We’re finally down to comfortable temperatures again here in Germany. Meanwhile Mexico: 50°C. 🥵😩🥵

@prologic@twtxt.net Something replaced two consecutive ASCII dashes with a Unicode U+2013. This should work:

https://gopher.mills.io/uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2021-08/2021-08-25–the-ideal-smartphone.txt

@shreyan@twtxt.net Hmm, no, I’ve lost track of Pine stuff a while ago. 🤔 Maybe I’ll have another look some day.

@prologic@twtxt.net macOS is the standard OS for our employees. I’ve seen and used it plenty in the last 10+ years. 😅 Never as my main OS, though, because I have zero motivation to do that. 😅 What I have, works fine for me.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Huh, weird. Looks a bit like arson, yes. 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org This is one of the files:

https://movq.de/v/5918f06a81/JACOBI%7E1.MP3

You can tell the age by the filename. 🤣 This file was stored on an LS120 disk for a while around 1997, then copied to a CD-R, then finally from there to my NAS in 2016.

Full version with more bits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5YUZCNOB-Y

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh boy, that band still exists! 😅 I think some of the first MP3s I ever had in the 1990ies were from them … Short samples from their website … I wonder if I still have them.

@prologic@twtxt.net To elaborate a bit more:

I’m a control freak and a tinkerer. Almost everything I do in the realm of computers is about understanding how it works and being able to tweak it. I rarely care about “just getting things done”.

And I’m tired of fighting. Sure, what I want to do might be possible on macOS or Windows or Android or whatever – but those systems are not meant to be used like I want to. On the other hand, Linux and BSD give me all the tools I need and they don’t get in my way (usually – OpenBSD can be quite opinionated).

Smartphones and tablets are a lost cause to me. Most manufacturers obviously hate it if the user is in control of anything, so they lock it all down. Android is the lesser evil (last time I tried it wasn’t that hard to write your Android app, but that was like 10 years ago) and it offers you slightly more options than iOS (simple things like settings your own ringtone …), but it’s still not something that I enjoy using.

More: gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2021-08/2021-08-25–the-ideal-smartphone.txt

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ya, that’s a few extra steps, though, and it’s extra-extra work if you’re not running Yarn. On Mastodon, this appears to be the norm. 🤔

Hm, so, on Mastodon, everyone can see that I’m following an account if that account has made their list of followers public? Do I understand correctly? 🤔 This affects my privacy, but someone else has control over it?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Well, lots of curse words, but it sums up my thoughts pretty nicely. 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh no. 😨 Must be horrible for those people to watch their stuff burn down …

@marado@twtxt.net Oh wow. 🤔 Let’s see how well that works in practice.

(I’d still prefer it if smartphones/tablets were more like the PC world, where installing arbitrary OSes is the norm: Nobody stops me from running a current Linux distro on my 15 year old machine. But I’m afraid that ship has sailed.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hmm, honestly, I don’t really know what tree rosin smells like. 🤔 The stuff that I have here certainly smells like “wood”, quite “dark”, a bit sweet and somewhat like Whisky. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net I’ll try to write a proper answer when I’m in a better mood. 😅 At the moment, I’m unbelievably pissed (because of other things). 🤣

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no People really are different. 😅 I can’t stand Apple stuff at all.

The only good thing is that they support iPhones for a long-ish time. The Android ecosystem is so ridiculously fucked up in that regard. Especially when you buy cheap Android phones, they are pretty much guaranteed to never receive updates … I almost think this should be illegal.

Got new rosin for my bass. Until now, I was using the no-name stuff that came with the instrument. Wow, what a difference. It finally feels like the bow actually works. 😳

Besides, it smells really good. 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Tell me about it … Our local pond, where all the ducks live, has almost dried out. 🥵 I hope we’ll get some rain soon …

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no Last night’s events? Do I want to know? (Or are you referring to the mercenaries in Russia?)

Or maybe it’s just bugs, of course.

TIL: There appear to be different whitespace collapsing rules in XML that – at least some of the parsers we used – don’t agree on. Some appear to expect that <a> </a> results in an empty string, others don’t. Well, .trim() it is, I guess.

(I didn’t research any specs on this.)

@thiegui@texto-plano.xyz No idea, I don’t recall having seen the domain twtxt.org before, either. Maybe someone is trying out something new? 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That … that is a lot of clothes pins. 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m going back and forth at the moment, can’t make up my mind. 😅 Exactly, I’d rather waste RAM than CPU cycles in this case. Battery lifetime suffers, heat goes up, …

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no Oh! 😆 So you still live in an oven like the rest of us. 😂

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no A colleague is currently traveling in Norway and said she’d have to go past the polar circle to get somewhat non-shitty temperatures. 🥵 So, I wonder where @stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no lives (roughly) to get those lovely 12°C? 😅

@thiegui@texto-plano.xyz Are there any twtxt registries left? 🤔 I thought they all died out.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s tough to find that sweet spot (“when to write automation?”). 🤔 But when you say “years ago”, hmm, yes, maybe you waited too long. 😅

After having used st as my main terminal for a while now:

• Most things work just like in xiate, but I did patch st heavily. Took quite some time to do this, but it was also fun, so it was worth it.
  
• st uses much less memory than xiate (12-20 MB for st, 40 MB+ for xiate) – but way more CPU time. 😅 When I move another window on top of an st window (so that st has to do a lot of redraws), the CPU spikes so much that my whole X server begins to stutter.
  
• There’s no point in denying it: Font rendering is way better in xiate, because it can use the whole GTK-Pango-Whatever stuff. That’s a lot of code and could arguably be viewed as “bloat”, but the results are also better. Font stuff is not trivial, it’s inherently complex.

Had my first upright bass lesson today! 🥳 I love this instrument. I also got to play an acoustic upright bass for a little bit (mine is electric) – what a beast. 😅

My goodness, this was a hot and humid day. 😩

@thiegui@texto-plano.xyz Nobody down here in the depth, either. ✌️

@prologic@twtxt.net Heh, of course you have a Go tool for that 😅

(Still several orders of magnitude faster than typing directly on my phone. Yes, I feel very old and outdated. 🫤)

New favorite Vim config line:

nmap <Leader>qr :%!qr --ascii<CR>

Write some text, then hit <Leader>qr to transform it into a QR code (intended to be scanned with your phone).

Uses python-qrcode.

Yes: https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Someone told me in a conversation a few years back. (I only found that link to wikipedia yesterday and it appeared to be a good starting point. 😅)

Yes, there’s always disagreement. But there are some things that I don’t want to tolerate/ignore. Also, there’s a difference between “it’s good software, I use it” and “hey, nice community, I want to be a part of it”.

(When it comes to the suckless project, though, I just don’t know how to deal with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Suckless.org :/ It’s all left a bit ambiguous and there’s never been a clear statement, afaik. Makes me uncomfortable, sorry.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, wmii, I totally forgot about that one. :D That was a long, long time ago … I never used wmi, though.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Going over the list of their projects, I think mainly dwm and st fall in that category. I also use a few others (dmenu, farbfeld, slock, xssstate, in the past also tabbed) which can be used “as is”. Granted, though, these are also much simpler. 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That sounds plausible. :) Plus, when they depart, they sometimes turn very quickly and don’t even fly over my head.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org To my surprise, st has builtin zoom. 🤯 I use that very often, too.

But vanilla st lacks other features that I, personally, find essential. For example a scrollback buffer. (That’s a very controversial topic in that community …) What you have to do, is go through this list and pick patches that you like:

https://st.suckless.org/patches/

Of course, they don’t all apply cleanly or are outright buggy sometimes, because anyone can push a patch to that list. There’s not really a strong review process.

At the end of the day, when you’re using st, you’re very likely effectively forking it. I’m not entirely sure yet if I’m up for that. 😅 Why do that anyway? Just for the fun of tinkering with it. 😅 The good thing is that upstream development has slowed down considerably in the last few years. It appears to be much more stable these days. Running my own st fork might actually be doable. We’ll see.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org The planes like to land “against the wind”. When it’s coming from east, they approach from west towards east (and thus fly over me) – and vice versa. When it’s coming from west, they take off towards west, which, for some reason, is quieter than landing. 🥴 Maybe they just climb faster than they descend, I don’t know.

Once more, I’m toying with st. I actually might switch for real this time. My GTK/VTE terminal does work quite well (as long as I don’t port it from GTK 3 to GTK 4), but dealing with the nitty gritty details in st is just way more interesting. 😅

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no Almost makes me want to do some 3D stuff again, too. 😅 It’s been a while … Maybe it’s better to wait for Winter, though, my machine might overheat. 🥵

It finally happened, the wind has changed. The planes are gone (for now).

Ein Papagei, zwei Papa Geier.

Renewed the cushions on my headphones → boom, noise cancelling got a lot better again.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org 😅

Oh, I wish. “Aliens landed on earth” would be one of the greatest headlines imaginable. I wouldn’t get my hopes up, though. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm, I’ll have to look into it. 🤔 Probably not what I meant, but interesting nontheless. 👍