movq

uninformativ.de

No description provided.

↳ In-reply-to » Chilly 15°C in the shade with a slight breeze, but it was very nice in direct sun. I jumped outside after calling it quits. There were five herons on that meadow, super sweet. One even caught something fairly large when I returned, but it was already too dark, so my camera just cooked up a blurry pixel soup.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org What is that “tower” in the top left of 05? 🤔 And wow, 20 and 21 are great!

⤋ Read More
↳ In-reply-to » The original twt is unavailable. It may have been edited or deleted, or is from an unknown or muted feed.

@david@daiwei.me I use OpenBSD’s smtpd, which was super easy to set up. It gets a little bit more complicated these days because you also need a DKIM setup, so every outgoing mail goes from smtpd to dkimproxy and back to smtpd. And then dovecot for POP3/IMAP (has basically nothing to do with the other two).

I’m cheating a bit, though: I use config management on top, which means that all the UNIX users and mailboxes and directories are created by that. If you were to do that manually, it would be a huge pain.

Maybe I’ll write a blog post about this some day, just for fun. 🤔

JMAP? Never heard of it.

⤋ Read More

#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.

⤋ Read More
↳ In-reply-to » @lyse

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.)

⤋ Read More
↳ In-reply-to » Made a little program to print the system’s uptime on DOS, OS/2, and Windows NT:

@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

⤋ Read More

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.

⤋ Read More
↳ In-reply-to » Did I post this here already?

@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. 🥲

⤋ Read More
↳ In-reply-to » @lyse Thanks. 😅 I didn’t check the time, but I guess something between 15 and 30 minutes? 🤔

@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.

⤋ Read More
↳ In-reply-to » I’d estimate that ~90% of the traffic I get is some kind of non-human / non-browser thing.

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.

⤋ Read More

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?

⤋ Read More

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.)

⤋ Read More
↳ In-reply-to » 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. 🥳

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

⤋ Read More
↳ In-reply-to » 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. 🥳

@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.)

⤋ Read More

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.)

⤋ Read More