I noticed that there are quite a few UI glitches in vim-classic – and quickly found the cause: It comes with outdated Unicode tables.

I have to admit that I wasn’t aware that there’s a new Unicode release every year:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#Versions

Look at this huge number of changes. Every program has to keep track of that, often through libraries but sometimes not (like in Vim’s case).

I use Unicode extensively, but this shit is extremely expensive …

My TUI framework is having the same problem. At the moment, this is all offloaded to wcwidth, but if that library was to become unmaintained, I’d have to track Unicode myself.

Gah!

The DOS days were simpler. CP437, end of story. (Yes, I know that’s a lie.)

Been digging Susam Pal’s Wander Console: https://susam.net/wander/

I like the way it combines human curation with algorithmic randomness, allowing you to visit other #smolweb sites without leaving “home”.

Like this one - The Oldschool PC Font Resource: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/

I plan on adding one to my own site as part of its next update.

Added 1 account https://balloon.oldcities.org/twtxt-active-users.txt

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, I have a couple of teachers in my family and they all tell similar stories. 🙄

I have almost no recollection of my time at the “Gymnasium” anymore. I’m either traumatized by it or I wasn’t very interested in what happened there. 😅 But I have some vague memories of doing “computer stuff” at school. There certainly were computers and they certainly ran DOS games like Duke Nukem, that I do know. 😂 Just checked my records, and no, this wasn’t an official class. At best, it was one of those AGs. 🤔

@bender@twtxt.net I wish I could do that. Unfortunately, my camera is not good enough. Not even close. It’s just all black. :‘-( #000. Or maybe #060508 if you’re really lucky.

But I will take my tripod tonight and see what I can do.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hahaha. It could have been worse, though. I’ve heard stories from others that were many levels crazier than what I experienced. And I’m glad that I was very, very lucky with almost all of my teachers throughout all of school. One of my maths teacher, who was also my computer science teacher then, is the reason I do what I do for a living. It’s all his fault! ;-)

Ja, possibly a BaWü thing. The ministry of education and cultural affairs changes the rules, curriculums and details every one or two years, anyway.

Said teacher had to fight real hard that he was allowed to teach CS in class 12 and 13. As a real subject, that is, not just an extracurricular activity („AG“). At first, the ministry refused, because we’re just am „allgemeinbildendes Gmyi“, not an „informationstechnisches Gymi“. It’s insane, you’ve got super motivated (and technically as well as humanly excellent) teachers and then forbid them to offer a class. What the hell!? (Fun fact on top, he had a doctor in CS and was also teaching at the university of applied sciences.)

Eventually, they granted permission to only have a two hours a week class („zweistündig, wie Nebenfach“). One or two years later – too late for me, unfortunately – they allowed four hours a week („vierstündig, wie Hauptfach“). But each pupil had to sign upfont that they will not take CS class in the Abi. That was still exclusive to ITGs only. Completely ridiculous.

I reckon, you can talk to any random teacher and they will endlessly tell you about very dubious decicions from the ministry. :-/

I just killed the website for my Kirby podcaster plugin. I was keeping it for too long because there were those "support the development" possibilities on the site. I just moved the docs to my site. Now all the plugins are in one place, which makes it easier to maintain the documentation, etc. All the domains (i.e. https://podcaster-plugin.com/) should now redirect to my page, too.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Awww, that sounds like a typical experience at school. 😅 They meant well but somehow it was still shitty …

I’ve never heard about that Wahlteil/Pflichtteil stuff (or forgot about it). Must be a BaWü thing. 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It was before my time as well. 3.0 was my first. 😅

I just started a new #getkirby collection here on Mastodon, please let me know if you want to be added:https://mastodon.online/collections/116769879481433457

Version 4.6 of Mastodon Collections introduces lists of users to make it easier to find accounts on specific topics.https://maurice-renck.de/en/blog/2026/mastodon-collections

On Complaining About AI in Pinterest on Reddit ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E3S

Alright. I found a way to avoid errors and install twtxt (original) https://github.com/buckket/twtxt/issues/194

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org take a small video, pretty please! I would love the see them shining in the fields! On the pics, 1 is mine, all mine! 🥰

@movq@www.uninformativ.de ahem that dreaded time has come! In the US they are due on 15 April, and wife, the tax doer, waits until the last day to complete them. “If we are going to pay, we may as well delay”, that’s her motto. 😅

@bender@twtxt.net Hell yeah, we’ve seen the first fireflies of the season! \o/ \o/ \o/ How cool! Maybe 50-70 in total. Gotta check every evening now. :-)

The sunset wasn’t too bad when I left the house to pick up my mate: https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2026-06-17/

It’s Venus over the moon. And Jupiter is further diagonally down between the clouds.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That was before my time, I joined the party late. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Let us know how it went. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s right, way harder than centrally managed. They even didn’t reach concensus over the main folder: “Alle Programme, “Alle Programme (x86)”, “All Programs”, “All Programmes”, etc. Anyway.

For class 11 (or maybe already in 10, I don’t remember exactly) we could choose either between traditional maths class with a graphical calculator or “Mathe mit CAS”. There were two teachers in my entire school who were able to teach the latter. It was also fairly new at the time I believe. Certainly unheard of for a „allgemeinbildendes Gymnasium“, maybe the technical ones were already offering it for some time, not sure. It was clear to me that I would take the maths with CAS class.

Each kid had to buy their own Cassiopeia A-Something. I don’t know how much that thing was (definitely more expensive than a graphical calculator) and whether the school subsidized that in any form. But it was slow and underpowered as hell. We rarely used it in class nor for homework (most if not all had already a desktop at home). Typically, when we worked with the CAS, we sat down on the desktop computers. Our class took place in one of the two computer rooms. The desktops were placed on the three sides (left, right, back, facing the walls or windows) and the regular school desks were in the middle. Since there were more pupils than desktops, we always shared. Nowadays, we call it pair programming. ;-)

For the exams we had the “mandatory part” (Pflichtteil) without any tools. Once we finished that and handed the papers to our teacher, we were then allowed to boot up our Cassiopeias and work with them for the second part. Before the exam started, everyone had to show the teacher that they reset their small computer to factory settings. This second part was called „Wahlteil“. But you had to do it in order to pass. So, I never understood the choice of this term. Maybe it’s because the first part is the exact same for everyone (graphical calculator and CAS class), but the second part was definitely different for the two classes. Each suited to their tools.

After one or two exams, it became clear that the Cassiopeia was far from ideal. So, we took the second part at the desktop computers from then on. Our teacher unplugged the network cables himself to avoid cheating. Each computer had an “HDD Sheriff” running that reset the disk at startup. There was also an issue that the personal user accounts were affected by that. Sometimes all your data were lost. If you were lucky, they were still there. So, we saved our Maple project to local disk (if the computer didn’t crash in between, that was no problem) and at least eventually before leaving the classroom, we then also saved it on the server. For that, the teacher quickly plugged in the cable, we saved, and then the cable was unplugged again immediately. Oh, and everybody used their USB sticks, too.

All in all, this Cassiopeia A-* was quite a useless purchase. :-D I’m not sure if I still have it. At least I thought several times about giving it to the flea market. Don’t know if I did or not.

hello from my http gopher proxy written in quickjs bash

#catsoftwtxt

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org The what? What happened? Do I want to know? 😭

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I might check it out – once the vacation is over. 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org 😂😭

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

But it’s Windows, it doesn’t have a place in my heart.

The older I get, the more I’m glorifying anything pre XP. 😅 But that’s only because everything today is so horrible.

Well, not anything pre XP. 3.0 or newer would be nice, because Windows 2.x was still pretty bare bones:

https://movq.de/v/00162b9df8/

(OS/2 was great, though, except for the lack of a good file manager.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ah, you mean the categorization. Yeah, that would never work in Windows, at least not without having a centralized package manager (so there’s one authoritative source of which program belongs into which category).

Oh wow, those Cassiopeias look pretty cool. Did you have one of those or one for each kid?

Markdown makes it easy to format and structure text. I‘m a big fan and use it wherever I can. But how did Markdown actually come about?https://maurice-renck.de/en/blog/2026/the-epic-story-of-markdown

🎶 Akiko Yano - Japanese Girl (Full Album, HQ Vinyl LP) (1976) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4d_dnlB3Dk

Hello everyone! I am from Japan. 🗾 I have separate twtxt accounts, but since yarn seems convenient for replying, I’ll make this one a reply-focused account. 🎈 balloon (English): https://balloon.oldcities.org/twtxt.txt 🎈 fu-sen (Japanese): https://fu-sen.oldcities.org/twtxt.txt

I didn’t try it, but this looks like something for real sysadmins: https://github.com/dimonomid/nerdlog The UI looks very usable and the README is also promising.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yes, yes, yes and yes.

The start screen looks exactly like a website not a desktop application.

I mean, I find Motif also fairly ugly. Granted, it’s a hell lot more discoverable than anything today. The old Windows UIs probably had the best balances. But it’s Windows, it doesn’t have a place in my heart. So, I stick with good old KDE. ;-) That’s my nostalgia kicking in.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yes, this screenshot. However, not the Dutch but rather the German version, no wonder it looks so crazy!!1!11

It’s been a hot minute or two since I last used KDE, so I don’t remember exactly. I just vaguely recall that I found myself thinking multiple times that the KDE application categories were better matching or there were more or something like that. Most of my classmates were on Windows and had one giant long list of all sort of stuff in there. You even had to scroll in the menu. Sure, they installed all kind of garbage, which didn’t exactly help. Where in KDE, they were actually grouped by Office, Internet, Graphics, Multimedia, Games, etc. In Windows, applications usually hid themselves in a sub folder named after the software vendor. At least in the later (?) days.

I only used Win 95, 98 and XP at home. For maths class with computer algebra system (Maple), we had a Cassiopeia with Win CE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_Cassiopeia At school, there was probably also Win 2000, but I don’t know anymore for sure.

These commit messages… https://github.com/vergonha/garden-tui

Speaking of UIs, this is how Thunderbird looks now:

https://movq.de/v/a41105eebb/

So we continue to let every program make up its own UI style (and then we complain that “the Linux desktop” looks “messy” and “inconsistent”). I guess this uses GTK, but it doesn’t look like any other GTK program. Buttons, tabs, drop-downs, whatever, it’s all different. It even has its own subwindow system (i.e., popups that you can’t move).

I didn’t say this in the blog post, but I’m convinced that programmers these days absolutely positively hate everything that looks even remotely like Windows 95 or Motif – with a passion. I see that in my coworkers as well, they really can’t stand it. It’s an emotional thing.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org In what way was KDE 3’s menu organized? KDE 1 is the only KDE version I ever used. 😅 We’re talking about this one, right?

Isn’t Notepad++ and Python cheating!? :-D

Well, Python was certainly already a thing back then, but Notepad++ is from 2003, right. I think I used https://www.wintotal.de/download/proton/ at the time? Maybe? I don’t know. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Regarding https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-06-16/0/POSTING-en.html:

In my opinion, the KDE 3.5 menu was organized way better than the Windows Start menu. Granted, a typical KDE installation had much more applications to offer, too. So, there was more need to get it right. And it probably was also later in time.

Isn’t Notepad++ and Python cheating!? :-D

Crazy story on the clock’s seconds. I never heard of that before. Neat.

Yeah, UI these days is horrible. (That’s why my own TUIs suck, too!)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That, uh … yeah, that would work as well. 😅🤦‍♀️

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @bender@twtxt.net Thank you! It’s some kind of a thistle I reckon. My mate is a bee hunter, I’ll link the next one that comes up.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Phew! ;-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yiha! Alternatively, you could embed the

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Gotta make the economy go “around” and keep public services in play 😅 Good luck! 🤞

@movq@www.uninformativ.de fully agree! And 10, and 11, and 18. By far my favourites, @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org.

🎶 【高音量】矢野顕子のピアノが癒しになる歌15曲‼️（Live 音源） https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCN27FFPLvM

Comme d’habitude avec Ego c’est magistral, mais là c’est une immense […] 🔗 https://yom.li/notes/20260616122041 🔖 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2JDvXvymBQ

Accounts that have posted within about one year https://balloon.oldcities.org/twtxt-active-users.txt

🎶 YMO リハーサル音源 1979年 約70分 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X18lqUTDyGs

From Missing the Playoffs to the NBA Finals ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E3N

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, 02.jpg is great. Camera just a little lower next time to put more emphasize on the … whatever that is in the foreground. 😅

Oh god, finally: The thumbnail generator for my blog now renders a typical “play” icon for videos.

https://movq.de/v/017c2070f4/s.png

Saves me the need to write “this is a video” every time. 😬

The dairy farm has a new milk vending machine. The prices increased by 20%. One liter is now 1.20€ instead of 1.00€. But I don’t complain.

In a few meters of shrubs there were easily 50 butterflies. That was crazy, I’ve never seen this many in one spot. I should have taken a video.

The grain field in the beginning was looking so great. Crazy colorful and very yummy looking. I would have loved to take a bite. Or at least lie down right in the middle.

That was another great time in the outdoors. The 21°C were killing us, though. We were always glad when we reached a shady spot with a little breeze. I’m not gonna survive the 35°C later this week. :-(

https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-06-15/