House of Legends

Thoughts and Ideas

  • Thanks for details

    nokke

    @magical_cat I run a relay (publicly known, but not on the official list) and nobody (spammers) ever bothers it, just the usual SSH brute force login attempts (I use fail2ban on the ssh port of the relay).

    The process to create an account requires "doing work" (setting up the keys, etc.) and not just the traditional "make login, send spam". There are technical hurdles which sort of stop spammers from even trying. (so far, yet, etc.)

    June 14, 2026, 10:55 0 boosts 0 favorites

    I am less concerned about this aspect. And I will think about ways how to put the relay to a good use.

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  • roughnecks

    @magical_cat there is no spam issue with deltachat, because contacts must verify themselves and everything is encrypted.

    The worst case scenario is that your server gets some unused accounts, which will also be automatically removed at some point.

    You'd better read some docs 👍

    June 13, 2026, 18:14 0 boosts 0 favorites

    Thanks for pointing this out. Yeah, I deserved to be RTFM-ed because all I read so far is the installation docs and description of these links.

    And being a bit over-anxious about not spam per se but more about automations and bots, with their usage for some evil purposes.

    Thanks again for explanation.

  • I had update my profile a bit

    I have now to use the post https://legends.house/private-messages-better-with-email-and-pgp/ I wrote a while ago as a “profile card”. Main changes are DeltaChat card and link and also Matrix address I have.

    This of course does not mean I expect many people would start to contact me via these ways. Quite contary.

    But I looking for ways to test these.

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  • I configured two servers but there is a caveat

    Or actually two caveats.

    First, and the biggest one, is that I don’t have contacts to test them with, and all I have that is only a bit of experience of setting them up. One is chatmail (Delta Chat) server. And it have a gotcha that if I will make this address public, anyone, including bots and bad actors can register, and I am not versed in all that whether it has any UI to show list of registered accounts and moderation function like block a bad actor or an IP range. Or at least I don’t know how this done by chatmail admins.

    Other thing is that I configured a Matrix server, but to be honest I don’t have people to chat with as I am not very social by nature. It all sort of “how complex it would be to spin off a Matrix server on my domain in 2026?”. So I got an answer, and now I have it.

    But these servers now, as I see, sort of unused and dormant. What I will do with all that? Who knows. It may require some time and a spark to find a use to all this.

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  • Found a fun game about Marshrutka driver

    Here are the quote from author description of the Cow on Road game:

    My wife is Georgian and I have lived in Tbilisi for five years. We decided the driving experience here deserved its own video game, so we built one.

    You drive a marshrutka down an old Tbilisi street and dodge what the road gives you: Priuses drifting between lanes, Wolt couriers, potholes that rattle the whole bus, street dogs that run out to chase cars, pedestrians who cross wherever they want, and cows. Of course cows. There is honking and authentic Georgian yelling from the car windows.

    It is free, browser-based, no signup needed to play.

    There is a monthly leaderboard and the top driver wins a free course bundle from EasyGeorgian, the Georgian learning platform my wife and I run.

    Would love feedback, especially on what Tbilisi road hazard we forgot.

    Cow on road game illustration
    Cow on road game illustration

    Regarding feedback, it has been asked on Reddit here.

    I played this game a bit and enjoyed it a lot. It represents in a simple and a fun way the difficulties of work of marshrutka driver on the Tbilisi steets.

    Speaking of Marshrutka, this is a phenomenon of its own. They are usually (old?) Mercedes minibus with seats on each side, a narrow space in the middle and a overhead grab bar above each row of seats. They used often by passengers who ready to suffer by having a tough ride standing and holding by the overhead bar with one hand and pressing a seat with a leg or other hand to not fall.

    Random photo of famous Tbilisi marshrutka. It is yellow minibus on photo and the door is opened to take a passenger.
    Random photo of famous Tbilisi marshrutka. It is yellow minibus on photo and the door is opened to take a passenger.

    To me they become a social mirror of energetic, intense, zero-regulation freedom vibe of years when Bendukidze & other reformers from Saakashvili team made their unique reforms and projects. One of key aspects of this period was hyper-expressiveness of anything and vibe that anything possible. Including having a ride being stuck standing between plenty of random people busy their lives in a hurry. Meanwhile driver do few things at once, like drive, speaks by phone, screams at other drivers on the street, takes cash payments from passengers, gives them the change, and all this immersed often into loud music or radio air.

    Now marshrutkas are used primary as a way of inter-city transport, and it is a bit civilized a bit, but jokes are still here about Tbilisi Marshrutkas and their unique atmosphere.

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  • A thing I miss from my childhood

    In this post I will not use any illustration. Because I am writing about absence of something today that was one of nice thing that was part of some masterpieces games of 1990s. Some games like C&C had real video cinematics in them as cutscenes. With real actors playing there as characters and surrounding people and so on.

    Today I miss this kind of cinematic cutscenes in games.

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  • Technical question

    Technical question

    First I would say something not related to post contents. This time I decided to not use an AI generation or search for a stock photo, but draw a simple sketch as an illustration.

    Road sign of question on are bollard with an electronic label endlessly scrolling text TECH.
    Drawing shows a road sign of question on a bollard with an electronic label endlessly scrolling text TECH. Font of text is too big so label looks too narrow for the shown text. There is some road with a curb in front of it and a grass growing around and behind the bollard.

    After experiencing what happens if you setup the Chatmail relay on same domain where I have the normal email, I wondering about something like what Yunohost does, when there is some fancy admin UI to configure all this, add and remove accounts there without command line or with dedicated commands set like “accounts add username” but with latest Chatmail and matrix server with shared accounts space?

    I understand that these protocols are completely different, I just want to be sure I can share addresses like

    magical_cat@stove.legends.house // for chatmail & DeltaChat but not "default email" like site registrations or e-commerce websites/shops.
magical_cat:stove.legends.house // for Matrix & Element
@magical_cat@stove.legends.house // for ActivityPub direct messages

    with option to share these identifiers and links here at blog.

    Ideally it would be nice also have something like

    @magical_cat@cinema.legends.house //for videos shared on activity pub from PeerTube

    You can say that easiest way to have that is to use the yunohost and install these apps on separate subdomains but I want to either reuse domain where possible, or use the latest codebase of these programs. And I want to set it up in following way:

    1. For such account it should have some kind of profile data synhronized across apps and managed at single place, ideally some backend page.
    2. If I would specify some email address like magical_cat@legends.house for such account, software should send the notifcations there, let it be password reset or notification about direct message/comment.
    3. Ideally it should work like shared accounts provider for all these apps, keeping accounts info including email, username (and optionally password? But this is not mandatory thing) in sync across apps.

    You would say I should just use Yunohost, but I want to get it working such way using the latest software versions of e. g. chatmail relay and matrix, and ideally – briar relay.

    To be honest this all looks like mutually exclusive requirements of using latest versions and shared accounts list, and the expectation it would work on shared domain is something that is beyond capabilities of today tech. May be I would be able to use chatmail and one other messeging protocol on same domain but only because it would use email ports. If chatmail and matrix relay will have to live on different domains, I would have to be creative in these subdomains to keep it fun, like mailbox for chatmail, stove for matrix relay, closet for briar relay and cinema for PeerTube and so on, but keeping this blog on root domain of legends.house and managed WordPress service of Hostinger.

    Who else had setup like that with or without Yunohost on same VPS, with or without container manager?

    PS: special feedback I like to hear about idea to use a sketch drawn by hand in few minutes as the illustration for blog post, and this illustration as example of such tactic.

    PS: I am not making a choice between DeltaChat & Matrix, not because I want avoid some holywar between these protocols, but because I want to try to use both where appropriate. I not have too much of contacts, so may be it is about getting experience of setting it up, mostly.

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  • Djembro, RO, supports 🇺🇦🇬🇪

    @magical_cat

    Nice! Is that area close to your home?

    June 5, 2026, 04:24 0 boosts 0 favorites

    Yes this is area I can see looking from my windows (and they are most of that wall, so view almost not blocked). Being at 3 floor is enough to see quite far, up to tops of few nearby hills.

    Grass colors are so bright this Spring and first week of Summer, this week. Probably because of not too hot weather so far.

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  • Sometimes sky is so beautiful

    Here are few photos of the morning sky I took yesterday.

    These are photos made almost in same minute just with different angles. Sunlight plays completely different games on each photo.

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  • Djembro, RO, supports 🇺🇦🇬🇪

    @magical_cat

    Indeed. You’ve probably heard that all of taijiquan is to be found in the bear. I remember one particular day when I had an aha! moment with the bear. I had already been practicing it for several years, but had not made a particular connection. It was an epiphany, and I only wanted to keep doing the bear for the rest of the hour.

    Congratulations on continuing your practice! Happy exploration!

    May 31, 2026, 17:24 0 boosts 1 favorites

    This time for me it was not about the Bear. it was about the Deer this time. I found that “aha!” moment in moving weight from back leg to front, and then in Monkey and in Tiger of animal frolics, and finally – in Deer.

    My discovery was that as soon as I start to hurry, instead of living practice with attention it deserves, I end up the “front” leg being heavy even before I “moved onto it”.

    And then these moments come, when I recognized things from deep dive videos about how important to place heel first of empty leg before going forward, and that gentle transition when you place heel first and connecting all three points of “foot tripod” as you move weight to the leg which was empty before, without losing connection of back leg… This is important part of the flow, when weight leak from one leg to another like water from full jug to an empty one.

    Speaking of Bear, now I recall a thought, that I probably told to you once that Bear has all 5 principles described by Ben Lo (that video is great, I even do form multiple times often just to put proper attention on these principles, one at a time).

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