movq @www.uninformativ.de

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Recent twts from movq

Now that’s interesting. Some of these bots start crawling at URLs like this:

https://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/NetTracer-Scenes/GPUTracer/multipass/xlonitor/http-collect/getpw

That is obviously completely wrong. But I can explain it. Some years ago, I screwed up my nginx rewrite rules, and that’s how these broken URLs came to be.

It all redirects to /git now, which is why that endpoint sees so much traffic lately.

But what does that mean? Why do they start there? I can only speculate that this company bought an old database of web links and they use that to start crawling. And it was probably a cheap one, because these redirects have been fixed for quite a long time now.


#xukjpvq

(#nbo4v7q) @prologic@twtxt.net I’m doing that now as well, but I don’t think this is a good solution. This is going to hurt ā€œself-hostingā€ in the long run: I cannot afford true self-hosting where I actually do host everything here at home – instead, I must use a cloud provider / VPS for that. It is only a matter of time until my provider starts doing AI shit as well (or rather, the customers do it) and then what? I get blocked, e.g. I can’t send email to (some) people anymore. This is already bad and it’s going to get worse.


#qomj33a

(#sux32qq) As expected: Didn’t last long. They’re coming from different IPs now.

I’ve read enough blog posts by other people to know that this is probably pointless. The bots have so many IPs/networks at their disposal …


#5qaxnia

(#sux32qq) ā€œBut all your stuff is MIT licensed! They are allowed to do that!ā€

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. ā€œAIā€ breaks that. They incorporate my code and my articles in their product and make it appear as if it was their work.


#imftnja

(#sux32qq) Why do I care about this?

  1. The load will become a problem at some point.
  2. These crawlers and the current ā€œAIā€ in general are breaking the rules. I am supposed to be paying for every little thing, I get sued for ā€œpiracyā€. 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.

#2s2wjga

(#sux32qq) 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.


#qiq5bnq

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.


#sux32qq

(#m47speq) @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 ā€œAIā€ over everything.

It will die down eventually. I hope.


#nuwbn2a

(#olsdv7a) @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 ā€œmainā€ 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. šŸ¤”


#f32o7jq

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

#o3ru4sa

(#ssoep5q) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, removing the cover will probably help. I’ll have to try. šŸ˜… 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. šŸ˜… 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.


#3mfliaq

I’ve got a prototype of my hardcopy simulator going. I’m typing on the keyboard and the ā€œdisplayā€ 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. šŸ˜

(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 …)


#ssoep5q

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 ā€œPCsā€ anymore. No more home computing, no more ā€œI just write my own softwareā€. 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.


#hzbwhuq

(#3lw7tcq) @prologic@twtxt.net Anything above a couple hundred Euros. šŸ˜… The current Epson LX-350 appears to be not that pricey, though. šŸ¤”

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.


#pdtpa5q

(#5swkiqa) @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 ā€œthe following $n bytes are part of a bitmap imageā€, 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. šŸ˜…


#tgpmfxa

(#3lw7tcq) @prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, those POS thingies are similar. There’s ā€œESC/POSā€ as a variant of ā€œESC/Pā€, if I’m not mistaken.

All I can say is, when I go to big stores like Amazon, then I have trouble finding ā€œtraditionalā€ dot matrix printers for use at home. šŸ˜… 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.


#izeco4a

(#3lw7tcq) @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 ā€œESC/Pā€ standard. That’s very widely supported.


#5swkiqa

(#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