It’s Sunday, and tomorrow I don’t have to work, as I have two weeks of vacation. The first time since May. My only breaks from work were when I hurt my hand and wasn’t able to type for a week, and two free days last week, but those also weren’t really relaxing for me. So I am very much looking forward to the next two weeks! I really feel the exhaustion from the last few months with work sometimes being stressful, the start of my fiancée’s teacher training, and some other topics. But this year again showed me that bi … ⌘ Read more
Rare Jurassic ‘sword dragon’ prehistoric reptile discovered in the UK
A near-complete skeleton found on the UK’s Jurassic Coast has been identified as a new and rare species of ichthyosaur—a type of prehistoric marine reptile that once ruled the ancient oceans. ⌘ Read more
Where fish feed ingredients come from key for sustainability, new study finds
A new study led by researchers from the University of Tasmania, in collaboration with international partners including The University of Manchester, has found that the environmental footprint of aquaculture feeds is influenced more by where ingredients are sourced than by the types of ingredients used. ⌘ Read more
There are five types of sleep – here’s what that means for your health
Scientists have identified five sleep profiles, each of which is linked to distinct mental health symptoms and brain activity patterns ⌘ Read more
Chemists create red fluorescent dyes that may enable clearer biomedical imaging
MIT chemists have designed a new type of fluorescent molecule that they hope could be used for applications such as generating clearer images of tumors. ⌘ Read more
OSINT: Google Dorking Hacks: The X-Ray Vision for Google Search
You type in some keywords, scroll past 10 pages of useless results, and wonder why the internet’s hiding the good stuff. Sound familiar?
[Continue reading on Inf … ⌘ Read more
Tiny RISC-V Development Board with WCH CH32V317WCU6 Available from $6.80
The nanoCH32V317 is a compact development board created by MuseLab to simplify prototyping and embedded system development. It integrates USB connectivity, Ethernet support, and a straightforward programming interface through USB Type-C, providing an accessible platform for engineers and hobbyists working with RISC-V microcontrollers. The board is powered by the WCH CH32V317WCU6, a RISC-V microcontro … ⌘ Read more
MacOS Tahoe 26 Feels Slow? Try These 6 Performance Tips
Some Mac users who have updated to macOS Tahoe 26 feel like the new operating system runs slower than their prior MacOS installation did. Reports online suggest there can be general sluggishness and lagging performance, sometimes with frame rate drops and stuttering animations on the screen, or even when typing. Other users in various forums … Read More ⌘ Read more
@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it Holy fuck! 🤣 I just realized how bad my typing was in my reply before 🤣 🤦♂️ So sorry about that haha 😆 I blame the stupid iPhone on-screen keyboard ⌨️
I bought an iPhone (as my third smartphone)
I never thought I would do this, but I bought an iPhone. It’s a pretty cheap iPhone SE 2. Gen (2020) used from eBay, like the device I got issued from my work. It’s so tiny and it’s really difficult to type even a short text like this. ⌘ Read more
@zvava@twtxt.net I never used any of the social media platforms, that’s why I’m probably ignorant.
I don’t understand the concept of a retwt. Just quote the (relevant) parts from whereever and comment on that. Or post a link instead of a quote. Sounds simple enough. :-) That’s also has the benefit that it works with every source, no matter what. Since it’s called retwt, I’d imagine this to only work (well) with whatever messages the system itself offers. But I could be wrong. What would be the benefit of having a dedicated message type or structure for “hey, look at that” messages in your opinion?
Hmm, what’s a content warning?
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Holy shit, that’s insane! :-D I tried it, but i’m absolutely terrible at these type of games. I’m having trouble with the keys to move around. Maybe after ages I would pick it up and it becomes natural. I just was never a real gamer.
I will definitely try to read through the code, though! This looks sick. 8-)
Three weather services with three different forecasts. We got a little bit rained on, so at least some of them were not completely wrong. The timing was off by an hour, though. And nobody expected the Spanish inqui^W^Wthunder either. It was a nice walk.
Oh cool, as I type this, lighning and thunder very close by now. At most a kilometer away. Glad I’m home and not in the woods anymore. And heavy rain kicks in, too.
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, removing the cover will probably help. I’ll have to try. 😅 And, yes, the scrolling is pretty annoying (and kind of ruins the experience a little bit).
The printer isn’t that loud – at least not for a dot matrix printer. 😅 It’s been ~30 years since I’ve last seen them in person, but I remembered these things to be louder. I’m typing on my Model M, maybe that contributes to the perceived noise on this video. Here’s an isolated recording of that keyboard: https://movq.de/v/ddc98b03d8/2022-02-21–model-m-goes-brrr.ogg 🤣 It really sounds like that when you’re typing fast. Brrrrt.
I’ve got a prototype of my hardcopy simulator going. I’m typing on the keyboard and the “display” goes to the printer:
https://movq.de/v/56feb53912/s.png
https://movq.de/v/235c1eabac/MVI_8810.MOV.mp4
The biiiiiiiiiig problem is that the print head and plastic cover make it impossible to see what’s currently being printed, because this is not a typewriter. This means: In order to see what I just entered, I have to feed the paper back and forth and back and forth … it’s not ideal.
I got that idea of moving back/forth from Drew DeVault, who – as it turned out – did something similar a few years back. (I tried hard to read as little as possible of his blog post, because figuring things out myself is more fun. But that could mean I missed a great idea here or there.)
But hey, at least this is running on my Pentium 133 on SuSE Linux 6.4, printer connected with a parallel cable. 😍
(Also, yes, you can see the printouts of earlier tests and, yes, I used ed(1) wrong at one point. 🤪 And ls insisted on using colors …)
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Are you sure?
because there is virtually no market for these devices anymore, meaning new ones are very, very expensive.
I think dot matrix printers are still pretty common in many Point of Sales (POS) registers right? At least here in AU they’re very common. I had a quick look myself today, there seems to be quite a solid market for these types of printers. In fact even EPSON still sell Dot Matrix printers themselves 🤣
The XMPP Standards Foundation: MongooseIM 6.4 - Simplified and Unified
MongooseIM is a scalable and efficient instant messaging server. It implements the open, proven, extensible and constantly evolving XMPP protocol, which is an excellent choice when it comes to instant messaging. To communicate with other XMPP entities, the server uses three main types of interfaces, listed in the table below.
XMPP InterfacePurposeConnection typeReworked in v … ⌘ Read more
@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com Also just a heads up, GIF(s) aren’t supproted as an Avatar type on yarnd (what runs twtxt.net). I’d change this to something that’s more supproted like PNG, JPEG, etc.
@movq@www.uninformativ.de having to go to a gopher proxy to see a text document better served on readily available web servers… 🤭, but I digress. Verbatim text:
What's Missing from "Retro"
~softwarepagan
------------------------------------------------------------------
You know, often, when I say I miss older ways of computing or
connecting online, people tell me "there's nothing stopping you
from doing that now!" and they are technicay correct in most cases
(though I can't, for example, chat with friends on MSN ever
again...) However, let me explain that while this type of thing can
*sort of* fill that hole in my heart, it isn't *the same.*
Say, for example, I wanted to connect with others over a BBS. This
wouldn't offer the same types of connections it used to. While
there are BBSes around with active users, they're no longer there
to discuss movies, Star Trek, D&D, games, etc. They're there to
discuss *BBSes.* The same can be said for Gopher, old-school forums
and all sorts of revival projects (such as Escargot, Spacehey,
etc.) Retrocomputing enthusiasts, while they have a variety of
interests, are often in these spaces to discuss the medium itself
and not other topics. This exists at a stark contrast from how
things were in the past, where a non-tech-inclined person may learn
the tech to connect with likeminded others (as I did as a
Zelda-obsessed kid.)
The same can be said of old media. People will say "well, nobody is
stopping you from watching old shows/movies now!" Again, they are
technically correct. I can go home right now and watch *Star Trek:
The Next Generation* to my heart's content. It will never again,
however, be current, or new. When something is new, it serves as a
shared cultural experience. Remember how "Game of Thrones* felt in
the mid-to-late 2010s? Yeah, that.
It's sad. I sustain myself on a mixed diet of old things, new
things, and new things intended for old millenials like me who like
old things. It can be bittersweet.
apt manpage of Ubuntu recently, which, for some reason, uses blue text in one place:
Ah, so apparently they don’t like writing manpages anymore and instead use XML:
https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/blob/main/doc/apt.8.xml
And then they use XSLT on top and what not:
https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/blob/main/doc/manpage-style.xsl.cmake.in
It’s not even explicitly blue:
https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/blob/main/doc/apt.ent?ref_type=heads#L17
Abstractions upon abstractions upon abstractions.
@prologic@twtxt.net haha yeah for the youtube rules i just copied the first JSON block in your screenshot (i typed it out) and it miraculously worked! yayyy
/short/ if it's of this useless kind. Never thought that they ever actually will improve their Atom feeds. Thank you, much appreciated!
@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz @movq@www.uninformativ.de Sorry, I neither finished it nor in time. :-( That’s as good as it’s gonna get for the moment: https://git.isobeef.org/lyse/gelbariab/-/tree/master/rss-proxys?ref_type=heads
The README should hopefully provide a crude introduction. The example configuration file is documented fairly well, I believe (but maybe not). You probably still have to consult and maybe also modify the source code to fit your needs.
Let me know if you run into issues, have questions, wishes etc.
Here’s an example of X11/Xlib being old and archaic.
X11 knows the data type “cardinal”. For example, the window property _NET_WM_ICON (which holds image data for icons) is an array of “cardinal”. I am already not really familiar with that word and I’m assuming that it comes from mathematics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_number
(It could also be a bird, but probably not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinalidae)
We would probably call this an “integer” today.
EWMH says that icons are arrays of cardinals and that they’re 32-bit numbers:
https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/latest-single/#id-1.6.13
So it’s something like 0x11223344 with 0x11 being the alpha channel, 0x22 is red, and so on.
You would assume that, when you retrieve such an array from the X11 server, you’d get an array of uint32_t, right?
Nope.
Xlib is so old, they use char for 8-bit stuff, short int for 16-bit, and long int for 32-bit:
That is congruent with the general C data types, so it does make sense:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_data_types
Now the funny thing is, on modern x86_64, the type long int is actually 64 bits wide.
The result is that every pixel in a Pixmap, for example, is twice as large in memory as it would need to be. Just because Xlib uses long int, because uint32_t didn’t exist, yet.
And this is something that I wouldn’t know how to fix without breaking clients.
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I spent so much time in the past figuring out if something is a dict or a list in YAML, for example.
What are the types in this example?
items:
- part_no: A4786
descrip: Water Bucket (Filled)
price: 1.47
quantity: 4
- part_no: E1628
descrip: High Heeled "Ruby" Slippers
size: 8
price: 133.7
quantity: 1
items is a dict containing … a list of two other dicts? Right?
It is quite hard for me to grasp the structure of YAML docs. 😢
The big advantage of YAML (and JSON and TOML) is that it’s much easier to write code for those formats, than it is with XML. json.loads() and you’re done.
** Of fairies, compost, and computers **
Lately I’ve buried myself in reading fiction. Stand outs from among the crowd are, of course, Middlemarch but also a lot of sort of scholarly fairy fiction; works that follow the scholastic adventures of studious professorial types in vaugely magical settings. Namely Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries’, Heather Fawcett and The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow.
I’ve also been working on a handful of personal utility programs. I … ⌘ Read more
To really annoy my neighbors and everyone in a 5 mile radius, I might take my Model M and type a blogpost on the balcony. 😈
How can one write blazing fast yet useful compilers (for lazy pure functional languages)?
I’ve decided enough is enough and I want to write my own compiler (seems I caught a bug and lobste.rs is definitely not discouraging it). The language I have in mind is a basic (lazy?) statically-typed pure functional programming language with do notation and records (i.e. mostly Haskell-lite).
I have other ideas I’d like to explore as well, but mainly, I want the compiler to be so fast (w/ optimisations) that … ⌘ Read more
That time “AI” translation almost caused a fight between a doctor and my parents
What if you want to find out more about the PS/2 Model 280? You head out to Google, type it in as a query, and realise the little “AI” summary that’s above the fold is clearly wrong. Then you run the same query again, multiple times, and notice that each time, the “AI” overview gives a different wrong answer, with made-up details it’s pulling out of its metaphorical ass. Ev … ⌘ Read more
Bridge Types
⌘ Read more
What is Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)? Completely explained with types. ⌘ Read more
@thecanine@twtxt.net right. Spell checkers are not AI. Full grammar checking, and correction? That one I have not seeing, but on AI. So, what I meant was, let the grammar gaffes show; we type as we speak (most of the time). About spelling mistakes, well, let them be corrected as we have done since 1971(?).
@thecanine@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de So I actually agree with you! I think Dustin is taking a bit of a “deep and dark” path here (depression), and there are many parallels to other types of activities that we can all talk to. “AI” or “LLM”(s) here should be no different. Use them, Don’t use them. I don’t really see how it takes away our creativity or critical thinking.
Exciting Cybersecurity Careers That Don’t Require Coding
Do you believe that cybersecurity is only for programmers who are bent over keyboards, typing code after code to ward off hackers? Rethink…
[Continue reading on InfoSec Write-ups »] … ⌘ Read more
** “Before injection, understanding” — What every hacker needs to master before exploiting a NoSQL…**
NoSQL database types
[Continue reading on InfoSec Write-ups »](https: … ⌘ Read more
Two main types of cats exist. 😅 ⌘ Read more