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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (1d ago)

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 …)

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lyse
lyse.isobeef.org
 (5w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » I was drafting support for showing “application icons” in my window manager, i.e. the Firefox icon in the titlebar:

@movq@www.uninformativ.de According to this screenshot, KDE still shows good old application icons: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/KDE_Plasma_5.21_Breeze_Twilight_screenshot.png

And GNOME used to have them, too: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Gnome-2-22_%284%29.png

I like the looks of your window manager. That’s using Wayland, right? The only thing on this screenshot to critique is all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1 At least the file browser. 8-)

This drives me nuts when my workmates share their screens. I really don’t get it how people can work like that. You can’t even read the whole line in the IDE or log viewer with all the expanded side bars. And then there’s 200 pixels on the left and another 300 pixels on the right where the desktop wallpaper shows. Gnaa! There’s the other extreme end when somebody shares their ultra wide screen and I just have a “regularish” 16:10 monitor and don’t see shit, because it’s resized way too tiny to fit my width. Good times. :-D

Sorry for going off on a tangent here. :-) Back to your WM: It has the right mix of being subtle and still similar to motif. Probably close to the older Windowses. My memory doesn’t serve me well, but I think they actually got it fairly good in my opinion. Your purple active window title looks killer. It just fits so well. This brown one (https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-07-22/0/leafpads.png) gives me also classic vibes. Awww. We ran some similar brownish color scheme (don’t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98 for some time on the family computer. I remember other people visting us not liking these colors. :-D

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (7w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » The lack of suckless-like simple, hackable software these days is appalling.

@prologic@twtxt.net Hm, I wouldn’t say that. Go code could fall into that category as well.

Maybe this topic could use a blog post / article, that explains what it’s about. I’m finding it hard to really define what “suckless-like software” is. 🤔 (Their own philosophy focuses too much on elitism, if you ask me.)

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (7w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » The lack of suckless-like simple, hackable software these days is appalling.

@prologic@twtxt.net Ah, I’m referring to software that’s similar to that of suckless.org: Small, minimal codebases, small tools, but still useful. dmenu is probably the best example and also farbfeld.

Here’s the author of Anubis talking about some of their experiences:

https://xeiaso.net/blog/why-i-use-suckless-tools-2020-06-05/

(You can skip the long config and keybinds part.)

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (9w ago)

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.

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (10w ago)

OpenBSD has the wonderful pledge() and unveil() syscalls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXO6nelFt-E

Not only are they super useful (the program itself can drop privileges – like, it can initialize itself, read some files, whatever, and then tell the kernel that it will never do anything like that again; if it does, e.g. by being exploited through a bug, it gets killed by the kernel), but they are also extremely easy to use.

Imagine a server program with a connected socket in file descriptor 0. Before reading any data from the client, the program can do this:

unveil("/var/www/whatever", "r");
unveil(NULL, NULL);
pledge("stdio rpath", NULL);

Done. It’s now limited to reading files from that directory, communicating with the existing socket, stuff like that. But it cannot ever read any other files or exec() into something else.

I can’t wait for the day when we have something like this on Linux. There have been some attempts, but it’s not that easy. And it’s certainly not mainstream, yet.

I need to have a closer look at Linux’s Landlock soon (“soon”), but this is considerably more complicated than pledge()/unveil():

https://landlock.io/

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bender
twtxt.net
 (10w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » @prologic I am finding writing my Notes very therapeutic. Just create a markdown file and commit, push, and it’s live. Whatever comes to mind, whatever I want to keep as relevant. Silly things, more like a dump.

@prologic@twtxt.net yes, I never understood you using micro.blog (and paying for it, nonetheless!). I don’t like it (as a platform), and have an unexplainable dislike for its creator.

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prologic
twtxt.net
 (10w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » @prologic I am finding writing my Notes very therapeutic. Just create a markdown file and commit, push, and it’s live. Whatever comes to mind, whatever I want to keep as relevant. Silly things, more like a dump.

@bender@twtxt.net Maybe one day I’ll take back over my prologic.blog domain from µBlog and redoit with my handy zs tool with some nice CSS 🤣

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kat
yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz
 (12w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » hacking jetbrains mono to include CJK characters from a noto font for stupid purposes (i listen to asian music and my conky sidebar has a lastfm widget so sometimes it shows asian text and jetbrains doesn't render those. so i am frankensteining my way into making it do that)

@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

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nghialele
nghia.im
 (12w ago)

i saw folks in #lowendtalk are discussing about which password managers are worth using?. should have summary people’s opinion and my own into a blog post, had this idea for a while, the purpose is to tell my people how to be more secure & easier in life.

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prologic
twtxt.net
 (13w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » @kat I don’t like Golang much either, but I am not a programmer. This little site, Go by example might explain a thing or two.

One of the nicest things about Go is the language itself, comparing Go to other popular languages in terms of the complexity to learn to be proficient in:

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kat
yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz
 (15w ago)

i got so emo about my site not being statically generated and instead hand coded but it’s like i don’t even know if i want that because i feel most SSGs are built for blogging and continuous posting and i don’t want that i just want to make my silly pages….

that being said, the one i’d use if i did switch to one would be astro and that one is so flexible i could really do anything with it including keeping my pages as is mostly without doing the blog stuff. idk! something to consider

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (16w ago)
↳ In-reply-to » https://alex.party/posts/2025-05-05-the-future-of-web-development-is-ai-get-on-or-get-left-behind/

And on a similar note, cross-post from Mastodon:

What I love about HTML and HTTP is that it can degrade rather gracefully on old browsers.

My website isn’t spectacular but I don’t think it looks horrible, either. And it’s still usable just fine all the way down to WfW 3.11:

It’s not perfect, but it’s usable. And that makes me happy. Almost 30 years of compatibilty.

The biggest sacrifice is probably that I don’t enforce TLS and that HTTP 1.0 has no Host: header, so no vhosts (or rather, everything must come from the default vhost). (Yes, some old browsers send Host:, even though they predate HTTP 1.1. Netscape does, but not IBM WebExplorer, for example.)

(On the other hand, it might completely suck on modern mobile devices. Dunno, I barely use those. 🤪)

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andros
twtxt.andros.dev
 (16w ago)

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.

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andros
twtxt.andros.dev
 (16w ago)

@bender@twtxt.net Yes, you right. But is premium for more than that.
I use a feature I love a lot: customising different searches with different themes or links.
It’s easy to understand with an example. I have a search with the name “Django”. I set sources: Django documentation, stack overflow, topic “programming” and so on. It’s very quick to find Django solutions.
I also have another way to find my stuff: search my blog and repositories.
I had problems paying for the first mouths, now it’s a working tool for me.

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osnews
feeds.twtxt.net
 (17w ago)

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

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