In-reply-to » Sooooooooo, things happened, and I now have a dot matrix printer again. 😍😂

This is why I love tech from that era.

Write bytes to a parallel port and stuff happens. If it’s just ASCII bytes, then it will print ASCII text. Even the simplest programs can use a printer this way.

With a little bit of ESC/P, you can print images and other fancy stuff. That’s what I did this morning – never worked with ESC/P before, now I can print images. It’s not that hard.

Hayes-compatible modems are similar: Write some AT commands to the serial port and the modem does things. This isn’t even arcane knowledge, it’s explained in the printed manual.

Maybe I’m wearing rose-tinted glasses here, but I think with all this old stuff, you get useful results very quickly and the manuals are usually actually helpful. It’s so much easier to get started and to use this hardware to the full extent. Much less complexity than what we have today, not a ton of libraries and dependencies and SDKs and cloud services and what not.

https://movq.de/v/4bd16cb3c7/tux1.jpg

https://movq.de/v/4bd16cb3c7/tux2.jpg

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In-reply-to » We went out an hour earlier to escape the rain. But we got drizzled on, nevertheless. As expected, the rain jacket was finally wet on both the out- and inside. Sweating under that plasic layer is unavoidable with these temperatures. It was still a very nice walk and great vibe with the gray soup. Just right. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de There haven’t been decent ones for a while.

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In-reply-to » We went out an hour earlier to escape the rain. But we got drizzled on, nevertheless. As expected, the rain jacket was finally wet on both the out- and inside. Sweating under that plasic layer is unavoidable with these temperatures. It was still a very nice walk and great vibe with the gray soup. Just right. :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Aww, yeah. 😍 (Reminds me, I haven’t paid attention to the sunset in quite a while …)

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In-reply-to » Sooooooooo, things happened, and I now have a dot matrix printer again. 😍😂

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org When/if I can pull it off, there will be videos! 😅

I never used hardcopy terminals, either. We did have a dotmatrix printer, but that was just used as a regular printer.

Inkjets, I don’t know. They were pretty fascinating and cool when they came out. A lot faster than dotmatrix and obviously quiter. They never gave me much trouble, actually. But I switched to a laser printer long before crap like DRM’ed ink cartridges became a thing.

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In-reply-to » Bloody AI clowns:

Here’s an interesting thought/angle on this topic:

gemini://gemini.conman.org/boston/2025/08/21.1

A further check showed that all the network blocks are owned by one organization—Tencent [4]. I’m seriously thinking that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) encourage this with maybe the hope of externalizing the cost of the Great Firewall [5] to the rest of the world.

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In-reply-to » We went out an hour earlier to escape the rain. But we got drizzled on, nevertheless. As expected, the rain jacket was finally wet on both the out- and inside. Sweating under that plasic layer is unavoidable with these temperatures. It was still a very nice walk and great vibe with the gray soup. Just right. :-)

Surprisingly, the sky got quite some lovely colors this evening. I approve! https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-08-21/

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In-reply-to » Sooooooooo, things happened, and I now have a dot matrix printer again. 😍😂

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Heck yeah, have fun! :-) We never had a matrix printer, started off with a cathode ray tube and an inkjet pisser.

I’m happy to see you compose your first twtxt message using ed on your new output device. We definitely need video proof of that! ;-)

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We went out an hour earlier to escape the rain. But we got drizzled on, nevertheless. As expected, the rain jacket was finally wet on both the out- and inside. Sweating under that plasic layer is unavoidable with these temperatures. It was still a very nice walk and great vibe with the gray soup. Just right. :-)

Didn’t bring my camera, I guarantee that it would have gotten soaking wet.

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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 …

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In-reply-to » After around 3 years, I managed to make my "smallest recognizable canine", even smaller. So here's the all new, smallest recognizable canine 2.0: Media

@thecanine@twtxt.net Wow. I’m not an artist in any way, but I have tried to make icons for programs or fonts every now and then. Making something that is still recognizable at so few pixels is hard. Hats off!

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In-reply-to » After around 3 years, I managed to make my "smallest recognizable canine", even smaller. So here's the all new, smallest recognizable canine 2.0: Media

@thecanine@twtxt.net My daughter (who is pretty good already at art and only 10 :D) says this looks like a “blob” 🤣 I tried to explain to her that this is pixel art, but I’m not quite sure she has the same appreciation (yet) 😅

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je suis en train de travailler sur du gemtext amélioré. J’ai déjà le code awk qui fonctionne bien, ~200 LOC. Demain je me colle à l’implémentation en C, puis quand c’est prêt je publie ma ‘pot’, c’est à dire les ‘prx opinionated text’

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In-reply-to » That's soooo amazing! A Pirate Treasure Chest Made Out Of A Pallet by Epic Upcycling: https://youtu.be/euqru1gVJoQ

@bender@twtxt.net There are all sorts of pallets. I made my wooden mallet from a heavy duty beech pallet a few years ago:

Image

Oh yes, this guy is so cool. I think the next machines I need are a thickness planer and a big dust collector with at least hose 100mm diameter! :-)

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In-reply-to » That's soooo amazing! A Pirate Treasure Chest Made Out Of A Pallet by Epic Upcycling: https://youtu.be/euqru1gVJoQ

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org that’s so cool! I had to do some research, as I thought all pallets were made using cheap pine wood (which is quite soft), but, boy, as I erring big time! Oak it is also used, which is hardwood, and quite durable.

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