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 …)

Dear @doctormo@doctormo, I’m a great admirer of your work in general and hopefully I won’t creep you out by telling everyone I’m your fan!

As a creator of digital vector-based art I find the color management stuff (trying to figure how to generate things to print “in CMYK”) mind boggling. I slowly try to read and acquire the concepts and vocabulary to understand more about this. I’m grateful for your work in this area. Thank you!

#FLOSS #CMYK #ColorManagement #inkscape

Surprisingly, the sky got quite some lovely colors this evening. I approve! https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-08-21/

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

@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.

@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

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I also wondered for a very long time why nobody improved the man experience in the terminal. I’d love to see links and more colors.

Stuff that nobody needs:

systemctl uses ANSI escape codes to underline text (\e[4m) and then it also uses special escape codes – that Wikipedia classifies as “not in the standard”, but I haven’t looked it up – to change the color of the underline. That color change is barely noticeable in the first place.

Some terminals don’t support this and now my systemctl output is blinking because of that.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, huh, maybe it was just my GNOME 2 themes back then that didn’t show the icon. 🤔

I like the looks of your window manager. That’s using Wayland, right?

Oh, no. It’s still X11. All my recent Wayland comments resulted from me trying to switch, but I think it’s still too early. Being unable to use QEMU (because it can’t capture the mouse pointer) is a pretty big blocker for me. This is completely broken, it just happens to be unnoticeable with modern guest OSes, so it’s probably not a priority for devs.

(Not to mention that I would have to fork and substantially extend dwl in order to “replicate” my X11 WM. And then, after having done that, I’d have to follow upstream Wayland development, for which I don’t have the resources. Things would need to slow down before I can do that.)

all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1

Heh. I’ve been using tiling WMs for ~15 years now, so it’s actually kind of refreshing to see something different for a change. 😅

Probably close to the older Windowses.

That particular theme is a ripoff of OS/2 Warp 3: https://movq.de/v/6c2a948882/s.png 😅

We ran some similar brownish color scheme (don’t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98

Oh god. Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of those, either. 🥴

@movq@www.uninformativ.de According to this screenshot, KDE still shows good old application icons: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/KDE_Plasma_5.21_Breeze_Twilight_screenshot.png

And GNOME used to have them, too: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Gnome-2-22_%284%29.png

I like the looks of your window manager. That’s using Wayland, right? The only thing on this screenshot to critique is all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1 At least the file browser. 8-)

This drives me nuts when my workmates share their screens. I really don’t get it how people can work like that. You can’t even read the whole line in the IDE or log viewer with all the expanded side bars. And then there’s 200 pixels on the left and another 300 pixels on the right where the desktop wallpaper shows. Gnaa! There’s the other extreme end when somebody shares their ultra wide screen and I just have a “regularish” 16:10 monitor and don’t see shit, because it’s resized way too tiny to fit my width. Good times. :-D

Sorry for going off on a tangent here. :-) Back to your WM: It has the right mix of being subtle and still similar to motif. Probably close to the older Windowses. My memory doesn’t serve me well, but I think they actually got it fairly good in my opinion. Your purple active window title looks killer. It just fits so well. This brown one (https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-07-22/0/leafpads.png) gives me also classic vibes. Awww. We ran some similar brownish color scheme (don’t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98 for some time on the family computer. I remember other people visting us not liking these colors. :-D

Folks, another unicorn vomited in our sky tonight: https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-07-19/

Image

We covered quite some ground in the two and a half hours today. The weather was nice, mostly cloudy and just 23°C. That’s also why we decided to take a longer tour. We saw four deer in the wild, three of which I managed to just ban on film, quality could be better, though. My camera produced a hell lot of defocused photos this time. Not sure what’s going on with the autofocus. https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-07-10/

When the sun came out, colors were just beautiful:

Image

We got some colorful spots in the sky this evening: https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-07-08/

Image

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, this really could use a proper definition or a “manifest”. 😅 Many of these ideas are not very wide spread. And I haven’t come across similar projects in all these years.

Let’s take the farbfeld image format as an example again. I think this captures the “spirit” quite well, because this isn’t even about code.

This is the entire farbfeld spec:

farbfeld is a lossless image format which is easy to parse, pipe and compress. It has the following format:

╔════════╤═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Bytes  │ Description                                             ║
╠════════╪═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ 8      │ "farbfeld" magic value                                  ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (width)                      ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (height)                     ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ [2222] │ 4x16-Bit BE unsigned integers [RGBA] / pixel, row-major ║
╚════════╧═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

The RGB-data should be sRGB for best interoperability and not alpha-premultiplied.

(Now, I don’t know if your screen reader can work with this. Let me know if it doesn’t.)

I think these are some of the properties worth mentioning:

• The spec is extremely short. You can read this in under a minute and fully understand it. That alone is gold.
  
• There are no “knobs”: It’s just a single version, it’s not like there’s also an 8-bit color depth version and one for 16-bit and one for extra large images and one that supports layers and so on. This makes it much easier to implement a fully compliant program.
  
• Despite being so simple, it’s useful. I’ve used it in various programs, like my window manager, my status bars, some toy programs like “tuxeyes” (an Xeyes variant), or Advent of Code.
  
• The format does not include compression because it doesn’t need to. Just use something like bzip2 to get file sizes similar to PNG.
  
• It doesn’t cover every use case under the sun, but it does cover the most important ones (imho). They have discussed using something other than RGBA and decided it’s not worth the trouble.
  
• They refrained from adding extra baggage like metadata. It would have needlessly complicated things.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Oh, that’s great! I haven’t heard about any of them before either. There’s also a caveat though, that I ran right into the very first time I tried this in zsh:

$ ls > /dev/null
$ echo $_
--color=tty

Yeah, exactly what you think:

$ which ls
ls: aliased to ls --color=tty

Alt+. is going to be my favorite one! In the above, it would also give me /dev/null, which might be probably more what I would expect.

i ordered some fun colorful new minidiscs so i can finally get back to recording my mixes :D looking forward to it

@quark@ferengi.one Ta. Hmm, what’s wrong with the blue text color? Is it too dark on the black background for you? :-?

Normal links are blue while images are teal. I thought I differentiate the two if I easily can. The underline of URLs comes from my terminal and is not tt’s fault.

Configuring colors is in the todo list. But of course, providing a sane default is definitely something I’d like to have.

Once again, I went on a hike onto my backyard mountain after calling it quits very late. This time I brought my cam along. The view was extremely hazy, but the setting sunlight resulted in cool colors. The freshly cut grass smelled wonderful.

I saw a flock of pidgeons circling around and some sort of rat or mouse quickly running over the road in front of me from one field into the next one with a giant nut in its mouth. Or so I at least believe, couldn’t really tell, it happened so fast.

A couple enjoyed the setting sun on a bench and stripped their shoes on this warm evening. Somebody forget their bottle of water on the summit, but it looked rather cool in the evening light:

Image

Not sure what they’re doing, but they now set up scaffolding at the ruin. I heavily doubt it, but it would be cool if they rebuilt the castle. :-)

On the way back I met up with a mate who couldn’t come along right from the beginning. We saw two deer on the meadow, but it was already too dark for my camera, the photos were totally rubbish. The sunset turned really pretty and colorful just in time when I reached home. https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-06-10/

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Very rarely does it happen. Yup, the clouds are to praise for today’s spectacle. Surpringly, the pink is fairly close to how it actually looked in person. I was pleased to see that. The neon orange in front of the grayish sky was way cooler, though. I wish I could close the aperture on my camera in the hope of capturing the insane color. Oh well.

Once again, we had some very beautiful colors this evening: https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-05-16/

Image

Forgot to post these here: A bunch of Mandelbrot images using the trans, ace, and aro color palettes.

Image

Image

Image

More and full res PNGs:

https://movq.de/v/c732f4178a/

https://movq.de/v/fa024865a8/

Love all the funky colors though 😎

I’m keeping this color scheme on my laptop for now:

Image

@bender@twtxt.net Shall we remove this primary/secondary color sttting? 🧐

Another nice stroll in nature last week: https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-04-03/

Image

@thecanine@twtxt.net I found it! This looks like colored easter eggs when squinting.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz i wound up with xcolor AND pastel at the same time, because xcolor does exactly what i want while pastel and its picker subcommand does the same thing, relying on xcolor, but brings up a nice graphic of the picked color and related colors, plus more than just the hex code. neat.

just spent like half an hour finding a terminal based color picker that would just. turn the cursor into a cross hair and let me pick from the screen. in linux fashion this was somehow difficult

I wrote about making Glenda’s Joy Division cover (with updated colors and a link to source): http://a.9srv.net/b/2024-11-23

updates en la identidad visual: dark/light themes y nuevos colores | https://compudanzas.net/identidad_visual.html

new favorite color: space cadet (#1E2952) (not really)

Thank you @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org - yeah they are kinda crazy color wheels

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Unless you are stripping stuff on your twts, there is no much to implement. Things will be bold , italics , underlined , and so on, on a client that can render them. Since jenny uses Mutt, I can use my own regex in it to color them as I like. That’s pretty much it.

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/7CdoznhJaLEKHwvJW/p/LfGzAduBWzY5gq6FE uses color really well in proofs. I will need to copy that.

pcd quito 2021: we had a talk on compudanzas and a workshop on coloring computers. | https://compudanzas.net/talks_and_workshops.html

hatching is a monochrome system traditionally used in woodcuts and engravings to denote tinctures (colors) [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatching_(heraldry)]] #1bit #links

randoma11y is a color generator that generates two colors and scores them using WCAG system for accessibility: [[https://randoma11y.com/]] #links #color

The lospec palette list is a database of palettes for pixel art: [[https://lospec.com/palette-list]] #links #pixelart #color

the c64 method would be an even cheaper video storage mechanism, but you wouldn’t get constant 2-bit color.

my #breathingcard etudes are 128x64 resolution videos with 4x zoom, that normally use no more than 4 colors (2-bits) using a 2-bit color storage format, that’s ~7mb a minute for raw uncompressed 60 fps video. not bad. #halfbakedideas

I’ve been thinking about storing the output of some of my audio-visual etudes in a more portable lossless 4-bit indexed color format, rather than rely on x264 directly. #halfbakedideas #etudes #breathingcards #longterm

the natural color system: when in doubt, these are some pretty good functional colors. [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Color_System]].

gameboy color speaker replaced using ds lite speaker. sounds quieter than I expected. but better than no sound at all. this, combined with the new case I got for it, makes it almost feel like a brand new device :)

%23-quote-bottom<\/title><\/linearGradient><\/defs>… https://jezebel.com/pizzagate-satanic-panic-and-the-power-of-conspiracy-t-1833551416

Editions https://qz.com/1442051/colorful-architecture-is-a-symbol-of-cultural-heritage-in-bolivia/

GitHub - JoYoungjoo/SC-FEGAN: SC-FEGAN : Face Editing Generative Adversarial Network with User’s Sketch and Color https://github.com/JoYoungjoo/SC-FEGAN

‘Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse’ Ignored the Rules – Variety https://variety.com/2019/film/awards/spider-man-into-the-spiderverse-colored-outside-the-lines-1203141617/

Nicolas Cage to Star in ‘Color Out of Space’ – Variety https://variety.com/2019/film/news/nicolas-cage-color-out-of-space-1203115589/

ENTH Flux aha Color Forth http://www.ultratechnology.com/enthflux.htm

Color Forth http://www.ultratechnology.com/color4th.html

Bad idea of the day: Rather than having a ‘madness’ mechanic, have a ‘stress’ mechanic that causes perceptual distortion (tunnel vision, increased color contrast, blurred vision, louder environmental sounds) & motor distortion (worse aim, movement delays)

Bad idea of the day: replace whitespace with color changes

Bad idea of the day: run deOldify on manga pages, consider the new color schemes canon, move to a surreal universe of floating pastels

The Color of Pomegranates: A Failed Video Essay - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MXjUf05HVE

@freemor@freemor.homelinux.net I thought so too. Color me surprised when I surveyed my follow programmers in my dept and only 3 out 12 knew what I was talking about.

Band name of the day: impossible color

The opposite of ‘interesting’ is ‘colorful’.

Remember the good old [hellenic] days, when political parties were sports teams and were also named after their jersey colors, and politicians were elected via lottery?

Why tech’s favorite color is making us all miserable https://www.fastcodesign.com/90177573/how-blue-became-techs-favorite-color-and-why-it-shouldnt-be

Syntax highlighting. Because colors.

Color: From Hexcodes to Eyeballs http://jamie-wong.com/post/color/

Bad idea of the day: Rearrange the frames of a movie so that each frame is followed by the remaining frame that has the minimum (or maximum) difference, in terms first of brightness and then of color

Bad idea of the day: Sort the frames of a movie by average color & play it that way

Rethemed my desktop using the colors from the atom-one-dark theme: https://imgur.com/a/IDunX