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 …)

@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! ;-)

having fun with omg.lol lately

(Just for fun, SuSE Linux 6.4 from ~25 years ago: https://movq.de/v/dc62d0256c/s.png )

i signed up for omg.lol and i’m really liking it. such a cozy and fun little community with a suite of fun web things. i wish the financial barrier to entry was a bit lower though (maybe like $5 for a few months on it or something) just so i could recommend it to my broke friends more, but i totally get why it’s priced the way it is (solo dev!!!)

@kingdomcome@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I REPLIED TO THIS AND NOW IT’S NOT SHOWING WTFFFF anyway what i said was that i have some fun stuff in the daily note template already like ASCII weather forecast from wttr AND a jenny holzer quote from fortune!!! i should add more fun stuff!!!

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I BELIEVE IN U!!! Making it fun helps! Maybe like put images in the docs so it’s cuter to look at! I did that, but with physical journaling. Except instead of pics it was receipts & leaves & dried flowers lol

@thecanine@twtxt.net Nice! :-)

When tidying up my good mate’s birthday party site last night we emptied the beer pong cups which had been filled with just ordinary tap water. There was also a cute dog whose owner gave it its drinking bowl, but it was not interested. Just for fun I offered it one of those water cups and it began to drink. We all had to laugh so hard because it was completely unexpected and looked so funny. Can’t describe this comicalness of the situation. :-D

i am having fun with dmenu

https://bytes.4-walls.net/kat/dotfiles/src/branch/main/config/.local/bin/dict
https://bytes.4-walls.net/kat/dotfiles/commit/b5ca2e0eaba3cbc0cf0898926ffcb0bb064d17c7

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org yesss it’s not my idea but it’s sooo fun here ngl like i should use it more!!

Xfce does one thing very right: It stores its settings in plain-text XML files. This allows me to easily read, track, and maybe even distribute these settings to other machines.

(Unlike GNOME’s dconf, which uses some binary file format. Fun fact: The older and now deprecated gconf also used XML files.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, if there’s no stable API, then it’s not a lot of fun … Bah. :|

guys microformats are so fun

Alright, now for something fun! Taxes! Yay!

i love pinkpantheress so much she’s so cute and fun and tapped into every aesthetic and dance music sound i love. if you like house and garage and D&B music, check her out!!!! she absolutely knows her shit too btw she’s sampled basement jaxx and adam F

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFWXqLSr4ZM

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I also don’t think that I’m a particularly good speaker. :-) The workshop model is a good idea, I like that.

Yeah, it’s really good fun. I can highly recommend it. This is also a good way to train (new) developers to think like attackers, how to break in, destroy something or raise awareness of some classes of bugs. Then you can avoid them next time. It’s surprising to me what vulnerabilities come up during this event every time. So, absolutely worth it, win, win.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

They’re all talks, not real hands-on trainings like you did.

I love listening to good, well-structured talks. Problem is, not everybody is a good speaker and many screw it up. 🥴 I’m certainly not a great speaker, which is why I gravitate more towards “workshops”, in the hopes that people ask questions and discussions arise. Doesn’t always work out. 🤣 At the very least, I almost always have some other person connect to the projector/beamer/screenshare and then they do the stuff – this avoids me being wwwwaaaaaaaaayyyy too fast.

We are usually drowned in stress and tight deadlines, hence events like today are super rare … We used to do it more often until ~10 years ago.

Once a year the security guys organize a really great hacking event, though.

Oh dear, I’d love to participate in that. 🤯 That sounds like a lot of fun. (Why don’t we do this?!)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Interesting internal education sessions are way too infrequent here as well. There are a bunch of “knowledge transfer” meetings actually, but 90% of the topics already sound totally boring to me. The other 9% talks turned out to be underwhelming, sadly. I only attended a single one where it was delivered what has been promised. They’re all talks, not real hands-on trainings like you did.

Once a year the security guys organize a really great hacking event, though. Teams can volunteer to hand in their software dev instances and all workmates are invited to hack them and report security vulnerabilities. That’s a lot of fun, but also gets frustrating towards the end when you don’t make any progress. :-) There’s also some actual hands-on training in advance for preparation of the two days. Unfortunately, I missed the last event due to my own project being very stressful at the time.

When I had a Do What You Want Day I also show my direct teammates what I learned in the hopes of this being interesting to them as well. I’m the only one in my team using this opportunity, sadly.

I did a “lecture”/“workshop” about this at work today. 16-bit DOS, real mode. 💾 Pretty cool and the audience (devs and sysadmins) seemed quite interested. 🥳

• People used the Intel docs to figure out the instruction encodings.
  
• Then they wrote a little DOS program that exits with a return code and they used uhex in DOSBox to do that. Yes, we wrote a COM file manually, no Assembler involved. (Many of them had never used DOS before.)
  
• DEBUG from FreeDOS was used to single-step through the program, showing what it does.
  
• This gets tedious rather quickly, so we switched to SVED from SvarDOS for writing the rest of the program in Assembly language. nasm worked great for us.
  
• At the end, we switched to BIOS calls instead of DOS syscalls to demonstrate that the same binary COM file works on another OS. Also a good opportunity to talk about bootloaders a little bit.
  
• (I think they even understood the basics of segmentation in the end.)
  

The 8086 / 16-bit real-mode DOS is a great platform to explain a lot of the fundamentals without having to deal with OS semantics or executable file formats.

Now that was a lot of fun. 🥳 It’s very rare that we do something like this, sadly. I love doing this kind of low-level stuff.

@prologic@twtxt.net have fun!

@prologic@twtxt.net Enjoy your road trip! Have fun!! 🤘

i ordered some fun colorful new minidiscs so i can finally get back to recording my mixes :D looking forward to it

Of Pointlessware and CEOs
Had a moment, to check up on some of the companies, I stopped following, get to The Browser Company and see their newest product - it’s just Chrome, with an AI chat window pop-up and that’s it. Something Canary Chrome, come with already.
I see Theo from T3.gg, making fun of it on YouTube and promoting “his” product - an AI chat app, where you can choose from multiple models, by all the popular AI companies. Something I already have a worse version of, at work and I don’t even use it.
There’s also an interview, about the future of virtual keyboards, surely this is at least actually a real thing and not more pointless horse shit. I check the website of the keyboard SDK, and it’s around 20 identical apps, that just copy the same keyboard SDK/api and slap chatgpt features on top - in the App Store, these are surrounded by chatgpt clones, that just feed the users prompts, into the real thing and put ads, next to the answers.

Having some fun with SIRDS this morning.

What you should see: https://movq.de/v/dae785e733/disp.png

And the tutorial I used for my C program: https://www.ime.usp.br/~otuyama/stereogram/basic/index.html

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org oh it wouldn’t be very long, maybe that’d make for a fun blog post! i just used the same tool that the nerd font people use to add glyphs, but for a “custom glyph set” i just added. the whole noto font LMAO

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz That sounds fun! I’m happy to read an article on how you did that. :-)

I had a lot of fun with my modems these past few days:

https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-05-31/0/POSTING-en.html

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz since rebuilding eunoia in astro i’ve had soooo much fun with it and i don’t even like JS

@prologic@twtxt.net That’s an interesting premise in that article:

The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation because nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will.

This is like saying it’s pointless to make music yourself because some professional player/audio engineer does a better job. Really, there’s always someone or something that’s better than you at a particular job.

If we focus too much on “competition”, then yes, you can just stop doing anything. I don’t know how common this mindset is, especially among artists or creative people. 🤔 I would have assumed that many writers, for example, simply enjoy the process of writing. Am I being too naive once more? 🤣

We had sun, clouds, wind, rain and a whole lot of fun on our trip to the Wasserberg. We’ve been out seven hours in total, not bad at all for all those kilometers. We added on some detours to check out a pond I’ve been introduced by a mate a few years back.

After some (expensive) tucker at the Wasserberghaus, we tried to actually visit the summit this time. However, there’s nothing to see, just a rough logging trail (46-49). That was a dead end, so we had to turn around. It was some nice exploring, but I reckon this was my first and last time up there. :-)

Unfortunately, we didn’t go to the neighboring Fuchseck this time, only the Wasserberg with some extras.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/wanderung-auf-den-wasserberg-2025-05-18/

static site generators make website-ing so fun like i wanna do so much with my site now

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club awww ty! it’s mostly fun stuff and links to my friends :) the buttons have been revived by indie web folks and the people at neocities, it’s super fun!

I just have to say the buttons page gives me the warm fuzzies with all the old school animated gifs. The internet seemed so fun back then…

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org fuck yeah!!! glad you had some fun

Thanks to @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz and her shelf I finally spent several hours in the woodshop. I wanted to build two drawers for the workbench and thought that I will complete this project in no time. I’ve been so wrong again. ;-)

I didn’t draw any plans, just measured a few times and then went to cutting a bunch of particle board leftovers at the table saw. I routed rebates on the sides, fronts and backs to lap the boxes and sink in the bottom. It turned out that having no plans was a stupid idea. I cut exactly on the lines as I calculated and measured, however, the math in my head fell apart when it eventually met reality. The bottoms are too short, so I gotta glue on some strips. Also, with the longer fronts, the sides won’t work either, I have to fix them as well. :-D

Finally, the lid of my cyclone bucket broke when the negative pressure got too large. Oh well. It was just an old wood glue bucket, I’ve got another empty one, so I can use that lid but strengthen it first with some plywood. Something for future Lyse to deal with.

All in all, it was still good fun. Wood (haha) do it again, but at least with some sketches on paper. ;-)

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz @bender@twtxt.net Hahaha! I can’t recall either, maybe even just a chisel or a knive? I’m not terribly good at it, not even close. It’s just fun. And I do it all too rarely. :-/

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz That’s cool. Also, looks like a fun woodworking project in case you exceed the hundred slots. :-) The plywood lap joints might be quite repetetive, but gang cutting them with a story stick or some other fixture shouldn’t be too terrible.

@prologic@twtxt.net ah that’s alright! the banner is just for fun :] it might be easier to skip to the comments with this link if you want (it’s in the site view mode rather than my page’s theme) https://luckyzukky.dreamwidth.org/98451.html?style=site#comments

@prologic@twtxt.net yeah, the post is here! you can check the comments to see my friends and i talking and stuff it’s so fun https://luckyzukky.dreamwidth.org/98451.html

i started a little thing on my dreamwidth and called it a flash prompt box. basically it’s a limited time thing where people can prompt me for stuff i’m offering, like short fanfiction, photoshop-edited user icons, music recs, and a bit more! i’m having sooo much fun with it so far it’s been a blast just making stuff for friends :)

also more friends are making their own posts with the same concept which is SO cool to see

Nobody want to be a shitty programmer. The question is: Do you do anything not to not be one?
Reading blogs or social media and watching YouTube videos is fun. After them, your code may be a little better, of course. But you need a lot. You need to study! Read good books and study the code of other programmers, for example. Maybe work with a new language, architectures and paradigms. You need break the routine.

If you know Object-oriented programming, you learn functional programming.
If you know Model-View-Controller, you learn Model-View-ViewModel.
If you don’t know anything about architectures, you learn Clean Architecture, Hexagonal Architecture, etc.
If you know Python, you learn Ruby or Go.
If you know Clojure or Lisp… you don’t need to learn anything else. You are already a good programmer. Just kidding. You can learn Elixir or Scala.

Be a good programmer my friend.

slowing working away at my latest code project: learning PHP by recreating the 2000s fandom mainstay known as a fanlisting! it’s been super fun i added a dynamic nav bar and other modifications in the latest commit

fanlistings even to this day rely on old PHP scripts dating back to the early 2000s that need whole ass mySQL or postgres DBs and are incredibly insecure. you can look at them here they’re like super jank lol it’s sad that new fanlistings have to use them because there’s no other options….

We just split about one and a half cubic meters of fire wood at our scout yard. And even more chainsaw action to cut the logs in smaller chunks. I’m bloody tired now. But it was really great fun swinging the axe. I will sleep like a rock tonight.

i’m slowly learning nixOS as part of my new fujocoded contract thing and as scary as it is it’s highkey kinda fun. like what do you mean i configure the bootloader with one god damn line in a file that’s EPIC

i don’t think any of you know what a fan listing is but basically it was a fandom thing in the 2000s where people would make websites that other people could sign up for to show they’re a fan of something. more info here.

anyway i made a fan listing kinda thing in PHP to learn the language. it was fun af

https://bytes.4-walls.net/kat/toys/src/branch/main/fan

I guess this is trivial to do with some pre-existing engine, but it’s more fun to do it yourself: https://movq.de/v/0cfa4e9504/world.tar.gz

Remembered a fun little “hello world” program I made in 2018:

https://movq.de/v/a1c4a819e6/vid.mp4

(It runs smoothly. My computer just isn’t fast enough for a smooth X11 screengrab at that resolution.)

The VTech Socratic method
We’ve had a lot of fun with VTech’s computers in the past on this blog. Usually, they’re relatively spartan computers with limited functionality, but they did make something very interesting in the late 80s. The Socrates is their hybrid video game console/computer design from 1988, and today we’ll start tearing into it. ↫ Leaded Solder web log Now we’re in for the good stuff. A weird educational computer/game console/toy thing from the late ’80s, by VTech. I have a massive soft s … ⌘ Read more

Can you beat me at the circle game? 😂 https://neal.fun/perfect-circle/

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz it happens lol tbh I think it’s kind of funny? but I think if I had done that I’d feel mega embarrassed, so I don’t want you to feel made fun of >w<;;;