(#2wiqe5a) @klaxzy@klaxzy.net Iāve had many SD cards die in Raspberry Pis. Really annoying. Iāve eventually switched to using a read-only rootfs. š«¤
#katfdkq
If this user/feed is violating this Pod's (yarn.meff.me) community guidelines as set out in the Abuse Policy, please report them immediately!
You are also free to Unfollow or Mute this user or feed. Muting will also remove that user/feed's content from your view and you will no longer see content from that user/feed anywhere.
@movq does not follow you (they may not see your replies!)
(#2wiqe5a) @klaxzy@klaxzy.net Iāve had many SD cards die in Raspberry Pis. Really annoying. Iāve eventually switched to using a read-only rootfs. š«¤
I think Iām gonna participate in ROOPHLOCH this year: gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/gemlog/announcing-roophloch-2025.gmi
Now thatās interesting. Some of these bots start crawling at URLs like this:
That is obviously completely wrong. But I can explain it. Some years ago, I screwed up my nginx rewrite rules, and thatās 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.
(#nbo4v7q) @prologic@twtxt.net Iām doing that now as well, but I donāt think this is a good solution. This is going to hurt āself-hostingā in the long run: I cannot afford true self-hosting where I actually do host everything here at home ā 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 canāt send email to (some) people anymore. This is already bad and itās going to get worse.
(#qckggyq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Didnāt know that, either. š The one guy even tried to test this theory with a Polaroid? And āconfirmedā it? What the heck. š„“
(#sux32qq) @dce@hashnix.club Yeah, Iāve read about that approach. Sounds clever. Truth is, Iām too tired. š¢ I donāt want to spend too much of my time fighting assholes.
Iāve now started blocking entire cloud hosters. Sorry, not sorry.
(#sux32qq) As expected: Didnāt last long. Theyāre coming from different IPs now.
Iāve read enough blog posts by other people to know that this is probably pointless. The bots have so many IPs/networks at their disposal ā¦
(#sux32qq) @prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, Iāve blocked some large subnets now (most likely overblocking a lot of stuff) and it has died down.
Iām not looking forward to doing this on a regular basis. This is supposed to be a fun hobby ā and it was, for many years. Maybe that time is just over.
(#sux32qq) āBut 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, thatās not true, the license states that the copyright notice must be retained. āAIā breaks that. They incorporate my code and my articles in their product and make it appear as if it was their work.
(#sux32qq) Why do I care about this?
(#sux32qq) This probably means that I can no longer host my own website. I donāt 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.
Iāll keep an eye on it for a while. Maybe try to block some IPs.
Sooner or later, Iāll take the website down and shift everything to Gopher.
(#sux32qq) It doesnāt pose a problem for my serverās performance ā 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. Iām getting about 120k hits on https://www.uninformativ.de/git/ now in a couple of hours.
They donāt 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.
(#k2henjq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Best logo ever made. š (Itās partially proprietary software. Just for Epson scanners, I think? Not sure.)
(#p6i65da) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, that was a lot of fun. š Now letās wait and see if I ever get to actually use this. š
(#m47speq) @thecanine@twtxt.net We donāt use Microsoft at work ā but similar products of other big companies. Theyāre all doing the same. The core product gets worse and worse, because they focus so much on vomiting āAIā over everything.
It will die down eventually. I hope.
This is something that @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz might enjoy:
Recreating the āEPSON Image Scan!ā logo with one of my Tux plushies. š
(#6uc4zla) @prologic@twtxt.net Enjoy the weekend. š„³ (I rarely drink these days. I hope my tiny little Whisky collection doesnāt go bad. š)
The audacity ⦠how about you keep it, eh?
From: Netflix <info@members.netflix.com>
Subject: Hereās whatās leaving Netflix soon
(#olsdv7a) @dce@hashnix.club Ah, oh, well then. š„“
My client supports that, if you set multiple url =
fields in your feedās metadata (the top-most one must be the āmainā 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. š¤
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
(#ssoep5q) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, removing the cover will probably help. Iāll have to try. š And, yes, the scrolling is pretty annoying (and kind of ruins the experience a little bit).
The printer isnāt that loud ā at least not for a dot matrix printer. š Itās been ~30 years since Iāve last seen them in person, but I remembered these things to be louder. Iām typing on my Model M, maybe that contributes to the perceived noise on this video. Hereās an isolated recording of that keyboard: https://movq.de/v/ddc98b03d8/2022-02-21āmodel-m-goes-brrr.ogg 𤣠It really sounds like that when youāre typing fast. Brrrrt.
(#jzw6nja) @dce@hashnix.club I switched over to following you on Gopher, because why not. š
(#dzpiybq) @thecanine@twtxt.net Oh! 𤯠Hadnāt heard of this before. And 100% agree with that video.
Iāve got a prototype of my hardcopy simulator going. Iām typing on the keyboard and the ādisplayā 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 whatās 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 ⦠itās not ideal.
I got that idea of moving back/forth from Drew DeVault, who ā as it turned out ā 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. š
(Also, yes, you can see the printouts of earlier tests and, yes, I used ed(1)
wrong at one point. 𤪠And ls
insisted on using colors ā¦)
(#jpm4ikq) @bender@twtxt.net That is a noble goal. We can talk about that ā as long as it doesnāt mean giving up essential freedoms like choosing which software you can run on your device (without having to ask someone for permission).
(#hzbwhuq) @prologic@twtxt.net Iām not smart enough to answer that question. š Certainly feels like unregulated capitalism. Governments being too slow and/or unwilling to intervene ⦠Itās a mess.
(#hzbwhuq) @thecanine@twtxt.net I sure hope thereās going to be push back. Is it going to happen, realistically? I donāt know.
(#hzbwhuq) @prologic@twtxt.net Yes, this is another instance of restricting āpersonalā computing. You wonāt be able to install arbitrary software anymore (āsideloadingā, as they call it).
Itās not unique, itās not new. Boiling the frog alive.
Weāre 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 donāt even know if that would be possible), this is going to be a reality on every platform sooner or later.
Iād guess in 20, 30 years, there wonāt be āPCsā anymore. No more home computing, no more āI just write my own softwareā. You wonāt own devices anymore, itāll all be rented and the landlord will tell you what you can do with it.
I hope that Iām wrong, but given where we are today, I donāt think that I will be.
(#3lw7tcq) @prologic@twtxt.net Anything above a couple hundred Euros. š The current Epson LX-350 appears to be not that pricey, though. š¤
I mean, what do you want to do with it? If you want to use this as an actual printer for daily use, Iād get a laser printer instead, because theyāre very reliable and the print quality is top notch.
I got my dot matrix printer mostly for experiments and nostalgia, so I wouldnāt want to pay something like 300-400⬠for it.
(#5swkiqa) @prologic@twtxt.net Itās 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 āthe 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).
Itās just that the units are a bit weird, because this is all done in bloody inch. š
(#5swkiqa) @prologic@twtxt.net Hereās one: https://github.com/vmykh/printer_labs/blob/master/escp2ref.pdf
(#3lw7tcq) @prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, those POS thingies are similar. Thereās āESC/POSā as a variant of āESC/Pā, if Iām not mistaken.
All I can say is, when I go to big stores like Amazon, then I have trouble finding ātraditionalā dot matrix printers for use at home. š Epson still sells them, but theyāre more expensive than my laser printer was. So yeah, they still exist, just expensive, by the looks of it.
(#dzpiybq) @thecanine@twtxt.net Thatās cute. š (Why Clippy, though? š )
(#3lw7tcq) @prologic@twtxt.net Hmm, good question. I havenāt checked the market, I got mine from someone I know. But to be honest, Iād 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. š«¤
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 āESC/Pā standard. Thatās very widely supported.
Should I go on a tour with these hot air balloons some day? Not sure if itās scary as hell. š
(#3lw7tcq) This is why I love tech from that era.
Write bytes to a parallel port and stuff happens. If itās 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. Thatās what I did this morning ā never worked with ESC/P before, now I can print images. Itās not that hard.
Hayes-compatible modems are similar: Write some AT commands to the serial port and the modem does things. This isnāt even arcane knowledge, itās explained in the printed manual.
Maybe Iām 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. Itās 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.