Infrastructure updates for wheresalice.info
- migrated my main site to European hosting, a European dns provider, and removed the dependency on Cloudflare. It is still a .info domain though, which does depend on the USA
- added HTTP/3 support to subdomains serving dynamic content
- added HTTPS records for wheresalice.info (which means it theoretically works in IPv6 on modern browsers, but probably doesn't)
Why can't we support IPv6 for legacy browsers and other applications? A very good question
- RFC2181 says we can't use a CNAME for the apex. Specifically, it can't be used in combination with NS and SOA records (and historically MX records)
- AAAA records exist for the hostname we would CNAME to but aren't documented as being usable by the hosting provider
- ALIAS records aren't a real thing, they just dynamically return the relevant A/AAAA records. This is a problem because the nameservers would all need the private keys for dnssec signing
Let's hope that HTTPS records become more widely used
Failing to find music on the fediverse
Inspired by Martin's 38C3 talk on search engines I spent some time today taking up the idea of using Mastodon's trending links API to see if I could find some interesting music-related links.
I did this by fetching https://www.fediverse.to/data/dataset.js and stripping the javascript to turn it into json and then extracting just the mastodon hosts with a "music" category:
cat dataset.js | jq -r '.[] | select(.cat[] | contains("music")) | select(.sw=="mastodon") | .url' > hosts
I then looped through all 82 hosts to fetch "https://%s/api/v1/trends/links"
Of the 82 hosts, only 15 had any links. And none of the links were music related, most were popular news stories.
It was a nice idea, but it looks like you'd have to actually crawl the instances to collect links if you want anything other than the popular sites.
hacky go code if you want to replicate - https://pb.envs.net/?264dc776fc8d4a69#H2wQEFt8fcGPSvRWmekigHuHqbSb8CABwd69FzKsatsP
2025-01-01
Things you may have missed in December:
- HOPE (Hackers Of Planet Earth) is now annual, next conference August 15-17, 2025
- Ghostty (a new terminal emulator) had their first public release
- 38C3 Chaos Computer Club Congress happened and videos of the talks are already online
- My 2024 Soundcloud Playback
- I guess I have a blog again now?
- And a matrix account
@wheresalice:envs.net
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