iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 26/09/2026

I've been working on a presentation that uses #CoolRetroTerm to emulate a #vt220, and re-tooling all my editor and shell and #fzf stuff to fit those limitations. And you know what? It's kind of surprisingly modern and comfortable. I feel like I spent the 90s […] [Original post on teh.entar.net]

An fzf invocation on a cool-retro-term terminal in amber monochrome, showing an ascii-art rendition of Peter Weinberger's infamous portrait from his Bell Labs ID.

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

So the #TimeWarrior web site has this image in its banner, in a file named "swatch". But nothing on the site gives me any hint as to how to get `timew` to actually do anything like this. Is it a third-party plugin? Is it just a set of options people keep […] [Original post on teh.entar.net]

A cool looking week view with coloured blocks marking out what was done when, with sums on the right. It's all done in a terminal with plain ASCII text and ANSI colour codes.

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 19/06/2026

I'm still tinkering with the symbology, and one of my constraints is that it not rely on colour to convey information. Everything on the legend needs to have a distinct visual pattern even in greyscale. #cycling #london #ealing #mapping #osm #gis

A map of Acton and Brentford, with cycle routes marked in an alternating check stripe pattern, except where the route would force you to "take the lane" on a designated road. Footpaths are dotted lines, cycleways are solid lines, mixing with limited traffic (bus lanes, service roads, contraflows, etc) are dashed, and mixing with pedestrians is a dotted line with periodic dashes.

A map of Hanwell, central Ealing and Northfields, with cycle routes marked in an alternating check stripe pattern, except where the route would force you to "take the lane" on a designated road. Footpaths are dotted lines, cycleways are solid lines, mixing with limited traffic (bus lanes, service roads, contraflows, etc) are dashed, and mixing with pedestrians is a dotted line with periodic dashes.

A map of Southall and Greenford, with cycle routes marked in an alternating check stripe pattern, except where the route would force you to "take the lane" on a designated road. Footpaths are dotted lines, cycleways are solid lines, mixing with limited traffic (bus lanes, service roads, contraflows, etc) are dashed, and mixing with pedestrians is a dotted line with periodic dashes.

A map of Northolt and Perivale, with cycle routes marked in an alternating check stripe pattern, except where the route would force you to "take the lane" on a designated road. Footpaths are dotted lines, cycleways are solid lines, mixing with limited traffic (bus lanes, service roads, contraflows, etc) are dashed, and mixing with pedestrians is a dotted line with periodic dashes.

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 12/06/2026

Couldn't happen to a nicer group of corpos.

Outages Happening Right Now
EpubPub
began 21 minutes ago
Chub AI
began 23 minutes ago
Cloudflare
began 29 minutes ago
Oculus
began 42 minutes ago
Google
began 45 minutes ago
TikTok
began 1 hour ago
X (Twitter)
began 1 hour ago
WhatsApp
began 1 hour ago
Meta Threads
began 1 hour ago
Facebook Messenger
began 1 hour ago

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 23/05/2026

I'd like to thank #UCL for not only giving out Bicentennial Biscuits, but also this commemorative coin for my personally surviving 200 years of University. #Graduation

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 15/05/2026

I am unreasonably proud of the `$PS1` prompt I wrote up on permacomputing.net/spacehobo It does a lot of dynamic display of information only if it's relevant, using some tricks to avoid subprocesses (which would step on `$?` among other things). This […] [Original post on teh.entar.net]

$A shell window showing my coloured dynamic prompt. The text contains (apologies for the ascii art logo toward the end): ``` root(nick)@~# false (1)root(nick)@~# logout (1)~$ vi .bash_aliases [1]+ Stopped nvim .bash_aliases (148)[1]~$ jobs [1]+ Stopped nvim .bash_aliases [1]~$ fg nvim .bash_aliases ~$ rsync -azvP .bash_aliases eik.permacomputing.net: sending incremental file list .bash_aliases 2,364 100% 1.59MB/s 0:00:00 (xfr#1, to-chk=0/1) sent 634 bytes received 59 bytes 277.20 bytes/sec total size is 2,364 speedup is 3.41 ~$ ssh eik.permacomputing.net (_) | Use% Mounted on Avail ___ _| | __ 54% / 2.4G / _ \ | |/ / 1% /tmp 247M | __/ | < 51% /var 2.9G \___|_|_|\_\ 4% /home 6.0G up 6 days, 16 hours, 11 minutes Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie) that's no moon, it's a space station! spacehobo@eik:~$ cd permacomputing/ spacehobo@eik:~/permacomputing{main}$ debian_chroot="It works" (It works)spacehobo@eik:~/permacomputing{main}$ ```$

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 11/05/2026

2027 is going to be the Daft Punkiest year for the Piccadilly line.

The new front of next year's piccadilly trains, which includes an LED strip instead of circular headlamps, which make the thing look like a Daft Punk helmet. It's on display at the Design Museum in Kensington.

the word "Piccadilly" done in the Daft Punk font to resemble one of their albums.

An outdoor photo of Northfield Depot, with one of the new trains on a siding in the shade. It looks less futuristic somehow, amidst the weeds and overgrowth.

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 08/05/2026

At one point I found a sort of combination monaspace nerd font, that mainly used Xenon but had different monaspace sub-fonts for different styles (bold, italic, etc). I really liked this, and used it for a few years before some of the quirks of its outdated […] [Original post on teh.entar.net]

A screenshot of neovim running in a remote tmux window, illustrating the futuristic angular bold reserved words of the code displayed, as well as the handwritten italic style of the comments.

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 08/05/2026

I used to have a very short foot.ini, but then I decided to override the default gruvbox theme

A shell session with beautiful type and retro colours, catting the file for the foot terminal's configuration. The text is as follows:

dpi-aware=no
font=Monaspace Argon NF:size=12
font-bold=Monaspace Krypton NF:style=Bold:size=12
font-italic=Monaspace Radon NF:style=Italic:size=12
font-bold-italic=Monaspace Radon NF:style=Bold Italic:size=12

#include=/usr/share/foot/themes/gruvbox-dark
[colors]

# Gruvbox material medium
background=282828
foreground=d4be98

regular0=3c3836
regular1=ea6962
regular2=a9b665
regular3=d8a657
regular4=7daea3
regular5=d3869b
regular6=89b482
regular7=d4be98

bright0=3c3836
bright1=ea6962
bright2=a9b665
bright3=d8a657
bright4=7daea3
bright5=d3869b
bright6=89b482
bright7=d4be98

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 30/04/2026

Euston is the most station of all time.

A photo of the overly broad siding next to platform 16 at Euston Station. It's a giant concrete box with spindly cable runs hung down nearly half the height from the ceiling, but also plastic bags with drainage hoses attached to large sections of the steel-and-concrete ceiling. The middle bag is safety yellow and has the word "SAFETY" written on it in inverse black text.

The whole thing is a waste of space designed by people who thought that driving a few dozen people to their trains was more important than making sure tens of thousands of people per hour can effectively make it through the most important station for trains to the northwest.

We tore down a gorgeous Georgian building for this rot.

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 30/03/2026

Good morning. It is only 8AM UTC on Rainy Fascist Island, and already solar power is producing more electricity than fossil fuels. grid.iamkate.com

A colourful ring chart from grid.iamkate.com showing the following generation mix:

9.7% fossil fuels
Gas 3.65GW 9.7%
67.9% renewables
Solar 3.86GW 10.2%
Wind 21.22GW 56.3%
Hydroelectric 0.51GW 1.4%
16.1% other sources
Nuclear 4.79GW 12.7%
Biomass 1.28GW 3.4%

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 06/03/2026

Of course I only realised a day later that this reaction image I'd made for this sort of situation actually had a name I could trivially have searched for.

A close-up shot of Sean Connery and some of the crew on the bridge of the Red October, captioned "Give me a Yike, Vasily. One Yike only, please."

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 02/02/2026

@pikesley Best give them a nice book to read, for their troubles.

The cover of a mythical Penguin Books edition (from the "travel and leisure" category) of a book entitled "Your Joke is Factually Incorrect" with the subtitle "A guide to dying alone."

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 24/01/2026

openai.com/index/scaling-postgresql ← in which our OpEnAi brainiacs tell us that the best way to scale postgresql is to...not scale it, and just replace it with subscription services. Lol.

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 22/01/2026

In IRC, @june posted Unicode ba gua sets in response to some octal chatter, and i promised to show this notation i came up with 15 years ago for a fictional setting. It captures the shape your fingers trace when setting octal values on console switches.

a notebook with two pens. the page shows the digits 0 through 7 in decimal, then their binary representation, then a horizontal like for each with the ones represented as vertical lines off it, then as hasty more dynamic approximations of the previous shapes m

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 19/01/2026

Went into a Vodaphone shop to get @neale a pay-as-you-go SIM for a week, and they had this advert up on the wall. I don't think there is a better depiction of corporate social media than this.

An ad under the heading "Time to buy and enjoy". It is a poster with the text "THE FUN NEVER ENDS WITH UNLIMITED SOCIAL MEDIA from just £10/month on VOXI Mobile". The artwork shows two mobile phones propped up in front of two brains floating in bibbling jars of clear liquid. One is lit orange from beneath, and the other green.

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 28/12/2025

@drahsturgis Did you ever cover this anti-eugenics version of dracula on your show or in your classes?

a book in front of a christmas tree.. it is power of darkness: the unique version of dracula

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 21/12/2025

The #solstice will be just before sundown here in London.

a screenshot of a suntimes app for London around noon on the solstice

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 10/12/2025

@evan I mean, I have a subscription feed and I play from oldest to newest. The #AntennaPodEcho says more about the release schedule/runtime of the podcasts I subscribe to (although AHT is one where I use the @AntennaPod queue filters to avoid reruns).

The AntennaPod "Echo" summarising my top five podcasts in 2025. It has the "album art" for the top 5 podcasts and says:

"My favorite podcasts. 2025.

1. RISK!
2. TRASHFUTURE
3. Throughline
4. American History Tellers
5. You're Wrong About.

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 18/11/2025

Once again I am looking for replacement builders' gloves for cycling, and @duckduckgo is giving me some grim sci-fi zombie emperor fanfic.

A duckduckgo search for "Showa 306" returning a summary answer of "2231 AD", which would be correct had the Showa Emperor ruled Japan for 306 years, but um...

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 16/11/2025

Wow hey apparently #FreeBSD has 3D-accelerated #UUCP via their fancy new desktop-oriented installer?

A screenshot from a video showing a desk recording setup with microphone, laptop, and a leather-bound notebook with fountain pen. overlaid is a text-mode screen capture of the FreeBSD Installer with a text-based menu reading:

|Desktop|
Select users to add to the "video" group for 3D acceleration.

markp Mark
Root Charlie &
uucp UUCP pseudo-user

There is an X next to markp.

Beneath is a shell reading "root@:/ # reboot"

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 06/11/2025

This is what I hear when people gasp about how heavy my bicycle is compared to theirs. #BikeTootler

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 28/10/2025

Another amazing find by @larsbrinkhoff is this #LAP6 source code printout: bitsavers.org/pdf/washingtonUnivers… It was good to see probably the most hardcore #LINC program out there in its original source form […] [Original post on teh.entar.net]

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 22/10/2025

@cdamian I am saw-ET-in-cinemas-as-a-kid years old.

The scene from Spielberg's E.T. where Elliot is riding a bicycle on a two-lane road with a milk crate on the front carrying the eponymous ET alien wrapped in a muslin blanket and looking skyward. Behind Elliot's bicycle are his older brother and his friends on BMX bikes, riding furiously behind him. Elliott wears a red hoodie, and the older riders are in greys with occasional flashes of red.

The only headwear pictured is hoodies, trucker hats and headphones.

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2025

Wow, I just dug up my old #ZigZag (www.nongnu.org/gzz/gi/gi.html) diskette. I was at one of Roger Gregory's house parties in the Presidio, and #TedNelson demonstrated this software on a 486 resting on the floor. He then handed out these diskettes to […] [Original post on teh.entar.net]

The instruction sheet unfolded to show text in triangular quadrants. It's rubbish for OCR due to the weird diagonal boundaries, but there are keystroke guides for things like reassigning axes, connecting cells, breaking conditions, making new dimensions, etc.

The summary says "ZigZag space consists of multidimensional lists, viewable (currently) in two dimensions at a time, as rows and columns on the screen. What you can do with this is rather surprising. you can build spreadsheets and outlines and schedules, with fine-grained connections not previously convenient. You can build menus for Unix or DOS macros and their options, and lots of things we haven't had time to do yet. We propose this as a new rational space for the internals of computerdom, for new kinds of data, for new PDAs and phones. Plus you can use game controllers for its 2 windows. Enjoy."

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2025

My #RetroComputing exhibit about the #LINC is about to open at the #UCL Urban Room for the next two months. www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/events/2025/…

a poster for an exhibition at the UCL Urban Room in front of a picture window, through which one can see exhibits on tables including a replica computer panel from 1962.

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2025

ZOMG I actually have a LINC front panel finally.

A view from above and to the right of a pale blue rendered flat panel of some imaginary material, with squares and circles punched out, and text inlaid saying things like "ACCUMULATOR" and "INSTRUCTION LOCATION" and "MEMORY ADDRESS" and "LEFT SWITCHES".

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 27/07/2025

Oh yeah, I use ChachiPT: I look at a photo of Scott Baio every time someone posts LLM-generated drek, and laugh at both him and the slop.

An image from the opening credits to Happy Days, which depicts a jukebox's turntable from above, with a cutout circle showing a very young Scott Baio in an orange sleeveless shirt, titled in yellow lettering "also starring Scott Baio as Chachi".

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 26/07/2025

As with all EnGaGeMeNt, this is certainly a double-edged sword. People pass screenshots around to share wit, but also to dunk, and loads of people finding original threads can be a massive pain as this person discovered.

A...tumblr thread, I think? There's conflicting scrollbars and it says "3/7" in a little lozenge at the top. Who knows how many layers of screenshotting this thing has survived.

insane-tomato posts: "Trick or Yeet!" I shout to the children when I open the door. "Yeet?" one says confusidly. I shrug. "Yeet it is." I throw the child.

technicallyoneofakind replies: Not Halloween but, okay.

insane-tomato replies: okay you stick of unsalted butter i made this on halloween but everyone just likes to reblog it for some reason

The bottom says "Source: insane-tomato" for some reason.

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 24/07/2025

This floated past a meme channel I idle in, and it reminds me that I fought hard against this in the 2000s. At every company I worked in, or every conference I'd participate in, they'd contract out to someone who would produce shirts like these. By my last job […] [Original post on teh.entar.net]

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Space Hobo @spacehobo.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy · 06/07/2025

I usually only ever post images of me from behind. That way it's clearly me: if you know you know, but nobody will use my face for whatever nefarious One Ealing/Reform Party agitprop they always seem to be up to. Mrs. Hobo once took a photo of me walking in […] [Original post on teh.entar.net]

A watercolour painting of a cloudy sky with occasional patches of blue. The bottom third is a green field, seemingly structured in some kind of rows, with a brown area to the right middle ground. Bare trees dot the horizon.

In the foreground is a white man in black shoes, trousers, flat cap and calf-length overcoat, sporting a yellow scarf and wire-framed spectacles. He is walking away from the viewer, hands in pockets, his head turned to look at something just left of frame, so that you can see his ear and cheekbones but little else.

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