"Sigil is a deterministic identicon generator originally created for Cupcake."
ok...
...click over to Cupcake to see what's up and can't figure out exactly what it is before the page break...where I find that:
"Cupcake is part of the growing Tent ecosystem."
ok...
"Tent is a protocol for real time communication and personal data storage. Tent is decentralized like email so you can communicate with users on every Tent host. There are no proprietary APIs or central authorities that can limit users' speech or apps' functionality."
now we're getting somewhere -- also, Cupcake appears to be $5/mo
The copy on Cupcake is intentionally vague. Most of the apps powered by Tent don't exist or haven't been released yet, but will start coming out soon. We've been working on a Dropbox-type app that's powered by Tent, for example.
I gotta respect the Tent.io crew. After trying their Twitter clone last year (made HN front page a couple times around July/Aug 2012), I was ready to write off the whole thing as a failure — didn't think they were building things anyone really needed. But they keep iterating and making new stuff. Who knows, maybe I was wrong. And Sigil looks legitimately cool regardless of how the projects that spawned it work out.
Aptly named or not, a google search for sigil shows the epub editor as the first result. The project has been around a long time:
https://code.google.com/p/sigil/
Hmm.. just random pondering, but it's basically like a really simplistic QR code for a unique value. I wonder if there's a use case for having some sort of a "sigil"/gravatar scanner app for mobiles.
Presumably the md5 hash could be used to look up a value from a web service endpoint running on the site hosting the gravatar. Not sure what value this would bring, but who knows.
ok...
...click over to Cupcake to see what's up and can't figure out exactly what it is before the page break...where I find that:
"Cupcake is part of the growing Tent ecosystem."
ok...
"Tent is a protocol for real time communication and personal data storage. Tent is decentralized like email so you can communicate with users on every Tent host. There are no proprietary APIs or central authorities that can limit users' speech or apps' functionality."
now we're getting somewhere -- also, Cupcake appears to be $5/mo
for more info: https://tent.io/
Despite reading HN almost every day, it's still really hard to keep up with stuff.