@prologic@twtxt.net Must say I do kinda like the rounded design, passport screen ratio, the inner screen textured finish and the promised pencil support, making this a pocketable drawing tablet.

Obviously wouldn’t buy it, or any other foldable device, with these fragile plastic displays, lack of a headphone jack and thanks to iOS also too many software compromises.

Since earlier this year, I main a TCL phone, I got during a sale event, for under $150 and it really has pretty alright specs: 8GB RAM, recently updated to Android 16, 90Hz refresh rate, even the headphone jack, …

maximum nostalgia slop (themed SpaceHey profile + QMMP with a bad Winamp skin)

Trying to change my site a bit and needed a more cartoony sitting canine for it.

Literally just a day after Elon came out with his legal threats towards all of Nitter and people like me complained about it, Open AI decides to no longer work with Cursor (acquired by Space X), explicitly saying it’s because Elon wouldn’t stop breaking their signed contracts and scraping (distilling) their models, behind their back.

https://openai.com/index/our-decision-on-cursor-following-its-acquisition-by-spacex/

This is not even the only instance of this happening, many mentioned having similar problems with Elon in the past. Not too long ago Kylie Robison shared a rumor xAI engineers were banned from using Anthropic models through Cursor, because of their scraping, though they seem to have later patched things over with Elon, when they had to start renting his data centers.

If I say companies should at least consider the 3 line CC license before scraping my sites, I’m seen as the unreasonable one.

But when I use an alternative forontend, to read feeds on their sites, without having to make yet another free account, now the same companies and their users scream about some unspecified part of their license being violated, threaten legal action and expect me to care about it.

GitHub thread: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/1442#issuecomment-5413651441

Had no clue @prologic@twtxt.net has his own computer mouse brand now, straight up giving them away, for under $3 a piece.

I got one and well pleasantly surprised, especially for the price. It fits perfectly in the hand, decent rubber, weighs nothing, clicks very silently. The scroll wheel is where you can feel some of the cost cutting, it’s pretty wonky, but good enough.

Classic cheap thin long cable, you better like 1600 DPI, cause there’s no button to change that. Sensor is the usual red light, but works on all surfaces, bedsheets included. Gliders are small and not around the sensor, but at this weight, that makes next to no difference.

Decent 8/10 option

Had no clue @prologic@twtxt.net has his own computer mouse brand now, straight up giving them away, for under $3 a piece.

I got one and well pleasantly surprised, especially for the price. It fits perfectly in my hand, decent rubber, weighs nothing, clicks very silently. The scroll wheel is where you can feel some of the cost cutting, it’s pretty wonky, but good enough.

Classic cheap thin long cable, you better like 1600 DPI, cause there’s no button to change that. Sensor is the usual red light, but works on all surfaces, bedsheets included. Gliders are small and not around the sensor, but at this weight, that makes next to no difference.

Decent 8/10 option

Real tired of doing these, but here’s another Android developers vs Google update, this time there’s both good and bad news.

The good:
-Users will be able to enable “sideloading” for all current and future devices, attached to their Google account, rather than having to undergo the tedious 24 hour wait including process, on each device.

-Rather than these changes to “sideloading” and “advanced workflows” being implemented at random different dates, in different countries, we’ll all get them come 2027.

The bad:
As GrapheneOS developers recently mentioned “Google replaced pushing Git tags for certain source code with obtaining source code via Google Drive after making a request through Google Forms. It’s completely ridiculous and they’ve gradually become very slow at handling requests. They’re in clear violation of the GPLv2 now.”

whole thread: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117057099753905023

@david@daiwei.me since I became linuxpilled and embraced SSH, I do my Wordles through https://late.sh/

Can strongly recommend it, even has all the other daily puzzles: minesweeper, sudoku, solitaire, nonogram (kinda hate those),…

Maybe not the best family activity, the chat can be somewhat spicy and so can the collaborative ASCII art drawing game.

⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟧🟧⬜🟨🟧⬜⬜
⬜🟧🟧🟨⬜🟧⬛🟨⬜
⬜🟧🟨🟧🟧🟥🟨🟨⬜
⬜⬜🟧🟨🟨🟧🟥⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟧⬜⬜🟧⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
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Most of this insane power consumption happens during the models training, so the additional cost of prompting, is minimal. Facebook invented cool ways to exted the environmental damage far beyond the training stage, by dumping the dirty data center water into nearby water sources, but that’s more so a Facebook problem, than a fault of AI.

I would still never waste my own money, paying for any AI subscriptions that my employer doesn’t already pay for, no matter if we use them, or not.

I am also against aggressive scraping and taking everything as training data, disregarding the authors wishes and license. I allow it on my website, mostly as proof that no matter how much they scrape my stuff, the real me remains both a superior webdev and artist.

I am well aware this makes me come across really egotistical, especially after developers far better than me, embraced vibe coding, arguably way too much. To give an example, all attempts to get Microsoft Copilot, that’s embedded into SharePoint, to generate an extension/uBlock filter to make SharePoint revert to the old superior UI failed, but I was able to do that in three lines of code ( https://thecanine.smol.pub/ublock-filters ), in half an hour, despite me never seeing the code of that page before. After a few of these comparisons, it is increasingly hard to see most of these tools, as my replacement.

I am not even going to talk about the people trying to imitate my art style with AI, until they can show me a result where all the squares are the same size, in a grid and actually square.

I am a bit split on this, don’t think there’s any real use for AI in things like art, at absolute most getting a reference to compare with multiple non-AI ones, or possibly some animation in between frames, if it ever gets better at making those. Would not rely on it for any of my personal projects, more than maybe a quick search that would have previously been done on Stack Overflow, but if I work somewhere and they demand it be used similarly to how it is described on this site, considering the current IT job market, I’d probably take the slop bullet, over being unemployed.

Obviously even in that case, I’d only do this to generate code I can understand, improve and review. I’m definitely not advacating people just put their feet up on the table and let some random combination of “AI agents”, vibecode their entire codebase.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org there is a Czech song, intentionally written to include no vowels except “a”, with “a” being included in every word, except the one letter long ones:
https://youtu.be/eB1cL4I5OZ8

This is obviously not common, and the author is a legend for accomplishing this.

@david@daiwei.me if you have some weekend home type place, with no Internet, getting TV through an antenna and a DVBT box, my recommendation is to just buy some old Dell monitor with HDMI to 3.5mm audio output built in, so you can connect speakers to it.

Doesn’t have to be Dell, but you can often just buy one of those from your employer, for under $25 here.

Were this sadly makes much less sense, in with Internet TV services. Those usually need a dedicated TV app to function and while that can be replaced with a $200 TV box, that some providers force you to rent, thus making you pay more for your Internet TV forever - this also means giving up the “archive app”, that gives you access to all the on demand content, included in the price of your mandatory TV license. None of these overpriced boxes come with it, as they’d mauch rather make you pay, for yet another subscription service instead.

So yes, you can kinda do it with an Internet TV too, assuming you trust the expensive box to not spy on you, but in that case you’re mostly just paying a whole lot more, for a lot less, than you would be, with the LG TV.

https://youtu.be/Q9uefFYe6bM

I really am saddened by the current state of LG, as someone who used their phones and monitors for decades and still uses and albeit cautiously recommends their TVs, to those who can also go through the hours long process, to reconfigure them.

They really are the ultimate great hardware, burdened by adware and spyware filled anti-consumer firmware company.

Deleted some old no longer used pixelart from my galley and added this as an alternative version, of the sprite one.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks! You had one of the strangest guesses so far, first one I had to look up. 😄 It is a reference to a (human) cop/detective, from a 2019 videogame. Since there’s no spoilers tag on Twtxt, the name of the file on my site, includes the correct answer.

Finally finished another meme one, I always wanted. It took forever, to get it right, so I really hope people get the reference.

🎵 Doganon - I fought management
(just a joke, those who know, know)

[verse]
Barkin’ at cars in the hot sun,
I fought management and uh they won,
I fought management and uh they won,
I needed a raise cause I had none,
I fought management and uh they won,
I fought management and uh they won,

[chorus]
I wake up at five and it feels so bad,
Guess my project’s gone,
It was the best team that I ever had,
I fought management and uh they won,
I fought management and uh,

[pre-churus]
Stuck in traffic since round 6:01,
I fought management and uh they won,
I fought management and uh they won,
I lost my team and project lost funds,
I fought management and uh they won,
I fought management and uh they won,

[chorus]

Even lower resolution sitting canine, made trying to find out, if one under 20x20 is possible, came to be 18x15.

Second attempt, at mixing a couple of previous designs together and I think this one came out pretty cute looking.

The smallest sitting canine drawn so far, yet more detailed, than some of the previous ones.

As an enjoyer of delightfully bad graphic design, found on most Czech village center cork boards, I’m sad to see the stolen clipart and badly cropped watermarked stock images, gradually replaced with AI slop.

This is far from a serious rant, but generating images of my kind being telepathically hit with sharp rocks, surely gives me a right to complain.

So far these seem the most prominent slop categories, seem to be…

Architecture slop:

1. find a sketch of what an old building looked like
   
   
2. generate an AI version, without correcting any of the perspective errors - this one is diagonally levitating
   
   
3. generate a recreation of the buildings demise - after going through the AI, for the second time, it is now a completely different building
   
   

Moralizing slop:

History slop:

Drew one in the old Pokémon battle angle and resolution.

This one comes from this years (now scrapped) April 1st DLSS 5 gag, that was originally supposed to use Microsofts AI - in ways similar to the Nvidia technology, which produced interesting, overly detailed results. I wanted to see if I could beat the AI thing at drawing something like that myself and many redraws later, this is my best result.

@bender@twtxt.net both, but neither directly. I know every workaround there is, including those used by developers, to test apps, while working on them. However if “sideloading” becomes so tedious, even the more technical users, cannot be bothered to do it, competing appstores and independent developers, not wanting to send their money and ID to Google, loose users at such rate, they likely won’t be able to justify continuing to maintain their projects, people like me rely on.

In the interest of fairness and hopefully for the last time, I ever have to address this, Google has flip-flopped again and promised “sideloading” will not be removed from their version of Android, but instead have to be enabled in the developer settings, using the following “advanced flow”:

To be perfectly clear, this still falls short of what I wanted, but at this point, it is a compromise I’m willing to take, over further pursuing this, through the various available European courts, myself.

Here is their full statement:
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/android-developer-verification.html

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org sounds like a plan, it’d be the second biggest version, in Australia.

Number one is on the rplace.live map canvas, where the previous one is in America and the one from today here - no reason other than the fact those countries had a good empty spot, to put them in, at the time I drew them.

Back to the regular scheduled dogpostin and back to something very low resolution.

Also new stuff on my website, won’t list it all here, you’ll just have to check.

@bender@twtxt.net It is not yet lost, other than the ongoing communication with local politicians, the European Commission, (thanks to other developers) the U.S. Department of Justice, over 50 other organizations (see some of them, signed on the open letter, top of the before mentioned website), we’re also actively looking into possible workarounds and exploring other available legal options, while companies like Motorola, are already planning to offer GrapheneOS, on some phones.

@bender@twtxt.net Yes, really should have chosen my words more wisely. As @movq@www.uninformativ.de mentions, we got a vague promise of an “advanced flow” being implemented, and in my case also a vague promise of a video call, with someone at Google, regarding it. Now when the backlash died down, it does not look like Google plans to follow through, with any of this and they’re completely unwilling to elaborate and get back to us, about if and how any of this will be implemented.

Last year, I made a huge mistake. I repeated on here, what multiple sourcea at Google told me, and what is to this day, written on their blog about Android.
I failed to take into consideration, that people who work at Google, often just lie, or present things intentionally vaguely, so they do not have to follow through with their promises.
I would like to apologize to everyone, who took my previous posts here, as assurance software not explicitly approved by Google, will continue working on Android, past this year (or even just a couple months from now) and that everything has been resolved, as things are now in fact even worse, than they were before. To follow the current state of “Open Android”, please check: https://keepandroidopen.org/

Bit of a remake, of a chubby-looking, quick meme doodle, from 5 years ago.

A new sitting canine, for my website.

Feeling nostalgic, for 3D-ish old game sprites, so I made one of myself.

@prologic@twtxt.net Not even entirely sure how I did it myself, but likely a lucky combination of the new tail swirl, the legs closer to the screen being bigger and the head looking slightly to the side (eye & ear position), with bottom part of the hair, going behind the snout. The white is just an outline, around most of my works, so I don’t think that plays a part.

This one is a slightly more 3D looking, as well as the first one, with the tail swirled.

2025 end the year rewind:

Compared to only 3 new artworks in 2024 and next to no work, on other projects, this year I not only met the self-imposed goal of monthly pixelart, but exceeded it by 50%, with 18 additions in total.

Relicensed the majority of canine faction owned art and projects, under two less restrictive Creative Commons licensees*. This also applies retroactively, to everyone who used/archived our art and projects, back when the old license didn’t allow it.

Disappointed by the current state of the Internet and continued lack of competition among browsers, completely reworked the main website* and made Smol Drive** (a new image gallery project), both made to be compatible with as many web and Gemini browsers, as possible.

*see https://thecanine.smol.pub
**see https://thecanine.smol.pub/smolbox

@movq@www.uninformativ.de great video. I don’t agree with everything, especially the modern websites highlighted as not that bad, but definitely agree, with the main point. https://youtu.be/2z7kVH9xePM

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe They did their own thing at first, but from version 6 onward, it’s also just Chromium.

Canine: HotTopic, sparkledog, Christmas tree looking edition

To everyone previously asking, what my (and other developers) endless complaining about Google, to both every EU body, with a form on their website and every relevant team at Google accomplished…
WE FUCKING WON!!!
“While security is crucial, we’ve also heard from developers and power users who have a higher risk tolerance and want the ability to download unverified apps.”
-source

I was also able to work with my new webhost, to bring back “🐕.fr.to” - everyones favorite vanity redirect domain, for my site, Googles changes to SSL warnings in Chrome, killed at the beginning of this year.

The lesson: I NEED TO COMPLAIN MORE

@bender@twtxt.net to work through both https and gemini, the site is not written in HTML, but in Gemtext, automatically converted to HTML, when needed. Gemtext is nicely explained for example here: https://garden.bouncepaw.com/hypha/gemtext . In short, it is so limited, no line can be more than one thing, so no links in a list are possible, othar than doing it through something like this primitive workaround.

Just a small update, on my birthday (on the 5th), I accidentally deleted the main page, of my website, so I’m using that as an opportunity, to try something new, at https://thecanine.smol.pub or gemini://thecanine.smol.pub - depending on your preferred protocol.

Any feedback is welcome!

Design trends I think will take off in 2026
but tierlist

S - move from flat design to more detailed, 3D, more complex logos.

A - glass, not just liquid, Windows Vista, 7, 11,… accessibility concerns, but I like to see it.

B-/C+ - black and white icons, favicons. I did it before it was cool, but it’s getting overused.

E - gradientslop, barely started, already all blends together.