The Biggest Mystery in the Universe ⌘ Read more

@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it Hahaha, that made me laugh real good. :-D I find it always surprising what collects in a short amount of time.

ChatGPT vs Brain Shocking Study Results! ⌘ Read more

There are a couple of add-ons to block YouTube Shorts in the browser, but if you are using Firefox with uBlock Origin, you do not need to install anything extra. Just add this filter list to the uBO settings, and you are free from those annoying short videos! At least on the PC… Sadly, even with YouTube Premium, there is no option to just ban Shorts from the mobile app. ⌘ Read more

** Read the Book **
There’s a whole lot going on, and I’ve been feeling myself develop bad habits concerning doom scrolling. I can’t reconfigure my life to not have a phone, so, instead, I made a thing to replace those things that invite me to doomy scroll. Meet Read the Book.

Read the book is a relatively simple website where you can read a book. The books are presented in short chunks so you’re never faced with a big scrolling wall of text. It has support for dark mode and light mode, and you can u … ⌘ Read more

James Webb Telescope Distance Determination Methods Explained! ⌘ Read more

Cognitive Load & How the Brain REALLY Learns! ⌘ Read more

Thank you, @alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it! It’s not sealed at all. If you were pouring in a liquid, it would run out on all four corners. It’s just folded over and carefully hammered shut as best as possible. 03 is a bit blurred, but you can see the tab from the right (the short side) tucking in on the left (the long side). The hem on top clamps it in place fairly decently.

I decided against blind rivets, because they leave ugly looking and sharp backsides, which can also interfer with the contents of the box. However, they would be an easy solution to make the corners more rigid and prevent any movement from the short sides.

Unfortunately, I can’t weld or solder, so that’s not an option. It would be the by far best solution. I wanna learn it one day, though.

Yes, Ken is a really great dude. He’s the reason I gave this a shot in the first place. :-)

AI & LLM Addiction In School ⌘ Read more

AI Therapy & The Risks of Cheap Mental Health ⌘ Read more

AI’s Impact on Intimate Relationships ⌘ Read more

L.I.S.A. Unveiling Spacetime with Black Hole Orbits ⌘ Read more

L.I.S.A.’s Universe Window Discoveries are Beyond Expectation ⌘ Read more

💩 on Company Time ⌘ Read more

How to Test If A Multiverse is Safe 💡 ⌘ Read more

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

Honest Government Ad | Global Sumud Flotilla ⌘ Read more

@zvava@twtxt.net it is amazing how much you have accomplished in such a short time. Take time to sleep, though! :-)

Shark eggs haunt my nightmares ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org yeah it’s not all that tall hahah! but yeah i am totally blinded to any sense of tall/short buildings lmao

the end of friendlyjordies ⌘ Read more

Tattooing Tardigrades with Teeny Tiny… electrons. ⌘ Read more

This machine took control of my brain… and eyeballs ⌘ Read more

Passing a Camel through the eye of a needle ⌘ Read more

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:

https://x.org/releases/current/doc/libX11/libX11/libX11.html#Obtaining_and_Changing_Window_Properties

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.

I have a Python script that transforms the original YouTube channel Atom feed into a more useful Atom feed by removing the spam description and replacing it with the video duration, filtering out videos by title, duration, etc. I just updated it to exclude the damn Shorts garbage more efficiently. Finally, YouTube updated their Atom feed generation, so that the video URL contains /short/ if it’s of this useless kind. Never thought that they ever actually will improve their Atom feeds. Thank you, much appreciated!

Status 2025-07-21
Morning, computer! Spending my days off trying to figure things out.
Some of them will occur in this post. I think best when I’m writing,
after all.

I’m back from a short vacation since a couple of weeks. I’m still
going to take a few days off every week for a while. I need the break.
It’s been way too many 12-16 hour workdays. I’m nominally working 80%
(~6 hour days), so I figure I’ve been working a lot for free.

Yeah, well, I like the TKey project to succeed. The ideas behind it
have implicatio … ⌘ Read more

Open Sauce is nearly here!! ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, this really could use a proper definition or a “manifest”. 😅 Many of these ideas are not very wide spread. And I haven’t come across similar projects in all these years.

Let’s take the farbfeld image format as an example again. I think this captures the “spirit” quite well, because this isn’t even about code.

This is the entire farbfeld spec:

farbfeld is a lossless image format which is easy to parse, pipe and compress. It has the following format:

╔════════╤═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Bytes  │ Description                                             ║
╠════════╪═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ 8      │ "farbfeld" magic value                                  ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (width)                      ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (height)                     ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ [2222] │ 4x16-Bit BE unsigned integers [RGBA] / pixel, row-major ║
╚════════╧═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

The RGB-data should be sRGB for best interoperability and not alpha-premultiplied.

(Now, I don’t know if your screen reader can work with this. Let me know if it doesn’t.)

I think these are some of the properties worth mentioning:

• The spec is extremely short. You can read this in under a minute and fully understand it. That alone is gold.
  
• There are no “knobs”: It’s just a single version, it’s not like there’s also an 8-bit color depth version and one for 16-bit and one for extra large images and one that supports layers and so on. This makes it much easier to implement a fully compliant program.
  
• Despite being so simple, it’s useful. I’ve used it in various programs, like my window manager, my status bars, some toy programs like “tuxeyes” (an Xeyes variant), or Advent of Code.
  
• The format does not include compression because it doesn’t need to. Just use something like bzip2 to get file sizes similar to PNG.
  
• It doesn’t cover every use case under the sun, but it does cover the most important ones (imho). They have discussed using something other than RGBA and decided it’s not worth the trouble.
  
• They refrained from adding extra baggage like metadata. It would have needlessly complicated things.

How does Yorick levitate? ⌘ Read more

Our new LEVITATING Servo Skull Secretary ⌘ Read more

Not Too Active Here
As you can see, I am not too active around here. I am elsewhere writing notes, which are short, silly, but fun. I am keeping this around for, mostly, two reasons. Old stuff, though bad, is part of me, a record of my past. I also may decide to come by, eventually, and write something in a longer format.

So, here I leave this blog—which I insisted on calling “weblog” for a while—frozen in time. ⌘ Read more

On my blog: Short Fiction — Transgender Athlete Bans https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/22/title-ix-hope.html #fiction #freeculture #lgbtpridemonth #politics

How many human eggs to make an omelet? ⌘ Read more

“My experience with Canonical’s interview process”
A short while ago, we talked about the hellish hiring process at a Silicon Valley startup, and today we’ve got another one. Apparently, it’s an open secret that the hiring process at Canonical is a complete dumpster fire. I left Google in April 2024, and have thus been casually looking for a new job during 2024. A good friend of mine is currently working at Canonical, and he told me that it’s quite a nice company with a great working … ⌘ Read more

10 Iconic “Temporary” Structures That Still Stand Today
Some of the world’s most iconic structures were never meant to stick around. Built for the World’s Fairs, quick fixes, or temporary exhibitions, these buildings were supposed to be dismantled or demolished after serving their short-term purpose. But fate—and sometimes public opinion—had other plans. Whether due to popularity, practicality, or sheer indifference, these “temporary” constructions […]

The post [10 Iconic “Temp … ⌘ Read more

Leaking in Plain Sight: How Short Links Expose Sensitive Data ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Here’s a short-list:

• Simple, minimal syntax—master the core in hours, not months.
  
• CSP-style concurrency (goroutines & channels)—safe, scalable parallelism.
  
• Blazing-fast compiler & single-binary deploys—zero runtime dependencies.
  
• Rich stdlib & built-in tooling (gofmt, go test, modules).
  
• No heavy frameworks or hidden magic—unlike Java/C++/Python overhead.

i wish it was realistic for me to learn golang but every single time i try to comprehend any go code i’m like What the fuck am i looking at. why is all of this so short and condensed GIVE ME VERBOSE CODE

Update- meet our new baby Tangerine! (Tango for short 🧡) ⌘ Read more

“Forgive me for the harm I have caused this world. None may atone for my actions but me and only in me shall their stain live on. I am thankful to have been caught, my fall cut short by those with wizened hands. All I can be is sorry, and that is all I am.”

This is my new kitten Skyrim Remastered Ultimate Edition (Sky for short) ⌘ Read more

Tea & Peaches: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon London Recap, Atlanta Sneak-Peek
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 in London was nothing short of historic. As the biggest KubeCon to date — with 12,418 attendees, including 46% first-timers — it was a moment of celebration, reflection, and connection for… ⌘ Read more

i started a little thing on my dreamwidth and called it a flash prompt box. basically it’s a limited time thing where people can prompt me for stuff i’m offering, like short fanfiction, photoshop-edited user icons, music recs, and a bit more! i’m having sooo much fun with it so far it’s been a blast just making stuff for friends :)

also more friends are making their own posts with the same concept which is SO cool to see

modern-latex: A short guide to LaTeX that avoids legacy cruft
Comments ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz @quark@ferengi.one In 2014 one person created protocol ii. Later it forked in IDEC. Why i said this? Because it’s simple “federated” forum-like protocol where from your station fetch another every 5-10 minutes. Stations has topic-based channels like idec.talks, linux.16, haiku.os, zx.spectrum. In short it’s FIDO but.. more modern? Documentation: https://github.com/idec-net/new-docs (mostly Russian, but you can use translator, also protocol already translated to english)

Zhaoxin’s KX-7000 x86-64 processor
Chips and Cheese takes a very detailed look at the latest processor design from Zhaoxin, the Chinese company that inherited VIA’s x86 license and has been making new x86 chips ever since. Their latest design, 世纪大道 (Century Avenue), tries to take yet another step closer to current designs chips form Intel and AMD, and while falling way short, that’s not really the point here. Ultimately performance is what matters to an end-user. In that respect, the KX-7000 somet … ⌘ Read more

PATH isn’t real on Linux
I have no idea how much relevance this short but informative rundown of how PATH works in Linux has in the real world, but I found it incredibly interesting and enlightening. The basic gist – and I might be wrong, there’s code involved and I’m not very smart – is that Linux itself needs absolute paths to binaries, while shells and programming languages do not. In other words, the Linux kernel does not know about PATH, and any lookup you’re doing comes from either the shell or the pr … ⌘ Read more

About the nuclear power plant on the Moon, they are beating us. There was a time we were ahead, but I understand nothing lasts forever. Now, being a world power for only one hundred and twenty some years, and a super power for around seventy sure is a record (as in short-lived). The Roman Empire lasted over 500 years!

golf.vim v0.1.1 - fixed keystroke logging, removed ultra‑short runs, now captures all modes ⌘ Read more