visibility & my stoplight application

Computers are magic in the sense that science is magic. Magic is dispelled with knowledge, but one requires a monumental amount of knowledge to dispel magic. Science is not difficult, just dark until one has illumination via information. A computer in containment is whatever, but sprawled out over the internet is O_O. I understand networking enough to know there is a lot I don’t know and consequently a lot to be scared of.

Alt spaces + treacherous internet = burst of energy which infused a project I began drafting earlier this year. The nice thing about computers is their firm materialism: there is no confusion about input or output, there is always an answer that accounts for everything. So my reason told me that I must be able to have some sort of vision over the outputs that appear on my computer. This is a dumb way to say network monitoring.

I turned to claude to develop a project plan that includes a defined mandate, a list of dependencies, the required architecture, and the actual steps for implementation. These items constitute a workbook that I’ll be reviewing when I have the energy. It also established my repo along with a gitignore (which I’ll also review in time).

Initially, I wanted this to be a raspberry pi project though the cost for the hardware here would be prohibitive and unnecessary since I only use one device. I’m keeping an eye out for raspberry pi projects (probably pico projects).

web tools

The shrines I am crafting require assets from across the web. These include structural materials (buttons, banners, favicons) as well as public official art. I understand that websites serve content as URLs, and my browser loads those URLs to interact. It stood to reason that these images are stored within directories on the webserver, so I figured there must be a way to receive a catalogue of images on particular websites.

I put this to claude and it built me a python script that uses curl. This worked for an older website, but did not for a newer one. This has to do with how the information is stored. From here, a prompt led to relying on the wayback machine which works but risks pulling waaaaay too much information. The Puella Magi wiki returned 12,000 images and was only 18% finished. A prompt led to adding a limit param and voila.

This works for any website and outputs an html of webarchive URLs which I find helpful. There are obvious drawbacks. My follow-up includes: