Is it really possible to deflect an asteroid using nuclear weapons ?
Scientists have used a new computer simulation to find out if nuking an asteroid could actually save us from catastrophe. Nuclear weapons have the pot… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

I can’t remember if the hex viewer back then had these options. Don’t even recall what software that was. :-)

The one that I used during my Windows 95 days was “Hex Workshop”. It had similar features, just not as promimently displayed. It shows them down there in the statusline as “Value”:

Image

Newer versions can probably do more, haven’t checked. 😅 (Assuming this program still exists.)

Apart from selecting text to copy into the clipboard. But that probably has the potential for trouble and interference with button clicks, etc.

Yeah, that’s a big problem: Once you activate mouse mode in the terminal, the terminal loses the ability to select text. 😞 You’d either have to emulate that in the program itself (like Vim does) or give the user an easy way to turn mouse support on/off during runtime.

How did the startup times develop?

They’re pretty stable at around 230 ms on my old NUC. It’s just fast enough so that it doesn’t annoy me.

Some pretty pics to illustrate the much improved reference Salty.im client, salty-chat.

** Constraint propagation for fun **
I’ve been playing the very good Squeakross this weekend. It is adorable and the aesthetics are absolutely immaculate, but I’ve found the actual picross puzzles to be a point of frustrating friction in the game when compared to the picross-style puzzles in my bicross game.

Picross puzzles, aka nonograms, can relatively easily have ambiguous solutions. Because the hints only tell you how many co … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org some people just own enough to fit in a backpack. 💭

@dce@hashnix.club Wow! Moving without a vehicle, that seems impressive to me. Was it just down the street or how did you accomplish this? I hope you didn’t loose all your belongings due to a fire or similar catastrophe.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Nice, it’s coming together! Despite it being ages ago that I used a hex editor or viewer, these different representations of information appear very handy to me. If I had to mess around on binary formats, I’d definitely appreciate them. I can’t remember if the hex viewer back then had these options. Don’t even recall what software that was. :-)

I, too, only very, very rarely use the mouse in the terminal. Apart from selecting text to copy into the clipboard. But that probably has the potential for trouble and interference with button clicks, etc. If one isn’t careful.

How did the startup times develop?

Chaos as AI sends tourists to attraction that doesn’t actually exist
A travel booking website ended up in a pickle recently when one of its articles sent people to a non-existent attraction. According to reports, an Aus… ⌘ Read more

#py5 #Processing #Python #CreativeCoding

Image

Hmmm, that’s a pity. I never realized that before. The following Go code

var b bool
…
b |= otherBool

results in a compilation error:

invalid operation: operator | not defined on b (variable of type bool)

I cannot use || for assignments as in ||= according to https://go.dev/ref/spec#Assignment_statements. Instead, I have to write b = b || otherBool like a barbarian. Oh well, probably doesn’t happen all that often, given that I only now run into this after all those many years.

I’m inclined to remove all mouse support, except for moving windows. 🤔 I originally wanted this to emulate the behavior of DOS programs, but a) mouse support is a lot of code, b) using the mouse is cumbersome anyway and I would rarely do it.

Does ‘de-extinction’ make people more comfortable with extinction ?
If science can simply resurrect an extinct species, will humanity be more inclined to allow more species to go extinct ? Christopher Lean, Andrew Jame… ⌘ Read more

What’s going on here?

https://imgur.com/gallery/dude-back-trying-to-keep-together-ilY5Ltu

Is that real? Did I just watch a politician genuinely chuckle? That’s unheard of. Is that even legal?

OpenAI when someone pushes their API credentials to a public repo ⌘ Read more

It was so great going to the sauna again, we were looking forward to that the whole week. :-) It’s been over a year, holy cow, time flies. We definitely have to pick up on that tradition again, that’s for sure.

We attended two Aufguss sessions, the first and last one in our four hour visit. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to the other two, because the crazy people already occupied the entire sauna 15 minutes before the start. Yeah, no.

Now, the bellies are stuffed with kebabs. Yum! Let’s see how often I wake up tonight to rehydrate.

Also transfering interesting radio recordings I found on the used MiniDiscs to FLAC.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de You’re right, that’s neat. I also saw Pask’s take on that which he referenced. I don’t know if I will ever attempt anything like that. Can’t imagine to succeed in that mission.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I see. Yeah, if you gotta have to tediously plow through, it feels deeper. And sometimes it actually is.

We had super thick fog this morning. It rolled in extremely quickly, maybe 15 minutes at most. Visibility was below 50 meters. Looked cool from inside.

New leaked US military footage shows fast-moving UFO over Syria
The intriguing new footage was recently revealed by investigative journalists Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp. According to Corbell, the clip - which … ⌘ Read more

Next-gen ‘magnetoplasma’ rocket could get humans to Mars in 30 days
The development of a whole new type of rocket engine could help to open up the solar system for exploration. Boasting greater efficiency and speed tha… ⌘ Read more

Also the short documentary ‘John Was Trying to Contact Aliens’ was really heartfelt and great. Didn’t know the story of John Shepherd yet. Discovered some great music thanks to this short film. Inkl. Harmonia

Recording audio to MiniDiscs like it’s 2001.

When I manage to reproduce the bug that was reported to me ⌘ Read more

NT avocado farm getting closer to reality
A Top End horticulturalist is working on tropical variates of avocado and has agreed to supply a grower with hundreds of trees. ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Found some numbers now, they’re saying it was around 10cm in 3-4 hours. I don’t know, felt like more. 😂 The forecast wasn’t really good either, now that I think about it. They said there’s going to be some snow, okay, fine, but then, boom.

Haha, that old ad is lovely. Those days are over. 🤣

Haven’t watched it to the end yet, but @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org might like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EarBm4tfMXs

TIL that #Processing 4 on Windows now has an installer!

I is not just a zipped folder anymore, I wonder if it will make it harder for people to use it on restricted school labs…

TIL that #Processing4 on Windows now has an installer!

https://processing.org/download

I is not just a zipped folder anymore, I wonder if it will make it harder for people to use it on restricted school labs…

#Processing #CreativeCoding

TIL that #Processing4 on Windows now has an installer!

https://processing.org/download

It is not just a zipped folder anymore, I wonder if it will make it harder for people to use it on restricted school labs…

#Processing #CreativeCoding

When I have to debug code with zero comments written by someone who already left the company ⌘ Read more

** Bicross **
I made a game. I’ve written about it in passing a few times, but here is an honest to goodness intro to it!

Bicross is 3 versions of the same basic game,

• Bicross, is a zen-mode version of the game.
  
• Bicross RPG, is an RPG version of the game where you can earn power ups, and build up hearts and stuff.
  
• Bicross Daily, is very similar to the RPG version, but everyone who plays on a given … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, so just half a millimeter then! :-D That’s plenty these days for everything to shut down, I’m afraid. If only the same élan was still in action as back then:

Image

And here I am watching Mattias Björnström’s gas pedal freezing at full throttle around -40°C. Well, falls apart and gets stuck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLgmV15XeSY

I’m not an expert on this subject at all, but I reckon an automatic in addition with all its sensors is much worse than a manual one. All wheel drive, studded tires and diff locked is what one wants in icy situations. :-D

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I don’t know a number (wait, why can’t I google a Wetterbericht but only a Wettervorhersage?!), but it was enough for public transportation to shut down. 😅 I think I saw around five trucks on the side of the road who couldn’t continue, too icy. Some cars stranded.

My car has an automatic gearbox and I’m not sure if that’s good or bad in such conditions. 😂 Pretty hard to accelerate without spinning wheels …

Would you drink wine from a bottle made from seaweed instead of glass?
The federal government provides $2 million towards developing low-emissions alternatives to glass wine bottles using materials like seaweed and plant sugar. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net (While browsing through that, I noticed that https://mu-lang.dev/ itself doesn’t really mention the source code repo, does it? 🤔 Like, the quickstart guide begins with “Build the host: go build ./cmd/mu”, but where’s the git clone … command? 😅)

I’m not really sure what the goal is. 🤔 Do you want to get pull requests for the docs? Or bug reports for mu itself? 🤔

Well that was a lot of snow. Barely made it home. (Because, of course, today was the day where I went to the office. 🤣)

Trying an experiment. Created a Github repo for mu over at https://github.com/prologic/mu as a social experiment to see if we can maintain a tailored Github docs-only repo of a project, see if it gets any interest 🤔

NASA provides major update on Artemis II manned Moon mission
The launch of the Space Launch System (SLS) had been tentatively scheduled for as soon as next week. Those hoping to see the first crew fly around the… ⌘ Read more

I built Audiofern to make it simple to turn PDFs into audiobooks. Upload a document, get clean, chapterized narration with natural voices, and share it via a hosted player—or download M4A/M4B and keep it forever. Files are private by default, and pricing is transparent: pay once by audio hour or subscribe to build a listening library.

https://audiofern.com

#audiobooks #accessibility #builders

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

Trump rumored to be making alien disclosure speech on July 8th
Whispers of a disclosure speech on the anniversary of the Roswell incident have been doing the rounds online. According to reports, the rumor comes co… ⌘ Read more

When I have to explain for the umpteenth time why we can’t “just add a button” ⌘ Read more

Out-of-control Chinese rocket almost causes UK national emergency
A rocket that had been plummeting to Earth had a chance of falling on the UK and Northern Europe this week. According to reports, the UK government ha… ⌘ Read more

Row in Australia as teachers told to tell kids about dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark
Concerns have been raised in Queensland over instructions to teach Christian school children to doubt science. The teaching of Creationism in schools … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Man I listened to aht first one, what good shit™ 💩 Haha 🤣 Loved it! 😍

Some people are literally allergic to the cold… and it can prove deadly
For an unfortunate few, being cold isn’t simply uncomfortable, it can be a matter of life or death. Adam Taylor: For most people, cold weather is an i… ⌘ Read more

Planet ‘remarkably similar to Earth’ found 146 light-years away
Another potentially habitable world has been discovered thanks to data collected by the Kepler Space Telescope. The discovery of extraterrestrial life… ⌘ Read more

Growers turn to netting to save crops from heatwave sunburn
Sales of netting to protect fruit crops from extreme weather have increased in the past five years as researchers warn heatwaves will continue to impact agriculture. ⌘ Read more

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

Aww man, I need to pick up learning Finnish again. I just love the sound of that language.

Surprisingly, I still understand quite a bit of what she’s saying here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfnt5-7QBvQ

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

I reckon up until then you had to have another first name that clearly differentiated.

Yes, apparently so. (I’m glad we stopped doing that. I don’t get this obsession with the contents of other people’s pants. 🤢)

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

Did this ever happen or was this an urban myth? Would have to dig up some statistics, I guess. (Anecdotal evidence: None of the people I know gave their kids crazy names. 😆)

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

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

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

NASA’s Juno probe has measured the thickness of Europa’s icy crust
The icy Jovian moon has long been a place of interest for scientists due to its subterranean ocean of liquid water. When it comes to finding places wi… ⌘ Read more

When I finally understand what a library function does thanks to my pair ⌘ Read more

When the director walks past me and I pretend to be thinking very seriously ⌘ Read more

Are Australians ready for genetically modified tomatoes? The proof will be in the eating
The purple tomato was altered to make it taste better and boost nutrition. ⌘ Read more

Fell into a bit of a rabbit hole and learned that it took German law until 2008 to actually allow unisex/gender-neutral first names: https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/entscheidungen/rk20081205_1bvr057607.html 🤦

I wonder if my elderly German neighbors have learned enough English by now to understand what I’m swearing about all day long. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net cool! Will test later today. I recommend to keep up with the changes, and make them non-technical user “friendly”.

@klaxzy@klaxzy.net Nope, not IONOS, but we use them a lot at work. To be honest, I consider them one of the better providers (at least regarding the IaaS stuff that we do). 😅

When the sales rep suddenly comes to grab us for a client meeting ⌘ Read more

Encouraging my kids to program as they draw: https://akkartik.name/post/2026-01-28-devlog

The rise of AI psychosis: can AI trigger or exacerbate mental illness?
As more and more of us come to rely on AI in our daily lives, a psychiatrist looks at the potential consequences. Alexandre Hudon: Artificial intellig… ⌘ Read more

Sobering export report for Australian producers as world turns off wine consumption
Global demand for Australian wine is continuing to dwindle, with the latest Wine Australia export report showing an 8 per cent decrease in 2025 as consumers opt for alcohol-free trends. ⌘ Read more

Every single year I complain we should have an independent survey of Python users, not of “Python developers”, as many people who use Python do not identify as professional software developers (https://ciberlandia.pt/@villares/109885982178235703) and the questions in the survey make no sense for them. We should have someone doing serious research designing an unbiased survey, not a software firm like Jetbrains doing market research.
Every year I fail to do something effective about this.

[Reposted publicly with some tweaks]

The Doomsday Clock has moved 4 seconds closer to midnight
The symbolic clock has inched closer than ever to armageddon due to a ‘global failure in leadership’. Maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scienti… ⌘ Read more

When I restart a service and everything goes back to normal ⌘ Read more

When I have to explain the project to someone who just joined ⌘ Read more

I’m struggling with the archive.org #waybackmachine interface… would anyone know if it is possible to do textual search on a single site/domain (over the multiple recorded snapshots and sub-pages)?

I’m struggling with the @internetarchive@internetarchive #waybackmachine interface… would anyone know if it is possible to do textual search on a single site/domain (over the multiple recorded snapshots and sub-pages)?

I’ve got sore muscles. The sticky snow couldn’t be pushed, it had to be laborously cleared shovel by shovel. :-D

In my lunch break, I went on a short stroll. Oh boy, walking through deep damp snow is exhausting! There were sections with easily 30 centimeters and more. Some big wind drifts had piled up. Despite melting off quickly in the 4°C, especially turning the trees brown again, the white landscape still looks so nice. I’m glad these road marking sticks finally came in handy for the snow plow guys. :-) The black and orange stripes are 30 cm high.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-01-26/

That’s probably it. There’s no significant snowfall announced for the rest of the week and temperatures are supposed to stay in the 2-4°C range by day.

Americans in six US states warned about the threat of ‘exploding trees’
A peculiar phenomenon that occurs only during periods of particularly cold weather has been raising eyebrows recently. If you happen to be strolling t… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I was also extremely surprised and couldn’t believe it myself. But around the hair were definitely two, three millimeters of ice with a bunch of snow on top. I couldn’t simply brush it off, the hair were all frozen together. Back in the house, it took maybe three minutes to melt the solidified white stuff and free up and disconnect the individual hair. Crazy.

Yeah, 0°C in town, maybe -2°C on the summit. It definitely didn’t feel all the cold, but I came prepared with a few layers of cloth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

New mission to study the Sun by creating solar eclipses in space
Researchers are attempting a novel new way to study the conditions responsible for solar storms. Nicola Baresi, Huw Morgan and Lucie Green: When a sol… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org (Was that a reference to Abed? 😅)

Has a bit of a long history story behind this, where last year at work we were reading this book called Engineering a Safer World and initially came across a service called Speech Reply that allowed me to upload a PDF copy of the book and start to read it, but unfortunately, the free trial right now before I can finish reading it turns out that Speech Reply service cost a whopping US$30 a month and expected me to pay a full year upfront, which was well over US$300 just for one fucking book! So I sent their sales and support staff a message kindly asking if it were possible to just pay for the audio transcription of just a single book or to change to a monthly subscription fee, to which they refused, so basically in the end I got very angry and told them to go fuck themselves and built my own service. A year later here we are :-)

@prologic@twtxt.net sounds like an excellent project! Looking forward to it.

Illegal tobacco boom exposes the demand problem behind WA’s black market
Much has been made of how the WA government is trying to stop the supply of illegal cigarettes, but its more difficult challenge is what can be done to ease demand. ⌘ Read more

Another project where I’m going to use my terminal widget toolkit is a hex editor. This is still very young, obviously, and there’s a lot of work to do (both in the toolkit and this particular application), but I’m making some progress:

https://movq.de/v/2bae14ed16/vid-1769283187.mp4

Since this program is UTF-8 clean (I hope), you can do things like enter multi-byte UTF-8 sequences or paste them from the system clipboard (another hex editor I just tried failed to do this correctly):

https://movq.de/v/e9241034c1/vid-1769283755.mp4

Under the hood, I’m using mmap() with MAP_PRIVATE, which is really cool: I get the entire file as a byte array, no matter how large it is, no need to actually read it upfront; and MAP_PRIVATE means that I can write to this area however I like without changing the underlying file. The kernel does copy-on-write for me. Only when you hit Save, it will write to the filesystem. And it’s just a couple lines of code. The kernel does all the magic. 🥳

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That’s a long way to walk! 🤯

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

When a coworker who’s about to leave forwards me all their unresolved tickets ⌘ Read more

Bizarre conspiracy theory claims Earth’s gravity will stop for 7 seconds
The idea seems to have stemmed from claims of a leaked NASA document known as ‘Project Anchor’. We’ve heard a lot of ‘out there’ conspiracy theories o… ⌘ Read more

When the client sends me their list of “just 2 or 3 small things to fix” ⌘ Read more

Aussie table grape exports jump nearly 300 per cent amid ‘great’ growing year
A rise in demand is making it feasible for some Australian grapes to be on sale in South-East Asia within 48 hours of being dispatched. ⌘ Read more

Your supermarket apple could be a year old. How is that possible?
Apples only grow for three months of the year — but thanks to an ancient technique, that doesn’t stop us grabbing one from the grocery store year round. ⌘ Read more

Bank of England must prepare for alien disclosure, says senior analyst
Financial institutions are being urged to prepare for a financial collapse triggered by news about alien life. From the outbreak of war to the loss of… ⌘ Read more

My washing machine is making funny noises and I’m this 🤏 close to just throwing it out and washing everything by hand, instead of buying another expensive enshittified product that’s designed to break down in a couple of years.

Washing is easy anyway, the spin cycle to dry that stuff is the important part …

When I’m about to dive into a massive debugging session ⌘ Read more

26-ft-tall prehistoric structures may have been a whole new form of life
Known as Prototaxites, these bizarre organisms had long proven challenging to categorize. If you had gone for a stroll through a swamp around 400 mill… ⌘ Read more

When the request isn’t exactly clear but I still manage to deliver what was expected ⌘ Read more

When I take a closer look at the code of the project I’m about to take over. ⌘ Read more

Egypt’s pyramids were built using an internal lifting system, study suggests
New research has proposed that counterweights and pulley-like mechanisms were used to build the pyramids. The effort and skill needed to construct som… ⌘ Read more

When I try to make my technical point heard during the team meeting. ⌘ Read more

Rogue dolphins that attack boats have their own language, study finds
The discovery is so unexpected that it has been likened to ‘suddenly finding a new [human] language in the middle of Europe’. For several years now, a… ⌘ Read more

When I hear the sales rep commit to a deadline in front of the client ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Only missing roots would trigger that kind of sync IIRC. And that only works if another peering pod has the root twt. What you’re remembering, possibly, is an attempt to do what you were thinking of… But I tried it, turned out to be too expensive of an operation to do auotmatically.

Texas authorities warn of new spike in ‘mystery seed’ deliveries
Someone has been delivering mystery seed packets to Texas residents and it is by no means the first time. It’s a phenomenon that has been ongoing for … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net what has changed? Before anyone replying to a feed would pull it in, no? Am I remembering incorrectly?