@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org 🔥🔥🔥

I have a feeling that learning to play electric double bass through an amplifier was a big mistake.

At the core, this is an acoustic instrument. If you play it through an amp, you will instinctively only do the bare minimum to get some sound going, because the amp does the heavy lifting. But it’s just not right.

This is a very physical instrument. It needs a lot of force and strength – in comparison, an electric bass guitar is almost flimsy and delicate. I need to “feel” what’s going on and that’s just not the case when using headphones.

I feel like I wasted ~3 years. 🫤 But maybe it’ll get better from now on …

Made this a few weeks ago, just listened to it again and I quite like it:

https://www.uninformativ.de/music/2025-1-ebow/Fog.ogg

This is just one instrument: Electric bass guitar + EBow. And echo/delay on top. But it’s a single track, single take. It amazes me quite a bit how much you can do with that little thing. 🤯

https://movq.de/v/2496f8ba36/s.png

@dce@hashnix.club I’ve never heard of weirdcore before, but it’s kind of intriguing. 😃

@dce@hashnix.club The difference in brightness is pretty big. When the Moon is completely inside of the Earth’s shadow, you can see the red tint:

https://movq.de/v/7b4c323c0c/

As soon as direct sunlight returns, even just a little bit, the Moon looks mostly normal again.

Yeah, it’s probably overkill. 🙈

Oops, maybe I should have posted a reminder. 🥴

@dce@hashnix.club By the time you posted your twt, the red phase was already over. 🙈 Stellarium has a pretty good simulation of the whole thing.

Lunar eclipse just now: https://movq.de/v/f377c108cb

How about no longer using in-browser Git repo viewers? Make the AI bots do the work and actually clone the repo.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Nice! And I didn’t look out the window at all. Was watching eels. 😂

Well, that was fascinating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxNq8zOEbM8

@bender@twtxt.net The person actually reached out to me. It’s all good. ✌️

@dce@hashnix.club Oof, that’s surprising. I wouldn’t have expected that to be so slow. 😳😳😳

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org You might enjoy this one: https://github.com/TheMozg/awk-raycaster

Dear dev.alessandrocutolo.it, do you really need to fetch my twtxt feed every 20-30 seconds? 😅 Not that it’s posing a problem, but I feel like this could be optimized. For example, how about using the if-modified-since request header: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Headers/If-Modified-Since

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @dce@hashnix.club It’s pretty cool, I won’t argue that, but also really simple, to be completely honest. 😅 The BIOS already provides all you need to send data to the printer:

https://helppc.netcore2k.net/interrupt/bios-printer-services

The BIOS actually does provide a great deal of things, which, to me, was one of the most surprising learnings of this project (the project of writing a little 16-bit real-mode OS, that is). It often doesn’t feel like I was writing an operating system – it felt more like writing a normal program that just uses BIOS calls like we would use syscalls these days.

(I’ve also read a lot of warnings, like “don’t use the BIOS for this or that”. Mostly because it tends to be very slow.)

Good morning. Driving the dot matrix printer from my little real-mode toy OS. 🖨️

(This is just a wrapper around BIOS INT 17. I love it nonetheless. 😅)

https://movq.de/v/6b3f9a2837/MVI_8839.MOV.mp4

Speaking of clouds, yesterday evening: https://movq.de/v/bafe89fd66/p.jpg

Right, now that I’m reading some comments: I was initially assuming that they would actually make it impossible for distros to provide a 32-bit build (intentionally or unintentionally). But maybe that’s not the case and distros can just continue to ship a 32-bit Firefox …

Is that really necessary? How hard is it to make a 32-bit build? 🤔 Honest question. https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2025/09/05/firefox-32-bit-linux-support-to-end-in-2026/

@dce@hashnix.club Which Thinkpad specifically is this? “Late-2010s” doesn’t sound very old, to be honest, I wonder why OpenBSD is giving you so much trouble. 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh no! 😱😱😱

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Weather’s great at the moment, isn’t it? I like it when it’s cloudy, dark, chilly. 😊

Ariadne explains some of the reasons behind this “Wayback” thingy (rootful X11 on Wayland):

• https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/115147291885663574
  
• https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/115147331909980717
  

They should put this in a FAQ on their website or something. The whole endeavor makes more sense when you look at it like this.

@bender@twtxt.net I switched back to groff a few weeks ago. 🤪

@zvava@twtxt.net Hooray for more twtxt clients 🥳

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org (Haha, every time I read the word “Gophers”, I have to stop and remind myself that this is about Golang. 🤪)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I usually only have my GPS tracker with me. That trip yesterday was probably a one-time thing. 😅 It was fun, but I’d rather not carry so much stuff around. 🥴

@dce@hashnix.club Glad you liked it. 😅

@bender@twtxt.net Right. 😂 groff, Markdown, groff. Justified, unjustified, justified.

@bender@twtxt.net Oh, there’s an easy explanation. But maybe some mysteries are best left unexplained. 😃 If you want to solve this riddle: The solution is in the phlog! Somewhere! 😅

@bender@twtxt.net The address is/was correct but probably got mangled by the Markdown renderer. Let’s try again in a code block:

gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2025/2025-09/2025-09-03--roophloch.txt

@thecanine@twtxt.net I’m seeing those Clippys everywhere now. 📎

@bender@twtxt.net Yeah, the acronym is funny. 😅

Wandering through the woods for 8km … gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2025/2025-09/2025-09-03–roophloch.txt

@klaxzy@klaxzy.net I’ve had many SD cards die in Raspberry Pis. Really annoying. I’ve eventually switched to using a read-only rootfs. 🫤

I think I’m gonna participate in ROOPHLOCH this year: gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/gemlog/announcing-roophloch-2025.gmi

Now that’s interesting. Some of these bots start crawling at URLs like this:

https://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/NetTracer-Scenes/GPUTracer/multipass/xlonitor/http-collect/getpw

That is obviously completely wrong. But I can explain it. Some years ago, I screwed up my nginx rewrite rules, and that’s how these broken URLs came to be.

It all redirects to /git now, which is why that endpoint sees so much traffic lately.

But what does that mean? Why do they start there? I can only speculate that this company bought an old database of web links and they use that to start crawling. And it was probably a cheap one, because these redirects have been fixed for quite a long time now.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m doing that now as well, but I don’t think this is a good solution. This is going to hurt “self-hosting” in the long run: I cannot afford true self-hosting where I actually do host everything here at home – instead, I must use a cloud provider / VPS for that. It is only a matter of time until my provider starts doing AI shit as well (or rather, the customers do it) and then what? I get blocked, e.g. I can’t send email to (some) people anymore. This is already bad and it’s going to get worse.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Didn’t know that, either. 😂 The one guy even tried to test this theory with a Polaroid? And “confirmed” it? What the heck. 🥴

@dce@hashnix.club Yeah, I’ve read about that approach. Sounds clever. Truth is, I’m too tired. 😢 I don’t want to spend too much of my time fighting assholes.

I’ve now started blocking entire cloud hosters. Sorry, not sorry.

As expected: Didn’t last long. They’re coming from different IPs now.

I’ve read enough blog posts by other people to know that this is probably pointless. The bots have so many IPs/networks at their disposal …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBEKlIV_70E

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, I’ve blocked some large subnets now (most likely overblocking a lot of stuff) and it has died down.

I’m not looking forward to doing this on a regular basis. This is supposed to be a fun hobby – and it was, for many years. Maybe that time is just over.

“But all your stuff is MIT licensed! They are allowed to do that!”

Haha. As if they would care. They crawl everything they get their hands on.

Besides, that’s not true, the license states that the copyright notice must be retained. “AI” breaks that. They incorporate my code and my articles in their product and make it appear as if it was their work.

Why do I care about this?

1. The load will become a problem at some point.
   
2. These crawlers and the current “AI” in general are breaking the rules. I am supposed to be paying for every little thing, I get sued for “piracy”. But apparently, these rules only apply to me. If I had more money, I could break them. Fuck that.
   
3. I simply don’t want it. Period.

This probably means that I can no longer host my own website. I don’t want to deploy something like Anubis, because that ruins the whole thing: I want it to be accessible from ancient browsers, like OS/2 or Windows 3.11.

I’ll keep an eye on it for a while. Maybe try to block some IPs.

Sooner or later, I’ll take the website down and shift everything to Gopher.

It doesn’t pose a problem for my server’s performance – yet. But if more bots/companies start doing this, my website will go down from the load.

The bots have begun to access my website way more often. I’m getting about 120k hits on https://www.uninformativ.de/git/ now in a couple of hours.

They don’t cache anything, probably on purpose.

It comes in waves. I get about 100 hits (all at once) on that /git endpoint, all from different IPs. Then it takes a moment until I get another wave of about 500-1000 requests (all at once) where they do HEAD requests on some of the paths below /git. I assume they did a GET earlier and are now checking if something has changed.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Best logo ever made. 😅 (It’s partially proprietary software. Just for Epson scanners, I think? Not sure.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, that was a lot of fun. 😃 Now let’s wait and see if I ever get to actually use this. 😂

@thecanine@twtxt.net We don’t use Microsoft at work – but similar products of other big companies. They’re all doing the same. The core product gets worse and worse, because they focus so much on vomiting “AI” over everything.

It will die down eventually. I hope.