movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (12h ago)

My hoster broke UDP, so DNS is broken as well and that takes a lot of things with it. No more email for me, I guess.

Letā€™s hope theyā€™ll fix it soon.

#gw45uga
lyse @lyse.isobeef.org
 (1d ago)

(#xl7dt5a) Iā€™ve got sore muscles. The sticky snow couldnā€™t be pushed, it had to be laborously cleared shovel by shovel. :-D

In my lunch break, I went on a short stroll. Oh boy, walking through deep damp snow is exhausting! There were sections with easily 30 centimeters and more. Some big wind drifts had piled up. Despite melting off quickly in the 4Ā°C, especially turning the trees brown again, the white landscape still looks so nice. Iā€™m glad these road marking sticks finally came in handy for the snow plow guys. :-) The black and orange stripes are 30 cm high.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-01-26/

Thatā€™s probably it. Thereā€™s no significant snowfall announced for the rest of the week and temperatures are supposed to stay in the 2-4Ā°C range by day.

#sb75tsa
lyse @lyse.isobeef.org
 (1d ago)

Just showelled 20cm of snow for half an hour, fuck me! Iā€™m totally shattered. But itā€™s worth it. Looks so beautiful. And all the disbelief and terror in the eyes of the people. Well, thatā€™s what our winters were like three decades ago. Iā€™m just glad that I can work from home.

#xl7dt5a
lyse @lyse.isobeef.org
 (1d ago)

(#ykh2qpa) @movq@www.uninformativ.de I was also extremely surprised and couldnā€™t believe it myself. But around the hair were definitely two, three millimeters of ice with a bunch of snow on top. I couldnā€™t simply brush it off, the hair were all frozen together. Back in the house, it took maybe three minutes to melt the solidified white stuff and free up and disconnect the individual hair. Crazy.

Yeah, 0Ā°C in town, maybe -2Ā°C on the summit. It definitely didnā€™t feel all the cold, but I came prepared with a few layers of cloth.

#3td266q
lyse @lyse.isobeef.org
 (2d ago)

What a beautiful, beautiful 0Ā°C Sunday arvo and evening! The weather forecast delayed the snow by the minute. An hour or so after it finally started very, very lightly, I headed off for the woods to check out the lake again. Unfortunately, with the fresh snow layer, the crazy wild surface texture of the ice sheet wasnā€™t visible anymore. But it brought some other nice views and photo opportunities.

I initially thought that I just go for a quick turn. However, with the snowfall a wee bit increasing I was hooked and kept going. Visibility was poor, but the snow blankets just looked too stunning. The road surfaces were quite slippery, so I often just walked alongside the pathways. On downhill slopes I had some good fun sliding down the road on my feet. With varying success. Luckily, I managed not to fall.

On the summit of the mountain the twigs had those absolutely magnificently looking windblown crystal coverings. Awwwwwww! They never get old. It was already getting dark, so the camera was tired and wanted to sleep. The snow program then made use of the flash and Iā€™m quite pleased with how these shots turned out.

Two deer crossed the road in front of me and ran into the woods, that was sight for sore eyes. Although I felt bad that they had to flee from me in this white terrain. By the time I got home, the snow had accumulated around eight centimeters in height, even in town down in the valley. Walking on this fresh snow is just amazing. And I love the sound it makes. Today, the snow consistency must have been just right, because the crushing sound was really loud.

I cannot recall that I had frozen hair and beard before, but today, there was a thick ice buildup. In case I had, it was definitely never this much. Felt really cool.

Enough of this preliminary skirmishing, there ya go: https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-01-25/

#jsg36sq
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (2d ago)

Omg, Python. Parsing arguments with argparse takes 50 ms on my NUC, because this pulls in all kinds of fancy stuff behind the scenes, colorization and what not. šŸ˜®ā€šŸ’Ø

#gjiiaeq
prologic @twtxt.net
 (2d ago)

(#vx4rw2q) Has a bit of a long history story behind this, where last year at work we were reading this book called Engineering a Safer World and initially came across a service called Speech Reply that allowed me to upload a PDF copy of the book and start to read it, but unfortunately, the free trial right now before I can finish reading it turns out that Speech Reply service cost a whopping US$30 a month and expected me to pay a full year upfront, which was well over US$300 just for one fucking book! So I sent their sales and support staff a message kindly asking if it were possible to just pay for the audio transcription of just a single book or to change to a monthly subscription fee, to which they refused, so basically in the end I got very angry and told them to go fuck themselves and built my own service. A year later here we are :-)

#it3vh2q
prologic @twtxt.net
 (2d ago)

This weekend, Iā€™m building a service that turns PDFs into chaptered, audiobookā€‘quality narration in minutesā€”upload, listen in a builtā€‘in player, and download MP3/M4B files with clean metadata.

#vx4rw2q
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (2d ago)

Another project where Iā€™m going to use my terminal widget toolkit is a hex editor. This is still very young, obviously, and thereā€™s a lot of work to do (both in the toolkit and this particular application), but Iā€™m making some progress:

https://movq.de/v/2bae14ed16/vid-1769283187.mp4

Since this program is UTF-8 clean (I hope), you can do things like enter multi-byte UTF-8 sequences or paste them from the system clipboard (another hex editor I just tried failed to do this correctly):

https://movq.de/v/e9241034c1/vid-1769283755.mp4

Under the hood, Iā€™m using mmap() with MAP_PRIVATE, which is really cool: I get the entire file as a byte array, no matter how large it is, no need to actually read it upfront; and MAP_PRIVATE means that I can write to this area however I like without changing the underlying file. The kernel does copy-on-write for me. Only when you hit Save, it will write to the filesystem. And itā€™s just a couple lines of code. The kernel does all the magic. šŸ„³

#ihycs7q
lyse @lyse.isobeef.org
 (3d ago)

(#mx4fpvq) @bender@twtxt.net I love that you set your alarm. :-D Lucky for my new teammates (or maybe not) Iā€™m not gonna leave them. No week has passed where my old mates didnā€™t consult me, so I reckon Iā€™m still a secret service agent in the old team. :-P

#orrpedq
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (5d ago)

My washing machine is making funny noises and Iā€™m this šŸ¤ close to just throwing it out and washing everything by hand, instead of buying another expensive enshittified product thatā€™s designed to break down in a couple of years.

Washing is easy anyway, the spin cycle to dry that stuff is the important part ā€¦

#bb54rfq
prologic @twtxt.net
 (1w ago)

(#3szczeq) @bender@twtxt.net Only missing roots would trigger that kind of sync IIRC. And that only works if another peering pod has the root twt. What youā€™re remembering, possibly, is an attempt to do what you were thinking ofā€¦ But I tried it, turned out to be too expensive of an operation to do auotmatically.

#blltcsa
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (1w ago)

Spent basically the entire day (except for the mandatory walk) fighting with Pythonā€™s type hints. But, the result is that my widget toolkit now passes mypy --strict.

I really, really donā€™t want to write larger pieces of software without static typing anymore. With dynamic typing, you must test every code path in your program to catch even the most basic errors. pylint helps a bit (doesnā€™t need type hints), but thatā€™s really not enough.

Also, somewhere along the way, I picked up a very bad (Python) programming style. (Actually, I know exactly where I picked that up, but I donā€™t want to point the finger now.) This style makes heavy use of dicts and tuples instead of proper classes. That works for small scripts, but it very quickly turns into an absolute mess once the program grows. Prime example: jenny. šŸ˜©

I have a love-hate relationship with Pythonā€™s type hints, because they are meaningless at runtime, so they can be utterly misleading. Iā€™m beginning to like them as an additional safety-net, though.

(But really, if correctness is the goal, you either need to invest a ton of time to get 100% test coverage ā€“ or donā€™t use Python.)

#4yvgryq