In-reply-to » We use all the Microsoft programs at work - Teams and Outlook especially.

@thecanine@twtxt.net We don’t use Microsoft at work – but similar products of other big companies. They’re all doing the same. The core product gets worse and worse, because they focus so much on vomiting “AI” over everything.

It will die down eventually. I hope.

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We use all the Microsoft programs at work - Teams and Outlook especially.

After all kinds of technical problems with Teams, that sometimes go unresolved for over a year, Microsoft shifted their priorities away from fixing things and towards adding an annoying AI Copilot button, that just takes up space and all it does, is loads the website in Teams, so I disabled it. Soon they just add it back, but in a different row of icons, therefore it’s now a different button, you have to disable (I think they added yet another one, to the Teams, on my work phone and I had to disabled that too). Not too long after, the desktop one just enabled itself, because of “an error” and I can disable it, but doing so activates a popup, that begs you to turn it back on, every once in a while. You can’t disable the popup and can only click “Yes” or “Not now” on it. I still keep it disabled, out of principle, but yesterday I noticed yet another Copilot button, this time in the top right corner of my Outlook and this one cannot be disabled, on the business version of Outlook and even on the personal one, it’s only possible to do it through hidden privacy settings, by prohibiting the program from connecting to Microsoft servers, for extra “features”.

There’s people complaining about it online, so it’s clear nobody really wants it, but at this point Microsofts position is that you will have at least one useless AI button on your screen, at any given time, and you will be happy. And yes, their AI sucks and if I absolutely have to use AI for something, there’s already 2 better options, we have access to, at work.

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In-reply-to » Weekend! Whooo 🤣 Having a few too many glassses of 🍷 listening to music on Youtube and playing Chess which I haven't been playing much lately 😢

@bender@twtxt.net I’ve been cutting back too 😅 Trying to avoid drinking (with alcohol) 24hr before fixtures (🏓) and before training 🤣

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In-reply-to » Weekend! Whooo 🤣 Having a few too many glassses of 🍷 listening to music on Youtube and playing Chess which I haven't been playing much lately 😢

Enjoy! This is a longer weekend for us too (Labor Day), and even longer for me, as I have asked for Tuesday off. Yayyyyy! I will not be drinking (I voluntarily stopped drinking anything with alcohol in it), but I will try to get a few things done, and then relax.

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@dce@hashnix.club No worries 😌 It’s all documented in our soecs, it’s not such a common thing that we’ve felt the great need to really solve, we’re aware folks want to sometimes have their feed on several protocols, and that’s totally fine™ 😅

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@dce@hashnix.club Ah, oh, well then. 🥴

My client supports that, if you set multiple url = fields in your feed’s metadata (the top-most one must be the “main” URL, that one is used for hashing).

But yeah, multi-protocol feeds can be problematic and some have considered it a mistake to support them. 🤔

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You can fuck right off, thank you very much.

(18/29) upgrading firefox
New optional dependencies for firefox
    onnxruntime: Local machine learning features such as smart tab groups

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In-reply-to » I’ve got a prototype of my hardcopy simulator going. I’m typing on the keyboard and the “display” goes to the printer:

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, removing the cover will probably help. I’ll have to try. 😅 And, yes, the scrolling is pretty annoying (and kind of ruins the experience a little bit).

The printer isn’t that loud – at least not for a dot matrix printer. 😅 It’s been ~30 years since I’ve last seen them in person, but I remembered these things to be louder. I’m typing on my Model M, maybe that contributes to the perceived noise on this video. Here’s an isolated recording of that keyboard: https://movq.de/v/ddc98b03d8/2022-02-21–model-m-goes-brrr.ogg 🤣 It really sounds like that when you’re typing fast. Brrrrt.

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In-reply-to » I’ve got a prototype of my hardcopy simulator going. I’m typing on the keyboard and the “display” goes to the printer:

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Haha, that’s so cool! :-) Could you remove the cover to at least reduce the amount of scrolling around? But I bet any amount of scrolling is annoying.

This printer has quite some noise level to it. Or how bad is it really in person?

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In-reply-to » Joining the Clippy profile picture club, now that I finally finished my custom one. Media

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks, it’s mostly following the Louis Rossmann thing https://youtu.be/2_Dtmpe9qaQ - a symbol of protest, against the rapid enshitification the Internet is facing, accelerated to the extreme, during this year. It has reached a point where something really has to be done about it all. Obviously not just everyone changing their profile pictures, but also cataloguing all the consumer rights violations, invasion of privacy, censorship,… to shove it in the face of as many government officials, as possible.

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I’ve got a prototype of my hardcopy simulator going. I’m typing on the keyboard and the “display” goes to the printer:

https://movq.de/v/56feb53912/s.png

https://movq.de/v/235c1eabac/MVI_8810.MOV.mp4

The biiiiiiiiiig problem is that the print head and plastic cover make it impossible to see what’s currently being printed, because this is not a typewriter. This means: In order to see what I just entered, I have to feed the paper back and forth and back and forth … it’s not ideal.

I got that idea of moving back/forth from Drew DeVault, who – as it turned out – did something similar a few years back. (I tried hard to read as little as possible of his blog post, because figuring things out myself is more fun. But that could mean I missed a great idea here or there.)

But hey, at least this is running on my Pentium 133 on SuSE Linux 6.4, printer connected with a parallel cable. 😍

(Also, yes, you can see the printouts of earlier tests and, yes, I used ed(1) wrong at one point. 🤪 And ls insisted on using colors …)

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Dear @doctormo@doctormo, I’m a great admirer of your work in general and hopefully I won’t creep you out by telling everyone I’m your fan!

As a creator of digital vector-based art I find the color management stuff (trying to figure how to generate things to print “in CMYK”) mind boggling. I slowly try to read and acquire the concepts and vocabulary to understand more about this. I’m grateful for your work in this area. Thank you!

#FLOSS #CMYK #ColorManagement #inkscape

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In-reply-to » @prologic @moveq I think it's mostly the serious lack of competition. All the Android phone manufacturers just use the Google version of Android, bundle in piles of Google bloatware and do whatever Google tells them to. If some of them installed Lineage, or any other versions, with their own stores and rules, or even just offer a less Googly version of their phones, as an option, for more experienced users, Google wouldn't be able, to push everyone around.

@bender@twtxt.net have you seen how many Google apps, get shoved into the new releases of Android. MicroG, Google Play, maybe Chrome is fine, but everything else, I can’t get rid of, is just bloatware to me.

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In-reply-to » To combat malware and financial scams, Google announced today that only apps from developers that have undergone verification can be installed on certified Android devices starting in 2026.

@bender@twtxt.net That is a noble goal. We can talk about that – as long as it doesn’t mean giving up essential freedoms like choosing which software you can run on your device (without having to ask someone for permission).

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In-reply-to » @prologic @moveq I think it's mostly the serious lack of competition. All the Android phone manufacturers just use the Google version of Android, bundle in piles of Google bloatware and do whatever Google tells them to. If some of them installed Lineage, or any other versions, with their own stores and rules, or even just offer a less Googly version of their phones, as an option, for more experienced users, Google wouldn't be able, to push everyone around.

@thecanine@twtxt.net I think Google’s Android is as vanilla as it can be, coming from the “source”. The bloatware is more often than not vendor’s provided, no? I don’t consider Google apps and services bloatware, but an intrinsic part of the Android “vanilla” experience.

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In-reply-to » RIP Android:

@prologic@twtxt.net @moveq@twtxt.net I think it’s mostly the serious lack of competition. All the Android phone manufacturers just use the Google version of Android, bundle in piles of Google bloatware and do whatever Google tells them to. If some of them installed Lineage, or any other versions, with their own stores and rules, or even just offer a less Googly version of their phones, as an option, for more experienced users, Google wouldn’t be able, to push everyone around.

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In-reply-to » To combat malware and financial scams, Google announced today that only apps from developers that have undergone verification can be installed on certified Android devices starting in 2026.

@prologic@twtxt.net, the very first sentence addresses something that needed to be addressed. Maybe tech savvy people will not have these issues, but many non-tech savvy people (and old people) I know has had, and has, cyclically, a myriad of malware, pestware, etc., issues on their Android based phones. It is a wild-west.

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In-reply-to » RIP Android:

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @prologic@twtxt.net this is extremely concerning and I hope there is enough push back to stop this! The ability to modify apps, is one of the two biggest reasons, I’m still using Android. If they remove that option, I’ll be forced to switch to one of the de-Googled forks.

That might not be a good solution either, because I need banking and identity verification apps on my main device and already had to get a second device for work, which has tighter sideloading restrictions and I would very much not like to be forced into using three Android phones simultaneously, to do what should be possible, with just one.

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In-reply-to » RIP Android:

To combat malware and financial scams, Google announced today that only apps from developers that have undergone verification can be installed on certified Android devices starting in 2026.

This requirement applies to “certified Android devices” that have Play Protect and are preloaded with Google apps. The Play Store implemented similar requirements in 2023, but Google is now mandating this for all install methods, including third-party app stores and sideloading where you download an APK file from a third-party source.

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RIP Android:

https://9to5google.com/2025/08/25/android-apps-developer-verification/

Since nobody is going to push back on this (I don’t even know if that would be possible), this is going to be a reality on every platform sooner or later.

I’d guess in 20, 30 years, there won’t be “PCs” anymore. No more home computing, no more “I just write my own software”. You won’t own devices anymore, it’ll all be rented and the landlord will tell you what you can do with it.

I hope that I’m wrong, but given where we are today, I don’t think that I will be.

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Sometimes it’s a small thing, it’s a bit jarring when orgs that want to pose as international/global publish some copy/event based on US school terms/seasons. That’s a reminder of how other people are at the periphery and will be probably ignored most of the time. Isn’t it obvious we have different school year arrangements & seasons around the world? I guess @melissawm@melissawm will share my sentiments about this.

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I only learned about the .envelope object/propriety in #shapely yesterday, before that I used .bounds (a min/max of points tuple), but envelope is good to know because it provides an easy way of getting the centroid and the area of the bounding box, which can be very useful.

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In-reply-to » Should I go on a tour with these hot air balloons some day? Not sure if it’s scary as hell. 😂

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Nice picture, this hot air balloon has quite a large basket.

Yes, go for it! :-)

My grandpa went ballooning ages ago and liked it. The balloonist misjudged the height a bit and landed in an open-air pool. Well, not in the water, but on the sunbathing lawn just inside the fence. :-D After the ride, everybody was given a very long personal name that they had to memorize. Decades later, my grandpa still knew his assigned name.

The most important thing to know is that – in German – you don’t fly (fliegen) a ballon, but ride (fahren) it: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballonfahren#Fahren_oder_fliegen Judging by the English wikipedia article, this is not an English thing, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_ballooning

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Interactive demo of #shapely’s centroid for the triangle :)

import py5
from shapely import Polygon, Point

def setup():
    py5.size(400, 400)
    py5.stroke_join(py5.ROUND)
    
def draw():
    py5.background(200)
    pts = ((100, 100), (300, 100),
           (py5.mouse_x, py5.mouse_y))
    xs, ys = zip(*pts)
    cx = sum(xs) / len(xs)
    cy = sum(ys) / len(ys)
    tri = Polygon(pts)
    py5.no_fill()
    py5.stroke_weight(1)
    py5.stroke(0, 200, 0)
    py5.shape(Point(cx, cy).buffer(5))
    py5.stroke(0, 0, 200)
    py5.shape(tri.envelope.buffer(2))
    py5.shape(tri.envelope.centroid.buffer(5))
    py5.stroke_weight(3)
    py5.stroke(0)
    py5.shape(tri)
    py5.fill(0)
    py5.shape(tri.centroid.buffer(2))

py5.run_sketch(block=False)

#py5 #python #creativeCoding

Video

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In-reply-to » Sooooooooo, things happened, and I now have a dot matrix printer again. 😍😂

@prologic@twtxt.net Anything above a couple hundred Euros. 😅 The current Epson LX-350 appears to be not that pricey, though. 🤔

I mean, what do you want to do with it? If you want to use this as an actual printer for daily use, I’d get a laser printer instead, because they’re very reliable and the print quality is top notch.

I got my dot matrix printer mostly for experiments and nostalgia, so I wouldn’t want to pay something like 300-400€ for it.

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In-reply-to » @prologic Hmm, good question. I haven’t checked the market, I got mine from someone I know. But to be honest, I’d suspect that buying a used one is actually your best shot, because there is virtually no market for these devices anymore, meaning new ones are very, very expensive. 🫤

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Haha yeah rightio, and yeah inches suck 🤣

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In-reply-to » @prologic Hmm, good question. I haven’t checked the market, I got mine from someone I know. But to be honest, I’d suspect that buying a used one is actually your best shot, because there is virtually no market for these devices anymore, meaning new ones are very, very expensive. 🫤

@prologic@twtxt.net It’s quite similar to how escape sequences work in a terminal. ASCII text is printed as ASCII text and then an escape sequence can make it bold or underline and so on. Other escape sequences allow you to say “the following $n bytes are part of a bitmap image”, and then this gets printed at whatever the current position is (somewhat similar to SIXEL in a terminal).

It’s just that the units are a bit weird, because this is all done in bloody inch. 😅

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In-reply-to » @prologic Hmm, good question. I haven’t checked the market, I got mine from someone I know. But to be honest, I’d suspect that buying a used one is actually your best shot, because there is virtually no market for these devices anymore, meaning new ones are very, very expensive. 🫤

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Is there like a TL;DR of this standard? I can’t say I remember this tbh 🤔

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In-reply-to » Sooooooooo, things happened, and I now have a dot matrix printer again. 😍😂

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, those POS thingies are similar. There’s “ESC/POS” as a variant of “ESC/P”, if I’m not mistaken.

All I can say is, when I go to big stores like Amazon, then I have trouble finding “traditional” dot matrix printers for use at home. 😅 Epson still sells them, but they’re more expensive than my laser printer was. So yeah, they still exist, just expensive, by the looks of it.

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In-reply-to » @prologic Hmm, good question. I haven’t checked the market, I got mine from someone I know. But to be honest, I’d suspect that buying a used one is actually your best shot, because there is virtually no market for these devices anymore, meaning new ones are very, very expensive. 🫤

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Got a link to this

ESC/P standard.

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In-reply-to » Sooooooooo, things happened, and I now have a dot matrix printer again. 😍😂

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Are you sure?

because there is virtually no market for these devices anymore, meaning new ones are very, very expensive.

I think dot matrix printers are still pretty common in many Point of Sales (POS) registers right? At least here in AU they’re very common. I had a quick look myself today, there seems to be quite a solid market for these types of printers. In fact even EPSON still sell Dot Matrix printers themselves 🤣

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In-reply-to » Sooooooooo, things happened, and I now have a dot matrix printer again. 😍😂

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm, good question. I haven’t checked the market, I got mine from someone I know. But to be honest, I’d suspect that buying a used one is actually your best shot, because there is virtually no market for these devices anymore, meaning new ones are very, very expensive. 🫤

FWIW, I have an OKI Microline 3390eco. Good thing is, you can still buy new cartridges for it.

If you want to buy a new device, check if it supports the “ESC/P” standard. That’s very widely supported.

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In-reply-to » Sooooooooo, things happened, and I now have a dot matrix printer again. 😍😂

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Kind of curious now… Is there a (to buy new) dot matrix printer you’d recommend if someone wanted to get into this sort of thing (sending plain ‘ol bytes to a printer port)? 🤔 (I remember this back in the ye ‘old days!)

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In-reply-to » Sooooooooo, things happened, and I now have a dot matrix printer again. 😍😂

This is why I love tech from that era.

Write bytes to a parallel port and stuff happens. If it’s just ASCII bytes, then it will print ASCII text. Even the simplest programs can use a printer this way.

With a little bit of ESC/P, you can print images and other fancy stuff. That’s what I did this morning – never worked with ESC/P before, now I can print images. It’s not that hard.

Hayes-compatible modems are similar: Write some AT commands to the serial port and the modem does things. This isn’t even arcane knowledge, it’s explained in the printed manual.

Maybe I’m wearing rose-tinted glasses here, but I think with all this old stuff, you get useful results very quickly and the manuals are usually actually helpful. It’s so much easier to get started and to use this hardware to the full extent. Much less complexity than what we have today, not a ton of libraries and dependencies and SDKs and cloud services and what not.

https://movq.de/v/4bd16cb3c7/tux1.jpg

https://movq.de/v/4bd16cb3c7/tux2.jpg

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In-reply-to » We went out an hour earlier to escape the rain. But we got drizzled on, nevertheless. As expected, the rain jacket was finally wet on both the out- and inside. Sweating under that plasic layer is unavoidable with these temperatures. It was still a very nice walk and great vibe with the gray soup. Just right. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de There haven’t been decent ones for a while.

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In-reply-to » We went out an hour earlier to escape the rain. But we got drizzled on, nevertheless. As expected, the rain jacket was finally wet on both the out- and inside. Sweating under that plasic layer is unavoidable with these temperatures. It was still a very nice walk and great vibe with the gray soup. Just right. :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Aww, yeah. 😍 (Reminds me, I haven’t paid attention to the sunset in quite a while …)

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In-reply-to » Sooooooooo, things happened, and I now have a dot matrix printer again. 😍😂

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org When/if I can pull it off, there will be videos! 😅

I never used hardcopy terminals, either. We did have a dotmatrix printer, but that was just used as a regular printer.

Inkjets, I don’t know. They were pretty fascinating and cool when they came out. A lot faster than dotmatrix and obviously quiter. They never gave me much trouble, actually. But I switched to a laser printer long before crap like DRM’ed ink cartridges became a thing.

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In-reply-to » Bloody AI clowns:

Here’s an interesting thought/angle on this topic:

gemini://gemini.conman.org/boston/2025/08/21.1

A further check showed that all the network blocks are owned by one organization—Tencent [4]. I’m seriously thinking that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) encourage this with maybe the hope of externalizing the cost of the Great Firewall [5] to the rest of the world.

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In-reply-to » We went out an hour earlier to escape the rain. But we got drizzled on, nevertheless. As expected, the rain jacket was finally wet on both the out- and inside. Sweating under that plasic layer is unavoidable with these temperatures. It was still a very nice walk and great vibe with the gray soup. Just right. :-)

Surprisingly, the sky got quite some lovely colors this evening. I approve! https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-08-21/

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In-reply-to » Sooooooooo, things happened, and I now have a dot matrix printer again. 😍😂

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Heck yeah, have fun! :-) We never had a matrix printer, started off with a cathode ray tube and an inkjet pisser.

I’m happy to see you compose your first twtxt message using ed on your new output device. We definitely need video proof of that! ;-)

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We went out an hour earlier to escape the rain. But we got drizzled on, nevertheless. As expected, the rain jacket was finally wet on both the out- and inside. Sweating under that plasic layer is unavoidable with these temperatures. It was still a very nice walk and great vibe with the gray soup. Just right. :-)

Didn’t bring my camera, I guarantee that it would have gotten soaking wet.

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