https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBEKlIV_70E

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, I’ve blocked some large subnets now (most likely overblocking a lot of stuff) and it has died down.

I’m not looking forward to doing this on a regular basis. This is supposed to be a fun hobby – and it was, for many years. Maybe that time is just over.

“But all your stuff is MIT licensed! They are allowed to do that!”

Haha. As if they would care. They crawl everything they get their hands on.

Besides, that’s not true, the license states that the copyright notice must be retained. “AI” breaks that. They incorporate my code and my articles in their product and make it appear as if it was their work.

Why do I care about this?

1. The load will become a problem at some point.
   
2. These crawlers and the current “AI” in general are breaking the rules. I am supposed to be paying for every little thing, I get sued for “piracy”. But apparently, these rules only apply to me. If I had more money, I could break them. Fuck that.
   
3. I simply don’t want it. Period.

This probably means that I can no longer host my own website. I don’t want to deploy something like Anubis, because that ruins the whole thing: I want it to be accessible from ancient browsers, like OS/2 or Windows 3.11.

I’ll keep an eye on it for a while. Maybe try to block some IPs.

Sooner or later, I’ll take the website down and shift everything to Gopher.

It doesn’t pose a problem for my server’s performance – yet. But if more bots/companies start doing this, my website will go down from the load.

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.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Best logo ever made. 😅 (It’s partially proprietary software. Just for Epson scanners, I think? Not sure.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, that was a lot of fun. 😃 Now let’s wait and see if I ever get to actually use this. 😂

@thecanine@twtxt.net We don’t use Microsoft at work – but similar products of other big companies. They’re all doing the same. The core product gets worse and worse, because they focus so much on vomiting “AI” over everything.

It will die down eventually. I hope.

This is something that @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz might enjoy:

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

Image

Image

@prologic@twtxt.net Enjoy the weekend. 🥳 (I rarely drink these days. I hope my tiny little Whisky collection doesn’t go bad. 😂)

The audacity … how about you keep it, eh?

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

@dce@hashnix.club Ah, oh, well then. 🥴

My client supports that, if you set multiple url = fields in your feed’s metadata (the top-most one must be the “main” URL, that one is used for hashing).

But yeah, multi-protocol feeds can be problematic and some have considered it a mistake to support them. 🤔

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

@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.

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 …)

@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).

@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.

@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

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.

@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.

@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. 😅

@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.

@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.

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

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

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

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

@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.

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.

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

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @prologic@twtxt.net It’s too real, isn’t it? 🤣

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 …

@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!

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

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Well, now that is pretty impressive. Upcycling ftw.

UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan

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

I could listen to him all day.

Only figured this out yesterday:

pinentry, which is used to safely enter a password on Linux, has several frontends. There’s a GTK one, a Qt one, even an ncurses one, and so on.

GnuPG also uses pinentry. And you can configure your frontend of choice here in gpg-agent.conf.

But what happens when you don’t configure it? What’s the default?

Turns out, pinentry is a shellscript wrapper and it’s not even that long. Here it is in full:

#!/bin/bash

# Run user-defined and site-defined pre-exec hooks.
[[ -r "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec ]] && \
        . "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec
[[ -r /etc/pinentry/preexec ]] && . /etc/pinentry/preexec

# Guess preferred backend based on environment.
backends=(curses tty)
if [[ -n "$DISPLAY" || -n "$WAYLAND_DISPLAY" ]]; then
        case "$XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP" in
        KDE|LXQT|LXQt)
                backends=(qt qt5 gnome3 gtk curses tty)
                ;;
        *)
                backends=(gnome3 gtk qt qt5 curses tty)
                ;;
        esac
fi

for backend in "${backends[@]}"
do
        lddout=$(ldd "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" 2>/dev/null) || continue