“surprise! spiritual growth!”
Capabilities in willow25!
We've added a batteries-included version of the meadowcap capability system into willow25. The batteries in question are made of the secure and efficient ed25519 signature scheme.
use rand::rngs::OsRng;
use willow25::prelude::*;
// Randomly generate a new keypair.
let mut csprng = OsRng;
let (subspace_id, secret) =
randomly_generate_subspace(&mut csprng);
let namespace_id =
NamespaceId::from_bytes(&[17; 32]);
// Create a write capability.
let mut cap = WriteCapability::new_communal(
namespace_id.clone(),
subspace_id.clone(),
);
// We have a capability and the secret
// for its receiver. Time to write an
// authenticated entry.
let entry = Entry::builder()
.namespace_id(namespace_id.clone())
.subspace_id(subspace_id.clone())
.path(path!("/ideas"))
.timestamp(12345)
.payload(b"chocolate with mustard")
.build().unwrap();
let authed = entry
.into_authorised_entry(&cap, &secret);
// It worked!
assert!(authed.is_some());With access control in place, willow25 is ready for the next step of implementing persistent entry storage.
Shout-out!
Thank you to danmw, who has contributed new Path::create_slice and Path::create_suffix methods to willow_rs and willow25.
This could have been a very simple task, but the resulting code would not have been optimally efficient. So Dan went ahead and adjusted our Path struct, which required delving into the least-readable parts of our codebase. Didn’t seem to be a problem though, everything runs great — and in O(1) time instead of the O(n) solution we would have expected. Thank you for this effort!
Two weeks ago, @Soapdog asked me whether I could put the weekly songs on this website into a playlist. And thus, a slow descent into madness began. The tool in which I write these tracks has absolutely no support for that kind of thing — but it is open source and can be forked. And thus, I proudly present the official worm-blossom playlists page. Featuring not only a playlist of all weekly songs (automatically populated by Macromania, obviously), but also a bonus playlist of a bunch of tracks I have accumulated in a plaintext file over the years.
The original tool for creating this music is Beepbox, but I have been using a “mod” of it, which really just means a fork. Or rather, a fork of a fork [...] of a fork. There’s a family tree of how these mods have evolved, and I decided to fork pretty close to the leaves, at the 2024 mod AbyssBox (primarily because it has a ring modulation effect). The codebase is a succession of mostly independent, mostly undocumented spaghetti modifications to an undercommented core. So everything took longer than expected, but eventually I succeeded in adding my own underdocumented spaghetti modifications!
The codebase I started from had no notion of multi-song containers at all. The first thing I had to add was code that would allow the synthesizer to emit a notification once it had finished playing its song. Next, since many of the songs are infinite loops, I added support for slowly fading out a track after some number of repetitions (fun fact: you need a logarithmic decrease in volume, not a linear one). Finally, at the start and end of playback there would always be an audible click sound, so I added a miniscule exponential ramp-in and ramp-out. I cannot unhear that click in other beepbox mods now!
As a bonus, since we have full control over the audio player now instead of merely embedding it, I adjusted the colour scheme to be even more worm-blossomy — and I could finally remove some vertical spacing that had been bothering Sam! All of this was a fun side-quest, but now I am completely done with it and will almost certainly not add any additional features such as a playlist-to-zip-of-mp3s export, earwig compatibility, or even custom sound synthesis to it.
~Aljoscha
links of the week
- Rainbow Mazes — make sure to look at some of the different presets to really appreciate the expressiveness of this tool.
For this week's comic, I composed an image to look like console output, printed it out, cut it out and glued it to the rest of the comic before scanning it back in and putting it on the internet. I hope somebody out there appreciates that. I make the original Rust Unwrapped image available here.
There's only one month left to do all the things I really wanted to do in 2025. Which means this week I got curtain bangs and started prototyping a video game. Will it be any good? If you never hear about it again, you will know the answer (the bangs look great though).
~sammy
Contributions Welcome: Add Meadowcap default values (Rust)
https://codeberg.org/worm-blossom/willow_rs/issues/21
In Willow25, we specify a well-known keypair to use as a default, effectively enabling public access to any data “secured” by this keypair. But we have not added it to the Rust implementation yet. This issue is a nice opportunity for getting familiar with the new Meadowcap API.
It has been really nice to see pull requests come in for our contribution-welcome issues. For Willow, there are only a few left. We have had less luck with our ufotofu issues, but who knows, maybe this’ll be the week?
Many thanks again to 
And thank you to 
Firstly, we’ve reworked 
For breakfast I often turn to the humble porridge. I like to put big chunks of apple in my porridge which cook just long enough to get soft but still keep their structure, kind of like in an apple pie. I like to cook my porridge low and slow, which really annoys everyone else.
You can't go far wrong with a curry. I break up a cauliflower into little florets and roast them in the oven until they start to caramelise at the edges. I could eat them just like that, but in a curry sauce they're even better. I make a curry sauce from scratch and it is completely inauthentic.
Salmon is great when you're low on time because you just smack it in the oven for a bit. In the colder months I like to do a roast vegetable mix alongside it: potato, beetroot, sweet potato, red onion, topped with some capers. The purple of the beetroot and onions look so good next to everything else.
And when it all became too much for me I just ordered pizza. hashtag winning
