Heh, that’s a cute story: https://www.osnews.com/story/145459/you-paid-me-a-long-time-linux-user-to-use-windows-11-exclusively-for-a-month-heres-how-it-went/

Hmmm… Something ain’t right. What did I break this time?

@prologic@twtxt.net My bad. It has been a while since the last time I poked around my mystery box, and I must have Effed up something yesterday. Is it fixed now? (Also, I’ve noticed that access to my avatar is, somehow, still denied. Still poking at it. 🤦)

XMPP greatest peak was when Google Talk was around. Being able to chat with thousands, if not millions, of Google users at that time, using your own domain, and your own XMPP server was amazing. Then Google, in all its wisdom, and as it does very often, decided to kill it.

I might be on the minority, but can care less about video calls. Heck, even calls! Text is King. 🤪

@prologic@twtxt.net I linked you some of my findings on the twtxt.app on IRC. The main problem is the hashing. Totally broken. But you have got to give it some thought, because GitHub hosting of the feed is tricky (even more so if they are CNAMEing their domain to it). It is also finicky because Pages is auto-enabled on username.github.io, so actions must run each time you twt.

Okay, wow. Windows NT 4 wasn’t part of my timeline back then, so this is the first time I’m seeing it in action. And this thing came with IE 2, which I’ve also never seen before. (That’s interesting, because I remember using IE even on Win 3.x, but apparently that was already IE 3?)

It also makes me really happy to see my website work in these old browsers. Fullscreen images are “broken” because those are PNG or WebP, but the rest works just fine. 🥳

https://movq.de/v/56243a3e54

What a week!

It looks like I mostly missed the #twtxthashgeddon (so happy belated twtxthashgeddon day, to those who celebrate), although I’m glad that twtxt-lib appears to have come through it more-or-less unscathed.

Also, today is (was) July 4th, so happy US Independence Day (to those that celebrate). I didn’t feel much like celebrating, myself, so instead I went and played Magic (results tomorrow).

Finally, today is (now) July 5th, so happy X-Day (to those that celebrate). I can’t help but feel like this would be a great time for the saucers to come…. Just sayin’. 👽

BTW - welcome to twtxt @GabesArcade@gabesarcade.com!

Did Microsoft Shift Its Profits to Low-Tax Countries?
Microsoft is apparently shifting its profits to countries with low taxes — and out of countries where they have many more employees and significant sales. Back in 2005 Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer even said that a low corporate tax rate “is part of the overall advantage of doing business in Ireland,” remembers long-time Slashdot reader theodp. (Ballmer added “It wo … ⌘ Read more

4K @ 60 FPS USB Video Capture Finally Becomes Less Problematic On Linux
One area of Linux hardware testing I haven’t explored much in many years has been modern USB video capture for the lack of said hardware. The last time I did much video capturing on Linux was during the Hauppauge PCI card days. It turns out though that USB video capture of 4K 60 FPS content has been a pain point under Linux but is finally smoothing out with newer versions of the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Phoronix Premium Summer Sale To Help Support Linux Hardware Testing
For those that missed Phoronix turning 22 years old last month when running a special to help support the site, a few readers mentioned recently they missed out on seeing the deal in time. Paired with the US Independence Day holiday and summer sales elsewhere, now through 10 July is a Phoronix Premium summer sale if wishing to view the site ad-free while supporting the daily open-source/Linux news coverage and relentless Linux hardware testing… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Found it and fixed it! 🎉 The crawler’s discovery spider was fetching every feed a second time, without any conditional headers (plus a couple of other politeness bugs: redirected feed URLs never stored their cache validators, and there was no floor between re-fetches). Now every feed is fetched at most once per crawl, always with If-Modified-Since / If-None-Match, and never more than once per 15m no matter what. Just deployed — please keep an eye on your access logs and let me know if you still see anything impolite from the crawler 🙏

My mate and I hiked up the backyard mountain. We got 25°C and quite some wind, so it was actually not too terrible. The wind could have blown harder or the temps a little lower, but oh well.

I saw the squirrel’s bushy tail stick up on the forest floor in the sunlight and immediately thought of this cute little feller. Since it didn’t move at all, even when we came closer, I got irritated and reconsidered that it might actually be some kind of dried up farn. But then we also were able to see its body. Unfortunately, the squirrel ran up the tree too quickly, so all the shots are kinda crap.

At one flower spot, there were sooo many butterflies, wasps, flies, bugs and other insects. The botanic was completely crowded.

The workers were transferring logs from one log truck to the other in a parking lot. I’ve never seen this happening before. When we passed the same place on the way home, they had moved logs into a sea container. That was surprising. This semi wasn’t there on the way there. One log was probably too long and sticking out the container, so they probably had to wait for somebody to return with a chainsaw. Crazy that they’re shipping logs from here probably overseas. Why else would they put them in a sea container?

After our first break, a blackbird was really posing for us with his worm in the dark shade.

Today was my first time I ever saw a hummingbird hawk-moth (Taubenschwänzchen) for real. My mate photographed them many, many times before, but I never came across one myself. So, that was really special.

The forest service installed an outdoor table with two benches next to the timber lion, that was cool to see. We sat down for a few minutes and enjoyed both the view into the Fils valley and ant on the tabletop, but the sun was beating down too heavily on us, so we had to move on.

All in all, it was a very nice few hours long hike. Enjoy! https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-07-03/

Coreboot + AMD openSIL On MSI Ryzen Motherboard Now Works With Windows 11
With 3mdeb’s Dasharo port of AMD openSIL and Coreboot running on the Gigabyte EPYC motherboard, 3mdeb engineers have been devoting more time to their bring-up of Coreboot+openSIL on the MSI PRO B850-P consumer motherboard for desktop AMD Ryzen. They now even have Microsoft Windows 11 working atop this open-source firmware alternative along with other features implemented… ⌘ Read more

There’s no more time to waste to rotate some months into their archive feed files.

GraalVM CE 25.1.3 Gets Native Image “Hello World” Program Down To Just 6.5MB
GraalVM, the advanced JDK focused on ahead-of-time (AOT) Native Image compilation and since last year began shifting focus to more non-Java languages like Python and JavaScript, is out with its newest community feature release. GraalVM Community Edition 25.1.3 is now available with some interesting changes in tow… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh dear! :-(

Now, it’s cooler outside than inside. Time to open the windows and start the wind machines.

Ex-Governors, Big Tech Launch Coalition To Help Workers ‘Navigate the AI Economy’
“Amid growing public anger over A.I. and a debate over how to regulate it, a group of employers, state governors and foundations has raised $500 million to try to answer some of those questions themselves,” reports the New York Times.

“Just how many jobs will AI upend?” asks the Wall Street Journal, reporting that t … ⌘ Read more

RADV Enables Vulkan Descriptor Heap Support By Default
In time for the Mesa 26.2 stable release expected out in August, the Radeon RADV Vulkan driver is now exposing the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap descriptor heap support by default… ⌘ Read more

Apologies for the late #caturday post, but I figure it’s more of a state of mind, like that time Shadow temporarily “borrowed” the dog bed (and discovered how comfy a blanket pile can be)…

Image

Microsoft Slammed for Building Copyright-Infringing Supercomputer for OpenAI in New Court Filing
The New York Times alleges Microsoft actively encouraged OpenAI to steal its copyrighted work, reports Ars Technica, citing a new (and heavily redacted) court filing Thursday:

NYT’s motion comes after the [U.S.] Supreme Court sided with Cox Communications in a case where Sony tried … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2-rc1 Released: “Things Look Reasonably Normal” While Landing AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 FRL, AMD ISP4 & CAS
As expected, Linux 7.2-rc1 was released a brief time ago to cap off the Linux 7.2 merge window. Now it’s off for eight weeks or so of testing before Linux 7.2 stable is released that will in turn go on to power the likes of Fedora 45 and Ubuntu 26.10… ⌘ Read more

Are Checks Sent Through the Mail Vulnerable to Theft?
The New York Times tells the story of a 63-year-old retiree who wrote a check for several thousand dollaras to pay her taxes. But she discovered much later that her taxes were never paid because that check had been intercepted and then altered to be payable to someone else:

In some cases, thieves may pilfer one or more checks from local mailboxes. Adam Rust, director … ⌘ Read more

@kiwu@twtxt.net Last time you asked we were all tired. Now we’re EXHAUSTED because it’s 40 °C around here. 🥵😂😭

The firefly season is ending. I only saw 200 of them or so. There was one female directly on the forest road. If only I brought my camera and tripod, that would have worked out I reckon. I had my torch with me and this looked really cool.

Dusk took forever today. It was really long light out there. Full moon is tomorrow.

On the way back, there was suddenly a load clatter and crashing sound 100 meters away from me. I didn’t see anything, but a tree fell over in the forest out of the blue. Fuck me dead, that was scary as hell. Luckily, I was already on the main road, only meadows around me. It’s the second time I witnessed a tree accidentally coming down. The first one was during the most expensive hail storm in our area so far in 2011 behind me when setting up a summer camp. The weather changed in less than 15 minutes.

Maybe not such a good idea to go out so late alone. :-? Any rustling in the forest immediately reminded me of the boar the other day. Luckily, always false alarm. Still a bit terrified from that event.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh my! :-O We reached 38°C. It’s now down one degree.

I just got up from my two, three hours siesta. And I tell you, that was bloody amazing. Layed in bed in undies, no blanket, just some power metal in my headphones and I was sleeping like a baby. Normally, I NEED a blanket, no matter what. But this summer, it’s already the second time that I actually manage to drop off without one.

Ah, with lazy loading, browsers only start loading images when the load event occurs. And that takes time. Hm. Not a fan, I might revert this. 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I noticed that loading="lazy" might not be so great after all.

This is without lazy loading:

The total page load time is around 400-500 ms. Okay.

Now this is with lazy loading:

It finished much quicker, after about 250 ms. Sounds good.

But notice this gap right here?

This wasn’t there before. With lazy loading, it now takes something like 80-100 ms until the browser even starts loading images. This is Chromium, but Firefox shows a similar gap.

The net result is that there is a very noticeable delay/flicker when you open a page, because it takes so long until the images have loaded. Yes, the layout doesn’t shift around, but that has nothing to do with lazy loading.

How odd. 🤔

Bitcoin Drops Again. Skeptical Investment Strategist Calls It ‘Useless’
Friday Bitcoin closed at just $59,948 — dropping 19% just for June and more than 50% lower than its record high in October of $124,310.

To commemorate the occasion CNBC interviewed long-time bitcoin skeptic Jeremy Grantham, reporting that the 87-year-old cofounder/chief investment strategist of the massive asset-management firm GMO is … ⌘ Read more

Interesting, HTTPS is almost twice as slow as plain HTTP on my server (~72 ms vs. ~135 ms):

$ hyperfine -r 50 "curl -so /dev/null 'http://movq.de/blog/postings/2024-05-23/0/t/word11a.jpg.jpg'"
Benchmark 1: curl -so /dev/null 'http://movq.de/blog/postings/2024-05-23/0/t/word11a.jpg.jpg'
  Time (mean ± σ):      72.7 ms ±  17.2 ms    [User: 6.2 ms, System: 4.8 ms]
  Range (min … max):    49.5 ms …  99.7 ms    50 runs

$ hyperfine -r 50 "curl -so /dev/null 'https://movq.de/blog/postings/2024-05-23/0/t/word11a.jpg.jpg'"
Benchmark 1: curl -so /dev/null 'https://movq.de/blog/postings/2024-05-23/0/t/word11a.jpg.jpg'
  Time (mean ± σ):     135.5 ms ±  28.9 ms    [User: 17.8 ms, System: 5.6 ms]
  Range (min … max):    93.2 ms … 198.5 ms    50 runs

Damn, I broke my Atom feed (and a reader let me know, that’s cool!).

I run vnu on all HTML and CSS files after each build of the website, but I don’t run a feed validator. 😬 Time to change that.

‘Fingerprints’ of Black Hole’s Event Horizon Detected For First Time
Researchers say they detected the first gravitational-wave “fingerprints” of a black hole’s event horizon by analyzing the final moments of the powerful GW250114 merger. The findings support Einstein’s general relativity and may eventually help probe frame dragging and quantum fluctuations near black holes. Phys.org reports: For the new r … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Mhm, yeah, I also think I like date := time.Date(2026, time.June, 19, /**/ 17, 0, 0, 0, time.UTC) the most. 🤔 (My only gripe with this is that it isn’t obvious whether the third 0 is milli-, micro- or nanoseconds. These days it’s probably nanoseconds, but you never know.)

New Study Shows That Tall Vehicle Hoods Cause Hundreds More Deaths Per Year
joshuark shares a report from Car and Driver: A new study conducted by the New York Times shows that the increase in vehicle hood height seen over the last two and a half decades, mainly due to the rise in popularity of large SUVs and trucks, has resulted in several thousand deaths that otherwise may not have happened. The s … ⌘ Read more

GTA VI Is a Worrying Sign For the Future of Physical Games
Rockstar Games has revealed the price of Grand Theft Auto VI to be $79.99, and confirmed that the physical versions of the game won’t include a disc. Instead, they’ll contain a one-time download code when it launches November 19. “Not only is that a disappointing decision for people who like to own physical games, but given the scale of the next GTA, it als … ⌘ Read more

Walmart’s First Nuclear Deal Shows Demand Beyond AI Data Centers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Barron’s: Walmart is signing a long-term contract to buy nuclear power for the first time ever, a promising sign that the industry’s future is supported by more than just the AI data center boom. The retail giant agreed on Tuesday to buy power from a nuclear plant in Illinois owned by Constellation Energ … ⌘ Read more

Bob Iger’s Disney Wanted Apple, Twitter, and 007
In an exit interview with The Financial Times (paywalled), former Disney CEO Bob Iger says the company seriously considered buying Twitter, explored a potential merger with Apple, and pursued the James Bond franchise during his tenure. The Verge reports: According to Iger, Disney came close to buying Twitter from co-founder Jack Dorsey “at a very attractive price,” sometime prior … ⌘ Read more

A 25-Year-Old Blog Looks Back At 40 Years of Computing
Ancient Slashdot reader Mark Round writes: Longtime reader here (since mid-1999 – Hot Grits! Oog the Caveman! Beowulf clusters!), and I can still remember posting back on Slashdot’s own 5th anniversary. Time’s rolled on: my own blog just turned 25, and it’s now roughly 40 years since I first sat down at a computer. So I went digging through archive.org, old bac … ⌘ Read more

COSMIC Epoch 1.1 Released With COSMIC-Monitor, Compositor Improvements
System76 today released COSMIC Epoch 1.1 as the newest feature release as well as being their first time bumping the minor version number since the December release of COSMIC 1.0… ⌘ Read more

Mark Zuckerberg Directed Meta To Create a Prediction Markets App
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, recently dispatched a small team at his company to create a smartphone app similar to Polymarket and Kalshi, two employees with knowledge of the matter said. Users would not wager money, and the app would probably rely on a video game-like poi … ⌘ Read more

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Arrives In Florida
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has arrived at Kennedy Space Center ahead of a Falcon Heavy launch targeted for no earlier than August 30. The observatory will survey the sky about 1,000 times faster than Hubble with a field of view at least 100 times wider, helping scientists study dark matter, dark energy, and exoplanets. Spaceflight Now report … ⌘ Read more

AI Law Firm Wins UK Court Case For First Time
Garfield AI, the UK’s first regulator-approved AI law firm, has won its first court case after helping a freelancer recover 7,000 pounds in unpaid fees. “I was owed money for work I had done, but it felt like the process of recovering it could be too stressful, expensive and time-consuming,” said Tamires Camal Taquidir, a freelancer who had provided HR-related services to a hospitalit … ⌘ Read more

Hmmm are there really no decent Wayland (desktop) compatible image viewers that don’t drag in Mesa and all it’s hundreds of dependences or GCC and libgcc and it’s multi-hour long build time or Rust? geez

TikTok Shows 3x More AI Slop Than YouTube, Report Finds
“About 59% of TikTok videos served to a new account’s For You feed are AI slop,” writes Search Engine Journal, “according to a report from Kapwing, the video creation tool company. That’s roughly three times the rate Kapwing found on YouTube.”

The company manually reviewed over 10,000 TikTok videos across 20 categories and ran a separate fresh-account test, countin … ⌘ Read more

Cops Keep Getting Arrested for Using Flock’s Cameras to Stalk People
404 Media remembers how a Florida police office looked up his ex-girlfriend’s license plate in the Flock automated license plate reader system at least 69 times in 2024 — even searching for her mom’s license plate at least 24 times. The police office was charged with stalking and hacking-related offenses, serving one day in prison with five … ⌘ Read more

After Six Years Of Work and Over 360 Patches, Linux 7.2 Finally Removes Bug-Prone strncpy
Tech Times reports:

Linux 7.2’s merge window closed out a cleanup campaign on Friday that most kernel developers had stopped expecting to see end: the complete removal of strncpy(), a C string-copy function that the kernel’s own documentation labels “actively dangerous,” from every subsystem, driv … ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.2 Merges Vulkan Present Timing Support For X11/XWayland
Mesa’s Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) code now has support for present timing support “VK_EXT_present_timing” with X11 and XWayland… ⌘ Read more

New Super PAC Aims to Rally Tech Workers to Help Limit AI: ‘the Guardrails Alliance’
“A grassroots movement is forming among everyday tech workers who are demanding their companies develop and deploy AI responsibly,” reports TechCrunch.

Hoping to leverage that discontent is a new super PAC called the Guardrails Alliance. The New York Times reports that it launched Thursday with backers t … ⌘ Read more

Google’s Gemini Partially Figures Out A Lengthy Linux Boot Time On Modern ASUS Laptop
Google Antigravity with the Gemini 3.5 Flash model helped a Linux user sort out a situation where his laptop was taking around 36 seconds to boot the kernel, which shouldn’t be the case for the high-end laptop with AMD Ryzen 9 processor and 32GB of RAM. It ended up being yet another case of device firmware issues, but now a Linux kernel patch is pending for working around the issue on the ASUS ROG Strix G16 G614 laptop while … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Begins Making Preparations For NVIDIA “Blackwell-Next”
When going through the VFIO subsystem patches for the ongoing Linux 7.2 merge window, there isn’t too much to get excited about for end users with these changes. But there is the first time mentioning “Blackwell-Next” enablement by NVIDIA for the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

How truly wonderful! I went out tonight and the first thing I noticed was the temperature drop. It felt actually quite pleasing. What a welcome surprise, I didn’t expect that at all. It was warmer in the forst than between the fields. The tiniest breeze helped to cool off the surroundings I think. Right now, the temperature shows 23°C. It’s supposed to reach 18°C at 5 in the morning before it rapidly shoots through the sky again.

When I left the house I even saw the very end of a nice sunset. A bat was around, too. The several thousand fireflies delivered a fantastic show. It’s such a pity that I cannot show this to you. :-(

There were many frogs or toads around. Luckily, the light tan gravel road made for a good constrast to the darker hopping amphibians. So, I spotted them just in time. No animals were harmed.

The moon was out and lit up the scenery. I was perfectly chasing my own shadow for several hundred meters on a forest road. I had the moon right in my back. That moon light shadow felt magical. <3

It must have set a new record on picking up spider webs along the way. The threads around arms and legs always feel quite yucky. People were blasting music somewhere in town. You could here that noise in the entire forest. I found that rather annoying. All street lamps are operational again, so I got already blinded right at the entrance to the town. But other than that, this was a very nice evening stroll. Totally recommended. Already looking forward to tomorrow. :-)