movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (21h ago)

(#3lw7tcq) 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

#apzmoxq
prx @si3t.ch
 (2d ago)

J’ai fait du tri dans /log aujourd’hui. Des choses qui ne sont plus d’actualitĂ©, d’autres que je prĂ©fĂšre oublier

#jmelbwq
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (2d ago)

(#3lw7tcq) @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.

#4qlnpja
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (2d ago)

(#zwhvoea) 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.

#6ye6zfa
lyse @lyse.isobeef.org
 (3d ago)

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.

#pweyrzq
prx @si3t.ch
 (4d ago)

ça avance bien mes essais sur mon plaintext to html. J’ai fait le + dur en C avec les balises audio, video et img. :)

#ehug6wq
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (4d ago)

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 


#vjmlkeq
prx @si3t.ch
 (5d ago)

je suis en train de travailler sur du gemtext amĂ©liorĂ©. J’ai dĂ©jĂ  le code awk qui fonctionne bien, ~200 LOC. Demain je me colle Ă  l’implĂ©mentation en C, puis quand c’est prĂȘt je publie ma ‘pot’, c’est Ă  dire les ‘prx opinionated text’

#hb24vpa