u/Federal-Canary3548

Looking at London’s growth over nearly 2,000 years, I was surprised by just how long the city remained relatively compact.

Roman and medieval London obviously changed enormously over the centuries, but geographically the later expansion is on another level. Once you get into the 18th and especially 19th century, the difference is pretty dramatic.

This 3D timeline shows the development from around 50 AD to the present:

https://youtu.be/NfOzqVW33bs

If you had to pick one period that transformed London more than any other, what would it be? Industrial Revolution feels like the obvious choice, but I’d be interested to hear arguments for earlier turning points.

Hi everyone,

I run Midgard MUD, a German LPMud on LDMud. Our players can create ANSI portraits of their characters (half-block characters, 24-bit colour). The portraits show up with `finger`, in our hall of fame and on hero cards players can share.

Over Intermud this went wrong a lot, because the sending MUD knows nothing about the player on the other end. We saw:

- blinking text (a filter reading `38;2;5;0;255` number by number hits `5` = blink)

- grey or white blocks where unknown codes were replaced

- question marks instead of `▀` for players without UTF-8

- colours the client couldn't actually display

So together with Invisible@Beutelland we worked out a small extension to Intermud-2 (Zebedee protocol):

- **`query ansi`**: a MUD answers `no`, `8`, `16`, `256` or `truecolor`, meaning the colours it generally passes through to its players in finger replies. No answer means no colour.

- **Two optional lowercase fields in finger requests**, `ansi` and `charset` (`utf-8` / `ascii`). They tell the other MUD what the requesting player's client can show, as far as the player's own MUD knows from MTTS, TTYPE or its web client. The sender then picks the matching version, down to a spaces-only one for players without UTF-8.

- **Only colour codes get through**: receivers pass SGR sequences through and strip every other escape sequence. That's worth doing for any MUD that displays Intermud replies.

It's fully backwards compatible. The common inetd ignores unknown fields, there's no new packet type, and MUDs that don't take part notice nothing. Midgard and Beutelland both have it running.

The full write-up (English and German) has screenshots, packet examples, step-by-step code for the common inetd (`/secure/inetd.c`, `/secure/udp/*.c`) and security notes such as rate limiting against spoofed UDP:

https://midgardmud.de/intermud/ansi.html#en

If you run a MUD on Intermud-2, I'd love to hear from you, whether you'd like to implement it, see problems with it, or know a better way. I know most English-speaking MUDs use I3 or Grapevine instead. If you think something like this would make sense there too, I'm curious about that as well.

You can reach me here, by Intermud tell to Odin@Midgard, or on -d-code / -intercode. Or here of course. :-D

I've been working on this for the last few months and just wanted to share. It's a free browser-based tool for inspecting and removing metadata from photos, videos, audio, PDFs and Office documents — and it has a small image-forensics lab built in.

Live: https://midgardmud.de/tools/exif/

Why I built it: every other "EXIF remover" online asks you to upload your private files to a server. That's the opposite of privacy. So I wrote one that runs 100% in the browser via the File API — your file never leaves your device. F12 → Network tab → drop a 50 MB photo → you'll see zero outbound requests.

What it does:

• Strips metadata from JPG/PNG/WebP/GIF/HEIC/TIFF, MP4/MOV/MKV/WebM/AVI, MP3/FLAC/OGG/WAV, PDF, DOCX/XLSX/PPTX

• Privacy Risk Score 0–100 with per-file breakdown so you see what's actually leaking

• 4 one-click privacy profiles (Anonymous / Social-safe / Keep camera / GPS-only)

• Forensics: ELA, JPEG-Ghost re-save heatmap, DQT compression fingerprint, Noise + CFA/Bayer pattern (defensible alternative to AI-image detectors), Copy-Move clone detection, embedded-thumbnail audit, RGB histogram, hex viewer, structure inspector

• SHA-256 + perceptual hash (pHash) per file

• ExifTool-compatible JSON export

• Per-tag EXIF editor + GPS spoofing for JPEG

• C2PA self-signed Content Credentials

• Works fully offline as a PWA after first visit

• 19 languages

Stack: vanilla JS, no framework, no build step, ~12k lines. libheif WASM lazy-loaded for HEIC. Web Worker for big videos so the UI stays responsive.

Happy to answer anything about how the parsers work, why I avoided React, or how the JPEG-Ghost / Copy-Move detection is implemented. Feedback very welcome.