# I am the Watcher. I am your guide through this vast new twtiverse.
# 
# Usage:
#     https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/users              View list of users and latest twt date.
#     https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/twt                View all twts.
#     https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/mentions?uri=:uri  View all mentions for uri.
#     https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/conv/:hash         View all twts for a conversation subject.
# 
# Options:
#     uri     Filter to show a specific users twts.
#     offset  Start index for quey.
#     limit   Count of items to return (going back in time).
# 
# twt range = 1 6434
# self = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://lyse.isobeef.org/twtxt.txt&offset=6134
# next = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://lyse.isobeef.org/twtxt.txt&offset=6234
# prev = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://lyse.isobeef.org/twtxt.txt&offset=6034
And we're back to the regular landscape! Not only in subject but also photo orientation. No more silly portrait. I can't recall it exactly, but I reckon that was one of ~20°C days. The evening sun was really crazy that day, made a great combination with the puddles: https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-04-02/

Sun reflecting in puddles~
@prologic Not sure if the confirmation helps at all. You just condition yourself to immediately press y on a daily basis.

Apart from that, aborting the removal should probably terminate the function with a non-zero exit code, something like return 1.
@movq Same! Another infrastructure apocalypse at work. Who needs reliable shit? Definitely not us.
@doesnm Hahahaha, I heard this one before, but it's brilliant! :-D
@prologic Ta! :-)
Pretty sunset from last weekend: https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-03-30/

Looks like the bird nest in the tree is destroyed by the bushfire any second
@prologic Spring cleanup! That's one way to encourage people to self-host their feeds. :-D

Since I'm only interested in the url metadata field for hashing, I do not keep any comments or metadata for that matter, just the messages themselves. The last time I fetched was probably some time yesterday evening (UTC+2). I cannot tell exactly, because the recorded last fetch timestamp has been overridden with today's by now.

I dumped my new SQLite cache into: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/backup.tar.gz This time maybe even correctly, if you're lucky. I'm not entirely sure. It took me a few attempts (date and time were separated by space instead of T at first, I normalized offsets +00:00 to Z as yarnd does and converted newlines back to U+2028). At least now the simple cross check with the Twtxt Feed Validator does not yield any problems.
And now, let's finish it off with Besigheim's old town. Only when we left, the sun peaked through the clouds. That was a bit unfortunate, but what can you do? It has some nice buildings. https://lyse.isobeef.org/besigheim-2025-03-30/

Besigheim
Today, we had a cleanup day with the scouts. I estimate that we ended up with about half a metric ton of rubbish. Despite the heat it was really great fun.

All the garbage delivered to the municipal building yard
@prologic In all my two Go projects I use modernc.org/sqlite and can't complain. Works great for me.
@david This pink tree I featured in a few shots is a magnolia tree. I haven't noticed any particular smell, it just looks pretty. :-) That's a close-up: https://lyse.isobeef.org/bad-wimpfen-2025-03-28/18.jpg (I only noticed the spider and its web when I reviewed my photos.)
@thecanine Happy to hear that. :-)
The photo series covering old stuff continues. This time, Gundelsheim. Actually, mostly the castle hotel Horneck, I hardly took any photos from the town itself. I really should have, though. Let me just blame… aehm… yeah, the rain! It's totally the rain's fault!! When it started to drizzle, I actually took the first photos, so it's a total lie. https://lyse.isobeef.org/schlosshotel-horneck-in-gundelsheim-2025-03-30/

Magnolia tree and a tower
@arne I'm very glad I only rarely have to deal with .docx & Co. And when I have to, 99% is in read mode only. Even though, I don't think that Markdown is the best choice, I use it on a daily basis. Some things, like links, in reStructuredText are better in my opinion.

Jira just resists to switch to Markdown and forces us to use its silly markup language.

For real typesetting, LaTeX is the way to go. But I very, very rarely do that.
Hirschhorn also offers a nice old town. The castle with all its many buildings up the mountain is very beautiful. This is my absolutely favorite one, it just looks soo great:

Bloody cool building in the Hirschhorn castle

Walking back down the narrow stairs with all the crooked, well-worn steps of different heights and lengths was quite challenging.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/hirschhorn-2025-03-30/
@movq Awwwwww! <3 Thank you, that is now in my collection. :-) The other ones aren't bad either, very nice!
@thecanine My apologies, mate! :-( As @david pointed out, this was definitely not my intent at all.

For the easter egg hunt, I first looked for a hidden image map link on the pixel dog in the right lower corner itself. Maybe one giant pixel just links to somewhere else, I figured. But I couldn't find any and then quickly moved on. Hence, I naturally viewed the HTML source. Because where else would be a good hiding place for easter eggs, right?

Next, I noticed the <font> tags. I thought I had read quite some time ago that they are not an HTML5 thing, but wasn't entirely sure about it. So, I asked the W3C HTML validator. Sure enough. I thought I let you know about the violations. If somebody had found a mistake on my site, I'd love to hear about it, so I could fix it. I'm sorry that my chosen form of report didn't resonate with you all that well. I reckoned you'll also find it a bit funny, but I was clearly very wrong on that.

I actually followed the dog cow link to the video, so I ended up on the easter egg. However, I didn't recognize it as such. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Oh well.

Regarding my message about the browser quirks: I read your answer that you were arguing against the HTML validator findings. Of course, everybody can do with their sites whatever they likes._
@movq Sorry for being completely offtopic, but that's a really cute bird! :-)
A hike to the highest mountain in the Odenwald, the Katzenbuckel, lit. cat hillock. It was very windy and the sun very rarely showed its face, so it was quite chilly. Nice scenery, nevertheless. Surprisingly, this ski-jumping hill is still in operation. I've never expected this in a hundred years, judging by its state. https://lyse.isobeef.org/katzenbuckel-2025-03-29/

Entrance to a ski-jumping hill in a rather questionable state
@arne ;-)
@bender Hahaha, YMMD! :-D
@movq @xuu That sounds like kat! :-)

Is there some Makefile shenanigans going on maybe? $V and $C being swallowed by the Makefile. I fell in that trap again the other day.
@movq Oh yeah, take some pictures when you do. :-)
@bender @eapl.me @xuu @movq Glad you all agree. :-D My SOAP knowledge is extremely rusty, I luckily had not to deal with that crap anymore for quite some years now. I even couldn't remember the XML declaration and had to look it up. ;-)
@movq Yeah, I'm also disappointed each and every time.
Let me introduce you to the much superior version 4 instead: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/twxm4.xml
@thecanine And this is exactly why there are quirks modes in browsers…

I'm actually glad I don't have to deal with all this web shit and work with compilers that hit me in the face when I do something illegal. :-)
@arne Oh no, you are in front of the line!!
Eberbach is nowhere near Bad Wimpfen in comparison, but still has a nice historic old town: https://lyse.isobeef.org/eberbach-2025-03-29/

Timber framed houses
Bad Wimpfen has a pretty cool old town with timber framed houses. Looks really beautiful: https://lyse.isobeef.org/bad-wimpfen-2025-03-28/

Bergfried
@thecanine I found it! This looks like colored easter eggs when squinting.
@kat They all just wanted to be friends with a cool gal like you. ;-) It's sad that putting things openly on the internet just waits to be raided by script kiddies, bots or spammers eventually.
@movq Yeah, like nearly all of them. There is the so called Bannwald, where it typically is not allowed to log, but there's only one in my entire county and I haven't even visted it. I should change that. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bannwald
@movq Hahaha, geil! :-D
@movq Haha, that's cool! :-D
@movq That's really great! I can't tell the difference to the original. :-)
This time, I brought my cam along. We checked out a piece of ex-forest they've cut down. It looks terrible now. :-( At least the spruce resin smell was nice. https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-03-27/

Stacked logs
@eapl.me According to an update of the article, others have suggested the same.

Your explanation seems fitting. I just don't get why people don't use feed readers anymore. Anyway.
@xuu Yeah, it will be delayed. Oh well. That's just the way it is. :-)
@movq Hahaha, that filename! :-D 100 times better than I could ever play.
@xuu If the unread counter becomes negative, wouldn't that mean I have that many more read messages? :-D

@bender You're spot on, it's important to not introduce classical bugs!
@movq Oh dear. :-( Have they fixed it?
@prologic @movq I had a t-shirt with this one or the other decade ago. :-)
"Unread messages: -1": Well, classic off by one error. I gotta have to hunt that down.
@movq That's not very retrocomputing!
@eapl.me Interesting! Two points stood right out to me:

1. Why the hell are e-mail newsletters considered a valid option in the first place? Just offer an Atom feed and be done with it! Especially for a blog of this very type. This doesn't even involve a third party service. Although, in addition he also links to Feedburner, what the fuck!? No e-mail address or the like is needed and subject to being disclosed.

2. When these spam mailers want to prevent resubscribing, then for fuck's sake, why don't they use a hash of the e-mail address (I saw that in yarnd) for that purpose? Storing the e-mail address in clear text after unsubscribing is illegal in my book.
@movq I see, fair point, yeah.
@movq Yikes! I didn't know about about:compat. Crazy!
@xuu Wow, that's a giant graveyard. In my new database I have 16,428 messages as of now. Archive feed support is not yet available, so it's just the sum of all the 36 main feeds.
@david Ah shit, sorry, you're right! :-D
There are 82.108 read statuses, but only 24.421 messages in the cache. In contrast to the cache with the messages, the read statuses are never cleaned up when a feed was unsubscribed from. And the read statuses also contain old style hashes, before we settled on the what we have today. Still a huge difference. Hmm.
Thanks, @movq!

My backing SQLite database with indices is 8.7 MiB in size right now.

The twtxt cache is 7.6 MiB, it uses Python's pickle module. And next to it there is a 16.0 MiB second database with all the read statuses for the old tt. Wow, super inefficient, it shouldn't contain anything else, it's a giant, pickled {"$hash": {"read": True/False}, …}. What the heck, why is it so big?! O_o
@movq You could also just use a tiling window manager. :-) As a bonus, it doesn't waste dead space, the window utilizes the entire screen. To also get rid of panels and stuff, put the window in fullscreen mode.
If I didn't mess this up, 61 feeds reduced down to 36.
I now subscribed to most feeds in my Go tt reimplementation that I already followed with the old Python tt. Previously, I just had a few feeds for testing purposes in my new config. While transfering, I "dropped" heaps of feeds that appeared to be inactive.

This might motivate me to actually "finish" the new client, so that it could become my daily driver. No need to use the old software stack any longer. Let's see how bad this goes.
@movq Yeah, most of the graphical applications are actually KDE programs:

* KMail – e-mail client
* Okular – PDF viewer
* Gwenview – image viewer
* Dolphin – file browser
* KWallet – password manager (I want to check out pass one day. The most annoying thing is that when I copy a password, it says that the password has been modified and asks me whether I want to save the changes. I never do, because the password is still the same. I don't get it.)
* KPatience – card game
* Kdenlive – video editor
* Kleopatra – certificate manager

Qt:

* VLC – video player
* Psi – Jabber client (I happily used Kopete in the past, but that is not supported anymore or so. I don't remember.)
* sqlitebrowser – SQLite browser

Gtk:

* Firefox – web browser
* Quod Libet – music player (I should look for a better alternative. Can't remember why I had to move away from Amarok, was it dead? There was a fork Clementine or so, but I had to drop that for some unknown reason, too.)
* Audacity – audio editor
* GIMP – image editor

These are the things that are open right now or that I could think of. Most other stuff I actually do in the terminal.

In the past™, I used the Python KDE4 bindings. That was really nice. I could pass most stuff directly in the constructor and didn't have to call gazillions of setters improving the experience significantly. If I ever wanted to do GUI programming again, I'd definitely go that route. There are also great Qt bindings for Python if one wanted to avoid the KDE stuff on top. The vast majority I do for myself, though, is either CLI or maybe TUI. A few web shit things, but no GUIs anymore. :-)*
Oh, it's called "unsubscribe".
@movq Oh, right, a type would be good to have! :-D
@movq Where can I join your club? Although, most software I use is decentish in that regard.

I just noted today that JetBrains improv^Wcompletely fucked up their new commit dialog. There's no diff anymore where I would also be able to select which changes to stage. I guess from now on I'm going to exclusively commit from only the shell. No bloody git integration anymore. >:-( This is so useless now, unbelievable.
@kat Pointers can be a bit tricky. I know it took me also quite some time to wrap my head around them. Let my try to explain. It's a pretty simple, yet very powerful concept with many facets to it.

A pointer is an indirection. At a lower level, when you have some chunk of memory, you can have some actual values sitting in there, ready for direct use. A pointer, on the other hand, points to some other location where to look for the values one's actually after. Following that pointer is also called dereferencing the pointer.

I can't come up with a good real-world example, so this poor comparison has to do. It's a bit like you have a book (the real value that is being pointed to) and an ISBN referencing that book (the pointer). So, instead of sending you all these many pages from that book, I could give you just a small tag containing the ISBN. With that small piece of information, you're able to locate the book. Probably a copy of that book and that's where this analogy falls apart.

In contrast to that flawed comparision, it's actually the other way around. Many different pointers can point to the same value. But there are many books (values) and just one ISBN (pointer).

The pointer's target might actually be another pointer. You typically then would follow both of them. There are no limits on how long your pointer chains can become.

One important property of pointers is that they can also point into nothingness, signalling a dead end. This is typically called a null pointer. Following such a null pointer calls for big trouble, it typically crashes your program. Hence, you must never follow any null pointer.

Pointers are important for example in linked lists, trees or graphs. Let's look at a doubly linked list. One entry could be a triple consisting of (actual value, pointer to next entry, pointer to previous entry).

_______________________
/ ________\_______________
↓ ↓ | \
+---+---+---+ +---+---+-|-+ +---+---+-|-+
| 7 | n | x | | 23| n | p | | 42| x | p |
+---+-|-+---+ +---+-|-+---+ +---+---+---+
| ↑ | ↑
\_______/ \_______/

The "x" indicates a null pointer. So, the first element of the doubly linked list with value 7 does not have any reference to a previous element. The same is true for the next element pointer in the last element with value 42.

In the middle element with value 23, both pointers to the next (labeled "n") and previous (labeled "p") elements are pointing to the respective elements.

You can also see that the middle element is pointed to by two pointers. By the "next" pointer in the first element and the "previous" pointer in the last element.

That's it for now. There are heaps ;-) more things to tell about pointers. But it might help you a tiny bit.______________________________________________
@andros @prologic Exactly. The screenshots of the last few days show it in action. But I do not consider it ready for the world yet. @doesnm appears to have a high pain tolerance, though. :-)
@andros You use your real name as login name, too?

@prologic I see this with the scouts. Luckily, not at work. But at work, I'm surrounded by techies.

@movq Oh my goodness! I'm so glad that I don't have to deal with that in my family. But yeah, I guess you're onto something with your theory. This article is also quite horrific. O_o
@movq Wooaah, that is cool! \o/
Hahaha, a bird is singing really load and it sounds almost exactly like a car alarm. Well, it's probably the other way around, the car alarm was modeled after the birdcall. :-)
@eapl.me I looked at the first few puzzles and they are pretty cool so far! I haven't actually implemented any of them, but I'm fairly certain about how I'd solve them properly. I went through some linked reference articles yesterday, they're also really good. I will recommend this to some workmates. :-)
It's extremely surprising to me that younger non-technical people just type in their full name (properly cased first and last name with a space in between) for a technical username in account registration or login forms. I've seen that happening several times in the past few years. The field name is "Benutzername" in German, literally "username". Even adding a placeholder text to signal that they could simply use their nickname in lowercase did not change anything at all. Well, one person used at least an e-mail address.

This wasn't the case six, seven years ago, everybody had some "real" username. Even non-techies. It looks like some "common knowledge" is getting lost. Strange. Very weird. It trips me every time I see it.

Have you experienced something similar?
@doesnm Heck yeah! Worky, worky! \o/
@movq Hahaha, that name is certainly fitting! :-D

Yeah, I should revert that and try to figure out which programs misbehaved. But that's something for future Lyse. 8-) Right now, I just redefine TERM in my Makefile when the USER happens to be me.
Well, some time ago I put this in my ~/.Xdefaults:

URxvt.keysym.Control-Up: \033[1;5A
 URxvt.keysym.Control-Down: \033[1;5B
URxvt.keysym.Control-Left: \033[1;5D
 URxvt.keysym.Control-Right: \033[1;5C

Probably to behave more like XTerm and fix a few other issues I had with other programs. But, it turns out, tcell expects the original sequence: https://github.com/gdamore/tcell/blob/main/terminfo/r/rxvt/term.go#L487

Hmm.~
Hmmm, when I Ctrl+Left to jump a word left, I get 1;5D in my tt2 message text. My TERM is set to rxvt-unicode-256color. In tt, it works just fine. When I change to TERM=xterm-256color, it also works in tt2. I have to read up on that. Maybe even try to capture these sequences and rewrite them.
@david Tada, the reply context is now also shown above. It's slowly coming together and reaching a state where I can actually use this as my daily driver I think. :-)

Reply form in tt2 shows the messages to which a reply is composed
@david Thanks, yes, absolutely! ;-)

I now notice that I should also show the original message(s) to which I reply. That was super useful in the original tt. But one after the other. The mentions are now automatically filled in. \o/
Perfect!

It worked!

I now also implemented basic replying by hitting a as in answering. What's missing is automatically adding mentions in the message text template. That's gonna be a bit more tricky, though.
Righto, now with added basic subject support. Hopefully!
(Back in tt.) Well, it kinda worked. At least appending to the file. But my cache database got screwed up. I do not yet support replies, so the subject and and root hash columns have not been set at all, resulting in a message that is just not shown at all. I gotta do something about that next. The good thing is, though, after simply fixing the two columns the message appeared on screen.
(The previous message was written with tt.) Now, this is the second attempt in tt2.

Let's see!
Dang it, first attempt failed:

Composing a new message in tt2

Somehow, my local feed cannot be opened to append to. I reckon, I have to resolve the tilde first:

Opening feed file failed: no such file or directory
@kat Allegedly, there's at least a CLI for that, yarnc. I neither used nor looked at it, though.
@movq Oh for sure, I fully agree!
@eapl.me Cool!

Proposal 3 (https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/twtxt.dev/issues/18#issuecomment-19215) has the "advantage", that you do not have to "mention" the original author if the thread slightly diverges. It seems to be a thing here that conversations are typically very flat instead of trees. Hence, and despite being a tree hugger, I voted for 3 being my favorite one, then 2, 1 and finally 4.

All proposals still need more work to clarify the details and edge cases in my opinion before they can be implemented.
@kat It's there, but yarnd's markdown library probably thinks that it's some broken HTML and swallows it, not sure.

Heart shows up fine in tt
@thecanine Yeah, nobody will ever find that setting.
@movq ]:-> Ah, just that one line scrolls horizontally, not the entire screen.
@thecanine It suits your site very well, but I find this font hard to read. In any case, keep on pixeling.
@movq Haha! Yeah, I really don't know if that's the best translation.
@xuu How's traveling the stars going? :-)
@movq :-D

In the meantime, I tried to add English subtitles, so the international audience has a chance of enjoying some of them, too. There are a bunch of puns, so translations don't work at that great.

I went to an exhibition of my fine arts teacher who passed away last year. He was a pretty cool dude and good teacher. I reckon I had him in 7th and probably also 8th grade. His Schelme (imps) were very famous here in this county and presumably well beyond.

Unfortunately, picture frame glas doesn't mix all that great with a fairly dark light and my camera. So, sorry in adavance for the poor quality. Anyway, I photographed a few funny paintings. Watch out, it may contain saucy contents: https://lyse.isobeef.org/siegfried-wagner-farrenstall-2025-03-15/.
@movq Hahaha, nice! :-D I had to check the solution to get it. It's a good one.
Ich war auf der Ausstellung meines letztes Jahr verstorbenen BK-Lehrers. Er war ein ziemlich cooler Typ und guter Lehrer. Wenn ich mich recht erinnere, müsste ich ihn in der 7. und vermutlich auch 8. Klasse gehabt haben. Seine Schelme waren hier im Landkreis und vermutlich darüber hinaus weit bekannt.

Bilderrahmenglas in Verbindung mit vergleichsweise dunkler Beleuchtung gibt leider keine gute Kombination mit meiner Kamera ab. Vorab entschuldige ich mich bereits für die zu wünschen übrig lassende Qualität. Nichtsdestotrotz habe ich ein paar witzige Bilder abfotografiert. Obacht, kann mitunter anzüglichen Inhalt enthalten: https://lyse.isobeef.org/siegfried-wagner-farrenstall-2025-03-15/

Drei Eichhörnchen und ein Kind im bunten Blätterwald
Hahaha, ein Klassiker herrlich nachgespielt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkNuWG_J544 Unglaublich, kann man sich bei uns heutzutage überhaupt nicht mehr vorstellen.
@eapl.me Yes, I believe so.
That's cool, solar eclipse on the moon: https://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflyspace/54386246629/in/album-72177720313239766/
@movq @prologic Dito. Even though I only had four day weeks and three days of weekend the last month, I feel very exhausted as well. Back to five days next week. :-(
@movq That's cool! I just can't justify the amount of space it permanently takes. But it fits nicely with the other gauges you have. And with that in mind, it actually is super tiny.

@eapl.me Interesting, I wasn't aware that other parts of the world consider them to be a German thing :-)
@arne Das ist ein recht zuverlässiger Wetterbericht. Wenn die Bauern mit ihren Güllefässern hier vorbeifahren, weiß ich sofort, dass Regen angekündigt ist. :-)

Ha, das Lied gefällt mir außerordentlich gut! \o/ Mit Abstand das beste Güllelied. Ich kenn noch ein paar schwäbische, aber die gehen lang nicht so ab wie dieses hier.
@eapl.me @bender @prologic Not including a photo was a stupid move, sorry. There you go:

Desk calendar highlighting the current date with a red "today window"

This particular one is 95mm wide and 185mm high. Fairly compact.

I can only use it figure out distances to other dates and to do some basic calendar math. I'm not able to actually schedule anything. But I grew up with a month calendar like you have there where all appointments of the entire family was recorded.

By far most of my paper use is drawing random stuff on scratch paper during meetings. :-D

Random stuff drawn in interesting meetings
@arne Ah, witzige Geschichte! Ich fürchte, der Eberhardt wird sich nun bei mir auch festsetzen. ;-)
I got a small desk calendar as advertising gift. It shows three months at once. I'm using this thing since the beginning of this year and I have to say that it turned out to be super useful. I'm happily surprised.

It sits on my desk next to my rightmost monitor. I've set it up so that I can see the last, current and next months. Each morning, I advance the "today window" or whatever its proper name is. This gives me a sense of what date we have today and which I will have forgotten half a minute later already. At most. However, it's easily at hand by turning my head just a few degrees.

With the last month still showing, I had several occasions so far where a date in the past popped up in a meeting. I could easily tell when something happened, how long ago that was. Or how many days or weeks are left until we have to deliver something, etc.

In hindsight, this is absolutely no surprise at all. But I still find it fascinating. I'm now actually wondering why I never had something like that before. How could I live without that thing? Sure, I pulled up a calendar on my computer, ncal -w3 or so. But I always hated the inverted ncal output, necessary for showing week numbers, though. Having a paper calander right next to my screen at all times is sooooo much more handy.

So, do yourself a favor and think about whether such a desk calendar might be useful to you.

The only annoying thing is that the "today window" moves too easily. It slips down by its own. I reckon it wants me to regularly interact with it, so that I memorize the current date.
@andros If something fits in a CSV file, it typically doesn't require a database. I agree with that. Depending on the application, more complicated queries might benefit from a database, though. I don't know awk very well, but I could imagine that grep, sed and cut reach their CSV processing limits rather quickly when you have to deal with escaped (multiline) fields.

I only very rarely have to deal with CSV files or databases in my day to day life. Maybe, these classic Unix tools offer some tricks I'm not aware of. When I have some more complicated CSV input, I generally reach for Python.
@eapl.me @arne @andros Thanks mates!

Hmmm, Eberhardt. Ist das eine plattdeutsche Sache? Dass ich den flinken Nagern so lang zuschauen konnte, war ein seltener Glücksfall. Normalerweise sind die nach fünf oder spätestens zehn Minuten wieder aus dem Sichtfeld verschwunden.