Wesley Moore

On 24 August I received an email from Vultr saying that my server had used 78% of its 3Tb bandwidth allocation for the month. This was surprising as last time I looked I only used a small fraction of this allocation across the various things I host.

After some investigation I noticed that the Nitter instance I set up six months ago at nitter.decentralised.social seemed to be getting a lot of traffic. In particular it seemed that there were several crawlers including Googlebot and bingbot attempting to index the whole site and all its media.

Near the conclusion of my #100binaries Twitter series I started working on the blog post that contained all the tweets. It ended up posing a number of interesting challenges and design decisions, as well as a couple of Rust binaries. Whilst I don’t think the process was necessary optimal I thought I’d share the process to show my approach to solving the problem. Perhaps the tools used and approach taken is interesting to others.

I recently completed a #100binaries series on Twitter wherein I shared one open-source Rust tool or application each day, for one hundred days (Jul—Nov 2020). This post lists binaries 1–50. See page 2 for binaries 51–100.

After nearly 3 years and more than 3200 posts I’m going to slow down the posting frequency on Read Rust. I hope this will free up some spare time and make it easier to take breaks from social media. I aim to share all of the #rust2021 posts I can find, but after that I’ll probably only share posts that seem particularly noteworthy or interesting.

I have my system configured to use JoyPixels for emoji, which I consider vastly more attractive than Noto Color Emoji. Sadly GitHub uses browser sniffing to detect Linux user-agents and replaces emoji with (badly aligned) images of Noto Color Emoji. They don’t do this on macOS and Windows. In this post I explain how I worked around this.

This week I discovered some details of digital display technology that I was previously unaware of: pixel formats. I have two Dell P2415Q displays connected to my computer. One via DisplayPort, the other via HDMI. The HDMI connected one was misbehaving and showing a dull picture. It turned out I needed to force the HDMI port of my RX560 graphics card to use RGB output instead of YCbCr. However, the amdgpu driver does not expose a means to do this. So, I used an EDID hack to make it look like the display only supported RGB.

I don’t have time to build all the things I’d like to build, so I’m offering bounties on the following work.

Recently I aliased top to ytop. Then I became aware of bottom, and zenith. These are all terminal based system monitoring tools that you might use instead of top. In this post I set out to compare them.

It’s been more than 10 years since I started working on the previous design for this website 😅. This feels like a good point to come up with a new one!