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

Image

Erlang Solutions: MongooseIM 6.4: Simplified and Unified
MongooseIM is a scalable and efficient instant messaging server. With the latest release 6.4.0, it has become more powerful yet easier to use and maintain. Thanks to the internal unification of listeners and connection handling, the configuration is easier and more intuitive, while numerous new options are supported.

New features include support for TLS 1.3 with optional channel binding for improved security, single round-trip authent … ⌘ Read more

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 …

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Ucycling just rocks to hard!

@bender@twtxt.net Hahaha, I bet you could use it for a myriad of things! :-D

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org ooooh! I wish I had that mallet here at work today. So many uses come to mind! 😂

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org that’s so cool! I had to do some research, as I thought all pallets were made using cheap pine wood (which is quite soft), but, boy, as I erring big time! Oak it is also used, which is hardwood, and quite durable.

Adelaide leads the charge to replace single-use fruit stickers
A Riverland citrus grower has started using laser printing on fruit eliminating the need for traditional stickers. ⌘ Read more

I use Headscale. Love it!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh yeah, once in the quarter to the office is absolutely amazing and luxurious. Thank you teammates and employer! Though, I would already have been on site when these things happened earlier.

Today is my last day of holiday. Back to work again tomorrow. Not looking forward, vacation is just great. So easy to get used to.

Today I finally got rid of my /29 IPv4 subnet with my ISP used to power my ingress. No longer.

I intentionally use #AI tools to work…

A library to help use the #Beholder system of webcam detected markers with #p5js

https://enricllagostera.github.io/p5.beholder/

#AlternativeControllers #CreativeCoding #GameMaking

A library to help use the #Beholder system of webcam detected markers with #p5js (made by https://enric.llagostera.com.br/)

https://enricllagostera.github.io/p5.beholder/

#AlternativeControllers #CreativeCoding #GameMaking

Sam Whited: Notes
I’ve recently been using the Mixxx software for DJs. This page includes some
personal notes on my own use cases, what’s good, what’s bad, etc.
It is not really made for general consumption, but is thrown up here anyways.
It will be a bit rambling and/or ranty at times, most likely.

Let’s get my overall impressions of the software out of the way up front: it’s
absolutely great and I recommend it over the commercial alternatives for DJs of
all stripes (except maybe Radio DJs, it’s not really for … ⌘ Read more

I’m using #Filen (@filen@filen) for a while now and I’m very pleased with it!

«Affordable zero-knowledge end to end encrypted cloud storage made in Germany.» Works on #Linux, nice well thought features.

So I’m going to share a referral link because «For every friend you invite to Filen you receive 10 GB - and your friend also receives 10B. It’s that easy»:

https://filen.io/r/631ce32074f259f710691e4eec751eb9

I have been using #Filen (@filen@filen) for a while now and I’m very pleased with it!

«Affordable zero-knowledge end to end encrypted cloud storage made in Germany.» Works on #Linux, nice well thought features.

So I’m going to share a referral link because «For every friend you invite to Filen you receive 10 GB - and your friend also receives 10B. It’s that easy»:

https://filen.io/r/631ce32074f259f710691e4eec751eb9

@movq@www.uninformativ.de having to go to a gopher proxy to see a text document better served on readily available web servers… 🤭, but I digress. Verbatim text:

What's Missing from "Retro"
~softwarepagan
------------------------------------------------------------------
You know, often, when I say I miss older ways of computing or
connecting online, people tell me "there's nothing stopping you
from doing that now!" and they are technicay correct in most cases
(though I can't, for example, chat with friends on MSN ever
again...) However, let me explain that while this type of thing can
*sort of* fill that hole in my heart, it isn't *the same.*

Say, for example, I wanted to connect with others over a BBS. This
wouldn't offer the same types of connections it used to. While
there are BBSes around with active users, they're no longer there
to discuss movies, Star Trek, D&D, games, etc. They're there to
discuss *BBSes.* The same can be said for Gopher, old-school forums
and all sorts of revival projects (such as Escargot, Spacehey,
etc.) Retrocomputing enthusiasts, while they have a variety of
interests, are often in these spaces to discuss the medium itself
and not other topics. This exists at a stark contrast from how
things were in the past, where a non-tech-inclined person may learn
the tech to connect with likeminded others (as I did as a
Zelda-obsessed kid.)

The same can be said of old media. People will say "well, nobody is
stopping you from watching old shows/movies now!" Again, they are
technically correct. I can go home right now and watch *Star Trek:
The Next Generation* to my heart's content. It will never again,
however, be current, or new. When something is new, it serves as a
shared cultural experience. Remember how "Game of Thrones* felt in
the mid-to-late 2010s? Yeah, that.

It's sad. I sustain myself on a mixed diet of old things, new
things, and new things intended for old millenials like me who like
old things. It can be bittersweet. 

Updating my #Processing + #Python tools table:

https://github.com/villares/Resources-for-teaching-programming/blob/main/README.md#processing–python-tools-table

After some years, things changed and my opinions changed a bit too:

• #py5 is going supper strong and the “new snake_case names” are not an issue for me anymore. I used to worry a lot about all the Processing Python mode examples and teaching materials out there, and some of my own, with “CamelCase Processing names” I’m not worried at all about it anymore!

• For the record, Processing Python mode is just a legacy thing, no one should start anything with it.

• The great pure Python Processing implementation project #p5py seems stalled, latest release in Dec. 2023 :((( Advancing it was always going to be an uphill battle…

• The unrelated Brython based site p5py.com seems to be gone, so I removed it from the table.

• I added a link to my own #pyp5js hack py5pjs/py5mode because this is what I’m using most nowadays.

Updating my #Processing + #Python tools table:

https://github.com/villares/Resources-for-teaching-programming/blob/main/README.md#processing–python-tools-table

After some years, things changed and my opinions changed a bit too:

• #py5 is going super strong and the “new snake_case names” are not an issue for me anymore. I used to worry a lot about all the Processing Python mode examples and teaching materials out there, and some of my own, with “CamelCase Processing names” I’m not worried at all about it anymore!

• For the record, Processing Python mode is just a legacy thing, no one should start anything with it.

• The great pure Python Processing implementation project #p5py seems stalled, latest release in Dec. 2023 :((( Advancing it was always going to be an uphill battle…

• The unrelated Brython based site p5py.com seems to be gone, so I removed it from the table.

• I added a link to my own #pyp5js hack py5pjs/py5mode because this is what I’m using most nowadays.

Updating my #Processing + #Python tools table:

https://github.com/villares/Resources-for-teaching-programming/blob/main/README.md#processing–python-tools-table

After some years, things changed and my opinions changed a bit too:

• #py5 is going super strong and the “new snake_case names” are not an issue for me anymore. I used to worry a lot about all the Processing Python mode examples and teaching materials out there, and some of my own, with “CamelCase Processing names” I’m not worried at all about it anymore!

• For the record, Processing Python mode is just a legacy thing, no one should start anything with it.

• The great “pure Python” (no Java required) Processing implementation project #p5py seems stalled, latest release in Dec. 2023 :((( Advancing it was always going to be an uphill battle…

• The unrelated Brython based site p5py.com seems to be gone, so I removed it from the table.

• I added a link to my own #pyp5js hack py5pjs/py5mode because this is what I’m using most nowadays.

Updating my #Processing + #Python tools table:

https://github.com/villares/Resources-for-teaching-programming/blob/main/README.md#processing–python-tools-table

After some years, things changed and my opinions changed a bit too:

• #py5 is going super strong and the “new snake_case names” are not an issue for me anymore. I used to worry a lot about all the Processing Python mode examples and teaching materials out there, and some of my own, with “CamelCase Processing names” I’m not worried at all about it anymore!

• For the record, Processing Python mode is just a legacy thing, no one should start anything new with it.

• The great “pure Python” (no Java required) Processing implementation project #p5py seems stalled, latest release in Dec. 2023 :((( Advancing it was always going to be an uphill battle…

• The unrelated #Brython based site p5py.com seems to be gone, so I removed it from the table.

• I added a link to my own #pyp5js hack py5pjs/py5mode because this is the version of pyp5js I’m using most nowadays.

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. 🤣

I think that most of the paper dollars are in the hands of US citicens.

@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.

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:

Image

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.

Image

** Make awk rawk **
A friend online recently replied to something I wrote about awk by saying:

[…] it’s a danged shame [awk] didn’t continue to evolve the way Ruby, Python, PHP have evolved over the decades.

I had exactly this thought while working on my slightly unhinged“lets see if I can implement a basic scheme using awk by writing an assembler and VM in awk,” skwak. Which eventually lead me to start noodling on how to layer in some modern niceties into awk, without breaking awk’s portability.
… ⌘ Read more

The XMPP Standards Foundation: The XMPP Newsletter July 2025

Image

XMPP Newsletter Banner

Welcome to the XMPP Newsletter, great to have you here again!
This issue covers the month of July 2025.

Like this newsletter, many projects and their efforts in the XMPP community are a result of people’s voluntary work. If you are happy with the services and software you may be using, please consider saying thanks or helping these project … ⌘ Read more

#Pillow #PIL #Python

DeprecationWarning: 'mode' parameter is deprecated and will be removed in Pillow 13 (2026-10-15) img1 = PIL.Image.fromarray(my_array, mode="RGB")

So I went to see the documentation:

https://hugovk-pillow.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/Image.html#PIL.Image.fromarray

And came out empty handed, that is, couldn’t understand what to do instead :(

And the plot thickens:
https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/pull/9063

(@py5coding I guess you’ll want to check this out at some point. py5_tools.animated_gif uses this)

#Pillow #PIL #Python

DeprecationWarning: 'mode' parameter is deprecated and will be removed in Pillow 13 (2026-10-15) img1 = PIL.Image.fromarray(my_array, mode="RGB")

So I went to see the documentation:

https://hugovk-pillow.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/Image.html#PIL.Image.fromarray

And came out empty handed, that is, couldn’t understand what to do instead :(

And the plot thickens (this affects many projects, there are some workarounds, but some argument about “reverting” this change allowing some “mode” on import):

https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/pull/9063

(@py5coding@py5coding I guess you’ll want to check this out at some point. py5_tools.animated_gif uses mode=“RGB”)

#Pillow #PIL #Python
On Image.fromarray():

DeprecationWarning: 'mode' parameter is deprecated and will be removed in Pillow 13 (2026-10-15) img1 = PIL.Image.fromarray(my_array, mode="RGB")

So I went to see the documentation:

https://hugovk-pillow.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/Image.html#PIL.Image.fromarray

And came out empty handed, that is, couldn’t understand what to do instead :(

And the plot thickens (this affects many projects, there are some workarounds, but some argument about “reverting” this change allowing some “mode” on import):

https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/pull/9063

(@py5coding@py5coding I guess you’ll want to check this out at some point. py5_tools.animated_gif uses mode=“RGB”)

@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”:

Image

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.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Here’s the full config I use.

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

Image

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

#GitHub #GitHubPages #fail This is driving me mad…

Images randomly deciding not to load on all my pages.

Is it just me? Is it my browser’s fault? Is it just in Brazil?

I was working on this #shapely + #trimesh page… and I can only see the last image (the animated gif)!

https://abav.lugaralgum.com/material-aulas/Processing-Python-py5/shapely-e-trimesh.html

Update: On this exact page I have bungled the image URLs (I blame Marktext for being stupid and not using a relative reference). But I swear loading problems have been going on other well formed pages.

XMPP Interop Testing: MOAR TESTS!
Ever heard of XMPP Interop Testing? It’s this cool project that helps make sure different XMPP servers can all work
together smoothly. Our XMPP Interop Testing project provides a suite of automated tests that can be integrated into
CI/CD pipelines to verify the compliance and interoperability of XMPP server implementations.

Late last year, we reported that we had secured funding graciously provided by NLnet that allowed
us to massively build out t … ⌘ Read more

Since Fastly acquired and recently shut down glitch.com, some of my ancient webapps are no longer available, nor do I have any plans to make them available again - all had either zero, or very few monthly visits, used outdated libraries and would be a waste of money, to continue hosting and updating elsewhere.

All art archives remain unaffected and all projects shut down before 2025, were already permanently deleted, but if there’s someone out there, still relying on the recently discontinued projects, somehow - you can reach out and request their source code.

These requests will only be honoured, until the end of this year, when we plan to permanently delete, all of this data (both webapps and files only hosted on Amazons CDN).

Canine out °_°

Prosodical Thoughts: Debian repository key change
We have been working on some changes to our Debian/Ubuntu package repository.
If you use our repository to keep up to date with new Prosody packages, you
need to take action before 4th August 2025 to continue receiving updates
smoothly.

The ‘apt’ utility has been moving towards a new format for specifying package
repositories. If you are familiar with putting deb lines in a sources.list
file, [that method is changing](ht … ⌘ Read more

Hi roman at shibboleths.org! Why do you use java? My lynx browser has no java.

If you think the EU-US agreement is good news, think again:

“We will replace Russian gas and oil with significant purchases of US LNG, oil and nuclear fuels,” the European Commission President says in a statement.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c5y0d0yz282t?post=asset%3A23c287b5-7113-4081-8b9d-71b8de41df4c#post

@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. 😆

@prologic@twtxt.net Cool! What program do you use to draw this up?

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.

guys i use VPS systems from time to time and they scare me. wdym they have every port open by default and the firewall is your responsibility. what the fuck bro

Global update: Trump in Scotland says EU trade deal has 50-50 chance as tariff row grows. Gaza sees 9 more starvation deaths (122 total); UN says famine is deliberate. Thai-Cambodia clashes kill 16, displace 135k. US raid in Syria kills top ISIS leader & sons.

You know you’re getting old when there’s quite a few scripts in your ~/bin that you use daily, but you haven’t edited them once in well over 10 years …

@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:

Image

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:

Image

And GNOME used to have them, too:

Image

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 (

Image

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org True, at least old versions of KDE had icons:

Image

GNOME, on the other hand, didn’t, at least to my old screenshots from 2007:

Image

I switched to Linux in 2007 and no window manager I used since then had icons, apparently. Crazy. An icon-less existence for 18 years. (But yeah, everything is keyboard-driven here as well and there are no buttons here, either.)

Anyway, my draft is making progress:

Image

I do like this look. 😊

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Cool! I just got an idea for work tomorrow: Use dmenu to quickly start different SSH tunnels I routinely need.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I haven’t used KDE or GNOME for ages, but I’m sure KDE at least used to show application icons in the title bars. They proabably still do. But then, one could argue that KDE is mimicking Windows. I never thought like that, I always found KDE way superior, because I was able to configure it like a madman.

In i3, I don’t have any application icons. I remember missing them at the beginning. But I don’t even have the classical minimize, maximize and close buttons in the title bar either. Just the title. Being mostly keyboard driven and a tiling window manager, these buttons are not super useful, anyway.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I’m just used to it because I deal with such things all the time. :-)

Here’s an example of X11/Xlib being old and archaic.

X11 knows the data type “cardinal”. For example, the window property _NET_WM_ICON (which holds image data for icons) is an array of “cardinal”. I am already not really familiar with that word and I’m assuming that it comes from mathematics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_number

(It could also be a bird, but probably not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinalidae)

We would probably call this an “integer” today.

EWMH says that icons are arrays of cardinals and that they’re 32-bit numbers:

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/latest-single/#id-1.6.13

So it’s something like 0x11223344 with 0x11 being the alpha channel, 0x22 is red, and so on.

You would assume that, when you retrieve such an array from the X11 server, you’d get an array of uint32_t, right?

Nope.

Xlib is so old, they use char for 8-bit stuff, short int for 16-bit, and long int for 32-bit:

https://x.org/releases/current/doc/libX11/libX11/libX11.html#Obtaining_and_Changing_Window_Properties

That is congruent with the general C data types, so it does make sense:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_data_types

Now the funny thing is, on modern x86_64, the type long int is actually 64 bits wide.

The result is that every pixel in a Pixmap, for example, is twice as large in memory as it would need to be. Just because Xlib uses long int, because uint32_t didn’t exist, yet.

And this is something that I wouldn’t know how to fix without breaking clients.

We finally got a caliper donated for this year’s scout flea market. We didn’t sell it, but kept it ourselves. It will come in very handy every now and then in our material store. For example, I missed having a caliper in the past when sorting our random assortment of screws or measuring the depth of a hole. It’s a wee bit banged up (probably happened during transport) and didn’t come with a box, but the latter is now solved.

The lid and bottom came from a wardrobe back panel I got from a mate, the sides were rocket sticks in their former lives. I found some scrap of felt in our material store and some hinges laying around in the drawers of my own workshop.

Unfortunately, the table saw teared up the plywood veneer fibres badly, even though I put tape around to prevent that. This is the first time it didn’t work. At. All. To cover that up, I painted the box with some decades old tinting paint (price tag says Deutsche Mark, not Euro!) from my paint cabinet. It’s awesome, works absolutely perfectly and doesn’t smell the slightest bit. I reckon, this caliper box is plenty good enough for occasional use at our scout material store.

Image

Only figured this out yesterday:

pinentry, which is used to safely enter a password on Linux, has several frontends. There’s a GTK one, a Qt one, even an ncurses one, and so on.

GnuPG also uses pinentry. And you can configure your frontend of choice here in gpg-agent.conf.

But what happens when you don’t configure it? What’s the default?

Turns out, pinentry is a shellscript wrapper and it’s not even that long. Here it is in full:

#!/bin/bash

# Run user-defined and site-defined pre-exec hooks.
[[ -r "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec ]] && \
        . "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec
[[ -r /etc/pinentry/preexec ]] && . /etc/pinentry/preexec

# Guess preferred backend based on environment.
backends=(curses tty)
if [[ -n "$DISPLAY" || -n "$WAYLAND_DISPLAY" ]]; then
        case "$XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP" in
        KDE|LXQT|LXQt)
                backends=(qt qt5 gnome3 gtk curses tty)
                ;;
        *)
                backends=(gnome3 gtk qt qt5 curses tty)
                ;;
        esac
fi

for backend in "${backends[@]}"
do
        lddout=$(ldd "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" 2>/dev/null) || continue
        [[ "$lddout" == *'not found'* ]] && continue
        exec "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" "$@"
done

exit 1

Preexec, okay, then some auto-detection to use a toolkit matching your desktop environment …

… and then it invokes ldd? To find out if all the required libraries are installed for the auto-detected frontend?

Oof. I was sitting here wondering why it would use pinentry-gtk on one machine and pinentry-gnome3 on another, when both machines had the exact same configs. Yeah, but different libraries were installed. One machine was missing gcr, which is needed for pinentry-gnome3, so that machine (and that one alone) spawned pinentry-gtk …

gomdn: Yet another Static Site Generator
Yet another Static Site Generator (SSG), but this one is mine.

It’s a stupidly simple Go program ( wc says 229 lines), more like a
hack, really, but I don’t need something like Hugo. Most of the real
work is done by the goldmark package, of course. This is mostly just a
wrapper, deciding if something needs to be rebuilt.

I’ve been using a Perl script together with cmark (originally
Markdown.pl) since forever. And before that the old [txt2tags](htt … ⌘ Read more

I have a Python script that transforms the original YouTube channel Atom feed into a more useful Atom feed by removing the spam description and replacing it with the video duration, filtering out videos by title, duration, etc. I just updated it to exclude the damn Shorts garbage more efficiently. Finally, YouTube updated their Atom feed generation, so that the video URL contains /short/ if it’s of this useless kind. Never thought that they ever actually will improve their Atom feeds. Thank you, much appreciated!

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I have absolutely no idea, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it uses the closest full image after your cut point and not the one before. Hence, the deltas between the two full images have nothing to really refer to. So, the video player just shows the first full image it finds and “freezes” the image until the video stream actually hits it.

Let me try to visualize it, | represent full images, . just subsequent deltas:

Original start of video
↓
|......|.....|........|......|..
   ↑                      ↑
   Cut point      Cut point

Resulting video:

   ....|.....|........|....
   ↑↑↑↑
   This is where it freezes         

Could be complete bullshit, though. Wouldn’t be the first time that I’m wrong. :-)

I’m just curious, what exact command line do you use to cut the video?

i should work on my PHP project again just so i have an excuse to use htmx

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org yesss it’s not my idea but it’s sooo fun here ngl like i should use it more!!

Sorry shibboleths.org! I get a warning with my ip, even when I use lynx with a german IP from

I have this very simple #Python script that uses #imageio to convert all PNG files on a folder into a #GIFAnimation, and this is a #FreeSimpleGUI version of it (I usually run a command line version).

As I usually run #gifsicle on the command line after creating a GIF, I decided to update it to add #pygifsicle to do it for me and save a step.

https://github.com/villares/sketch-a-day/blob/main/admin_scripts/make-gif.py

Image

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Nice use of dmenu.

Maybe someone can explain this to me.

An #EU citizen trying to access Facebook today faces the following choices (see screenshots).

In there, they say that they are asking this again to comply with #EU rules, and yet the question - and the options to choose from - are the same they had in the past.

So, hm, how does this make them comply with something they weren’t complying before? What’s the detail I’m missing?

#Meta #Facebook #GDPR

Image

Image

Xfce does one thing very right: It stores its settings in plain-text XML files. This allows me to easily read, track, and maybe even distribute these settings to other machines.

(Unlike GNOME’s dconf, which uses some binary file format. Fun fact: The older and now deprecated gconf also used XML files.)

«Using data from Morgane Laouenan et al., the map is showing birthplaces of the most “notable people” around the world. Data has been processed to show only one person for each unique geographic location with the highest notability rank. Click below to show people only from a specific category.
Made by Topi Tjukanov.»

https://tjukanovt.github.io/notable-people

via @mekaru@mekaru
#wikidata #cartography

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, the doctors have started using AI voice agents and they understand jack shit. 😭😭😭

Zip It! - Finding File Similarity Using Compression Utilities - Computerphile ⌘ Read more

Thinking about doing “Wayland Wednesday”. Only use Wayland every Wednesday. Collect bugs, report bugs, fix bugs.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, it’s not a strong sandbox in jenny’s case, it could still read my SSH private key (in case of an exploit of some sort). But I still like it.

I think my main takeaway is this: Knowing that technologies like Landlock/pledge/unveil exist and knowing that they are very easy to use, will probably nudge me into writing software differently in the future.

jenny was never meant to be sandboxed, so it can’t make great use of it. Future software might be different.

(And this is finally a strong argument for static linking.)

Another hacky #Python script using the #HackMD API… this one is to change the write permissions… you might want to adapt it or check out the other API helper methods:

https://gist.github.com/villares/177c2323d424d5b2b0de49570fb4e2fd?permalink_comment_id=5673097#gistcomment-5673097

The WM_CLASS Property is used on X11 to assign rules to certain windows, e.g. “this is a GIMP window, it should appear on workspace number 16.” It consists of two fields, name and class.

Wayland (or rather, the XDG shell protocol – core Wayland knows nothing about this) only has a single field called app_id.

When you run X11 programs under Wayland, you use XWayland, which is baked into most compositors. Then you have to deal with all three fields.

Some compositors map name to app_id, others map class to app_id, and even others directly expose the original name and class.

Apparently, there is no consensus.

@prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net That’s what I thought as well, sounds way too expensive to me. But I have no idea what the prices are over here. Probably also astronomical. Campers sit around most of the time, one really would need to use them a lot to justify spending so much money on them.

But yeah, each to their own (expensive) hobbies. :-) I, for example, burn my money on tools that I don’t really™ need. :-P

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org which browser do you use? Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, under Ubuntu, all show it fine.

Lazy-fedi-question… I have a “working”(?) code example of TF-IDF #tfidf using #scikitlearn and I know the main concepts, but all the tutorials I find are a bit — I don’t want to be harsh but —crappy… Can someone point me to some nice open resource on it?

i made a new tumblr account to interact with fandom last week. while using the site today i got logged out and when i logged back in i was told my account was terminated. mullenweg will pay for this

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I do my timetracking in a little Python script, locally. Every now and then, I push the data to our actual service. Problem solved – but it’s a completely unpopular approach, they all want to use the web site. I don’t get it. Then, of course, when it’s down, shit hits the fan. (Luckily, our timetracking software is neither developed nor run by us anymore. It’s a silly cloud service, but the upside is that I’m not responsible anymore. 🤷)

Some of our oldschool devs tried to roll out local timetracking once, about 15 years ago. I don’t remember anymore why they failed …

This is developed inhouse, I’m just so glad that we’re not a software engineering company. Oh wait. How embarrassing.

Oh to be anonymous on the internet. That must be nice. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de This is a really good example of “simplicity” but achieves the intent and goals 👌

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

I don’t use a screen reader fortunately (actually they’re pretty garbage). So all good 👍 (I juse use full-screen zoom).

@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.

For example, I reckon software should treat stdout and stderr with care and never output logs or other such garbage to stdout that cannot possibly be useful in a UNIX pipeline 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net Hm, I wouldn’t say that. Go code could fall into that category as well.

Maybe this topic could use a blog post / article, that explains what it’s about. I’m finding it hard to really define what “suckless-like software” is. 🤔 (Their own philosophy focuses too much on elitism, if you ask me.)

@prologic@twtxt.net Ah, I’m referring to software that’s similar to that of suckless.org: Small, minimal codebases, small tools, but still useful. dmenu is probably the best example and also farbfeld.

Here’s the author of Anubis talking about some of their experiences:

https://xeiaso.net/blog/why-i-use-suckless-tools-2020-06-05/

(You can skip the long config and keybinds part.)

Ignite Realtime Blog: Empowering Digital Sovereignty with Openfire: A Secure and Customizable Communication Platform
In today’s interconnected world, digital sovereignty has become increasingly important for individuals and organizations seeking to maintain control over their data, infrastructure, and technologies. Openfire, an open-source, real-time collaboration (RTC) server that uses the XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence … ⌘ Read more

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club This wasn’t always the case, though. Quake3, Quake4, Unreal Tournament 99 and 2004 are examples of games that used to run very well as native Linux games. But that was 20+ years ago …

A good blog post that makes some good points: Can I ethically use LLMs?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de reminds me how many Windows games using Proton (or WINE with similar patches) on Linux run better than some of the old native Linux binaries.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I have to say, this sounds much worse than our stuff at work. 🫩 (We don’t use any Microsoft services, at least not for core tools.)

I hear you, @movq@www.uninformativ.de! :‘-(

At work, too. For a few weeks now when I try to log into this horrible Outlook web intershit (Because why would they fix the Evolution integration?! It’s cactus for well over a year now. Probably more like two.), it forwards me to the corporate weblogin, I enter my credentials, even do the bloody MFA crap and get redirected back to Outlook. “Loading mailbox…” “Please wait for us to log you out, do not close this window while this process is underway.” Fuck you! I have to delete the cookies for this damn domain each and every fucking time. Otherwise, this goes in circles forever. I tried the game for 15 minutes, no joke.

But wait, there’s more! Why just fuck it up only a little bit? This week I get logged out at the middle of the day. Every. Single. Day. Not even close to eight hours since I started, no. What the hell!? I reckon I just don’t even bother reauthenticating anymore in the arvo. No more e-mails for Lyse after lunch. Fuck it. It’s just distraction, anyway, right?!

Cheers @danzin@danzin, was it you who added a PR to core #Python about pprint?

(listening to #corepy #podcast)

Update: Thank you so much for improving Python @danzin@danzin !

core.py: PyCon US 2025 Recap
Starting from: 01:32:45 https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/corepy/episodes/PyCon-US-2025-Recap-e347dc3
https://anchor.fm/s/eb6edc3c/podcast/play/104100675/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-5-13%2Fb281ac3a-b0ec-49b9-b31d-7a90031e910d.mp3#t=5565

Someone did a thing:

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/114763322251054485

I’ve been silently wondering all the time if this was possible, but never investigated: Keep doing X11 but use Wayland as a backend.

This uses XWayland’s “rootful” mode, which basically just gives you a normal Wayland window with all the X11 stuff happening inside of it:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-Rootful-Useful

In other words, put such a window in fullscreen and you (more or less) have good old X11 running in a Wayland window.

(For me, personally, this won’t be the way forward. But it’s a very interesting project.)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yes, flat UIs are broken! I’m used to that by now, but it’s still more work to recognize than when there are borders around buttons, etc.

These are lists in your Inkscape example, right? (I’m too lazy to start Inkscape myself and look at it. And writing this took longer than just seeing for myself, but here we are. I met up with one of my best schoolmate this morning and it’s fucking hot already. So I blame the heat.) Nested tabs are probably an own death sin in itself. I know, I know, the upper ones can be made into windows and dragged around, but still.

whaaaat. how did i get here? last time I used gopher/veronica/etc was in the mid 90s, in the Temple University computer labs. Probably on a DEC Ultrix Unix account

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, it’s been a while. Didn’t feel this long, though. Not at all, I’m quite surprised. :-O

But like with every quality content, there is no publishing schedule. Eventually, @mckinley@mckinley.cc will write another article for all of us. :-)

Updating my “how install and use #py5” pages, check them out if you want to “… draw and experiment some #CreativeCoding with #Python …”

EN: https://abav.lugaralgum.com/como-instalar-py5/index-EN.html

ES: https://abav.lugaralgum.com/como-instalar-py5/index-ES.html

PT: https://abav.lugaralgum.com/como-instalar-py5/

#Processing #Python #CreativeCoding #py5

@movq@www.uninformativ.de it’s sooo bad here on the east coast of the US omg 102F/38C heat here!!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

They’re all talks, not real hands-on trainings like you did.

I love listening to good, well-structured talks. Problem is, not everybody is a good speaker and many screw it up. 🥴 I’m certainly not a great speaker, which is why I gravitate more towards “workshops”, in the hopes that people ask questions and discussions arise. Doesn’t always work out. 🤣 At the very least, I almost always have some other person connect to the projector/beamer/screenshare and then they do the stuff – this avoids me being wwwwaaaaaaaaayyyy too fast.

We are usually drowned in stress and tight deadlines, hence events like today are super rare … We used to do it more often until ~10 years ago.

Once a year the security guys organize a really great hacking event, though.

Oh dear, I’d love to participate in that. 🤯 That sounds like a lot of fun. (Why don’t we do this?!)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Interesting internal education sessions are way too infrequent here as well. There are a bunch of “knowledge transfer” meetings actually, but 90% of the topics already sound totally boring to me. The other 9% talks turned out to be underwhelming, sadly. I only attended a single one where it was delivered what has been promised. They’re all talks, not real hands-on trainings like you did.

Once a year the security guys organize a really great hacking event, though. Teams can volunteer to hand in their software dev instances and all workmates are invited to hack them and report security vulnerabilities. That’s a lot of fun, but also gets frustrating towards the end when you don’t make any progress. :-) There’s also some actual hands-on training in advance for preparation of the two days. Unfortunately, I missed the last event due to my own project being very stressful at the time.

When I had a Do What You Want Day I also show my direct teammates what I learned in the hopes of this being interesting to them as well. I’m the only one in my team using this opportunity, sadly.

I did a “lecture”/“workshop” about this at work today. 16-bit DOS, real mode. 💾 Pretty cool and the audience (devs and sysadmins) seemed quite interested. 🥳

• People used the Intel docs to figure out the instruction encodings.
  
• Then they wrote a little DOS program that exits with a return code and they used uhex in DOSBox to do that. Yes, we wrote a COM file manually, no Assembler involved. (Many of them had never used DOS before.)
  
• DEBUG from FreeDOS was used to single-step through the program, showing what it does.
  
• This gets tedious rather quickly, so we switched to SVED from SvarDOS for writing the rest of the program in Assembly language. nasm worked great for us.
  
• At the end, we switched to BIOS calls instead of DOS syscalls to demonstrate that the same binary COM file works on another OS. Also a good opportunity to talk about bootloaders a little bit.
  
• (I think they even understood the basics of segmentation in the end.)
  

The 8086 / 16-bit real-mode DOS is a great platform to explain a lot of the fundamentals without having to deal with OS semantics or executable file formats.

Now that was a lot of fun. 🥳 It’s very rare that we do something like this, sadly. I love doing this kind of low-level stuff.

** My measurer **
My dad is an electrical engineer and physicist. Measuring things is a core part of his professional life, and something he seems to spend a lot of time doing around the house. This is all to say my dad is relatively expert in the ways of measuring things so I think it’s hilarious that he calls absolutely anything he is using to measure anything else“my measurer.” Measuring tape, oscilloscope, scale, volt meter, bubble level, table spoons, whatever. They’re all“my measurer.” ⌘ Read more

think i’m gonna use this license on my git repos going forward. it kicks ass https://anticapitalist.software/