Dr. Friedrich von Never

Engineer, programmer, gentleman. Cosmic revenant. JetBrains Rider tech lead.

Dr. Friedrich von Never boosted:
The FreeDOS Projectfreedosproject@fosstodon.org
2025-06-30

On June 29, 1994, I announced what turned into the FreeDOS Project.

That's 31 years ago today! And I thought what better way to celebrate the anniversary than by showing how to install FreeDOS.

We released FreeDOS 1.4 in April, so it's been out for a while. If you haven't installed 1.4 yet, here's what it looks like:

youtu.be/4H0TWZocJZY

Dr. Friedrich von Never boosted:
2025-06-20
Is it just me or is GitHub going “we will not maintain the single most used action ever” a red flag for the continued investment in this service

https://github.com/actions/checkout/pull/2194
Dr. Friedrich von Never boosted:
2025-06-19

The most bananas paper, how to raise to a power using a table, a multiply, and operand modification.

So, you want a reciprocal sqrt? Take your input operand X, split it into two parts X1 and X2, use the X1 to calc this polynomial C', flip some bits in X2, reassemble X1 and X2 into X', multiply C'*X' and voila, 6 or 7 decimals of precision!

It's like alien technology, how the hell is it so good?

sci-hub.se/10.1109/12.736432

Dr. Friedrich von Never boosted:
Kouji Matsuikekyo@mi.kekyo.net
2025-06-17

これの元になった(いや、逆か?)GitReaderのリリース

ワークツリーの参照とワーキングディレクトリの状態取得をサポート(結構アレだった

https://github.com/kekyo/GitReader/blob/main/README_ja.md

Dr. Friedrich von Never boosted:
Hayley Question-Markbarrowofdirt@barrowof.gay
2025-06-11
Orange writing on a black background. The writing says "You cannot shut down your computer while enemies are nearby."
Dr. Friedrich von Never boosted:
Andrii Kurdiumovkurdiumov@hachyderm.io
2025-06-06

Wrote simple property based tests for path normalization in TruePath from @fornever . I hope that’s practical enough to get idea how property based tests can be applied. It’s always bother me when lot abstract ideas thrown around even if giving sample is great way to learn.

kant2002.github.io/testing/202

Dr. Friedrich von Never boosted:

Your periodic reminder that Borland released the sourcecode to Turbo Vision under an open source license, and then someone added Linux, Windows and Unicode support to it, so you can use it to write modern applications

github.com/magiblot/tvision?ta

Turbo vision text user interface showing a menu anl two windows, one filled with cjk characters and another with emojis
Dr. Friedrich von Never boosted:

Happy 50th birthday, cron! Thanks for remembering all of our jobs for us 😎

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron

#cron #unix #linux #birthday

Dr. Friedrich von Never boosted:
Foone🏳️‍⚧️foone@digipres.club
2025-05-14

there's something beautifully wrong about trying to advertise copilot to a windows 98 machine.

a windows 98 desktop, using IE4 to look at a microsoft page, which is advertising Copilot as your AI companion
Dr. Friedrich von Never boosted:
2025-05-13

remember when I asked for a replacement for #disqus and then ranted about how none of the available solutions would also integrate with #mastodon?

Well shit. I did it again and scratched my own itch and barfed out another open source project.

Introducing: Meh..

https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2025-03/26-meh_another_comment_system

* single install serves as many sites as you want
* can be used in static websites (it's lightweight web components in the frontend)
* imports Disqus
* fetches Mastodon replies as comments
* supports different languages (so far en, fr, es, de)
* probably has bugs

#opensource #opensourcesoftware #comments

The logo of Meh. A somewhat bored looking smiley that is also a chat bubble.

The text says "Meh… another comment system"
Dr. Friedrich von Never boosted:
Anatoly Shashkin💾dosnostalgic
2025-05-09

A trailer for the 1997 "adult" comedy point & click adventure game "GAG: The Unplugged Adventure" ("ГЭГ: Отвязное Приключение") from Russia.

If you'd like to try it out yourself, two brand new ISOs for the English version (published in the Netherlands in 1999 as "GAG: The Impotent Mystery") are now on the Internet Archive.
Unlike ISOs that have already been floating around the Web for 20 years, these are not damaged, and the game is fully completable:
archive.org/details/gag-unplug

Dr. Friedrich von Never boosted:
Rib :ms_red_panda:Rib@fedi.rib.gay
2025-04-24

Today Melissa Lewis over on BlueSky pointed out that the font used in the infamous "You wouldn't steal a car" anti-piracy campaign was actually designed by Just van Rossum, whose brother, Guido, created the Python programming language (bsky.app/profile/melissa.news/post/3ln7hx5rhcj2v)

She also pointed out that the font had been cloned and released illegally for free under the name "XBAND Rough". Naturally, it would be hilarious if the anti-piracy campaign actually turned out to have used this pirated font, so I went sleuthing and quickly found a PDF from the campaign site with the font embedded (
web.archive.org/web/20051223202935/http://www.piracyisacrime.com:80/press/pdfs/150605_8PP_brochure.pdf).

So I chucked it into FontForge and yep, turns out the campaign used a pirated font the entire time!

A screenshot of FontForge opening a PDF brochure from the "Piracy is a Crime" campaign, showing that it is using the font XBAND Rough, an unlicensed clone of the font FF Confidential.
Dr. Friedrich von Never boosted:
Anatoly Shashkin💾dosnostalgic
2025-04-22

First public release of WinAmp

Dr. Friedrich von Never boosted:
Urs Enzler 🐉UrsEnzler@tooting.ch
2025-04-17

Woohoo, some nice F# improvements in Rider.

#fsharp
#dotnet

Dr. Friedrich von Never boosted:
Cédric Luthi0xced@hachyderm.io
2025-04-17

Async ZipFile APIs might come to #dotnet 10, finally! 🎉 A pull request is being worked on, almost ten years after the issue asking for async zip APIs was opened.
github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull

Dr. Friedrich von Never boosted:
Serial Experiments Lynnlynn@woof.tech
2025-04-13

Wizards and daemons, both considered powerful entities throughout history, have now been largely reduced to clerical duties in the software world

Dr. Friedrich von Neverfornever@dotnet.social
2025-04-08

Today, thanks to help from a contributor, I've published my project VerifyEncoding to #PowerShell Gallery. The project's been evolved from a script I used to copy-paste into all my OSS repositories, to make sure nobody commits \r\n or UTF-8 BOM to text files.

Go check it out!

powershellgallery.com/packages

Dr. Friedrich von Neverfornever@dotnet.social
2025-04-08

@sergevm Is it possible that you've got this after installing .NET 9 actually? I think there's a problem in how it interprets DOTNET_ROOT or DOTNET_ROOT_x64 or something.

Dr. Friedrich von Never boosted:
2025-04-03

Mark your calendars: ICFPC 2025 is going to be held from Friday 5th September 2025 at 12:00 UTC to Monday 8th September 2025 at 12:00 UTC, with the usual lightning division in the first 24 hours.

icfpcontest2025.github.io/

#ICFPC #icfpcontest #icfpc2025

Dr. Friedrich von Never boosted:
Cassidy James :ea: :gg: :fh:cassidy@blaede.family
2025-03-27

I get that issue trackers are hard, but I feel like stale bots that *close issues* come off as so hostile. I shouldn't have to come back to the issue tracker every month to confirm, “Yes, this is still an issue!” to prevent the issue from getting closed.

Tag an issue as “stale” for easier triage—that’s fine! But “oops you aren’t engaged enough, sorry, your issue doesn’t exist anymore” feels like a bit of a slap in the face. Especially if it gets closed as “not planned.”

Client Info

Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.04
Repository: https://github.com/cyevgeniy/lmst