I don’t care much for the video, but damn, that is one catchy song. 🎶 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko70cExuzZM

What’s broken™ on my system that makes a little “door” show up in YouTube’s progress thingy? Happens in Firefox and Chromium. https://movq.de/v/f03f47afcc

Finally, new books arrived. Let’s see if Dead Silence is as good as it sounds. 😃

It happened.

“Can you help me debug this program? I vibe coded it and I have no idea what’s going on. I had no choice – learning this new language and frameworks would have taken ages, and I have severe time constraints.”

Did I say “no”? Of course not, I’m a “nice guy”. So I’m at fault as well, because I endorsed this whole thing. The other guy is also guilty, because he didn’t communicate clearly to his boss what can be done and how much time it takes. And the boss and his bosses are guilty a lot, because they’re all pushing for “AI”.

The end result is garbage software.

This particular project is still relatively small, so it might be okay at the moment. But normalizing this will yield nothing but garbage. And actually, especially if this small project works out fine, this contributes to the shittiness because management will interpret this as “hey, AI works”, so they will keep asking for it in future projects.

How utterly frustrating. This is not what I want to do every day from now on.

Calling it “IBM Bob” … I guess that’s just IBM humor. 🤣 https://www.ibm.com/products/bob

This makes me happy. Radio controlled clocks perfectly in sync. ⌚🥳

https://movq.de/v/6b1847a056/VID_20251007_181904.mp4.mp4

From the chicken archive, 2017.

Not mine, these were more or less free roaming chickens. Farmers didn’t use some of their fields for a while and allowed some other farmer to let the birds live there in the meantime.

(Full resolution, CC BY-SA.)

It’s time to say goodbye to the GTK world.

GTK2 was nice to work with, relatively lightweight, and there were many cool themes back then. GTK3 was already a bit clunky, but tolerable. GTK4 now pulls in all kinds of stuff that I’m not interested in, it has become quite heavy.

Farewell. 👋

Solving this puzzle took me longer than I care to admit. It’s kind of obvious in hindsight. https://movq.de/v/83e5aa0709/MVI_8895.MOV.mp4

All good things come to an end, I guess.

I have an Epson printer (AcuLaser C1100) and an Epson scanner (Perfection V10), both of which I bought about 20 years ago. The hardware still works perfectly fine.

Until recently, Epson still provided Linux drivers for them. That is pretty cool! I noticed today that they have relaunched their driver website – and now I can’t find any Linux drivers for that hardware anymore. Just doesn’t list it (it does list some drivers for Windows 7, for example).

I mean, okay, we’re talking about 20 years here. That is a very long time, much more than I expected. But if it still works, why not keep using it?

Some years ago, I started archiving these drivers locally, because I anticipated that they might vanish at some point. So I can still use my hardware for now (even if I had to reinstall my PC for some reason). It might get hacky at some point in the future, though.

This once more underlines the importance of FOSS drivers for your hardware. I sadly didn’t pay attention to that 20 years ago.

20 years ago, normal people avoided technology and techies would jump on the newest gadgets as soon as they could

now, normal people buy smart toasters & coffee mugs while every techie I know is on the verge of retreating to the forest

https://plush.city/@JellyTBeagle/115272072725713725

Okay, I give up. The “shopping list” app™ on my phone broke for no reason whatsoever, there wasn’t even an update. I’m going back to pen and paper.

Hopefully I can muster up the energy to start this new project:

Put up lots of thermometers and hygrometers in the apartment, have them report their readings wireless to a database.

I suspect that I’ll have to “build” these myself, because ready-to-use kits most like require some sort of cloud service. Dunno, haven’t checked yet.

Great to see so many new clients popping up. 👌

The twtiverse appears to have shrunk. Among the 61 feeds that I follow, I don’t see any hash collisions anymore. 🤔

Task for this weekend:

https://movq.de/v/b05a7ce782/vid-1758959332.mp4

When you call man ascii, you get this nice table, but there’s a weird vertical line at the bottom. That line is supposed to be a vertical rule and is supposed to go from the bottom of the table all the way to the top.

Let’s see if I can debug this. (Not getting my hopes up at this point, but I’ll try.)

The driver’s license documents in Germany now have an expiration date. You have to renew them every 15 years. (Not the license itself, just the documents.)

I just got my renewed documents. Their expiration date says something like 01.09.40. Huh? That looks super weird to me, like an error. But no, it’s 2040 … Just 15 years away.

Happy equinox – where the world is illuminated like this:

https://movq.de/v/3f9fc6ebdd/equinox.png

(Instead of this or this.)

Doing a bit of 2018 Advent of Code now to relax. 🎄

The worst thing you can do is make your infrastructure (switches, wifi, ...) depend on some cloud service. Because someone else is maintaining that service; you have no control over it. You 100% depend on that other person now. Very stupid idea.

Now guess what manufacturers are pushing for ...

Now guess who couldn't complete a task at work this Saturday morning, because a certain cloud service was down ...

IT is fucked. Throw it all away and start over.

Severe but funny burn-ins on my TFT again:

https://movq.de/v/9df0437d27/MVI_8891.MOV.mp4

Now everything looks like it has that silly slogan as a background image:

https://movq.de/v/9df0437d27/smol.jpg

Sometimes, I wonder how my desktop looks to other people. Normal sighted people, I mean. For me, everything is much smaller and always slightly blurry (almost antialiased) because of my eyesight.

Maybe it does look horribly pixelated and super ugly to other people, and that’s why everyone prefers smoothed fonts and UIs and all that … ? 😂

Speaking of Sudoku, I was banging my head against this for 15 minutes:

https://sudokupad.app/adventure/94-advvvvvvvven

I’m glad I eventually got it right. 🥴

(via https://dosgame.club/@Tijn/115221132694421937)

Next level poop: Can’t log in to reddit anymore with adblock enabled. It says invalid usename or password.

Can’t resist.

https://movq.de/v/2a7918d719/a.jpg

We’ve got a new feature!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-lgJX3npiQ

I have a feeling that learning to play electric double bass through an amplifier was a big mistake.

At the core, this is an acoustic instrument. If you play it through an amp, you will instinctively only do the bare minimum to get some sound going, because the amp does the heavy lifting. But it’s just not right.

This is a very physical instrument. It needs a lot of force and strength – in comparison, an electric bass guitar is almost flimsy and delicate. I need to “feel” what’s going on and that’s just not the case when using headphones.

I feel like I wasted ~3 years. 🫤 But maybe it’ll get better from now on …

Made this a few weeks ago, just listened to it again and I quite like it:

https://www.uninformativ.de/music/2025-1-ebow/Fog.ogg

This is just one instrument: Electric bass guitar + EBow. And echo/delay on top. But it’s a single track, single take. It amazes me quite a bit how much you can do with that little thing. 🤯

https://movq.de/v/2496f8ba36/s.png

Lunar eclipse just now: https://movq.de/v/f377c108cb

How about no longer using in-browser Git repo viewers? Make the AI bots do the work and actually clone the repo.

Well, that was fascinating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxNq8zOEbM8

Dear dev.alessandrocutolo.it, do you really need to fetch my twtxt feed every 20-30 seconds? 😅 Not that it’s posing a problem, but I feel like this could be optimized. For example, how about using the if-modified-since request header: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Headers/If-Modified-Since

Good morning. Driving the dot matrix printer from my little real-mode toy OS. 🖨️

(This is just a wrapper around BIOS INT 17. I love it nonetheless. 😅)

https://movq.de/v/6b3f9a2837/MVI_8839.MOV.mp4

Speaking of clouds, yesterday evening: https://movq.de/v/bafe89fd66/p.jpg

Is that really necessary? How hard is it to make a 32-bit build? 🤔 Honest question. https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2025/09/05/firefox-32-bit-linux-support-to-end-in-2026/

Ariadne explains some of the reasons behind this “Wayback” thingy (rootful X11 on Wayland):

• https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/115147291885663574
• https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/115147331909980717

They should put this in a FAQ on their website or something. The whole endeavor makes more sense when you look at it like this.

I think I’m gonna participate in ROOPHLOCH this year: gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/gemlog/announcing-roophloch-2025.gmi

Now that’s interesting. Some of these bots start crawling at URLs like this:

https://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/NetTracer-Scenes/GPUTracer/multipass/xlonitor/http-collect/getpw

That is obviously completely wrong. But I can explain it. Some years ago, I screwed up my nginx rewrite rules, and that’s how these broken URLs came to be.

It all redirects to /git now, which is why that endpoint sees so much traffic lately.

But what does that mean? Why do they start there? I can only speculate that this company bought an old database of web links and they use that to start crawling. And it was probably a cheap one, because these redirects have been fixed for quite a long time now.

The bots have begun to access my website way more often. I’m getting about 120k hits on https://www.uninformativ.de/git/ now in a couple of hours.

They don’t cache anything, probably on purpose.

It comes in waves. I get about 100 hits (all at once) on that /git endpoint, all from different IPs. Then it takes a moment until I get another wave of about 500-1000 requests (all at once) where they do HEAD requests on some of the paths below /git. I assume they did a GET earlier and are now checking if something has changed.

This is something that @kat might enjoy:

Recreating the “EPSON Image Scan!” logo with one of my Tux plushies. 😅

The audacity … how about you keep it, eh?

From: Netflix <info@members.netflix.com>
Subject: Here’s what’s leaving Netflix soon

You can fuck right off, thank you very much.

(18/29) upgrading firefox
New optional dependencies for firefox
    onnxruntime: Local machine learning features such as smart tab groups

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 …)

RIP Android:

https://9to5google.com/2025/08/25/android-apps-developer-verification/

Since nobody is going to push back on this (I don’t even know if that would be possible), this is going to be a reality on every platform sooner or later.

I’d guess in 20, 30 years, there won’t be “PCs” anymore. No more home computing, no more “I just write my own software”. You won’t own devices anymore, it’ll all be rented and the landlord will tell you what you can do with it.

I hope that I’m wrong, but given where we are today, I don’t think that I will be.

Should I go on a tour with these hot air balloons some day? Not sure if it’s scary as hell. 😂

https://movq.de/v/3e26ec9a71/IMG_8800-edit.jpg

I’ve been doing this for so lang that I’ve unlearned how to do this.

Sooooooooo, things happened, and I now have a dot matrix printer again. 😍😂

(One of the end goals is to simulate a hardcopy terminal on my old box. I’m waiting for another cable to arrive, I don’t have USB there. And then use ed(1) like it was meant to be used! 😅)

https://movq.de/v/850e04ba36/VID_20250821_180801.mp4.mp4

https://movq.de/v/850e04ba36/closeup.jpg

The GPG signatures of my software tarballs have been wrong for years (because I’ve been using rsync wrong, funny enough, it wasn’t a GPG issue) and nobody ever noticed. (They still are wrong at the moment, because I haven’t pushed the fix, yet.)

This confirms that this is just a total waste of time. Nobody ever checks this. Maybe this matters if you’re a distro, but why even bother as a single person …

Please enjoy this horrible madness: https://userinyerface.com/game.html

UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEb_YL1K1Qg

I could listen to him all day.