@arne@uplegger.eu I’m very glad I only rarely have to deal with .docx & Co. And when I have to, 99% is in read mode only. Even though, I don’t think that Markdown is the best choice, I use it on a daily basis. Some things, like links, in reStructuredText are better in my opinion.

Jira just resists to switch to Markdown and forces us to use its silly markup language.

For real typesetting, LaTeX is the way to go. But I very, very rarely do that.

Hirschhorn also offers a nice old town. The castle with all its many buildings up the mountain is very beautiful. This is my absolutely favorite one, it just looks soo great:

Walking back down the narrow stairs with all the crooked, well-worn steps of different heights and lengths was quite challenging.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/hirschhorn-2025-03-30/

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Awwwwww! Thank you, that is now in my collection. :-) The other ones aren’t bad either, very nice!

@thecanine@twtxt.net My apologies, mate! :-( As @david@collantes.us pointed out, this was definitely not my intent at all.

For the easter egg hunt, I first looked for a hidden image map link on the pixel dog in the right lower corner itself. Maybe one giant pixel just links to somewhere else, I figured. But I couldn’t find any and then quickly moved on. Hence, I naturally viewed the HTML source. Because where else would be a good hiding place for easter eggs, right?

Next, I noticed the <font> tags. I thought I had read quite some time ago that they are not an HTML5 thing, but wasn’t entirely sure about it. So, I asked the W3C HTML validator. Sure enough. I thought I let you know about the violations. If somebody had found a mistake on my site, I’d love to hear about it, so I could fix it. I’m sorry that my chosen form of report didn’t resonate with you all that well. I reckoned you’ll also find it a bit funny, but I was clearly very wrong on that.

I actually followed the dog cow link to the video, so I ended up on the easter egg. However, I didn’t recognize it as such. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Oh well.

Regarding my message about the browser quirks: I read your answer that you were arguing against the HTML validator findings. Of course, everybody can do with their sites whatever they likes.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Sorry for being completely offtopic, but that’s a really cute bird! :-)

A hike to the highest mountain in the Odenwald, the Katzenbuckel, lit. cat hillock. It was very windy and the sun very rarely showed its face, so it was quite chilly. Nice scenery, nevertheless. Surprisingly, this ski-jumping hill is still in operation. I’ve never expected this in a hundred years, judging by its state. https://lyse.isobeef.org/katzenbuckel-2025-03-29/

@arne@uplegger.eu ;-)

@bender@twtxt.net Hahaha, YMMD! :-D

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @xuu@txt.sour.is That sounds like kat! :-)

Is there some Makefile shenanigans going on maybe? $V and $C being swallowed by the Makefile. I fell in that trap again the other day.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh yeah, take some pictures when you do. :-)

@bender@twtxt.net @eapl.me@eapl.me @xuu@txt.sour.is @movq@www.uninformativ.de Glad you all agree. :-D My SOAP knowledge is extremely rusty, I luckily had not to deal with that crap anymore for quite some years now. I even couldn’t remember the XML declaration and had to look it up. ;-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, I’m also disappointed each and every time.

Let me introduce you to the much superior version 4 instead: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/twxm4.xml

@thecanine@twtxt.net And this is exactly why there are quirks modes in browsers…

I’m actually glad I don’t have to deal with all this web shit and work with compilers that hit me in the face when I do something illegal. :-)

@arne@uplegger.eu Oh no, you are in front of the line!!

Eberbach is nowhere near Bad Wimpfen in comparison, but still has a nice historic old town: https://lyse.isobeef.org/eberbach-2025-03-29/

Bad Wimpfen has a pretty cool old town with timber framed houses. Looks really beautiful: https://lyse.isobeef.org/bad-wimpfen-2025-03-28/

@thecanine@twtxt.net I found it! This looks like colored easter eggs when squinting.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz They all just wanted to be friends with a cool gal like you. ;-) It’s sad that putting things openly on the internet just waits to be raided by script kiddies, bots or spammers eventually.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, like nearly all of them. There is the so called Bannwald, where it typically is not allowed to log, but there’s only one in my entire county and I haven’t even visted it. I should change that. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bannwald

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hahaha, geil! :-D

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Haha, that’s cool! :-D

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s really great! I can’t tell the difference to the original. :-)

This time, I brought my cam along. We checked out a piece of ex-forest they’ve cut down. It looks terrible now. :-( At least the spruce resin smell was nice. https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-03-27/

@eapl.me@eapl.me According to an update of the article, others have suggested the same.

Your explanation seems fitting. I just don’t get why people don’t use feed readers anymore. Anyway.

@xuu@txt.sour.is Yeah, it will be delayed. Oh well. That’s just the way it is. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hahaha, that filename! :-D 100 times better than I could ever play.

@xuu@txt.sour.is If the unread counter becomes negative, wouldn’t that mean I have that many more read messages? :-D

@bender@twtxt.net You’re spot on, it’s important to not introduce classical bugs!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh dear. :-( Have they fixed it?

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de I had a t-shirt with this one or the other decade ago. :-)

“Unread messages: -1”: Well, classic off by one error. I gotta have to hunt that down.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s not very retrocomputing!

@eapl.me@eapl.me Interesting! Two points stood right out to me:

1. Why the hell are e-mail newsletters considered a valid option in the first place? Just offer an Atom feed and be done with it! Especially for a blog of this very type. This doesn’t even involve a third party service. Although, in addition he also links to Feedburner, what the fuck!? No e-mail address or the like is needed and subject to being disclosed.

2. When these spam mailers want to prevent resubscribing, then for fuck’s sake, why don’t they use a hash of the e-mail address (I saw that in yarnd) for that purpose? Storing the e-mail address in clear text after unsubscribing is illegal in my book.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I see, fair point, yeah.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yikes! I didn’t know about about:compat. Crazy!

@xuu@txt.sour.is Wow, that’s a giant graveyard. In my new database I have 16,428 messages as of now. Archive feed support is not yet available, so it’s just the sum of all the 36 main feeds.

@david@collantes.us Ah shit, sorry, you’re right! :-D

There are 82.108 read statuses, but only 24.421 messages in the cache. In contrast to the cache with the messages, the read statuses are never cleaned up when a feed was unsubscribed from. And the read statuses also contain old style hashes, before we settled on the what we have today. Still a huge difference. Hmm.

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.

If I didn’t mess this up, 61 feeds reduced down to 36.

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.

@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. :-)

Oh, it’s called “unsubscribe”.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, right, a type would be good to have! :-D

@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.

@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 @prologic@twtxt.net Exactly. The screenshots of the last few days show it in action. But I do not consider it ready for the world yet. @doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt appears to have a high pain tolerance, though. :-)

@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

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Wooaah, that is cool! \o/