DOGE staffer,‘Big Balls’, provided tech support to cybercrime ring, records show
Comments ⌘ Read more

How to protect your phone and data privacy at the US border
Comments ⌘ Read more

Thanks, @movq@www.uninformativ.de!

My backing SQLite database with indices is 8.7 MiB in size right now.

The twtxt cache is 7.6 MiB, it uses Python’s pickle module. And next to it there is a 16.0 MiB second database with all the read statuses for the old tt. Wow, super inefficient, it shouldn’t contain anything else, it’s a giant, pickled {"$hash": {"read": True/False}, …}. What the heck, why is it so big?! O_o

@movq@www.uninformativ.de You could also just use a tiling window manager. :-) As a bonus, it doesn’t waste dead space, the window utilizes the entire screen. To also get rid of panels and stuff, put the window in fullscreen mode.

I now subscribed to most feeds in my Go tt reimplementation that I already followed with the old Python tt. Previously, I just had a few feeds for testing purposes in my new config. While transfering, I “dropped” heaps of feeds that appeared to be inactive.

This might motivate me to actually “finish” the new client, so that it could become my daily driver. No need to use the old software stack any longer. Let’s see how bad this goes.

BigQuery pricing model cost us $10k in 22 seconds
Comments ⌘ Read more

@david@collantes.us @prologic@twtxt.net Sorry! https://cascii.app/

A collection of postgreSQL patterns that you can use in other databases
https://mccue.dev/pages/3-11-25-life-altering-postgresql-patterns
#postgresql #databases

Playing multimedia with Dillo
What if you want to use a web browser like Dillo, which lacks JavaScript support and can’t play audio or video inside the browser? Dillo doesn’t have the capability to play audio or video directly from the browser, however it can easily offload this task to other programs. This page collects some examples of how to do watch videos and listen to audio tracks or podcasts by using an external player program. In particular we will cover mpv with yt-dlp which supports YouTube … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, most of the graphical applications are actually KDE programs:

• KMail – e-mail client
  
• Okular – PDF viewer
  
• Gwenview – image viewer
  
• Dolphin – file browser
  
• KWallet – password manager (I want to check out pass one day. The most annoying thing is that when I copy a password, it says that the password has been modified and asks me whether I want to save the changes. I never do, because the password is still the same. I don’t get it.)
  
• KPatience – card game
  
• Kdenlive – video editor
  
• Kleopatra – certificate manager
  

Qt:

• VLC – video player
  
• Psi – Jabber client (I happily used Kopete in the past, but that is not supported anymore or so. I don’t remember.)
  
• sqlitebrowser – SQLite browser
  

Gtk:

• Firefox – web browser
  
• Quod Libet – music player (I should look for a better alternative. Can’t remember why I had to move away from Amarok, was it dead? There was a fork Clementine or so, but I had to drop that for some unknown reason, too.)
  
• Audacity – audio editor
  
• GIMP – image editor
  

These are the things that are open right now or that I could think of. Most other stuff I actually do in the terminal.

In the past™, I used the Python KDE4 bindings. That was really nice. I could pass most stuff directly in the constructor and didn’t have to call gazillions of setters improving the experience significantly. If I ever wanted to do GUI programming again, I’d definitely go that route. There are also great Qt bindings for Python if one wanted to avoid the KDE stuff on top. The vast majority I do for myself, though, is either CLI or maybe TUI. A few web shit things, but no GUIs anymore. :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Although, most software I use is decentish in that regard.

Is that because you mostly use Qt programs? 🤔

I wish Qt had a C API. Programming in C++ is pain. 😢

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Where can I join your club? Although, most software I use is decentish in that regard.

I just noted today that JetBrains improv^Wcompletely fucked up their new commit dialog. There’s no diff anymore where I would also be able to select which changes to stage. I guess from now on I’m going to exclusively commit from only the shell. No bloody git integration anymore. >:-( This is so useless now, unbelievable.

SawStart
⌘ Read more

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Pointers can be a bit tricky. I know it took me also quite some time to wrap my head around them. Let my try to explain. It’s a pretty simple, yet very powerful concept with many facets to it.

A pointer is an indirection. At a lower level, when you have some chunk of memory, you can have some actual values sitting in there, ready for direct use. A pointer, on the other hand, points to some other location where to look for the values one’s actually after. Following that pointer is also called dereferencing the pointer.

I can’t come up with a good real-world example, so this poor comparison has to do. It’s a bit like you have a book (the real value that is being pointed to) and an ISBN referencing that book (the pointer). So, instead of sending you all these many pages from that book, I could give you just a small tag containing the ISBN. With that small piece of information, you’re able to locate the book. Probably a copy of that book and that’s where this analogy falls apart.

In contrast to that flawed comparision, it’s actually the other way around. Many different pointers can point to the same value. But there are many books (values) and just one ISBN (pointer).

The pointer’s target might actually be another pointer. You typically then would follow both of them. There are no limits on how long your pointer chains can become.

One important property of pointers is that they can also point into nothingness, signalling a dead end. This is typically called a null pointer. Following such a null pointer calls for big trouble, it typically crashes your program. Hence, you must never follow any null pointer.

Pointers are important for example in linked lists, trees or graphs. Let’s look at a doubly linked list. One entry could be a triple consisting of (actual value, pointer to next entry, pointer to previous entry).

  _______________________
 /               ________\_______________
↓               ↓         |              \
+---+---+---+   +---+---+-|-+   +---+---+-|-+
| 7 | n | x |   | 23| n | p |   | 42| x | p |
+---+-|-+---+   +---+-|-+---+   +---+---+---+
      |         ↑     |         ↑
       \_______/       \_______/

The “x” indicates a null pointer. So, the first element of the doubly linked list with value 7 does not have any reference to a previous element. The same is true for the next element pointer in the last element with value 42.

In the middle element with value 23, both pointers to the next (labeled “n”) and previous (labeled “p”) elements are pointing to the respective elements.

You can also see that the middle element is pointed to by two pointers. By the “next” pointer in the first element and the “previous” pointer in the last element.

That’s it for now. There are heaps ;-) more things to tell about pointers. But it might help you a tiny bit.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev You use your real name as login name, too?

@prologic@twtxt.net I see this with the scouts. Luckily, not at work. But at work, I’m surrounded by techies.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh my goodness! I’m so glad that I don’t have to deal with that in my family. But yeah, I guess you’re onto something with your theory. This article is also quite horrific. O_o

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I had no idea. However, I think we’re losing our sense of anonymity. I even started using my real name!

It’s extremely surprising to me that younger non-technical people just type in their full name (properly cased first and last name with a space in between) for a technical username in account registration or login forms. I’ve seen that happening several times in the past few years. The field name is “Benutzername” in German, literally “username”. Even adding a placeholder text to signal that they could simply use their nickname in lowercase did not change anything at all. Well, one person used at least an e-mail address.

This wasn’t the case six, seven years ago, everybody had some “real” username. Even non-techies. It looks like some “common knowledge” is getting lost. Strange. Very weird. It trips me every time I see it.

Have you experienced something similar?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org There’s a reason it’s called “(n)curses”. 😏 The only advice I can give is to never fiddle with reassigning control sequences and $TERM variables. Leave $TERM at whatever value the terminal itself sets and use an appropriate terminfo file for it. If there are programs misbehaving, they probably blindly assume XTerm and should be fixed (or have XTerm as a hard requirement). If you try to fix this on your end, it’ll likely just break other programs. 🥴

@david@collantes.us Ah, I just went to bed, great to see you figured it out. 😅 I probably would have ended up with something similar (but I’m not a Vimscript guru). 🤔

@david@collantes.us Tada, the reply context is now also shown above. It’s slowly coming together and reaching a state where I can actually use this as my daily driver I think. :-)

Image

@david@collantes.us Thanks, yes, absolutely! ;-)

I now notice that I should also show the original message(s) to which I reply. That was super useful in the original tt. But one after the other. The mentions are now automatically filled in. \o/

@david@collantes.us While you’re typing? I guess this could be used as a starting point (doesn’t work on the very first line):

inoremap <CR> <Esc>:r!date +"\%F \%T"<CR>A 

What’s the end goal here? 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org oh yeah i use the CLI sometimes it’s fun af

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Allegedly, there’s at least a CLI for that, yarnc. I neither used nor looked at it, though.

Memory safety for web fonts in Chrome: Google replaces FreeType with Rust-based alternative
There’s no escaping Rust, and the language is leaving its mark everywhere. This time around, Chrome has replaced its use of FreeType with Skrifa, a Rust-based replacement. Skrifa is written in Rust, and created as a replacement for FreeType to make font processing in Chrome secure for all our users. Skifra takes advantage of Rust’s memory safety, and … ⌘ Read more

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Using full-blown Cloud services is good for old people like me who don’t want to do on-call duty when a disk fails. 😂 I like sleep! 😂

Jokes aside, I like IaaS as a middle ground. There are IaaS hosters who allow you to spin up VMs as you wish and connect them in a network as you wish. You get direct access to all those Linux boxes and to a layer 2 network, so you can do all the fun networking stuff like BGP, VRRP, IPSec/Wireguard, whatever. And you never have to worry about failing disks, server racks getting full, cable management, all that. 😅

I’m confident that we will always need people who do bare-bones or “low-level” stuff instead of just click some Cloud service. I guess that smaller companies don’t use Cloud services very often (because it’s way too expensive for them).

I saw 100% I/O wait in htop today but couldn’t find a process which actually does I/O. Turns out, I/O wait isn’t what it used to be anymore:

https://lwn.net/Articles/989272/

In my case, it was mpd which triggered this:

https://github.com/MusicPlayerDaemon/MPD/issues/2241

mpd doesn’t actually do anything, it just sits there and waits for events. To my understanding, this is similar to something blocking on read(). I’m not quite sure yet if displaying this as I/O wait (or “PSI some io”) is intentional or not – but it sure is confusing.

Image

my biggest fear of starting to work with servers professionally is realizing that no one uses servers anymore and having to do some cloud bullshit instead

@david@collantes.us You are right! I need to check this problem. Thank you very much!

Java 24 released
Oracle, the company owned by a guy who purchased a huge chunk of the Kingdom of Hawaii from the Americans, has released Java 24. I’ll be honest and upfront: I just don’t care very much at all about this, as the only interaction I’ve had with Java over the past, I don’t know, 15 years or so, is either because of Minecraft, or because of my obsession with ancient UNIX workstations where Java programs pop up in the weirdest of places. I know Java is massive and used everywhere, but going through the … ⌘ Read more

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev your client is breaking things, I am afraid. This hash (ptxsca), which you seem to be using to reply to @movq@www.uninformativ.de is not the right one.

@eapl.me@eapl.me Good job! I have added these comments:

1. It is only long for humans. Clients can only leave a hyperlink.
   
2. The nickname is just a decoration, only the date that acts as the id and the URL matter. The nick is used for humans reading the feed.
   
3. It can be migrated with a script, if the feed exists.

After 47 years, OpenVMS gets a package manager
As of the 18th of February, OpenVMS, known for its stability and high-availability, 47 years old and ported to 4 different CPU architecture, has a package manager! This article shows you how to use the package manager and talks about a few of its quirks. It’s an early beta version, and you do notice that when using it. A small list of things I noticed, coming from a Linux (apt/yum/dnf) background: There seems to be no automatic dependency … ⌘ Read more

i love everything pico.sh i wish i had more of a use for their services but the paste service is SUPER handy omg i finally had a reason to use it (to send a friend my unfinished failed marvel API bash program lol) and it’s epic. i love SSH i love TUI apps they are the best

Enlightenment 0.27.1 released
A few months after 0.27.0 was released, we’ve got a small update for Enlightenment today, version 0.27.1. It’s a short list of bugfixes, and one tiny new feature: you can now use the scroll wheel to change the volume when your cursor is hovering over the mixer controls. That’s it. That’s the release. ⌘ Read more

More pro for the DEC Professional 380 (featuring PRO/VENIX)
Settle down children, it’s time for another great article by Cameron Kaiser. This time, they’re going to tell us about the DEC Professional 380 running PRO/VENIX. The Pro 380 upgraded to the beefier J-11 (“Jaws”) CPU from the PDP-11/73, running two to three times faster than the 325 and 350. It had faster RAM and came with more of it, and boasted quicker graphics with double the vertical resolution built right into … ⌘ Read more

Apple’s long-lost hidden recovery partition from 1994 has been found
In 1994, a single Macintosh Performa model, the 550, came from the factory with a dedicated, hidden recovery partition that contained a System 7 system folder and a small application that would be set as bootable if the main operating system failed to boot. This application would then run, allowing you to recover your Mac using the system folder inside the recovery partition. This feature was app … ⌘ Read more

What is twtxt for me? It is a community of users sharing plain text following a specification that can be readable by both humans and machines.

For some it is a microblogging platform, for others it is a social network, others see it as an enhanced RSS feed and a few consider it a hacker’s toy. I use it as a learning platform. And as collateral damage, I’m meeting some very interesting people.

And for you?

Lungfish
⌘ Read more

I think I should try self-hosting some Mastodon thingy again.

The “export data” feature on the Mastodon instance I’m using seems to be broken. I’ve contacted the admins but we couldn’t find the issue – yet. I don’t want to bother them too much, it’s a free service after all.

But this means that everything I post over there is very, very volatile. It could all be gone in 5 minutes and I’ll have no way to restore it. Hmm.

I have a file with US holidays but I think it’s on my laptop still

Bit of an update, there is now a general licence for all my stuff:

“Unless projects are accompanied by a different license, Creative Commons apply (“BY-NC-ND” for all art featuring the Canine mascot and “BY-NC” for everything else).”

It’s even included on my website, where most of the demand for a clear licence originated from:

Image

In practice this changes nothing, as I was never enforcing anything more than this anyway and given permission for other use too. Now it’s just official that this is the baseline, of what can be done, without having to ask for permission first.

Chapter 1:

Audio

Audio

if you want a different voice let me know which to use: https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/

Ironclad 0.6 released
It’s been a while, but there’s a new release of Ironclad, the formally verified, hard real-time capable kernel written in SPARK and Ada. Aside from the usual bugfixes, this release moves Ironclad from multiboot to Limine, adds x86_64 ACPI support for poweroff and reboot, improvements to PTY support, the VFS layer, and much more. The easiest way to try out Ironclad is to download Gloire, a distribution that uses Ironclad and the GNU tools. It can be installed in both a virtual machine an … ⌘ Read more

A look at Firefox forks
Mozilla’s actions have been rubbing many Firefox fans the wrong way as of late, and inspiring them to look for alternatives. There are many choices for users who are looking for a browser that isn’t part of the Chrome monoculture but is full-featured and suitable for day-to-day use. For those who are willing to stay in the Firefox “family” there are a number of good options that have taken vastly different approaches. This includes GNU IceCat, Floorp, LibreWolf, and Zen. ↫ Joe Brockm … ⌘ Read more

Musk’s Tesla warns Trump’s tariffs and trade wars will harm Tesla
Elon Musk’s Tesla is waving a red flag, warning that Donald Trump’s trade war risks dooming US electric vehicle makers, triggering job losses, and hurting the economy. In an unsigned letter to the US Trade Representative (USTR), Tesla cautioned that Trump’s tariffs could increase costs of manufacturing EVs in the US and forecast that any retaliatory tariffs from other nations could spike costs of export … ⌘ Read more

WinRing0: why Windows is flagging your PC monitoring and fan control apps as a threat
When I checked where Windows Defender had actually detected the threat, it was in the Fan Control app I use to intelligently cool my PC. Windows Defender had broken it, and that’s why my fans were running amok. For others, the threat was detected in Razer Synapse, SteelSeries Engine, OpenRGB, Libre Hardware Monitor, CapFrameX, MSI Afterburner, OmenMon, FanCtrl, Z … ⌘ Read more

KDE splits KWin into kwin_x11 and kwin_wayland
One of the biggest behind-the-scenes changes in the upcoming Plasma 6.4 release is the split of kwin_x11 and kwin_wayland codebases. With this blog post, I would like to delve in what led us to making such a decision and what it means for the future of kwin_x11. ↫ Vlad Zahorodnii For the most part, this change won’t mean much for users of KWin on either Wayland or X11, at least for now. At least for the remainder of the Plasma 6.x life … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ah, yes, a calendar that shows the past $x months is great! I have this as a widget in my bar:

Image

Before that I also used something like cal. It works, but it’s a bit cumbersome.

@eapl.me@eapl.me @bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net Not including a photo was a stupid move, sorry. There you go:

Image

This particular one is 95mm wide and 185mm high. Fairly compact.

I can only use it figure out distances to other dates and to do some basic calendar math. I’m not able to actually schedule anything. But I grew up with a month calendar like you have there where all appointments of the entire family was recorded.

By far most of my paper use is drawing random stuff on scratch paper during meetings. :-D

Image