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 I’m so glad that I don’t have anything to do with the modern Windows world … Must be really annoying to waste one’s time on stuff like this. 🥴
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hmm, I don’t know of a green-ish Office suite. I mean, LibreOffice is green, but that’s not what you mean. 😅
Ahhh, TeXNicCenter! Many people in Uni used this. What happened to it, is it dead? The last release is from 10 years ago. 🫤
Admittedly, it took me a while to figure out and appreciate all the advantages of actually marking up the document structure properly.
Same here, to be honest. I think it was HTML which changed that eventually. 🤔 Not sure if any “ordinary” users that I know use semantic markup, but then again, none of them write any documents that need this. And in reality, most people are more concerned (rightfully so) with the actual appearance of their document – so it is an extra step to first mark something as a heading and then change the document style to get the appearance they actually want. That’s why I think that all the “Works”-like suites aren’t complete rubbish. They have their place.
These days I rarely reach for LaTeX or LibreOffice to craft new stuff in my private life. Simple text files is usually it.
I was going to ask “but how do you write letters”, and then I realized that the last letter I’ve written was in 2022. 😂 It has become super rare indeed.
@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Hmmm, I might give Searx a try. 🤔
That outage yesterday was a good thing. Made me question and reevaluate all this. 😅
QOTD: Which web search engine do you use? 😂
rm -rf just got me, big time. I realized what had happened and stopped it in less than a second, but it had already deleted ~3000 (70 GiB) of files I didn't want to delete. Luckily I had backups in Restic.
@mckinley@twtxt.net Oops. Glad to hear the backups worked. 😅
@bender@twtxt.net In retrospect, it looks pretty obvious, yeah. 🫤 Or at least like a red flag.
@prologic@twtxt.net Going to be interesting to find out what caused this. 🤔 Bing (like, the real bing.com) is still down for me as well.
DuckDuckGo’s help page doesn’t really make it clear that they rely on Bing that much:
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
I guess this outage is a good thing. 😅 Lots of people now read up on this.
@prologic@twtxt.net I wasn’t aware of the extent. 😞 The whole thing is down now that Bing is down.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years now, worked fine. Today it’s down – and now I’m learning that it runs on Bing? 😳
https://www.searchenginemap.com/
Why do I keep getting hits by a DuckDuckBot then?
www.uninformativ.de 20.191.45.212 - - [23/May/2024:03:00:48 +0200] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 659 "http://www.uninformativ.de/" "DuckDuckBot/1.1; (+http://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot.html)"
iTerm2 now has ChatGPT integration 🚮 https://iterm2.com/news.html
O_o Software problem, it can’t be helped.
https://movq.de/v/961aef2366/nsfw068-willkommen-im-kapitalismus.ogg (This was originally about an iPhone, IIRC, but it fits many situations. 🥴)
@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no Nice indeed. 👍 (That is a lot of houses in a rather small area. I somehow expected there to be way more space between you and your neighbors. 😅)
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org What can you do against spam on jabber? 🤔
@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
H e i l i g e r S p e r r s a t z , B a t m a n !
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
@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Yeah, there is no guarantee with any of these things, it can all be faked or ignored. 🫤 I’m still going to do it in the hopes that some of those bots respect it.
@mckinley@twtxt.net I just got bitten by this again: I would make passive mode the default mode of FTP. 🥴
I spent some more time with StarOffice 3.1 and it is indeed a bit clunky (of course it is, it’s from 1996). For example, a table of contents does not update automatically – you have to delete it and re-insert it. Sometimes it has graphical glitches. Font rendering isn’t too great.
And yet, I wish we would use this instead of $the_other_thing at work. It’s much faster (on my Pentium 133!) and more featureful. 🫤 (Or, you know, StarOffice’s modern descendant: LibreOffice.)
Okay, GPS performance has degraded a lot over the last few days.
- Time to first fix is a couple of minutes now, instead of 5-30 seconds.
- Accuracy is reduced greatly, probably because the phone can one lock on to about 6-12 satellites, this used to be around 30 satellites.
In theory and under good conditions, you need 4 satellites to get a fix. But in reality, there are rarely “good conditions”, there are always buildings, hills, or trees nearby, so you need as many satellites as you can possibly get.
It’s not completely useless (yet), but it’s not great. I think I’m gonna lift some firewall restrictions. 🫤
@prologic@twtxt.net Ahhh, I right, now I remember. That ai.txt boils down to this, I guess:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /
… or maybe I should do this based on allowlisting rather than blocklisting. 🤔 Only allow a couple of bots that I think are fine …
Anyone got a link to a robots.txt that “blocks” all the “AI” stuff?
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. 🧓
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. 😭
@rrraksamam@twtxt.net You sure that’s enough? My laptop already has 32 GB RAM. You gotta pump those numbers up!
@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, I was just surprised by that low number, because I still have 126 feeds in my list. Buuuuuut I guess I could clean that up a bit as well. 🥴
@prologic@twtxt.net Not a lot left, huh 🤔
@aelaraji@aelaraji.com lol, yeah, that would be great 😂
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @mckinley@mckinley.cc Huh, I envy you. 😅 I was browsing my GitHub stars, clicked Next a couple of times and then hit the back button on my mouse. Boom, I don’t get back to the previous page but to my profile page: https://github.com/vain?tab=stars
At work, it is absolutely pointless to expect forward/backward to work. Almost everything breaks. Maybe some older Jira still works, but that’s about it.
@prologic@twtxt.net I sure hope you’re right. 😅 I’d love nothing more than not having to rely on the internet for this. 🤞
(I clearly remember sitting in my car and waiting an eternity to get a fix, though. I’d regularly start the GPS device and then continue to load up my bags/stuff into the car because it took so long. 😅 Maybe it was just a shitty device, who knows …)
The GPS satellites transmit an almanac, a (coarse) list of all satellite positions:
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog862/node/1739
That’s apparently crucial for a low “time to first fix” and, as I understand it, that’s where A-GPS comes into play: Downloading this information from the satellites takes about 12.5 minutes, but downloading it via the internet (A-GPS) is much faster.
So the question is: How long is this data valid for? It’s a bit hard to find information on this … It looks like it’s valid for several weeks:
https://flysight.ca/wiki/index.php/Almanac_and_ephemeris
If true, it would mean the situation is much less dramatic than I thought. 😅 I go on a walk every couple of days and that gives the device more than enough time to download an updated almanac. So, I guess I should be fine without A-GPS if I regularly use (standard) GPS for an hour or so. 🤔
We’ll see. This might take a couple of months to find out. 😂
I’m gonna need some medication if I have to keep doing this. 😬 It’s infuriating.
Automatically numbered sections, 1978 in nroff / ms: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Bell-Release/usr/man/man7/ms.7#L231-L233
Thinking about disabling the two extra buttons for “forward” and “backward” on my mouse, because today’s websites don’t support this anymore, and it’d safe me the constant moments of “oh for fuck’s sake”. 🙄
I’m (just) old enough to have experienced the German Democratic Republic first hand and if they had had any of these capabilities … 🙈🙈🙈
@mckinley@twtxt.net Aaaaaaaahhhhhhh! 🙈🙈🙈 What a mess …
@mckinley@mckinley.cc Wow, nice. 😍
@mckinley@twtxt.net Thanks for the info. 🤔
This is quite bizarre. Why are we accepting this? 🤔 I guess it just doesn’t matter to people when they use Google for everything anyway (mail, Google Drive, …) … 😒 Bah.
It’s extra “funny” in my case, because I run that Matrix server myself, so I assumed that data is only sent between that server and the clients. But no, of course not, lots of things still get shoved through Google and Apple. 😂😭 How silly.
@prologic@twtxt.net That must be hard indeed. 🤔 Are the kids old enough to be interested in this kind of stuff? (Are kids in generall still interested in this? 😂)
@prologic@twtxt.net Right! I think I remember 😅
@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. 😎
@aelaraji@aelaraji.com It would appear so. 🤔 (I’m too lazy to set that up, though, I rather just don’t use notifications. They’re not that important in this case.)
I was not aware that I needed a cloud service for something as (seemingly) simple as local app notifications. 😳
Another thing that doesn’t work anymore after blocking network traffic from my Android phone: Some push notifications.
I run a Matrix server for our family. I use “FluffyChat” on my phone. Traffic from the phone to my Matrix server is allowed and chatting in FluffyChat works.
But I don’t get any notifications anymore on new messages.
So, what’s going on here? Does FluffyChat, which only really needs to talk to my own server, rely on some cloud service for notifications? Seriously? 🤔 How does that work, does this cloud service see all my notifications or what?
Anyone around who did app development on Android? Can you shed some light on this?
(The old device I’m referring to was a handheld device. It was not built into the car and was not running 24/7.)
I’ll make an experiment: I’ll keep blocking all the phone’s internet traffic and then we’ll see how bad the GPS performance will get in a couple of hours/days. 😅 (If I got it all wrong and it still works fine, that’d be great!)
@prologic@twtxt.net Regarding the static URL: The hostname at least is a CNAME record and resolves to something at cloudfront. What I meant was that I, as a user, cannot configure this URL anywhere in the Android UI. 🤔
@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm, have you used a GPS device 15, 20 years ago? I had one in my car. It would take a long time until it got a first “fix” of your location. That’s because it can take up to 12 minutes until you have gathered all the data directly from the satellites. These days, GPS trackers on smartphones get a fix within seconds, maybe 30 seconds tops, because they get pre-seeded with (approximated) satellite positions via A-GPS.
We also not only have the USA’s GPS these days but also other satellite systems like the EU’s Galileo or Russia’s Glonass. A-GPS helps you get “in contact” quickly with more satellites, which enhances the precision quite a lot.
So, yeah, you can use it without A-GPS. But it would be very annoying and imprecise. I bought a new phone last year and A-GPS was broken on that one (I saw no internet traffic at all), which made it basically useless, to the point where I wouldn’t want to use it at all. I sent it back and bought another model.
To my knowledge, the only way to use GPS without something like A-GPS is to have it turned on all the time, so you get regular updates directly from the satellites.
One thing I’ve learned from locking down my Android phone (see #pknsrda):
The data for assisted GPS does not come from Google or, better yet, A PUBLIC SERVICE, but from a server hosted by the hardware manufacturer. Without regularly fetching fresh A-GPS data, the GPS performance is much worse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GNSS).
This means that the hardware manufacturer has (more or less) direct control over whether I’m able to use GPS or not. This isn’t an Android setting, it’s buried deep within the device, no way to change the URL. If that manufacturer decides one day to cut me off, for whatever reason, or goes bankrupt or whatever, then I’ll have to buy a new phone.
And of course, this data transfer is encrypted as well, so I don’t know what my phone sends to those servers.
All this smartphone business is such a clusterfuck. I should have never bought one of those things.
@prologic@twtxt.net Thanks. I expected this to take much longer. 😅
Whoohoo, it’s fixed. 🥳 Now I can look at funny pictures again!
I took the opportunity to remove some dependencies on the internet from my workflow. Actually, outages like these are healthy.