I was able to dig up StarOffice 3.1, which I used in the 1990’ies on Windows 95. This was the highlight of my day. 🥰 As you can see in the photo below, this CD includes a version for Windows 3.1, 95/NT – and OS/2! How cool is that? My CD back then did not have the OS/2 version.

StarWriter of StarOffice 3.1 can do a lot of the stuff that I’m missing in the tool at work. Like automatic numbering of sections/chapters and cross-references to other parts of the document. Essential basic stuff like that.

All the following screenshots are from QEMU VMs (OS/2 2.1, Windows 3.11, and Windows 98), but I think I’m gonna install this on my real OS/2 Warp 4 box soon. 🧓

https://movq.de/v/eebbe648a5/

What really blew my mind is this feature, though: You can rearrange your document’s structure using drag-and-drop. Here’s a demo (Window 2000):

https://movq.de/v/67523d0d3f/so31.mp4

I really, really wish the tool at work would have a feature like that. It would have saved me so much time already. 😭

@rrraksamam@twtxt.net You sure that’s enough? My laptop already has 32 GB RAM. You gotta pump those numbers up!

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, I was just surprised by that low number, because I still have 126 feeds in my list. Buuuuuut I guess I could clean that up a bit as well. 🥴

@prologic@twtxt.net Not a lot left, huh 🤔

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com lol, yeah, that would be great 😂

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @mckinley@mckinley.cc Huh, I envy you. 😅 I was browsing my GitHub stars, clicked Next a couple of times and then hit the back button on my mouse. Boom, I don’t get back to the previous page but to my profile page: https://github.com/vain?tab=stars

At work, it is absolutely pointless to expect forward/backward to work. Almost everything breaks. Maybe some older Jira still works, but that’s about it.

@prologic@twtxt.net I sure hope you’re right. 😅 I’d love nothing more than not having to rely on the internet for this. 🤞

(I clearly remember sitting in my car and waiting an eternity to get a fix, though. I’d regularly start the GPS device and then continue to load up my bags/stuff into the car because it took so long. 😅 Maybe it was just a shitty device, who knows …)

The GPS satellites transmit an almanac, a (coarse) list of all satellite positions:

https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog862/node/1739

That’s apparently crucial for a low “time to first fix” and, as I understand it, that’s where A-GPS comes into play: Downloading this information from the satellites takes about 12.5 minutes, but downloading it via the internet (A-GPS) is much faster.

So the question is: How long is this data valid for? It’s a bit hard to find information on this … It looks like it’s valid for several weeks:

https://flysight.ca/wiki/index.php/Almanac_and_ephemeris

If true, it would mean the situation is much less dramatic than I thought. 😅 I go on a walk every couple of days and that gives the device more than enough time to download an updated almanac. So, I guess I should be fine without A-GPS if I regularly use (standard) GPS for an hour or so. 🤔

We’ll see. This might take a couple of months to find out. 😂

I’m gonna need some medication if I have to keep doing this. 😬 It’s infuriating.

Automatically numbered sections, 1978 in nroff / ms: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Bell-Release/usr/man/man7/ms.7#L231-L233

Thinking about disabling the two extra buttons for “forward” and “backward” on my mouse, because today’s websites don’t support this anymore, and it’d safe me the constant moments of “oh for fuck’s sake”. 🙄

I’m (just) old enough to have experienced the German Democratic Republic first hand and if they had had any of these capabilities … 🙈🙈🙈

@mckinley@twtxt.net Aaaaaaaahhhhhhh! 🙈🙈🙈 What a mess …

@mckinley@mckinley.cc Wow, nice. 😍

@mckinley@twtxt.net Thanks for the info. 🤔

This is quite bizarre. Why are we accepting this? 🤔 I guess it just doesn’t matter to people when they use Google for everything anyway (mail, Google Drive, …) … 😒 Bah.

It’s extra “funny” in my case, because I run that Matrix server myself, so I assumed that data is only sent between that server and the clients. But no, of course not, lots of things still get shoved through Google and Apple. 😂😭 How silly.

@prologic@twtxt.net That must be hard indeed. 🤔 Are the kids old enough to be interested in this kind of stuff? (Are kids in generall still interested in this? 😂)

@prologic@twtxt.net Right! I think I remember 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net Thanks 😅

This is my setup, I think I posted these before:

Image

Image

It’s a Celestron Ultima 100 (originally bought for bird watching, not a telescope) with a special adapter so that I can mount my Canon EOS 600D directly. The sun filter is just a generic filter for 100mm scopes. The tripod isn’t very good and actually rather annoying. 😂

It’s not a very complicated setup. 🤔 Being able to mount the camera directly is crucial.

I was able to take a photo of the large sunspots that made the news these days:

https://www.uninformativ.de/pics/photo/astro/2024-05-11–IMG_7512-sun-AR3664.jpg

It’s not a super high quality shot, my scope isn’t good enough for that. Still cool to see. 😎

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com It would appear so. 🤔 (I’m too lazy to set that up, though, I rather just don’t use notifications. They’re not that important in this case.)

I was not aware that I needed a cloud service for something as (seemingly) simple as local app notifications. 😳

Another thing that doesn’t work anymore after blocking network traffic from my Android phone: Some push notifications.

I run a Matrix server for our family. I use “FluffyChat” on my phone. Traffic from the phone to my Matrix server is allowed and chatting in FluffyChat works.

But I don’t get any notifications anymore on new messages.

So, what’s going on here? Does FluffyChat, which only really needs to talk to my own server, rely on some cloud service for notifications? Seriously? 🤔 How does that work, does this cloud service see all my notifications or what?

Anyone around who did app development on Android? Can you shed some light on this?

(The old device I’m referring to was a handheld device. It was not built into the car and was not running 24/7.)

I’ll make an experiment: I’ll keep blocking all the phone’s internet traffic and then we’ll see how bad the GPS performance will get in a couple of hours/days. 😅 (If I got it all wrong and it still works fine, that’d be great!)

@prologic@twtxt.net Regarding the static URL: The hostname at least is a CNAME record and resolves to something at cloudfront. What I meant was that I, as a user, cannot configure this URL anywhere in the Android UI. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm, have you used a GPS device 15, 20 years ago? I had one in my car. It would take a long time until it got a first “fix” of your location. That’s because it can take up to 12 minutes until you have gathered all the data directly from the satellites. These days, GPS trackers on smartphones get a fix within seconds, maybe 30 seconds tops, because they get pre-seeded with (approximated) satellite positions via A-GPS.

We also not only have the USA’s GPS these days but also other satellite systems like the EU’s Galileo or Russia’s Glonass. A-GPS helps you get “in contact” quickly with more satellites, which enhances the precision quite a lot.

So, yeah, you can use it without A-GPS. But it would be very annoying and imprecise. I bought a new phone last year and A-GPS was broken on that one (I saw no internet traffic at all), which made it basically useless, to the point where I wouldn’t want to use it at all. I sent it back and bought another model.

To my knowledge, the only way to use GPS without something like A-GPS is to have it turned on all the time, so you get regular updates directly from the satellites.

One thing I’ve learned from locking down my Android phone (see #pknsrda):

The data for assisted GPS does not come from Google or, better yet, A PUBLIC SERVICE, but from a server hosted by the hardware manufacturer. Without regularly fetching fresh A-GPS data, the GPS performance is much worse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GNSS).

This means that the hardware manufacturer has (more or less) direct control over whether I’m able to use GPS or not. This isn’t an Android setting, it’s buried deep within the device, no way to change the URL. If that manufacturer decides one day to cut me off, for whatever reason, or goes bankrupt or whatever, then I’ll have to buy a new phone.

And of course, this data transfer is encrypted as well, so I don’t know what my phone sends to those servers.

All this smartphone business is such a clusterfuck. I should have never bought one of those things.

@prologic@twtxt.net Thanks. I expected this to take much longer. 😅

Whoohoo, it’s fixed. 🥳 Now I can look at funny pictures again!

I took the opportunity to remove some dependencies on the internet from my workflow. Actually, outages like these are healthy.

This is going to take a while … See ya in a couple of days/weeks.

I have a day off, national holiday.

What happened so far:

• Internet outage since early in the morning. Still going on.
  
• Unable to reach a human being at my ISP, so I hope they mean it when the computer voice says “we know it, we’re on it”. 🤣
  
• systemd (PID 1) crashed. Might be partially my fault, but meh.
  

I take this as a sign to not do any computer stuff today. 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net Doesn’t matter. Far, far away! From everything! That’s where I’d go. 😂

Ran a few tests.

Copying data from the NAS’s encrypted ZFS pool to the USB disk’s encrypted btrfs runs at ~20 MByte/s. That is for a single 1 GB file of random data. Cold caches, sync included.

That same USB disk with the same btrfs can sustain ~75 MByte/s when I use it on my workstation (i7-3770).

And indeed, the aes flag does not show up in the output of lscpu on the NAS.

I’ll try to tweak some things about this, but it might be time for an upgrade … 🫤 (Or I’ll have to re-think the entire thing somehow.)

@mckinley@twtxt.net It’s probably a bit faster, but not much. Maybe 20-30 MByte/s (I watched one 40 GB file being copied and it took 20-30 minutes or something like that.)

I need to optimize this. 🥴

The “annoying” thing about hardware these days is that it basically keeps working “forever”. At least much, much longer that you’d expect.

Now that I think about it … I only remember one PC of mine actually dying because of a hardware failure – and that was probably because I did too much overclocking. 😂 If it wasn’t for changes in software, I could probably still use them all. I mean, why not, my Pentium 133 still works and I use it for gaming regularly.

So … my little NAS probably won’t die any time soon. Hmmm.

@mckinley@twtxt.net Not really sure, to be honest. Probably a couple hundred GB … ? 🤔 With the changed data, it might be half a TB to transfer? I’m just guessing.

Let’s see how it goes next time. I don’t expect to add much data any time soon. (On the other hand, I’ll swap the USB disks for the next run, so it’ll take the same ~9 hours, again. Meh.)

I think the solution is to have less data. 😈

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, only ~30 of the ~133 feeds I’m following have had a twt in the last month … 56 in the last year. Some had their last twt in 2016. 🫤

@prologic@twtxt.net From the DOM? That can’t be right. 😳😳😳

@prologic@twtxt.net It always fetches the canonical feed URL and, when it can’t find the latest twt hash (that it saw in the previous run) it traverses the archived feeds until it does find it. Something along those lines.

I just got one such notification:

Date: Tue, 07 May 2024 15:56:01 +0200
From: me@pinguin
To: me@pinguin
Subject: [regularly] jenny

Fetching archived feed https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt/1 (configured as prologic, https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt)
Fetching archived feed https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt/2 (configured as prologic, https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt)
Fetching archived feed https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt/3 (configured as prologic, https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt)
Fetching archived feed https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt/4 (configured as prologic, https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt)
Fetching archived feed https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt/5 (configured as prologic, https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt)

Now, your feed did not get archived, as far as I can tell. So why am I getting this then? Have you edited a twt just now? That would explain it. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net Strip it from what? From requests being sent to the server? That’s always been the case, afaik. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Huh? What does that look like in Chrome? 🤔 (I only have Chromium.)

@prologic@twtxt.net My client tells me when it fetches archived feeds. That’s all.

@prologic@twtxt.net Ah, yes, that’s better! 👍

(Hmmm, I think I could add the time of the last twt to the output of jenny -l. 🤔 Currently it only shows the last successful retrieval time.)

@prologic@twtxt.net Every now and then, I get a notification about Yarn feeds getting archived/rotated. 😅 Appears to work without issues. 👍

@prologic@twtxt.net One minor detail: The Makefile wants to run date -Is, which doesn’t exist on OpenBSD. Not sure how relevant this platform is for you, though. 😅

I haven’t come up with a portable solution yet. date '+%FT%T%z' is the closest approximation that works on both GNU and OpenBSD, but it doesn’t include a colon in the time zone offset, so it’s 0200 instead of 02:00. 🤦 I’m not sure if this is ISO8601 compliant. And it’s still not POSIX. 🤦 Well, I tried. 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net Newcomers might have a little difficulty because just “installing” a Go compiler is not enough – you also need to add ~/go/bin to your $PATH, at least I did. I’m not sure what to do about it, though. 🤔 This doesn’t really belong into Yarn’s setup guide and it’s mentioned as one of the first things in the Arch wiki, for example, but still … To newcomers this might look a bit like a broken build process:

openbsd$ gmake server
/bin/sh: minify: not found
/bin/sh: minify: not found
/bin/sh: minify: not found
gmake: *** [Makefile:84: generate] Error 127

Maybe extend Yarn’s guide just a little bit, like: “… be sure to have Go installed and set up properly, e.g. env vars are set …”? Maybe that could point readers into the right direction. 🤔

What I don’t like about my strategy is that it’s so slow. ☹️ I did change a lot of data this time, so it’s slower than usual, but still …

The backup run from my main workstation onto the NAS took 2.5 hours. The one from my laptop to the NAS took 1.75 hours (hmm, why the difference?). (Those two ran one after the other, not at the same time.)

The backup run from my NAS onto one of the USBs disks is still running, I started it 5.5 hours ago. I hope it’ll finish within the next 2 hours.

Most of this is CPU-bound, because I’m using full disk encryption everywhere and that NAS only has a tiny AMD C-60 CPU from ~2011 which runs at 1 GHz and doesn’t even have a CPU fan. I guess I could upgrade this box, but it’s still working, just slow, so I won’t throw it in the trash – and what do I do with it then? Can’t sell it, can’t gift it to anyone. So I’ll keep using it.

@prologic@twtxt.net I just set up a Yarn instance from scratch and, honestly, I don’t think a yarnd setup is needed. 🤔

I followed the instructions here and they were simple enough: https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn/src/branch/main/README.md#configuring-your-pod

It needs a little polishing (for example, it says COOKIE_SECRET is optional which it isn’t), but it was a good experience overall.

Maybe it’s just me, but I prefer reading installation instructions. And I believe that not having something like yarnd setup nudges you (the author) into keeping those instructions short and concise. Whereas the existence of yarnd setup means that you can cram everything and the kitchen sink in there, because it’s convenient. That can lead to a convoluted setup process – and me, the user, does not really know what that command really does, which is something that I, personally, don’t like. 😅

I wonder what Android does now that I’ve blocked all those connections. Will it queue all the data and just send it the next time it has an internet connection (which will happen sooner or later)? That would mean my blocking attempts are mostly pointless. 🥴

No way of telling what’s going on, it’s all encrypted …

@prologic@twtxt.net Get fucked, indeed. 🫤

@prologic@twtxt.net

things we don’t even know about or have any control over (or very little)

That’s the thing: It’s not apps doing weird stuff, it’s the phone’s operating system itself. I can choose which apps to run and which permissions they have, that’s all fine, but what the fuck is “ImsApp” and why does it need access to GPS and my camera?! Completely untrustworthy.

Experiment: Locking down my Android phone in the firewall, only allowing outgoing connections that I approve of. Let’s see how that goes.

Even just looking at the log of attempted connections is scary. This thing is talking to everything all the time. Worse, there are some system apps that regularly query the device’s GPS location and you can’t turn that off … Shitty spy device. 🙄