@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, nice, an unexpected ISS visit! 😃 How bad is the light pollution in your area? I could imagine that you have rather clear skies. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net 31 (octal) is 25 (decimal). 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net It is, yep. 🌙

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m gonna give you a hint: Octal, decimal. 😅

View from my window last evening:

Image

Moon, Venus, an airplane in the top left corner, wind parks in the distance.

(This is already too much for a standard camera. The moon is super bright, the rest is not. Guess I should go HDR some day?)

@prologic@twtxt.net It’s surprisingly honest here, isn’t it? It mimics some patterns of thinking. Period.

@prologic@twtxt.net Did you get the joke? 😏

Why do programmers confuse Halloween and Christmas?

QmVjYXVzZSBPY3QgMzEgPSBEZWMgMjUuCg==

🤪

@prologic@twtxt.net Not sure what you mean by silly shenanigans? 😅 I think our companies are smaller in general and thus easier to reach. But the bigger the company, the harder it gets, I’d say. 🤔 (I don’t even know if we have EU laws that require a certain level of customer service. Could be! Honestly, I very rarely reach out to companies. 🤔)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yyyyyyyes, but I don’t think/hope that’s related. That’s the last thing I need. 😂 I’m hoping it’s just crashed routers at the ISP or something like that.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Mutt, since … 2008, I think. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net I know the feeling. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm, my workflow looks like this:

• My public server receives mail.
  
• Either my desktop PC or my laptop fetches new mail (via mpop) into a maildir.
  
• That maildir gets synced to other machines via unison (I used Git for that purpose for 13 years, unison is a bit faster).
  

Sending mail works similarly:

• One of my machines sends mail (via msmtp) and stores it in the maildir.
  
• unison syncs that to other machines.
  

What I like about that is that I don’t have to keep the mail files on my server. If my server crashes (never happened so far), I can upload a new blank OpenBSD image and use config management to set it up. I actually don’t make backups of my mailserver/webserver. 😅

Regarding IMAP, well, I don’t actively dislike it (other than our server at work being very, very slow, but that’s probably not IMAP’s fault). It’s more that I don’t have a need for it. 🤔

Yet another internet outage. Getting more and more of those. 😒

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org FWIW, I’ve been using Martin Lambers’ mpop/msmtp for ages now without issues: https://marlam.de/

I’m not a fan of IMAP (I don’t want my server to create/keep data), but at work I use isync: https://isync.sourceforge.io/

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Do you use a config management system like Ansible or BundleWrap on your servers? (bw is our in-house solution, we started it around the same time as Ansible.)

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club Years?! 😂

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Glad to hear that. 😃 We run about a thousand Ubuntu installations on servers and updates are usually smooth sailing.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ohh, I love them. Ever heard one calling? Pure dinosaur vibes.

Let’s finish this day with this masterpiece. (I still don’t understand how just two instruments can produce such a big sound.) // YOB - Adrift in the Ocean // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uif5XmYF7_k #NowPlaying

@arne@uplegger.eu /me rennt schreiend davon 🙈🙈🙈

Das Firmenhandy sagt mir nach einem Update: „Dein Pixel kann jetzt noch mehr!“ Aha. Ist es jetzt ein Voxel? Kann’s jetzt mehr als 256 Farben? Oder was? Ich bin eindeutig nicht die Zielgruppe solcher Sprüche …

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t think that’ll help. 😅 But don’t worry, I’ve been disappointed in k8s again today, so I’m good. 😂

I really need to catch up on your recent twtxt proposals/developments. I’m totally lost in my other projects at the moment. 🫣

Didn’t really work on my OS this week. Well, editor and assembler also run on DOS now, but that wasn’t hard (still cool!):

https://movq.de/v/13bf8c77b9/los-tools-on-dos.mp4

The subshell thingy also works on DOS, I like that.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I think so. Not in my apartment, but somewhere in this building. I guess. 😂

@johanbove@johanbove.info Do it! Those things are great. The “sonic” ones are even better. I wish those products had been available 20 years ago, would have saved me some trouble. 😅

Typical construction site: Absolutely nothing happened so far. If there’s still nothing going on by Monday, I’m putting some of the disks back in.

I’m developing k8s Stockholm syndrome. Send help.

„Das Leben ist hart“, albert ein Stein.

– irgendwer auf YouTube

Speaking about telescopes, I have a feeling that a modern medium-priced telescope could be really great. I mean, if I can see Saturn’s rings with my bird scope, I would expect a good-ish telescope to be pretty great these days. 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I see. 🤔 Does it say anything about the magnification factor?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh no. 🥴 What kind of telescope have you got?

An all time favorite. // Amorphis - Drifting Memories // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoY4oJkpBEs #NowPlaying

@johanbove@johanbove.info Easier said than done. Couldn’t believe my eyes this morning.

@xuu What’s going on here? Are you doing anything or does it jump to that error page randomly?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ahh, that good old orange light. 😍 Yeah, everything’s foggy here as well.

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club @arne@uplegger.eu Don’t let your telescopes rot! 😃

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org They say, 18:48 today is the next time slot: https://social.bund.de/@dlr_next/113859521382441187

ISS (the long “line” on the right) passing Venus and Saturn:

Image

Jupiter and its moons a few days ago:

Image

Not spectacular shots, but hey, it’s something.

Also saw the crescent Venus and Saturn’s rings through my scope (you know, the one for bird watching).

Preaching to the choir, I guess: The PC is Dead: It’s Time to Make Computing Personal Again

@xuu@txt.sour.is The OA this time. I don’t know if it’s any good. I saw an actor that I thought I recognized, looked it up, saw that the show got cancelled, and then stopped watching. I hate unfinished stories.

Reverse-engineering a carry-lookahead adder in the Pentium 🤯

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club Pretty much. 😂 It’s all the stuff tagged as “DesktopEnv” here: https://www.uninformativ.de/git/ The WM was written from scratch as a learning project, although it feels very similar to dwm, yes.

(Those 440 bytes include the BIOS Parameter Block, which can’t be used for code. The available space for the code is just 378 bytes. There’s really not a lot going on here other than loading the kernel into memory, or some second stage of a bootloader, and then executing that.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Maybe with the very simplest of the easy ones it might be still reasonably straight forward

I did that and the compiled bootloader is now 439 bytes in size – the available space is 440 bytes. So, phew, it just fits now. 😂

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oof, I know that feeling. 😂 (It was much worse when I still had my 1280x1024 screen. 🥴)

Corporate IT environments are just a nightmare. Bah. No. We don’t talk about that now. It’s the weekend! 🥳🥳🥳

Friendly, regular reminder to always check if a TV show has already been cancelled before you start watching it.

(Uff, wow, ich glaube, das letzte Mal im Kino war ich 2003 zu „Matrix Reloaded“.)

@anth@a.9srv.net I stopped using a persistent browser profile ~10 years ago and this was a great decision. When I shut down my PC at the end of the day, the browser profile with all the tabs and history is gone. I don’t miss it at all. By now, I’m disciplined enough to take a note of important links right away.

This probably doesn’t work for everybody, but I love it.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I take it this is a typical corporate network with a ton of firewalling rules? And, oh god, so much Microsoft. 🤢

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Heh, thanks, yeah, reading the Intel docs takes time. I’ve been doing that on and off since September (for this blog post), so I’m almost used to it now. But doing that for the very first time is quite gnarly. They’re not super well written.

I really think (this time) that I won’t add many more features. 😅 At the moment, the program is very “generic” and basically only does some pattern matching: If it sees a mov instruction followed by some 8 bit register and then some 8 bit number, then it encodes it as a 0xB0 byte using a certain mechanism (e.g., the register number might get added to 0xB0 and then the 8 bit number might just follow verbatim). That’s what the long list in the screenshot shows. “A cmp followed by two arguments of a certain type gets encoded as …” They’re all handled exactly the same.

Adding support for more instructions mostly just means adding more entries to that table.

If I were to add “optimizations”, I guess complexity would skyrocket. 😅

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Have fun. 🐧🚗 I played that a lot out of boredom during the peak of the pandemic. 😅

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Well, consider me jealous. 😅

So, is that a standard lubuntu or a special version for that laptop? Any driver issues so far?

The most valuable resource is Table B-13 at the end of Volume 2D of the Intel docs. It’s a very long but easy to understand table of instruction encodings – assuming you already know how that ModR/M stuff works.

Image

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, what else does one need? 😅

I added more instructions, made it portable (so it runs on my own OS as well as Linux/DOS/whatever), and the assembler is now good enough to be used in the build process to compile the bootloader:

Image

That is pretty cool. 😎

It’s still a “naive” assembler. There are zero optimizations and it can’t do macros (so I had to resort to using cpp). Since nothing is optimized, it uses longer opcodes than NASM and that makes the bootloader 11 bytes too large. 🥴 I avoided that for now by removing some cosmetic output from the bootloader.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I read it in the news, lots of ice in your area. 🫤 (There’s nothing going on over here.)

Alright, I have a little 8086 assembler for my toy OS going now – or rather a proof-of-concept thereof. It only supports a tiny fraction of the instruction set. It was an interesting learning experience, but I don’t think trying to “complete” this program is worth my time.

The whole thing is just a learning project, I don’t want to actually make a usable OS. There are a few more things I want to have a look at and then I’ll eventually move on to 386/amd64 later this year (hopefully).

https://movq.de/v/d8f30cbe75/vid3.mp4

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Nice! 🥳

And thanks for the reminder! I forgot, of course. But I had a quick look now and got to see Saturn and its (currently very flat) rings. This never gets old, always blows my mind. Looks like a scifi movie. 😃

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That was great! 😃 Now I need to go back and watch the other videos by that guy. 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hmm, their illustration looks pretty optimistic. 🤔 When I look at it in Stellarium, the cluster around Saturn is pretty close to the Sun. Not sure you can see them. 🤔 Saturn is even closer to the Sun than Mercury – and Mercury is notoriously hard to observe.

But I hope I’m wrong!

January looks pretty interesting, too, btw.

@quark@ferengi.one Broken in what way?

Image

Image

The editor can launch a new shell now:

https://movq.de/v/6ec68b50dd/los86-edit-shell.mp4

Trivial to implement but super useful. It allows for simple but meaningful dev cycles: Edit source code, run/test it, back to editor. That’s what I do in the video.

(The Brainfuck program is silly, but I got nothing else at the moment.)

The I/O cache is also getting better. All that back and forth doesn’t hit the disk at all, once cached.

This whole thing is much more fun and interesting when you run it from a real floppy disk. It’s a 5.25” floppy in the video (so it’s actually floppy 😅). Disk seek times can be catastrophic and you don’t notice any of this on modern disks.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Being able to render user avatars is certainly nice. 😃 I’m always happy to see more twtxt/Yarn clients!

@prologic@twtxt.net lol 😅

@arne@uplegger.eu Ach wie schön. :-) BF1942 hab’ ich schon ewig nicht mehr gesehen. Meine mich zu erinnern, dass das im Multiplayer ein bisschen wonky war, kam nicht an Größen wie UT oder Q3 ran. Aber es war lustig mit all den Fahrzeugen, Flugzeugen, Schiffen. 😅

@doesnmppsflt@doesnm.p.psf.lt Hmmm, the only time jenny requests something from twtxt.net is when you use the fetch context feature. jenny doesn’t interpret those long IDs as valid twt hashes, though, and won’t try to fetch them from Yarn. 🤔

Can you still reproduce this bug?

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Oh, nice. I didn’t get the chance yet to actually see and use one of those in real life, but they look very interesting. If my current laptop ever breaks down, I hope that framework will still be around. 😅

@arne@uplegger.eu Meine letzte LAN ist deutlich über 15 Jahre her. Die letzte richtige mit vielen Leuten und so tollen Sachen wie „wir schleppen mal Tower-PC und Röhrenmonitor im Zug quer durch Deutschland“ ist sicher 20 Jahre her. 😂

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’ve never written any substantial Brainfuck code myself. It’s super fascinating, though. The programs from https://brainfuck.org/ are very short and yet they do a lot. I don’t know how long numwarp.b would be if I wrote it in Python. 🤯

@doesnmppsflt@doesnm.p.psf.lt Not sure which bug you’re referring to. 🤔 (Did I forget?)

Those long IDs like (#113797927355322708) are simply part of that feed. Looks like the author just dumps ActivityPub IDs into twtxt. I think this used to work in the past, but the corresponding spec (https://twtxt.dev/exts/hash-tag.html) has been deprecated and jenny doesn’t support – actually, jenny never supported that.

jenny can only group threads by exactly one criterium (because it writes a Message-ID into the mail file) and that’s the regular twt hash. So, anything else, like people doing “#CoolTopic”, isn’t possible.

@prologic@twtxt.net Fine by me. I don’t see/remember a valid reason for just doing @. Was there ever a reason to do that? 🤔

Not a witch, I’m just programmed that way. 😂

My OS has a Brainfuck interpreter now and this counts as a programming language, right? We’re feature complete now. 😂

https://movq.de/v/1335167b35/vid4.mp4

@bender@twtxt.net That’s the way! 😂

I just used screego to help a family member with their Windows PC. Flawless experience! 💚

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org You would love the recent changes in Google Chat. Emojis are animated now. 🥴

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Not bad, I got over 1000. (And I expected more as well.) It felt great to just create a folder called “vacation2024” and move them all in there, done. 😏

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Earplugs are great, too! Feels like they block out more noise than NC headphones.

I automatically take off the headphones when I’m half asleep. I don’t even notice it. 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net Those are in-ear, right? 🤔

(I was wondering why you’re still awake. Then I realized it’s already morning where you live … 😅)

@prologic@twtxt.net Some 10 year old Bose QuietComfort 25. They’re great, but you have to replace the ear cushions every 4 years or so.

I’ve made it a habit to always put on my noise cancelling headphones when going to bed (without music). It’s pure heaven. 😂 Silence and darkness. I fall asleep within minutes. 😂 Good night. 😴

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Yeah, that sounds familiar. 😅😩 Reminds me of that comic: https://movq.de/v/1e2bcf790f/logout.jpg Stay strong 💪

@prologic@twtxt.net Oh dear, get well soon. 🤒

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org pam_happy_hour is my favorite. Gotta roll this out at work. :-)

Yes, that commit fixes it. (Wow, building Vim from source is a heavy process. 😳)

And that was the first time Vim ever crashed on me:

Vim: Caught deadly signal SEGV
Vim: preserving files...
Vim: Finished.
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

I was using Ctrl+P to scroll through the completion list. 🤔 Reproducible. Ctrl+N still works.

Hopefully fixed by this: https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/8d0bb6dc9f2e5d94ebb59671d592c1b7fa325ca6

“2025” doesn’t look right. That looks like a date which is absurdly far into the future. Like 2199 or something.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz @bender@twtxt.net We’ve used pgloader at work to migrate an old legacy application from MySQL to PostgreSQL. Their website says it also works with SQLite. 🤔

… and then there’s SVED from SvarDOS at 6035 bytes. Oh, dear!

Good thing is, SVED is free software:

https://github.com/SvarDOS/core/tree/master/sved/trunk

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org The west. Nasty wind is always coming from the bloody west. (My apartment is facing the west and so I get to enjoy all the storms. 😂)

Good weather/wind comes from the east. (Which makes all the planes approach from the west again and so I get to enjoy their noise. 😂😂)

@bender@twtxt.net Maybe, I don’t want to risk anything, though, and I can’t get this video out of my head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 😅 (My main machine runs on an SSD, the HDDs are just for additional data like my software archive, music, …)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net What are we looking at here? Are those requests per second? 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Thanks. 😅 Fingers crossed.

In the process of temporarily removing and securing all my hard disks. They’ll be turning this building into a construction site for the next weeks/months. Lots of heavy drilling and hammering. Not sure what this means for spinning disks and I’d rather be on the safe side. 🫤

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That’s the script, if you’re interested: https://www.uninformativ.de/git/bin-pub/file/mcalc.html

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Right, there is some hope left for Python docs because of the type hints. 😃 (I still don’t use them, because, ugh. 🤦)

To quote GLaDOS: Yesterday I saw a deer!

Image

… aaaaaaand I had the first bug in my toy OS that was caused by caching. 😂 Bloody caching. (It only triggered in error conditions, but still.)

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Yeah, Java itself is somewhat “controversial”, I guess. 😅 But I’ve always found their documentation to be very pleasent to work with, at least that of the standard library.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Okay, horrible cookie popup aside, would you say this is easier to read? https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/List.html#method.summary 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, robots.txt or ai.txt are not worth the effort. I have them, but they get ignored. Just now, I saw a stupid AI bot hitting one of my blog posts like crazy. Not just once, but hundreds of times, over and over. 🤦🙄