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Show HN: X11 desktop widget that shows location of your network peers on a map

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Re: Show HN: X11 desktop widget that shows location of your network peers on a map

#71
post #23

This seems like it belonged on freshmeat ca. Y2K.

What's that? Webarchive/google don't return much of anything.

Like product hunt but OSS.

Imagine if GitHub release authors publicized releases in a timeline view.

v.0.1 of this or v3.0 of that had the same exposure.

One site. Daily fix.

Re: Show HN: X11 desktop widget that shows location of your network peers on a map

#72

Nice. My only gripe is that the map is not very easy to read, especially on the smaller sizes. There are too many coast lines and borders, so it can be hard to locate countries, especially in the Mediterranean. Would it be possible to draw land masses in solid (white?), and leave borders in dark (background color?). Other than that, works fine on Debian Linux and KDE. The map shows up on all desktops, which I like (b…

Thanks for feedback! Will make it much more configurable as soon as I have time.

Re: Show HN: X11 desktop widget that shows location of your network peers on a map

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's that? Webarchive/google don't return much of anything.

http://freshmeat.net was a directory of open source software back in the 90's and noughts. It was one of the main ways to discover software. But what is X11? Is that like Wayland? ;-)

Yep, my "package repo", if you will, for pretty much everything I installed on Slackware back in the day.

Re: Show HN: X11 desktop widget that shows location of your network peers on a map

#76

Works also great with WindowMaker. I've added it to ~/GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/autostart

Using windowmaker in 2025 is certainly an ...interesting choice, though I admit the app probably looks like it fits right in with that aesthetic

Re: Show HN: X11 desktop widget that shows location of your network peers on a map

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using sarcasm. Sarcasm that you missed.

I stopped reading the rest. I just saw Electron is mentioned. Some people honestly think that is a good approach.

No, not rest API, electron.

Re: Show HN: X11 desktop widget that shows location of your network peers on a map

#79
post #38
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the discussion. Fix is already committed.

As long as you’re fixing that bug, you should do it right. If the return value from snprintf if more than 256 but less than a few GB then you should malloc a buffer big enough to hold the string and then call snprintf again with the new buffer. Only if that or malloc fails would you print an error. (It’s really a shame that the C standard library requires so many extra steps to do things correctly; this ought to be w…

Not sure offhand how portable it is, but asprintf() handles automatic buffer allocation, thus not requiring any extra steps afaik.

It does exit on MacOS and Linux, at the very least.

Re: Show HN: X11 desktop widget that shows location of your network peers on a map

#80

This is some old school style bare bones C. popen with a big old pipe chain is pretty quick n dirty. I’d have gone digging around in proc for the active connections. Cool stuff though. I like that it’s so straightforward to read.

> This is some old school style bare bones C. Which has now become some kind of meta-ironic fashion statement. It's 2025's going to the coffee shop with a typewriter.

it's more like taking notes with pen and pencil, while other patrons of the coffee shop use an electron-based note-taking "app" on their macbooks that uploads each keypress to the cloud, helpfully adding a half-second lag
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