Timasomo FAQ

Thread #3: Reflection for Week Two of Four

Halfway through!

Give a Progress Update

How's it been going? Tell us where you're currently at!

Breakdowns and Breakthroughs?

With any creative process, there'll always be unexpected flashes of brilliance or unexpected fizzles for what seemed like good ideas. Have you encountered anything that didn't go like you wanted it to, or something that up and surprised you out of nowhere?

What's Coming Up This Week?

With seven days down already, what do the next seven look like for you? Let us know where you're headed.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Inspiration

Where do you draw your inspiration from? What other creative works have inspired you? What creative works do you hope your creation emulates, channels, or stands alongside of? I know it can come across as lofty to compare your own work to those of "established" art, but compare away! No need to be modest!

As before: best of luck to ALL participants! Let's go MAKE SOMETHING.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their week.

If you have any plans, goals, accomplishments, or even failures, whether they be personal or work related, I'd love to hear about them. This is a place for casual discussion about your week, past, present, and future.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this week?

This topic got me thinking on this. Nowadays I'm not a very emotional guy but in the past some movies completely wrecked me. My Girl, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Blue Gate Crossing (cried from the movie theater till the bus stop), The Hottest State (which quite literally accelerated the end of one of my relationships) and Stand by Me are examples of movies that made me cry like a little baby. But also some anime, like Rec and Kare Kano, and books like The Sorrows of Young Werther. What about you?

Occasionally, especially for newer users, I'll see a post in a section of the site where it doesn't belong, sometimes without (proper) tags. What's the best way to bring this to the attention of folks who can fix it? Leaving comments is messy and distracts from the discussion, but right now it's the only method I know of to bring up the issue.

Apologies if this belongs in ~tech, that group is more on topic than ~talk but I think it’s for news and links more than open questions. (Edit: Looks like it's been moved to ~comp, I guess that works too.)

I’m looking for an HDMI switch. It needs to support at least 4K resolution and have at least 10 input ports. It also needs to have Toslink audio out. Remote control support is a “nice to have” but physical buttons are fine too.

I’m having trouble locating a product like this online. Not sure if I’m just using the wrong terms or if it doesn’t actually exist. Can any Tildes gearheads give me a pointer here?

This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their weekend.

If you have any plans, things you want to get done, things you have done, things you haven't done, or even if you just want to talk about how you're doing this weekend, this is a place for casual discussion about those things.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this weekend?

Timasomo FAQ

Thread #2: Reflection for Week One of Four

One week down, three to go! Why does it feel like we just started but also like there's not a whole lot of time left?!

Give a Progress Update

How's it been going? Tell us where you're currently at!

Breakdowns and Breakthroughs?

With any creative process, there'll always be unexpected flashes of brilliance or unexpected fizzles for what seemed like good ideas. Have you encountered anything that didn't go like you wanted it to, or something that up and surprised you out of nowhere?

What's Coming Up This Week?

With seven days down already, what do the next seven look like for you? Let us know where you're headed.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Making Time

How do you make time in a busy schedule for creativity? Do you find it hard to balance your creativity with other life demands? Do you have any tips or tricks that enable you to put more time and effort into your output?

As before: best of luck to ALL participants! Let's go MAKE SOMETHING.

This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their week.

If you have any plans, goals, accomplishments, or even failures, whether they be personal or work related, I'd love to hear about them. This is a place for casual discussion about your week, past, present, and future.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this week?

This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their weekend.

If you have any plans, things you want to get done, things you have done, things you haven't done, or even if you just want to talk about how you're doing this weekend, this is a place for casual discussion about those things.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this weekend?

Timasomo FAQ

Thread #1: It Begins!

Timasomo begins whenever it hits 12:00 AM on November 1st, wherever you are on the globe. Dive into your projects! Here's the task list for this thread:

Formally Identify Your Goal

In the last post, we all talked about what we were aiming for. Now is the time to set a specific goal that you intend to commit to. Be both optimistic and reasonable!

Map Out Your Plan (If You Need One)

Some people like seeing where their creativity takes them, and some people like having a formal process to follow. If you're the type that needs a plan, set one up an share it here (if you want to).

Conduct a Self-Forecast

Evaluate yourself as a creator. What are you good at? What do you need to really focus on? How strong is your follow-through? Forecast how this will go for you and try to plan around your own strengths and weaknesses.

Cheer Others On

This won't be as necessary at the beginning when optimism, resources, and stamina are all at their highest, but it's always fine -- nay, encouraged -- to post positive, uplifting, and supportive comments to others in Timasomo. Even if you are not participating, you can always cheer others on!

Make Posts As You Go

I will be posting these threads every Friday. Feel free to keep a running thread within the post of how things are going for you. It's okay to come back and re-post in here with updates.

With that said, these posts might get a little cluttered so some might prefer their own conversation space, or would just rather have one that they're directing apart from mine. If you'd rather make your own topic about your project or anything related to Timasomo, feel free! I encourage multiple Timasomo posts over the course of the month, not just these weekly check-ins. Just make sure you tag your post "timasomo" so we can easily find it.

Best of luck to ALL participants! Let's go MAKE SOMETHING.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

Developing topic, don't see any news sources on it yet. Lots of pro-CCP troll issues being opened, as well as people starting to open issues going against the original trolls. (e.g. pro-HK protester messages)

Hacker News discussion

Notepad++ v7.8.1 : Free Uyghur announcement

Notepad++ GitHub issues page

Sample issues

Tildes is much like Hacker News and Reddit in that article previews are limited to just headlines. (Well, there are tags, but they're de-emphasized since they're hidden by default.)

While they are very concise, a problem with headlines is that we rely on them too much. Even good ones don't really tell you what the article is about. In cases where it's hard to read the article (because it's paywalled or whatever) the conversation can be based mostly on the headline rather than the substance of the article. On Hacker News there are often mini-disputes about whether the headline is clickbait or not, and what's a better headline. "Headline is misleading" is a pretty common complaint.

I'm wondering if we could add a bit more information? One possibility would be a "Subtitle" field. Lots of articles have subtitles that are somewhat more informative, and doing a copy-paste is pretty easy.

Another would be to have a "pull quote" field. This requires a bit of editorial judgement by the submitter about what's the best pull quote, but I think that's okay. It's still copy-paste so at least they don't have to summarize anything in their own words.

For the last few days I've been posting a pull quote as the first comment whenever I post an article, and I think it works fairly well, except that the summary says "1 comment" when actually nobody commented - it's just the pull quote. Also, having an explicit field for the pull quote might allow better UI possibilities, like you could put them under the headline in the topic list.

This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their week.

If you have any plans, goals, accomplishments, or even failures, whether they be personal or work related, I'd love to hear about them. This is a place for casual discussion about your week, past, present, and future.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this week?

This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their weekend.

If you have any plans, things you want to get done, things you have done, things you haven't done, or even if you just want to talk about how you're doing this weekend, this is a place for casual discussion about those things.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this weekend?

This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their week.

If you have any plans, goals, accomplishments, or even failures, whether they be personal or work related, I'd love to hear about them. This is a place for casual discussion about your week, past, present, and future.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this week?

This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their weekend.

If you have any plans, things you want to get done, things you have done, things you haven't done, or even if you just want to talk about how you're doing this weekend, this is a place for casual discussion about those things.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this weekend?

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their week.

If you have any plans, goals, accomplishments, or even failures, whether they be personal or work related, I'd love to hear about them. This is a place for casual discussion about your week, past, present, and future.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this week?

If a top-level comment is collapsed by default (presumably due to "noise" tags), replies to that comment will still trigger the "1 new" text on the topic, but won't be visible when you visit the thread - and there's not even any indication that you should expand the noise-tagged comment to see a reply.

Would it be possible(/desirable) to show the red indicator next to collapsed comments if there's a new comment underneath them?

I've noticed a trend (with Reddit, but I don't exclude the possibility it could be happening elsewhere) that people post a topic, then a day later they delete it. I've always been of the opinion that the best use of a discussion forum is to leave an answered topic for future posters to find. Especially when a community is hardcore anti-repost.

Am I the only one who gets annoyed by this, or have others come across this too?

This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their weekend.

If you have any plans, things you want to get done, things you have done, things you haven't done, or even if you just want to talk about how you're doing this weekend, this is a place for casual discussion about those things.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this weekend?

I apologize if this is a topic that has been covered before. I haven't really been able to find anything and I'm not really sure what a good search keyword is. But I noticed this as part of the Hearthstone player ban thread.

On a traditional bulletin board forum it's not really an issue because the conversations unfold chronologically anyway. When you have the atemporality of threaded comment chains that gets disorganized fast.

Basically, it's a "still developing" story where more events and news keep happening that's germane to the discussion. As the news comes up, people who already read the thread might not see the comments being posted about subsequent developments and be able to follow it because each piece of additional news or info. ends up happening in a comment/sub-thread that ends up arranged in fairly arbitrary, rather than chronological order.

The Democratic Debate threads have been similar, where the reactions and consequences of the topics being discussed can keep a discussion going for a long time, but it all happens in sub threads that people are unlikely to see. Many of these developments don't really merit a thread of their own, but after a few days or so it gets hard to actually have a big-picture discussion because the news has overtaken the scope of the discussion thread.

In a thread with an active OP, I've noticed what tends to happen is the OP will steadily edit new developments into the main post to update it. I think this has actually worked pretty well BUT edits don't bump posts as far as I can tell. Also, the people posting the updates aren't necessarily getting as much credit (in terms of votes, exemplary labels, or whatever) and, insofar as that matters to people that's a thing. Do you think this is adequate as things scale or would some novel design or subcomment system be needed?

This topic is part of a weekly series where we can talk about board games. Feel free to talk about any aspect of board gaming you'd like. Here are some potential talking points to get you started:

• Are you looking for a recommendation? Tell us a game you'd like, and we'll see if we can think of one that may suit you.
• Have you tried something new and want to chat about it? Tell us about why you like a particular board game!
• Did you have a particularly interesting tabletop gaming experience? Tell us about your 9-point swing in Catan, or the time you managed to finish off the entire village in Ultimate Werewolf!

Anything goes topic-wise: serious or funny, major or minor, significant or inconsequential. The only criteria is that you think more people should know about or be aware of whatever it is you're choosing to share.

Also, explain why you think it's necessary or valuable to spread that knowledge/awareness.

Hi

I think we could start a new trend to make the world better by trading advertisement for tips and how to behave in a society. The important thing is not to be invasive or change the user experience in any way.

So do you see the top bar where we don't have nothing? I think it would be a great place to have a new phrase on every refresh like this:
"A bottle of plastic is to put in the yellow trash can".
"Open Source is important so we don't rely on company's for everything"
"If you smoke please don't throw butts in to the ground, buy a cheap portable ashtray"
"Remember that not everyone is having good day"
"Don't throw cotton swab in to the toilet"
"When brushing your teeth turn of the water in the dead times or better use a cup to use less water"
"2OATH is always important to have"
"Password manager is a must have now a days (having the same password in everything defeats the purpose)"
"Read more than the titles before you make conclusions"
"When driving don't forget to use the lights when turning/changing lanes"
"Think twice when using paper"
"Beverages are not water"
"Focus a distant point from time to time if you are long hours in front of the monitor)"
"When you are putting music in public you are invading the other space"
"Wait for the people to exit the train before entering"
"If you drink don't drive not because of you but because of the other people"
"Put the phone down while driving, everyone says that can do that before hitting someone"

Before of witch phrase it would say the topic.

I think for this phrases we can't have nothing political, religious or other topics that could change people views or that could offend.
Maybe we could have topics for country's because of the costumes.

Little things like this, I hope I could express the idea(more directs and simple maybe?). And if this is welcome maybe the correct way of doing this is making a repository on gitlab(every file would be a topic maybe) so everyone could add new phrases and use the list for other sites. Of course we would need to get a few trust worthy people that have a good sense of witch phrases to accept or create rules for them.
Maybe there is a better way of creating a public DB but I don't know any at least.
And if people wanted could select the topics they wanted(all or some or none).

This could also show the importance of donating and support open projects so we don't need to get money from third party's in any way and better yet, use the empty space to make the world a better place.

So I've been putting in topics for each episode of The Good Place for a couple weeks, and it's been a little slow but reasonable amounts of activity. But for week to week shows in the future, would it be more appropriate to have one big thread made for the season premiere and bump that on a weekly basis and enforce marking posts when a particular episode happened, so we can better track discussion and continue threads of discussion across weeks, or would that just kinda be a mess?

Time for a story.

Some of you might remember that I was planning on going abroad. I intended to visit New York City with one of my best friends, setting foot in the United States for the first time in my life. I have had reservations about the actions and the state of politics of the US for a while, but I'm by no means an activist; I largely settle for small discussions regarding this topic, online or among friends. This means that I had not considered the current administration as a deterrent to my week-long trip.

For the sake of what I'm about to talk in the rest of this post, some additional personal details are needed for context. I am a EU citizen and a second-generation immigrant, child of a parent born in North Africa. I was fortunate enough not to have to go through having to acquire a "real" visa as my country is part of the ESTA program. This program is a fast track of sorts that allows a non-citizen to get clearance to get into the US by providing information through an online form. As I went through that automated process, I arrived at one step that worried me: they asked about being a citizen of another country. Now, I have both an EU ID and passport but I have double-nationality from my parent and so I also have ID and (an expired) passport from that country.

That country is not unstable or known to host terrorists or extremist organizations but I was wondering if I would be lumped in with immigrants from more troubled countries and so I hesitated to put that information at all. But then I figured that it would be a bad idea to lie and then have to explain why I lied if they figured out. And I didn't visit that country for a decade. So in the end I did input that info. This decision stayed with me and caused me anxiety until the end of the 72 hour waiting period. I thought about being denied while having already spent roughly a thousand bucks on the airplane ticket and the hotel. Fortunately in the end everything went through. That put my fears at ease.

Let us fast forward to the day of the trip. My friend and I had the good idea to stay up really late the night before even though our flight was outrageously early. I think I slept for 3 hours if that. And during the 8 hour flight I absolutely could not sleep despite my best efforts. This is just me setting the stage for some heavy sleep deprivation.

Arriving at JFK, we eventually stumble upon the horribly long queue for customs. When we got to an officer, my friend went first, giving his passport and scanning his fingerprints. I went just after him, doing the same. However, the officer seems to have an issue. They close their booth and ask me to follow them. My friend's watching and is like "wtf is going on", the only thing I manage to say is "welp later I guess", maybe not realizing what is going on.

My passport withheld, I'm led to a waiting room... and told to wait there, no reason given. The officer tells me that "it" should be quick. As I scan the room, I mostly see Arab or Asian people with an additional one or two white-passing people. I sit and get my phone out to message my friend where I am and what I was told, when an agent immediately tells me that no phone is allowed. I can only imagine how panicked my friend was getting at that point.

An hour passes.

With still no reason given for what I'm going to call an arrest, I then had had time enough time to see people go through, leave and for others to take their place all the while I listened to the officers talk to each other and interact with the visitors.

The ratio of people stayed mostly the same, meaning the majority was comprised of Arab and Asian people, roughly half didn't speak English at all. There were two types of processing. The first one was people waiting 20 minutes and getting called to a counter in the same room, getting their passport back and being allowed to leave. The second one was people waiting at least half an hour and getting summoned to go with an officer to an ominous corridor, staying at least half an hour and then being allowed to leave.

The officers at the counter chatted within themselves in a friendly manner, typing on their computer at the same time, a nice front immediately shattered by how they talked down to everyone. One elderly person went to get something in their luggage placed at the opposite end of the room when two officers yell at them to sit back down. An asian person was using their phone unaware of the restriction when an officer warns them: "Don't use your phone. Don't use your phone! Hey! Don't use your phone! Oh for the love of- DON'T. USE. YOUR. PHOOONE." Apparently talking slowly to a visitor in a foreign language means they can obviously understand what the office is saying and that they're just acting like they don't understand. And more variations of cliché American cop tropes.

A half hour passes - still no reason given.

My friend tries to approach the room to get information and I hear an officer asking firmly for him to go away. (Un)fortunately an officer finally summons me. They lead me into a room and I'm invited to sit down. The officer apologizes for the wait, and then begins an hour long interview. They are very friendly and ask what places I intend to visit, they ask me about my childhood, my parents, my relation to my other country, my education, my hobbies, my jobs. Then I'm asked to unlock my phone. They go through every app and ask me to explain what they all do. They capture my Facebook name, contact names, what is open in my browser, and more stuff that I can't see.

I cannot describe how distressing it is to see an officer of the law go through your phone. I could not predict if they would stumble problematic material or if they would interpret things the wrong way. This is why I hate people that say "oh I don't care about privacy, I've got nothing to hide". You think I have anything at all to hide?! I am a law-abiding citizen of my country, I have never harbored any intention of committing a crime in my entire life, I can't harm a fly for heaven's sake!

And finally after all of this I am allowed to go. I get to my friend and hug them and try to get out of this place as fast as possible.

Maybe you're wondering if I tried to oppose any of this? Hell no. Not using my phone, waiting without reason, giving an ungodly amount of personal information and give access to my phone to a stranger, I did not fight through any of this. Why? I was afraid. I was an alien going through customs in the Patriot Act era. It was very clear to me that if I tried to block any of this process I would not go out of that airport to the US. I have my principles in privacy, but I did not want to waste a literal thousand bucks and more of my time.

So I went along.

Here's the ruby gem page and here's the github. Right now it comes with a command line browser that can browse the front page and group pages with no sorting options, and you can view the contents of a topic (link or text) aswell as the comments. The methods defined in lib/tilde-scraper/api.rb can be used to scrape tildes pages into Group, Page, Topic, and Comment objects.

Right now it's super basic and messy, but I figured if anyone was interested in it it would be the people here.

So I have a philosophy and rationality class in cegep. Currently, the topics are pretty general since that's well, what the class is about but well, those don't interest me as much as the debates around Open Access, Copyright, Open Data, Free Software, Piracy, etc. relating to technology

but well, in some of those cases, it would be hard for my teacher to be able to grade if what I'm saying is true so well, I'm creating this in the hopes that some of you have ideas for questions which might interest me but still be easy to enough for my philosophy teacher to well, be able to evaluate my work.

Of course I've already asked my teacher if I could do a question which isn't necessarily related to the class beforehand but he's a little scared of what I might come up with, hah.

This is a recurring thread in ~games.tabletop where we can talk about board games in a fun way. Feel free to discuss boardgames in any way you want! Each week I add a guiding topic / question, just to help things along:

What's the last game you played?

What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.

Notes

We're coming up on #30! Exciting!

Previous topics

Previous topics are listed in the wiki.

Did something cool recently, and no one’s bothered to ask?

Got some stuff on your chest, and no one’s checking in?

Super passionate about a niche topic that not too many people think of?

Toss your question-hopeful here, and let someone pop it!

A long time ago, there was a discussion about anonymous comment posting. I’d link it if I wasn’t typing at mobile, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find.

How did things about anonymous posting evolve, @Deimos? Do you plan to eventually make something like this?

There are plenty of topics such as this one which would IMO strongly benefit from anonymous comments - I can definitely see much higher participation if that was the case.

Regarding the abuse, I won’t reiterate all the points made in the thread ^{[todo: link]} and purposed solutions, but what about turning anonymous posting on only in some topics, perhaps where the topic author manually turned them on? We could have them for sensitive topics while holding people accountable for their words in all the political topics.

What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.

Notes

I'm finally going to update the wiki today, hopefully. FYI.

Previous topics

Previous topics will be ARE listed in the UPDATED wiki!!! as soon as I update it.

This post is related and in some part a repetition of my other topic on how to buy a laptop for Linux.

Because I'm in Brazil, many brands and stores that do not ship to my country are out of the question, and even the ones that ship usually cost more than I can pay due to currency exchange rate and shipping costs themselves. What are some universal stores, brands and models that I can probably find on my location, that won't give me much trouble running Linux?

I don't require playing games or top performance (8GB RAM and i5 processor would be the minimum requirements). And SSD would be nice, but, for my budget, it's a plus.

I just need something that is durable and works reliably under Linux, especially when it comes to audio and HDMI output, video graphics adapter support, booting from USB, hibernating, sleeping and power management.

Thanks!

Despite me still being a little distracted thanks to WoW Classic and somewhat absent from Tildes lately as a result, since it's been a few weeks since the last Unofficial Weekly Discussion topic, I wanted to make sure to get one posted this week. And since it's been a while, I wanted to try something a bit more lighthearted and fun than usual to get things flowing again. So here it is:

What is your most "thinking outside the box", "pie in the sky" and/or "out there" idea for Tildes?

It doesn't matter whether you think it's really a good idea or not, it will work or not, it would ultimately have a net positive or negative effect, or how impossible it might be to implement; Let's just get the creative juices flowing and start throwing out our "craziest" ideas for the site!

p.s. Once again, let's please try to keep things positive, and keep any criticism purely constructive and friendly so as not to discourage people from participating.

Previous Unofficial Weekly Discussions:

Week #1, #2, #3

Other relevant links:
Donate to Tildes - Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board - Tildes Official Docs

I recently happened to mention edbrowse in a throwaway comment, and @ainar-g expressed some interest in it. I took my sweet time, but I finally managed to assemble a short(ish) write-up on it, and my sleep-addled mind is thinking that this topic - niche, weird tools - could just become recurrent.

Terminal brosers, such as lynx, w3m and elinks, while still used and under more-or-less active development, are very niche tools. edbrowse fills a niche within that niche, as it's meant for use by non-sighted people, and thus provides an interface even more bare-bones and arcane than the usual TUI/curses apps that share its space.

As per the name, edbrowse's interface is heavily inspired by ed's, the standard text editor: edbrowse, in fact, is not just a web browser, but it combines together a browser, a text editor, a mail client, and - for some reason - a database client. All of these functions are mostly controlled via one-letter commands and, as is tradition, only displaying a single ? on error^*.

edbrowse is also unique amongst the terminal browsers because of its support for JavaScript and the DOM. The text it spits out is meant for Braille displays and screen readers, so it lacks niceties like color or aligned tables, but if you were to browse to reddit.com with it, you would see a perhaps ASCII-art Snoo fill the screen^†.

"Browsing reddit? How‽," you might ask. "How am I supposed to get this thing to stop questioning me? All those ? are filling me with existential dread, I have no idea what to do!"

While it's all there in the manual (but not in the manpages, for some reason), reading through 30k words of text can be a bit of a slog. They do provide a cheatsheet, though, even if it's a bit messy.

So, how do you use edbrowse? If you already know how ed works, most commands (especially "movement", search and listing commands) will work as expected - it is also an editor, after all - but edbrowse adds another handful of them.

The most important of them is, perhaps, browse. It will make edbrowse put in an HTTP request, grab the response (if any), and then render it. It will print out the length, in bytes, of the response and of the rendered text, and stop there.

$ edbrowse
edbrowse ready
b https://tildes.net
119201
20083

To actually peruse the page you can use any of the ed listing commands (print, list, and number), or the z command. z works much like p, but it prints a number of lines (normally 24) while "remembering" your position within the page.

0z10
{Tildes}
{Log in}
<>Sidebar

* {Activity}
* {Votes}
* {Comments}
* {New}
* {All activity}

Links are indicated by curly brackets, while form elements (both input elements and buttons) are wrapped in angle brackets. You can follow a link by jumping to the line containing it and issuing a go command (using g2 to follow the second link on that line, g3 for the third, g$ for the last), but, in normal use, you should probably just search for the link text.

/{Log in}/g
5886
923
0z10
{Tildes}
<>Sidebar

Log in

Username <>
Password <>
<-> Keep me logged in
<Go>Log in

The same thing goes for form elements, but the command to use, here, is i (for interact). i has actually four different subcommands: i[N]=, to set the value of a text field, ipass[N] to prompt for the value of a password field, i[N]* to press a button^‡, and i[N]? to ask edbrowse what that damned element is supposed to be.

/Username/ i=mftrhu
/Password/ ipass
hunter12
/<Go>/i*
submitting form
124579
20049

You can jump back to the previous page with ^, and refresh the current page with rf.

Of course, edbrowse can do much more - can be configured to do much more, via .ebrc, as it possessed (very) rudimentary programming facilities. It can edit its own configuration file, and reload it with config, so - rejoice. You won't ever need to leave it.

And, after seeing just how aesthetically pleasing its configuration language can be, I'm confident that you won't ever want to leave it.

# Switch to a new editing session
e2
no file
e ~/.ebrc
# Show the last lines of the configuration file
$100,113n
100 function+google {
101 b http://www.google.com
102 /<>/ i=~0
103 /</ i1*
104 /^About/+2
105 }
106 function+ddg {
107 b https://duckduckgo.com
108 /<>/ i=~0
109 i2*
110 /<Go secure>/+1
111 /<Go secure>/+2
112 z24
113 }

As I said earlier, while edbrowse does possess some programming facilities, they are very rudimentary. Functions are nothing more than sequences of edbrowse commands with some flow control constructs: they can do everything an user could do, which means that they are often convoluted and overly terse.

The ddg function, for example (which is invoked via <ddg [PARAMS]), first browses to duckduckgo.com. The DuckDuckGo home page, as rendered by edbrowse, only contains a link followed by the search form:

{About DuckDuckGo Duck it!}

<> <S secure> <X>

So the function looks for the (first) empty text field (/<>/), fills it in with the parameters passed to it (i~=0), activates the second form element on that line (i2*) and, once the results page has loaded, skips the initial boilerplate (/<Go secure>/+1,+2) and prints the first 24 lines of results (z24).

Sure. It could be replaced by a single line, replacing all the form interaction with a simple b https://duckduckgo.com/?q=~0, but where would be the !!FUN!! in that?

* This is not completely true, as edbrowse will show more long-form error messages, but it's pretty inconsistent with them.
† Iff you have JS enabled in your current session. It can be toggled on and off with the js command.
‡ I had no luck with the Tildes buttons (e.g., sidebar toggle, upvote button), though, at least not with the version of edbrowse that Debian bundles up.

Inspired by similar topics such as "what are you reading" and "what creative project are you working on", and being obsessed with structured self-development, I thought I'd start this.
As the title says. Share what your goal is, why you want to achieve it and how you will go about it (the steps/behaviors). You can include a timeline/target date which hopefully will instill a sense of accountability and increase motivation.
I'm also hoping to get some inspiration and/or tips for my own life goals.

If this gains interest I might post this once a quarter for follow-ups and new goals.

I'll share mine in a comment below.