… 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 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 Aaaaaaaahhhhhhh! 🙈🙈🙈 What a mess …

@mckinley@mckinley.cc Wow, nice. 😍

@mckinley 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 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. 😳

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 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 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.