@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaas? Hier plenkt niemand!!1! 😱😱😱

#FrakturFreitag: Jemand hat Geburtstag und hier ist der Draft für die Karte. (Oder – wie beim letzten Mal – die tatsächliche Karte, wenn ich zu faul bin, das nochmal „sauber“ zu machen. 😝)

Das Geschenk ist ein Zeitungsabo, daher dieses äußerst kreative „Gedicht“.

Diesmal auf die Uhr geschaut: Gedauert hat das ~30 Minuten. Und weil ich es wagte, so lange dasselbe Bild auf meinem Monitor anzuzeigen – meine Buchstabenreferenz –, hab’ ich jetzt erstmal für werweißwielange ’ne tolle Image Retention.

Ich brauche einen neuen Monitor.

txt.sour.is is down, huh? 🤔

Haha, indeed:

1. Initial uptime: A bit over 1 minute.
   
2. Changing to serial console, running uptime again: It’s down to 7 seconds.
   
3. Changing back to the VGA console: It’s again down to 1 second.
   

This really doesn’t track the actual uptime, it just happens to “mostly work”. (Like a lot of things in DOS.)

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com I’m not a hardcore OS/2 fan, either, but it does spark a great deal of nostalgia for me. 😍 For example: https://movq.de/blog/postings/2024-12-25/0/POSTING-en.html

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Crazy, who comes up with things like that?

I didn’t come up with it, but I was close, I guess. DOS is so small, you don’t have much of a choice but to search for “anything related to time”. There aren’t that many syscalls/functions. You’ll quickly notice that there’s no global tick counter. So what else is there? Hmm, “get the mtime of a file” is pretty much the only other time-related thing. And which file is “stable”, probably allocated just once at boot? Mark Aitchison tried to use NUL, which is a pretty good idea. Thinking about it in retrospect, stdin does indeed make more sense, though, because that object really does get allocated just once at “boot” and then it stays the same. That’s not guaranteed for NUL (although just as likely).

But, it is possible in DOS to move “the console” to a serial port:

I wonder what that does to my little uptime program. :-)

Today, I also learned that -R is an alias for -r in rm.

Ah, I remember that. Dug it up and saved it in the blog: -R is more portable/consistent: http://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-09-30/0/POSTING-en.html

@prologic@twtxt.net Oh gosh, that looks wonderful. 😍

Made a little program to print the system’s uptime on DOS, OS/2, and Windows NT:

https://movq.de/git/retrouptime/

(Release pending.)

This was pretty easy to do on Windows, a bit harder on OS/2 (because documentation is scarce), and quite the mess on DOS. DOS doesn’t explicitly keep track of the system’s uptime, so you have to resort to tricks like “give me the mtime of stdin”, which probably works … Yeah.

@prologic@twtxt.net Right, sorry!

It’s a video filmed by a person standing on a beach. The hero of this little movie is a guy on a stand-up paddle board: He’s out on the ocean and tries to reach his air mattress, which is floating on the ocean next to him. But it’s a cloudy and windy day, and he can’t quite reach it. So he keeps paddling and paddling, until he almost got it. Then, another gust of wind – the mattress is gone again. But he doesn’t give up! He keeps paddling, almost reaches it – and another gust of wind. This keeps going for quite a while. Eventually, he is so close to his air mattress that he jumps off his board and tries to truly grab the mattress. And he aaaaaaalllllmooooooooost got it! But then, of course, another big gust of wind and the mattress gets pushed far, far away. Probably gone for good. 🥲

Did I post this here already?

“A short film about hope”

https://movq.de/v/eb0675d4ce/a-short-film-about-hope.mp4

Source: https://social.tchncs.de/@grumpy_copi/117257509153287572

@prologic@twtxt.net Let’s hope there are no more … ahem … party poopers. 🤣

That was an interesting read about C:

https://pikuma.com/blog/c-integer-sizes-not-a-mistake

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Might be because the typical “German Fraktur” (this isn’t a thing) uses very unusual uppercase letters. And “k” is just weird. And “f” and “ſ” (long “s”) are very close together.

This is “Luther’sche Fraktur” from around 1708 (a photo from the book “Fraktur” by Albert Kapr), the book says this was one of the most popular ones:

I have lots of trouble deciphering those uppercase letters.

By the way, this is worth mentioning: Fraktur fonts are often associated with Nazi Germany, but did you know that the Nazis eventually banned these fonts in 1941?

Yeah. Typical Nazi stuff.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Coloring wasn’t too bad, I did it in Inkscape where I can easily move those rectangles around. 😅

Oh, and only 29 clients have requested the actual image:

29 movq.de/blog/postings/2026-09-25/0/bine-initial.png

Assuming that that’s an actual human being who’s interested in the content, then it’d be less than 1% of the hits that I get.

I’d estimate that ~90% of the traffic I get is some kind of non-human / non-browser thing.

Here are some numbers on the recent blog post:

3804 movq.de/blog/postings/2026-09-25/0/POSTING-en.html
 404 movq.de/blog/postings/2026-09-25/0/t/bine-initial.png.jpg

The HTML page is obviously the blog post itself. The image is the thumbnail of the “opener” image: That’s the thing that you’re pretty much guaranteed to see when you open the post in a browser.

But out of the 3800 hits on the HTML page, only 400 (~10%) are also requesting that image.

So … it’s ~90% noise, right?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks. 😅 I didn’t check the time, but I guess something between 15 and 30 minutes? 🤔

@david@daiwei.me The “e” in “tired” and the “a” in “that”. 🥴

🫩🫠 #FrakturFreitag

You know that I’m “Prinzessin Müllabfuhr”, but the English translation isn’t that great.

So, I’m going by “Princess Dumpsterfire” now.

(I’m forced to use this shit at work.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Helloooo! 🐦‍⬛

@prologic@twtxt.net A person? Pooping on the street? Yikes.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, lovely. 🥳

@arne@uplegger.eu Entschuldige, aber auf Rechtschreibfehler hinzuweisen, ist vermutlich das deutscheste, was ein Mensch tun kann. 😂

@arne@uplegger.eu (Hey, no kink shaming.)

It’s a sunn o)))-y day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKuJPsJuSHg&list=OLAK5uy_lwyneWbkUCZaVrHI4IDSaOhD3qSWrCxpw

#NowPlaying

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That is unexpected indeed. There was a slingshot involved in the last book I read and that sounded much less terrifying. 😅

@shinyoukai@twtxt.net Sounds promising. 🤔 I’ll check it out!

@david@daiwei.me Works for me. 🤔

(Wahahah, what an absurd conversation if you don’t know the context. 🤣)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hell no, I won’t feed you my hair!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, the partition stuff with disklabels is what I’m absolutely not used to. I need to invest more time learning this. Not just using it, but how and where is it represented on disk and all that.

I carry my notebook/netbook around a lot. 😅 Watching movies in bed, for example.

I think I’ll stick with NetBSD for a while. It works surprisingly well, it’s new stuff to explore, it’s fast, and then there’s this:

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@netbsd/112446618914747900

Gentoo (https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy) might be another idea, but I’m afraid that the little netbook might be too slow for that? Or are there binary packages? No idea, it’s been ages since I touched this distro.

(Regarding Linux in general … we all know what Linus said. I’m not sure where this project is heading.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Where do all these come from?! 😂

Just some light Sunday afternoon entertainment: Printing from NetBSD on the dotmatrix printer by dumping data to /dev/ulpt0. The netbook doesn’t have a parallel port, so this must be done over USB. NetBSD.escp was created by a little custom ESC/P converter written in C. 🥳

https://movq.de/v/14b09c47a5/print-small.mp4

Video description:

Video begins with a view of the netbook’s screen: 3 windows are open, one of them showing the typical NetBSD logo to print, the other one shows the commands I ran in preparation:

magick /usr/X11R7/include/X11/pixmaps/NetBSD.xpm -depth 8 -alpha set /tmp/NetBSD.pam
./pam2escp /tmp/NetBSD.pam /tmp/NetBSD.escp

The other terminal shows a root shell with this command:

cat /tmp/NetBSD.escp >/dev/ulpt0

I hit Enter, the printer starts printing.

Camera pans to show the printer, an Oki ML 3390. Continuous paper. Once finished, I manually feed the paper a little bit to better show the result.

(If you turn up the volume enough, you can hear “Leaving” by “Chill Carrier” from 2008.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Rest assured, they will do it that way. It’s a stupid world. 🤣

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Jesus. 😂😂😂

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Keep ’em coming! 🤣

Mit diesem Zauberspruch von https://mastodon.social/@islieb werde ich nun ins Wochenende zusammenbrechen. 🥳💀🫩 #FrakturFreitag

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yes! That’s the good stuff. That’s why I’m here. Mmmmmhhhhhhhhh! 😃

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org lol!

What a fucking shit show of a year. Jesus Fucking Christ. Gimme a break.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ahh, ohh! Thanks! :D

Both of these scenarios is mindboggling – imagine such a world:

Gastornis species were very large birds that were traditionally thought to have been predators of various smaller mammals, such as ancient, diminutive equids. However, several lines of evidence, including the lack of hooked claws (in known Gastornis footprints), studies of their beak structure and isotopic signatures of their bones, have caused scientists to now consider that these birds were probably herbivorous, feeding on tough plant material and seeds.

If they ever invent a time machine, I wanna go back to the Dinos. 🦕

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org 🥲

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org What is that crazy large Dino Chicken in 23.jpg? :D

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m planning to have a look. Soon. I hope.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks! Easy to read? Damn, I need to try harder. 🤪

@prologic@twtxt.net Is simply not buying it an option? Or is there too much social pressure?

Premature #FrakturFreitag. Had to practice the letter “F” and try a few variations.

😐

I love David Revoy’s comics: https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/miniFantasyTheater/069.html

@thecanine@twtxt.net I love it. %)