@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, give it a shot. At worst you know that you have to continue your quest. :-)

Fun fact, during a semester break I was actually a little bored, so I just started reading the Qt documentation. I didn’t plan on using Qt for anything, though. I only looked at the docs because they were on my bucket list for some reason. Qt was probably recommended to me and coming from KDE myself, that was motivation enough to look at the docs just for fun.

The more I read, the more hooked I got. The documentation was extremely well written, something I’ve never seen before. The structure was very well thought out and I got the impression that I understood what the people thought when they actually designed Qt.

A few days in I decided to actually give it a real try. Having never done anything in C++ before, I quickly realized that this endeavor won’t succeed. I simply couldn’t get it going. But I found the Qt bindings for Python, so that was a new boost. And quickly after, I discovered that there were even KDE bindings for Python in my package manager, so I immediately switched to them as that integrated into my KDE desktop even nicer.

I used the Python KDE bindings for one larger project, a planning software for a summer camp that we used several years. It’s main feature was to see who is available to do an activity. In the past, that was done on a large sheet of paper, but people got assigned two activities at the same time or weren’t assigned at all. So, by showing people in yellow (free), green (one activity assigned) and red (overbooked), this sped up and improved the planning process.

Another core feature was to generate personalized time tables (just like back in school) and a dedicated view for the morning meeting on site.

It was extended over the years with all sorts of stuff. E.g. I then implemented a warning if all the custodians of an activitiy with kids were underage to satisfy new the guidelines that there should be somebody of age.

Just before the pandemic I started to even add support for personalized live views on phones or tablets during the planning process (with web sockets, though). This way, people could see their own schedule or independently check at which day an activity takes place etc. For these side quests, they don’t have to check the large matrix on the projector. But the project died there.

Here’s a screenshot from one of the main views: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/k3man.png

This Python+Qt rewrite replaced and improved the Java+Swing predecessor.

@bender@twtxt.net It’s a great movie, enjoy! :-)

@prologic@twtxt.net Yep, that’s heaps better, ta! <3

@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 ;-)).

@bender@twtxt.net Kaboom! Hahaha, I did not think of that at all, thanks for pointing it out, mate! :‘-D

But let me clarify just in case: I honestly do not want to bash this project. In fact, it’s a great little invention. It’s just that I’m not conviced by the current user interface decisions. Anyway, web design isn’t right up my alley. I just wanted to add some fun. And luckily, at least someone liked it so far. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Don’t you worry, this was meant as a joke. :-D

There was a time when I thought that Swing was actually really good. But having done some Qt/KDE later, I realized how much better that was. That were the late KDE 3 and early KDE 4 days, though. Not sure how it is today. But back then it felt Trolltech and the KDE folks put a hell lot more thought into their stuff. I was pleasantly surprised how natural it appeared and all the bits played together. Sure, there were the odd ends, but the overall design was a lot better in my opinion.

To be fair, I never used it from C++, always the Python bindings, which were considerably more comfortable (just alone the possibility to specify most attributes right away as kwargs in the constructor instead of calling tons of setters). And QtJambi, the Java binding, was also relatively nice. I never did a real project though, just played around with the latter.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de The one for Delphi was quite good. But JCreator (I don’t remember exactly) was awful and I never looked back to GUI designers. Always layed out the GUI by hand in code myself since then. These days I don’t deal with GUI programming anymore.

@bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net Let’s see on which day we’ll finally settle.

I reckon the white-space: nowrap is a bit evil on the gatherly notes, though.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hähähä, let’s feed the trolls! :->

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Nice! :-) Since vim is quite advanced cavemanery, you could probably even remap Enter when editing the twtxt.txt.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Java/Swing!

@bender@twtxt.net Hm, are we talking about different dates or are there different timezone offsets for this timezone abbreviation? With EDT being UTC-4, 2025-11-02T12:00:00Z is Sunday at 8:00 in the morning local time for you. Or were did I mess up here? :-?

@prologic@twtxt.net You want me to submit a reply with “I probably won’t show up”?

Not that I really understand everything, but this is a really cool talk: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-hacking-the-rp2350

@bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net I got confused again, but luckily, the 2nd November 2025 at noon UTC is right on a Sunday in my timezone. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hahaha, now I’m curious what use case you have in mind. :-D

@prologic@twtxt.net Ouch, I don’t want to get hit by these projectiles! :-O Is that black tube on the bottom the remains of a chair leg?

I reckon one could collect these hail stones and put them in the drinks to work around the lost air conditioning. At least if one doesn’t mind icy drinks. (I can’t stand that, because I immediately get hickup when drinking something cold.)

Sunsets never get old: https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-10-27/

@bender@twtxt.net Ohhh! Well, this Sunday is even more unlikely as I’m probably helping a mate in the woods. But maybe we’re quicker than I think.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s way more expensive and time-consuming in the end. If only somebody had warned us!!1

The triangle reminds me of zalgo text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zalgo_text

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’re supposed to see storm gusts up to 79 km/h. Let’s get the kites!

(I know, this is nothing for folks at the coasts.)

@arne@uplegger.eu @movq@www.uninformativ.de Der reine Spielzeugladen im Nachbarort hat auch schon vor Jahren dicht gemacht. Online gibt’s das halt alles deutlich günstiger.

Turned out I didn’t make it, sorry. Maybe next time. I hope you had a great yarn, @prologic@twtxt.net and @bender@twtxt.net, and didn’t waste any time waiting for me.

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/

@prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net I might join, but cannot tell for sure at the moment.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de My impression also is that good sysadmins are missing. No wonder if they all get laid off because they’re “not doing anything” and developers can just operate their shit themselves. Or so the bosses and plenty devs think. Sadly, that’s the general view.

Hell no, devops is bullshit in my opinion. Most developers (including myself) are rather bad at administrating. A good sysadmin offers other skills. Great admins appear to just sit around, but they’re much more proactively working than programmers who also operate the same stuff. The latter have a waaay more reactive work model in comparison. When things have already gone south. The sysadmin, on the other hand, would have noticed and thus prevented the vast majority very early on when it was far from becoming a problem in the future.

At least that’s my personal experience in all those years in different projects and what my mates tell me from their companies. Sure, skills can be learned, but it’s just not happening (enough). And obviously, there are people out there who excel in both disciplines, but they are rare. Most fall in one of the categories. Not to forget, plenty are just bad at everything. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, we like to be paranoid. We’ve been right so many times. Unfortunately.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, new cars are totally out of question. If I ever have to, only rather old ones are contemplable.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Holy fuck! Whoever bought such a bed fully deserves this. There isn’t the faintest trace of pity on my face.

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t want to defend this, but at least over here a SIM card is necessary for the mandatory emercency call by law in case of a crash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECall Of course, this enables all sorts of other shenanigans.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Ah! Maybe, but just maybe, this weight helps to keep the device from wandering around if a CD is spinning inside. CDs should be pretty well balanced, though.

Good luck with the replacement of the capacitors and reviving this player! :-)

Hahaha! https://www.toonpool.com/user/196055/files/blutlache_4502399.jpg

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Where the heck did you find that? What is that thing? Yeah, totally looks like an attempt to make some garbage feel more solid. Unless this steel plate is actually used for attaching bolts from the other side or something like that. Which I highly doubt, given that there are muuuuuch cheaper options to install various types of nuts in plastic.

Yeah, this goo makes it just harder to disconnect. I bet it doesn’t add water protection to the connections at all.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de ;-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Über den musste ich auch sehr lachen. :-D

Hahaha, in dieser Liste https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzerin:Anneke_Wolf/Edits_des_Grauens sind schon echte Perlen enthalten, z.B. https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Baustelle&diff=prev&oldid=18568598 :-D

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I haven’t noticed an increase in flies here, feels totally normal. Just a bit more fruit flies in the house with all the windfall gathering. It was worse the past years, though.

@bender@twtxt.net I thought the same. Or just don’t clean it at all to add to the patina. :-)

The colorful autumn looks stunning, even with a gray sky. https://lyse.isobeef.org/spaziergang-zum-oedenturm-2025-10-12/

Jason delivers again! This pallet wood coffee table looks truly fantastic, but cleaning the surface might be not the easiest thing in the world I reckon: https://youtu.be/3weDt0GCa-Q

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @prologic@twtxt.net Unfortunately, I had to review a coworker’s code that was also spewed out the same way. It was abso-fucking-lutely horrible. I didn’t know upfront, but then asked afterwards and got the proud (!) answer that it indeed was “assisted”. I bet this piece of garbage result was never checked or questioned the tiniest bit before submitting for review. >:-( It didn’t even do the right thing as a bonus.

What a giant shitshow. Things just have to burn to the ground several times.

@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it Hahaha, why does this sound so familiar? :-D

@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it Hell yeah, that looks great! :-) What a pity you’re not having any photos, though. I love that you went to a craftsmanship school and learned some amazing skills. The older I get, the more I admire all sorts of crafts. That’s also why I started building physical stuff myself in my spare time.

This sketch is well done, so you countersunk the holes to make room for the heads. Makes absolutely sense. Mille grazie! <3

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, it’s lovely out there right now.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s satisfying. :-) Not all my clocks are radio-controlled, though.

I’ve got a digital alarm clock from the Netherlands (no idea where I got this) and it always runs an hour late. No clue. I put it on a shelf in the workshop where it causes the least amount of confusion.

@prologic@twtxt.net Oh, I will certainly check this out! Thanks for the tip, mate! <3

I went on a short stroll in the woods and came across two great spotted woodpeckers. They were busy with their courtship display, I reckon, so it took them a while to notice me and escape into thicker parts out of sight. That was really awesome. There are a lot of apples and sloes now, looking really good. The cam issues still persist, though, I wish the photos were sharper. Also, I got the error that the function wheel was not adjusted correctly and alledgedly pointed between two options numerous times. And no, it was bang on a setting. https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-10-07/

In today’s blurry photos series: https://lyse.isobeef.org/rabe-2025-10-06/

@prologic@twtxt.net Oh, that’s cool! :-) Feeding magpies seems to be an Aussie thing, the Cutting Edge Engineering Australia videos usually also include a cute magpie feeding clip.

@bender@twtxt.net Off you go to the magpie hunt! We wanna see Florida pies!

Today, I experimented with Linux Capabilities as a continuation to my Unix Domain Sockets research from a few months ago: https://lyse.isobeef.org/caller-information-via-unix-domain-sockets/#capabilities

I learned that I don’t know hardly anything and there is heaps more to explore. Tomorrow, I will do the same in Go and see how that feels.

I got the magpie again this morning: https://lyse.isobeef.org/elster-2025-10-05/ 02 is at takeoff.