And to finish the day: Om Live at Pioneer Works 🤘 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwnDKcoVHmY

Now playing: Funky bass and people moving in a funny way, doing funny faces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVyEPAMpwDc (Vulfpeck & Chris Thile – Dean Town)

I want smell-cancelling nose… phones… thingies.

RIP GitHub https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-08-updated-rate-limits-for-unauthenticated-requests/

Good thing I left long ago.

Forgot to post these here: A bunch of Mandelbrot images using the trans, ace, and aro color palettes.

More and full res PNGs:

https://movq.de/v/c732f4178a/

https://movq.de/v/fa024865a8/

I have zero mental energy for programming at the moment. 🫤

I’ll try to implement the new hashing stuff in jenny before the “deadline”. But I don’t think you’ll see any texudus development from me in the near future. ☹️

YouTube just went from this:

To this:

Why.

Red for “activated” and dark gray for “deactivated” was easy to recognize.

Now we have light gray for “activated” and dark gray for “deactivated”. It’s clearly worse.

Why, why, why.

The thing about upright bass is that you must play it on a regular basis. At least several times a week, ideally daily. It requires quite a bit of strength and it’s very easy to lose those muscles again – at least I don’t use them that much otherwise. 🤣 I’ve been through several cycles of “gain strength → lose strength → goto 0” now …

Sometimes things go wrong when buying CDs second-hand. I bought an album quite cheap – but as it turned out, they only checked the cover, not the content, so I got something else instead which is actually much more expensive. 🤣

https://alex.party/posts/2025-05-05-the-future-of-web-development-is-ai-get-on-or-get-left-behind/

Good old times. #Windows98

So, the “AI” bots have reached my website. Looks like they’re just slowly crawling everything at the moment – no DDoS-like attack yet. I wonder if that has something to do with my website being 100% static HTML. There are no GET parameters they can tweak and, at the end of the day, there’s not that much data on my server anyway … And maybe they have no idea what stagit is, so it doesn’t trigger “standard behavior”, like “this is a Gitea instance, let’s crawl this like crazy!”?

Confession:

I’ve never found microblogging like twtxt or the Fediverse or any other “modern” social media to be truly fulfilling/satisfying.

The reason is that it is focused so much on people. You follow this or that person, everybody spends time making a nice profile page, the posts are all very “ego-centric”. Seriously, it feels like everybody is on an ego-trip all the time (this is much worse on the Fediverse, not so much here on twtxt).

I miss the days of topic-based forums/groups. A Linux forum here, a forum about programming there, another one about a certain game. Stuff like that. That was really great – and it didn’t even suffer from the need to federate.

Sadly, most of these forums are dead now. Especially the nerds spend a lot of time on the Fediverse now and have abandoned forums almost completely.

On Mastodon, you can follow hashtags, which somewhat emulates a topic-based experience. But it’s not that great and the protocol isn’t meant to be used that way (just read the snac2 docs on this issue). And the concept of “likes” has eliminated lots of the actual user interaction. ☹️

So, we’re at roughly 30°C now and my brain is in lala land. 🥵☹️

If we must stick to hashes for threading, can we maybe make it mandatory to always include a reference to the original twt URL when writing replies?

Instead of

 hello foo bar

you would have

(<a href="?search=123467" class="tag">#123467</a> http://foo.com/tw.txt) hello foo bar

or maybe even:

(<a href="?search=123467" class="tag">#123467</a> 2025-04-30T12:30:31Z http://foo.com/tw.txt) hello foo bar

This would greatly help in reconstructing broken threads, since hashes are obviously unfortunately one-way tickets. The URL/timestamp would not be used for threading, just for discovery of feeds that you don’t already follow.

I don’t insist on including the timestamp, but having some idea which feed we’re talking about would help a lot.

Once or twice a year, I make an effort to switch from dark mode / black terminals to light mode again.

It usually doesn’t end well, because the contrast is just not as good. There’s a reason that things like professional DAWs or CAD software use a dark theme.

With a heavy bold font, it’s much better:

https://movq.de/v/331aa40bde/s.png

My font doesn’t get any bolder than this, though. I’d have to make a new variant of it. Mhh. 🤔

Remembered a fun little “hello world” program I made in 2018:

https://movq.de/v/a1c4a819e6/vid.mp4

(It runs smoothly. My computer just isn’t fast enough for a smooth X11 screengrab at that resolution.)

Someone has started to run git pull on one of my repos – once every two minutes. This is a very pointless endeavour. I push new code a couple of times per month.

So far, this isn’t causing any issues. I think this is just a regular human being who misconfigured some automation. And I hope this doesn’t mean that the “AI” bots have finally discovered my page …

To the parents or teachers: How do you teach kids to program these days? 🤔

Bloody pandemic has screwed with my perception of time. I thought a certain even happened recently, like 2022 or 2023. But no, it was 2018.

It feels like 2020 to and including 2023 never happened. 🫤

Can you beat me at the circle game? 😂 https://neal.fun/perfect-circle/

Saw someone else posting this and, yep, it’s true:

“The Tree”™ in last winter:

https://movq.de/v/f0c0e1e38c/

Now it’s getting greener:

https://movq.de/v/24e62315ef/

That was a wild ride:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSMDb1CWD6Y

Notice how old all these people sound. They started playing this game like 10, 15, 20 years ago, most of them left, but some are still there. I love that level of commitment. 😃

Also interesting from a technical point of view. Creating that virtual world and keeping it running consistently for so long … 🤯

jenny really isn’t well equipped to handle edits of my own twts.

For example, in 2021, this change got introduced:

https://www.uninformativ.de/git/jenny/commit/6b5b25a542c2dd46c002ec5a422137275febc5a1.html

This means that jenny will always ignore my own edits unless I also manually edit its internal “json database”. Annoying.

That change was requested by a user who had the habit of deleting twts or moving them to another mailbox or something. I think that person is long gone and I might revert that change. 🤔

Bloody WhatsApp, bloody chat apps on smartphones, I’m going nuts. If you want to TYPE, use a device WITH A KEYBOARD. Don’t send me useless undecipherable gibberish. FFS!

I should quit IT and start a career as a fortune teller.

Last night I dreamed that the neighbouring buildings were on fire. Now guess where the firefighters have just showed up.

Using AI in education is like using a forklift in the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.

https://fedi.neuwirth.priv.at/@konrad/114352350424913566

It’s AI shit, but … it is funny … and an appropriately bizzare response to a bizzare situation. 😂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ8qGOe2K0o

Pigeon of the day.

We’ve been on a trip to another city this weekend and one thing struck me as really odd:

The lack of “public water” in our cities.

Almost no way of washing your hands or going to the toilet or whatever. You can’t even pee in a bush, because a) that’s illegal and b) there are no bushes!

(It’s always been that way, I just never noticed before. 🥴)

I don’t need an X11 compositor for fancy graphics effects or whatever. I have true hardware support for that.

My TFT just slightly burns in and then it looks like dmenu has a semi-transparent background.

Yeah.

Test:

this is a code block
[2025-04-08 17:50:00] with a timestamp in brackets

The end.

Test: An emoji 🐧

Test: Just ASCII

I wonder if my current Linux installation will actually make it to 20 years:

$ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
[2011-07-07 11:19] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)

It’s not toooo far into the future.

It would be crazy … 20 years without reinstalling once … phew. 🥴

Fuuuuuuucking hell. 😮‍💨 It’s one of “those” days.

I’ve been using GIMP 3.0 for a few weeks now and it’s great. New features and I got rid of two custom plugins because they’re in core now. Literally nothing broke for me. And I really appreciate that they kept the familiar UI (instead of changing things just for the sake of change).

Thank you! 🥳

I’m playing with ratterplatter again: It’s a toy that watches disk I/O and emulates the noise of a real hard disk. (Linux only.) It uses sound samples from one of my older disks.

I tried a different approach at estimating the disk activity and I think I finally got it right (after almost 10 years … 🤦).

Demo, booting a Windows 2000 VM: https://movq.de/v/1400544cc6/2kboot-ratterplatter-2.mp4

(For this purpose alone, I put a couple of mini speakers into my PC case, so that the noise comes from the right place: https://movq.de/v/a3b2dc0932/speakers.jpg)

The results aren’t too bad, but this thing can’t be super accurate due to the huge I/O caches that we have these days. For the video, I dropped the caches before booting Windows, otherwise you would have heard almost nothing.

FWIW, if you don’t know it yet, this is the equivalent for proper keyboard sound: https://github.com/zevv/bucklespring

Just saw this user agent popping up:

yarnd/ERSION@OMMIT  go1.23.4 (+https://.../twtxt.txt; @username)

ERSION? OMMIT? 😅

Tom Waits in 2025 looks and sounds exactly like you’d expect. 🥴

I’m a long-term mpd user (some 16+ years), but for $reasons I have to compile it myself now – and, boy, that is one heavy program. Takes several minutes to build. 😳

Hab’ ich einen Durst! Ist noch Lack da?

Super stressful day at work and, once I got home: Internet outage.

I guess that’s a sign.

Guilty pleasure, blasphemy, shitty audio, … something like that. Seven Nation Army on double bass. 🤪 https://movq.de/v/e3a4dcff2e/sad-nation-army.ogg

If you’ve played Grim Fandango back in the day, you’ll enjoy this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNc58NznIUM

The brokenness of the web can be examined by opening about:compat in Firefox.

Lots and lots of workarounds for specific websites.

Thinking about adding a little “focus” feature to my window manager: It hides all but one window, no wallpaper, no bars.

It would turn this

https://movq.de/v/a75eb68770/a0.jpg

into this

https://movq.de/v/a75eb68770/a1.jpg

or this

https://movq.de/v/a75eb68770/b0.jpg

into this:

https://movq.de/v/a75eb68770/b1.jpg

🤔

I’ve identified several issues with my current (admittedly cheap) upright bass by now. It might be time to upgrade to a better model. 🤔

If only those things weren’t so damn expensive. I just checked the prices and simply burst out laughing. 😂

When will the flat UI craze end? Can I get my buttons, scrollbars, and toolbars back, please?