Right, now that I’m reading some comments: I was initially assuming that they would actually make it impossible for distros to provide a 32-bit build (intentionally or unintentionally). But maybe that’s not the case and distros can just continue to ship a 32-bit Firefox …

Is that really necessary? How hard is it to make a 32-bit build? 🤔 Honest question. https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2025/09/05/firefox-32-bit-linux-support-to-end-in-2026/

@dce@hashnix.club Which Thinkpad specifically is this? “Late-2010s” doesn’t sound very old, to be honest, I wonder why OpenBSD is giving you so much trouble. 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh no! 😱😱😱

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Weather’s great at the moment, isn’t it? I like it when it’s cloudy, dark, chilly. 😊

Ariadne explains some of the reasons behind this “Wayback” thingy (rootful X11 on Wayland):

• https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/115147291885663574
  
• https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/115147331909980717
  

They should put this in a FAQ on their website or something. The whole endeavor makes more sense when you look at it like this.

@bender@twtxt.net I switched back to groff a few weeks ago. 🤪

@zvava@twtxt.net Hooray for more twtxt clients 🥳

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org (Haha, every time I read the word “Gophers”, I have to stop and remind myself that this is about Golang. 🤪)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I usually only have my GPS tracker with me. That trip yesterday was probably a one-time thing. 😅 It was fun, but I’d rather not carry so much stuff around. 🥴

@dce@hashnix.club Glad you liked it. 😅

@bender@twtxt.net Right. 😂 groff, Markdown, groff. Justified, unjustified, justified.

@bender@twtxt.net Oh, there’s an easy explanation. But maybe some mysteries are best left unexplained. 😃 If you want to solve this riddle: The solution is in the phlog! Somewhere! 😅

@bender@twtxt.net The address is/was correct but probably got mangled by the Markdown renderer. Let’s try again in a code block:

gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2025/2025-09/2025-09-03--roophloch.txt

@thecanine@twtxt.net I’m seeing those Clippys everywhere now. 📎

@bender@twtxt.net Yeah, the acronym is funny. 😅

Wandering through the woods for 8km … gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2025/2025-09/2025-09-03–roophloch.txt

@klaxzy@klaxzy.net I’ve had many SD cards die in Raspberry Pis. Really annoying. I’ve eventually switched to using a read-only rootfs. 🫤

I think I’m gonna participate in ROOPHLOCH this year: gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/gemlog/announcing-roophloch-2025.gmi

Now that’s interesting. Some of these bots start crawling at URLs like this:

https://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/NetTracer-Scenes/GPUTracer/multipass/xlonitor/http-collect/getpw

That is obviously completely wrong. But I can explain it. Some years ago, I screwed up my nginx rewrite rules, and that’s how these broken URLs came to be.

It all redirects to /git now, which is why that endpoint sees so much traffic lately.

But what does that mean? Why do they start there? I can only speculate that this company bought an old database of web links and they use that to start crawling. And it was probably a cheap one, because these redirects have been fixed for quite a long time now.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m doing that now as well, but I don’t think this is a good solution. This is going to hurt “self-hosting” in the long run: I cannot afford true self-hosting where I actually do host everything here at home – instead, I must use a cloud provider / VPS for that. It is only a matter of time until my provider starts doing AI shit as well (or rather, the customers do it) and then what? I get blocked, e.g. I can’t send email to (some) people anymore. This is already bad and it’s going to get worse.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Didn’t know that, either. 😂 The one guy even tried to test this theory with a Polaroid? And “confirmed” it? What the heck. 🥴

@dce@hashnix.club Yeah, I’ve read about that approach. Sounds clever. Truth is, I’m too tired. 😢 I don’t want to spend too much of my time fighting assholes.

I’ve now started blocking entire cloud hosters. Sorry, not sorry.

As expected: Didn’t last long. They’re coming from different IPs now.

I’ve read enough blog posts by other people to know that this is probably pointless. The bots have so many IPs/networks at their disposal …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBEKlIV_70E

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, I’ve blocked some large subnets now (most likely overblocking a lot of stuff) and it has died down.

I’m not looking forward to doing this on a regular basis. This is supposed to be a fun hobby – and it was, for many years. Maybe that time is just over.

“But all your stuff is MIT licensed! They are allowed to do that!”

Haha. As if they would care. They crawl everything they get their hands on.

Besides, that’s not true, the license states that the copyright notice must be retained. “AI” breaks that. They incorporate my code and my articles in their product and make it appear as if it was their work.

Why do I care about this?

1. The load will become a problem at some point.
   
2. These crawlers and the current “AI” in general are breaking the rules. I am supposed to be paying for every little thing, I get sued for “piracy”. But apparently, these rules only apply to me. If I had more money, I could break them. Fuck that.
   
3. I simply don’t want it. Period.

This probably means that I can no longer host my own website. I don’t want to deploy something like Anubis, because that ruins the whole thing: I want it to be accessible from ancient browsers, like OS/2 or Windows 3.11.

I’ll keep an eye on it for a while. Maybe try to block some IPs.

Sooner or later, I’ll take the website down and shift everything to Gopher.

It doesn’t pose a problem for my server’s performance – yet. But if more bots/companies start doing this, my website will go down from the load.

The bots have begun to access my website way more often. I’m getting about 120k hits on https://www.uninformativ.de/git/ now in a couple of hours.

They don’t cache anything, probably on purpose.

It comes in waves. I get about 100 hits (all at once) on that /git endpoint, all from different IPs. Then it takes a moment until I get another wave of about 500-1000 requests (all at once) where they do HEAD requests on some of the paths below /git. I assume they did a GET earlier and are now checking if something has changed.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Best logo ever made. 😅 (It’s partially proprietary software. Just for Epson scanners, I think? Not sure.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, that was a lot of fun. 😃 Now let’s wait and see if I ever get to actually use this. 😂

@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.

This is something that @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz might enjoy:

Recreating the “EPSON Image Scan!” logo with one of my Tux plushies. 😅

Image

Image

@prologic@twtxt.net Enjoy the weekend. 🥳 (I rarely drink these days. I hope my tiny little Whisky collection doesn’t go bad. 😂)

The audacity … how about you keep it, eh?

From: Netflix <info@members.netflix.com>
Subject: Here’s what’s leaving Netflix soon

@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. 🤔

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

@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.

@dce@hashnix.club I switched over to following you on Gopher, because why not. 😅

@thecanine@twtxt.net Oh! 🤯 Hadn’t heard of this before. And 100% agree with that video.

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 …)

@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).

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m not smart enough to answer that question. 😅 Certainly feels like unregulated capitalism. Governments being too slow and/or unwilling to intervene … It’s a mess.

@thecanine@twtxt.net I sure hope there’s going to be push back. Is it going to happen, realistically? I don’t know.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yes, this is another instance of restricting “personal” computing. You won’t be able to install arbitrary software anymore (“sideloading”, as they call it).

It’s not unique, it’s not new. Boiling the frog alive.

We’re heading towards this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

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.

@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.

@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. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net Here’s one: https://github.com/vmykh/printer_labs/blob/master/escp2ref.pdf

@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.

@thecanine@twtxt.net That’s cute. 😃 (Why Clippy, though? 😅)

@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.

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

https://movq.de/v/3e26ec9a71/IMG_8800-edit.jpg

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

I’ve been doing this for so lang that I’ve unlearned how to do this.

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

@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.

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.

Sooooooooo, things happened, and I now have a dot matrix printer again. 😍😂

(One of the end goals is to simulate a hardcopy terminal on my old box. I’m waiting for another cable to arrive, I don’t have USB there. And then use ed(1) like it was meant to be used! 😅)

https://movq.de/v/850e04ba36/VID_20250821_180801.mp4.mp4

https://movq.de/v/850e04ba36/closeup.jpg

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @prologic@twtxt.net It’s too real, isn’t it? 🤣

The GPG signatures of my software tarballs have been wrong for years (because I’ve been using rsync wrong, funny enough, it wasn’t a GPG issue) and nobody ever noticed. (They still are wrong at the moment, because I haven’t pushed the fix, yet.)

This confirms that this is just a total waste of time. Nobody ever checks this. Maybe this matters if you’re a distro, but why even bother as a single person …

@thecanine@twtxt.net Wow. I’m not an artist in any way, but I have tried to make icons for programs or fonts every now and then. Making something that is still recognizable at so few pixels is hard. Hats off!

Please enjoy this horrible madness: https://userinyerface.com/game.html

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Well, now that is pretty impressive. Upcycling ftw.

UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEb_YL1K1Qg

I could listen to him all day.

Okay, often times, these “employer gimmicks” are just silly, but this one did make me laugh:

Image

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh dear. 🙈 So glad that WfH is a thing now. Imagine how utterly annoying it would be if they expected you to still come in despite this …

Another wave of tens of thousands of hints by the same bot on the same file:

https://movq.de/v/61f8d39d2f/s.png

There’s probably a simple explanation for this: Maybe this bot was written with “AI” and it’s simply complete garbage.

This isn’t a serious threat for my low-profile website – yet. Can’t wait for this to get worse …

This genre is great for background music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n–SX54AUZU

@eric@itsericwoodward.com I guess it is. 👋

@bender@twtxt.net curl -s gopher://… does that for you.

What’s Missing from “Retro”: gopher://midnight.pub/0/posts/2679

Hard to believe that this song is from 1985:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cen22TBHo9M

@prologic@twtxt.net They would know how to do that, but the issue was anything else, like switching workspaces or opening a terminal window or any window at all. 😅

We did an experiment at work today: Do I even need to lock my laptop when I’m gone or is nobody able to use it anyway?

It went as expected. 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m so tired of this. (That’s the goal. They want to wear people down.)

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz If you’re willing to ignore that it’s proprietary software, then Windows used to be pretty good. Like, 25 years ago. After Windows 2000 (or maybe XP) it went downhill fast. Kind of makes me sad, actually. 😂

Ah, so apparently they don’t like writing manpages anymore and instead use XML:

https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/blob/main/doc/apt.8.xml

And then they use XSLT on top and what not:

https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/blob/main/doc/manpage-style.xsl.cmake.in

It’s not even explicitly blue:

https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/blob/main/doc/apt.ent?ref_type=heads#L17

Abstractions upon abstractions upon abstractions.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Oh no. 😨 Backups! We need more backups!

You can explicitly use colors in manpages. I saw this in the apt manpage of Ubuntu recently, which, for some reason, uses blue text in one place:

https://movq.de/v/de5ab72016/s.png

Makes little sense to me. I’m glad that most manpages don’t do this. I wouldn’t want unicorn vomit all over the place.

Using colors can be done using the low level commands \m and \M:

.TH foo_program 3
\m[blue]I'm blue\m[], da ba dee.
\m[red]\M[yellow]I'm red on yellow.\m[]\M[]
This is quite horrible.

https://movq.de/v/394282ec75/s.png

Spiders are the only web developers that enjoy finding bugs.

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club Yeah, it’s really the last thing we need. I’d love to see X11 getting more attention – but not like this …

In case you were blissfully unaware: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XLibreIsExplicitlyPolitical

@bender@twtxt.net This should be a core feature, no configuration required. 🤔

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz On the one hand, all these programs have a very long history and the technology behind manpages is actually very powerful – you can use it to write books:

https://www.troff.org/pubs.html

I have two books from that list, for example “The UNIX programming environment”:

https://movq.de/v/c3dab75c97/upe.jpg

It’s a bit older, of course, but it looks and feels like a normal book, and it uses the same tech as manpages – which I think is really cool. 😎

It’s comparable to LaTeX (just harder/different to use) but much faster than LaTeX. You can also do stuff like render manpages as a PDF (man -Tpdf cp >cp.pdf) or as an HTML file (man -Thtml cp >cp.html). I think I once made slides for a talk this way.

On the other hand, traditional manpages (i.e., ones that are not written in mandoc) do not use semantic markup. They literally say, “this text is bold, that text over here is italics”, and so on.

So when you run man foo, it has no other choice but to show it in black, white, bold, underline – showing it in color would be wrong, because that’s not what the source code of that manpage says.

Colorizing them is a hack, to be honest. You’re not meant to do this. (The devs actually broke this by accident recently. They themselves aren’t really aware that people use colors.)

If mandoc and semantic markup was more commonly used, I think it would be easier to convince the devs to add proper customizable colors.

@arne@uplegger.eu lol 😅

(Just for fun, SuSE Linux 6.4 from ~25 years ago: https://movq.de/v/dc62d0256c/s.png )

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Colorized manpages have been a thing for a very long time:

https://movq.de/v/81219d7f7a/s.png

Problem is, hardly anybody knows this, because you configure this by … drumroll … overwriting TERMCAP entries of less in your ~/.bashrc:

export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\e[38;5;3m'      # Bold
    export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\e[0m'           # End Bold
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\e[4;38;5;6m'    # Underline
    export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\e[0m'           # End Underline
export GROFF_NO_SGR=1                     # Needed since groff 1.23

Speaking of manpages:

“Man pages are great, man readers are the problem”

https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2025/04/09/man-pages-are-great-man-readers-are-the-problem/

mandoc is nicer to read/write than the man macro package and, most importantly, it’s semantic markup.

HTML output is a bit broken in GNU groff, though (OpenBSD on the left, GNU on the right):

https://movq.de/v/f1898e648f/s.png

🤔

Still, I’m inclined to convert my manpages to mandoc.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I still haven’t tried it. 🤐 Some day, perhaps …

@kiwu@twtxt.net Hello. 😅

In 1996, they came up with the X11 “SECURITY” extension:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4w548u/what_is_up_with_the_x11_security_extension/

This is what could have (eventually) solved the security issues that we’re currently seeing with X11. Those issues are cited as one of the reasons for switching to Wayland.

That extension never took off. The person on reddit wonders why – I think it’s simple: Containers and sandboxes weren’t a thing in 1996. It hardly mattered if X11 was “insecure”. If you could run an X11 client, you probably already had access to the machine and could just do all kinds of other nasty things.

Today, sandboxing is a thing. Today, this matters.

I’ve heard so many times that “X11 is beyond fixable, it’s hopeless.” I don’t believe that. I believe that these problems are solveable with X11 and some devs have said “yeah, we could have kept working on it”. It’s that people don’t want to do it:

Why not extend the X server?

Because for the first time we have a realistic chance of not having to do that.

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html

I’m not in a position to judge the devs. Maybe the X.Org code really is so bad that you want to run away, screaming in horror. I don’t know.

But all this was a choice. I don’t buy the argument that we never would have gotten rid of things like core fonts.

All the toolkits and programs had to be ported to Wayland. A huge, still unfinished effort. If that was an acceptable thing to do, then it would have been acceptable to make an “X12” that keeps all the good things about X11, remains compatible where feasible, eliminates the problems, and requires some clients to be adjusted. (You could have still made “X11X12” like “XWayland” for actual legacy programs.)

I wasn’t really aware until recently that programs can’t choose their own window’s position on Wayland. This is very weird to me, because this was not an issue on X11 to begin with: X11 programs can request a certain position and size, but the X11 WM ultimately decides if that request is being honored or not. And users can configure that.

But apparently, this whole thing is a heated debate in the Wayland world. 🤔

“Wayland Will Never Be Ready For Every X.Org User”

https://youtu.be/yURfsJDOw1E

This is just the universe telling me to reduce my screen time.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org To be fair, I did first notice this a while ago. But no monitor I ever had showed burn-ins like this (be it TFT or CRT), so I didn’t know that I should have sent it back. And then it got worse over time and now I see ghost images after 20-30 minutes. :(

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Ooooooohhhhh, nice 😲

Really, it won’t be long until I give the world the finger and move everything behind Gopher or Gemini. It’ll be a while until the bots find me there.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’d expect a custom build like that to cost at least 50’000€ here in Europe. Used campers with 100’000 - 200’000 km already on their clock are 20-40k€, apparently. 😆