Fuck me dead! I accidentally confused an HTML file for a YAML file and manually opened it in my browser. Unfortunately, I clicked on the OK button of the popped up dialog a bit too fast, it just caught me off guard. It asked which program to open the YAML file in. Of course Firefox thought that it could handle that and suggested itself by default. Conveniently, the “don’t prompt me again and always use this selection from now on” checkbox was enabled.

And then the endless loop of death started. Turns out, this fucking browser can’t do shit with YAML files and delegated to what had been just configured. Oh, would you look at that!? Firefox! Empty tabs after empty tabs appeared. Killing and restarting Firefox just loaded the last session with all the tabs and the loop continued.

Some bloody snakeoil on my work machine slows down link openening requests by two, three seconds. It’s always absolutely anoying, but luckily, it actually limited the rate of new tabs popping up. I still could not close the many tabs fast enough that had accumulated before I noticed what was going on in the background.

Going to the settings to change them was always interrupted with a new tab opening in the foreground.

Finally, killing Firefox and renaming the file on disk before restarting Firefox did the trick and broke the loop. I was still holding down Ctrl+W for a minute or so to get rid of the useless tabs. I didn’t want to loose the important tabs, so just ditching the session wasn’t an option.

Fell into a bit of a rabbit hole and learned that it took German law until 2008 to actually allow unisex/gender-neutral first names: https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/entscheidungen/rk20081205_1bvr057607.html 🤦

Just importing data classes takes another 60 ms … This fancy new stuff is really costly.

Great article by Ploum about chatbots/AI and education: https://ploum.net/2026-01-19-exam-with-chatbots.html

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org The thing is that’s hard to avoid if TYPE_CHECKING, but documentation tools such as pdoc don’t support that … so it’s either type hints or API docs. 🤷

I hope I can eventually find a way out of this mess …

@prologic@twtxt.net I’d love to take a look at the code. 😅

I’m kind of curious to know how much Assembly I need vs. How much of a microkernel can I build purely in Mu (µ)? 🤔

Can’t really answer that, because I only made a working kernel for 16-bit real mode yet. That is 99% C, though, only syscall entry points are Assembly. (The OpenWatcom compiler provides C wrappers for triggering software interrupts, which makes things easier.)

But in long mode? No idea yet. 😅 At least changing the page tables will require a tiny little bit of Assembly.

How Markdown Took Over the World
22 years ago, developer and columnist John Gruber released Markdown, a simple plain-text formatting system designed to spare writers the headache of memorizing arcane HTML tags. As technologist Anil Dash writes in a long piece, Markdown has since embedded itself into nearly every corner of modern computing.

Aaron Swartz, then seventeen years old, served as the beta tester before its quiet March 2004 debut. Goo … ⌘ Read more

Enquanto esperam pelo debate entre todos os candidatos (desta vez mesmo todos, os 11) que vai dar às 22h, estejam à vontade para ler o meu resumo do debate na rádio que aconteceu entre os três “candidatos excluídos” (André Pestana, Humberto Correia e Manuel João Vieira), caso não o tenham ouvido.

Costumo fazer threads para os debates, mas visto que este ouvi em diferido preferi escrever no meu blog em vez de ter aqui uma mega-thread… mas se quiserem comentar, estejam à vontade para comentar aqui 😛

https://tilde.pt/~marado/blog/sobre-o-debate-na-radio-entre-os-candidatos-menores-a-presidencia-da-republica.html

#ptpol #debate #presidenciais

I came across this on “Why Is SQLite Coded In C”, which I found interesting:

“There has lately been a lot of interest in “safe” programming languages like Rust or Go in which it is impossible, or is at least difficult, to make common programming errors like memory leaks or array overruns.”

If that’s true, then encountering those issues means the programmer is, simply, horrible?

Did you miss today’s event on #PublicDomain ? Or you didn’t, but want more? Don’t miss Natick FOSS’s upcoming event, on the 8th of January, where #PublicDomainDay will be celebrated!

2:45PM NY time
7:45PM GMT

https://natickfoss.org/archive.html#UpcomingMeeting

Image

And now the event loop is not a simple loop around curses’ getch() anymore but it can wait for events on any file descriptor. Here’s a simple test program that waits for connections on a TCP socket, accepts it, reads a line, sends back a line:

https://movq.de/v/93fa46a030/vid-1767547942.mp4

And the scrollbar indicators are working now.

I’ll probably implement timer callbacks using timerfd (even though that’s Linux-only). 🤔

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I noticed that your feed’s last modification timestamp was missing in my database. I cannot tell for certain, but I think it did work before. Turns out, your httpd now sends the Last-Modified with UTC instead of GMT. Current example:

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 06:50:20 UTC

I’m not a fan of this timestamp format at all, but according to the HTTP specification, HTTP-date must always use GMT for a timezone, nothing else: https://httpwg.org/specs/rfc9110.html#http.date

New post: 2025 - A Year in review (https://www.itsericwoodward.com/journal/2025/12-31-year-in-review.html)

Happy New Year, everyone!

At around 19 seconds in the video, you can see some minor graphical glitches.

Text mode applications in Unix terminals are such a mess. It’s a miracle that this works at all.

In the old DOS days, you could get text (and colors) on the screen just by writing to memory, because the VGA memory was mapped to a fixed address. We don’t have that model anymore. To write a character to a certain position, you have to send an escape sequence to move the cursor to that position, then more escape sequences to set the color/attributes, then more escape sequences to get the cursor to where you actually want it. And then of course UTF-8 on top, i.e. you have no idea what the terminal will actually do when you send it a “🙂”.

Mouse events work by the terminal sending escape sequences to you (https://www.xfree86.org/current/ctlseqs.html#Mouse%20Tracking).

ncurses does an amazing job here. It’s fast (by having off-screen buffers and tracking changes, so it rarely has to actually send full screen updates to the terminal) and reliable and works across terminals. Without the terminfo database that keeps track of which terminal supports/requires which escape sequences, we’d be lost.

But gosh, what a mess this is under the hood … Makes you really miss memory mapped VGA and mouse drivers.

It’s that time again, I’ve just rotated my #twtxt feed!

Find last quarter’s twts at the feed, or see them on the web.

My little toy operating system from last year runs in 16-bit Real Mode (like DOS). Since I’ve recently figured out how to switch to 64-bit Long Mode right after BIOS boot, I now have a little program that performs this switch on my toy OS. It will load and run any x86-64 program, assuming it’s freestanding, a flat binary, and small enough (< 128 KiB code, only uses the first 2 MiB of memory).

Here I’m running a little C program (compiled using normal GCC, no Watcom trickery):

https://movq.de/v/b27ced6dcb/los86%2D64.mp4

https://movq.de/v/b27ced6dcb/c.png

Next steps could include:

• Use Rust instead of C for that 64-bit program?
  
• Provide interrupt service routines. (At the moment, it just keeps interrupts disabled.)

Lab report: Reading a 4th Edition Research Unix tape image on Plan 9 — http://a.9srv.net/reports/index.html#v4

Happy birthday Katrina! https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-12-23/0/POSTING-en.html :-)

Wow, @movq@www.uninformativ.de, so many tables. No idea what I expected (I’m totally clueless on this low-level stuff), but that was quite an interesting surprise to me. https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-12-21/0/POSTING-en.html

I quit LinkedIn
I recently quit LinkedIn. Ironically, the post I made about why I was
quitting was probably the most viewed thing I ever posted. Haha.

If you need to see my CV it’s right here on my website:

https://hack.org/~mc/cv.html

This is what I wrote back in November:

I’m terminating my account on LinkedIn next week. This is possibly
some kind of career suicide.

I’m very seldom visiting LinkedIn, so I’m probably late to the party,
as usual. Perhaps there has already been a lar … ⌘ Read more

The phone situation
I need to write something about this or I’ll burst.

I have a new phone. It’s an old iPhone SE 2022. Yes, I know. Evil,
evil Apple. Won’t someone please think of the privacy issues? Right,
well, Apple has at least better reputation about these things than
Google does, but we’ll come to that.

It feels like I’m betraying the FLOSS cause. I feel horrible, although
probably not just because of this.

Let’s recap:

• My main phone has been a de-googled (not even microG) Fairphone 4
  with CalyxOS. CalyxOS … ⌘ Read more

Alright, Advent of Code is over:

https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-12-12/0/POSTING-en.html

It’s been quite the time sink, especially with the DOS games on top, but it was fun. 🥳

In case you’re wondering: All puzzles (except for part 2 of day 10) were doable in Python 1 on SuSE Linux 6.4 and ran in a finite time on the Pentium 133. Puzzle 10/2 might have been doable as well if I had better education. 🤣

The “AOSP Devs” @aosp_devs@aosp_devs year in review:

https://aosp-devs.org/2025/11/30/year-in-review.html

Advent of Code 2025 starts tomorrow. 🥳🎄

This year, I’m going to use Python 1 on SuSE Linux 6.4, writing the code on my trusty old Pentium 133 with its 64 MB of RAM. No idea if that old version of Python will be fast enough for later puzzles. We’ll see.

https://fokus.cool/2025/11/25/i-dont-care-how-well-your-ai-works.html

AI systems being egregiously resource intensive is not a side effect — it’s the point.

And someone commented on that with:

I’m fascinated by the take about the resource usage being an advantage to the AI bros.

They’ve created software that cannot (practically) be replicated as open source software / free software, because there is no community of people with sufficient hardware / data sets. It will inherently always be a centralized technology.

Fascinating and scary.

How bad was the “Digital Sovereignty Summit”?

Heise explains: https://www.heise.de/en/opinion/Analysis-of-the-Digital-Sovereignty-Summit-Open-Source-Gets-Scolded-11084765.html

But I’ll highlight one thing - the Declaration for European Digital Sovereignty, published and signed there, has this ridiculous sentence:

“Open-source solutions can play an important role enhancing digital sovereignty, provided they meet high cybersecurity standards and are complemented by reliable proprietary technologies where appropriate.”

#Sovereignty #EU #OpenSource

And regarding those broken URLs: I once speculated that these bots operate on an old dataset, because I thought that my redirect rules actually were broken once and produced loops. But a) I cannot reproduce this today, and b) I cannot find anything related to that in my Git history, either. But it’s hard to tell, because I switched operating systems and webservers since then …

But the thing is that I’m seeing new URLs constructed in this pattern. So this can’t just be an old crawling dataset.

I am now wondering if those broken URLs are bot bugs as well.

They look like this (zalgo is a new project):

https://www.uninformativ.de/projects/slinp/zalgo/scksums/bevelbar/

When you request that URL, you get redirected to /git/:

$ curl -sI https://www.uninformativ.de/projects/slinp/zalgo/scksums/bevelbar/
HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2025 06:13:51 GMT
Server: OpenBSD httpd
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 510
Location: /git/

And on /git/, there are links to my repos. So if a broken client requests https://www.uninformativ.de/projects/slinp/zalgo/scksums/bevelbar/, then sees a bunch of links and simply appends them, you’ll end up with an infinite loop.

Is that what’s going on here or are my redirects actually still broken … ?

To everyone previously asking, what my (and other developers) endless complaining about Google, to both every EU body, with a form on their website and every relevant team at Google accomplished…
WE FUCKING WON!!!
“While security is crucial, we’ve also heard from developers and power users who have a higher risk tolerance and want the ability to download unverified apps.”
-source

I was also able to work with my new webhost, to bring back “🐕.fr.to” - everyones favorite vanity redirect domain, for my site, Googles changes to SSL warnings in Chrome, killed at the beginning of this year.

The lesson: I NEED TO COMPLAIN MORE

Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today
Article URL: https://adguard-dns.io/en/blog/archive-today-adguard-dns-block-demand.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45936460

Points: 500

# Comments: 165 ⌘ Read more

PSOs to be redeployed from train stations in retail crime crackdown
Security patrols at 120 “low-crime rate” train stations will be scaled back as Protective Services Officers’ target major suburban retail hubs and crime hot spots on the rail network. ⌘ Read more

Sydney’s food truck divide: The suburbs with hundreds and those with none
There are close to 2000 food trucks in Sydney. See how many your area has. ⌘ Read more

Eastern suburbs council votes to trade native trees for ocean views
A Sydney council has voted to remove trees in clifftop reserves in some of Sydney’s wealthiest suburbs to restore ocean views for waterfront residents. ⌘ Read more

‘Terrible’: P-plate driver charged after pregnant woman killed in Sydney’s north
A 33-year-old woman who was eight months’ pregnant has died, along with her unborn child, after being struck by a car in Sydney’s north-west. ⌘ Read more

The Age photos of the week, November 15, 2025
The week in photos from our award-winning staff photographers and regular contributing photographers at The Age ⌘ Read more

Amyl and the Sniffers’ free gig shut down over security fears in Melbourne
A free gig by Australian rockers Amyl and the Sniffers has been shut down after security fences at Federation Square “got crushed in”. ⌘ Read more

Cycling body welcomes Queensland e-bike crackdown
E-bike suppliers have been warned they face hefty fines if they sell non-compliant bikes, following the recent deaths of two boys. ⌘ Read more

Police hunt more protesters over planned rock-throwing attack on officers
Images have been released of seven more protesters who police have accused of assault during a Melbourne protest last month. ⌘ Read more

P-plate driver charged after pregnant woman killed in Sydney’s north
A 33-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant has died, along with her unborn child, after being struck by a car in Sydney’s north-west. ⌘ Read more

Pregnant woman dies after crash in Sydney’s north-west
A woman has died and a driver has been arrested in Sydney’s north-west after a crash in a carpark in Hornsby. ⌘ Read more

Man charged after police seize $35k worth of cocaine from apartment
Police have thwarted an illegal drug trafficking operation to supply cocaine across St Kilda after seizing $35,000 worth of drugs from an apartment. ⌘ Read more

P-plater arrested after fatal crash involving pregnant woman in Hornsby
A 33-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant has died, along with her unborn child, after being struck by a car in Sydney’s north-west. ⌘ Read more

P-plater arrested after fatal crash involving pregnant woman
Police arrested a 19-year-old man early on Saturday following the collision. ⌘ Read more

No offers, don’t ask, don’t tell: The real estate agent tricks used to duck price rules
Buyers are furious, experts aren’t surprised, and here’s how property underquoting rogues get away with it. ⌘ Read more

The day the Dismissal saved a bored Canberra teenager’s afternoon
The constitutional crisis was, at last, an upside to my adolescence. ⌘ Read more

‘Free radical’: Filmmaker farmer Rachel Ward on vaccines, RFK Jr and her new paddock-to-plate project
The actor-director, big fan of RFK Jr and his vaccine stance, has embarked on a new project after discovering the benefits of cow poo for the environment. ⌘ Read more

Help! Gathering mail for neighbours in the holidays is driving me postal
Modern Guru understands the weight of the responsibility of this role – but it also confers a certain status. ⌘ Read more

The November 15 edition
Teenagers test-drive the social media ban: ‘idk what to do’ | Anthony Hopkins on life epiphanies | Why many are fleeing NYC | Forest bathing’s deepening appeal ⌘ Read more

Will next-gen NIDA grads join former alumni Cate, Baz, Toni and Hugo?
Just 22 students – whittled down from 1000 applicants – will graduate from the world-acclaimed drama school next Friday. ⌘ Read more

‘Couldn’t believe my luck’: The moment with Germaine Greer that thrilled this Aussie artist
Australian photographer Polly Borland on working with Greer, putting her own flesh into her work – and why she’s been visiting a Buddhist temple. ⌘ Read more

This theatre was meant to cost $188 million. The real price is almost double
The redevelopment of Parramatta’s Riverside Theatres could be revolutionary for Sydney – but it has hit another cash problem. ⌘ Read more