@bender@twtxt.net Both Gopher and Mastodon are a way for me to “babble”. 😅 I basically shut down Gopher in favor of Mastodon/Fedi last year. But the Fediverse doesn’t really work for me. It’s too focused on people (I prefer topics) and I dislike the addictive nature of likes and boosts (I’m not disciplined enough to ignore them). Self-hosting some Fedi thing is also out of the question (the minimalistic daemons don’t really support following hashtags, which is a must-have for me).

I’ll probably keep reading Fedi stuff, I just won’t post that much, I think.

Gopher server is back online and I’ll be phasing out Mastodon.

gopher://uninformativ.de

(No, I won’t do multi-protocol twtxt again. 😅)

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, it’s difficult, you often don’t get what you’d expect. They also make heavy use of 3rd party libraries. IIUC, for random numbers, they refer to this library. I’ve read many times that the Rust stdlib is intentionally minimalistic (to make it easier to maintain and port and all that).

I’m struggling with this, using 3rd party libs for so many things isn’t really my cup of tea. I’ll probably make my own tiny little “standard library”. It’s silly, but I don’t see any other options. 🤷

@bender@twtxt.net “Mhhhhhhh, hehehe, gonna poop on that car. 😏”

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That’s interesting, I see them (Teichrallen) everywhere I look. 🤯 It feels like they’re about as common as mallards (Stockenten) over here. 🤔

@quark@ferengi.one Plot twist: I only drink decaf. 🤯🤯🤯

Sitting on the balcony with a fucking cup of coffee. https://movq.de/v/463f1f9d03/s.png

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I’m sure he’s doing a good job! 😊

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Looks pretty nice! Enjoy the mild temperatures while you can. 😅

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Thanks mate. 👌 (In the grand scheme of things I’m still doing great. World news are a horrible shit show nowadays, ffs. 😭)

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Welcome back. 👋 (It’s a bit quiet here in general. 🤔)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks. 😅 Quite a few of them waddle around at the pond in our village. But those two individuals were seen in a nearby zoo. They’re not zoo animals, they just live there. 😅

Bird photos of the day:

• Egyptian Goose
  
• Common Moorhen (half asleep)
  
• Rock Dove
  

https://movq.de/v/4fe0207d31/

I wanted to port this to Rust as an excercise, but they still have no random number generator in the core library: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/130703

That’s the code, it’s surprisingly simple: https://movq.de/v/81dd5649be/

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Only 10% of the German population had Internet access in 1998: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Deutschland#/media/Datei:Diagramm_Internetnutzer_in_Deutschland.svg I guess I was lucky in that regard.

(If today’s tech wasn’t constantly trying to track and scam you, I might still be an early adopter.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Nice! The final desk looks like it’s right out of Skyrim. 😃

Having some fun with SIRDS this morning.

What you should see: https://movq.de/v/dae785e733/disp.png

And the tutorial I used for my C program: https://www.ime.usp.br/~otuyama/stereogram/basic/index.html

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oooooh, never seen that before. 😲 Either white-balance doing funny stuff or unusual “filtering” through those clouds. 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ctrl-U in Vim does something similar (“Delete all entered characters before the cursor in the current line”), but it does not put them into the “clipboard”. I sometimes hit Ctrl-U by accident and then my text is gone. 😡😂

A bill from our ISP in 1998.

We’re talking about a month here, 1998-07-27 to 1998-08-26.

Basic fee: 7.50 DM (about 6€ today).

Online time: 516 minutes, 23.53 DM (about 20€ today).

That’s just the ISP costs, if I’m not mistaken. The underlying phone calls were pretty pricey as well.

Just as a little courtesy call (is that the right term?): 2025 continues to be annoying and exhausting, and I won’t really have the energy to work on twtxt/Yarn or texudus. Other than the occasional retrocomputing thingy (which gives a nice boost of nostalgia), I’m not doing much of anything lately.

cc @prologic@twtxt.net @andros@twtxt.andros.dev

SuSE Linux 6.4 and Arachne on DOS also work (with Windows 2000 as a call target):

• https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-05-31/0/POSTING-en.html#suse-linux-64
  
• https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-05-31/0/POSTING-en.html#arachne-on-dos

@bender@twtxt.net Hm, I was just surprised to see so many non-english feeds in there. 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Like this? 😅

Source: https://mastodon.social/@islieb/114635884398567253

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Where do they come from, anyway? Are they somehow auto-discovered or is this a curated list?

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I don’t do a lot of CSS and tried to use flexboxes recently, couldn’t find a great explanation. I somehow managed to get the desired effect, but am I using them correctly? Who knows.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I cannot / could not imagine that, either – but if it’s publicly available on the internet and something links to it, they’ll eventually find, scrape it, use it. ☹️

@arne@uplegger.eu … Petrasilie? :-D

When I chose the MIT license for all of my software, I thought:

“Should I use GPL, which I don’t really understand? Is that worth it? Yeah, there is a theoretical possibility that some company might use my code in their proprietary product … and then what? Should I sue them to enforce the GPL? I’m not going to do that anyway, so I’ll just use the MIT license.”

And now we have those LLM scrapers and now it’s suddenly a reality that these companies (ab)use my code. I can see it in my logs. I didn’t expect that back then.

GPL wouldn’t help, either, of course. (Regardless, I now think that GPL would have been the better choice anyway.)

I’m honestly considering taking my code and website offline. Maybe make it accessible through some obscure protocol like Gopher or Gemini, but no more HTTP.

(Yes, Anubis might help. Temporarily.)

I’m just tired.

Getting a bit quiet in the Yarniverse.

@arne@uplegger.eu Was sind denn Petras? :-)

🌈 Hooray! 🌈

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz A blast from the past! 😅 And all of it still works, that’s quite the surprise. I mean, I’m making real phone calls here and let the modems talk over that connection … Almost like in the 90ies. 😅

@nghialele@nghia.im Man, I wish I could watch Formula 1 on a regular basis again, but it has become expensive as fuck here. 🫤

This is my highlight, really, haven’t seen this in action in a loooooooong time:

Image

Image

Image

I had a lot of fun with my modems these past few days:

https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-05-31/0/POSTING-en.html

@bender@twtxt.net Not sure if you’re serious or joking, but: IE3 introduced support for CSS, Mosaic completely ignores it. 😅 Besides, it looks fine in IE3 now as well, after I fixed my CSS bug. 🤪

@prologic@twtxt.net Mosaic (2.7) works fine, I maintain that package in the AUR and test my website regularly. 😅

https://movq.de/v/d7787d6fb1/s.png

@quark@ferengi.one Ah, I see. Hm, only problem is, IE 3 doesn’t seem to support this yet. 😅 Nah, I don’t think I’ll go down that road – seems like a slippery slope. 🤣

@bender@twtxt.net Probably, yes. 🤔 There’s no standard way to do that, though, is there? 🤔

… but as it turned out, this was a bug in my CSS. It works now. 🥳

https://movq.de/v/0b35c66e11/s.png

My website is compatible with many old browsers, but Internet Explorer 3, uhm, not so much.

https://movq.de/v/d038528c00/s.png

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Yep, can’t wait to hear that dial-up sound again. 😃

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Awww, welcome to the family, little guy. 😅

Maybe you’ll enjoy this as well:

I still have one of my first modems, a Creatix LC 144 VF:

I think this was the modem that I used when I first connected to the internet, but I’m not sure.

I plugged it in again and it still works:

The firmware appears to be from 1994, which sounds about right. I don’t think we had internet access before that. We certainly did use local mailboxes, though. (Or BBS’s, as you might call them.)

I now want to actually use that modem again. For the moment, I can only use a phone to dial into it, I lack a second modem to actually establish a connection. Here’s a video:

Not spectacular, but the modem does answer after me entering ATA.

I bought another cheap old modem on eBay and am now waiting for it to arrive. Once it’s here, I want to simulate an actual dial-up session, hopefully from OS/2 or Windows 3.x.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Ah, I see. I would assume that you’ll get used to it at some point. 🤔 But yeah, a lot of meaning is packed into these symbols. (It’s much, much worse with languages like Rust. 😅)

That was so great to watch, I was smiling from ear to ear the whole time. 😃

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7LYCERDnX4

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz In what way should it be more verbose? Can you give an example? 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, yeah, nothing beats modern DVCSs. I just hope that having CVS is better than nothing. We’ll see. 😂