I bought an iPhone (as my third smartphone)
I never thought I would do this, but I bought an iPhone. It’s a pretty cheap iPhone SE 2. Gen (2020) used from eBay, like the device I got issued from my work. It’s so tiny and it’s really difficult to type even a short text like this. ⌘ Read more

Paul Walter has been posting amazing #GIS stuff on linkedin….

Like this: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paulwaynewalter_urban-gis-people-great-free-self-paced-activity-7373022072685506560-z0S5

«Oh, also, here is a link to Transitland’s map of open #GTFS data: https://www.transit.land/map#3.5/40.41/-104.84»

@movq@www.uninformativ.de But it’s so reliable and they have all the experts, they know what they’re doing! And don’t forget, it’s way cheaper! Just think of the 34 cents saved every year on paper, the business dude calculated!

Enjoy your weekend! (I hope, you just called it a day and don’t have to drive to the office or silly shenanigans like that.)

Why I’m Holding Off On Upgrading to MacOS Tahoe 26 For Now
If you’re anything like me, you’re typically excited about new operating systems being released, but also approach with a little hesitation. After diving right into iOS 26 on iPhone, I regretted it for various reasons including some Liquid Glass annoyances, sluggishness, and battery drain (though my opinions are rapidly evolving, more on that separately!), and … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2025/09/19/why-im … ⌘ Read more

Severe but funny burn-ins on my TFT again:

https://movq.de/v/9df0437d27/MVI_8891.MOV.mp4

Now everything looks like it has that silly slogan as a background image:

https://movq.de/v/9df0437d27/smol.jpg

@zvava@twtxt.net In tt, I recognize umlauts in nicks, but they cannot include whitespace, @, !, #, (, ), [, ], <, >, " (but ' is okay). Whitespace also acts as a separator between nick and URL. @<Hello World http://example.com> ends up exactly like that and is not a mention.

I would like to wish everyone, including all haters and losers (of which, sadly, there are many) a truly happy and enjoyable weekend!

@zvava@twtxt.net @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I also think a location based reference might be better.

A thread is a single post of a single feed as a root, but the hash has the drawback of not referencing the source, in a distributed network like twtxt it might leave some people out of the whole conversation.

I suggest a simpler format, something like: (#<TIMESTAMP URL>)

This solves three issues:

• Easier referencing: no need to generate a hash, just copy the timestamp and url, it’s also simpler to implement in a client without the rish of collisions when putting things together
  
• Fetchable source: you can find the source within the reference and construct the thread from there
  
• Allow editing: If a post is modified the hash becomes invalid since it depends on [ timestamp, url, content ]

Hello everyone! 👋

After a long while away, I’m back on twtxt with this new feed.

Some of you might remember me as justamoment@twtxt.net, that was a test account I made for trying things out, but I ended up keeping it more than planned.

I also tried other social platforms in search of a place that felt right for me.

In the end twtxt was the one that ticked all of my boxes:

• Slow social: it act more like a feed reader and I really appreciate that there’s no flood of content that I can’t keep up with.
  
• No server needed: I absolutely love to have total control over my content, I tend to avoid having moving parts that might break, plus you can put your feed under version control and it’s all backed up.
  
• Ownership: I can put my feed anywhere I want and nobody can decide if I can access it or not.
  
• For hackers: a single .txt file allows me to join a community, how cool is that!
  

This is why I decided to build my own twtxt client, one that allows you to decide how the feed is presented on your “instance”.

It’s still in the making but I’ll try to share a bit of it once I defined how things should work.

Coincidentally, I discovered that @itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com and @zvava@twtxt.net were also building a twtxt client, seems like twtxt is set to grow!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @movq@www.uninformativ.de bbycll’s nickname regex is /^([-_\p{N}\p{L}])+$/iu because i don’t like how english-centric only allowing ascii letters/numbers is though this only applies to local users as of now, currently all nicknames are tolerated when parsing remote feeds and i just do mentions how yarn does (just the feed url)

in the wild, i’ve noticed a texedus feed with spaces in the nick (where its spec explicitly disallows whitespace in the nick) and feeds with other symbols in the nick too. honestly, i think we should just tolerate arbitrary nicknames for sake of user expression (while stripping or converting unreasonable characters) and just leave them out of mentions

@zvava@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m not entirely sure about the spaces, but maybe they were omitted to simplify parsing of mentions in the form of @<nick url>. If the next token after the @<nick does not look like a URL, it’s not a mention but regular text. This is just wild guessing, though.

Looking at the regex and tests in the original twtxt reference implementation seems to confirm that theory in the sense as it relies on whitespace as the delimiter:

https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/screenshot-2025-09-17-21-30-25.png

Another thing about nicks is that the original twtxt reference implementation converts nicks to all lowercase:

https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/screenshot-2025-09-17-21-20-39.png

You probably know this already, the original twtxt file format specification can be found here: https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/twtxtfile.html

As for extensions, I don’t know of anything outside of twtxt.dev that has actually been (partially) implemented. However, there is also the issue tracker of the official reference implementation. You might wanna dig through that. For example, there is an alternative suggestions of multiline messages: https://github.com/buckket/twtxt/issues/157

@zvava@twtxt.net There would be only one hash for a message. Some to be defined magic date selects which hash to use. If the message creation timestamp is before this epoch, hash it with v1, otherwise hammer it through v2. Eventually, support for v1 could be dropped as nobody interacts with the old stuff anymore. But I’d keep it around in my client, because why not.

If users choose a client which supports the extensions, they don’t have to mess around with v1 and v2 hashing, just like today.

As for the school of thought, personally, I’d prefer something else, too. I’m in camp location-based addressing, or whatever it is called. There more I think about it, a complete redesign of twtxt and its extensions would be necessary in my opinion. Retrofitting has its limits. Of course, this is much more work, though.

@thecanine@twtxt.net Id like that too, it just can’t come from me, because native mobile dev just isn’t my thing 😢

Adding too this. The configuration example at the repository reads:

{
	"nick": "Example",
	"description": "alice's twtxt instance!",
	"host": "twtxt.example.com",
	"admin": "alice"
}

Would it make more sense changing nick to instance_name or similar? Usually nick is reserved for users, like here, quark. Right? Also, is host the same FQDN to be used while proxying traffic to the application? That is, using the above configuration, it’s Caddy configuration would be:

twtxt.example.com {
	encode
	reverse_proxy :31212
}

Is that correct?

On the configuration topic, the example at the repo reads like this:

“

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Luckily, I had a grep -v git at the end, so my repo is still in working order. Phew. I wish find had grep-like --exclude-dir and --exclude options (or the include variants) instead of its own weird options that I never can remember and combine properly.

@zvava@twtxt.net I was about to suggest that you post some examples. By now, we’re pretty good at debugging hashing issues, because that happens so often. 😂 But it looks like you figured it out on your own. ✌️

Does Apple really need to become an AI company?
Amid claims it is falling behind the likes of Google and OpenAI, the iPhone-maker continues to double down on what it’s actually good at. ⌘ Read more

«… It all went well until 1980 or so, when Ronald Reagan appointed a new head of the EPA. The lady didn’t like her stationery we had designed and with a simple “I want my daisy back” undermined the overall graphic system. If the Queen doesn’t like it, we don’t like it became the attitude, and the program began to crumble. The old logo was fully reinstated and the graphic system was abandoned. A decade later, nobody at the EPA could find a copy of the Graphic Standards System, except a bunch of legalese that you will find on its website.

I’m a fan of the EPA and all its efforts and hope that we helped in some small way for this agency to communicate within itself, to other government agencies, and with the American people. I’m very grateful and appreciative that Jesse Reed and Hamish Smyth of Standards Manual, and Julie Anixter of AIGA, brought this document to life again. Have fun revisiting.»
(from the introduction by Steff Geissbühler)

wait….so i’m like nearly done? it just works? and it’s fast? this feels like the end of the first all-nighter i pulled where i just got post creation done, unaware of the three weeks that would follow — like looking at the roadmap i’m definitely not done but bbycll is like actually kind of usable now o.o

@prologic@twtxt.net excellent, mate, that’s what we like to read! Enjoy the weekend!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org no, as mentioned this “diagonal arrow” eye shape, is usually used for a smug expression. The optional white part, is in this case, where the dogs sclera would be visible, while they have their eyes, like this.
Here is a comparison between a real dog, making the face it is based on, and the exaggerated drawn version.

@thecanine@twtxt.net Yeah, what @bender@twtxt.net said. That tail is sick. Is this dog crying, though? The vertically elongated eye looks a bit like a tear running down.

Drawn based on a quick doodle, the canine returns victorious, from the battle of Hot Topic bargain bin, as smug as can be.
Whoever will be the first to inform him, the spikes aren’t real gold and it’s most likely not even leather, meaning it’s not what he’s really been searching the universe for, better prepare themselves, to be jumped on, bitten and shredded by claws.

is it normal for my yarn pod mentions tab to be totally empty because it’s been like this from the start

Woooooaaaahh, that’s bloody amazing! I wish I’d had a teacher like that.

English version: https://youtu.be/wi_q6IythMk
German version: https://youtu.be/2Lv1MMlFDBs

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz The duck was in a darker spot, so my camera wasn’t all that happy with the lighting. Upon further inspection, you’re right, now that you pointed it out, I can see it too! The feathers do look like an oil painting. ;-)

Woot, thank you! Using a config.json like this:

{
  "host": "localhost:31212",
  "protocols": ["http"]
}

Indeed did the trick! I know it isn’t production ready, but I wanted to see with my own eyes, locally, how did it look. :-) I like where you are going! It is looking very nice, and polished. Can’t wait for an alpha, beta, and release!

we are now parsing and recursively fetching remote feeds somewhat successfully, gotta work on the media proxy and markdown way more, so so many fucky edgecases….my friend’s feed with like four posts parsed correctly so i tried this account’s feed and well now im not going to bed on time

Video

we are now parsing and recursively fetching remote feeds somewhat successfully, gotta work on the media proxy and markdown way more, so so many fucky edgecases….my friend’s feed with like four posts parsed correctly so i tried this account’s feed and well now im not going to bed on time

edit: remaking demo video

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org omg this looks like a painting!

@zvava@twtxt.net I gave this, in my mind, a like/star/love.

Since Google announced their intentions to heavily limit sideloading on Android, starting end of 2026, I’ve been looking for potential solutions, for this policy change, that threatens the majority of projects I maintain, in some way. Google already killed my browser project years ago, but I have no other choice, than to fight this, any way I can.

The best choice to deal with this, will probably be the Android Debug Bridge, which can be used not only to install apps unrestricted, but also to uninstall, or remove, almost any unnecessary part of the OS. Shizuku, combined with Canta Debloater, is the winning combination for now.

I’ve already removed most Google apps from my device: the annoying AI assistant, the stupid Google app adding the annoying articles, left of your homes screen, Google One, Gboard, Safety app… it’s amazing, no distracting Google slopware, like in the good old Android 2 days! And I absolutely intend to keep it this way, from now on, no new Google apps or services on my devices, unless Google can give me a good enough reason, to allow them there and whenever the app that verifies signatures, to block installing apps not approved by Google, I’ll just remove it from my device and advocate others do so too.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org retwts are a discovery feature! on federated platforms with no algorithm where you only ever see posts from accounts you explicitly follow, the element of “hey look at this!” helps users to find other accounts they might like organically

i agree quoting and replying forum-style is generally a much better way of doing things even though im a heathen and i revel in the dark patterns inspired by quote posts but when you have nothing to add and you just want to share a twt with your followers it’d be good to have a standardized way of linking to twt

Why now might be a good time to upgrade your iPhone
The lineup for 2026 includes an improved iPhone 17 and 17 Pro, plus the skinny iPhone Air, and phones are not likely to go down in price by this time next year. ⌘ Read more

@dce@hashnix.club Nope. 😃 What’s that genre called? Sounds like old horror movies from the 70’ies (or it could be a soundtrack to Salad Fingers, if anyone remembers that).

@bender@twtxt.net I see, thanks. Well, I never found these warnings useful. To hide answers to conundrums or the like, ROT13ing or base64-encoding them is plenty sufficient.

Hahaha, I never heard of Poopgate before. :-D Poor passengers.

Something like this, for example.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org a content warning is kind of like a forum spoiler cut, or like the <details> tag in HTML; it lets you write a sentence or so that someone can then click to expand to see the actual post. it’s called a CW because most people use it to warn for potentially triggering/harmful subjects, but you can really use it for anything, like spoilers in a TV show or even for joke punchlines

at first i dismissed the idea of likes on twtxt as not sensible…like at all — then i considered they could just be published in a metadata field (though that field could get really unruly after a while)

retwts are plausible, as “RE: https://example.com/twtxt.txt#abcdefg”, the hash could even be the original timestamp from the feed to make it human readable/writable, though im extremely wary of clogging up timelines

i thought quote twts could be done extremely sensibly, by interpreting a mention+hash at the end of the twt differently to when placed at the beginning — but the twt subject extension requires it be at the beginning, so the clean fallback to a normal reply i originally imagined is out of the question — it could still be possible (reusing the retwt format, just like twitter!) but i’m not convinced it’s worth it at that point

is any of this in the spirit of twtxt? no, not in the slightest, lmao

I have a feeling that learning to play electric double bass through an amplifier was a big mistake.

At the core, this is an acoustic instrument. If you play it through an amp, you will instinctively only do the bare minimum to get some sound going, because the amp does the heavy lifting. But it’s just not right.

This is a very physical instrument. It needs a lot of force and strength – in comparison, an electric bass guitar is almost flimsy and delicate. I need to “feel” what’s going on and that’s just not the case when using headphones.

I feel like I wasted ~3 years. 🫤 But maybe it’ll get better from now on …

Made this a few weeks ago, just listened to it again and I quite like it:

https://www.uninformativ.de/music/2025-1-ebow/Fog.ogg

This is just one instrument: Electric bass guitar + EBow. And echo/delay on top. But it’s a single track, single take. It amazes me quite a bit how much you can do with that little thing. 🤯

https://movq.de/v/2496f8ba36/s.png

Just like @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org, I totally forgot about the eclipse!

Unfortunately, it’s not as sharp as I’d like it to be: https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-09-07/

Image

** Strata **

A Counterfeit - a Plated Person -

I would not be -

Whatever strata of Iniquity

My Nature underlie -

Truth is good Health - and Safety, and the Sky.

How meagre, what an Exile - is a Lie,

And Vocal - when we die -

– Emily Dickinson

I made another game! This one pretty much has one single verb:“move.” The game, like most games I make, is a roguelike that relies heavily on probabilities and rng (random number generation).

Each level is … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de this seems like a bit of an overkill, that would also harm modding and power users - who often need to see the exact implementation of new features and benefit from the ability to pull up the history of code changes, in their browser. Sure they could clone the repo and do that locally, but if it has dependencies, they’d also have to clone those, to see how those get updated and it’d soon be a mess.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Completely off-topic, I didn’t know that the English language picked up the German word “Ersatz”. Discovering things like that always brings me joy. It has some interesting other properties, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ersatz_good#Etymology

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz like it’s the shame that kills me the most but i just gotta get through it if i want a working server (and i really do!!!)

Dear dev.alessandrocutolo.it, do you really need to fetch my twtxt feed every 20-30 seconds? 😅 Not that it’s posing a problem, but I feel like this could be optimized. For example, how about using the if-modified-since request header: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Headers/If-Modified-Since

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @dce@hashnix.club It’s pretty cool, I won’t argue that, but also really simple, to be completely honest. 😅 The BIOS already provides all you need to send data to the printer:

https://helppc.netcore2k.net/interrupt/bios-printer-services

The BIOS actually does provide a great deal of things, which, to me, was one of the most surprising learnings of this project (the project of writing a little 16-bit real-mode OS, that is). It often doesn’t feel like I was writing an operating system – it felt more like writing a normal program that just uses BIOS calls like we would use syscalls these days.

(I’ve also read a lot of warnings, like “don’t use the BIOS for this or that”. Mostly because it tends to be very slow.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m looking for an OS that runs better than Windows (🤮) and through which I can do basic stuff like read RSS feeds and browse geminispace; but which I can also learn from.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org hihi ^^ i did that at first, but i personally i don’t like it when websites don’t let me change my password when i am already authenticated — fwiw you can view and log out other sessions, if that diminishes this attack vector at all

Listen missy, don’t you disappear on us like that again, do you hear me?! 😂 Welcome back, kat! I was wondering where you were, but figured something more interesting was keeping you busy. 🙈

I have a late-2010s ThinkPad running OpenBSD, but it’s about as fast as a snail carrying heavy shopping through molasses. I’d like to run something other than Linux, for variety, but the other members of the BSD family failed for various reasons. What OS do you guys think I should try?

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

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

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

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

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

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

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, nice read!

If I’m in the woods, I’d like to not waste my time with computers and focus on the beauty of nature. ;-) So, I’m not gonna participate in that event. But I’d read your articles on that subject anytime. :-)

My bad, looks like they get to keep these deals too, so this decision, really changes almost nothing.

@important_dev_news@n8n.andros.dev This feels like a decision that punishes Mozilla and Apple, way more than it punishes Google.

Looks like it’s this time of the year again where we get beautiful sunsets more often: https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-09-01/

@prologic@twtxt.net Thanks, mate! Glad you like my new avatar 😅👍

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

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

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

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

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

Hahaha, how funny is that!? The Dunning-Kruger effect research was sparked off by two bank robbers who rubbed lemon juice in their faces as this makes them invisible, just like invisible ink. :‘-D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_Greater_Pittsburgh_bank_robberies

I now imagine all these AI wankers with lemon juice in their faces.

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

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

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

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

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

There’s always something more urgent: I’ve been known for a long time that sooner or later I’d feel prompted to switch from #github to somewhere else (since 2018 at least!), but I’ve been postponing and only very slowly flirting with the idea… That didn’t work too bad for me: if I had rushed into it I would have probably migrated to #gitlab, before knowing about the more objectionable sides to it. In the end, 2025 was the year I finally acted upon the urge to move. I did not do a very thorough analysis of the alternative hosts - what I have been reading about them along the years felt enough, and I easily decided to choose #codeberg. Being hasty like that, alas, was a mistake: I just now found - during this slow and time-consuming process of deciding what and how to migrate - that there is a low repository limit on codeberg: “The owner has already reached the limit of 100 repositories.” I’m not complaining, mind you, and those “lucky 100” that are already there will stay - at least as a sort of backup. But this means that codeberg is not for me - and so this time I turn to you, the #mastodon community.

What github alternative, not self-hosted, should I move my >100 projects into?

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de My metadata only has my HTTPS URL. I didn’t consider having multiple. I was talking about my config.yaml. Jenny sounds like a good client, so I might give that a try.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, removing the cover will probably help. I’ll have to try. 😅 And, yes, the scrolling is pretty annoying (and kind of ruins the experience a little bit).

The printer isn’t that loud – at least not for a dot matrix printer. 😅 It’s been ~30 years since I’ve last seen them in person, but I remembered these things to be louder. I’m typing on my Model M, maybe that contributes to the perceived noise on this video. Here’s an isolated recording of that keyboard: https://movq.de/v/ddc98b03d8/2022-02-21–model-m-goes-brrr.ogg 🤣 It really sounds like that when you’re typing fast. Brrrrt.

You know, I think I do actually like it here better than my other social media. It’s slower and quieter, but it feels more organic and nobody’s trying to sell me anything, promote their podcast, or change the way I think. It’s just… nice!

** To the surprise of literally no one, I’m working on implementing a programming language all my own **
Inspired by conversation at a recent Future of Coding event, I decided I’d write up a little something about the programming language I’ve been working on (for what feels like forever) before I’ve gotten it to a totally shareable state. I have a working interpreter that I’m pretty pleased with, but I don’t yet have an interact … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net That is a noble goal. We can talk about that – as long as it doesn’t mean giving up essential freedoms like choosing which software you can run on your device (without having to ask someone for permission).

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

Its like TV. Very few good channels and many bad channels. Or like books. Very few good books and many bad books. Look for spezialized channels and educate your children. Read the bible.com . But only Jesus is reliable. Forget Moses and the punishing God.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @prologic@twtxt.net this is extremely concerning and I hope there is enough push back to stop this! The ability to modify apps, is one of the two biggest reasons, I’m still using Android. If they remove that option, I’ll be forced to switch to one of the de-Googled forks.

That might not be a good solution either, because I need banking and identity verification apps on my main device and already had to get a second device for work, which has tighter sideloading restrictions and I would very much not like to be forced into using three Android phones simultaneously, to do what should be possible, with just one.

I used to be able to sell my music anywhere in the world - and I have managed to send CDs to quite remote places, or kingdoms with nefarious regimes… but now, well, there is one country where I can not ship cassettes or CDs to: the USA 🇺🇸.

It’s not like I’m expecting any loss: I rarely sell music, and when I do it is rarely to the states (I don’t know why, I think my stuff ought to be way more popular! 😁). But still, it is disheartening to see there is now an effective wall, a country where I won’t be able to (directly) reach. Congratulations to everyone involved.

[PS: if you’re puzzled about what is this all about - a number of European countries, including Portugal, won’t be shipping stuff to the US due to legal uncertainty regarding Trump’s tariffs.]

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Nice picture, this hot air balloon has quite a large basket.

Yes, go for it! :-)

My grandpa went ballooning ages ago and liked it. The balloonist misjudged the height a bit and landed in an open-air pool. Well, not in the water, but on the sunbathing lawn just inside the fence. :-D After the ride, everybody was given a very long personal name that they had to memorize. Decades later, my grandpa still knew his assigned name.

The most important thing to know is that – in German – you don’t fly (fliegen) a ballon, but ride (fahren) it: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballonfahren#Fahren_oder_fliegen Judging by the English wikipedia article, this is not an English thing, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_ballooning

@prologic@twtxt.net Anything above a couple hundred Euros. 😅 The current Epson LX-350 appears to be not that pricey, though. 🤔

I mean, what do you want to do with it? If you want to use this as an actual printer for daily use, I’d get a laser printer instead, because they’re very reliable and the print quality is top notch.

I got my dot matrix printer mostly for experiments and nostalgia, so I wouldn’t want to pay something like 300-400€ for it.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Is there like a TL;DR of this standard? I can’t say I remember this tbh 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, those POS thingies are similar. There’s “ESC/POS” as a variant of “ESC/P”, if I’m not mistaken.

All I can say is, when I go to big stores like Amazon, then I have trouble finding “traditional” dot matrix printers for use at home. 😅 Epson still sells them, but they’re more expensive than my laser printer was. So yeah, they still exist, just expensive, by the looks of it.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org When/if I can pull it off, there will be videos! 😅

I never used hardcopy terminals, either. We did have a dotmatrix printer, but that was just used as a regular printer.

Inkjets, I don’t know. They were pretty fascinating and cool when they came out. A lot faster than dotmatrix and obviously quiter. They never gave me much trouble, actually. But I switched to a laser printer long before crap like DRM’ed ink cartridges became a thing.

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

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

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

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

A very good one:
“Whatever AI Looks Like, It’s Not”

(notice the photo by Thomas Schmitt that illustrates the article)

https://archive.ph/I4nRA

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks, glad you like it, but sadly I’m not sure, if there’s still a way, for this particular project, to continue.

Reducing 38 pixels (previous smallest) to 27, inside of a 7x7 square canvas, is a result I’m really happy with. Now it seems I can only shave off single pixels and get a lot worse looking results - to the point it doesn’t even look like my mascot, to me.

There doesn’t seem to be a hard cap for drawing tiny dogs. It’s possible to arrange 5 pixels, in a way someone recognizes them, as some kind of a dog. The record for cats, is currently a single orange pixel: https://youtu.be/gzeK8NKuzmg

The only way to beat that, is either a monitor, with just a single red diode lit, inside one of its pixels, or an image file that’s broken and empty, on purpose.

@thecanine@twtxt.net My daughter (who is pretty good already at art and only 10 :D) says this looks like a “blob” 🤣 I tried to explain to her that this is pixel art, but I’m not quite sure she has the same appreciation (yet) 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Very nice! I fully agree, I really like listening to him, too.

In order to publish my personal projects/pages (and most of my teaching materials, hundreds of pages) on #Codeberg, I need to convert #markdown files into #HTML and sprinkle some CSS & JS from a layout template, like #GitHub’s Pages #Jekyll does, but I dread the complexity of installing and tending to Jekyll or Hugo or other static site generators, and I can’t even imagine going near Forejo Actions or any sort of CI intergration.

Should I be brave and do the Jekyll /static generator thing? Any other ideas for poor, overworked, stressed out, clumsy people? :(

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com Also just a heads up, GIF(s) aren’t supproted as an Avatar type on yarnd (what runs twtxt.net). I’d change this to something that’s more supproted like PNG, JPEG, etc.

But maybe, just maybe this is why they’re pushing so hard to have this “Age Verification” bullshit. So they can then shut people down like me that routinely “speak up” and “against the status quo”. Bend over backwards? I think not! Assholes 🤣

@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. 

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

@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.

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

you know i can never get into boy groups but i have liked EXO’s obsession since it came out. that “i want you” sample is just too good man https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxmP4b2a0uY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ok i really like XLOV. 1&Only is a great song. so vibe-y and sensual. and they released it in pride month too they Get It https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBZgirj_C2Y

There is a missing feature I’ve been intending to add to though, which is that any link that looks like a URL that might be an image, for example, ends with .png or .jpg or whatever, we should just render that as an image and not expect users to wrap it in Markdown image links ![](...)

on my yarn pod nothing really embeds (not even images) so i’m looking at the embed rules part of the mod settings and i’m like… i don’t know how to do any of this 😭😭😭

how do i serve cunt like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prR9miCSDlg