I’m playing with ratterplatter again: It’s a toy that watches disk I/O and emulates the noise of a real hard disk. (Linux only.) It uses sound samples from one of my older disks.

I tried a different approach at estimating the disk activity and I think I finally got it right (after almost 10 years … 🤦).

Demo, booting a Windows 2000 VM: https://movq.de/v/1400544cc6/2kboot-ratterplatter-2.mp4

(For this purpose alone, I put a couple of mini speakers into my PC case, so that the noise comes from the right place: https://movq.de/v/a3b2dc0932/speakers.jpg)

The results aren’t too bad, but this thing can’t be super accurate due to the huge I/O caches that we have these days. For the video, I dropped the caches before booting Windows, otherwise you would have heard almost nothing.

FWIW, if you don’t know it yet, this is the equivalent for proper keyboard sound: https://github.com/zevv/bucklespring

Just saw this user agent popping up:

yarnd/ERSION@OMMIT  go1.23.4 (+https://.../twtxt.txt; @username)

ERSION? OMMIT? 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org … I was fully expecting this to be a WSDL file. 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net I only buy stuff like that, for example games on GOG.COM. Or simply CDs or DVDs. (Rarely I “buy” a movie on some popular streaming service, fully aware that this is just “renting it”.)

But yeah, I sadly have to agree with @bender@twtxt.net. 😢

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Aww, this reminds me that I haven’t done any Fraktur/calligraphy in a hell of a long time. I should pick that up again. It’s always nice to see this on old buildings.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, to be fair, there’s not much of a difference other than a few grace notes (and just lower frequencies). I was mostly just fooling around with this one. 🥴

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org This is so crazy to me. When I think “forest”, I assume “untouched nature”, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. 🫤

Tom Waits in 2025 looks and sounds exactly like you’d expect. 🥴

I’m a long-term mpd user (some 16+ years), but for $reasons I have to compile it myself now – and, boy, that is one heavy program. Takes several minutes to build. 😳

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Does … does that mean … that we’re “trending” on TikTok? 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Commercial forest, I guess? (Are there any other forests?)

(The original was played on a guitar with an octave pedal, not a bass.)

Not in the mood to deal with reality today, so here’s another one of those silly things: https://movq.de/v/68c61f8ecc/r2_session.ogg This time on electric bass, tuned down to B-standard because oomph. (Well, sounds okay on my headphones, but I’m obviously no sound engineer. 🤪)

Hab’ ich einen Durst! Ist noch Lack da?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I had that as my avatar/userprofile pic at work for a few years. 😆

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Luckily, yeah. Happens every now and then. It’s usually not even worth reporting, they often fix it in 30-90 minutes anyway.

(Is this how we do “reactions” here on twtxt? 🤪)

@xuu@txt.sour.is @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org 💚

@prologic@twtxt.net 🍴💣

Super stressful day at work and, once I got home: Internet outage.

I guess that’s a sign.

Guilty pleasure, blasphemy, shitty audio, … something like that. Seven Nation Army on double bass. 🤪 https://movq.de/v/e3a4dcff2e/sad-nation-army.ogg

If you’ve played Grim Fandango back in the day, you’ll enjoy this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNc58NznIUM

@bender@twtxt.net 🙈🙈🙈

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I remember WebKit having a similar list, but I can’t find it right now … 🙈

@prologic@twtxt.net In all seriousness: Don’t worry, I’m not going to host some Fediverse thingy at the moment, probably never will. 😅

But I do use it quite a lot. Although, I don’t really use it as a social network (as in: following people). I follow some tags like #retrocomputing, which fills my timeline with interesting content. If there was a traditional web forum or mailing list or even a usenet group that covered this topic, I’d use that instead. But that’s all (mostly) dead by now. ☹️

@bender@twtxt.net That … was better than expected. 😂

The Mastodon admins say that it’s probably because of the size of my account (~600 MB), so the export process times out. And I understand that. Here on twtxt, I always use auto-expiring links when I post images or videos. It just gets too much data otherwise. I think I’ll just set my Mastodon account to auto-delete posts after ~180 days or something like that. Nobody cares about old posts anyway.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @bender@twtxt.net It already is a tiling window manager, but some windows can’t be tiled in a meaningful way. I admit that I’m mostly thinking about QEMU or Wine here: They run at a fixed size and can’t be tiled, but I still want to put them in “full screen” mode (i.e., hide anything else).

The brokenness of the web can be examined by opening about:compat in Firefox.

Lots and lots of workarounds for specific websites.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I have just opened the GIMP bug tracker (hosted at gitlab.gnome.org) and, I kid you not, they have deployed Anubis in front of it:

Oof.

Thinking about adding a little “focus” feature to my window manager: It hides all but one window, no wallpaper, no bars.

It would turn this

https://movq.de/v/a75eb68770/a0.jpg

into this

https://movq.de/v/a75eb68770/a1.jpg

or this

https://movq.de/v/a75eb68770/b0.jpg

into this:

https://movq.de/v/a75eb68770/b1.jpg

🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m glad to hear that! Yay for more clients. 😊

(I didn’t submit a proposal of my own, because it would basically just be a duplicate of another one. 😅)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Interesting, thanks for that list. 🤔

I’ve identified several issues with my current (admittedly cheap) upright bass by now. It might be time to upgrade to a better model. 🤔

If only those things weren’t so damn expensive. I just checked the prices and simply burst out laughing. 😂

… yeah, okay, I don’t think I’ll do that. 😅 Anything but twtxt is just too much effort.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Although, most software I use is decentish in that regard.

Is that because you mostly use Qt programs? 🤔

I wish Qt had a C API. Programming in C++ is pain. 😢

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org (I think of pointers as “memory location + type”, but I have done so much C and Assembler by now that the whole thing feels almost trivial to me. And I would have trouble explaining these concepts, I guess. 😅 Maybe I’ll cover this topic with our new Azubis/trainees some day …)

When will the flat UI craze end? Can I get my buttons, scrollbars, and toolbars back, please?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Maybe it’s a lyrebird. 😏

@prologic@twtxt.net Yes, it was one of those. 95, 98, and Me were all built on top of DOS, as far as I know.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I guess the thing is that usernames are no longer needed for many popular things, like WhatsApp. “Just install the app”, done. When I ran my Matrix server for our family, this was the first thing that people were bummed out about: “Oh, this needs a username and a password? Why doesn’t it just work? That’s annoying.”

People are less and less exposed to “low-level” details like this. There was also this story in 2021 about the concept of a “file”: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z

I lost my original Windows 95 CD (and it’s too expensive for my taste to buy on eBay), so I finally sat down and got an old disk image of one of my PCs to work in QEMU.

I don’t intend to do much with Win95. I just want to be able to boot it, if I want to check how certain things worked or looked in that version. The purpose of this really is to be an archeological digsite.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah and I don’t get why … There’s no copyrighted music in it, no ads (at least I don’t see any) … Just weird. 🥴

@prologic@twtxt.net Lol, I give up. 🥴

Didn’t know this side of Aurora. 😂

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iwS3EflIck
  
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPfjDyItz9U

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org There’s a reason it’s called “(n)curses”. 😏 The only advice I can give is to never fiddle with reassigning control sequences and $TERM variables. Leave $TERM at whatever value the terminal itself sets and use an appropriate terminfo file for it. If there are programs misbehaving, they probably blindly assume XTerm and should be fixed (or have XTerm as a hard requirement). If you try to fix this on your end, it’ll likely just break other programs. 🥴

@david@collantes.us Ah, I just went to bed, great to see you figured it out. 😅 I probably would have ended up with something similar (but I’m not a Vimscript guru). 🤔

@david@collantes.us While you’re typing? I guess this could be used as a starting point (doesn’t work on the very first line):

inoremap <CR> <Esc>:r!date +"\%F \%T"<CR>A 

What’s the end goal here? 😅

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Using full-blown Cloud services is good for old people like me who don’t want to do on-call duty when a disk fails. 😂 I like sleep! 😂

Jokes aside, I like IaaS as a middle ground. There are IaaS hosters who allow you to spin up VMs as you wish and connect them in a network as you wish. You get direct access to all those Linux boxes and to a layer 2 network, so you can do all the fun networking stuff like BGP, VRRP, IPSec/Wireguard, whatever. And you never have to worry about failing disks, server racks getting full, cable management, all that. 😅

I’m confident that we will always need people who do bare-bones or “low-level” stuff instead of just click some Cloud service. I guess that smaller companies don’t use Cloud services very often (because it’s way too expensive for them).