@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, removing the cover will probably help. I’ll have to try. 😅 And, yes, the scrolling is pretty annoying (and kind of ruins the experience a little bit).

The printer isn’t that loud – at least not for a dot matrix printer. 😅 It’s been ~30 years since I’ve last seen them in person, but I remembered these things to be louder. I’m typing on my Model M, maybe that contributes to the perceived noise on this video. Here’s an isolated recording of that keyboard: https://movq.de/v/ddc98b03d8/2022-02-21–model-m-goes-brrr.ogg 🤣 It really sounds like that when you’re typing fast. Brrrrt.

@dce@hashnix.club I switched over to following you on Gopher, because why not. 😅

@thecanine@twtxt.net Oh! 🤯 Hadn’t heard of this before. And 100% agree with that video.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Haha, that’s so cool! :-) Could you remove the cover to at least reduce the amount of scrolling around? But I bet any amount of scrolling is annoying.

This printer has quite some noise level to it. Or how bad is it really in person?

Cette font est vraiment bien. C’est celle que j’utilise pas défaut dans mes cours désormais. Lisible, et accessible pour troubles dys. https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/

Décidément, ce gestionnaire de fichiers en cli est vraiment le meilleur pour moi: https://github.com/lecram/rover

@dce@hashnix.club these are some of the same reasons that I enjoy Yarn.social/Twtxt 🙌

So, in addition to HTTPS and Gemini, my twtxt should now also be available over Gopher (gopher://hashnix.club:70/0/~dce/twtxt.txt). Not sure who, if anyone, would need this; but since my tilde provides Gopher hosting, I’d may as well mirror my twtxt there as well.

You know, I think I do actually like it here better than my other social media. It’s slower and quieter, but it feels more organic and nobody’s trying to sell me anything, promote their podcast, or change the way I think. It’s just… nice!

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 …)

@dce@hashnix.club Twet is a far better command line client. Yea 👌

@dce@hashnix.club I feel you 🤗

@dce@hashnix.club Hello! 👋 Welcome! 🤗

@dce@hashnix.club is it not duplicated. Well, at least not now.

This would have been neater, but evidently my client foesn’t support multiline posts.

Since 2020, I’ve been putting together one playlist every year, in which each track represents one month of that year. However, I also have assigned each season two specific songs, which does not change year-to-year: Spring: “A Little Bit Of Love” by Weezer and “Gretel” by Alex G; Summer: “Dumb” by Roe Kapara and “Endless Bummer” by Weezer; Autumn: “1979” by The Smashing Pumpkins and “The Dead Come Talking” by Roe Kapara; Winter: “Red Water (Christmas Mourning)” by Type O Negative and “Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End)” by The Darkness

@bender@twtxt.net That is a noble goal. We can talk about that – as long as it doesn’t mean giving up essential freedoms like choosing which software you can run on your device (without having to ask someone for permission).

@thecanine@twtxt.net I think Google’s Android is as vanilla as it can be, coming from the “source”. The bloatware is more often than not vendor’s provided, no? I don’t consider Google apps and services bloatware, but an intrinsic part of the Android “vanilla” experience.

@prologic@twtxt.net @moveq@twtxt.net I think it’s mostly the serious lack of competition. All the Android phone manufacturers just use the Google version of Android, bundle in piles of Google bloatware and do whatever Google tells them to. If some of them installed Lineage, or any other versions, with their own stores and rules, or even just offer a less Googly version of their phones, as an option, for more experienced users, Google wouldn’t be able, to push everyone around.

@dce@hashnix.club twtxt is quite light, and trouble-free. Welcome! I also run an ActivityPub server, but yeah, more often around here than there.

@dce@hashnix.club I don’t use Gemini, but I follow you on the good, old, HTTP(S)! :-)

@prologic@twtxt.net, the very first sentence addresses something that needed to be addressed. Maybe tech savvy people will not have these issues, but many non-tech savvy people (and old people) I know has had, and has, cyclically, a myriad of malware, pestware, etc., issues on their Android based phones. It is a wild-west.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m not smart enough to answer that question. 😅 Certainly feels like unregulated capitalism. Governments being too slow and/or unwilling to intervene … It’s a mess.

@thecanine@twtxt.net I sure hope there’s going to be push back. Is it going to happen, realistically? I don’t know.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah I’m worried about this too. What’s the systemic problem at paay here? Capitalism at it’s extreme? 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Yes, this is another instance of restricting “personal” computing. You won’t be able to install arbitrary software anymore (“sideloading”, as they call it).

It’s not unique, it’s not new. Boiling the frog alive.

We’re heading towards this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

To combat malware and financial scams, Google announced today that only apps from developers that have undergone verification can be installed on certified Android devices starting in 2026.

This requirement applies to “certified Android devices” that have Play Protect and are preloaded with Google apps. The Play Store implemented similar requirements in 2023, but Google is now mandating this for all install methods, including third-party app stores and sideloading where you download an APK file from a third-party source.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de TL;DR? 🤔

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.

Apparently twtxt wasn’t the right client to use. twet seems to be alright, though.

Assuming I configured this right, my twtxt should now also be available over Gemini!

Ben c’est pas dommage! Je regrette que de telles infos aient été conservée, naïf que je suis (note pour ce que ça vaut vu ce que j’ai pu entendre: je ne suis pas militant pro-homo, je suis hétéro, et en fait osef, chacun fait ce qu’il lui plaît tant que ça ne force personne). Don du sang : l’EFS supprime ses archives mentionnant les relations homosexuelles après une pétition

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Nice picture, this hot air balloon has quite a large basket.

Yes, go for it! :-)

My grandpa went ballooning ages ago and liked it. The balloonist misjudged the height a bit and landed in an open-air pool. Well, not in the water, but on the sunbathing lawn just inside the fence. :-D After the ride, everybody was given a very long personal name that they had to memorize. Decades later, my grandpa still knew his assigned name.

The most important thing to know is that – in German – you don’t fly (fliegen) a ballon, but ride (fahren) it: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballonfahren#Fahren_oder_fliegen Judging by the English wikipedia article, this is not an English thing, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_ballooning

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Wow, cool! :-)

Instagram is shit, Bluesky is corporate, and Mastodon is…okay, but not fantastic. Maybe twtxt is what I’m after…

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah I just got a bit curious after watching your video and reading your OP 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net Anything above a couple hundred Euros. 😅 The current Epson LX-350 appears to be not that pricey, though. 🤔

I mean, what do you want to do with it? If you want to use this as an actual printer for daily use, I’d get a laser printer instead, because they’re very reliable and the print quality is top notch.

I got my dot matrix printer mostly for experiments and nostalgia, so I wouldn’t want to pay something like 300-400€ for it.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Haha yeah rightio, and yeah inches suck 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net It’s quite similar to how escape sequences work in a terminal. ASCII text is printed as ASCII text and then an escape sequence can make it bold or underline and so on. Other escape sequences allow you to say “the following $n bytes are part of a bitmap image”, and then this gets printed at whatever the current position is (somewhat similar to SIXEL in a terminal).

It’s just that the units are a bit weird, because this is all done in bloody inch. 😅

Tiens, cool ça, pour se prêter des trucs entre voisins: https://lesecolohumanistes.fr/lecologie-au-quotidien/pret-entre-voisins/

@movq@www.uninformativ.de What do you define as “expensive”? 🤔 (I’ve always thought of modern-day painters as a “rip”, and the ink my god 🤯)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Is there like a TL;DR of this standard? I can’t say I remember this tbh 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Here’s one: https://github.com/vmykh/printer_labs/blob/master/escp2ref.pdf

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, those POS thingies are similar. There’s “ESC/POS” as a variant of “ESC/P”, if I’m not mistaken.

All I can say is, when I go to big stores like Amazon, then I have trouble finding “traditional” dot matrix printers for use at home. 😅 Epson still sells them, but they’re more expensive than my laser printer was. So yeah, they still exist, just expensive, by the looks of it.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Got a link to this

ESC/P standard.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Are you sure?

because there is virtually no market for these devices anymore, meaning new ones are very, very expensive.

I think dot matrix printers are still pretty common in many Point of Sales (POS) registers right? At least here in AU they’re very common. I had a quick look myself today, there seems to be quite a solid market for these types of printers. In fact even EPSON still sell Dot Matrix printers themselves 🤣

@thecanine@twtxt.net That’s cute. 😃 (Why Clippy, though? 😅)

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm, good question. I haven’t checked the market, I got mine from someone I know. But to be honest, I’d suspect that buying a used one is actually your best shot, because there is virtually no market for these devices anymore, meaning new ones are very, very expensive. 🫤

FWIW, I have an OKI Microline 3390eco. Good thing is, you can still buy new cartridges for it.

If you want to buy a new device, check if it supports the “ESC/P” standard. That’s very widely supported.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Kind of curious now… Is there a (to buy new) dot matrix printer you’d recommend if someone wanted to get into this sort of thing (sending plain ‘ol bytes to a printer port)? 🤔 (I remember this back in the ye ‘old days!)

Oh, j’ignorais ça à propos des messages sur l’acceptation des cookies trop chiants. ublock peut les désactiver. Merci fredg! https://galusik.fr/log/2025-08-24-ublock-petit-setup-ameliore.html