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dgelessus

@dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
11 followers 0 following 476 posts

person who computers. Casual disassembler of data formats. Standards and specifications enjoyer. Using Python for everything, even if it's a bad idea. ^_^ 🌉 bridged from ⁂ mastodon.social/@dgelessus, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026
okay, thanks for keeping me informed!.
Screenshot of the upper left corner of the GitHub "Notifications" page, showing an info banner that reads "This is a test message for the global banner. [link] Review this update"
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026
TIL: Python's sort/sorted with reverse=True isn't always the same as simply reversing the sorted list! If some of the elements are equal according to the sort key, then reverse=True preserves the relative order of those elements, where reversing the sorted list would reverse the equal elements too.
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026
A "fun" Secure Boot problem today: Had a laptop with an older Ubuntu install and booted it off a current Debian live USB. After I did that, it refused to load the installed GRUB, which worked fine before! I assume the Debian live system updated some list so the old GRUB is now considered unsafe?
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/09/2026
Dropbox will disallow users under 18, starting in 2027. Huh. Not clear if this also applies to users without an accout who just want to download a public file, but I think it does? This seems... unusual. www.dropbox.com/en/terms2026
dropbox.com
2026 Terms of Service - Dropbox
2026 Terms of Service - Dropbox
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/09/2026
This went around as a joke a while ago, but apparently there's a real command called "clit" in many Linux distros. It stands for "convert .LIT" and absolutely nothing else, mhm. manpages.debian.org/trixie/convlit/…
Screenshot of a tweet by user "anna" @meowkoteeq:
"
devs naming an app:

macOS: Swoomp

Windows: Internet Manager 6 Extreme

Linux: klitoris
"
7:06 AM · Apr 21, 2026
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026
thanks, random Wikipedia editor. I might have been confused about the existence of Luxembourg otherwise en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_No…
Wikipedia screenshot: "the following countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.". In that list, "Luxembourg" is the only country name that has a link.
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026
Protip: When you print a string variable for debugging, use a printing mode that escapes special characters, like Python's repr. If the language doesn't have that, at least put brackets or quotes around the string value! Saves a lot of confusion when you see something like: ]RROR: [hello] != [hello
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026
So apparently if you're in the Mastodon web interface and press the L key, it focuses... something at the absolute bottom of the page, making it load more and more of the infinite scrollback, *repeatedly forever*. Which can be useful! I'm just a little surprised that they have a built-in DoS key.
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2026
Committing generated code to version control is pretty cool actually, because it makes it easy to see how your changes to the code generator are affecting the output
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/09/2026
It's so unsatisfying that even though C has conditional compilation, you basically can't do feature detection with it. You don't get reflection, because the preprocessor isn't really part of the language, and roughly none of the standards-guaranteed macros tell you the things you want to test for.
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026
The French word for "peanuts" is "arachides", which means that every time I look at the list of ingredients for French chocolate I will go "hey look there's spiders in it"
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026
[The Message from Deep Space, act 3] Couldn't the aliens be more consistent with their math syntax? They start off with postfix notation for arithmetic, but switch to infix for... everything else, including relational/logical operators! And that equality operator! Aliens, you can't just use […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026
* Applications 36 GB * Desktop 1 GB * Documents 9 GB * Downloads 860 GB * Music 23 GB * Pictures 17 GB someone please help me budget this, my home folder is dying
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/08/2026
soooo is it safe/a good idea to monkey-patch Python standard library classes/instances? I know the more robust solution is to write a wrapper class. But it's so inconvenient to write a delegating wrapper just to override one method, when you can just monkey-patch it in a couple of lines
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026
TIL that the zlib module in the Python stdlib is technically still an optional module, meaning that you're allowed to build CPython without linking against zlib and it will mostly work. I would've expected zlib to be a required dependency by now!
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2026
I'm implementing a simple file type auto-detector for a tool. Doesn't need to be super reliable - it's just a convenience feature to auto-pre-fill a file type dropdown, so even if it only works 80 % of the time, it's a usability improvement. Still, I thought I'd check how proper systems do this.
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2026
I love how Git just lets you use random things as remotes. Sure, a USB drive can be a Git host for your computer and your phone, why not. Just like Linus intended!
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/08/2026
> base64 > look inside > ASCII
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026
For some reason, macOS Quick Look doesn't want to keep a PDF open at midnight? Exactly at 00:00:00, the Quick Look window will reload and jump back to the first page of the PDF. This has caught me off-guard several times now, because apparently I like previewing PDFs at midnight?
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026
USB-C has been out for more than 10 years now and I still haven't gotten comfortable with being able to plug a laptop charger into a phone or vice versa. It feels SO WEIRD that you can plug a phone into an absolute chonker of a charger and it just... charges fast instead of frying and catching fire
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026
me: *enters username on website* website: "Do you want me to remember that?" me: "nah I'm fine thanks" *enters password* website: "Want me to remember the password?" me: "that would be pointless now, no?" website: "Perhaps you want to set up a passkey on this device?" me: "take a hint will ya?"
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/08/2026
It is deeply unpleasant to see the words "happy eyeballs glue" next to each other. Couldn't you have called it *anythiing else*? searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/n…
searchfox.org
netwerk/protocol/http/happy_eyeballs_glue - mozsearch
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/08/2026
While trying to build Firefox from source (in a slightly weird way), the build ran for hours and then failed in a component called "LUL". Feels like I'm being trolled (apparenly it stands for "Lightweight Unwind Library") searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/t…
searchfox.org
LulMain.h - mozsearch
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/08/2026
this sounds like an entirely believable modded Minecraft tool tier progression en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(unit)…
Screenshot of a Wikipedia table with 2 columns (and no visible headings):
"Nylon 6: 2–4"
"Hemp fibre: 35"
"Aluminium: 69"
"Tooth enamel: 83"
"Copper: 117"
"Structural steel: 200"
"Diamond: 1220"
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/07/2026
Maven Central/Sonatype is apparently considering a process for emergency security releases for packages where a regular release isn't possible. A trusted third party would then be allowed to publish an emergency release for a package they don't own. central.sonatype.org/policies/care-…
central.sonatype.org
Draft Central Approved Remediation for Emergencies - CARE
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026
memory-safe languages aren't as much fun when they stop being memory-safe :( This message brought to you by me debugging rare native crashes in a Python/Qt application. At least Python gives me stack traces for native crashes! Except the ones I get here don't make much sense...
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/07/2026
today I did an MTF transform! ... I mean I implemented a move-to-front transform, as used in data compression algorithms like bzip2. No idea what you were thinking of
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2026
RE: fosstodon.org/@pypi/116964090713548… Amazing that PyPI releases were not-quite-immutable until now *and* that nobody ever abused it! Good to see it fixed. (I remember realizing at some point "huh, you *could* do that!" and expected it to be exploited already, but apparently not!)
fosstodon.org
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/07/2026
Writing a custom text stream class in Python. Just spent, like, 2 hours thinking about how to implement universal newlines (it's way harder than you think at first). Then I figured I could also just... not. The stdlib's own io.StringIO defaults to no newline translation too. It'll be fine. I hope.
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Reposted by dgelessus
Amber :neodog_box: @puppygirlhornypost2.transfem.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/07/2026
it's either this or another .shitass directory in your home folder ​:harold:​ #shitpost
one of those kid shape toys showing a cylindrical piece. the piece is captioned "cache, databases, cookies, app storage" and the container is captioned "that's right it goes in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME"
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/07/2026
The great thing about working on an unpublished codebase: you can just go ahead and fix your bad naming choices and code structure, without worrying about breaking downstream users!
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/07/2026
epicenter, n. The act of pressing the Enter key in a theatrical manner. #UxbridgeEnglishDictionary
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/07/2026
I'm building a small GUI with a couple of text fields and such. Obviously, the user should be able to switch between them using the Tab key. One of the inputs is a code editor. Obviously, the user should be able to press Tab to indent code. Problem: How to let the user "tab away" from the editor?
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/07/2026
you know, I'd be a lot more okay with SMR hard drives if they were honest about it. There are enough cases where I don't care that writing a few GB takes 5 minutes longer! But please just *tell me* that you're not done! Don't artificially stop the activity LED while still very audibly writing stuff!
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/07/2026
The upcoming VLC 4 has a screen titled "🏠️ Home", and they translated it to German as "🏠️ Pos 1"... because that's the name of the Home key on German keyboards 😭
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/07/2026
Amazing technical achievement from Apple: the latest incremental iOS update is somehow twice as large as the full update/restore image! For my particular iPhone, the over-the-air patch from iOS 26.5 to 26.5.2 is 20.44 GB, whereas the full download via the computer is only 10.71 GB.
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/06/2026
codify /ˈkɒdɪfaɪ/, n. (transitive or intransitive) To turn (so or sth.) into a codfish. mastodon.social/@dgelessus/11523977… #UxbridgeEnglishDictionary
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/06/2026
pseudocode /ˈsuːdoʊkoʊd/, n. (US) Code that runs as the superuser after being started by an unprivileged user on a Unix system. #UxbridgeEnglishDictionary
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/06/2026
Writing a small hex editor widget and was excited to use the Unicode "Control Pictures" to represent the ASCII control characters. But sadly, the default Windows monospace font doesn't have these symbols, so they mess up the uniform line heights :( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_Pictu…
Wikipedia's table for the Unicode "Control Pictures" block, showing code points U+2400 through U+2429, which are single symbols for each of the ASCII control character names: "NUL", "SOH", "STX", "ETX", "EOT", etc. (followed by a few other symbols that also stand for control characters, but don't fit the pattern)
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/06/2026
*slaps roof of Rust toolchain cross-build* this bad boi can fit so many rebuilds of the same library
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/06/2026
sometimes I think about the YouTube video "You're watching YouTube" uploaded by YouTube, the official YouTube channel of YouTube. (At one point, I got shown this video in an ad slot, because I guess they were somehow out of advertisers in that particular moment?) youtu.be/neeJyW3f1zY
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/06/2026
Oh, we hit RFC 10000 some time in the last few days! Well, actually RFC 10008, thanks to them not always being published in numerical order. www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc10008 mastodon.social/@dgelessus/11633697…
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/06/2026
they call it "cross compiling" because you will be very cross when trying to do it
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/06/2026
Today's computer "fun": A script extracts some executables from a ZIP file, and the executables then fail to run, because they don't have execute permission set. On Windows. Yes, Windows ACLs support "execute" as a separate permission, and an .exe without that permission really cannot be executed!
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/06/2026
TIL that GCC includes a COBOL compiler since last year? Contributed by the company behind OpenLDAP?? gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcobol/gcobo…
gcc.gnu.org
GCOBOL(1) (gcc cobol compiler)
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/06/2026
Achievement unlocked: fixed an old broken HDD by whacking it a few times. Literally.
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/06/2026
["not what I'm called" meme format]

sys-apps/portage: "hey guys"
guys, pointing: "PORRIDGE"
sys-apps/portage: "NOT WHAT I'M CALLED"
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/05/2026
The x32 ABI just doesn't want to die, does it? Every time someone suggests "let's be real, nobody actually uses x32 anymore" a couple of people respond "no, surprisingly, x32 distros and users are still quite real" lore.kernel.org/lkml/20260523093734…
lore.kernel.org
[PATCH] x86: Start removing X86_X32_ABI - Sebastian Andrzej Siewior
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/05/2026
Who decided that the file extension for C headers should be .h, which sorts alphabetically after .c, making every C code diff hard to read from top to bottom :( They should have chosen .b instead, for "before file". Surely that wouldn't conflict with any other programming language whatsoever
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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/05/2026
The Minecraft Wiki article for Crying Obsidian can be improved significantly by removing every occurrence of the word "obsidian"
A wiki article section "History", subsection "Development", containing a table:
"February 23, 2011 - Jeb states he would like to add crying as a block.";
"March 30, 2011 - Jeb states that crying would act as a way of setting a respawn point. The idea would later be discarded in favor of beds.[3]";
"April 15, 2011 - Jeb states that the grass edge tile has replaced the crying in the texture file.";
"February 9, 2012 - Jeb states that he will bring back crying as soon as he's made preparations for more texture space.";
"December 3, 2019 - Maria Lemón notes that many players suggest implementing crying alongside new Nether features."Another wiki table, labeled "29w09a":
[Crying Obsidian icon] "Added crying.";
"Crying is currently obtainable only through bartering.";
"Crying has no function.";
"Crying produces a light level of 10.";
"Crying can be harvested with any pickaxe."Thumbnails of two Minecraft screenshots showing Crying Obsidian blocks. The image descriptions are "Crying in the overworld." and "Crying with programmer art textures.".
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