gopher://uninformativ.de/1/phlog movq 2025-09-26T13:20:34+00:00 2025-09-26T13:20:30+00:00 tag:uninformativ.de,2025-09-26:phlog/september-books 2025-09-26 -- September books ============================= Let's see what we got this month. First one was "Ostfriesennebel" by Klaus-Peter Wolf. A German book, set in Germany. Pretty weird to read about cities that I've been in. The story itself was quite okay, I think, I just prefer something that doesn't hit so "close to home" (quite literally). It's a lot like music: I usually don't like music with German lyrics, either, it's just too fa- miliar. It doesn't really inspire fantasy as much. Then I dug up "Choke" by Chuck Palahniuk. I bought this 20 years ago, because I liked "Fight Club" back then. I had never finished it. So, while I was waiting for other books to arrive, I finally read this one. I can't say if I liked it or not, to be honest. It's quite repetitive sometimes, which is probably intentional. The story itself is ... well, there's not that much of a plot. The whole thing is supposed to work on another level, I think, but it's not working too well for me. And I'll be honest, it was quite a bit depressing to read about a guy who con- stantly beats up himself and tells himself that he's a loser. Hmm. Very well, eventually "Francesca" (and "Beatrice", but I haven't fin- ished that one yet) by Lina Bengtsdotter arrived. I got these second hand, not new items. I was expecting just another story with the same main character, but that's not really the case, luckily. It's an actual continuation of the first book, which is great. I thus expect the third book, "Beatrice", to be an actual conclusion. At least I hope so. Any- way, "Francesca" was quite like "Annabelle" (the first book of the se- ries), same style and everything. Pretty nice. It's funny how the pace picks up a lot towards the end -- if the whole book was written like this, it would only need something like 50 pages. Here's a photo of all the books from August and September (excluding "Beatrice") -- because it's still crazy to me that I'm suddenly reading this much, out of nowhere: gopher://uninformativ.de/I/phlog/2025/2025-09/2025-09-26--books.jpg 2025-09-26T13:19:49+00:00 tag:uninformativ.de,2025-09-11:phlog/rose-tinted-windows-and-clippy 2025-09-11 -- Rose-Tinted Windows (and Clippy) ============================================== At this point, using Windows is nothing but a distant memory. It's be- coming a surreal thing and feels quite weird, nostalgic, melancholic. It'll be 20 years soon since it was installed as the main OS on one of my boxes. I sometimes try to keep those memories alive by booting it in a VM or on my retro PC, but it really isn't the same. And my memory is beginning to get very fuzzy. I recently found a screen- shot of what I first thought was Windows 2000, because it looks like this shot is from 2002. But no, it's Windows 98: http://www.uninformativ.de/desktop/2002-01-01--Windows98-date-unknown.jpg I could have sworn that I was on Windows 2000 by then. Maybe I switched later that year, maybe not, no idea anymore. I'm beginning to see this whole era through rose-tinted glasses. Espe- cially Win2k. I somehow see it as a rock-solid and well-rounded OS now. Was that really the case? I don't know. But there was something very different back then. And this leads us to current events. There was this Louis Rossmann video recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_Dtmpe9qaQ You've probably already seen it. He chose Clippy as a symbol of ... yeah, of what exactly? It's certainly a clever choice, because Clippy was widely known as the ultra-annoying thing that everybody turned off immediately. Nobody needed it, nobody wanted it. And yet, it was harmless. It's no coincidence that I'm focusing so much on Windows 2000: This was the last Microsoft (desktop) OS that did not betray you. XP's "product activation" was the beginning of the end. As far as I'm aware, this was the first widely deployed software that you did not own but just rented and Microsoft could actually enforce that now. Try installing Windows XP today, using the correct, legit product key that you once bought, and you'll see. It doesn't work anymore. Win2k still does. Office 97 and Clippy still work. My Star Office 3.1 CD, my OS/2 CDs and floppies, MS-DOS, you name it, it all still works. And it works *by design*, unlike XP, which was sabotaged by design. (Yes, yes, sure, you can still get XP to work using some tricks. I know that. That is besides the point. More on that below.) I often lament that I switched to Linux too late (2007), should have done that sooner, but the thing is: During that time, proprietary soft- ware *almost* felt like Free Software, because you could just do what- ever you wanted with it. Maybe it wasn't allowed legally, but you could do it. Yes, you didn't have the source code, which made it much harder, but it was still possible to do a great deal of tweaking and hacking. The whole system felt like it was *your* system. This made it pretty easy to just keep using something like Win2k. And that makes it easy today to view it through those rose-tinted glasses. At the point where we are today, using proprietary software or Free Software is not even a "choice" anymore for me. There is absolutely no way that I'm going to install *anything* on my PC that is hard-wired to the decision making of some company. Microsoft (and Apple and Google and virtually any other company) has direct control over that software, because it is connected to the internet all the time -- assuming it even runs on your machine to begin with. That is so completely unacceptable. I don't even have to make a choice here, no pros and cons to weigh. I don't have to decide that I'm going to use Free Software -- it's just a given. There is no alternative. Of course, Win2k then becomes some glorious thing of the past. Compared to the proprietary software that we have today, *everything* pre-XP feels great. Even Clippy. We have lost this old business model: Buy a program on a CD in a box and then it's yours. And it's much more than just a business model. Now, we live in a dark, depressing dystopia, where none of that exists anymore, everything is rented, everything can be taken away from you at any given point in time, everything can be turned against you. On top of that, it spies on you. This is not what personal computing was like 20-30 years ago. And the darkest, worst, most horrible thing about all this is that I can already hear some people saying: "Yeah, but you can just do $foo and then it works again!" Like the Windows XP thing. I recently re-installed it on one of my old boxes. I got it to work, latest service pack and all that. Yes, I know. But this behavior is just boasting about some of your skills. It's what we nerds love to do. But: By doing this, people legitimize what these companies are doing. Nobody really honestly pushed back on XP, because, you know, FCKGW-RHQQ2-..., yes, cool, you found a little secret and it makes you feel smart. I know that all too well, I was the same. Nobody pushed back on Apple. Nobody will push back on Google when they're going to cripple Android by disallowing installation of software (they call it "sideloading"). If we don't stop being so nerdy and self-centered and, frankly, arro- gant, because we are able to work around some of the restrictions of those companies, then it'll get much, much worse: I guarantee you that the PC platform will be just the same as 2026 Android and iOS some day. They *will* lock that platform down. No more Linux, no more BSD, and Windows and macOS will become the worst nightmare you can imagine. Oh, Linux runs an all the servers now, they can't kill it, you say? Trust me, they will. They will find a way to run it in their datacenters and at the same time stop you from doing it at home (and probably also stop you from running it in *your* datacenter, because hey, have you heard about our cool Instrastructure As A Service product that runs in our cloud?). We must reject these efforts on a fundamental level. But of course, that doesn't make you look smart. It makes you look like some hippie. It, in fact, makes you look *dumb*, because, gosh, don't you know FCKGW? 2025-09-04T18:11:41+00:00 tag:uninformativ.de,2025-09-04:phlog/glad-that-i-know-some-c 2025-09-04 -- I'm glad that I know some C ========================================= I've been writing code in C for about 20 years now. Never as a profes- sional C programmer and I don't dare saying "I know C", because of the many pitfalls. But still, I've been using it for quite a while now and I think that I have a "good enough" grasp of it. There are many reasons why I like it. One of them came up today at work: *Sometimes*, one of our Python scripts would fail with "too many open files". I was able to debug this in a relatively short time thanks to C. I won't go into the details, it's boring. But the thing is: I could quickly write a little debug example in C. And since this is C, it a) is (relatively) low-level and b) (mostly) does exactly what you tell it to. The problem at hand had to do with dealing with file descriptors and I could be pretty sure that nothing in the C library/runtime gets in the way. When an FD is open, then it's open, end of discussion. There is no garbage collection or auto-cleanup or what- ever -- these things exist in other languages and they can make debug- ging hard at times. C is systems programming without anything getting in the way. Yes, it's error-prone and all that, but that's beside the point. My point is that C is a brilliant tool to help you understand what actually goes on behind the scenes. At the same time, it's still high-level enough as to not annoy you (unlike Assembler, for example). I often try to motivate our young interns to pick up C or even Assem- bler, but it's really tough. They're not that much interested. I have to admit, though, that I did not frame C as a tool for "learning" in the past. Maybe I should focus more on that. Maybe I should tell people: "If you learn this language and a bit of systems programming in general, then you will have a better understanding of virtually everything. You can still use your favorite scripting language to make your web apps." 2025-09-03T16:05:36+00:00 tag:uninformativ.de,2025-09-03:phlog/roophloch 2025-09-03 -- ROOPHLOCH 2025 ============================ Here we go! I just walked 3km into the woods, according to the GPS tracker on my Android phone. First of all, the hardest part of this challenge is finding a somewhat secluded spot. The last thing I want to do is talk to people. :-) I'm typing this on my Samsung NC10 Plus netbook, which runs OpenBSD. Let's try to take a photo (with a smartphone). Aha, next problem. There is no Internet here, says the phone. :-) Let's walk some more and put the netbook into suspend again ... Next try. Found another bench. Yes, there are benches here, this isn't some wilderness. But not a soul in sight, which is good. :-) Let's try to get that photo from the phone to the netbook. In theory, I should be able to set the phone to hotspot mode (smartphone acts as WLAN access point and DHCP server) and then transfer the data to a little webserver on the netbook. That worked! Oh dear, photos are so large these days. Makes the netbook swap, because it only has 1 GB of RAM. Ouch! Some fruit fell on my head. I'm trying to upload the photo, but the problem is, I'm too far "off grid". Mobile Internet is extremely slow, can't even connect to my server via SSH. I'll have to get closer to civilization again. A ping to 8.8.8.8 takes 8 seconds. Yes, seconds. Now I get more replies, 21 seconds, 26 seconds, ... brb. Alright, alright, I stand corrected. This is wilderness. Is Mobile Internet even real? Is it a hoax? I'm back in town now, sitting in a park. This has to be good enough. :-) Let's try to upload that photo again. It worked! But I forgot to install lynx on my netbook, I gotta do a quick "pkg_add lynx" in the park. Alright, there you go: gopher://uninformativ.de/I/phlog/2025/2025-09/2025-09-03--roophloch--a.jpg This was a 2 hour outdoor trip. Proofreading this entry one last time before publishing it ... Why does groff not justify the text? Nah, too lazy for that now. Going live in 3, 2, 1, ... _____ Edit at home: Forgot to mention, this is an entry for solderpunk's ROOPHLOCH: gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/announcing-roophloch-2025.txt _____ Edit at home: Maybe I should clarify some things. :-) Writing a phlog entry while sitting on a log in the woods is really weird, and I was rushing it a bit, to be honest. The setup was simple: Netbook + smartphone as a WLAN hotspot. Writing in Vim in an XTerm. All my standard tooling runs locally, like the Atom feed generation. Publishing the post via rsync over SSH. (Why did the netbook swap when doing stuff with that photo? Because I was resizing it from 4624x3472 to 640x480.) 2025-08-29T10:17:25+00:00 tag:uninformativ.de,2025-08-28:phlog/more-august-books 2025-08-28 -- More books in August ================================== This really comes as a surprise to me. Apparently, it takes me about one minute to read one page in a "standard" book. It means that reading for just one hour a day gets me to 420 pages a week -- which is more or less one book. Uh, okay. This is going to get expensive if I want to keep this up. It's really hard for me to believe. As I said before, reading (non-tech) books has always been a very, very slow process for me. But it looks like something has changed ... I enjoy it a lot now, it's relaxing, cozy, entertaining. And often times, I can't stop. After "The Family Across the Street", I got three more books (two of which are already finished by now). The first one was "Annabelle" by Lina Bengtsdotter. I like the Nordic Noir genre in general and this one mostly fits into that category -- ex- cept that it's set in summer, which makes it a bit unusual. It took a while until the story got my attention, there was a long-ish, slow-ish introduction and things didn't really take off somehow. But eventually, it turned into a nice and exciting story. The ending was not what I ex- pected at all, at first I thought it to be unimaginative and "meh" -- but it's actually much darker and more sad (sadder?) than what I thought was going to happen. A nice read overall. There are two more books by Lina Bengtsdotter featuring the same main character. I might get those soon. Next up was "My Darling Daughter" by JP Delaney. This one was surpris- ingly fast-paced right from the start. Not much of an introduction, you jump right in. I needed a moment to get used to the storytelling, be- cause the perspective jumps all the time. "I" and "me" is a different person in almost every chapter. But it works quite well. About one third through, I almost wondered where this is going, you already know so much, what other twists is he going to put into this story? But it just keeps going like that, one surprise after the other. The last third of the book clearly leaves the "Thriller" territory, though. It now turns into a story about legal battle, family drama, and focuses more on sex (which find very boring). It's still an enjoyable story overall (which is why I finished this in three days), but that last part is not *quite* what I was looking for. The last one is "Ostfriesennebel" by Klaus-Peter Wolf. Unlike the oth- ers, this is a German author, no idea if there's a translation. I think I'll have to stretch this one out artificially. Slow things down a bit.