Kicks Condor

#fraidycat

I use three main tags on this blog:

  • hypertext: linking, the Web, the future of it all.

  • garage: art and creation, tinkering, zines and books, kind of a junk drawer - sorry!

  • elementary: schooling for young kids.

26 Feb 2020

Reply to waxpancake

Yiii, this is rather scary. But I’m very glad for your nice spotlights, Andy. I’m perfectly content to just read Waxy. When that spotlight swings over here, I only wish I had bottoms on. Sorry just a baseball jersey.

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25 Feb 2020

Fraidycat 1.1 is out. This a big one.

🤳 Details at: fraidyc.at/blog.

🦀 New Twitch, Kickstarter, Pinterest, Facebook support.

💐 Sort follows, ignore post edits, expand everything.

And yeah - all Fraidycat news is moving to that blog link.

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13 Feb 2020

Notifier

Tight little tools - RSS feeds for newsletters, Telegram and web hooks.

Gotta give some respect to Kirill Maltsev for this essential set of RSS tools - simple but solid - along the lines of my beloved webmention.io and commentpara.de.

The key tool here is the read email via RSS page, which gives you a random unique email address. You can sign that email up for email newsletters, for instance, and then put the matching RSS feed into Fraidycat to track it like it was a blog.

You could even set up an alias to forward to this address and make yourself a low-key public inbox that won’t clutter up your private email.

I have a hyyyuge new release of Fraidycat coming out Monday that will support Twitch, public Facebook pages, Pinterest, Github users, Kickstarter projects and older RSS feeds. The Pinterest support is particularly juicy because it gives you direct links rather than Pinterest links. Don’t know if anyone uses that site any more, but it felt too subversive to skip out on.

Also, I’ve finally figured out how to load h0p3’s wiki without stalling the extension. Unfortunately, this required some additional permissions. The permissions situation is getting stupid. I’m sorry!!

Also don’t miss Jason McIntosh’s review of Fraidycat after a month of using it. I really appreciate this encouragement and the wonderful suggestions.

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24 Dec 2019

Fraidycat as Stuxnet

Fraidycat 1.0.7 is out (in the browser and on desktop), major performance improvements.

My appreciation to all of you out there who have been helping with Fraidycat - this last week has been very busy. There are now releases for Mac, Windows and Linux. These don’t sync between computers yet - but I have spent quite a lot of time polishing them up, to prepare for that. The web extension has been running kind of heavy, so I have now made some major improvements to its performance.

If you use Fraidycat in Firefox, the update is already available. I don’t think the Chrome extension will make it through their store until the end of the week.

I haven’t spent much time trying to spread the word on Fraidycat just yet. I am still clawing along until I can reach a quality that I am happy with. I am close. I think I just want to improve the appearance a bit over the next week and see if I can offer something a little less bland.

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26 Nov 2019

Reply: Stuck Following

Art Kavanagh

There’s still one feed I can’t delete but otherwise the erratic behaviour is gone 😊 👍

Hello! Can you give me the URL of the feed you’re having troubles with? Perhaps it’s something to do with that specific one.

(Thankyou for taking a crack at this - the OPML import is only a few weeks old, so I’m sure there is still work to do getting it perfect.)

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21 Nov 2019

The Fraidycat Concept

Fraidycat 1.0.4 is out today in the Firefox and Chrome stores.

Fraidycat 1.0.4 is out - and things are rolling. Much appreciation to all of those who are pitching in ideas on the issues page. Particularly Bauke and Joshua C. Newton - who brought up bugs that I was able to fix in this release. (And apologies about all the noise on this project - I’m excited about it right now and, believe me, I have a variety of things planned over the next month that will take us away from Fraidycat.)

The new version is already approved in the Firefox Add-ons area. The Chrome (and Vivaldi/Brave) extension is still at 1.0.3, but should update automatically very soon. I’ve also started offering a plain zip that you can install manually using these instructions. Auto-updates will not be available - but you will also not be dependent on the official ‘stores’.

This video is also mirrored at archive.org.

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11 Nov 2019

PSA: To anyone reading this ‘unfiltered’ page: I now have feeds for this page, so you can just put /all/ in your reader if you accept the dangers.

Fraidycat is also now out for Chrome. Both extensions have been updated to version 1.0.3, which is the latest code. Now we’ll have to see how sending updates to you goes. (Planning on an update next Monday.)

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09 Nov 2019

Fraidycat is officially out for Firefox now! While it should move your follows over automatically, you should probably export them - to be safe before upgrading. addons.mozilla.org

The Chrome/Vivaldi extension is very close. Thanks for all of the encouragement this week!

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07 Nov 2019

Reply: 2019.11.06 - HN: Fraidycat

h0p3

Fraidycat is a delightful browser extension for following people on the interwebs. Roughly, it’s an easy-to-use yet hackable, user-owned, FOSS, privacy-respecting, and experimental next-generation feed aggregator and reader. Not every platform offers RSS, so Fraidycat tries to build those bridges for you, scraping and packaging it up for you automagically, allowing you to tailor your own feeds, priorities, and timelines from across the web in your browser.

This is really helpful, h0p3!! Krikey, you’re such a friend.

Hear ye, hear ye. Tolle, lege; tolle, lege. Srsly, hyperbolic skiddie fanboi gushing here, so ignore me at-will, plz:

Haha, oh imagine if this was what you had to do to play well in the HN crowd. (This actually reminds me of that amazing story from The Star Diaries by Stanislaw Lem where the robots all speak Chaucerian English.)

Don’t let the frisky aesthetic of this gem fool ya: underneath the hood is essentially an engine which is necessary (even if insufficient) for a functioning democracy, for treating people not as mere means but as ends, and for fixing the problems of the centralization of infrastructures and processes which commodify our attention spans. It’s a spicy tool for the people and about the people. It sprankles your browser with mana, dope maymays, and the people you like or love (or don’t, ;P).

Omgz - I hate to play into your hyperbole here, but I think you’re right. (Don’t get me wrong - this is a shit tool.) This “having a personal engine to negotiate your link to others” is maybe the whole of it. (For some reason, I was thinking it was the simplistic non-feed view, purely an organization thing.)

The problem is that I need the networks to play well in some sense - I at least need to have access to scrape HTML fragments. But these networks will always fight back against that. We have to accept that. Fraidycat will need to be incredibly resilient and aggressive - like Stuxnet or like PRISM.

When you think about it, though, it’s ridiculous that this needs to be done. It’s insane! Civilian counterops.

It’s rad that you took the time to vocalize your angle. I need to internalize this, because there is further direction and understanding in this. I don’t fully understand what I’m doing - I absolutely thirst for these sick angles from other fields of view. ✌️

UUUUUHHHPDATE: Just saw Le Reddit Log. Holy shit - you are a madman. Buggin out over here. 😲

Damn man oh man - not sure I’m ready for this!!

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Reply: Encouraging Comment by Chris

Chris Aldrich

Kicks, far from a dumb project. I remember seeing a version of your personal copy in one of your videos ages ago and thinking, “I want that!!!” Of course it may take some more development on your part or some serious coding study on mine to get this up and running for myself. I can’t wait to see where this goes! Keep up the awesome work!

I think once it is approved in the Chrome and Firefox official extensions, it’ll be the right time for you to give it a swing. For now, we’re probably a month out on that. Still - I appreciate the motivating words. (And glad to have you back recently.) (And glad you got a break, too, of course!) 😎

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Reply: Nice Anon

Anonymous

Hey, I just love this and have it installed already. Very grateful for being part of a wider distributed future in the here and now. Keep going and let the world know if you need any support!!!

Hey, I appreciate this. You’re sweet. You’re very sweet stuff. Just enjoy yourself and I’ll be glad. And, if Fraidy misbehaves - let me know. ✨

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Reply: Fraidycat’s Chrome Extension

Brad Enslen

@kicks I just had a chance to really look at Fraidycat and I think you are really on to something here. I can’t wait for the Chrome version, so I can see if it works with Vivaldi browser. It’s an impressive idea.

I use it primarily with Vivaldi - works great for me. (And I love that Vivaldi encrypts my synced feeds - so the data is mine even if I’m syncing it through them for the time being.)

I’m just waiting for the extension to get approved through the Chrome Web Store. I expect that this will be something of an ordeal - getting my extension through Firefox’s approval system has had quite a few hang-ups that could take me a month to resolve. But thanks for your vote of confidence, Brad!

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05 Nov 2019

If you’re having trouble getting Fraidycat to sync between browsers, please reinstall from fraidyc.at. I would reinstall anyway—although you will have to restart your feed list—because I now have a fixed extension ID in Firefox.

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04 Nov 2019

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01 Nov 2019

Fraidycat source code is now up at github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat. I am planning to do a more public release of the web extension on Monday, but wanted to give a treat to anyone who feels especially intrepid. (Be aware that syncing has troubles when you load a self-built extension. Don’t just throw all your feeds in there yet.)

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25 Jul 2019

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06 Jun 2019

Reply: Irony Double-Down

Malcolm Blaney

hey Kicks, you could double-down on the irony… Fraidycat doesn’t display content, unless the content doesn’t link anywhere, then you do? Just a thought. 😃

I’m starting to think that, in Giles’ case, I need to run the photo through some image captioning algorithm and use that as the title. Generally, I won’t use algorithms—but this could be the exception. 😃

Good to hear from you, Malcolm. I haven’t encountered Dobrado before and it looks amazing.

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PLUNDER THE ARCHIVES

This page is also at kickssy42x7...onion and on hyper:// and ipns://.

MOVING ALONG LET'S SEE MY FAVORITE PLACES I NO LONGER LINK TO ANYTHING THATS VERY FAMOUS

glitchyowl, the future of 'people'.

jack & tals, hipster bait oracles.

maya.land, MAYA DOT LAND.

hypertext 2020 pals: h0p3 level 99 madman + ᛝ ᛝ ᛝ — lucid highly classified scribbles + consummate waifuist chameleon.

yesterweblings: sadness, snufkin, sprite, tonicfunk, siiiimon, shiloh.

surfpals: dang, robin sloan, marijn, nadia eghbal, elliott dot computer, laurel schwulst, subpixel.space (toby), things by j, gyford, also joe jenett (of linkport), brad enslen (of indieseek).

fond friends: jacky.wtf, fogknife, eli, tiv.today, j.greg, box vox, whimsy.space, caesar naples.

constantly: nathalie lawhead, 'web curios' AND waxy

indieweb: .xyz, c.rwr, boffosocko.

nostalgia: geocities.institute, bad cmd, ~jonbell.

true hackers: ccc.de, fffff.at, voja antonić, cnlohr, esoteric.codes.

chips: zeptobars, scargill, 41j.

neil c. "some..."

the world or cate le bon you pick.

all my other links are now at href.cool.