Funny wobbly moon sets:

https://movq.de/v/4bba078992/moon1.ff.jpg

I also tried to do a little stacked thingy, not too happy with it:

https://movq.de/v/4bba078992/stack.ff.jpg

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’ll be happy to wait until the show finishes. Just get me off this planet! 😂 https://movq.de/v/96d00c53b5/borg.png

@asquare@asquare.srht.site As far as jenny is concerned, it’ll create a thread. 😅 https://movq.de/v/207254756a/s.png

What’s going on with the timestamps on HackerNews articles? 🤔 A lot of them are off: https://movq.de/v/1341904fa5/s.png

@quark@ferengi.one This message of yours was another reason for writing 2hex and 2bin. It made me realize my existing hex2bin script was buggy. So now I have that portable version in C which runs pretty much everywhere: https://movq.de/v/31843f7317/s.png 🥳

Someone recommended a nice (German) talk:

https://media.ccc.de/v/ds24-394-linux-hello-world-nur-mit-einem-hex-editor

Luckily, everything™ is easier™ on DOS with .COM files. A fun little time killer to make a HELLO.COM using only a hex editor, the Intel docs and the DOS interrupt list.

That ModR/M stuff is easy in the end, but it took me quite some time to understand it. 🥴

(I’m still new to DOS on this level and didn’t know that all segment registers are initialized to the same values, apparently, so copying CS to DS was not necessary. Too lazy to update the screenshot. File size shrinks by 4 bytes.)

https://movq.de/v/0139fbaabc/doshello.png

@david@collantes.us Like that, right? https://movq.de/v/80f888d381/s.png

Speaking of public transportation, though: If it works, then it’s an amazing system. I love it.

I recently took the time to find an alternative route to one of my doctors. Hardly any people using that route and it’s faster. Absolutely brilliant. It’s like having a chauffeur. 😅

But navigating through that system is also a total nightmare. Which bus takes you to which places at which times, getting info about current construction sites, all that stuff. It takes forever.

And it doesn’t help at all that this is what their website looks like:

https://movq.de/v/acb23dc1c2/s.png

You can’t move that window at the bottom. It just sits there and takes up space from the map. It gets even worse: When you ask for a route, you get to see the buses and individual stops and all that – but all in that little window with that large font! Why do we all have widescreen monitors and than stack UI items vertically?

Sure, 30 years ago it was much worse. But it could also be much better today. 😅

Another idea for the upcoming Advent Of Code 2024:

OS/2 Warp 4 came with Java and that not only meant a runtime but a JDK including API docs. So, for AoC, I could try to solve as many puzzles as I can in that environment, directly on my old Pentium. For later puzzles, I’ll definitely want to switch to my normal workstation for faster development cycles – but I can still use Java and try to backport the solutions.

Sounds interesting. 🤔

https://movq.de/v/81ac0142f2/1.ff.jpg
https://movq.de/v/81ac0142f2/2.ff.jpg

It’s one of those days.

There was a time when WebKit (I think it was WebKit) stored metadata of downloads in extended attributes. Like the URL you were downloading it from.

https://movq.de/v/f79b94485a/s.png

This was really useful. 🤔 Chromium also did it for a while and then they removed it due to privacy concerns. Now none of the popular browsers do it anymore. 🫤

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665531
  
• https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/a9b4fb70b4318b220deee0da7b1693d16b8ed071
  
• https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260778

Lest we forget Mosaic: https://movq.de/v/f85fd317b3/mosaic.jpg

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org @bender@twtxt.net I pushed an alternative implementation to the fetch-context branch. This integrates the whole thing into mutt/jenny.

You will want to configure a new mutt hotkey, similar to the “reply” hotkey:

macro index,pager <esc>C "\
<enter-command> set my_pipe_decode=\$pipe_decode nopipe_decode<Enter>\
<pipe-message> jenny -c<Enter>\
<enter-command> set pipe_decode=\$my_pipe_decode; unset my_pipe_decode<Enter>" \
"Try to fetch context of current twt, like a missing root twt"

This pipes the mail to jenny -c. jenny will try to find the thread hash and the URL and then fetch it. (If there’s no URL or if the specific twt cannot be found in that particular feed, it could query a Yarn pod. That is not yet implemented, though.)

The whole thing looks like this:

https://movq.de/v/0d0e76a180/jenny.mp4

In other words, when there’s a missing root twt, you press a hotkey to fetch it, done.

I think I like this version better. 🤔

(This needs a lot of testing. 😆)

This has become quite a large thread. 😅

https://movq.de/v/5c51be2cd3/s.png

This morning’s task: Making the thumbnails in my blog compatible with IBM WebExplorer 1.0 on OS/2 Warp 3. 🤪

Before:

https://movq.de/v/b7443c8873/a.jpg

After:

https://movq.de/v/b7443c8873/b.jpg

And the fix was using -define jpeg:sampling-factor=2x1 when creating the thumbnails using ImageMagick.

I’m not really sure, though, what’s going on. 🤔

More context: https://tilde.zone/@movq/112981572946464025

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no Oh, I know that feeling all too well. Go for it! ✌️

Also:

https://movq.de/v/8cdad1ae3a/s.png

😅

@prologic@twtxt.net In that screenshot (https://twtxt.net/media/7c3rEWveU64SAxrXZ6CDYS.png), all the bracketed stuff is duplicated again, compared to lyse’s original twt. I suspect that’s the cause for the changed hash.

I could not reproduce this by manually duplicating those text areas in lyse’s twt. I end up with the hash pjdciga instead, but I probably mistyped something.

@prologic@twtxt.net Still expands to almost the correct raw twt, though: https://movq.de/v/c6243a9e61/s.png

You twt is truncated on twtxt.net, btw. 🤔

https://movq.de/v/7cb8a3bad4/huh2.png

Saw an “owl” in the woods today: https://movq.de/v/a7c2130c18/IMG_20240803_094845.jpg.jpg

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Glory! And honor! https://movq.de/v/7ddb7dcd0c/s.png 😅

Always makes me giggle a bit like an idiot when I see OS/2’s equivalent of the “trash” or “recycle bin”. The English original calls it “shredder” (which is appropriate – it deletes files, there is no delay like in Windows 95’s “recycle bin”) …

… but the German word for it is “Reißwolf”. That used to be a more or less common term, but nowadays it’s quite archaic. And it sounds needlessly violent. 😂🐺

There’s something special about writing your own programs for OS/2 in C and finally getting it to work after sifting through lots of ancient docs. ✨

I’d be totally lost without KO Myung-Hun’s website and Open Watcom v2. 🙏

(I’m making a little tool to dump floppy disks to image files. I know these programs already exist – I’m doing it for fun and to learn. The task itself is not complicated, but finding the correct docs is.)

https://movq.de/v/13597a4d87/os2dump.jpg

I needed to create a ZIP file under OS/2 2.1 and what’s the easiest™ way to do that?

Use WinZip under WIN-OS/2. 🤦

I know there are native ZIP programs for OS/2, but WinZip is what I was having readily available, and that basically sums up much of OS/2’s history. 🥴

https://movq.de/v/221699e4ef/a.jpg

Thinking about what to do for the next Advent of Code. 🤔

Writing the solutions as DOS programs in C was super fun last year and I don’t think I can top that. 💾

Something in the realm of retrocomputing would be nice. I wonder how far I can get using QuickBASIC 4.5. Haven’t touched this in ages – but I have a feeling that this could be rather painful. 😂

Or maybe I’ll just go for Rust again, because I’m not using that a lot and keeping up with it could be useful. Or maybe a mix of both, “as many puzzles as possible with QB 4.5, Rust for the rest”. 🤔

https://movq.de/v/ac63405fd1/b.jpg

What a night. The first storm cluster passed us in about 25km distance.

The second one hit us right in the face. The sky was constantly flashing and there was a continuous rumble, not individual thunder. (You can’t really hear it in the video, I was too close to the window …)

https://movq.de/v/e949ae6403/MVI_7687.MOV.mp4

Most of the lightning was inside the clouds, apparently.

https://movq.de/v/e949ae6403/IMG_7648.JPG

No water damage this time, luckily.

Iceland seems like a nice place to be right now.

I noticed these two benches:

https://movq.de/v/19f5512396/IMG_20240623_104210.jpg

The dark area below them? It’s not a shadow, it’s dirt. O_o

I meant to post a screenshot: https://movq.de/v/5d73604d79/20240618_21h09m16s_grim.png

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Indeed, it’s quite translucent. 😃

It depends on the type of rosin, though. The one that I used before is basically opaque and also much harder:

I intentionally went for the softer rosin this time, because I find it easier to use. It’s stickier and can be applied to the bow much easier.

Got a new pack of rosin for my double bass. There was a large bubble of air trapped inside. 🥴 It slowly made its way up over the course of a couple of days and now it finally burst. 😅

Good old (bitmap) Helvetica works as a GUI font again:

https://movq.de/v/2456cfb05a/helvetica.png

This broke a year ago and I gave up on it. Now it’s back. Crisp fonts, just like in the terminal. 💚

This is much easier for me to read. Maybe it’s because of my myopia. Everything is a little bit fuzzy anyway and font antialiasing on top is really exhausting for me.

But I can’t do anything. 😢

https://movq.de/v/dd46b2faa2/s.png

I still have my ICQ credentials and apparently they still work, but they want to know my phone number now. So, fuck that. 😂

https://movq.de/v/af1f167ce4/s.png

RIP, ICQ.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yep, this was pre-“everything comes from China/Asia”. My keyboard was made in the UK: https://movq.de/v/ac83b493f6/model-m.ff.jpg

OS/2 2.0 wasn’t much of a success, huh? So, sure, go ahead and repurpose those disks. 😂

https://movq.de/v/5ad2630508/IMG_20240519_072303.jpg-small.jpg

I was able to dig up StarOffice 3.1, which I used in the 1990’ies on Windows 95. This was the highlight of my day. 🥰 As you can see in the photo below, this CD includes a version for Windows 3.1, 95/NT – and OS/2! How cool is that? My CD back then did not have the OS/2 version.

StarWriter of StarOffice 3.1 can do a lot of the stuff that I’m missing in the tool at work. Like automatic numbering of sections/chapters and cross-references to other parts of the document. Essential basic stuff like that.

All the following screenshots are from QEMU VMs (OS/2 2.1, Windows 3.11, and Windows 98), but I think I’m gonna install this on my real OS/2 Warp 4 box soon. 🧓

https://movq.de/v/eebbe648a5/

What really blew my mind is this feature, though: You can rearrange your document’s structure using drag-and-drop. Here’s a demo (Window 2000):

https://movq.de/v/67523d0d3f/so31.mp4

I really, really wish the tool at work would have a feature like that. It would have saved me so much time already. 😭

@prologic@twtxt.net Thanks 😅

This is my setup, I think I posted these before:

It’s a Celestron Ultima 100 (originally bought for bird watching, not a telescope) with a special adapter so that I can mount my Canon EOS 600D directly. The sun filter is just a generic filter for 100mm scopes. The tripod isn’t very good and actually rather annoying. 😂

It’s not a very complicated setup. 🤔 Being able to mount the camera directly is crucial.

I was able to take a photo of the large sunspots that made the news these days:

https://www.uninformativ.de/pics/photo/astro/2024-05-11–IMG_7512-sun-AR3664.jpg

It’s not a super high quality shot, my scope isn’t good enough for that. Still cool to see. 😎

One great feature of Vim (and probably other editors) is “keyword completion”: Type the beginning of a word, then press Ctrl-N and Vim will give autocompletion options by scanning all the words in the current file. For example, when I now type “au” and then Ctrl-N, it will suggest “autocompletion”.

This is so very useful when writing text / prose. It’s especially useful for German text with all those long words like “Informationssicherheitsbeauftrager”. I use this feature all time and I sorely miss it when I’m forced to use some other crappy editor. 😩

https://movq.de/v/96049c4aea/s.png

YouTube introduces a “stable volume” feature:

https://movq.de/v/ad0dd48aac/a.jpg

Once filmmakers realize that people just want stable volume instead of SUPER LOUD SECTIONS (…andreallyquietones…), then maybe I can finally remove the limiter from my pipewire filter chain. 🥴

Since I finally configured X11 in this VM for shenanigans …

The original tuXeyes running in a SuSE Linux 6.4 VM and my clone from 2017 (which does not depend on a now ancient version of Qt):

Image

I feel you, buddy. 🤣

https://movq.de/v/f67fbcd93d/washing-machine.mp4

@bender@twtxt.net Get well soon!

(And thanks for not being one of those “it’s just a cold” guys.)

One of the super frustrating things about this: I have to write lots of documents, but I am required to use horrendous software to do that. It cannot even number sections automatically, nor can you insert cross-references to other sections. Simple stuff like that. It all has to be done manually.

Even Word 97 could do shit like that …

Low-quality smartphone shots from today’s walk:

https://movq.de/v/0f42ac9be0/

Most importantly: Ducklings! 😍 I’ll have to take my good cam next time.

More basement:

I completely forgot that DVD-RAM was a thing once. Found my old disks and they still work. 🤯 The data on them is from 2008, so they’re not that old. Still impressive.

The disks are two-sided. On the photo, that particular side of the disk on the left appears to be completely unused. 🤔

And then I read on Wikipedia that DVD-RAMs aren’t produced anymore at all today. Huh.

(I refuse to tag this as “retrocomputing”. Read/write DVDs that you can use just like a harddisk, thanks to UDF, are still “new and fancy” in my book. 😂)

Last week of my vacation. I made a little racing game for real-mode DOS that uses ray casting for rendering. There’s not a lot of game logic, except for lap timing and the tiles next to the walls have very high friction.

The tracks are procedurally generated. You can select one from the command line. (I love that concept very much.)

Getting the basic game done wasn’t too hard. I could reuse a lot of code from my little pool billiards game.

But … oh my goodness, the performance? The video was made on my Pentium 133, which is very powerful for the DOS era. And yet, it barely makes it above 25 FPS. I already used a couple of tricks (no floating point in some parts, try to keep an eye on cache locality, …) and I’ve passed on texturing the floor. The hot code paths are those that copy data in memory, like reading a pixel value for a texture and then copying it to the VGA buffer.

I’ve learned to appreciate games like Duke Nukem 3D a lot more now – how on earth can they be so fast? 🤯 I’ve got some homework to do …

https://movq.de/v/18f0d4be8d/MVI_6951.MOV.mp4

Today’s Advent of Code puzzle was rather easy (luckily), so I spent the day doing two other things:

• Explore VGA a bit: How to draw pixels on DOS all by yourself without a library in graphics mode 12h?
  
• Explose XMS a bit: How can I use more than 640 kB / 1 MB on DOS?
  

Both are … quite awkward. 😬 For VGA, I’ll stick to using the Borland Graphics Interface for now. Mode 13h is great, all pixels are directly addressable – but it’s only 320x200. Mode 12h (640 x 480 with 16 colors) is pretty horrible to use with all the planes and what not.

As per this spec, I’ve written a small XMS example that uses 32 MB of memory:

https://movq.de/v/9ed329b401/xms.c

It works, but it appears the only way to make use of this memory is to copy data back and forth between conventional memory and extended memory. I don’t know how useful that is going to be. 🤔 But at least I know how it works now.

We had a very red sunrise the other day:

https://movq.de/v/e4df272192/IMG_6693.JPG-small.jpg