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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@bender@twtxt.net That is a noble goal. We can talk about that – as long as it doesn’t mean giving up essential freedoms like choosing which software you can run on your device (without having to ask someone for permission).

@dce@hashnix.club twtxt is quite light, and trouble-free. Welcome! I also run an ActivityPub server, but yeah, more often around here than there.

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com Also just a heads up, GIF(s) aren’t supproted as an Avatar type on yarnd (what runs twtxt.net). I’d change this to something that’s more supproted like PNG, JPEG, etc.

Distrobox is pretty handy and kind of amazed I haven’t played with it before now. I wanted to quickly try out Proton’s Authenticator they just released, but they only had binaries for Ubuntu and Fedora (naturally), but I’m on Void Linux on this laptop.

Installed the latest basic Fedora image with Distrobox, used dnf to install the downloaded rpm file within it, and presto, running the app within Void like I’d just downloaded it though the normal repos.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz On the one hand, all these programs have a very long history and the technology behind manpages is actually very powerful – you can use it to write books:

https://www.troff.org/pubs.html

I have two books from that list, for example “The UNIX programming environment”:

https://movq.de/v/c3dab75c97/upe.jpg

It’s a bit older, of course, but it looks and feels like a normal book, and it uses the same tech as manpages – which I think is really cool. 😎

It’s comparable to LaTeX (just harder/different to use) but much faster than LaTeX. You can also do stuff like render manpages as a PDF (man -Tpdf cp >cp.pdf) or as an HTML file (man -Thtml cp >cp.html). I think I once made slides for a talk this way.

On the other hand, traditional manpages (i.e., ones that are not written in mandoc) do not use semantic markup. They literally say, “this text is bold, that text over here is italics”, and so on.

So when you run man foo, it has no other choice but to show it in black, white, bold, underline – showing it in color would be wrong, because that’s not what the source code of that manpage says.

Colorizing them is a hack, to be honest. You’re not meant to do this. (The devs actually broke this by accident recently. They themselves aren’t really aware that people use colors.)

If mandoc and semantic markup was more commonly used, I think it would be easier to convince the devs to add proper customizable colors.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz @movq@www.uninformativ.de Sorry, I neither finished it nor in time. :-( That’s as good as it’s gonna get for the moment: https://git.isobeef.org/lyse/gelbariab/-/tree/master/rss-proxys?ref_type=heads

The README should hopefully provide a crude introduction. The example configuration file is documented fairly well, I believe (but maybe not). You probably still have to consult and maybe also modify the source code to fit your needs.

Let me know if you run into issues, have questions, wishes etc.

In 1996, they came up with the X11 “SECURITY” extension:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4w548u/what_is_up_with_the_x11_security_extension/

This is what could have (eventually) solved the security issues that we’re currently seeing with X11. Those issues are cited as one of the reasons for switching to Wayland.

That extension never took off. The person on reddit wonders why – I think it’s simple: Containers and sandboxes weren’t a thing in 1996. It hardly mattered if X11 was “insecure”. If you could run an X11 client, you probably already had access to the machine and could just do all kinds of other nasty things.

Today, sandboxing is a thing. Today, this matters.

I’ve heard so many times that “X11 is beyond fixable, it’s hopeless.” I don’t believe that. I believe that these problems are solveable with X11 and some devs have said “yeah, we could have kept working on it”. It’s that people don’t want to do it:

Why not extend the X server?

Because for the first time we have a realistic chance of not having to do that.

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html

I’m not in a position to judge the devs. Maybe the X.Org code really is so bad that you want to run away, screaming in horror. I don’t know.

But all this was a choice. I don’t buy the argument that we never would have gotten rid of things like core fonts.

All the toolkits and programs had to be ported to Wayland. A huge, still unfinished effort. If that was an acceptable thing to do, then it would have been acceptable to make an “X12” that keeps all the good things about X11, remains compatible where feasible, eliminates the problems, and requires some clients to be adjusted. (You could have still made “X11X12” like “XWayland” for actual legacy programs.)

linode’s having a major outage (ongoing as of writing, over 24 hours in) and my friend runs a site i help out with on one of their servers. we didn’t have recent backups so i got really anxious about possible severe data loss considering the situation with linode doesn’t look great (it seems like a really bad incident).

…anyway the server magically came back online and i got backups of the whole application and database, i’m so relieved :‘)

(Now why is that GNOME gcr thing running with debug logs enabled that print stuff like “sending secret exchange: …”? Is this healthy?)

Only figured this out yesterday:

pinentry, which is used to safely enter a password on Linux, has several frontends. There’s a GTK one, a Qt one, even an ncurses one, and so on.

GnuPG also uses pinentry. And you can configure your frontend of choice here in gpg-agent.conf.

But what happens when you don’t configure it? What’s the default?

Turns out, pinentry is a shellscript wrapper and it’s not even that long. Here it is in full:

#!/bin/bash

# Run user-defined and site-defined pre-exec hooks.
[[ -r "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec ]] && \
        . "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec
[[ -r /etc/pinentry/preexec ]] && . /etc/pinentry/preexec

# Guess preferred backend based on environment.
backends=(curses tty)
if [[ -n "$DISPLAY" || -n "$WAYLAND_DISPLAY" ]]; then
        case "$XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP" in
        KDE|LXQT|LXQt)
                backends=(qt qt5 gnome3 gtk curses tty)
                ;;
        *)
                backends=(gnome3 gtk qt qt5 curses tty)
                ;;
        esac
fi

for backend in "${backends[@]}"
do
        lddout=$(ldd "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" 2>/dev/null) || continue
        [[ "$lddout" == *'not found'* ]] && continue
        exec "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" "$@"
done

exit 1

Preexec, okay, then some auto-detection to use a toolkit matching your desktop environment …

… and then it invokes ldd? To find out if all the required libraries are installed for the auto-detected frontend?

Oof. I was sitting here wondering why it would use pinentry-gtk on one machine and pinentry-gnome3 on another, when both machines had the exact same configs. Yeah, but different libraries were installed. One machine was missing gcr, which is needed for pinentry-gnome3, so that machine (and that one alone) spawned pinentry-gtk …

Something happened with the frame rate of terminal emulators lately. It looks like there’s a trend to run at a high framerate now? I’m not sure exactly. This can be seen in VTE-based terminals like my xiate or XTerm on Wayland. foot and st, on the other hand, are fine.

My shell prompt and cursor look like this:

$ █

When I keep Enter pressed, I expect to see several lines like so:

$
$
$
$
$
$
$ █

With the affected terminal emulators, the lines actually show up in the following sequence. First, we have the original line:

$ █

Pressing Enter yields this as the next frame:

$
█

And then eventually this:

$
$ █

In other words, you can see the cursor jumping around very quickly, all the time.

Another example: Vim actually shows which key you just pressed in the bottom right corner. Keeping j pressed to scroll through a file means I get to see a j flashing rapidly now.

(I have no idea yet, why exactly XTerm in X11 is fine but flickering in Wayland.)

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.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I do my timetracking in a little Python script, locally. Every now and then, I push the data to our actual service. Problem solved – but it’s a completely unpopular approach, they all want to use the web site. I don’t get it. Then, of course, when it’s down, shit hits the fan. (Luckily, our timetracking software is neither developed nor run by us anymore. It’s a silly cloud service, but the upside is that I’m not responsible anymore. 🤷)

Some of our oldschool devs tried to roll out local timetracking once, about 15 years ago. I don’t remember anymore why they failed …

This is developed inhouse, I’m just so glad that we’re not a software engineering company. Oh wait. How embarrassing.

Oh to be anonymous on the internet. That must be nice. 😅

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club This wasn’t always the case, though. Quake3, Quake4, Unreal Tournament 99 and 2004 are examples of games that used to run very well as native Linux games. But that was 20+ years ago …

@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.

It took about a year, I think, but I’ve now finished another run of Tomb Raider I, II, and III. And I have, for the first time, played the two bonus packs “Unfinished Business” (for TR I) and “Golden Mask” (for TR II). They’re available as a free download, if you have the original games. (The bonus pack for TR III is not free.)

I just love these games – and the game mechanics. It’s just the right balance between challenging and relaxing.

https://movq.de/v/c55a2a137d/the%2Dend.jpg

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.)

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I guess that qualifies as an “Arch moment”, albeit the first one I encountered. I’m running this since 2008 and it’s usually very smooth sailing. 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, YMMV. Some games work(ed) great in Wine, others not at all. I just use it because it’s easier than firing up my WinXP box. (I don’t use Wine for regular applications, just games.)

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Oh no, how unpenguinly! But at least it runs, even races. :-)

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz lol, oof, well, better than nothing. 🥴 It appears to run quite well. 🤔

@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

update on tux racer: ofc it doesn’t run on modern linux LMFAOOOOOOO i’m installing red hat in a VM right now

@bmallred@staystrong.run Oh sorry I should have explained those terms 🤦‍♂️

@bmallred@staystrong.run Ahhh this is an agent I’m tryining to play the game of Connect3. It uses a library written in Go I’ve been working on that supports Neuroevolution using Genetic Algorithms. Some features include: Mutation, Speciation, Lamarckian Evolution/Inheritence.

@prologic@twtxt.net do you remember Hamachi? Tailscale/Headscale is Hamachi on steroids. They are used primarily for creating a VPN among all your devices so they can talk to one another as if they were on the same LAN, even when they’re not. That was, mostly, my WireGuard usage.

I still have WireGuard running—because it is so lite that it doesn’t matter—to use as regular VPN, but Headscale keeps all my devices connected forming their own “mini-Internet” 100% of the time.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Cool! Does it still run on your machine? :-)

@prologic@twtxt.net Tailscale is awesome! I run Headscale; it replaced my vanilla WireGuard install.

Once again, I went on a hike onto my backyard mountain after calling it quits very late. This time I brought my cam along. The view was extremely hazy, but the setting sunlight resulted in cool colors. The freshly cut grass smelled wonderful.

I saw a flock of pidgeons circling around and some sort of rat or mouse quickly running over the road in front of me from one field into the next one with a giant nut in its mouth. Or so I at least believe, couldn’t really tell, it happened so fast.

A couple enjoyed the setting sun on a bench and stripped their shoes on this warm evening. Somebody forget their bottle of water on the summit, but it looked rather cool in the evening light:

Not sure what they’re doing, but they now set up scaffolding at the ruin. I heavily doubt it, but it would be cool if they rebuilt the castle. :-)

On the way back I met up with a mate who couldn’t come along right from the beginning. We saw two deer on the meadow, but it was already too dark for my camera, the photos were totally rubbish. The sunset turned really pretty and colorful just in time when I reached home. https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-06-10/

utilize HetrixTools for servers monitoring, then use a small one for UptimeKuma all the running websites.

the number of servers are increasing, free plan is going to be exploded.

that’s why i have to think of a solution to have separated monitoring solutions. one for the (virtual) machines, one for the websites

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Hmmm Please if this happens again, help me reproduce it. Any clues in the logs? Hmm? 🧐 My own pod has been running flawlessly for weeks now 😅

Running monthly backups…

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz are you running Grafana in a separate physical machine (or VM) than the one you are pulling metrics from?

Running - 4 miles: 4.00 miles, 00:09:40 average pace, 00:38:41 duration
nice and easy run on the treadmill. not sure how much i am going to run this week in anticipation for the final run.
#running #treadmill

@bender@twtxt.net I think this would be a good idea as @movq@www.uninformativ.de and @andros@twtxt.andros.dev have done ✅ I may even join the experiments if I have any spare time to hack a custom yrand branch and run it up on say something like a yarnexp.mills.io or something 🤔

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz one of my servers’ number of currently running containers is 69. haha sex number

Pinellas County Running - Long run: 8.00 miles, 00:09:07 average pace, 01:12:50 duration
last long run of the training plan. legs were heavy again today. first half hour had a nice sprinkling going on but that humidity crept right in afterwards. more tired than i should be and need to try and keep these next few runs light
#running

@bmallred@staystrong.run You mean ActivityPub + Twtxt? 🤔

@bmallred@staystrong.run It really is 🤣

Pinellas County Running - 3 miles: 3.02 miles, 00:08:36 average pace, 00:25:56 duration
legs felt really heavy today. woke up tired (even though getting plenty of rest) and probably going to feel the same the rest of the day.
#running

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev You know, I’d really love to see how/if location-based addressing works in practice. I might fork jenny to judy and run both things in parallel for a while … 🤔

This is up @movq@www.uninformativ.de ally, a tiny OS that runs in a boot sector. That’s, it’s only 510 bytes! But check it out, and see what it can do. Truly amazing. Can you beat that?!

Running - 4 miles: 4.78 miles, 00:08:03 average pace, 00:38:28 duration
jamming out and ran to the end of the song
#running #treadmill

You know what, I can always run a separate Snac instance alongside the GTS one later on if I want to, maybe even use it for sharing Phtography stuff… a pixelfed alternative on budget kind of thing. 🤡

Pinellas County Running - 5 miles: 5.06 miles, 00:08:58 average pace, 00:45:21 duration
hell of a day at work. the run felt so light today and it was good to get outside albeit late.
#running

@prologic@twtxt.net LMAO it’s fine! i think it’s running ok i’m just nervous i might’ve messed it up because honestly i just backed up my DB then did a git merge and overwrote the merge conflicts because i was lazy and didn’t know how to properly do an upgrade with git

@prologic@twtxt.net running the dame, oh my! TMI! :-P

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Unless you’ve found buds in this branch it should be fine 😆 Um running yhe dame!

@sorenpeter@darch.dk You’re welcome 🤗 We’ll run into each other again. I’m sure! 🤞

@Yarn@yarn.social yo, what’s up? I am busy running my business here!