@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org a content warning is kind of like a forum spoiler cut, or like the <details> tag in HTML; it lets you write a sentence or so that someone can then click to expand to see the actual post. it’s called a CW because most people use it to warn for potentially triggering/harmful subjects, but you can really use it for anything, like spoilers in a TV show or even for joke punchlines

@zvava@twtxt.net I never used any of the social media platforms, that’s why I’m probably ignorant.

I don’t understand the concept of a retwt. Just quote the (relevant) parts from whereever and comment on that. Or post a link instead of a quote. Sounds simple enough. :-) That’s also has the benefit that it works with every source, no matter what. Since it’s called retwt, I’d imagine this to only work (well) with whatever messages the system itself offers. But I could be wrong. What would be the benefit of having a dedicated message type or structure for “hey, look at that” messages in your opinion?

Hmm, what’s a content warning?

in the same vein, i think content warnings can be faithfully implemented by parsing CW: ..., tw // ..., etc. from the first line of a post followed by two newlines, like how they’re used on platforms that don’t have content warnings

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org hahaha very rarely!!! it wasn’t quite a sky scraper, just a few floors up, but my perspective may be skewed because i’m used to high buildings :P

I have a feeling that learning to play electric double bass through an amplifier was a big mistake.

At the core, this is an acoustic instrument. If you play it through an amp, you will instinctively only do the bare minimum to get some sound going, because the amp does the heavy lifting. But it’s just not right.

This is a very physical instrument. It needs a lot of force and strength – in comparison, an electric bass guitar is almost flimsy and delicate. I need to “feel” what’s going on and that’s just not the case when using headphones.

I feel like I wasted ~3 years. 🫤 But maybe it’ll get better from now on …

i love htmx i just need to find somewhere to use it

@thecanine@twtxt.net I’d expect especially power users not to use the web frontend. Unfortunately, in order to submit MR reviews that’s very often just the only option.

How about no longer using in-browser Git repo viewers? Make the AI bots do the work and actually clone the repo.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Interesting, yes. I didn’t know that.

No AI being used is really great. However, the same clips shown over and over again and some images being mirrored was quite annoying to me. Also, there were some quite terrible computer animations and sometimes the narration and picture didn’t match at all. Talking about the medieval period and then showing an image from the 18th hundred or so. What the heck?

These production issues made me sceptical pretty much early on. So I quickly crosschecked Wikipedia. But it seems spot on from what I’ve read. Very good. Also, the narrator’s voice was really nice to listen to.

Eels are fascinating creatures. :-)

Dear dev.alessandrocutolo.it, do you really need to fetch my twtxt feed every 20-30 seconds? 😅 Not that it’s posing a problem, but I feel like this could be optimized. For example, how about using the if-modified-since request header: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Headers/If-Modified-Since

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @dce@hashnix.club It’s pretty cool, I won’t argue that, but also really simple, to be completely honest. 😅 The BIOS already provides all you need to send data to the printer:

https://helppc.netcore2k.net/interrupt/bios-printer-services

The BIOS actually does provide a great deal of things, which, to me, was one of the most surprising learnings of this project (the project of writing a little 16-bit real-mode OS, that is). It often doesn’t feel like I was writing an operating system – it felt more like writing a normal program that just uses BIOS calls like we would use syscalls these days.

(I’ve also read a lot of warnings, like “don’t use the BIOS for this or that”. Mostly because it tends to be very slow.)

@dce@hashnix.club Apart from the crap produced in Redmond two decades ago, I only ever used and still happily use Linux, mainly Debian and Ubuntu. I’ve no idea, but maybe something in there catches your eye: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_operating_systems (I know, what a silly recommendation.)

Listen missy, don’t you disappear on us like that again, do you hear me?! 😂 Welcome back, kat! I was wondering where you were, but figured something more interesting was keeping you busy. 🙈

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org IIRC they’re getting attacked by bots on a huge level

also this is a really useful page!

@zvava@twtxt.net may I recommend to change the mention format upon hitting reply to something similar to what it’s used in Yarn, and perhaps hiding the hash on the post too? Looking good!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I noticed that:

gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2018/2018-06/2018-06-01.txt

Is the first non-justified, and it is when you started using Markdown. The last justified one was:

gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2018/2018-05/2018-05-27.txt

So, I might have found the mystery! :-D

Haha, fun! I browsed your gopher hole a little bit. I noticed some entries are fully justified (formatting), while others are not. I didn’t notice a pattern, though it makes sense not to use justification on entries with code. Yet, some prose entries are, and some are not. A mystery. :-)

@klaxzy@klaxzy.net I’ve had many SD cards die in Raspberry Pis. Really annoying. I’ve eventually switched to using a read-only rootfs. 🫤

Now that’s interesting. Some of these bots start crawling at URLs like this:

https://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/NetTracer-Scenes/GPUTracer/multipass/xlonitor/http-collect/getpw

That is obviously completely wrong. But I can explain it. Some years ago, I screwed up my nginx rewrite rules, and that’s how these broken URLs came to be.

It all redirects to /git now, which is why that endpoint sees so much traffic lately.

But what does that mean? Why do they start there? I can only speculate that this company bought an old database of web links and they use that to start crawling. And it was probably a cheap one, because these redirects have been fixed for quite a long time now.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m doing that now as well, but I don’t think this is a good solution. This is going to hurt “self-hosting” in the long run: I cannot afford true self-hosting where I actually do host everything here at home – instead, I must use a cloud provider / VPS for that. It is only a matter of time until my provider starts doing AI shit as well (or rather, the customers do it) and then what? I get blocked, e.g. I can’t send email to (some) people anymore. This is already bad and it’s going to get worse.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, that was a lot of fun. 😃 Now let’s wait and see if I ever get to actually use this. 😂

@thecanine@twtxt.net We don’t use Microsoft at work – but similar products of other big companies. They’re all doing the same. The core product gets worse and worse, because they focus so much on vomiting “AI” over everything.

It will die down eventually. I hope.

@thecanine@twtxt.net I hate it when businesses do this. As well as being annoying and unreliable, Microsoft software is known to have a hell of a lot of security vulnerabilities, and the AI features increase the attack surface. One can use a client like Thunderbird for the email, but Teams doesn’t really have an alternative. Awful stuff.

We use all the Microsoft programs at work - Teams and Outlook especially.

After all kinds of technical problems with Teams, that sometimes go unresolved for over a year, Microsoft shifted their priorities away from fixing things and towards adding an annoying AI Copilot button, that just takes up space and all it does, is loads the website in Teams, so I disabled it. Soon they just add it back, but in a different row of icons, therefore it’s now a different button, you have to disable (I think they added yet another one, to the Teams, on my work phone and I had to disabled that too). Not too long after, the desktop one just enabled itself, because of “an error” and I can disable it, but doing so activates a popup, that begs you to turn it back on, every once in a while. You can’t disable the popup and can only click “Yes” or “Not now” on it. I still keep it disabled, out of principle, but yesterday I noticed yet another Copilot button, this time in the top right corner of my Outlook and this one cannot be disabled, on the business version of Outlook and even on the personal one, it’s only possible to do it through hidden privacy settings, by prohibiting the program from connecting to Microsoft servers, for extra “features”.

There’s people complaining about it online, so it’s clear nobody really wants it, but at this point Microsofts position is that you will have at least one useless AI button on your screen, at any given time, and you will be happy. And yes, their AI sucks and if I absolutely have to use AI for something, there’s already 2 better options, we have access to, at work.

Enjoy! This is a longer weekend for us too (Labor Day), and even longer for me, as I have asked for Tuesday off. Yayyyyy! I will not be drinking (I voluntarily stopped drinking anything with alcohol in it), but I will try to get a few things done, and then relax.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, we’ve seen how this plays out in practice 🤣 @dce@hashnix.club My advice, do what @movq@www.uninformativ.de has hinted at and don’t change the 1st # url = field in your feed. I’m not sure if you had already, but the first url field is kind of important in your feed as it is used as the “Hashing URI” for threading.

@dce@hashnix.club Ah, oh, well then. 🥴

My client supports that, if you set multiple url = fields in your feed’s metadata (the top-most one must be the “main” URL, that one is used for hashing).

But yeah, multi-protocol feeds can be problematic and some have considered it a mistake to support them. 🤔

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Why the fuck do they think people need that‽ Most people don’t even use regular tab groups, and now they want to shoehorn an ML model in there as well‽

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 …)

@prologic@twtxt.net @moveq@twtxt.net I think it’s mostly the serious lack of competition. All the Android phone manufacturers just use the Google version of Android, bundle in piles of Google bloatware and do whatever Google tells them to. If some of them installed Lineage, or any other versions, with their own stores and rules, or even just offer a less Googly version of their phones, as an option, for more experienced users, Google wouldn’t be able, to push everyone around.

@dce@hashnix.club I don’t use Gemini, but I follow you on the good, old, HTTP(S)! :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @prologic@twtxt.net this is extremely concerning and I hope there is enough push back to stop this! The ability to modify apps, is one of the two biggest reasons, I’m still using Android. If they remove that option, I’ll be forced to switch to one of the de-Googled forks.

That might not be a good solution either, because I need banking and identity verification apps on my main device and already had to get a second device for work, which has tighter sideloading restrictions and I would very much not like to be forced into using three Android phones simultaneously, to do what should be possible, with just one.

Apparently twtxt wasn’t the right client to use. twet seems to be alright, though.

@prologic@twtxt.net Anything above a couple hundred Euros. 😅 The current Epson LX-350 appears to be not that pricey, though. 🤔

I mean, what do you want to do with it? If you want to use this as an actual printer for daily use, I’d get a laser printer instead, because they’re very reliable and the print quality is top notch.

I got my dot matrix printer mostly for experiments and nostalgia, so I wouldn’t want to pay something like 300-400€ for it.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, those POS thingies are similar. There’s “ESC/POS” as a variant of “ESC/P”, if I’m not mistaken.

All I can say is, when I go to big stores like Amazon, then I have trouble finding “traditional” dot matrix printers for use at home. 😅 Epson still sells them, but they’re more expensive than my laser printer was. So yeah, they still exist, just expensive, by the looks of it.

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm, good question. I haven’t checked the market, I got mine from someone I know. But to be honest, I’d suspect that buying a used one is actually your best shot, because there is virtually no market for these devices anymore, meaning new ones are very, very expensive. 🫤

FWIW, I have an OKI Microline 3390eco. Good thing is, you can still buy new cartridges for it.

If you want to buy a new device, check if it supports the “ESC/P” standard. That’s very widely supported.

This is why I love tech from that era.

Write bytes to a parallel port and stuff happens. If it’s just ASCII bytes, then it will print ASCII text. Even the simplest programs can use a printer this way.

With a little bit of ESC/P, you can print images and other fancy stuff. That’s what I did this morning – never worked with ESC/P before, now I can print images. It’s not that hard.

Hayes-compatible modems are similar: Write some AT commands to the serial port and the modem does things. This isn’t even arcane knowledge, it’s explained in the printed manual.

Maybe I’m wearing rose-tinted glasses here, but I think with all this old stuff, you get useful results very quickly and the manuals are usually actually helpful. It’s so much easier to get started and to use this hardware to the full extent. Much less complexity than what we have today, not a ton of libraries and dependencies and SDKs and cloud services and what not.

https://movq.de/v/4bd16cb3c7/tux1.jpg

https://movq.de/v/4bd16cb3c7/tux2.jpg

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org When/if I can pull it off, there will be videos! 😅

I never used hardcopy terminals, either. We did have a dotmatrix printer, but that was just used as a regular printer.

Inkjets, I don’t know. They were pretty fascinating and cool when they came out. A lot faster than dotmatrix and obviously quiter. They never gave me much trouble, actually. But I switched to a laser printer long before crap like DRM’ed ink cartridges became a thing.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Heck yeah, have fun! :-) We never had a matrix printer, started off with a cathode ray tube and an inkjet pisser.

I’m happy to see you compose your first twtxt message using ed on your new output device. We definitely need video proof of that! ;-)

Sooooooooo, things happened, and I now have a dot matrix printer again. 😍😂

(One of the end goals is to simulate a hardcopy terminal on my old box. I’m waiting for another cable to arrive, I don’t have USB there. And then use ed(1) like it was meant to be used! 😅)

https://movq.de/v/850e04ba36/VID_20250821_180801.mp4.mp4

https://movq.de/v/850e04ba36/closeup.jpg

The GPG signatures of my software tarballs have been wrong for years (because I’ve been using rsync wrong, funny enough, it wasn’t a GPG issue) and nobody ever noticed. (They still are wrong at the moment, because I haven’t pushed the fix, yet.)

This confirms that this is just a total waste of time. Nobody ever checks this. Maybe this matters if you’re a distro, but why even bother as a single person …

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Ucycling just rocks to hard!

@bender@twtxt.net Hahaha, I bet you could use it for a myriad of things! :-D

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org ooooh! I wish I had that mallet here at work today. So many uses come to mind! 😂

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org that’s so cool! I had to do some research, as I thought all pallets were made using cheap pine wood (which is quite soft), but, boy, as I erring big time! Oak it is also used, which is hardwood, and quite durable.

I use Headscale. Love it!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh yeah, once in the quarter to the office is absolutely amazing and luxurious. Thank you teammates and employer! Though, I would already have been on site when these things happened earlier.

Today is my last day of holiday. Back to work again tomorrow. Not looking forward, vacation is just great. So easy to get used to.

Today I finally got rid of my /29 IPv4 subnet with my ISP used to power my ingress. No longer.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de having to go to a gopher proxy to see a text document better served on readily available web servers… 🤭, but I digress. Verbatim text:

What's Missing from "Retro"
~softwarepagan
------------------------------------------------------------------
You know, often, when I say I miss older ways of computing or
connecting online, people tell me "there's nothing stopping you
from doing that now!" and they are technicay correct in most cases
(though I can't, for example, chat with friends on MSN ever
again...) However, let me explain that while this type of thing can
*sort of* fill that hole in my heart, it isn't *the same.*

Say, for example, I wanted to connect with others over a BBS. This
wouldn't offer the same types of connections it used to. While
there are BBSes around with active users, they're no longer there
to discuss movies, Star Trek, D&D, games, etc. They're there to
discuss *BBSes.* The same can be said for Gopher, old-school forums
and all sorts of revival projects (such as Escargot, Spacehey,
etc.) Retrocomputing enthusiasts, while they have a variety of
interests, are often in these spaces to discuss the medium itself
and not other topics. This exists at a stark contrast from how
things were in the past, where a non-tech-inclined person may learn
the tech to connect with likeminded others (as I did as a
Zelda-obsessed kid.)

The same can be said of old media. People will say "well, nobody is
stopping you from watching old shows/movies now!" Again, they are
technically correct. I can go home right now and watch *Star Trek:
The Next Generation* to my heart's content. It will never again,
however, be current, or new. When something is new, it serves as a
shared cultural experience. Remember how "Game of Thrones* felt in
the mid-to-late 2010s? Yeah, that.

It's sad. I sustain myself on a mixed diet of old things, new
things, and new things intended for old millenials like me who like
old things. It can be bittersweet. 

We did an experiment at work today: Do I even need to lock my laptop when I’m gone or is nobody able to use it anyway?

It went as expected. 🤣

@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. 😂