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.)

** A week notes to round out the summer **
I haven’t posted anything remotely resembling week notes since the middle of June! Since then many things have happened including, but not limited to: a trip to Minnesota to visit Isaac, a couple trips to New Hampshire for work, a family trip to Mount Desert Island to revisit our old stomping grounds, a whole heap of bicycle riding, I finished a couple great books, played some games, made some games, and wrote what is probably an unhealthy a … ⌘ Read more

Right, now that I’m reading some comments: I was initially assuming that they would actually make it impossible for distros to provide a 32-bit build (intentionally or unintentionally). But maybe that’s not the case and distros can just continue to ship a 32-bit Firefox …

Is that really necessary? How hard is it to make a 32-bit build? 🤔 Honest question. https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2025/09/05/firefox-32-bit-linux-support-to-end-in-2026/

@dce@hashnix.club Which Thinkpad specifically is this? “Late-2010s” doesn’t sound very old, to be honest, I wonder why OpenBSD is giving you so much trouble. 🤔

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz had to add an env variable to this pod’s configuration to increase the max media file size for this one LMAO

@dce@hashnix.club You should try los86! 8-)

Well, what are you trying to do on this ThinkPad? That might affect the OS choices.

I really had to laugh when I read your initial comparison. I love it! :-D

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?

👓 “How to Make an Apostrophe in HTML: The Complete 2500 Word Guide” https://thelinuxcode.com/how-can-i-make-an-apostrophe-in-html/

The XMPP Standards Foundation: The XMPP Newsletter August 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 August 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 help these proj … ⌘ Read more

the code to generate this image (have you noticed it is a 3D mesh?)
is here: https://abav.lugaralgum.com/selected-work/py5band/

#python #numpy #shapely #trimesh #py5

Hmm, gnu.org is slow as heck. Shorter HTML pages load in about ten seconds. This complete AWK manual all in one large HTML page took a full minute: https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html Is there maybe some anti AI shenanigans going on?

In any case, I find the user guide super interesting. My AWK skills are basically non-existent, so I finally decided to change that. This document is incredibly well written and makes it really fun to keep reading and learning. I’m very impressed. So far, I made it to section 1.6, happy to continue.

It was raining cats and dogs for a few minutes, I almost couldn’t see the houses down in the valley anymore. Pretty sick. :-)

@bender@twtxt.net Haha, yeah, we’re also better off rolling dice sometimes. I usually don’t mind liquid sunshine either. But I have to be prepared for it. As a matter of prudence, I brought my rain jacket along. In the end, I was wet from the inside as well, though. The breathability of this plastic bag isn’t as good as they always claim it to be. Especially in summer.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I couldn’t agree more! :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org oi, at least you still have weather services. We are soon to find ourselves looking at birds, ants, etc., to get a grasp. 😅

On a weather related topic, we get rains almost each day, mid-afternoon/late-afternoon. That’s great, because I love rain, but I also need to mow the wilderness in the back of the house, and the front lawn. So, yeah, kind of a conundrum.

@zvava@twtxt.net may I recommend to change the mention format upon hitting reply to something similar to what it’s used in Yarn, and perhaps hiding the hash on the post too? Looking good!

@zvava@twtxt.net Uuhh, that’s nice! And welcome to the twtxt world.

The password change might query the current password as well in order to make it difficult for attackers to change account passwords.

replies and following implemented! next step is further parsing of post contents, rendering threads, and then maybe i can finally start adding remote feeds…! though i kinda wanna redo the whole ui ^^’

Video

Folks I finally made something I wanted to make for a long time, a T-Shirt design thing.

Available at Rednubble https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/numpy-shapely-trimesh-and-py5-by-villares/173500912.7H7A9?asc=u

And also available in Brazil at Uma Penca: https://umapenca.com/villares/

You can also buy stickers and other items… soon my “Python Reading Club” and “Python is also for artists!” designs will be available. This will help support my free and open source activities. I make free and open educational resources, I teach at several places and I need to make ends meet.

#python #numpy #shapely #trimesh #py5 #creativeCoding #FLOSS

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Folks I finally made something I wanted to make for a long time, a T-Shirt design thing.

Available at Redbubble https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/numpy-shapely-trimesh-and-py5-by-villares/173500912.7H7A9?asc=u

And also available in Brazil at Uma Penca: https://umapenca.com/villares/

You can also buy stickers and other items… soon my “Python Reading Club” and “Python is also for artists!” designs will be available. This will help support my free and open source activities. I make free and open educational resources, I teach at several places and I need to make ends meet.

#python #numpy #shapely #trimesh #py5 #creativeCoding #FLOSS

Image

Folks, I finally made something I wanted to make for a long time, a T-Shirt design thing.

Available at Redbubble https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/numpy-shapely-trimesh-and-py5-by-villares/173500912.7H7A9?asc=u

And also available in Brazil at Uma Penca: https://umapenca.com/villares/

You can also buy stickers and other items… soon my “Python Reading Club” and “Python is also for artists!” designs will be available. This will help support my free and open source activities. I make free and open educational resources, I teach at several places and I need to make ends meet.

#python #numpy #shapely #trimesh #py5 #creativeCoding #FLOSS

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@bender@twtxt.net I switched back to groff a few weeks ago. 🤪

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org (Haha, every time I read the word “Gophers”, I have to stop and remind myself that this is about Golang. 🤪)

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com, hi there! Welcome to the twtverse! It seems you have a typo on your site address, an extra “c”.

Acreditar só nas coisas que corroboram as nossas opiniões é um tipo de viés difícil de escapar…
dito isso… rsrsrsrsr

https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/mit-study-finds-artificial-intelligence-use-reprograms-the-brain-leading-to-cognitive-decline/

@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. :-)

@bender@twtxt.net Oh, there’s an easy explanation. But maybe some mysteries are best left unexplained. 😃 If you want to solve this riddle: The solution is in the phlog! Somewhere! 😅

Haha, fun! I browsed your gopher hole a little bit. I noticed some entries are fully justified (formatting), while others are not. I didn’t notice a pattern, though it makes sense not to use justification on entries with code. Yet, some prose entries are, and some are not. A mystery. :-)

ProcessOne: Spotify’s Direct Messaging Gambit

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Last week, Spotify quietly launched direct messaging across its platform in selected areas, allowing users to share tracks and playlists through private conversations within the app. The feature was rolled out with mini … ⌘ Read more

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

Hustle culture lied to you (here’s a better way) ⌘ Read more

@zvava@twtxt.net Bit ahrd not to 🤣

Mathieu Pasquet: slixmpp v1.11
This new version includes a few new XEP plugins as well as fixes, notably
for some leftover issues in our rust JID code, as well as one for a bug that
caused issues in Home Assistant.

Thanks to everyone who contributed with code, issues, suggestions, and reviews!

Nicoco put in a lot of work in order to get all possible wheels built in CI. We now have manylinux and musl builds of everything doable within codeberg,
published to the codeberg pypi repo, and published on pypi. … ⌘ Read more

I finally have my new (top-secret) twtxt client in a working state. Next comes the deployment, which I hope to finish tonight. Release date: TBD. Stay tuned!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Or, the time of year when birds take to the skies in stunning flocks.🦆🦢

@klaxzy@klaxzy.net I’ve had many SD cards die in Raspberry Pis. Really annoying. I’ve eventually switched to using a read-only rootfs. 🫤

@zvava@twtxt.net Hey 👋 Welcome to Yarn.social 🤗

Ni Hao; bīng qílín!
I’m just dropping in, to emphasize my love for ice cream and the Chinese crawler bots, allocating their time and resources, towards scraping my humble website.

To show my gratitude, I’ve even added a random little dog generator to https://thecanine.ueuo.com/sparkle.html so that everyone can pick up their own custom dogFT, on their journey through my site.

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.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m doing that now as well, but I don’t think this is a good solution. This is going to hurt “self-hosting” in the long run: I cannot afford true self-hosting where I actually do host everything here at home – instead, I must use a cloud provider / VPS for that. It is only a matter of time until my provider starts doing AI shit as well (or rather, the customers do it) and then what? I get blocked, e.g. I can’t send email to (some) people anymore. This is already bad and it’s going to get worse.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Didn’t know that, either. 😂 The one guy even tried to test this theory with a Polaroid? And “confirmed” it? What the heck. 🥴

@dce@hashnix.club Yeah, I’ve read about that approach. Sounds clever. Truth is, I’m too tired. 😢 I don’t want to spend too much of my time fighting assholes.

I’ve now started blocking entire cloud hosters. Sorry, not sorry.

As expected: Didn’t last long. They’re coming from different IPs now.

I’ve read enough blog posts by other people to know that this is probably pointless. The bots have so many IPs/networks at their disposal …

@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.

“But all your stuff is MIT licensed! They are allowed to do that!”

Haha. As if they would care. They crawl everything they get their hands on.

Besides, that’s not true, the license states that the copyright notice must be retained. “AI” breaks that. They incorporate my code and my articles in their product and make it appear as if it was their work.

Why do I care about this?

1. The load will become a problem at some point.
   
2. These crawlers and the current “AI” in general are breaking the rules. I am supposed to be paying for every little thing, I get sued for “piracy”. But apparently, these rules only apply to me. If I had more money, I could break them. Fuck that.
   
3. I simply don’t want it. Period.

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.

The bots have begun to access my website way more often. I’m getting about 120k hits on https://www.uninformativ.de/git/ now in a couple of hours.

They don’t cache anything, probably on purpose.

It comes in waves. I get about 100 hits (all at once) on that /git endpoint, all from different IPs. Then it takes a moment until I get another wave of about 500-1000 requests (all at once) where they do HEAD requests on some of the paths below /git. I assume they did a GET earlier and are now checking if something has changed.

** Answering some questions about Baba Yaga **
My previous post found its way to Hacker News; I don’t have an account there, but a commenter asked a few questions that I thought I could answer in a follow up post.

Baba Yaga uses call-by-value evaluation, not call-by-need (aka“lazy”).

From the interpreter,

”`hljs javascript
function visitFunctionCall(node) {
const callee = visit(node.callee);

// Arguments ar … ⌘ Read more”`

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?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, that was a lot of fun. 😃 Now let’s wait and see if I ever get to actually use this. 😂

We use all the Microsoft programs at work - Teams and Outlook especially.

After all kinds of technical problems with Teams, that sometimes go unresolved for over a year, Microsoft shifted their priorities away from fixing things and towards adding an annoying AI Copilot button, that just takes up space and all it does, is loads the website in Teams, so I disabled it. Soon they just add it back, but in a different row of icons, therefore it’s now a different button, you have to disable (I think they added yet another one, to the Teams, on my work phone and I had to disabled that too). Not too long after, the desktop one just enabled itself, because of “an error” and I can disable it, but doing so activates a popup, that begs you to turn it back on, every once in a while. You can’t disable the popup and can only click “Yes” or “Not now” on it. I still keep it disabled, out of principle, but yesterday I noticed yet another Copilot button, this time in the top right corner of my Outlook and this one cannot be disabled, on the business version of Outlook and even on the personal one, it’s only possible to do it through hidden privacy settings, by prohibiting the program from connecting to Microsoft servers, for extra “features”.

There’s people complaining about it online, so it’s clear nobody really wants it, but at this point Microsofts position is that you will have at least one useless AI button on your screen, at any given time, and you will be happy. And yes, their AI sucks and if I absolutely have to use AI for something, there’s already 2 better options, we have access to, at work.

@bender@twtxt.net I’ve been cutting back too 😅 Trying to avoid drinking (with alcohol) 24hr before fixtures (🏓) and before training 🤣

Enjoy! This is a longer weekend for us too (Labor Day), and even longer for me, as I have asked for Tuesday off. Yayyyyy! I will not be drinking (I voluntarily stopped drinking anything with alcohol in it), but I will try to get a few things done, and then relax.

Weekend! Whooo 🤣 Having a few too many glassses of 🍷 listening to music on Youtube and playing Chess which I haven’t been playing much lately 😢

@dce@hashnix.club No worries 😌 It’s all documented in our soecs, it’s not such a common thing that we’ve felt the great need to really solve, we’re aware folks want to sometimes have their feed on several protocols, and that’s totally fine™ 😅

this is the 3rd sd card that dies on my pi-hole raspberry pi, i have no other choice but to try pi with nvme

@dce@hashnix.club Ah, oh, well then. 🥴

My client supports that, if you set multiple url = fields in your feed’s metadata (the top-most one must be the “main” URL, that one is used for hashing).

But yeah, multi-protocol feeds can be problematic and some have considered it a mistake to support them. 🤔

Speaking of PS/2, I wish PS/2 came back as the standard. I love that they use interrupts instead of polling to function.

It might just be my client, but it seems that I cannot track multiple URLs at once. As such, all three of my twtxt URLs will work for following, but mentions will only reach me at my HTTPS URL (https://hashnix.club/~dce/twtxt.txt). If there is a client that can cope with twtxt mirrors, I would love to know about it.

@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.

@dce@hashnix.club I switched over to following you on Gopher, because why not. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Haha, that’s so cool! :-) Could you remove the cover to at least reduce the amount of scrolling around? But I bet any amount of scrolling is annoying.

This printer has quite some noise level to it. Or how bad is it really in person?

So, in addition to HTTPS and Gemini, my twtxt should now also be available over Gopher (gopher://hashnix.club:70/0/~dce/twtxt.txt). Not sure who, if anyone, would need this; but since my tilde provides Gopher hosting, I’d may as well mirror my twtxt there as well.

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!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks, it’s mostly following the Louis Rossmann thing https://youtu.be/2_Dtmpe9qaQ - a symbol of protest, against the rapid enshitification the Internet is facing, accelerated to the extreme, during this year. It has reached a point where something really has to be done about it all. Obviously not just everyone changing their profile pictures, but also cataloguing all the consumer rights violations, invasion of privacy, censorship,… to shove it in the face of as many government officials, as possible.

I’ve got a prototype of my hardcopy simulator going. I’m typing on the keyboard and the “display” goes to the printer:

https://movq.de/v/56feb53912/s.png

https://movq.de/v/235c1eabac/MVI_8810.MOV.mp4

The biiiiiiiiiig problem is that the print head and plastic cover make it impossible to see what’s currently being printed, because this is not a typewriter. This means: In order to see what I just entered, I have to feed the paper back and forth and back and forth … it’s not ideal.

I got that idea of moving back/forth from Drew DeVault, who – as it turned out – did something similar a few years back. (I tried hard to read as little as possible of his blog post, because figuring things out myself is more fun. But that could mean I missed a great idea here or there.)

But hey, at least this is running on my Pentium 133 on SuSE Linux 6.4, printer connected with a parallel cable. 😍

(Also, yes, you can see the printouts of earlier tests and, yes, I used ed(1) wrong at one point. 🤪 And ls insisted on using colors …)

** 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

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

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

#FLOSS #CMYK #ColorManagement #inkscape

Back to Win16 8-) New arrivals of fixed programs for Win31. A big collection of tested network software for Win31. gopher://shibboleths.org/1/win31

Since 2020, I’ve been putting together one playlist every year, in which each track represents one month of that year. However, I also have assigned each season two specific songs, which does not change year-to-year: Spring: “A Little Bit Of Love” by Weezer and “Gretel” by Alex G; Summer: “Dumb” by Roe Kapara and “Endless Bummer” by Weezer; Autumn: “1979” by The Smashing Pumpkins and “The Dead Come Talking” by Roe Kapara; Winter: “Red Water (Christmas Mourning)” by Type O Negative and “Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End)” by The Darkness

I have to be fair and update this: turns out, there is another country I would be unable to ship to, and I only found out now: Syria. So… congratulations, I guess, to the USA for joining Syria in how inaccessible it has become.

@bender@twtxt.net have you seen how many Google apps, get shoved into the new releases of Android. MicroG, Google Play, maybe Chrome is fine, but everything else, I can’t get rid of, is just bloatware to me.

@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

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

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• 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.