides a myriad of feeds, with an RSS button available on the header of every webpage, but the list of feeds it links to is quite hard to read. Feed autodiscovery is supported, with 11 of their feeds listed as <link /> tags. Among this hodgepodge of feeds, you'll find:

2-day forecasts for every depression, storm or cyclone under their watch, as images or as text;

Updates to their KMZ or SHP exports, either individually for each cyclone or for an overview over one of their three regions, for geospatial people, with further docs on how to use them;

Descriptions of each depression, storm or cyclone as separate items;

The latest weather report as a podcast (this seems to be inactive);

Flight plans for any weather reconnaissance flights they might have each day;

Discussions, longer weather reports written less to follow a standard maritime/aviation weather report and more to be human-readable;

Monthly overviews of tropical weather;

Forecasts dedicated to navigation in offshore waters, in high seas, HF radio transmission quality, probable wind speeds for storms, etc.;

Advisories of incoming hurricanes, or forecasts, or status updates, or ICAO-compliant ones.

That's a lot. Most of these feeds are divided by region (Atlantic, Central Pacific or East Pacific, per WMO conventions), and by "storm wallet". A storm wallet is a large binder or collection of binders that forecasters used to archive all of their data into once each cyclone dissipates, numbered 1 to 5, to match the maximum advisory level reached. In the case of those feeds, this means each storm wallet is actually the current advisory level for the storm. Some feeds also have versions in Spanish, updated by their Puerto Rico office when they feel like it.

To make it slightly easier for feed aficionados (afeedcionados?) to figure out what they might be interested in, I wrote a terrible script to build an OPML file listing every available feed. You can access it and add it to your feed reader here; feel free to remove the likely numerous duplicates from your reader afterwards.

Note that some of these feeds include a <gml:Point> element in the items describing weather systems, but it isn't wrapped within a <georss:where> element, making those feeds invalid. This strangeness is what made me have a deeper look into GeoRSS in the first place, leading to the series of articles I posted in the last few weeks.

p1k3
~brennen is a fellow townie who plays the long game. His blog exists since 1997, and although the posting frequency has lowered, it is still active today. Look at the archive and be amazed.

In the middle of an IRC conversation, I mentioned how I was only reading the blog articles of my friends that I spot in my feedreader, right after mentioning I read 40 of brennen's posts. He proceeded to build an Atom feed with every single post from his website all the way to November of 2020, which is as of writing still available here. If you want to stress test your feedreader, or how much you like to read blog posts, add this feed. Don't expect it to be updated though since it was generated manually just once.

I went through every single of the 1960 entries of this special feed in just one month, and I read the other few dozen posts that were posted in the years since. It was really fun to follow along as ~brennen grows up. He told me he thought the older entries were embarrassing, and I can understand that since I also feel shame at things I put up online when I was younger, most of which I have deleted ever since. But going through all of his posts was fascinating. I wasn't laughing at young him or thinking any less of present him. I was just watching someone growing up a decade earlier than me, in a different country, with a different culture. I believe there is some great historical value in this online diary, just like how historians are studying the past by reading diaries. I hope ~brennen carries on with this great undertaking and continues shoving random tidbits of his life into this website. This is the World Wide Web at its finest: humans just being human.

UK Threat Level
As a citizen of a country that still is within the European Union, I am probably legally required to make fun of the United Kingdom, and Brexit is only one in an ever-growing list of reasons why I might want to do that. But there is one thing that I cannot complain about, and that is their government's website.

I could not find it anymore, but a while ago, I read a blog post about someone watching someone else use a PSP to access GOV.UK on some free Wi-Fi to do whatever business you might have on your government's website. They used that as an example of how good Web design allows accessibility, even to people whose only device might have an incredibly limited browser and who still need to fill out governement forms online. My own experience with browsing the web on a PSP teaches me that accessing any website nowadays is extremely difficult, but I am willing to believe that blog post because GOV.UK's design sounds like it could actually fit on a PSP, or at least still be readable.

GOV.UK's design system causes the website to often be listed on lists of "brutalist websites", due to the design being all about clearly displaying what people are looking for, unlike what most heavily monetized blogs or most web apps do now.

But we're not here to talk about website design of course. Another interesting and much more relevant part of the UK governement website is that they have feeds, and a lot of them. Integrating the UK transport accident investigation branches into https://tilde.town/~lucidiot/itsb/ was trivial, just pick the right filters and get your tailored Atom feed. I have started to randomly stumble upon the feeds of other UK public bodies, and I think I'll have to soon spend more time trying to list all the feeds they have because there's a lot to discover. A lot of feeds, of XML namespaces, of relationships to European projects, and probably more.

Let's just start with this rather simple feed: you can get updates on the current national terrorist threat level set by the MI5. I was both surprised at the fact that that's a feed, a feed that only gets updated at most twice a year, and at the fact that they have a separate threat level set for Northern Ireland. I'm fairly sure having a separate Vigipirate level in France for Corsican independentists would just be a self-fulfilling prophecy, causing them to attack more.

I naively hope the UK someday stops all its political bullshit, but only so they can keep feeding me more feeds, and inspire other countries to do the same.

Chicago Transit Authority alerts
I sometimes find myself a little bored by the list of feeds I would like to share on this feed. Quite a lot of them are blogs, and sharing a lot of blogs quickly gets repetitive. I am far more interested in the more unusual uses of RSS, like the RSS feeds of cyclones I shared a little while ago. So I occasionally look up some random keywords next to "RSS feed" in a search engine. I stumbled upon the Chicago Transit Authority's RSS feeds, and I was pleased by the sheer amount of them, but also by what they provide.

I like using RSS feeds as a means of getting not just blog posts. Getting warnings about delays or changes on a commute over RSS sounds really nice. Getting the kind of information that people think they need phone notifications for, or the kind of information companies want to you think you need a mobile app full of data collection for. And most importantly, getting it all into a system designed to handle a large amount of information, to sort it, to filter it, to display it conveniently, instead of just a sort of tray that doesn't fit more than a few notifications.

This reminds me of a BlackBerry Q5 I used before I switched to OnePlus. BlackBerry OS 10 is just Android with a BlackBerry UI, and its notification center was quite nice and could clearly better handle a large amount of notifications than Android or iOS' default interfaces. I guess this is just what happens when you design something to be used for more than just doomscrolling and swiping left or right on random faces.

Anyway, since I like to get all the interesting feeds neatly organized into even more XML, I wrote a script to generate an OPML file for all the Chicago Transit Authority feeds. Since they provide feeds for both a single line or category of alerts and for all at once, you'll get duplicates if you import that, but at least you will know about all the available feeds.

UK National Highways alerts
In the same vein as the Chicago Transit Authority alerts OPML file I generated, here's another OPML file of transportation alerts, but for England's highways.

These feeds are quite strange. They use non-namespaced extensions to RSS, which are illegal but will not break most feedreaders, to give some metadata on each item:

<reference>

A unique identifier for the event. I suppose this could just have been a <guid isPermaLink="false">.

<road>

The number of the road where the event occurs, like M20.

<region>

The region where the event occurs, which is equivalent to the region names in the regional feeds list.

<county>

The county where the event occurs.

<latitude>

The WGS84 latitude of the event's location. This could have been a <georss:point> or a <gml:pos> or a <icbm:latitude> or a <geo:lat>…

<longitude>

The WGS84 longitude of the event's location. This could have been a <georss:point> or a <gml:pos> or a <icbm:longitude> or a <geo:long>…

<eventStart>

ISO 8601 date of when the event starts. This could have been a <ev:startdate> from the RSS 1.0 Event Module.

<eventEnd>

ISO 8601 date of when the event ends. This could have been a <ev:enddate> from the RSS 1.0 Event Module.

<overallStart>

ISO 8601 date of when the cause of the event starts. For incidents, this is the same as <eventStart>. For road works that start before the event occurs (for example, road works that only close a road during a given time of day), this will be a different date.

<overallEnd>

ISO 8601 date of when the cause of the event ends. For incidents, this is the same as <eventEnd>. For road works that end after the event occurs (for example, road works that only close a road during a given time of day), this will be a different date.

Obviously, not a single feed reader will support these tags.

A larger issue however is just the sheer amount of items. Adding this OPML into a feedreader made it pull over fourteen thousand items. Now of course there are a lot of duplicates, since there are feeds by road, area, and for the whole network, as well as for incidents, roadworks, or both at once. The everything-everywhere firehose still has three thousand items, with tons and tons of roadworks everywhere.

Just the incidents-everywhere feed gets a new item from every few minutes to every few seconds, which is the fastest update rate I have ever seen on a feed. I guess those feeds really can only be used by software for further processing.

windows93
Something like 15 years ago, back when I was still excited by tons of things with computing, and not tired of where the whole industry is going thanks to capitalism, I discovered a service called Desktoptwo, and more generally the concept of a WebOS.

Desktoptwo was emulating some mix of the Windows, Mac and Linux desktop experiences, in a web browser. You had a few simple apps available like a notepad, and some storage space to keep your files on their servers. You could also use OpenOffice Writer, Calc and Impress: those would open a remote desktop connection within the browser to the actual OpenOffice running on their servers. It was quite impressive for the time.

At a similar time, I had also played with the Microsoft Office 2007 "Test Drive", powered by Runaware. Using Internet Explorer only, you could for a short amount of time play around with Office 2007 on a Windows XP virtual machine, using Citrix. Runaware also had other demos running, including one for Sage. I remember spending a lot of time just messing with those virtual machines, without knowing anything about the technology that made this possible yet. I was like 10 years old!

A few years later, I had found eyeOS, yet another WebOS, but that you could self-host this time. It had more applications available, but they were less interesting—the whole thing was more meant to be a demo of what apps you could create with it. They had something akin to an app store. I tried both their own demo instance and hosted my own, as I had learnt a bit more about webservers by that time.

I now tend to be wary of large piles of JavaScript like those as the current state of the JavaScript ecosystem tends to make everything worse, so I don't generally care much about the current attempts at making a new WebOS, like OS.js… unless they are fun.

Windows 93 is a pretty well done recreation of the Windows 95 user interface that started in 2014. It has a community that provided plenty of new apps to give the system a lot of content and fill it with weird jokes and "viruses". This is definitely not meant to be a replacement for a desktop OS like Desktoptwo or eyeOS attempted, and just a weird bundle of apps and games that mix the modern web and 30-year-old designs.

Their RSS feed gives some rare status updates about the project. I thought the project had been pretty much dead by now, since the feed had gotten no updates at all in a long while, but they announced that they working on a full rewrite. Version 3 will be open source, and it will be based on Sys42, their own custom framework that skips one of the worst parts of modern JavaScript (Webpack) and allows building any web OS, not just a whimsy Windows 95 clone.

I am impressed by how much effort people sometimes put into these projects.

Dev Zines
A list of zines related to software development or just tech in general, along with tools, tutorials, templates to create zines, and events such as zine fairs. An interesting random find from Tumblr. It doesn't seem to be getting many updates unfortunately!

Open Source Musings
There are plenty of websites showcasing various open source software projects, and plenty of websites encouraging you to use Linux, but a blog that strongly goes against techies and instead focuses solely on going FOSS for everyone but them is a bit rarer. Scott Nesbitt has multiple blogs that I might showcase in here, and also has strong opinions on tech. Open Source Musings is his blog where he shows how he uses Linux to write, edit images, blog, read ebooks, or just browse the web, things that are not aimed at a highly skilled technical audience; how to use Linux when you just want to use a computer every sometimes without being a nerd.