Since honesty is kindness, Microsoft is by far the worst company I ever had the displeasure of trying to communicate with. Getting them to fix the most basic of bugs always took years. In some cases it’s been over two and a half decades and it’s still broken.

I never thought it was even possible to make an operating system so broken, I’d have to manually restart my background services and set “network interface metrics” by hand, in advanced TCP/IP settings, while using it.

There are buttons that don’t even do anything when clicked and ones I’ve never seen do anything other than throw an error message.

The AI they rent to pretend to be an AI company, was for years outputting paragraphs, describing the beautiful and artful checkerboard pattern in the background, whenever trying to analyze transparent images. Transparent profile pictures work only on GitHub, the one product where the implementation was done prior to Microsoft acquisition.

Many engineers in their own forums, still manage to make that very AI sound smart, in comparison.

The design is an absolute shitshow, where no two things look like they belong in the same system — the only thing almost consistent, is excessive padding and rounded corners, placed wherever they fit the least.

But hey, 5000 engineers were fired, that will surely improve things!

I thought modifying the Caps key was cool. Now I discovered Home Row mods and gave em’ a try … Dear goodness! There’s no going back from this xD

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com Thank you! Yeah, riding a balloon into the sunset must be nice. Although, probably also really cold this time of year. On second thought, you got heating up top, so might not be too bad. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m probably also not good enough. I just thought that it might be kinda alright, there’s no shortage of work, one’s hopefully not replaced soon by automation and so on. Not sure.

And yes, there are a myriad of jobs that are extremely underpaid, have awful working hours, ruining your health and where you get treated like shit.

The outlook is poor.

My mate and I went on a hike on Saturday to Germany’s probably most famous tiniest hamlet. Well, not even hamlet, much smaller. It’s a farm (087) and a closed train station (088, 096-102). Okay, and four other houses. But that’s it. Durlesbach is known from the old folk song „Auf de schwäbsche Eisebahne“, literally “On the Swabian Railway”. According to the German Wikipedia article the German Folk Song Archive counts about 100 variants on the lyrics with up to 27 verses. The song enumerates a few stations and the most common version is about a farmer who ties his goat to the back of a train in order to save the freight costs. Alternatively, he’s used to that from previous ox cart trips where the goat just follows along. Of course, the goat doesn’t make it and the angry farmer throws the disembodied goat head at the conductor.

The weather was perfect. Sunny and clouds alternating, lower twenty-something degrees Celcius. Very beautiful. We took the train to Aulendorf and started our hike.

The level railway crossing in 051-054 is always closed and only opened on demand. I didn’t even know that this kind existed. But it’s really quiet there. We pressed the lever to call the train dispatcher who then opened the barriers for us. A few seconds later we told him that we successfully reached the other side and he closed them again. We were confused at first because the sign said only for authorized personnel and we were just two random hikers. But we gave it a shot and the dispatcher was super nice, no worries at all.

The river is always the Schussen. 092-094 is the creek Durlesbach, entering the Schussen, though. The Durlesbach station is now privately owned, unfortunately. However, it’s nicely kept in shape and there’s a cool monument with a historic steam engine, two wagons and four bronze figures reenacting the scene where the farmer is about to tie his goat, being observed by his wife and the conductor.

You can get all sorts of drinks in exchange for a donation at the display. These proceeds are used for the upkeep. I had an ACE juice which was absolutely delicious. A few hundred meters after we continued, I thought that I really should have bought a second one. It was just too good.

In Mochenwagen, we took the train back to Aulendorf. The Mochenwangen replacement service (we luckily didn’t have to take it, in fact, no idea when it is really in place) is 800 meters away from the train station. That fucking nuts.

We then changed trains to Ulm, just because that one arrived two minutes after we reached Aulendorf. But we spontaneously exited early in Biberach because we had some time to kill for the actual train to Stuttgart. The train station underpass there has some really beautiful graffiti. Shortly after, my second camera battery was flattened, too.

Going home worked out amazingly. When I switched again in Geislingen, my connecting train was already waiting on the other platform. 15 seconds before scheduled departure, the doors closed. One second to departure, we took off. That’s very rare nowadays and it was kind of magical to witness this first hand looking at the station clock.

Sorry for the many photos. I was busy sifting through them and only kept about 20%. Still too many, I know. Enjoy, nevertheless: https://lyse.isobeef.org/2026-10-03-wanderung-von-aulendorf-ueber-durlesbach-nach-mochenwangen/

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, it’s been a hot minute since I last came across Pascal. :-) When I first quickly skimmed through the code, my eyes fell on the reproducer in the comment and I immediately thought: This reminds me of Delphi! And sure enough, I then saw the .PAS file extension in the URL. That Kiwi applied some strange code formatting, I have to say, though.

Haha, that’s a sweet trick with stdin. Crazy, who comes up with things like that? It would have never crossed my mind to do stunts like that. :-D

Today, I also learned that -R is an alias for -r in rm. I think I never saw -R used here before. Of course for chmod and chown, but not rm.

The shutters weren’t closed yet, so I noticed some nice color reflections outside. I checked the other cardinal direction and lo and behold: https://lyse.isobeef.org/2026-09-21-abendhimmel/ Just in time. Contrary to what I first thought, I hadn’t missed the best part yet. :-)

I never thought I’d ever get scammed by an Amazon counterfeit product in my life 🤦‍♂️ I suppose with all the many 10’s of thousands of items sold there every day (and all the junk) I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later. I just tested a couple of USB Flash drives that were being sold as 512G, but were in fact only internally 8G, you write past the 8G and try to read those bytes back and you get a whole pile of zero’s back 🤣

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ahh, ohh! Thanks! :D

Both of these scenarios is mindboggling – imagine such a world:

Gastornis species were very large birds that were traditionally thought to have been predators of various smaller mammals, such as ancient, diminutive equids. However, several lines of evidence, including the lack of hooked claws (in known Gastornis footprints), studies of their beak structure and isotopic signatures of their bones, have caused scientists to now consider that these birds were probably herbivorous, feeding on tough plant material and seeds.

If they ever invent a time machine, I wanna go back to the Dinos. 🦕

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Humidity was through the sky. We had two thunderstorms pass by. One at 06:00 and and another one this arvo.

Somebody hooked this presumably plastic moon on the tree bark. Not sure why or what the reason is. Let’s just call it art. It looked weird and so I thought that it might poke other people’s interests as well. Worked out great. Got another question about it, too. ;-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I really thought you were playing the bass part, but this is just a picture of the CD cover. :‘-D I’ve got this in my collection as well. It’s good shit!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-08-05/0/POSTING-en.html Very interesting! I basically never analyze binary files, but this were some great thoughts on that subject. I hope to remember them when I find myself in the situation to look at binaries more closely.

@david@daiwei.me Sorry, I can’t do this anymore. A large part of my work (text, code, thoughts, …) of the last 20-25 years has been stolen and is now being sold at rampant prices to idiots who then complain about me being a backwards bitch (I get to hear this every single day). Everything I say and do in public is being abused.

Fuck that, I’m out.

Bwahahaha, these security folks have a great sense of humor! :-D Got a phishing test e-mail disguised as an overdue anti-phishing training e-mail:

Image

We receive these test phishing e-mails every now and then at work. When you follow the links and log in at the fake login, you probably get assigned another (real) training.

When I got this e-mail, I immediately thought of such a test. Since I actually do have some stupid training deadlines coming up soon, I wasn’t 100% sure, but still doubted that this was one of them. To make the timing even better, in the team meeting last week, our bosses reminded us to complete outstanding trainings before the deadlines. Ideally well in advance. Notifications about deadlines coming closer are sometimes not only sent to the individuals but also to the bosses and their bosses. And then things can get out of hands when somebody doesn’t read the e-mails properly and mistakes them for deadline exceeded reports.

Anyway, the URL also looked kinda legit. It really doesn’t help a single bit that domain names change all the fucking time. So, still with the test program in mind, I thought, I just give it a quick shot out of curiosity. Since I just had logged in before, the empty SSO username field was totally obvious then. Looking at the e-mail headers confirmed that this was indeed one of security’s field checks. :-)

I finally built a prototype of a marking gauge with a cutter wheel out of some scraps.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/streichmassprototyp-mit-messerrad/

It had been a long time in coming, I bought some replacement cutting wheels three years ago for exactly that purpose. I also found out that I need more M3 countersink bolts for future marking gauges that I want to make (maybe two or three more). Luckily, I had exactly one. I thought I got way more than that, but M3 is very, very scarce in my collection. My M3 bolt was barely long enough to attach the cutting wheel to the bar. But it’s okay for the prototype.

I was pleasantly surprised that I managed to drill the 2.5mm diameter hole almost perfectly in center in the 8mm diameter aluminium round bar. Center finder, drill press and vise with a vertical prism for the win!

I knew upfront that the M5 steel bolt to lock the bar in place definitely needs to be replaced with a brass or aluminium one (maybe with a knurled head). Otherwise, it cuts into the aluminium bar and leaves ugly marks. These burrs might even scratch the workpiece. But, of course, I don’t have any brass on hand either. Alternatively, I swap out the aluminium bar for a steel or even stainless steel one. Stainless might be tricky to precisely drill and tap, though.

I already learned a few things by making this prototype. The final wooden fence can be even a bit bigger. This round thing behind is also too short, I’d like it to be a tad longer and thicker. The final one will be made from hardwood, not spruce. Other than that, it’s great and already more practical than my store-bought marking gauge with its round fence. This only causes the tool to roll around on the workbench. Or even roll off. Stupid design.

Hmm …

My project pages have this “Downloads” section and I offer tarballs for each release:

https://movq.de/git/jenny/#downloads

I added this many years ago because an OpenBSD dev asked for it (but the project in question didn’t end up in their ports after all).

What are your thoughts on this? Is it necessary to offer tarballs?

I noticed that some distributions have already moved away from using tarballs and instead always clone from Git. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmmm, I have no idea how to solve that problem. 😅 Some jenny stuff aside, I received zero bug reports or code contributions since leaving GitHub in 2018.

I thought I had made that super easy, because you can just send me an email – no sign-up process, nothing. But that’s way too old-school, people don’t know how to use git format-patch (let alone git send-email) and they also don’t understand that they can just send me a link to their forked Git repo (which can be hosted anywhere). Git is super flexible and powerful, but those features are hardly ever used.

Maybe people even need some kind “reward”, or “fame”. Like those “achievements” that you can unlock on GitHub. (Something to put in their CV … ?)

@david@daiwei.me I first thought that this is a real lake, but it’s just a lake of craziness. :-D A town owned by a company (or so it reads to me), that’s insane.

Let me send you some nice 17°C.

Unread messages are yellow, while read messages are white in tt. Focusing them just alternates the fore- and background colors. With the old color scheme, I disliked that inline code and code blocks were basically just the opposite of normal text. Hence, unread code was white and read code yellow. I found this often confusing, especially with larger code blocks. Sure, there are the timestamp and author columns that still show the usual white (read) and yellow (unread) background for selected messages, but still.

This is how it was before with unread messages:

Image

Before with read messages:

Image

So, I just reworked the code styles. Not sure if I like that or if it is actually an improvement. Unread code is teal on gray when not in focus and becomes blue on orange when focused. I thought the dark gray code background on a black regular background is still nice and subtle. The same similarity in colors for focused messages meant to go with an orange code background on a yellow regular background. The teal was too light, so went with a blue foreground color:

Image

When read and unfocused, the new color scheme calls for the same code style teal on dark gray. However, with white as the main background for selected messages, I went with a light gray code background and a blue code foreground. Again, the contrast with white and teal wasn’t good enough. Vice versa, blue on dark gray is also not all that readable:

Image

It looks like a parrot. Let’s see if I begin to like it.

@david@daiwei.me Oh, really? I thought I’ve posted compose view screenshots before. Anyway. Glad you like it as much as I do. :-)

The update interval has always been one second. I just didn’t remember and thus tried to time it by watching the preview update while typing. It felt like roughly under two seconds, but apparently my inner clock was off. After taking the screenshot and then examining it more closely, I noticed that the interval is stated right in the UI. :-D So, I just amended my message and didn’t bother taking a new screenshot. I figured I just leave it alone and see who spots the change, if at all. And, of course, you found the easter egg. Congrats, mate! 8-)

Just thought it an interesting Hacker News article that caught my eye 👁️

@prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net is it normal that twtxtapp’s <tab> (white space) between the timestamps and posts look a bit shorter than the ones from jenny? just noticed that and thought maybe it’s someting you’d want to know.

The Rectangle highlights the whitespaces from Jenny and the Ellipse is over the ones from twtxtapp.

Image

@balloonfu-sen@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Thank you for doing this 🙏 – Just a thought… It might be possible for this to be fully automated from the Twtxt Search engine / crawler? Right? 🤔 It has all of the data… I also think it might be possible to distinguish between 1-way feedsa and “real folks” (ya know, 2-ways feeds) 🤣

Oh, crap! It’s only Thursday! I thought we had Friday already … nnnnooooooo, not another day. 😭

@prologic@twtxt.net I linked you some of my findings on the twtxt.app on IRC. The main problem is the hashing. Totally broken. But you have got to give it some thought, because GitHub hosting of the feed is tricky (even more so if they are CNAMEing their domain to it). It is also finicky because Pages is auto-enabled on username.github.io, so actions must run each time you twt.

My mate and I hiked up the backyard mountain. We got 25°C and quite some wind, so it was actually not too terrible. The wind could have blown harder or the temps a little lower, but oh well.

I saw the squirrel’s bushy tail stick up on the forest floor in the sunlight and immediately thought of this cute little feller. Since it didn’t move at all, even when we came closer, I got irritated and reconsidered that it might actually be some kind of dried up farn. But then we also were able to see its body. Unfortunately, the squirrel ran up the tree too quickly, so all the shots are kinda crap.

At one flower spot, there were sooo many butterflies, wasps, flies, bugs and other insects. The botanic was completely crowded.

The workers were transferring logs from one log truck to the other in a parking lot. I’ve never seen this happening before. When we passed the same place on the way home, they had moved logs into a sea container. That was surprising. This semi wasn’t there on the way there. One log was probably too long and sticking out the container, so they probably had to wait for somebody to return with a chainsaw. Crazy that they’re shipping logs from here probably overseas. Why else would they put them in a sea container?

After our first break, a blackbird was really posing for us with his worm in the dark shade.

Today was my first time I ever saw a hummingbird hawk-moth (Taubenschwänzchen) for real. My mate photographed them many, many times before, but I never came across one myself. So, that was really special.

The forest service installed an outdoor table with two benches next to the timber lion, that was cool to see. We sat down for a few minutes and enjoyed both the view into the Fils valley and ant on the tabletop, but the sun was beating down too heavily on us, so we had to move on.

All in all, it was a very nice few hours long hike. Enjoy! https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-07-03/

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org You think I thought about it on that level? 😅 I just heard that weird animal noise in the dark and I was the one who was running. 😂

A deer, multiple frogs, several thousand fireflies and something else. It was already very dark when I was silently drifting along on a nice soft mossy path, enjoying the firefly show left and right and in front of me. I then heard some rustling about 30 meters in the distance in the shrubs. I thought that I must have scared up a deer. But it kept on rustling without any worries. And I closed in without seeing anything.

Only when I heard the quick oink from just 10 meters away, I froze. Shit, no deer, but a boar! Suddenly, I was the one who was scared. It probably hadn’t noticed me before. But did it notice me now? Was that grunt a warning or just completely unrelated? The rustling appeared to slowly come closer. What if there were also piglets around? I couldn’t figure out how many boars there were. Maybe just one, possibly more. A wild boar easily rips a hunting dog apart, so I didn’t want to take any chances and decided I will not wait for them to eventually pass me behind the brush in just a hand full of meters, so I can keep on going. While I was just turning around, I heard another oink and was frighened to death. I ran 20 meters, before calming down a little bit. I listened for half a second and nobody was following me. Phew. I then walked back the path.

What an adventure, I tell you. That was my second (or maybe third?) wild boar encounter in the woods ever. A hell lot more scary at night than during daylight when you can actually see something.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, that would also be fine with me. I certainly do like the “arbitrary” in your comment.

While writing the article, I also thought about something like that:

date := time.Date(2026, 6, 19,
    17, 0, 0, 0, time.UTC)

Or possibly:

date := time.Date(
    2026, 6, 19,
    17, 0, 0, 0, time.UTC,
)

But it’s four lines for a damn timestamp. I also contemplated whether a comment acting as a separator is all that’s needed:

date := time.Date(2026, 6, 19, /**/ 17, 0, 0, 0, time.UTC)

I might like that the most. Not entirely sure yet. It kinda feels like a hack, but still a little elegant. Add your comment on top and we’re golden. Maybe?

I deliberately excluded them as this only distracted from the points I wanted to make. And I also realized that this example was just not ideal at all. Perhaps I should add them nevertheless?

If I ever invented a programming language, a much more human readable timestamp representation of some sort, RFC 3339 or very close to that would be part of that language. Something along the lines of /pattern/ for regexes in certain languages.

It’s 34°C and all the shutters are closed. Walking past the front door, I was surprised that there is light sneaking through the covered glass next to it. I somehow thought it’s already the middle of the night. :-D

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s right, way harder than centrally managed. They even didn’t reach concensus over the main folder: “Alle Programme, “Alle Programme (x86)”, “All Programs”, “All Programmes”, etc. Anyway.

For class 11 (or maybe already in 10, I don’t remember exactly) we could choose either between traditional maths class with a graphical calculator or “Mathe mit CAS”. There were two teachers in my entire school who were able to teach the latter. It was also fairly new at the time I believe. Certainly unheard of for a „allgemeinbildendes Gymnasium“, maybe the technical ones were already offering it for some time, not sure. It was clear to me that I would take the maths with CAS class.

Each kid had to buy their own Cassiopeia A-Something. I don’t know how much that thing was (definitely more expensive than a graphical calculator) and whether the school subsidized that in any form. But it was slow and underpowered as hell. We rarely used it in class nor for homework (most if not all had already a desktop at home). Typically, when we worked with the CAS, we sat down on the desktop computers. Our class took place in one of the two computer rooms. The desktops were placed on the three sides (left, right, back, facing the walls or windows) and the regular school desks were in the middle. Since there were more pupils than desktops, we always shared. Nowadays, we call it pair programming. ;-)

For the exams we had the “mandatory part” (Pflichtteil) without any tools. Once we finished that and handed the papers to our teacher, we were then allowed to boot up our Cassiopeias and work with them for the second part. Before the exam started, everyone had to show the teacher that they reset their small computer to factory settings. This second part was called „Wahlteil“. But you had to do it in order to pass. So, I never understood the choice of this term. Maybe it’s because the first part is the exact same for everyone (graphical calculator and CAS class), but the second part was definitely different for the two classes. Each suited to their tools.

After one or two exams, it became clear that the Cassiopeia was far from ideal. So, we took the second part at the desktop computers from then on. Our teacher unplugged the network cables himself to avoid cheating. Each computer had an “HDD Sheriff” running that reset the disk at startup. There was also an issue that the personal user accounts were affected by that. Sometimes all your data were lost. If you were lucky, they were still there. So, we saved our Maple project to local disk (if the computer didn’t crash in between, that was no problem) and at least eventually before leaving the classroom, we then also saved it on the server. For that, the teacher quickly plugged in the cable, we saved, and then the cable was unplugged again immediately. Oh, and everybody used their USB sticks, too.

All in all, this Cassiopeia A-* was quite a useless purchase. :-D I’m not sure if I still have it. At least I thought several times about giving it to the flea market. Don’t know if I did or not.

I went to check on the fireflies this season. But I didn’t see any. Instead lots of moths. At first, I thought it might have been still too light, but it was already dark enough for me to miss and destroy a snail shell. Bummer. Maybe it was too wet tonight. Although, it’s probably just another or two weeks until my glowing friends will finally show up.

In the beginning, I passed two beautiful deer on the edge of the forest. They were just ten meters away, but didn’t run off, really cool. :-) I kept on walking. Before I eventually left the woodland, a frog or toad crossed my path. It was very dark by then, though, so all I could see was a black blob.

Back in town, the street lamps on the first third were all turned off for some reason. I was already glad that I will reach home without getting blinded this time, but unfortunately, the other lamps were all operational.

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@itsericwoordward@itsericwoodward.com I just want to let you know that your mention completion seems to be broken. :-) The URL is duplicated with a comma in between. Actually, the protocols differ. I suspect that you extract all url metadata fields from the feed, not only the canonical one used for hashing (the first one) and join them. I’m not completely sure, I would need to read up on the specs (it’s already past bed o’clock, though), but I guess that there is no explicit rule for picking the mention URL. Without having thought about it too much, I reckon the safest bet is to stick to the hashing URL when in doubt and the URL that was used to subscribe to the feed is not available for whatever reason. The URL from the subscription list is probably even better.

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@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ah, I almost thought so (that you wrote it by hand), but then I looked at the source code and saw the TOC and I was like: “Naah, probably not. I would be way too lazy to do that manually.” 😅 And indeed … ha.

Oh god, yeah, that’s a lot of <span>. 🤔 Can’t really avoid that, I guess, especially if you want to do syntax highlighting of code blocks.

You wrote your own site generator, didn’t you?

In parts. I write everything in Markdown (it’s online, even: https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-05-29/0/POSTING-en.md), plus a few Vim shortcuts (to generate thumbnails, for example), and then python-markdown renders it: https://pypi.org/project/Markdown/ This process is wrapped in a shell script, like “re-render every page if the .md file is newer than the .html file” and that’s mostly it. And the Atom feed generator is completely custom. 🤔

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@movq@www.uninformativ.de what are your thoughts after reading it?

@prologic@twtxt.net so, “people with no inner monologue—a condition researchers sometimes refer to as anendophasia”, says the AI. Then “it is not a disorder: lacking an inner voice is simply a different, perfectly healthy way of being human”. Ah, so a condition, but a healthy one. Got it.

Again, I am not talking about a true monologue. If you have never thought “OK, let’s do this!” before engaging on an activity, then alright. Weird, in contrast to the rest of us, hard to believe, yes, but I believe you. Much of the troubleshooting, and creativity that comes with thought involves, well, thoughts. Maybe you are closer to AI than the rest of us, indeed! 🤪😂

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t believe you. For example, you are programming something, and you are planning the steps, or you struggle at certain point. Any train of thought, of any kind, has an addressing. “If I move this here, what will it happen?”. “Hmm if we’re to place this logic here, will it do what we need?“. “If I were to do this, will it work?” “Damn it, you are so stupid, James, how could you miss that?!!” And so on. 😅 And that’s just a minor thing.

Trust me, you do. We all do. Even the crazy ones.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I really like your style of writing, btw. It’s much calmer and less aggressive then mine. :-) When I turned my bullet points into paragraphs, I got a bit mad in the process.

Sure, feel free to include anything you want. Regarding citing, this is where twtxt falls short in my opinion. Especially with feed rotation, classic links die quickly. Message hashes only help so much. Nobody outside the twtxt universe knows how to deal with them. So, not perfect for inclusion on a web page. Linking to a thread or message on some yarnd instance might be the more user-friendly option. But the disadvantage is that it’s “just” a mirror, not the primary or original source. In all reality, this could be considered splitting hairs, though.

I should have probably written a proper article. That would have given me time to review the result more carefully, too. ;-) Perhaps that’s something for the future. But honestly, I’m not sure if I really want to waste my time and energy on that subject. So many other fun or useless things come to mind right away that I could do instead. 8-)

So, yeah, do whatever feels best to you. I don’t mind being cited or linked, but I also don’t mind not to be cited or not to be linked to. :-D Not a helpful answer, I know. Sorry. ;-) But anyway, thanks for asking, mate! I do appreciate it.

To finish my thought, linking to my frontpage is probably also useless, since I deliberatly do not have a table of contents there. In fact, my entire frontpage is rather silly.

@prologic@twtxt.net I have no doubts. Within that parsing thought, I wonder, where in the world is @xuu@txt.sour.is?

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@bender@twtxt.net I misread that sentence and thought that your first crush was called Gisela, and was like “wait, he’s not that old”.

Turns out, Gisela is a much younger name than I thought:

https://namecensus.com/first-names/gisela-meaning-and-history/

A peak in the late 1970is and late 1990ies? What?

But then it turned out that, in Germany, the popularity dropped rapidly in the late 1950ies, which actually matches my expectations:

https://www.beliebte-vornamen.de/5203-gisela.htm

In other words, some other countries picked up the name Gisela after it had already faded away in Germany.

What a fun rabbit hole. 😅

Obama on disclosure: ‘contact with intelligent aliens has not happened yet’
The former US president has reiterated his thoughts on conspiracy theories and government cover-ups. Back in February, Obama turned heads when, during… ⌘ Read more

‘I Actually Thought He Was Going to Hit Me,’ OpenAI’s Greg Brockman Says of Elon Musk
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Police officer is lowered into river to retrieve man-eating crocodile
The terrifying stunt saw the officer retrieve a crocodile that was thought to have eaten a missing businessman. According to reports, the businessman … ⌘ Read more

@kiwu@twtxt.net Dang it! I first thought it was jitters due to your exams. Hang in there!

I completely forgot, I saw my very first badger in the wild the day before yesterday. :-) That was absolutely cool! <3

I heard something comparatively large rustling in the bush right next to me and thought that it must be dear. Naturally, I stopped and tried to see what’s in there. The rustling went up the bank and it suddenly came down again towards the road I was on. That’s when I first layed eyes on it and identified it as a badger. For a split second I thought that it’s going to get after me and was ready to get running. But it just hadn’t noticed me yet. When it eventually spotted me, it froze for a few seconds and ran off uphill. My camera took too long to boot, so it was already gone by the time the photo machine was good to go.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I see him on those photos, and his singing starts ringing in my ears. I also thought, “I am going to miss him” because, you know, nothing is everlasting. But then I reproached myself; “enjoy the moment, dude, don’t taint it”. And so I shall.

New underground scans could help to locate the Ark of the Covenant
The golden chest was thought to have been the container in which Moses placed the original ten commandments. One of the most sought-after and mystifyi… ⌘ Read more

Large black puma-like cat spotted roaming the Scottish Highlands
Something large and exotic is thought to be prowling the wilds of Scotland’s Cairngorms National Park. The UK is certainly no stranger to stories of l… ⌘ Read more

World’s earliest known octopus turns out to be something else entirely
A famous fossil of what was thought to be a prehistoric octopus has been found to be nothing of the sort. Originally discovered at Mazon Creek in Illi… ⌘ Read more

I made the classic mistake. I thought I was smarter than this. I could try to scrub this from my repository, but that seems like more trouble than it’s worth, so here it is for your enjoyment: https://fossil.falsifian.org/misc/info/f6fa59e27781ce75f4cbaf700997ffffab41ad9d2e97b4aa3e360400ead3532c

Brain dead woman ‘jolted’ back to consciousness by large pothole
A woman who was thought to have had no chance of recovery was seemingly cured by a strong jolt on the road. According to reports, the 50-year-old - wh… ⌘ Read more

JD Vance still obsessed with UFOs, claims aliens are ‘demons’
The vice president recently reiterated his interest in the phenomenon and elaborated on what he thought about it. Around a year ago, we reported that … ⌘ Read more

Marks in Pompeii may be evidence of ancient Roman ‘machine gun’
A particularly deadly weapon may have once been employed by the Roman army during the siege of Pompeii. It’s certainly an interesting thought exercise… ⌘ Read more

Apple variety once thought extinct confirmed on NSW farm
The Rymer variety of cooking apple, once believed to have died out, has been found on a rural property in the NSW Southern Tablelands. ⌘ Read more

Could the infamous Majestic-12 papers have been real all along?
Documents pertaining to a shadowy UFO organization known as Majestic-12 may hold more merit than previously thought. The idea that there could be a cl… ⌘ Read more

NASA offers final verdict on odds of asteroid striking the Moon in 2032
An asteroid that was once thought to be heading for the Earth was later found to be heading toward the Moon instead. Back in 2025, concerns were raise… ⌘ Read more

Entire swarm of black holes discovered moving through our galaxy
A cluster of 100 stellar mass black holes is thought to be making its way through the Milky Way. As if one black hole wasn’t enough of a concern - ima… ⌘ Read more

New study of historical letter unravels Shakespeare family mystery
New research has offered up a new interpretation of a letter found in the 18th century thought to be from Shakespeare’s father. There is perhaps no pl… ⌘ Read more

There was an endless coming and going of sun, clouds and rain. Not to forget about the wind. I called it quits a bit earlier and went into the woods.

Towards the end I was completeley surrounded by rain curtains in all directions. This looked super cool. I thought I might make it home just in time without having to use my umbrella, but the rain clouds were way quicker than I anticipated. Just after the rain hit me, I met an acquaintance who just started his walk. The wind picked up hard and rain hammered down, mixed with snow. Holding the umbrella was a workout. Shortly after I returned, the rain stopped again.

I didn’t notice the kestrel sitting on the tree when I took the last photo. That was a nice surprise when I sorted through the nearly 300 pics.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-02-17/

Scientist develops drinkable vaccine in the form of a glass of beer
Imagine if instead of getting an injection, you could take a vaccine simply by downing an alcoholic drink. Those adverse to the thought of needles mig… ⌘ Read more

Fuck me dead! I accidentally confused an HTML file for a YAML file and manually opened it in my browser. Unfortunately, I clicked on the OK button of the popped up dialog a bit too fast, it just caught me off guard. It asked which program to open the YAML file in. Of course Firefox thought that it could handle that and suggested itself by default. Conveniently, the “don’t prompt me again and always use this selection from now on” checkbox was enabled.

And then the endless loop of death started. Turns out, this fucking browser can’t do shit with YAML files and delegated to what had been just configured. Oh, would you look at that!? Firefox! Empty tabs after empty tabs appeared. Killing and restarting Firefox just loaded the last session with all the tabs and the loop continued.

Some bloody snakeoil on my work machine slows down link openening requests by two, three seconds. It’s always absolutely anoying, but luckily, it actually limited the rate of new tabs popping up. I still could not close the many tabs fast enough that had accumulated before I noticed what was going on in the background.

Going to the settings to change them was always interrupted with a new tab opening in the foreground.

Finally, killing Firefox and renaming the file on disk before restarting Firefox did the trick and broke the loop. I was still holding down Ctrl+W for a minute or so to get rid of the useless tabs. I didn’t want to loose the important tabs, so just ditching the session wasn’t an option.

SpaceX proposes orbital data center made up of 1 million satellites
Elon Musk’s space firm is seeking regularity approval to develop a satellite constellation of unprecedented scale. If you thought the current array of… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I don’t have any statistics, just observe what is around me, so it’s very subjective. I know a bunch of kids with names I’ve never heard before. Sometimes, I first thought other kids were making fun of their friends by calling them by made-up nonsense. But no. Without question, I live under a rock. I just looked up some of them that came to mind immediately and they seem to be of Greek, Swedish and Latin origin, etc.

Elon Musk shares his current thoughts on aliens and consciousness
The SpaceX CEO recently spoke briefly about extraterrestrial life and humanity’s future. While Elon Musk is regarded as something of a controversial f… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I reckon up until then you had to have another first name that clearly differentiated. Didn’t read through the court decision, though.

Interesting, I always thought that Kiran was a male first name. But I only know one person with that name. As last name, though.

Now I’m wondering, was that also the beginning when parents started giving their kids really weird names?

UFO whistleblower: ‘angels in the Bible may have been alien visitors’
Speaking on the Joe Rogan podcast recently, David Grusch opened up on his thoughts about aliens and angels. Grusch, who previously worked with the Nat… ⌘ Read more

What a beautiful, beautiful 0°C Sunday arvo and evening! The weather forecast delayed the snow by the minute. An hour or so after it finally started very, very lightly, I headed off for the woods to check out the lake again. Unfortunately, with the fresh snow layer, the crazy wild surface texture of the ice sheet wasn’t visible anymore. But it brought some other nice views and photo opportunities.

I initially thought that I just go for a quick turn. However, with the snowfall a wee bit increasing I was hooked and kept going. Visibility was poor, but the snow blankets just looked too stunning. The road surfaces were quite slippery, so I often just walked alongside the pathways. On downhill slopes I had some good fun sliding down the road on my feet. With varying success. Luckily, I managed not to fall.

On the summit of the mountain the twigs had those absolutely magnificently looking windblown crystal coverings. Awwwwwww! They never get old. It was already getting dark, so the camera was tired and wanted to sleep. The snow program then made use of the flash and I’m quite pleased with how these shots turned out.

Two deer crossed the road in front of me and ran into the woods, that was sight for sore eyes. Although I felt bad that they had to flee from me in this white terrain. By the time I got home, the snow had accumulated around eight centimeters in height, even in town down in the valley. Walking on this fresh snow is just amazing. And I love the sound it makes. Today, the snow consistency must have been just right, because the crushing sound was really loud.

I cannot recall that I had frozen hair and beard before, but today, there was a thick ice buildup. In case I had, it was definitely never this much. Felt really cool.

Enough of this preliminary skirmishing, there ya go: https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-01-25/

Ark of the Covenant may have had a different purpose, Egyptologist claims
The biblical chest was thought to have been the container in which Moses placed the original ten commandments. One of the most sought-after and mystif… ⌘ Read more

Astronomers detect a mysterious signal from the beginning of time
A signal lasting just 10 seconds is thought to have originated from one of the most distant sources ever detected. 13 billion years ago, a huge star e… ⌘ Read more

Heh I thought I fixed that bug? (is it s abug?!)

Man charged with stealing 100 human skeletons in Pennsylvania
The man is thought to have been responsible for a lengthy spate of grave thefts from a historic burial ground. The bizarre and grim case, which had le… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s actually not nearly as half bad as I really thought it would be. Just having to eventually deal with the “lowering down” to machine code / ARM64 assembly in the end once you’ve verified the semantics in the VM.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I was surprised by that as well. 😅 I thought these were features that you can use, but no, you must do all this.

By the way, I now fixed the issue that I mentioned at the end and it works on the netbook now. 🥳

Image

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe But I thought Alpine was one of the good distro’s left. 😢 What’s it doing wrong?

Got a nice conspiracy theory for you:

https://mastodon.social/@mcc/115670290552252848

Actually wait I just thought about this and realized that the precise timing of the ACTUAL GitHub seed bank, by which I mean the Arctic Code Vault, on 2020-02-02, makes it more or less a perfect snapshot of pre-Copilot GitHub. Also precisely timed before we all got brain damage from COVID. This is the only remaining archive of source code by people with a fully working sense of smell

(Bonus points because the Arctic World Archive is located in Svaldbard and that’s the name of the AI in Stacey Kade’s “Cold Eternity”.)

#Processing & #py5 tip:
Remember the shapes you put on draw() will be redrawn over and over, and if they don’t move (leaving a trail) you might want to either clean each frame with background(...), or stop the draw loop (noLoop() in Processing or no_loop() in py5), otherwise you kill the anti-aliasing of the lines/strokes/edges!

I’m posting this tip because even using these tools for years and knowing this, today I briefly thought something was odd/broken because my lines were ugly with no “smoothing” :D

”`python
import py5

def setup():

py5.size(200, 200)
py5.stroke_weight(2)
# a line that will drawn once only
py5.line(10, 10, 190, 90)  

def draw():

# you could clean the frame here with background(200)
# this other line will be redrawn many times
py5.line(10, 110, 190, 190) 

def key_pressed():

py5.save('out.png')

py5.run_sketch()

”`

Image

@prologic@twtxt.net Ah, shit, you might be right. You can even buy these slot plates on Amazon. I didn’t even think to check Amazon, I went straight to eBay and tried to find it there, because I thought “it’s so old, nobody is going to use that anymore, I need to buy second-hand”. 🤦🤦🤦

It really shows that I built my last PC so long ago … I know next to nothing about current hardware. 😢

My current PC is from 2013, so I never even bothered to check, but as it turns out: My motherboard still has a serial port. 🤯 I thought these had long died out by then. To be honest, I didn’t have the need for one, either, not until recently … So I completely lost track if PCs have these things or not.

All I needed was one of those slot-cable-thingies. (And if the order of pins is correct, then it actually works. 🤦)

Image

Cool! One less USB device. 😃

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net Four people! Exactly my thoughts, bender, but super cute. :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org ugh, well, there goes my thought.

** Sticker party, November **
Some random thoughts including how the band Imagine Dragons is kinda like Metal for kids; distributing apps, even without involving Apple at all, is deeply annoying on macOS; Pokemon ZA is fun, but I think that I’m a turn-based girlie at heart; my partner has been playing a lot of Tears of the Kingdom lately, it has been a lot of fun for me to watch, and hair-pullingly frustrating for our nearly 10 year old who has strong opinions about the correct order of operations in that game; I wrote, but am cu … ⌘ Read more

And regarding those broken URLs: I once speculated that these bots operate on an old dataset, because I thought that my redirect rules actually were broken once and produced loops. But a) I cannot reproduce this today, and b) I cannot find anything related to that in my Git history, either. But it’s hard to tell, because I switched operating systems and webservers since then …

But the thing is that I’m seeing new URLs constructed in this pattern. So this can’t just be an old crawling dataset.

I am now wondering if those broken URLs are bot bugs as well.

They look like this (zalgo is a new project):

https://www.uninformativ.de/projects/slinp/zalgo/scksums/bevelbar/

When you request that URL, you get redirected to /git/:

$ curl -sI https://www.uninformativ.de/projects/slinp/zalgo/scksums/bevelbar/
HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2025 06:13:51 GMT
Server: OpenBSD httpd
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 510
Location: /git/

And on /git/, there are links to my repos. So if a broken client requests https://www.uninformativ.de/projects/slinp/zalgo/scksums/bevelbar/, then sees a bunch of links and simply appends them, you’ll end up with an infinite loop.

Is that what’s going on here or are my redirects actually still broken … ?

I was looking at some ancient code and then thought: Hmm, maybe it would be a good idea to see more details in this error message. Which of the values don’t line up. On the other hand, that feature isn’t probably used anyway, because it’s a bit ugly to use (historically evolved). And on top of that, most teams need something slightly different, if they deal with that sort of thing.

I still told my workmates about it, so they could also have a look at it and we can decide tomorrow what to do about it. Speaking of the devil, no kidding, not even half an hour later, a puzzled tester contacted me. She received exactly that rather useless error message. Looks like I had an afflatus. ;-)

It’s interesting, though, that in all those years, nobody stumbled across this before. At least we now know for sure that this is not dead code. :-)

The boss was tougher than she thought (Fizzy) [EldenRing] ⌘ Read more

The gold saga on @quark@ferengi.one’s thoughts continues with https://netbros.com/1750974122. That’s without any doubt the most beautiful 404 page I’ve ever come across in my entire life. What an overall master piece of art. Well done, mate! <3

https://netbros.com/some-rubbish-just-to-see-the-new-birds-on-the-404-page

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org then it was, most likely, space debris—which, sadly, make up for 98% of all space anomalies these days. And thought they have applied to the Grant Wishes Council, they are yet to be approved. Keep playing, though. 😅

@bender@twtxt.net Sounds about right.

I had a brainfart yesterday, though. For whatever reason I thought of subdomains, which are modeled with server entries in nginx. So, each could define its own access_log location. However, there are no subdomains in place! Searching around, I didn’t find any solution to give each user their own access log file.

One way would be a cronjob, aeh, systemd timer as I learned the other day, that greps the main access log and writes all user access log files with only the relevant stuff.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Haha, right. :-D

Ah, it’s this famous font. :-) I already thought so, but wasn’t sure if it’s actually the same.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Wow, that’s a hell lot of food! If it doesn’t spoil, it’s easily enough for the rest of your life and all your neighbors and surrounding cities, probably more. :-D

That’s a great font. I like it. It just suits the print style incredibly well. No offence, to the absolute contrary, I would not have thought that you actually designed that. It looks just so right. Hats off! :-)

Oh, and I forgot (because I thought it was obvious, my bad), set a nick, and a url at the very minimum on your feed. See “Metadata Extension”.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de my apologies if I crossed some lines, I only meant it as a friendly engagement (which, all aside, was achieved!). Thank you for sharing your thoughts; please know that I appreciate them.