@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”:

https://movq.de/v/a24558f83f/s.png

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.

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.

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

I love using #ThonnyIDE, and, on Linux, I can use !pip install, !jupyter lab, and !py5-live-coding mysketch.py on the interactive shell console, I wish this would work on Windows too :(

https://github.com/thonny/thonny/discussions/3736

Okay, I had heard of “River” before but I was not aware of this:

https://codeberg.org/river/river

River defers all window management policy to a separate window manager implementing the river-window-management-v1 protocol. This includes window position/size, pointer/keyboard bindings, focus management, window decorations, desktop shell graphics, and more.

This sounds promising and it follows the old X11 model. River does all the nasty Wayland work and I can make just the WM? 🤔🤯

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Aha! Well, happy hacking. A tiling window manager seems to be good fun. :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s not super comfortable, that’s right.

But these mouse events come with a caveat anyway:

ncurses uses the XM terminfo entry to enable mouse events, but it looks like this entry does not enable motion events for most terminal emulators. Reporting motion events is supported by, say, XTerm, xiate, st, or urxvt, it just isn’t activated by XM. This makes all this dragging stuff useless.

For the moment, I edited the terminfo entry for my terminal to include motion events. That can’t be a proper solution. I’m not sure yet if I’m supposed to send the appropriate sequence manually …

And the terminfo entries for tmux or screen don’t include XM at all. tmux itself supports the mouse, but I’m not sure yet how to make it pass on the events to the programs running inside of it (maybe that’s just not supported).

To make things worse, on the Linux VT (outside of X11 or Wayland), the whole thing works differently: You have to use good old gpm to get mouse events (gpm has been around forever, I already used this on SuSE Linux). ncurses does support this, but this is a build flag and Arch Linux doesn’t set this flag. So, at the moment, I’m running a custom build of ncurses as a quick hack. 😅 And this doesn’t report motion events either! Just clicks. (I don’t know if gpm itself can report motion events, I never used the library directly.)

tl;dr: The whole thing will probably be “keyboard first” and then the mouse stuff is a gimmick on top. As much as I’d like to, this isn’t going to be like TUI applications on DOS. I’ll use “Windows” for popups or a multi-window view (with the “WindowManager” being a tiny little tiling WM).

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, I see. Unfortunately, there seems to be no box drawing character for a corner with a diagonal line. Indeed, this is probably the best you can do.

Is the single character enough to hit it comfortably with the mouse, though? Maybe one additional to the left and above could be something to think about. Not sure. Of course this complicates it a bit more. Personally, I like fullscreen windows, so I’m definitely the wrong guy to judge this or even comment on. :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ah, the lower right corner is different on purpose: It’s where you can click and drag to resize the window. https://movq.de/v/cbfc575ca6/vid-1767977198.mp4 Not sure how to make this easier to recognize. 🤔 (It’s the only corner where you can drag, btw.)

@bender@twtxt.net Seriously, if I ever get a CRT monitor again, I want it to be an amber one and then hook it up to some 8086. 😅 Only problem is that this stuff is expensive as hell now …

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Very nice, it’s coming together!

Just in case you haven’t already noticed it, the right lower corner of the window in front was not updated when it received the focus. 8-) (In tt I also render focused text input fields with a doubly lined border, where unfocused ones have a single one.)

(The background and the window shadow are not amber and it wouldn’t have looked like that on a real monitor, unless you cranked up the brightness way too high.)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think they are Windows users, going by the lack of attention to detail, and the fact they love DFS. Ha!

On my way to having windows and mouse support:

https://movq.de/v/95bbbbd3e8/basic-windows.mp4

It would be cool to have something like Turbo Vision eventually.

(I considered just using Turbo Vision, but it’s a C++ library and that’s not quite what I’m looking for. But it’s not yet completely off the table.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I haven’t spoken to a single person yet who was a fan of all this. Not even the more conservative family members.

Some people have detonated several really loud bombs yesterday. This wasn’t a “Böller”. It shook my walls, doors, windows. Family members in other parts of the country reported the same … Is this a new trend?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m toying with the idea of making a widget/window system on top of Python’s ncurses. I’ve never really been happy with the existing ones (like urwid, textual, pytermgui, …). I mean, they’re not horrible, it’s mostly the performance that’s bugging me – I don’t want to wait an entire second for a terminal program to start up.

Not sure if I’ll actually see it through, though. Unicode makes this kind of thing extremely hard. 🫤

@zotero@zotero I noticed that some combinations of XFCE appearance (light) themes and Zotero made the menu “disappear” (black on black) as the window title was dark. Changing the Zotero to a dark theme or changing the XFCE theme worked (but then, I liked the dark window title on a light theme best…). Should I try to open an issue about this, or is it a XFCE issue? I don’t want to burden the maintainers but it was a bit disturbing not to find the menus…

#FediAjuda #AjudaMastodon meu irmão precisa comprar um computador, ele precisa navegar e rodar alguns programas de desenho, tipo inkscape. Ele sabe um pouco de SketchUp, e não sei se consigo tirar ele do Windows :((

Estamos no Brasil, alguma sugestão/dica perto de 2mil reais parcelados? Da Suponho que tela de 15”, i3 e SSD seja o mínimo?

I just noticed this pattern:

uninformativ.de 201.218.xxx.xxx - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:27 +0100] "GET /projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 301 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
www.uninformativ.de 103.10.xxx.xxx  - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:28 +0100] "GET http://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 400 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

Let me add some spaces to make it more clear:

    uninformativ.de 201.218.xxx.xxx - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:27 +0100] "GET                       /projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 301 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
www.uninformativ.de 103.10.xxx.xxx  - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:28 +0100] "GET http://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 400 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

Some IP (from Brazil) requests some (non-existing, completely broken) URL from my webserver. But they use the hostname uninformativ.de, so they get redirected to www.uninformativ.de.

In the next step, just a second later, some other IP (from Nepal) issues an HTTP proxy request for the same URL.

Clearly, someone has no idea how HTTP redirects work. And clearly, they’re running their broken code on some kind of botnet all over the world.

Windows at work, always a fresh inconvenience:

C:\>python -m pip install ipython
Requirement already satisfied: ipython in c:\users\[...]

C:\>ipython
'ipython' is not recognized [...]

#ipython #windows #python

@prologic@twtxt.net Hm, same startup delay. (Go is not an option for me anyway.)

It’s hard to tell why all this is so slow. Maybe in this particular case it has something to do with fonts: strace shows the program loading the fontconfig configs several times, and that takes up a bulk of the startup time. 🤔 (Qt6 or Java don’t do that, but they’re still slow to start up – for other reasons, apparently.)

To be fair, it’s “just” the initial program startup (with warm I/O caches). Once it’s running, it’s fine. All toolkits I’ve tried are. But I don’t want to accept such delays, not in the year 2025. 😅 Imagine every terminal window needing half a second to appear on the screen … nah, man.

Be it Java with Swing or PyQt6, it takes ~300 ms until a basic window with a treeview and a listbox appears. That is a very noticeable delay.

Is it unrealistic to expect faster startup times these days? 🤔

Once the program is running, a new second window (in the same process) appears very quickly. So it’s all just the initialization stuff that takes so long. I could, of course, do what “fat” programs have done for ages: Pre-launch the process during boot, windowless. But I was hoping that this wasn’t needed. 😞 (And it’s a bad model anyway. When the main process crashes, all windows crash with it.)

Digital Forensics — Windows USB Artifacts [Insider Threat Case] ⌘ Read more

** Timber **

Image

Timber, I’m not gonna lie, I kinda hated you. At the same time I am surprised to find how gutted I am now … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, you have to manually move each card one by one. That’s annoying. Haha, I remember the old Windows Solitair animation. :-)

Design trends I think will take off in 2026
but tierlist

S - move from flat design to more detailed, 3D, more complex logos.

A - glass, not just liquid, Windows Vista, 7, 11,… accessibility concerns, but I like to see it.

B-/C+ - black and white icons, favicons. I did it before it was cool, but it’s getting overused.

E - gradientslop, barely started, already all blends together.

@zvava@twtxt.net Late happy birthday! :-)

Cool, your website indeed mostly works even in w3m and ELinks. Sending notifications in the about page is out of question, since it requires JS. Apart from that, this is very good, keep it up!

Not sure how I can get the deskop look and feel working in Firefox, but since I’m a tiling window manager user, I prefer linear webpages anyway. :-)

Magpie with nut photographed through a dirty window: https://lyse.isobeef.org/elster-2025-11-01/

HTB Academy: Windows Fundamentals ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Uh, that actually looks not that terrible. Somehow, I remember Swing GUIs being way uglier.

As for Visual Basic, I only had to use VBA once in my life. That was in the beginning of my career when I inherited a project from a leaving coworker. Fuck me, was that awful. Just alone the damn compiler error dialog box popping up in my face all the time while editing and the compiler already trying to parse the unfinished and hence of course uncompilable code. Boy, that left a lasting impression on me. I ported everything to Java very quickly. Luckily, the code base wasn’t all that large at that point in time. I had to add a bunch of new features after that, so I was very glad that I convinced my workmate/project manager to do that first. We didn’t even need a GUI, the button in Excel was transformed to a command line program that just generated the large file.

But I cannot comment on the VB GUI designer, I never used that. Your screenshot looks very similar to the Delphi one, though. Only towards the end of my Delphi days I found out about the possibility to make the widgets snap to window edges and corners (I don’t remember how that was called), so that resizing the windows was actually possible without messing up their entire contents.

Switching to Linux, Delphi wasn’t an option anymore. For some reason I couldn’t use Kylix. Maybe it was already dead by the time I changed OSes. Or I couldn’t get it to run. I just don’t remember. I just recall that the unavailability of Delphi was the reason it took me a while to actually settle on Linux. I then fully switched to Java. The GridBagLayout was my absolutely favorite Swing layout manager. I reckon I used it 98% of the time, because it was so powerful and made the windows resize properly, just as I had learned to do in Delphi shortly before.

Up until discovering Swing, I used Java’s AWT for a short amount of time. That was very limited I think and I hit the limits fairly quickly. Later at uni, we had one project making use of SWT. Didn’t convince me either. I could be wrong, but I think there was also a SWT GUI designer plugin for Eclipse. If there really was, that one wasn’t in the same street as Delphi’s (there must be a reason I forgot about it ;-)).

A mate just sent me Microsoft’s magnificent master piece diagram regarding the end of life of Windows 10: https://support.microsoft.com/de-de/windows/windows-10-support-wurde-am-14-oktober-2025-eingestellt-2ca8b313-1946-43d3-b55c-2b95b107f281

That’s what you get for training with zalgo. :-D Of course, this isn’t even proper German.

In case they fix it, here’s a screenshot of the enlarged frontal crash: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/win10eol.png

We had some gray soup with the occasional fine rain with strong wind gusts. Despite the bad forecast we took the train to Geislingen/Steige and strolled up to the Helfenstein castle ruin. All the colorful leaves were so beautiful, it didn’t matter that the sun was behind thick layers of clouds.

We then continued to the Ödenturm (lit. boring tower). By then the wind had picked up by quite a bit, just as the weatherman predicted. We were very positively surprised that the Swabian Jura Association had opened up the tower. Between May and October, the tower is typically only manned on Sundays and holidays between 10 and 17 o’clock. But yesterday was Saturday and no holiday. The lovely lady up there told us that they’re currently experimenting with opening up on Saturday, too, because there are some highly motivated members responsible for the tower.

We were the very first visitors on that day. Last Sunday, when the weather lived up to the weekday’s name, they counted 128 people up in the tower. Very impressive.

The wind gusts were howling around the tower. Luckily, there are glass windows. So, it was quite pleasant up in the tower room. Chatting with the tower guard for a while, we got even luckier: the sun came out! That was really awesome. The photos don’t do justice. As always, it looked way more stunning in person.

Thanks to all the volunteers who make it possible to enjoy the view from the thirty odd meters up there. That certainly made our day!

After signing the guestbook we climbed down the staircase and returned to the station and headed back. The train even arrived on time. What a great little trip!

https://lyse.isobeef.org/wanderung-auf-die-burgruine-helfenstein-und-den-oedenturm-2025-10-25/

Beyond the Shell: Advanced Enumeration and Privilege Escalation for OSCP (Part 3)

Image

Part 3 reveals the high-value Windows PrivEsc methods that defeat rabbit holes. Master file transfer, service … ⌘ Read more

Everything in the realm of “smartphones” is such an incomprehensible clusterfuck. I want to throw this thing out the window.

And this fucking WhatsApp … jfc.

Debugging a Go runtime crash: the one-instruction window
Comments ⌘ Read more

The critical window of shadow libraries (2024)
Comments ⌘ Read more

Linux Sucks 2025 is coming.
“Linux Sucks: Windows 10 End of Life Edition” will be live streamed on October 14th, 2025. ⌘ Read more

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 9, 2025
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Kernel Rust features; systemd v258, part 2; Cauldron kernel hackers; BPF for GNU tools; 6.18 merge window, part 1; Lifetime-end pointer zapping; Robot Operating System.

• Briefs: OpenSSH 10.1; Firefox profiles; Python 3.14; U-Boot v2025.10; FSF presidency; Quotes; …

• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security upda … ⌘ Read more

Who needs git when you have 1M context windows?
Comments ⌘ Read more

windows gvim users, TitleBar may be styled now ⌘ Read more

Cars left with bullet holes, windows smashed after dramatic arrest in Sydney
A major police operation has taken place in Sydney’s south-west after tactical operations officers conducted a “high risk” arrest on a suburban street. ⌘ Read more

Publisher of famous Soviet newspaper Pravda falls to his death from a seventh-floor window ⌘ Read more

[$] 6.18 merge window, part 1
At the time of writing, there have been 9,099 commits in the 6.18 merge window,
8,475 non-merges and 624 merges. The
changes so far include core-kernel, graphics, and networking work, among others.
There are no big surprises, but several items that were discussed at this year’s
LFSMM+BPF Summit have now been merged. ⌘ Read more

(g+) Schon altes Eisen?: Ältere Hardware mit Linux Mint weiternutzen
Der von Microsoft erzwungene Umstieg auf Windows 11 sorgt dafür, dass an sich noch brauchbare Hardware nicht mehr nutzbar ist. Mit Linux Mint lassen sich entsprechende PCs aber bequem weiterverwenden. Eine Anleitung von Martin Loschwitz ( Linux Mint, Storage) ![](https://cpx.golem.de/cpx.php?class=17&aid=19923 … ⌘ Read more

All good things come to an end, I guess.

I have an Epson printer (AcuLaser C1100) and an Epson scanner (Perfection V10), both of which I bought about 20 years ago. The hardware still works perfectly fine.

Until recently, Epson still provided Linux drivers for them. That is pretty cool! I noticed today that they have relaunched their driver website – and now I can’t find any Linux drivers for that hardware anymore. Just doesn’t list it (it does list some drivers for Windows 7, for example).

I mean, okay, we’re talking about 20 years here. That is a very long time, much more than I expected. But if it still works, why not keep using it?

Some years ago, I started archiving these drivers locally, because I anticipated that they might vanish at some point. So I can still use my hardware for now (even if I had to reinstall my PC for some reason). It might get hacky at some point in the future, though.

This once more underlines the importance of FOSS drivers for your hardware. I sadly didn’t pay attention to that 20 years ago.

L.I.S.A.’s Universe Window Discoveries are Beyond Expectation ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Nice! And I didn’t look out the window at all. Was watching eels. 😂

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

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.

Interactive demo of #shapely’s centroid for the triangle :)

import py5
from shapely import Polygon, Point

def setup():
    py5.size(400, 400)
    py5.stroke_join(py5.ROUND)
    
def draw():
    py5.background(200)
    pts = ((100, 100), (300, 100),
           (py5.mouse_x, py5.mouse_y))
    xs, ys = zip(*pts)
    cx = sum(xs) / len(xs)
    cy = sum(ys) / len(ys)
    tri = Polygon(pts)
    py5.no_fill()
    py5.stroke_weight(1)
    py5.stroke(0, 200, 0)
    py5.shape(Point(cx, cy).buffer(5))
    py5.stroke(0, 0, 200)
    py5.shape(tri.envelope.buffer(2))
    py5.shape(tri.envelope.centroid.buffer(5))
    py5.stroke_weight(3)
    py5.stroke(0)
    py5.shape(tri)
    py5.fill(0)
    py5.shape(tri.centroid.buffer(2))

py5.run_sketch(block=False)

#py5 #python #creativeCoding

Video

I have a #CreativeCoding course at Domestika, teaching the first steps of #Python and #py5. The feedback from students always makes me happy!

Check out this work by a student:

https://www.domestika.org/en/projects/1841169-programacion?ttag=a_b_a_villares

And other testimonials:

https://www.domestika.org/en/courses/4307-designing-with-python-programming-for-a-visual-context?ttag=a_b_a_villares

Image

Image

I have a #CreativeCoding course at Domestika, teaching the first steps of #Python and #py5. The feedback from students always makes me happy!

Check out this work by a student:

https://www.domestika.org/en/projects/1841169-programacion?ttag=a_b_a_villares

And other testimonials:

https://www.domestika.org/en/courses/4307-designing-with-python-programming-for-a-visual-context?ttag=a_b_a_villares

Image

Image

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

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz If you’re willing to ignore that it’s proprietary software, then Windows used to be pretty good. Like, 25 years ago. After Windows 2000 (or maybe XP) it went downhill fast. Kind of makes me sad, actually. 😂

i’m helping someone get a reverse proxy going on windows and my god this operating system is dogshit

I wasn’t really aware until recently that programs can’t choose their own window’s position on Wayland. This is very weird to me, because this was not an issue on X11 to begin with: X11 programs can request a certain position and size, but the X11 WM ultimately decides if that request is being honored or not. And users can configure that.

But apparently, this whole thing is a heated debate in the Wayland world. 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org “Advanced”, well, probably more “mature”. There aren’t a ton of crazy features and that icon thing is the largest code addition in the last 10 years. %)

Speaking of OS/2 … I just realized that Windows 3.x didn’t have icons, either. If I’m not mistaken, this only got added in Windows 95. In other words, OS/2 had this feature before Windows did, because at least OS/2 2.1 from 1993 had icons. Who would have thunk.

(Now I kind of want to know which system really introduced this feature.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, huh, maybe it was just my GNOME 2 themes back then that didn’t show the icon. 🤔

I like the looks of your window manager. That’s using Wayland, right?

Oh, no. It’s still X11. All my recent Wayland comments resulted from me trying to switch, but I think it’s still too early. Being unable to use QEMU (because it can’t capture the mouse pointer) is a pretty big blocker for me. This is completely broken, it just happens to be unnoticeable with modern guest OSes, so it’s probably not a priority for devs.

(Not to mention that I would have to fork and substantially extend dwl in order to “replicate” my X11 WM. And then, after having done that, I’d have to follow upstream Wayland development, for which I don’t have the resources. Things would need to slow down before I can do that.)

all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1

Heh. I’ve been using tiling WMs for ~15 years now, so it’s actually kind of refreshing to see something different for a change. 😅

Probably close to the older Windowses.

That particular theme is a ripoff of OS/2 Warp 3: https://movq.de/v/6c2a948882/s.png 😅

We ran some similar brownish color scheme (don’t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98

Oh god. Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of those, either. 🥴

@movq@www.uninformativ.de According to this screenshot, KDE still shows good old application icons: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/KDE_Plasma_5.21_Breeze_Twilight_screenshot.png

And GNOME used to have them, too: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Gnome-2-22_%284%29.png

I like the looks of your window manager. That’s using Wayland, right? The only thing on this screenshot to critique is all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1 At least the file browser. 8-)

This drives me nuts when my workmates share their screens. I really don’t get it how people can work like that. You can’t even read the whole line in the IDE or log viewer with all the expanded side bars. And then there’s 200 pixels on the left and another 300 pixels on the right where the desktop wallpaper shows. Gnaa! There’s the other extreme end when somebody shares their ultra wide screen and I just have a “regularish” 16:10 monitor and don’t see shit, because it’s resized way too tiny to fit my width. Good times. :-D

Sorry for going off on a tangent here. :-) Back to your WM: It has the right mix of being subtle and still similar to motif. Probably close to the older Windowses. My memory doesn’t serve me well, but I think they actually got it fairly good in my opinion. Your purple active window title looks killer. It just fits so well. This brown one (https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-07-22/0/leafpads.png) gives me also classic vibes. Awww. We ran some similar brownish color scheme (don’t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98 for some time on the family computer. I remember other people visting us not liking these colors. :-D

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

https://movq.de/v/0e4af6fea1/s.png

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

https://www.uninformativ.de/desktop/2007%2D05%2D25%2D%2Dgnome2%2Dlaptop.png

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

Anyway, my draft is making progress:

https://movq.de/v/5b7767f245/s.png

I do like this look. 😊

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

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

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

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

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

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

We would probably call this an “integer” today.

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

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

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

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

Nope.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was drafting support for showing “application icons” in my window manager, i.e. the Firefox icon in the titlebar:

https://movq.de/v/0034cc1384/s.png

Then I realized: Wait a minute, lots of applications don’t set an icon? And lots of other window managers don’t show these icons, either? Openbox, pekwm, Xfce, fvwm, no icons.

Looks like macOS doesn’t show them, either?!

Has this grown out of fashion? Is this purely a Windows / OS/2 thing?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I fully agree with you on https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-07-22/0/POSTING-en.html!

Although, in the first screenshot, the window title background is much darker in the new version than the old one!1!1 :-P Kidding aside, the contrast in the old one is still better.

Also, note the missing underlines for the Alt hotkeys now. I just think that the underline in the old one is too thick.

Since Wayland compositors handle input devices on a lower level than X11 window managers, every compositor has to figure out on their own what a “mouse wheel click” is:

• https://github.com/labwc/labwc/issues/1068
  
• https://github.com/labwc/labwc/pull/2933
  

(I think “Wayland compositor” is a misnomer. They are full-blown display servers that also do compositing, plus Wayland window management, plus X11 window management.)

One can only hope that all this eventually gets moved into the wlroots library. (I’m not sure if that’s possible, nor if people would want that.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apparently, there is no consensus.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, this really could use a proper definition or a “manifest”. 😅 Many of these ideas are not very wide spread. And I haven’t come across similar projects in all these years.

Let’s take the farbfeld image format as an example again. I think this captures the “spirit” quite well, because this isn’t even about code.

This is the entire farbfeld spec:

farbfeld is a lossless image format which is easy to parse, pipe and compress. It has the following format:

╔════════╤═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Bytes  │ Description                                             ║
╠════════╪═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ 8      │ "farbfeld" magic value                                  ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (width)                      ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (height)                     ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ [2222] │ 4x16-Bit BE unsigned integers [RGBA] / pixel, row-major ║
╚════════╧═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

The RGB-data should be sRGB for best interoperability and not alpha-premultiplied.

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

I think these are some of the properties worth mentioning:

• The spec is extremely short. You can read this in under a minute and fully understand it. That alone is gold.
  
• There are no “knobs”: It’s just a single version, it’s not like there’s also an 8-bit color depth version and one for 16-bit and one for extra large images and one that supports layers and so on. This makes it much easier to implement a fully compliant program.
  
• Despite being so simple, it’s useful. I’ve used it in various programs, like my window manager, my status bars, some toy programs like “tuxeyes” (an Xeyes variant), or Advent of Code.
  
• The format does not include compression because it doesn’t need to. Just use something like bzip2 to get file sizes similar to PNG.
  
• It doesn’t cover every use case under the sun, but it does cover the most important ones (imho). They have discussed using something other than RGBA and decided it’s not worth the trouble.
  
• They refrained from adding extra baggage like metadata. It would have needlessly complicated things.

Yesterday’s moon through the window: https://lyse.isobeef.org/mond-2025-07-06/

Image

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

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

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

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

Someone did a thing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Gopher:// exist a lot bunch solutions for Windows, stop raping Internet Explorer :)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org as long as i get to see silly little tux sliding around in a silly game older than me it’s ok even if i committed windows/wine crimes to see it <33

Speaking of Wine, Arch Linux completely fucked up Wine for me with the latest update.

• 16-bit support is gone.
  
• Performance of 3D games is horrible and unplayable.
  

Arch is shipping a WoW64 build now, which is not yet ready for prime time.

And then I realized that there’s actually only one stable Wine release per year but Arch has been shipping development releases all the time. That’s quite unusual. I’m used to Arch only shipping stable packages … huh.

Hopefully things will improve again. I’m not eager to build Wine from source. I’d rather ditch it and resort to my real Windows XP box for the little (retro)gaming that I do … 🫤

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz UPDATE: getting it to run natively through a VM and other means all failed! so i did the cursed thing and tried the windows installer in wine…..

GUESS WHAT WORKED

Of Pointlessware and CEOs
Had a moment, to check up on some of the companies, I stopped following, get to The Browser Company and see their newest product - it’s just Chrome, with an AI chat window pop-up and that’s it. Something Canary Chrome, come with already.
I see Theo from T3.gg, making fun of it on YouTube and promoting “his” product - an AI chat app, where you can choose from multiple models, by all the popular AI companies. Something I already have a worse version of, at work and I don’t even use it.
There’s also an interview, about the future of virtual keyboards, surely this is at least actually a real thing and not more pointless horse shit. I check the website of the keyboard SDK, and it’s around 20 identical apps, that just copy the same keyboard SDK/api and slap chatgpt features on top - in the App Store, these are surrounded by chatgpt clones, that just feed the users prompts, into the real thing and put ads, next to the answers.

FAA: US-Flugbehörde will von Windows 95 und Disketten wegkommen
Aktuell nutzen Flughäfen in den USA Technik von vor dreißig Jahren. Außerdem fehlt Fachpersonal. Mehr Geld soll das ändern. ( Flugzeug, Windows 95)

Image

Windows: Skript schließt Lücke durch gelöschten Inetpub-Ordner
Viele Windows-Nutzer haben den zum April-Patchday erzeugten Inetpub-Ordner gelöscht, obwohl er Teil eines wichtigen Patches ist. Ein Skript korrigiert das. ( Sicherheitslücke, Microsoft)

Image

[$] The second half of the 6.16 merge window
The 6.16 merge window
closed on June 8, as
expected, containing 12,899 non-merge commits. This is
slightly more than the 6.15 merge window, but well in line with expectations.
7,353 of those were merged after
the summary of the first half of the merge\
window was written. More detailed statistics can be found in
[the LWN kernel source database](https://lwn … ⌘ Read more

iPadOS 26 with Multitasking Improvements, Menubar, & New Liquid Glass UI
Apple has debuted iPadOS 26 today, complete with some notable new features and changes to the iPad operating system. First to notice is the new numerical versioning system, with iPadOS 26 jumping many version numbers ahead of the current iPadOS 18 version, following a numerical system much like Microsoft used to use for Windows (remember … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2025/06/09/ipado … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Surface Pro 12 im Test: Kopf-an-Kopf-Rennen mit dem iPad
Endlich mal wieder ein gutes Windows-Tablet: Das Surface Pro 12 ist ausdauernd und gerade produktiv teils deutlich besser als ein iPad. Ein Test von Oliver Nickel ( Surface, Test)

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Kernel prepatch 6.16-rc1
Linus has released 6.16-rc1 and closed the
merge window for this release.

I think we had a fairly normal merge window, although I did get the
feeling that there were a few more “late straggler” pull requests
than usual. Not to a huge degree, but there was definitely an
upward bump at the end of the second week.

But on the whole, all the stats look pretty normal. ⌘ Read more

Run Classic MacOS & NeXTSTEP in Your Web Browser
If you’ve been a reader of OSXDaily for a while you almost certainly have seen us mention some of the fun web apps that allow you to run full fledged versions of operating systems in your web browser, from Mac OS 9, Mac OS 8, or Mac OS 7, to even Windows 1.0. Many of … Read More ⌘ Read more

Windows: Designproblem erlaubt Aushebeln von Gruppenrichtlinien
In Windows schlummert ein Designproblem, das es normalen Nutzern und Malware erlaubt, von Admins gesetzte Gruppenrichtlinien außer Kraft zu setzen. Ein Bericht von Günter Born ( Windows, Microsoft)

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Run Classic MacOS & NeXTSTEP in Your Web Browser
If you’ve been a reader of OSXDaily for a while you almost certainly have seen us mention some of the fun web apps that allow you to run full fledged versions of operating systems in your web browser, from Mac OS 9, Mac OS 8, or Mac OS 7, to even Windows 1.0. Many of … Read More ⌘ Read more

SuSE Linux 6.4 and Arachne on DOS also work (with Windows 2000 as a call target):

• https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-05-31/0/POSTING-en.html#suse-linux-64
  
• https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-05-31/0/POSTING-en.html#arachne-on-dos

Atomic Red Team Setup on Windows for ATT&CK-Based Adversary Simulation ⌘ Read more

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for June 5, 2025
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: OpenH264 in Fedora; Wallabag; Safety certification; 6.16 Merge window; Bounce buffering; Hardening repository problems; Device-initiated I/O; Faster networking; OSPM 2025; Free software in science.

• Briefs: Kea vulnerabilities; Alpine Linux 3.22.0; Fedora strategy; Quotes; …

• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, securi … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Edit: Windows bekommt Editor für die Kommandozeile
Microsoft entwickelt mit Edit einen eigenen Texteditor fürs Terminal. Das erinnert an Vim und Nano in Linux. ( Powershell, Windows)

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Windows: Microsoft entfernt aufdringliches Verhalten von Edge für EU
Künftig sollen Standard-Browser auch wirklich zum Standard für weit mehr Dateitypen werden. Zudem können sie Edge für PDFs leicht wechseln. ( Windows 11, Microsoft)

Image

Windows 11: Microsoft fordert einheitliche USB-Ports bei Windows-Laptops
Kunden sollen sicher sein können, dass sie bei allen USB-C-Buchsen ihres Windows-PCs alle Features verlässlich nutzen können. ( PC & Notebooks, Notebook)

Image

[$] Hardening fixes lead to hard questions
Kees Cook’s “hardening\
fixes” pull request for the 6.16 merge window looked like a
straightforward exercise; it only contained four commits. So just about
everybody was surprised when it resulted in Cook being temporarily blocked
from his kernel.org account among fears of malicious activity. When the
dust settled, though, the red alert was canceled. It turns out,
surprisingly, that Git is a tool with which one can inflict substantial … ⌘ Read more

Prisoner at large after fleeing prison farm on red tractor
A 43-year-old serving a sentence of more than six years is believed to have left the Lotus Glen low security prison farm, west of Cairns, on a red tractor during a 90-minute window on Sunday. ⌘ Read more

[$] The first half of the 6.16 merge window
As of this writing, 5,546 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline
kernel repository for the 6.16 release. This is a bit less than half of the
total commits for 6.15, so the merge window is well on its way. Read on for our
summary of the first half of the 6.16 merge window. ⌘ Read more

Bypassing Windows Defender & AVs with an LNK Exploit to Gain a Reverse Shell ⌘ Read more

Maybe you’ll enjoy this as well:

I still have one of my first modems, a Creatix LC 144 VF:

Image

I think this was the modem that I used when I first connected to the internet, but I’m not sure.

I plugged it in again and it still works:

Image

Image

The firmware appears to be from 1994, which sounds about right. I don’t think we had internet access before that. We certainly did use local mailboxes, though. (Or BBS’s, as you might call them.)

I now want to actually use that modem again. For the moment, I can only use a phone to dial into it, I lack a second modem to actually establish a connection. Here’s a video:

Image

Not spectacular, but the modem does answer after me entering ATA.

I bought another cheap old modem on eBay and am now waiting for it to arrive. Once it’s here, I want to simulate an actual dial-up session, hopefully from OS/2 or Windows 3.x.

Change window remapping ⌘ Read more