What is the Fediverse you're probably asking... well it's a collection of servers using decentralized, open source, social media platforms.

what that means is that it's not controlled by corporations, nothing is on a single server that can be hacked, and it's free to join, plus there's cross pollination between it all.

some more well known platforms include mastodon, basically a twitter alternative with aspects of tumblr.  Frendica, a decentralized face book alternative where people can make their own servers and stuff, and peertube which is a peer to peer based decentralized alternative to youtube and other video sharing platforms.

it's a lot harder to do DMCA claims and such, and it's hard to have information be lost.

it's possible this is the future of social media once the corps stagnate a bit but who knows...

just wanted to share this crazy thing I've stumbled upon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube

Finished up an 'alpha' version of a dark-theme userscript, I guess. like 95% of the site's functionality is there, minus the MyBB rich-text field for making posts and whatnot.

Screenshots:

Index page:


Thread/Post (Classic-Linear ONLY!)


Forum-View: 


Profile Page:


Newpoints:



TODO: 
- Post Control Buttons
- Checkboxes in various places
- UserCP is still mostly untested
- Threaded Post-view mode is untested
- Scrollbars


Stuff that I can't be f*** with:
- Anything to do with images or HTML
- The rich-text post editor
- Cross-browser support
- Removing any of the !important's in the code.

Installation:

1. Find the code here, copy/paste the whole thing.
   
2. Install Stylish for Chrome or FireFox
   
3. From Stylish, hit the three dots at the top, hit 'Create a New Style'
   
4. On the left from the New Style page, hit 'Import'
   
5. Paste the CSS in.
   
6. Save, exit, refresh Makestation.
   

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/02/politics/...index.html

I know we have multiple countries represented here at MS. (Some in Canada, Europe, and the US). Here in the US, there's a lot of talk going on about it. Most people don't really seem too terribly worried about it yet. Maybe concerned. But not in a state of panic. 

It's not that the virus has been proven to be extremely deadly (although deadly it is). We do know that Ebola was far worse, and much more serious. The issue with the Coronovirus is that we know very little about it. It's something that is pretty much completely new. We can't treat it the way that we treat the flu. We can't vaccinate against it the same way. 

What are your thoughts on the spread of the virus? How is it affecting your hometown or country?

I've long been looking for a screenshot for this. I finally found one, courtesy of JordanMussi on the MyBB community forums. Without further ado, this is how we used to look back in 2013.  



https://community.mybb.com/thread-129440...pid1022039

I miss the color scheme a little bit. I'd be willing to bring it back, but it needs some serious polish.

My coding style has changed so, so much over the years. 

I taught myself at a young age. That being said, I didn't realize just how much I didn't know until I started studying computer science at university. And oh my, do you learn so much. I occasionally dabble with old code of mine, and I realize that I've learned quite a bit over the years. 

That being said, if there is one thing I learned, it's how to NOT one-line code. As it turns out, having fewer lines of code does not mean that the code is faster. (In many cases, it's actually slower. Some of the complex functions that can help you one-line sections of code are very heavy-weight under the hood. Even in python, I write my own code to multiply matrices, because Numpy's functions are far too slow for the task. )

As a result, I end up writing quite a few lines of code to do even a simple task. I try to make my code as readable as possible, and don't worry so much about the line count. I'm often told that my code is overkill (or that it takes too many lines to do something simple). yes, I know how to use complicated functions and language constructs. I just choose not to. I value stability and readability, and performance, over elegant forms of creatively one-lined code. 

That being said, sometimes less code is advantageous. With larger files, it's often harder to pin-point sections of code that exist in a huge file with 2,000 lines. It also introduces more places where bugs could exist (more code is being used), so there is often a trade off. You find yourself limited by the speed that you can type.

What are your thoughts on code's line count? Do you find that you try to make your code compact, verbose, or somewhere in between?

This section of MS uses a slightly different theme (with a different color scheme) than the main forums. We're gonna take it up a notch, and put an actual, SC4, Cities Skylines, or Cities XL background on all pages within this section. 

We need submissions for a background! We will change these periodically. For the time being, if you have a nice screenshot you'd like to share, please post it here! (Please attach the image so that we can download it more easily for posting here. You may post an in-post link, or use our image hosting as well. (Our image host does not resize, compress, or otherwise re-encode your photos, so it works perfectly for site backgrounds.) 

If you have something you'd like to share, please post it here!

Okay I lied.
I'm not actually using an Arduino board this time.
Why?
Because they're bulky. 
And if you're going to try to do something questionable that might end up pissing off the person you're doing it to, then you want to be as discreet as possible, and fitting a MEGA2560 to the back of someone's computer isn't really the way to go about that.

Note:
This is a Work-In-Progress, basically a project journal that I'll be updating hopefully over the next week until I have a working prototype.
When it's complete, it'll probably look a lot more like my hash-cracking guide in terms of formatting and style.
For now, these are all ideas that I have in my head on how it will work and how I'm going to make it work.

So, without further ado, let's get into it.

Keyloggers:
What is a keylogger?
The short answer is, something that logs all the keys you press on your computer, in an attempt to grab sensitive data that might be unobtainable by any other means, due to encryption and whatnot. You might grab someone's email password and screw their life up from there, or maybe you just want to see what kind of 'videos' they watch in their downtime. 

Typically, keyloggers are pieces of software that just run silently in the background. The only problem with this is that antiviruses exist and keylogger detection rates are pretty high nowadays if you don't have code-signing certificates or driver-level execution. Both are relatively hard to pull off, so keyloggers aren't as popular as they used to be.

Background:
A couple years ago, one of my internet friends (in the security field) was recruiting people involved in electronics manufacturing and embedded development to come up with an undisclosed product. A year later, he came out with a Hardware Keylogger, with a nice shopify site and everything.

The cost was probably what a Rubber Ducky from Hak5 costs, about 50$ or so, and as we all know, Hak5 products are scams if you have the capability to make them yourself. I mean, you can basically create a Rubber Ducky using a 1$ digispark which already comes with a USB connector anyway so it's more or less just as discreet (if you're willing to 3D print a case for it or something to make it look like a normal USB drive.)

So, that got me thinking if there was a way for me to also recreate that product for 50x less cost and a little elbow grease. In the spirit of cyberpunks being hi-tech lowlifes, and without wanting to give up my hard-earned dollars on something I can probably make myself, I came up with the general idea of what the device did.
But, as that was years ago before I actually got decently good at embedded development, I put it off for a while.

So here I am now, with the general planning done and the materials acquired (rather, they were sitting around gathering dust and I figured I should probably put them to use and make something cool.) Here they are:

• 1 x Teensy 2.0 (AtMEGA32u4 16MHz)
  
• 1 x Female USB header/connector/port
  

Greetings, Zalost here and today I'm going to start with a basic overview of an idea I've sorta had for a while, the concepts behind which allow anyone to modify both car stereo systems and potentially use them to make custom home stereo systems, for cheap and or out of recycled stuff potentially.

ok so you can approach this many ways but the big one is that you need a central unit that can do the following.

*Adjustable volume control.
*Adjustable channel levels (stereo quadrophonic, or more if you want 7.1 etc.)
*At least 1 external input.

ok so to start with in my example I'm going to use as my central unit, your standard car stereo with cassette player.
Why a cassette player? because the one's used in cars are slot loading and take up way less space, also as I found out through tinkering with various ones, easier to clean and maintain since they're less complex electronically.

in this case we'll use an alpine 7288, it as a port on the back for an external CD changer, more on this in a moment.



Notice the CD option on the 3rd button below the cassette bay.

see on the back there's a 7 pin DIN connector for plugging into a CD changer, but since it accepts standard Stereo audio input we can make use of it with a custom cable.



so once you have your stereo input the hard part is done, well outside of the power supply, but we'll get to that, it involves an old PC power supply

so once you have your AUX input (select CD on the main unit), what you need to do next is wire the stereo wires to a switch of some kind, I particularly like rotary switches for this but you can use any kind of switch you want, the number of poles is the audio channels you're switching plus ground and the positions/throws is the inputs so keep that in mind when you are selecting your switch/Switches.

in our case I'll be using this 3 position rotary.



basically what this does is let's you select the inputs on your device, you can also do a bus switch setup but that raises the complexity.

finally you'll need to select your inputs.

you've already got 2 thanks to that car radio, AM/FM and Cassette, you have 3 more for a total of 5.

in my example let's add a Bluetooth input 



Wire the channels as needed.

a CD player can be added using one of many projects involving a CDrom drive and an arduino or raspberry pi as the control and playback interface, many old CD rom drives also offered L/R channel audio out options reducing the complexity of this, just use the sbc as an atapi controller.

and finally your aux input, just wire up a standard headphone/aux jack to the front, unless you want to add dedicated RC plus in the back.

note: if you want to add both, use a bus switch (insanely cheap these), and wire the voltage line to the chip so that it switches if it detects signal, you can do this by wiring one of the inputs to both the bus and the VCC pins, I'd say do that for the front headphone jack input. (read 8mm TRRS jack)

you can obviously have fun and be creative with this, use multiple switches, use switches with more inputs, etc.

some of the inputs you can build/add include things like 8track players, Tracker file players (xm files, mod files etc.), MP3/digital audio players (read off SD card or flash drive, possibly combine with CD player?)

it's able to be whatever you want and that's the fun part.

finally you're going to need a computer power supply.

I recommend a modular one, that way you can make your own wiring harness for whatever devices you're rigging up and just plug it in after the fact.

the diagrams for the various pinouts are on the web, just remember that most of your car equipment uses 12volts so you'll need to account for this in your power supply.

luckily computer power supplies output 12 volts and are fairly regulated, just adjust the amperage using a variable resistor to make sure it outputs the correct amperage, most car stereos use around 5 amps so make sure to account for this when making your wiring harness between the power supply and radio unit, same with any other components.
here's the formula for figuring out what resistor you need.
(5-4)/0.36=R

do the same for all other devices, you'll find the majority are DC so just adjust as needed getting the starting voltage as close to the needed as possible, usually on the high side to step down and regulate it.

there's tons of information on the net regarding using resistors in DC circuits to output specific amps and volts so do more research on that unless you want to end up with the bad smelling "magic smoke" frequently talked about in electronics circles.

I'll answer any questions posted as they come up and post my own unit as I build it but I wanted to go over the theory and concepts first.

It used to be a hugely mainstream genre. Eddie Van Halen, Led Zeppalin, Triumph, Rush, Metallica, and so many others were so hugely influencial on music, and it was so much more mainstream. 

Now, it's niche at best. Metallica carries the torch, to some extent. Tool is still around. Rush was around until recently. Greta Van Fleet is true classic rock, and they're doing great. But these days, mainstream music has changed so, so much. It is now much, much harder for a band to appeal to the masses AND stay true to classic rock while they are at it. 

Panic at the Disco is the new mainstream rock. As much as they are a great band, they aren't true classic rock. Not even close. It's rock with a major pop twist. 

What are your thoughts? And of course, in ten years, what bands do you think are going to be carrying the torch forward?

Status Updates - Advanced Status Feed

Update May 2, 2020: I'm currently in finals week at university. Development will be resuming within about a week. Please check back soon!

We're working on a brand new plugin for MyBB to allow profile comments, status updates, and more. And firstly, it's actually mostly written! It's installed here in its full form. A little buggy, don't worry, we will be fixing that.

What makes this plugin very unique is that it is the ONLY MyBB status/profile comment plugin that supports replies. Yaldaram had one many years back. It is now gone, and no longer available or supported. 

We also have statuses show up on the postbit, and have a special "community wall" with all status updates. It's going to be a fully featured plugin by the time that we are finished developing it. 

What's already implemented:

•  
• Replies! In addition to writing statuses on your own profiles (or other user's profiles), you can reply to them. It's a unique feature to our plugin here. No other plugin (that I am aware of) supports this. 
  
• Built in alerts. (They are fully featured and actively being improved) 
  
• Support for user profiles, index page, portal page, and a standalone page. 
  
• Built in Jquery and ajax. (Will be expanded upon significantly.)
  
• Highly configurable. 17 settings already, even in the dev version. 
  
• Similar features to Profile Comments/MyProfile. Write a status on your own profile, or on another user's profile.
  

• Add a like button. (Done) 
  
• Provide proper myalerts integration (and expand native alerts as well). 
  
• Moderator CP report functionality. 
  
• More ajax. Remove the redirect when you add or edit a new status. Make it appear instantly.  (Done)
  
• Style the postbit (under the avatar) statuses much better. (Done) 
  
• Make the "Community Wall" page much nicer. Add sorting by user, date, most liked, etc. into the mix. 
  
• Add a "buddy list only" sorting functionality so that you can either get notified when a buddy posts, or only see those posts on a special page. 
  
• Twitter-like hashtags?
  

• Feedback and ideas. I can't know what features are needed (or how they are used) unless real forums share some insight on what they need! (Really can't stress this one enough. Trust me, it helps me as a developer quite a bit. )
  
• 3-4 people who will commit to helping test the beta version when it's released. (I currently have one comitted tester already. If you would like to join the testing team in the next few months, please reach out! )
  
• Some styling help. If you can come up with a few CSS or template edits on what we have here that will make them look awesome, please reach out! Design is not necessarily my strongest area, so I'm open to any contributions of any kind.