# Learn more about twtxt: # https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ # https://www.uninformativ.de/twtxt-mention.html # # nick = movq # url = https://www.uninformativ.de/twtxt.txt # avatar = https://www.uninformativ.de/avatar.png#20240102 # # If you're on an older device that doesn't support modern crypto, you # can also use HTTP: # url = http://www.uninformativ.de/twtxt.txt # # Legacy, don't use: # nick_alias = vain # # prev = 6v47cua twtxt-old_2024-04-21_6v47cua.txt 2024-04-21T18:58:54Z (#x7b66yq) @ https://pixelfed.de/p/islieb/656813914793363318 2024-04-21T18:59:51Z Me feed just rolled over. Let’s see if something breaks. 😂 2024-04-21T19:14:48Z (#oc7xdyq) @ Goes to show how arcane that system has become. 🥴 I saw in another video today that Microsoft Office used names like `PMWord` and `PMExcel`.

There was a time when Vobis (you remember them?) sold PCs with OS/2 pre-installed. Those were the days, man! 😂

> It's already very quick.

That’s because it’s not running on a hard disk but a Compact Flash card. 😅 My Warp 4 box *is* on an HDD and scanning directory trees takes quite some time there. 🫤 Spinning rust is crazy slow. 2024-04-22T11:08:42Z (#lnornhq) @ It’s great to see so much “green”. 👌

The sequence of photos makes it look like you throw this (pretty creepy) snowman to the ground. 😂 2024-04-22T13:07:00Z (#6axgyza) @ 🤣 Bug free code, I wish. 😅

On a more serious note, how’s the adoption of Archive Feeds going? If you all were to clear your caches, would your clients fetch archived feeds? 🤔

(I’m kind of thinking about truncating my history, to be honest. There’s a lot of twts out there, many of them out-of-context by now. They’re of little use except maybe for showing that twtxt/Yarn is an “active platform”.) 2024-04-22T13:09:43Z (#nwv3ipq) @ My process hasn’t changed. (But the Gopher hole is gone. Here’s the file from 2023: https://movq.de/v/72fddfd8fe/2023-05-31--backups.txt )

What is your backup target btw? This NFS drive you’re speaking of is probably hosted on one of your local servers running in your apartment/house? 2024-04-22T17:04:31Z Ich frag’ mich schon oft, wie das für die englischen Muttersprachler sein muss, all diese sogenannten Markennamen zu benutzen. „Ich benutze Fenster 11! Das hier ist eine KraftPunkt-Präsentation. Den Kode für dieses Skript habe ich vom Deppendrehkreuz.“ All sowas. 🤔 2024-04-22T18:56:13Z (#qf7pavq) @ lol 😂

So you don’t feel a bit weird when you say “Windows” or “PowerPoint”? It’s just a brand, nothing special? 2024-04-24T08:24:28Z I have months of intense security compliance theater ahead of me and wish for a quick and painless death. 2024-04-24T12:42:54Z (#aiqtdda) @ Oh dear. 😭 2024-04-24T15:06:22Z (#aiqtdda) One of the super frustrating things about this: I have to write lots of documents, but I am required to use horrendous software to do that. It cannot even number sections automatically, nor can you insert cross-references to other sections. Simple stuff like that. It all has to be done *manually*.

Even Word 97 could do shit like that …

[![](https://movq.de/v/163ba9f8fd/.html%2Dindex%2Dthumb%2Ds.png.jpg)](https://movq.de/v/163ba9f8fd/s.png) 2024-04-24T15:08:23Z (#z4m2yla) @ Get well soon!

[![](https://movq.de/v/03106cee1c/.html%2Dindex%2Dthumb%2Ds.png.jpg)](https://movq.de/v/03106cee1c/s.png)

(And thanks for not being one of those “it’s just a cold” guys.) 2024-04-24T15:47:24Z (#aiqtdda) @ It is very proprietary, yes. 😂😭 2024-04-24T18:51:15Z One of the Xfce devs tries to estimate how many people use his software and is a bit surprised:

https://alexxcons.github.io/blogpost_9.html

😅 2024-04-24T19:26:00Z (#d5n4myq) @ Oops. That’s a bit scary.

Hmm, how many hardware devices have you lost due to lightning over the years? 🤔 We lost a modem once, but that was it. 2024-04-24T19:44:17Z (#aiqtdda) @ Oh my god, that sounds just as awful. Yes, that really makes you want to quit. Such a waste of time and energy. It’s really dangerous for one’s mental health as well, burnout is lurking just around the corner.

No, it’s not IBM. 😅 I won’t say what it is. 🥴 I don’t think I had contact with any (contemporary) IBM software since around 2010. I love toying around with retro IBM stuff (cause that’s what I grew up with), but really no idea what they’re up to these days. Even the IBM building in our city is long gone. 2024-04-25T12:50:47Z (#uxaaq5q) Well, looks like I’ll be using IBM software after all … 🤣 https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-joins-ibm (We use Terraform.) 2024-04-25T15:43:46Z (#jnfajzq) I don’t know why or how, but using `gtk_window_set_geometry_hints()` has the desired effect (now?). Reading GTK’s source code is too convoluted to find out what’s going on here. I can’t find a corresponding Wayland protocol.

Sway gets *very* slow when resizing such a window, so I’m a bit inclined to think that GTK does some weird trickery to get this to work. 🤔

Either way, xiate now sets geometry hints again and floating windows have the correct size now. Finally. 2024-04-26T13:02:34Z (#6axgyza) Well, there was one subtle bug: jenny did not fetch archived twts from your own feed (only from other people). I just happened to wipe all twts/cache from my disk, so I noticed that all my old stuff was missing. It’s a corner case, but it’ll be fixed in the next release. 2024-04-26T14:09:40Z The source code of “DOS 4” was released:

https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/tree/main/v4.0

Not without issues:

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/how-not-to-release-historic-source-code/

(Hence “DOS 4” in quotes, is it 4.00 or 4.01? Probably the latter.)

More DOS 4 history:

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/dos/dos-4-0/ 2024-04-26T15:02:19Z I think I’ll be doing this again:

https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2022-07-01-oldcomputerchallenge-v2-rtc.html 2024-04-27T12:27:04Z (#d6xdvyq) Looks like there’s not a lot of fancy magical stuff:

- https://komh.github.io/os2books/progfaq/112_L2_Whatisthebestwaytoco.html
- https://komh.github.io/os2books/progfaq/111_L2_Whatisthebestwaytoco.html

There is, however, a `DosKillThread()` function, which, as far as I know, does not exist on POSIX. 🤔 You can only send a signal to a POSIX thread and then it’ll hopefully end some day, right?

Killing threads is probably a bad idea, though. Who knows which state it’ll leave behind. It’s not like a process which will be properly cleaned up by the OS.

I think I’ll leave it as is. 🙂 2024-04-28T16:39:11Z I feel you, buddy. 🤣

https://movq.de/v/f67fbcd93d/washing-machine.mp4 2024-04-28T16:51:15+00:00 If you’re using jenny on Python 3.12, it will spit out a deprecation warning regarding `datetime.utcnow()`. This will be fixed in the next release. 2024-04-28T18:12:05+00:00 (#gxolr6a) @ It’s always been super niche, but I think in the age of Twitter more people have been looking for free/libre alternatives than these days, because Mastodon is a big thing now and has mostly replaced Twitter. Mastodon is free/libre, lots of instances, lots of communities. I have a feeling that Yarn/twtxt is mostly appealing to us nerds and minimalists.

I still love the core ideas of twtxt. It’s great for hardcore minimalists. Yarn.social is great for people willing to run a server daemon. I still think all of this is a good thing.

We have certainly lost lots of momentum, though. Plus, there appear to be simpler alternatives to full blown Mastodon now. I think @ and @ are running [snac](https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2)? I didn’t have a closer look at snac (no intention of running it), but if that is a relatively small daemon (maybe comparable to Yarn?) that gives you access to the whole world of ActivityPub, then, well, yeah … That’s tough to beat.

Not sure what my point is. 🤔 For me, it’s easy: I’ll keep using twtxt because all I have to do is host a text file. Dead simple, I love it.

It all depends on what your plans for Yarn.social are. 🤔 2024-04-30T12:36:27+00:00 (#gfajzzq) @ To quote from the german version of ISO 27001:

> Änderungen an Informationsverarbeitungseinrichtungen und Informationssystemen sollten Gegenstand von Änderungsmanagementverfahren sein.

Fuck off, you cunts. 🤣🖕 2024-04-30T12:37:18+00:00 (#mehox4a) @ My goodness, you have feet of steel. 😅 Yay, geese! 2024-04-30T13:00:53+00:00 (#u6enjda) @ Congratz! 🥳 2024-04-30T19:28:27+00:00 (#gxolr6a) @

> And I come back to twtxt.net every now and then to read up on conversations that seem to be incomplete in my own client. Like if a new feed appears that I don't follow (yet). That's certainly a convenience that I do enjoy. Thank you for that!

Indeed, I do that as well. 2024-04-30T20:00:48+00:00 Since I finally configured X11 in this VM for [shenanigans](https://tilde.zone/@movq/112361265690914286) …

The original tuXeyes running in a SuSE Linux 6.4 VM and my [clone from 2017](https://uninformativ.de/git/tuxeye2) (which does not depend on a now ancient version of Qt):

[![](https://www.uninformativ.de/desktop/.html%2Dindex%2Dthumb%2D2024%2D04%2D30%2D%2Dkatriawm%2Dtuxeyeception.jpg.jpg)](https://www.uninformativ.de/desktop/2024%2D04%2D30%2D%2Dkatriawm%2Dtuxeyeception.jpg) 2024-05-01T03:17:14+00:00 Damn those fucking planes and their noise. 2024-05-01T04:19:26+00:00 (#ocwsliq) Of all the retro OSes that I’ve got running, SuSE 6.4 is clearly the most powerful one. It comes with a ton of software and development tools. Windows 2000, which was released around the same time, is basically “empty” in comparison.

But of course, none of that mattered. No *popular* software, no adoption. 😅 And yes, things like configuring the X server were stupid hard back then. 2024-05-01T06:03:22+00:00 (#ivuo2vq) @ Yeah, they’re approaching three (!) parallel runways, directly above me. 😞 (The early days of Covid were super quiet and peaceful.) 2024-05-01T08:39:00+00:00 (#ivuo2vq) @ Of course, those shitheads. 🤣 (Doesn’t really make a difference in practice, luckily. There aren’t that many of them.) 2024-05-01T08:55:18+00:00 Is this “flat UI” madness ever going to end? I’m beginning to lose hope. 2024-05-01T12:57:24+00:00 (#7ovrseq) @ Not bad, maybe let’s go back to 98.css. 😃

@ It feels like the current cycle has been going on for a very long time now, almost 20 years. 😩 But I might be wrong here, maybe it started later. 2024-05-02T16:04:23+00:00 (#vrckl3a) @ At work? Not a chance. 😂

Private life? Sure. There was a regular community event called “A week in the TTY” [over at nixers.net](https://nixers.net/Thread-A-Week-In-The-TTY), where we spent a week only in text mode. It was easily doable.

There are some things where a graphical browser is pretty much mandatory these days. Online banking comes to mind. I *could* in theory physically go to the bank, but I’m way too lazy for that. 😂

Netflix is more popular nowadays and I wouldn’t want to miss that, either. 2024-05-02T16:29:17+00:00 (#vrckl3a) @ Ah, right, you were only talking about 24 hours. I think I can manage without Netflix for a day. 😅 2024-05-02T17:31:24+00:00 (#m35km2a) @ Same here. I’m watching the storm tracking on kachelmannwetter.com 🍿 2024-05-02T17:37:40+00:00 (#vrckl3a) @ Why not, give it a shot! 😅

I think I even integrated my password manager into tmux at some point. There’s a lot that you can do. 2024-05-02T17:39:06+00:00 In case you need a profile picture: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ 2024-05-02T17:45:35+00:00 YouTube introduces a “stable volume” feature:

https://movq.de/v/ad0dd48aac/a.jpg

Once filmmakers realize that people just want stable volume instead of SUPER LOUD SECTIONS (…andreallyquietones…), then maybe I can finally remove the limiter from my pipewire filter chain. 🥴 2024-05-03T09:03:38+00:00 (#rc2ehla) @ Yep, it’s pass. 👍 2024-05-03T09:11:47+00:00 (#gkwcrvq) @ Yes, over 20 years ago, a hard disk died. Not completely, only some parts of it, but it was enough to destroy ~30 GB or something like that.

I bought a lot of DVDs over time and many of them have become unreadable. Star Trek DS9 is among the victims, parts of TNG, parts of X-Files. Really annoying. I didn’t have the required disk space to make backups and, honestly, didn’t think they would die so quickly. When/if I buy movies these days, I either make a backup right away or I treat those DVDs as “will die soon”. 🫤

CDs regularly die, too, although not as often as DVDs.

And of course, lots of floppy disks are dead now. 😂🫤 2024-05-03T09:13:15+00:00 (#uguqlpq) (That hard disk was in a Windows box and there was no such thing as RAID or anything similar. Didn’t have the money for fancy stuff anyway.) 2024-05-04T04:19:46+00:00 (#f3cri4q) @ That’s the trick, yep. 👍 I have something like this in my `.vimrc`:

 au BufRead,BufNewFile jenny-posting.eml setl fo-=t wrap 2024-05-04T05:12:43+00:00 (#oowy2xa) @ You’re welcome. I guess this could/should also be mentioned in jenny’s docs. 😅 2024-05-04T06:14:15+00:00 (#y5uwu7q) @ Awwwwww! 😍 2024-05-04T06:25:11+00:00 (#oowy2xa) Those options are now included in jenny’s Vim package:

https://www.uninformativ.de/git/jenny/commit/698c4382208c5b5eb87999a30fd657167ab5b694.html 2024-05-04T12:42:26+00:00 One great feature of Vim (and probably other editors) is “keyword completion”: Type the beginning of a word, then press Ctrl-N and Vim will give autocompletion options by scanning all the words in the current file. For example, when I now type “au” and then Ctrl-N, it will suggest “autocompletion”.

This is so very useful when writing text / prose. It’s especially useful for German text with all those long words like “Informationssicherheitsbeauftrager”. I use this feature all time and I sorely miss it when I’m forced to use some other crappy editor. 😩

https://movq.de/v/96049c4aea/s.png 2024-05-04T12:52:13+00:00 (#uim2v6a) Well, I missed the time window. Time flies, they’re all grown up now. 😬 2024-05-04T13:26:45+00:00 (#spsmx5q) @ Lol, god no 🤣 2024-05-04T13:44:10+00:00 (#cakjm6q) @ Oh, so the cache just goes back about a month? 🤔 2024-05-04T15:27:09+00:00 QOTD: How large is your shell history? No history, 500 lines, 10'000, 100'000, something else? 2024-05-04T15:42:37+00:00 (#uoam6kq) @ To infinity and beyond? 🤔 How large is it currently? `history | wc -l` 2024-05-04T16:12:30+00:00 (#tdxiozq) @ Ah, so that’s the plane with the Brazilian women then. 😅 Enjoy your stay! 2024-05-04T16:28:17+00:00 (#tdxiozq) @ My condolences. 😂🙉 2024-05-04T16:29:33+00:00 (#s4nbfta) @ Wow. And you never wonder: “Wait, how did I do `$thing` back then?” Happens to me all the time. 😳 2024-05-05T04:57:35+00:00 (#dplm7sq) @ You mean you edit this file manually sometimes? 🤔 2024-05-05T05:02:16+00:00 (#2s2cegq) @ Noticed any slowdowns? I noticed a ~0.2 second delay when opening new shells, never bothered to check it, and now found out that it’s caused by the ~250k lines of shell history. 🥴 2024-05-05T05:05:00+00:00 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. 🙄 2024-05-05T07:36:33+00:00 (#pknsrda) @

> 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. 2024-05-05T08:12:21+00:00 (#pknsrda) @ Get fucked, indeed. 🫤 2024-05-05T08:14:44+00:00 (#pknsrda) 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 … 2024-05-05T16:49:23+00:00 (#2tjsjuq) @ 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. 😅 2024-05-06T17:06:56+00:00 (#ixpmzia) 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. 2024-05-06T17:21:45+00:00 (#2tjsjuq) @ 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](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Go), 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. 🤔 2024-05-06T17:37:22+00:00 (#2tjsjuq) @ 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. 😂 2024-05-07T11:43:21+00:00 (#bghmkra) @ Every now and then, I get a notification about Yarn feeds getting archived/rotated. 😅 Appears to work without issues. 👍 2024-05-07T11:44:25+00:00 (#e24exeq) (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.) 2024-05-07T13:23:34+00:00 (#pooumca) @ Ah, yes, that’s better! 👍 2024-05-07T13:24:13+00:00 (#bghmkra) @ My client tells me when it fetches archived feeds. That’s all. 2024-05-07T13:28:34+00:00 (#7gwktxq) @ Huh? What does that look like in Chrome? 🤔 (I only have Chromium.) 2024-05-07T13:41:38+00:00 (#7gwktxq) @ Strip it from what? From requests being sent to the server? That’s always been the case, afaik. 🤔 2024-05-07T14:03:40+00:00 (#bghmkra) @ 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. 😅 2024-05-07T14:04:38+00:00 (#7gwktxq) @ From the DOM? That can’t be right. 😳😳😳 2024-05-07T17:56:25+00:00 (#e24exeq) @ 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. 🫤 2024-05-07T18:33:50+00:00 (#ixpmzia) @ 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. 😈 2024-05-07T18:38:48+00:00 (#ixpmzia) 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. 2024-05-07T19:50:53+00:00 (#ixpmzia) @ 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. 🥴 2024-05-08T17:19:40+00:00 (#ixpmzia) 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.) 2024-05-08T17:20:14+00:00 (#l2uil4a) @ Doesn’t matter. Far, far away! From everything! That’s where I’d go. 😂 2024-05-09T07:21:07+00:00 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. 🤣 2024-05-09T11:11:53+00:00 (#dvnigcq) This is going to take a while … See ya in a couple of days/weeks. 2024-05-10T04:22:15+00:00 (#dvnigcq) 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. 2024-05-10T06:00:54+00:00 (#dvnigcq) @ Thanks. I expected this to take *much* longer. 😅 2024-05-10T14:40:52+00:00 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. 2024-05-11T03:55:45+00:00 (#iefub6q) @ 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. 2024-05-11T04:00:23+00:00 (#iefub6q) @ 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. 🤔 2024-05-11T04:01:55+00:00 (#iefub6q) 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!) 2024-05-11T04:07:46+00:00 (#2du5cpq) (The old device I’m referring to was a handheld device. It was not built into the car and was not running 24/7.) 2024-05-11T08:23:53+00:00 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? 2024-05-11T08:59:42+00:00 (#ghroc5q) @ 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. 😳 2024-05-11T09:02:57+00:00 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. 😎 2024-05-11T11:22:08+00:00 (#phld5ba) @ Thanks 😅

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

[![](https://movq.de/v/b64ca095f5/.html%2Dindex%2Dthumb%2DDSC_0001.JPG.jpg)](https://movq.de/v/b64ca095f5/DSC_0001.JPG)

[![](https://movq.de/v/b64ca095f5/.html%2Dindex%2Dthumb%2DDSC_0002.JPG.jpg)](https://movq.de/v/b64ca095f5/DSC_0002.JPG)

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. 2024-05-11T12:11:51+00:00 (#phld5ba) @ Right! I think I remember 😅 2024-05-11T12:37:24+00:00 (#phld5ba) @ 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? 😂) 2024-05-12T04:59:41+00:00 (#ghroc5q) @ 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. 2024-05-12T05:01:31+00:00 (#f5xzzha) @ Wow, nice. 😍 2024-05-12T08:12:06+00:00 (#ghroc5q) @ Aaaaaaaahhhhhhh! 🙈🙈🙈 What a mess … 2024-05-12T08:14:45+00:00 (#ghroc5q) I’m (just) old enough to have experienced the German Democratic Republic first hand and if they had had *any* of these capabilities … 🙈🙈🙈