@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 @moveq@twtxt.net I think it’s mostly the serious lack of competition. All the Android phone manufacturers just use the Google version of Android, bundle in piles of Google bloatware and do whatever Google tells them to. If some of them installed Lineage, or any other versions, with their own stores and rules, or even just offer a less Googly version of their phones, as an option, for more experienced users, Google wouldn’t be able, to push everyone around.

@prologic@twtxt.net, the very first sentence addresses something that needed to be addressed. Maybe tech savvy people will not have these issues, but many non-tech savvy people (and old people) I know has had, and has, cyclically, a myriad of malware, pestware, etc., issues on their Android based phones. It is a wild-west.

@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.

@thecanine@twtxt.net I sure hope there’s going to be push back. Is it going to happen, realistically? I don’t know.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yes, this is another instance of restricting “personal” computing. You won’t be able to install arbitrary software anymore (“sideloading”, as they call it).

It’s not unique, it’s not new. Boiling the frog alive.

We’re heading towards this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

@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.

To combat malware and financial scams, Google announced today that only apps from developers that have undergone verification can be installed on certified Android devices starting in 2026.

This requirement applies to “certified Android devices” that have Play Protect and are preloaded with Google apps. The Play Store implemented similar requirements in 2023, but Google is now mandating this for all install methods, including third-party app stores and sideloading where you download an APK file from a third-party source.

RIP Android:

https://9to5google.com/2025/08/25/android-apps-developer-verification/

Since nobody is going to push back on this (I don’t even know if that would be possible), this is going to be a reality on every platform sooner or later.

I’d guess in 20, 30 years, there won’t be “PCs” anymore. No more home computing, no more “I just write my own software”. You won’t own devices anymore, it’ll all be rented and the landlord will tell you what you can do with it.

I hope that I’m wrong, but given where we are today, I don’t think that I will be.

Apparently twtxt wasn’t the right client to use. twet seems to be alright, though.

#Pyxel is a retro inspired #GameEngine for #Python, it’s very impressive!

It’s not hard to generate a static HTML page that loads your game to run on the browser with #pyodide (WASM). And it comes with an assets editor and a #chiptune making tool.

https://github.com/kitao/pyxel

Sometimes it’s a small thing, it’s a bit jarring when orgs that want to pose as international/global publish some copy/event based on US school terms/seasons. That’s a reminder of how other people are at the periphery and will be probably ignored most of the time. Isn’t it obvious we have different school year arrangements & seasons around the world? I guess @melissawm@melissawm will share my sentiments about this.

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.]

I only learned about the .envelope object/propriety in #shapely yesterday, before that I used .bounds (a min/max of points tuple), but envelope is good to know because it provides an easy way of getting the centroid and the area of the bounding box, which can be very useful.

@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.

@prologic@twtxt.net It’s quite similar to how escape sequences work in a terminal. ASCII text is printed as ASCII text and then an escape sequence can make it bold or underline and so on. Other escape sequences allow you to say “the following $n bytes are part of a bitmap image”, and then this gets printed at whatever the current position is (somewhat similar to SIXEL in a terminal).

It’s just that the units are a bit weird, because this is all done in bloody inch. 😅

@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.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Got a link to this

ESC/P standard.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Are you sure?

because there is virtually no market for these devices anymore, meaning new ones are very, very expensive.

I think dot matrix printers are still pretty common in many Point of Sales (POS) registers right? At least here in AU they’re very common. I had a quick look myself today, there seems to be quite a solid market for these types of printers. In fact even EPSON still sell Dot Matrix printers themselves 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm, good question. I haven’t checked the market, I got mine from someone I know. But to be honest, I’d suspect that buying a used one is actually your best shot, because there is virtually no market for these devices anymore, meaning new ones are very, very expensive. 🫤

FWIW, I have an OKI Microline 3390eco. Good thing is, you can still buy new cartridges for it.

If you want to buy a new device, check if it supports the “ESC/P” standard. That’s very widely supported.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Kind of curious now… Is there a (to buy new) dot matrix printer you’d recommend if someone wanted to get into this sort of thing (sending plain ‘ol bytes to a printer port)? 🤔 (I remember this back in the ye ‘old days!)

This is why I love tech from that era.

Write bytes to a parallel port and stuff happens. If it’s just ASCII bytes, then it will print ASCII text. Even the simplest programs can use a printer this way.

With a little bit of ESC/P, you can print images and other fancy stuff. That’s what I did this morning – never worked with ESC/P before, now I can print images. It’s not that hard.

Hayes-compatible modems are similar: Write some AT commands to the serial port and the modem does things. This isn’t even arcane knowledge, it’s explained in the printed manual.

Maybe I’m wearing rose-tinted glasses here, but I think with all this old stuff, you get useful results very quickly and the manuals are usually actually helpful. It’s so much easier to get started and to use this hardware to the full extent. Much less complexity than what we have today, not a ton of libraries and dependencies and SDKs and cloud services and what not.

https://movq.de/v/4bd16cb3c7/tux1.jpg

https://movq.de/v/4bd16cb3c7/tux2.jpg

I’ve been doing this for so lang that I’ve unlearned how to do this.

ProcessOne: 🚀 ejabberd 25.08

Image

Release Highlights:

This release includes the support for Hydra rooms in our Matrix gateway, which fixes high severity protocol vulnerabilities.

• Improvements in Matrix gateway
  
• Fixed ACME in Erlang/OTP 28.0.2
  
• **[New mod_providers to serve XMPP Providers file](https://www.process-one.net/blog/rss/ … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Aww, yeah. 😍 (Reminds me, I haven’t paid attention to the sunset in quite a while …)

@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.

Here’s an interesting thought/angle on this topic:

gemini://gemini.conman.org/boston/2025/08/21.1

A further check showed that all the network blocks are owned by one organization—Tencent [4]. I’m seriously thinking that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) encourage this with maybe the hope of externalizing the cost of the Great Firewall [5] to the rest of the world.

The XMPP Standards Foundation: MongooseIM 6.4 - Simplified and Unified
MongooseIM is a scalable and efficient instant messaging server. It implements the open, proven, extensible and constantly evolving XMPP protocol, which is an excellent choice when it comes to instant messaging. To communicate with other XMPP entities, the server uses three main types of interfaces, listed in the table below.

XMPP InterfacePurposeConnection typeReworked in v … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Heck yeah, have fun! :-) We never had a matrix printer, started off with a cathode ray tube and an inkjet pisser.

I’m happy to see you compose your first twtxt message using ed on your new output device. We definitely need video proof of that! ;-)

We went out an hour earlier to escape the rain. But we got drizzled on, nevertheless. As expected, the rain jacket was finally wet on both the out- and inside. Sweating under that plasic layer is unavoidable with these temperatures. It was still a very nice walk and great vibe with the gray soup. Just right. :-)

Didn’t bring my camera, I guarantee that it would have gotten soaking wet.

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

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

yet another monologue about how to computer | https://nilfm.cc/new_flow.html

@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 Wow. I’m not an artist in any way, but I have tried to make icons for programs or fonts every now and then. Making something that is still recognizable at so few pixels is hard. Hats off!

@prologic@twtxt.net That’s fair, this version really is a stretch. Similar to old Atari game spirites, a lot is left to interpretation,especially by those who have not seen any of the more detailed ones, before.

On the other hand, some suggested I’m still wasting too many pixels on the tail, but removing those, makes it just a generic dog (at best), even to me.

@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) 😅

After around 3 years, I managed to make my “smallest recognizable canine”, even smaller. So here’s the all new, smallest recognizable canine 2.0:

@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! 😂

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

@bender@twtxt.net There are all sorts of pallets. I made my wooden mallet from a heavy duty beech pallet a few years ago:

Image

Oh yes, this guy is so cool. I think the next machines I need are a thickness planer and a big dust collector with at least hose 100mm diameter! :-)

@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.

UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEb_YL1K1Qg

I could listen to him all day.

#SFD #swag packs are going to be sent in the next 24h, grab one while you can!

https://digitalfreedoms.org/en/sfd/blog/order-swag

I wonder if Gopher might become a hit in some kind of civilization decline, due to its lightweight style appropriate for highly limited bandwidth

Tip on how to convert a big #PDF into a smaller one:
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=smaller.pdf big.pdf

** 📸 Photo **

Image

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? :(

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah i have wireguard to my three VPS regions that act as my ingress.

@eric@itsericwoodward.com Name change is no worries! 😉 Interesting/funnily enough my client yarnd seems to have picked it up automatically which is nice (I’ve historically always had a few bugs to iron out there 🤣)

@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.

@eric@itsericwoodward.com I prefer to call what we’ve built here really an “ecosystem”. A network isn’t really an apt description. Twtxt/Yarn is arguably IMO the purest decentralised non-social social media ecosystem I think in existence today 🤣

@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.

I just saw that these motherfuckers also query my twtxt feed. I have to enable access logs for everything again and see who else wants some napalm response. :-(

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh dear. 🙈 So glad that WfH is a thing now. Imagine how utterly annoying it would be if they expected you to still come in despite this …

@prologic@twtxt.net ahh! You are talking to yourself again. 😅

A cargo train ripped off several hundred meters of catenary and during construction they found a WW2 bomb. If I had gone to the office today, I would not have made it home for two reasons. https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/stuttgart/bombenfund-in-stuttgart-untertuerkheim-100.html

Another wave of tens of thousands of hints by the same bot on the same file:

https://movq.de/v/61f8d39d2f/s.png

There’s probably a simple explanation for this: Maybe this bot was written with “AI” and it’s simply complete garbage.

This isn’t a serious threat for my low-profile website – yet. Can’t wait for this to get worse …

@prologic@twtxt.net slightly off topic, what’s the URL for the feed you replied to? I must have muted it. 😅

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club Haha, yeah well “thinking” isn’t really something we even know how to define, let alone simulate 🤣

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 🤣

I realize I’m a nobody, and no-one will care or listen. But to the various UK, EU and AU politicians pushing for this “Online Safety Act” bullshit…. You’re all fucking utter morons! I can’t wait for the backflash of what will come next. Idiots.

Exactly, @eric@itsericwoodward.com! Welcome to the party. :-)

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

What is a #GameEngine for you? Is there a gray area between game engines and graphics frameworks? You can make games with SDL, RayLib, Processing (and py5…), p5js, d3js, but would you consider them game engines?

Maybe I should ask my students to make a game engine purist-neutral-radical alignment chart ? 🤡

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

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

[47°09′51″S, 126°43′29″W] Bad satellite signal – switching to analog communication

March 4th to September 25th, 1789 : The U.S. House of Representatives compiles a list of possible Constitutional Amendments, some of which will ultimately become the Bill of Rights. The House proposes seventeen out of the many which are offered; the Senate reduces this list to twelve. During this process Senator Tristram Dalton of Massachusetts proposes an Amendment seeking to prohibit, and provide a penalty for, any American accepting a “title of nobility” (RG 46 Records of the U.S. Senate). Although it isn’t passed, this is the first time a “titles of nobility” amendment is proposed.

@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. 

Aww man, the hot and sticky weather has returned to Minnesota. I wish the AC in my car worked..

Hard to believe that this song is from 1985:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cen22TBHo9M

@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. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de No one would figure out how to :q! ? 🤣

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. 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m so tired of this. (That’s the goal. They want to wear people down.)

This whole Age Verification that’s being rolled out in the UK, AU and parts of the EU is totally fucking bullshit. Death to the Online Safety Act.

San Francisco Billboards - August 2025
Every time I take a Lyft from the San Francisco airport to downtown going up 101, I notice the billboards. The billboards on 101 are always such a good snapshot in time of the current peak of the Silicon Valley hype cycle. I’ve decided to capture photos of the billboards every time I am there, to see how this changes over time. ⌘ Read more

Re. 1c97c : We have now [1913 and onwards] a situation in which U.S. citizens have been hoodwinked into accepting paper money which is owned by foreign corporations. More recently, U.S. citizens are allowing themselves to be hoodwinked into accepting bitcoin which is owned by foreign corporations. In both instances, it’s the foreign ownership which is the problem. I’ll want to review my notes on this, - but that’s what I remember just now.

@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. 😂

You can explicitly use colors in manpages. I saw this in the apt manpage of Ubuntu recently, which, for some reason, uses blue text in one place:

https://movq.de/v/de5ab72016/s.png

Makes little sense to me. I’m glad that most manpages don’t do this. I wouldn’t want unicorn vomit all over the place.

Using colors can be done using the low level commands \m and \M:

.TH foo_program 3
\m[blue]I'm blue\m[], da ba dee.
\m[red]\M[yellow]I'm red on yellow.\m[]\M[]
This is quite horrible.

https://movq.de/v/394282ec75/s.png

A ‘hey’ back to you, just to see whether I can reply - that was a problem the last time.

** 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

[47°09′01″S, 126°43′16″W] Transponder still failing – switching to analog communication

June 21st, 1789 - The Constitution for the United States of America is ratified, with New Hampshire becoming the ninth state to ratify. Article I, Sections 9 and 10 of the Constitution contain provisions which clearly prohibit the federal government and the states from granting titles: “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign State. No State shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money; emit bills of credit; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex postfacto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility.” However, no penalty for violating the Article is specified.

My next try with twtxt - because it’s the closest to my idea of microblogging.

had my last first day of school today. it wasn’t great, but I am happy to be close to graduating.

The XMPP Standards Foundation: The XMPP Newsletter July 2025

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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

XMPP Providers: A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats

In May 2025, we ran a small survey to gather feedback from XMPP server operators.
Our main concerns were XMPP Provider’s service and the project itself.
First of all, we would like to thank almost 60 people who participated in this survey.
While the XMPP Providers project currently lists a little more than 70 providers, this is a good turnout.
At this point we can already tell that the gen … ⌘ Read more

[47°09′04″S, 126°43′37″W] Storm recedes – back to normal work

[47°09′18″S, 126°43′41″W] Working impossible due to heavy rain