curl -s gopher://… does that for you.
@movq@www.uninformativ.de nice “silent mode”, thank you!
The author doesn’t really long for retro. They long for time passed, for old times. We all do. It is called ageing.
@bender@twtxt.net curl -s gopher://… does that for you.
@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.
What’s Missing from “Retro”: gopher://midnight.pub/0/posts/2679
@prologic@twtxt.net Sure is. I wonder how many websites I’ll have to just completely opt out of because of it.
Hard to believe that this song is from 1985:
@prologic@twtxt.net They would know how to do that, but the issue was anything else, like switching workspaces or opening a terminal window or any window at all. 😅
@movq@www.uninformativ.de No one would figure out how to :q! ? 🤣
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. 🤣
@prologic@twtxt.net I’m so tired of this. (That’s the goal. They want to wear people down.)
This whole Age Verification that’s being rolled out in the UK, AU and parts of the EU is totally fucking bullshit. Death to the Online Safety Act.
@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz yeah it’s pretty terrible these days. Most recent trouble I had was something as simple as installing and setting up the Tailscale client. On literally all my other devices (Linux and Android) that was a cinch, but on Windows…. ohh boy, I had to mess around with reg edits and all sorts of crap and eventually bludgeoned it into working, but it was a bloody pain.
@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. 😂
@movq@www.uninformativ.de WE NEED MORE BACKUPS!!!!!!!!!!!1
i’m helping someone get a reverse proxy going on windows and my god this operating system is dogshit
apt manpage of Ubuntu recently, which, for some reason, uses blue text in one place:
Ah, so apparently they don’t like writing manpages anymore and instead use XML:
https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/blob/main/doc/apt.8.xml
And then they use XSLT on top and what not:
https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/blob/main/doc/manpage-style.xsl.cmake.in
It’s not even explicitly blue:
https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/blob/main/doc/apt.ent?ref_type=heads#L17
Abstractions upon abstractions upon abstractions.
@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Oh no. 😨 Backups! We need more backups!
You can explicitly use colors in manpages. I saw this in the apt manpage of Ubuntu recently, which, for some reason, uses blue text in one place:
https://movq.de/v/de5ab72016/s.png
Makes little sense to me. I’m glad that most manpages don’t do this. I wouldn’t want unicorn vomit all over the place.
Using colors can be done using the low level commands \m and \M:
.TH foo_program 3
\m[blue]I'm blue\m[], da ba dee.
\m[red]\M[yellow]I'm red on yellow.\m[]\M[]
This is quite horrible.
@jost@jost.sdfeu.org Yeah replying is pretty easy if you see the first reply. Just preserve the so-called “Subject” 🤣
@kiwu@twtxt.net awww you got this kiwu <3
@jost@jost.sdfeu.org welcome!
@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz the culprit was, as always, a typo’d dd command
hey yall i accidentally nuked my main hard drive for the second time ever yesterday. spent the rest of the day setting up my PC again. thankfully i didn’t lose anything super crucial, i have most of that on another drive
@jost@jost.sdfeu.org Hey 👋
My next try with twtxt - because it’s the closest to my idea of microblogging.
@kiwu@twtxt.net Congrats 🥳
had my last first day of school today. it wasn’t great, but I am happy to be close to graduating.
@movq@www.uninformativ.de 🤣 LMAO! this one caught me off guard, I wasn’t expecting THIS
Spiders are the only web developers that enjoy finding bugs.
@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club Yeah, it’s really the last thing we need. I’d love to see X11 getting more attention – but not like this …
Distrobox is pretty handy and kind of amazed I haven’t played with it before now. I wanted to quickly try out Proton’s Authenticator they just released, but they only had binaries for Ubuntu and Fedora (naturally), but I’m on Void Linux on this laptop.
Installed the latest basic Fedora image with Distrobox, used dnf to install the downloaded rpm file within it, and presto, running the app within Void like I’d just downloaded it though the normal repos.
Certainly explains why in some parts of the interwebs I’ve noticed RWNJs suddenly hating on anything Wayland and pushing XLibre.
Wild when display servers become political battlegrounds.
In case you were blissfully unaware: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XLibreIsExplicitlyPolitical
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org you will have to agree, though, that Yarn has contributed to make it possible to mass adopt (with its many glitches, bugs, and all) because, still, the web is king.
@movq@www.uninformativ.de yeah, I think something glitched at my end for a brief moment. It does it just fine.
you know i can never get into boy groups but i have liked EXO’s obsession since it came out. that “i want you” sample is just too good man https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxmP4b2a0uY
@bender@twtxt.net This should be a core feature, no configuration required. 🤔
Oh, holy crap, it just did it now! 🤯
How do you get your man pages to hyphenate? Mine doesn’t do it.
@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz On the one hand, all these programs have a very long history and the technology behind manpages is actually very powerful – you can use it to write books:
https://www.troff.org/pubs.html
I have two books from that list, for example “The UNIX programming environment”:
https://movq.de/v/c3dab75c97/upe.jpg
It’s a bit older, of course, but it looks and feels like a normal book, and it uses the same tech as manpages – which I think is really cool. 😎
It’s comparable to LaTeX (just harder/different to use) but much faster than LaTeX. You can also do stuff like render manpages as a PDF (man -Tpdf cp >cp.pdf) or as an HTML file (man -Thtml cp >cp.html). I think I once made slides for a talk this way.
On the other hand, traditional manpages (i.e., ones that are not written in mandoc) do not use semantic markup. They literally say, “this text is bold, that text over here is italics”, and so on.
So when you run man foo, it has no other choice but to show it in black, white, bold, underline – showing it in color would be wrong, because that’s not what the source code of that manpage says.
Colorizing them is a hack, to be honest. You’re not meant to do this. (The devs actually broke this by accident recently. They themselves aren’t really aware that people use colors.)
If mandoc and semantic markup was more commonly used, I think it would be easier to convince the devs to add proper customizable colors.
@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Any time 😅
@prologic@twtxt.net THANK YOU SO MUCH OMG!!!
@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Here’s the full config I use.
i love the feeling i get after i take my meds. i feel normal for once
having fun with omg.lol lately
@prologic@twtxt.net haha yeah for the youtube rules i just copied the first JSON block in your screenshot (i typed it out) and it miraculously worked! yayyy
@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Cool! 😎 Yeah I’ll add that soon™
@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Oh sweet! I was gonna say, setting up those rules is a bit “complicated” 🤣 But I’m glad you worked it out! 👌