QOTD: What’s your favorite technological advancement in the last ~10 years? 🤔

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Exactly! 😂

It’s not what I meant (I was referring to the motor of the desk making a whirring sound 😂), but now I’m reminded of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sKppwrLBY8

What the heck is going on here today, so many messages. 😂

Regarding complexity budget, slow software, all that:

Very few people do take pride in building simple, elegant, high-quality systems, do they? Why is that? Why are huge shiny things with tons of features more attractive? 🤔

I never explicitly thought about this, to be honest. It was only at the back of my head. And I never tried to teach our younger “students” at work: “Hey, it’s a great achievement to build something simple and elegant. That’s something to be proud of!”

Worse, simple software is often described as “boring”. Yes, in a way, it is boring, because your brain doesn’t have to get into overdrive to understand it. But that’s exactly the point. And it’s hard to achieve that! Simple software isn’t just “fewer lines of code”, you have to be pretty clever to solve a problem in a simple and elegant way. So it’s something to be proud of.

Could this be an intuitive, emotional way to get more people on board the “simple software”-train? 🤔

The “Matrix Experiment”, i.e. running a Matrix server for our family, has failed completely and miserably. People don’t accept it. They attribute unrelated things to it, like “I can’t send messages to you, I don’t reach you! It doesn’t work!” Yes, you do, I get those messages, I just don’t reply quickly enough because I’m at work or simply doing something else.

I’ll probably shut it down.

Nobody cares about privacy. The reasons I bring up in discussions are “too nerdy”. They put all their stuff to Google or Apple, so why would messaging be any different? (We’re not even using all those Matrix crypto stuff … That would be insane.)

It’s a lost cause. I’m frustrated.

Will I give in and use WhatsApp instead? Not sure yet.

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm, yeah, hmm, I’m not sure. 😅 It all appears very subjective to me. Is 2k lines of code a lot or not?

I mean, I’m all for reducing complexity. 😅 I just have a hard time defining it and arguing about it. What I call “too complex”, others might think of as “just fine”. 🤔

Even if it might sound a bit overdramatic: Having a “mostly working” dwl Wayland setup now is a huge relief. 😅 It’s quite the weight off my shoulders.

There are still lots of items on my TODO list, but if X.Org were to die tomorrow, I wouldn’t be completely screwed. Only, like, 30% screwed.

Speaking of “AI” … I guess I gotta find out soon how to disable/sabotage Microsoft’s “Recall”, before this garbage takes over the family computers. 😩

(There’s no way the people in question will switch operating systems. I’ve tried, countless times.)

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com I think that’s the correct URL: https://staystrong.run/user/bmallred/twtxt.txt

QOTD: Which web search engine do you use? 😂

Anyone got a link to a robots.txt that “blocks” all the “AI” stuff?

Thinking about disabling the two extra buttons for “forward” and “backward” on my mouse, because today’s websites don’t support this anymore, and it’d safe me the constant moments of “oh for fuck’s sake”. 🙄

Another thing that doesn’t work anymore after blocking network traffic from my Android phone: Some push notifications.

I run a Matrix server for our family. I use “FluffyChat” on my phone. Traffic from the phone to my Matrix server is allowed and chatting in FluffyChat works.

But I don’t get any notifications anymore on new messages.

So, what’s going on here? Does FluffyChat, which only really needs to talk to my own server, rely on some cloud service for notifications? Seriously? 🤔 How does that work, does this cloud service see all my notifications or what?

Anyone around who did app development on Android? Can you shed some light on this?

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com That’s the trick, yep. 👍 I have something like this in my .vimrc:

au BufRead,BufNewFile jenny-posting.eml setl fo-=t wrap

Is this “flat UI” madness ever going to end? I’m beginning to lose hope.

@bender@twtxt.net To quote from the german version of ISO 27001:

Änderungen an Informationsverarbeitungseinrichtungen und Informationssystemen sollten Gegenstand von Änderungsmanagementverfahren sein.

Fuck off, you cunts. 🤣🖕

If you’re using jenny on Python 3.12, it will spit out a deprecation warning regarding datetime.utcnow(). This will be fixed in the next release.

@johanbove@johanbove.info Is there any reason to use this program? I can’t remember when I last had it installed, must have been early 2000’s.

Hey @sorenpeter@darch.dk, I’m sorry to tell you, but the prev field in your feed’s headers is invalid. 😅

First, it doesn’t include the hash of the last twt in the archive. Second, and that’s probably more important, it forms an infinite loop: The prev field of your main feed specifies http://darch.dk/twtxt-archive.txt and that file then again specifies http://darch.dk/twtxt-archive.txt. Some clients might choke on this, mine for example. 😂 I’ll push a fix soon, though.

For reference, the prev field is described here: https://dev.twtxt.net/doc/archivefeedsextension.html

Let’s not forget that this gem exists: Primus - Mr. Krinkle 🐷🎶 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOdo7dhvSwg

#NowPlaying

More basement:

I completely forgot that DVD-RAM was a thing once. Found my old disks and they still work. 🤯 The data on them is from 2008, so they’re not that old. Still impressive.

The disks are two-sided. On the photo, that particular side of the disk on the left appears to be completely unused. 🤔

And then I read on Wikipedia that DVD-RAMs aren’t produced anymore at all today. Huh.

(I refuse to tag this as “retrocomputing”. Read/write DVDs that you can use just like a harddisk, thanks to UDF, are still “new and fancy” in my book. 😂)

I’m this close to making an Android app for managing a shopping list.

I just accidentally deleted the wrong list in the app that I’m currently using, and now there’s no way to get it back. Recreating it is a major pain, because typing on a phone sucks ass. Fuck.

Maybe I should just go back to using pen and paper …

Not making THREADING the default view of e-mail clients and thus teaching users that e-mail is “chaotic” (if you get a lot of mail, it becomes unusable without threading) and “needs” full quoting all the time was one of the worst mistakes ever.

@prologic@twtxt.net High five, I’m “generation Java” as well! 😂 There were some leftovers of C++, we used that in the computer graphics courses in Uni a lot. But pretty much anything else that involved programming was Java.

(There was nothing even remotely resembling CS in our “high school”. That school neither had the required teachers nor the equipment / PCs.)

I finally found the NASM assembler.

https://nasm.us/index.php

I had heard that name before, many times, but somehow never looked into it. Weird. 🤨🤔

This is the kind of program I was looking for.

1. It is free software. Especially in the DOS ecosystem, free/libre software is a very scarce resource.
   
2. It’s a small command line program, not a huge behemoth.
   
3. Documentation appears to be well written.
   
4. It can even cross-compile DOS binaries from Linux.

I noticed that some of my software projects have a rather long lifetime, so I made a little graph:

https://www.uninformativ.de/git/timeline.png

@xuu@txt.sour.is That was one of the horror puzzles where I had to look for help. 🥴 I modelled my solution after this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pDSooPLLkI

(I can’t explain it better than the video anyway.) It takes a second on my machine and that’s with my own hashmap implementation which is probably not the fastest one.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org They sure are silly at times. :-) You really have to combine this event with something else, like learning a new language. Otherwise it gets boring real quick.

What I absolutely love about AoC is that it’s – indeed – a bit like school. 😅 The problems are well-defined, the inputs are well-defined, and there is a definite answer. It’s either right or wrong – period. Compared to real life and work, I welcome this very much. 🤣

But when you do take the time to analyze / reverse-engineer this puzzle, then it’s really cool. Might be my favorite one so far. 😃

I’m really bad at competitive programming. 🙄 For today’s #AdventOfCode puzzle, I spent an eternity trying to understand exactly what kind of bG9naWMgY2lyY3VpdAo= the puzzle input describes – I haven’t done that in well over a decade, so I made little progress. I knew right from the start that SSBoYWQgdG8gbG9vayBmb3IgY3ljbGUgbGVuZ3RocyBhbmQgdGhlbiBmaW5kIHRoZSBMQ00K. It just didn’t occur to me to just run my program on cGFydGlhbCBpbnB1dAo= and print those numbers. 🥴 I only did that after over 4 hours (including time to debug my nasty C code) and then, boom, solution …

Ah, there it is. Today’s AoC puzzle is of a categeory that I find the least interesting. Gonna take my time with this one. 😴

I bet today’s AoC puzzle was the last easy one before we descend into madness. 🤣

Today’s Advent of Code puzzle was rather easy (luckily), so I spent the day doing two other things:

• Explore VGA a bit: How to draw pixels on DOS all by yourself without a library in graphics mode 12h?
  
• Explose XMS a bit: How can I use more than 640 kB / 1 MB on DOS?
  

Both are … quite awkward. 😬 For VGA, I’ll stick to using the Borland Graphics Interface for now. Mode 13h is great, all pixels are directly addressable – but it’s only 320x200. Mode 12h (640 x 480 with 16 colors) is pretty horrible to use with all the planes and what not.

As per this spec, I’ve written a small XMS example that uses 32 MB of memory:

https://movq.de/v/9ed329b401/xms.c

It works, but it appears the only way to make use of this memory is to copy data back and forth between conventional memory and extended memory. I don’t know how useful that is going to be. 🤔 But at least I know how it works now.

Never in my life will I understand why Americans bleep out curse words. 🤔

One thing to note about #AdventOfCode: It is really, really important to inspect your input data.

Your data could be considered part of the puzzle description. By inspecting it, you can find clues and you might find out that you can make certain assumptions.

(I mean, what’s the alternative? There could be a list of allowed assumptions in the textual descriptions, right? That wouldn’t be a lot of fun, I think, as it would give away too much information about the solution. It’s more interesting to find those clues yourself.)

Today’s AoC puzzle is a very simple problem on modern machines, but quite tricky for me: It involves a number that doesn’t fit into 32 bits. 🤔 I wonder if/how I can manage to port this beast to DOS. (I once wrote a “big int” library myself, but that was ages ago and I hardly remember it anymore.)

… it just finished and brute-force worked. 18 minutes of computing time on my 11 year old machine, single-threaded.

It is a pleasure to work with the help system of Borland’s Turbo C++ 3.0 on DOS. The descriptions are clear and concise. There are short and simple examples. Pretty much every help page is cross-refenced and those links can be clicked.

@xuu@txt.sour.is Ah, you went with the “scanning” approach as well. I did that, too.

It’s quite surprising to see (imho) how many people on reddit started substituting strings (one becomes 1 etc.). That makes the puzzle much harder by introducing nasty corner cases.

(Maybe I was just lucky this time to pick the correct approach right from the start. 🤣 Or maybe it’s a bit of experience from doing past AoC events …)

@eapl.me@eapl.me Which problems are those? 🤔

The only “advanced” Tetris I played back then was “Block Out”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpeSH6pbio4

Except it didn’t run nearly as smooth as in this video. 😅

The amount of shady Android apps in Google’s “Play Store” is so large, it makes me want to write my own software instead. 😖

@shreyan@twtxt.net The only problem is that there is no such thing as “plain text”. Is it ASCII? UTF-8? DOS or UNIX line endings? Something else?

.txt or “plain text” are ambiguous terms, I’m afraid. 🫤

Other than that, it looks neat and interesting. 😅

In case you haven’t heard yet …

https://groups.google.com/g/vim_announce/c/tWahca9zkt4

Bram Moolenaar has died. 😢

@prologic@twtxt.net FWIW, I pay a little under 3€/month for a VPS with 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 20 GB disk, 40 TB traffic. 🤔

I’d love to read the original source code of this:

https://ecsoft2.org/t-tiny-editor

This was our standard editor back in the day, not an “emergency tool”. And it’s only 9kB in size … which feels absurd in 2023. 😅 The entire hex dump fits on one of today’s screens.

Being so small meant it had no config file. Instead, it came with TKEY.EXE, a little tool to binary-patch T.EXE to your likings.

I’m having an Internet outage at the moment … and now I can’t use valgrind anymore, because it needs to fetch stuff from the net during startup. 😒

I’m in love with Wasabi.

A GTK 4 application showing an empty window uses about 160 MB of RAM:

$ wget https://movq.de/v/138ab3e622/win.c
$ cc -Wall -Wextra -o win win.c $(pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk4)
$ ./win

It also takes several seconds to start on my machine because it is compiling shaders and initializing DRI (it’s faster on the second run, unless you happen to lose ~/.cache/mesa_shader_cache/). This might be a hint as to why it’s using so much memory: There’s obviously much more going on behind the scenes these days, not just a little bit of internal housekeeping and then creating a window.

Enjoying a day off, sitting on the balcony in some nice 18°C. 👌

Random photos: https://movq.de/v/863829c893

Here’s a massive image (5928x24180, 12 MB JPG) showing many of the planes that flew by: https://movq.de/v/34a6d39baa/montage.jpg

People complain about the noise that the crows in our area make. Well … https://movq.de/v/7b8c06eb73/noise.ogg Notice anything?