@movq@www.uninformativ.de TL;DR? 🤔

RIP Android:

https://9to5google.com/2025/08/25/android-apps-developer-verification/

Since nobody is going to push back on this (I don’t even know if that would be possible), this is going to be a reality on every platform sooner or later.

I’d guess in 20, 30 years, there won’t be “PCs” anymore. No more home computing, no more “I just write my own software”. You won’t own devices anymore, it’ll all be rented and the landlord will tell you what you can do with it.

I hope that I’m wrong, but given where we are today, I don’t think that I will be.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Nice picture, this hot air balloon has quite a large basket.

Yes, go for it! :-)

My grandpa went ballooning ages ago and liked it. The balloonist misjudged the height a bit and landed in an open-air pool. Well, not in the water, but on the sunbathing lawn just inside the fence. :-D After the ride, everybody was given a very long personal name that they had to memorize. Decades later, my grandpa still knew his assigned name.

The most important thing to know is that – in German – you don’t fly (fliegen) a ballon, but ride (fahren) it: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballonfahren#Fahren_oder_fliegen Judging by the English wikipedia article, this is not an English thing, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_ballooning

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Wow, cool! :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah I just got a bit curious after watching your video and reading your OP 😅

@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.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Haha yeah rightio, and yeah inches suck 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net It’s quite similar to how escape sequences work in a terminal. ASCII text is printed as ASCII text and then an escape sequence can make it bold or underline and so on. Other escape sequences allow you to say “the following $n bytes are part of a bitmap image”, and then this gets printed at whatever the current position is (somewhat similar to SIXEL in a terminal).

It’s just that the units are a bit weird, because this is all done in bloody inch. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de What do you define as “expensive”? 🤔 (I’ve always thought of modern-day painters as a “rip”, and the ink my god 🤯)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Is there like a TL;DR of this standard? I can’t say I remember this tbh 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Here’s one: https://github.com/vmykh/printer_labs/blob/master/escp2ref.pdf

@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.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Got a link to this

ESC/P standard.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Are you sure?

because there is virtually no market for these devices anymore, meaning new ones are very, very expensive.

I think dot matrix printers are still pretty common in many Point of Sales (POS) registers right? At least here in AU they’re very common. I had a quick look myself today, there seems to be quite a solid market for these types of printers. In fact even EPSON still sell Dot Matrix printers themselves 🤣

@thecanine@twtxt.net That’s cute. 😃 (Why Clippy, though? 😅)

@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.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Kind of curious now… Is there a (to buy new) dot matrix printer you’d recommend if someone wanted to get into this sort of thing (sending plain ‘ol bytes to a printer port)? 🤔 (I remember this back in the ye ‘old days!)

Should I go on a tour with these hot air balloons some day? Not sure if it’s scary as hell. 😂

https://movq.de/v/3e26ec9a71/IMG_8800-edit.jpg

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

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m in Standard Camp. ;-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de There haven’t been decent ones for a while.

Joining the Clippy profile picture club, now that I finally finished my custom one.

I’ve been doing this for so lang that I’ve unlearned how to do this.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Aww, yeah. 😍 (Reminds me, I haven’t paid attention to the sunset in quite a while …)

@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.

@twtxtory@twtxtory.adn.org.es it is designed that way on purpose 🤣

Surprisingly, the sky got quite some lovely colors this evening. I approve! https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-08-21/

@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! ;-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Haha, yeah. I never bothered with them.

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

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @prologic@twtxt.net It’s too real, isn’t it? 🤣

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks, glad you like it, but sadly I’m not sure, if there’s still a way, for this particular project, to continue.

Reducing 38 pixels (previous smallest) to 27, inside of a 7x7 square canvas, is a result I’m really happy with. Now it seems I can only shave off single pixels and get a lot worse looking results - to the point it doesn’t even look like my mascot, to me.

There doesn’t seem to be a hard cap for drawing tiny dogs. It’s possible to arrange 5 pixels, in a way someone recognizes them, as some kind of a dog. The record for cats, is currently a single orange pixel: https://youtu.be/gzeK8NKuzmg

The only way to beat that, is either a monitor, with just a single red diode lit, inside one of its pixels, or an image file that’s broken and empty, on purpose.

Geil, Staffel 10 von Feuer & Flamme ist da! https://www.ardmediathek.de/serie/feuer-und-flamme/staffel-10/Y3JpZDovL3dkci5kZS9mZXVlcnVuZGZsYW1tZQ/10

@thecanine@twtxt.net Wow. I’m not an artist in any way, but I have tried to make icons for programs or fonts every now and then. Making something that is still recognizable at so few pixels is hard. Hats off!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de wut da fuq?! 🤯

@thecanine@twtxt.net Haha I thought myself there might ahve been too many pixels on the tail, but I’m no expert in this field 🤣 It’s still a nice canine though! 👌

@prologic@twtxt.net That’s fair, this version really is a stretch. Similar to old Atari game spirites, a lot is left to interpretation,especially by those who have not seen any of the more detailed ones, before.

On the other hand, some suggested I’m still wasting too many pixels on the tail, but removing those, makes it just a generic dog (at best), even to me.

@thecanine@twtxt.net My daughter (who is pretty good already at art and only 10 :D) says this looks like a “blob” 🤣 I tried to explain to her that this is pixel art, but I’m not quite sure she has the same appreciation (yet) 😅

After around 3 years, I managed to make my “smallest recognizable canine”, even smaller. So here’s the all new, smallest recognizable canine 2.0:

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Fucking hell!

@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

Please enjoy this horrible madness: https://userinyerface.com/game.html

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

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Very nice! I fully agree, I really like listening to him, too.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Well, now that is pretty impressive. Upcycling ftw.

@bender@twtxt.net There are all sorts of pallets. I made my wooden mallet from a heavy duty beech pallet a few years ago:

Oh yes, this guy is so cool. I think the next machines I need are a thickness planer and a big dust collector with at least hose 100mm diameter! :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org you have sent me down the rabbit hole now. That guy is a true wizard!

@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.

UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEb_YL1K1Qg

I could listen to him all day.

That’s soooo amazing! A Pirate Treasure Chest Made Out Of A Pallet by Epic Upcycling: https://youtu.be/euqru1gVJoQ