@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Yeah, there is no guarantee with any of these things, it can all be faked or ignored. 🫤 I’m still going to do it in the hopes that some of those bots respect it.

@mckinley@twtxt.net I just got bitten by this again: I would make passive mode the default mode of FTP. 🥴

I spent some more time with StarOffice 3.1 and it is indeed a bit clunky (of course it is, it’s from 1996). For example, a table of contents does not update automatically – you have to delete it and re-insert it. Sometimes it has graphical glitches. Font rendering isn’t too great.

And yet, I wish we would use this instead of $the_other_thing at work. It’s much faster (on my Pentium 133!) and more featureful. 🫤 (Or, you know, StarOffice’s modern descendant: LibreOffice.)

Okay, GPS performance has degraded a lot over the last few days.

• Time to first fix is a couple of minutes now, instead of 5-30 seconds.
  
• Accuracy is reduced greatly, probably because the phone can one lock on to about 6-12 satellites, this used to be around 30 satellites.
  

In theory and under good conditions, you need 4 satellites to get a fix. But in reality, there are rarely “good conditions”, there are always buildings, hills, or trees nearby, so you need as many satellites as you can possibly get.

It’s not completely useless (yet), but it’s not great. I think I’m gonna lift some firewall restrictions. 🫤

@prologic@twtxt.net Ahhh, I right, now I remember. That ai.txt boils down to this, I guess:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /

… or maybe I should do this based on allowlisting rather than blocklisting. 🤔 Only allow a couple of bots that I think are fine …

Anyone got a link to a robots.txt that “blocks” all the “AI” stuff?

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 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 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 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 Right! I think I remember 😅

@prologic Thanks 😅

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

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. 😳