Tootfinder

Sometimes it is handy to use archives formats that do not confuse our windows friends. Or perhaps you want a quick listing, or to update files without reading and writing the entire thing (i.e. non-solid archives).
Zip or 7z can be handy. The problem is that with their Windows hertitage they do not (reliably) retain certain UNIX-y 'things'. Be that permissions or symlinks.
Here is an example symlink workaround. Permissions left as an exercise for the reader:

A simple shell‑based workaround for archiving projects with symlinks in formats that don’t preserve them (e.g. .7z or certain .zip files). It generates a script that records all symlinks, excludes them from the archive, and later recreates them after extraction.
A simple shell‑based workaround for archiving projects with symlinks in formats that don’t preserve them (e.g. .7z or certain .zip files). It generates a script that records all symlinks, excludes ...

Extremely frustrated with #Backblaze today. They actively block restores to non-Apple formats on a Mac - even natively supported ones like ExFAT. I explicitly want to restore to non-Apple format to achieve platform agnosticism. Now I have 8 TB stuck in their cloud and have to decide which bothersome way outside my elderly Mac Mini server I want to struggle with in order to get my data back.…

@… Actuellement, c’est conçu que pour Deckset, mais d’autres formats pour diapos seraient souhaitables. Et puisque reveal.js est un format supporté par Pandoc, un filtre analogique Š deckset-slides.lua devrait être même plus simple.
S’il y a un utilisateur potentiel, je pourrais y regarder de plus près dans les jours Š venir.

@… Actuellement, c’est conçu que pour Deckset, mais d’autres formats pour diapos seraient souhaitables. Et puisque reveal.js est un format supporté par Pandoc, un filtre analogique Š deckset-slides.lua devrait être même plus simple.
S’il y a un utilisateur potentiel, je pourrais y regarder de plus près dans les jours Š venir.

“Please note that access to your Animate files and project data will end on 1 March 2027. To ensure a smooth transition, we encourage you to export your Animate FLA and XFL files to other formats such as SWF, SVG and MP4 files before this date.”
R.I.P., #Flash. 🪦

When people talk about the Enlightenment as if it were an intellectual garden party where everyone sipped wine and agreed about reason, they're missing the part where producing and distributing ideas was (in fact) dangerous and thankless work.
Today we have more information than any civilization in history.
But aside from Wikipedia, we've organized the sum total of our collective knowledge into formats optimized for making people angry at strangers in pursuit of private …

The Case for Blogging in the Ruins
In 1751, Denis Diderot began publishing his Encyclopédie, a project that would eventually span 28 volumes and take more than two decades to complete. The French government banned it twice. The Catholic Church condemned it, Diderot's collaborators abandoned him, his publisher secretly censored entries behind his back, and he worked

Another interesting command line tool on #macOS explained by the wonderful Eclectic Light Company https://eclecticlight.co/2025/11/24/convert-text-betwe…

Convert text between file formats, including webarchives
Convert between text, HTML, RTF, RTFD, Word .doc and .docx, WordML, ODT and Safari Web Archives using this command tool.

How #uv got so fast
#python

Rankings for Week 14 https://www.espn.com/fantasy/football/story/_/page/FFWeeklyPlayerRank25main-46028352/fantasy-football-rankings-2025-nfl-week-qb-rb-wr-te-dst

I've been thinking about getting a new action camera since my 14 year old GoPro died. I know people love the Insta360 cams but I'm not a fan of proprietary file formats.
I'm still pissed at GoPro for hardware that stopped working, but I do have a ton of GoPro mounts already and they just use MP4 for their video files.
The Insta360 can shoot in non-360 mode, though I don't know if that still uses the proprietary format.
I guess I gotta go read some reviews.

For your edification, the most common form factor of floppy disks:
5¼ inch (no metal door thing)
3½ inch (the one the save icon was modeled after)
There were also 8 inch (used before 1980s mainly), and various not very successful 3 inch, 2½ inch and 2 inch formats.
Note that while the form factor might have been the same, a lot of diskettes aren't mutually software compatible between systems.
There's physical sub-formats (e.g. one sided, hard sectors, varying supported densities due to magnetic properties etc.) too.

In 2021 I gave a talk about “openness” briefly tracing the history from the Free Software movement, #GNU, and OSS, to open formats like XML and ODF, then to the #FreeCulture and #OpenData movement like

netpbm tools are a suite of tools to convert and fiddle with the ppm/pbm/pgm (collectively pnm) file formats, which are pretty much the simplest image formats on the planet, which even have an ASCII version; so if you have a simple script you want to generate simple images with they're a good choice of format, and if you have them, the pbm tools can convert to/from pretty much anything else or do simple scale/etc - lighter than ImageMagick say.

❗ Aplicaciones de notas y migración 🗒️
Si trabajšis con el ordenador a menudo, seguro que os suena esta historia. Se manejan muchas notas, con muchos formatos, fotos, enlaces, tablas, etc. Hasta ahora uso #UpNote , una herramienta absolutamente increíble, lo mejor que he visto tras probar al menos 10 aplicaciones. Me quedaría con ella para siempre, pero cada vez me preocupa mšs la seguridad y

The {esquisse} package makes it easy to plot your data in different ways with a drag and drop interface: #rstats

Explore and Visualize Your Data Interactively
A shiny gadget to create ggplot2 figures interactively with drag-and-drop to map your variables to different aesthetics. You can quickly visualize your data accordingly to their type, export in various formats, and retrieve the code to reproduce the plot.

Amazon plans to let authors offer their DRM-free ebooks in the EPUB and PDF formats through Kindle Direct Publishing, starting January 20, 2026 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/10/amazon-chan…

Amazon changes how copyright protection is applied to Kindle Direct's self-published ebooks | TechCrunch
Amazon says its Kindle Direct DRM-free titles will be available as PDFs and EPUB files going forward.

from my link log —
Faster zlib/DEFLATE decompression on arm64 and x86.
https://dougallj.wordpress.com/2022/08/20/faster-zlib-deflate-decompression-on-the-apple-m1-and-x86/
saved 2022-08-20

Faster zlib/DEFLATE decompression on the Apple M1 (and x86)
DEFLATE is a relatively slow compression algorithm from 1991, which (along with its wrapper format, zlib) is incredibly widely used, for example in the PNG, Zip and Gzip file formats and the HTTP, …

Is there such a thing as a USB to 50 pin SCSI adapter? I have a HD from a Mac SE/30, before I destroy it I wonder if there is anything on it? Its the drive from my wife's Mac when we met and got married so umm.. its old. I know Linux could read these formats years ago, not sure if that is still the case. #RetroComputing

Major streaming platforms are increasingly adopting "pause ads", which appear when viewers pause content and can include full-screen, interactive formats (Brian Steinberg/Variety)
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/big-streamers-bet-in…

Big Streamers Bet on Increasingly Aggressive ‘Pause Ads’
Big streamers are placing more focus on aggressive "pause ads" that pop on screen after a viewer calls for a halt in the action.

Any computer touchers familiar with the origin story of UUIDs/GUIDs?
In particular I'm curious how we ended up with the weird format of 32 bits, 2x 16 bits, 8 bytes rather than the two obvious formats (uint32[4] or uint8[16]). And the C struct format doesn't align with the typical hex printing (8-4-4-4-12 hex digits)
My best guess is that it's somehow related to the version 1 GUID format where you'd have { MAC address, version nibble, timestamp} but neither the st…

La culture de la manifestation, ça s'apprend et en famille.
Souvenir d'il y a trois ans où nous protestions contre les oligarques du Charbon Mongol.

'pandoc' is a document conversion CLI program that can read and write loads of different document formats; mostly for text, but with formulas and references and things; so any type of markdown practically to any other, or to and from html, or ebooks, or wikis or man pages, or...
https://pandoc.org/

I hadn’t planned to do this today, but I just added a new filter to pandoc-lecturenotes https://github.com/mxpiotrowski/pandoc-lecturenotes, which allows you to produce slides in any of the formats supported by

Or one could use LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice and not be dependent on some distant service provider.
Online office suites confuse me. It’s unclear what *modern* problem they address. Sharing files is a solved problem. Common data formats exist. https://mastodon.social/@DevOpsPink/11

Tatiana Mikhaleva (@DevOpsPink@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image Proton rolled out Proton Sheets - a spreadsheet Google can’t peek into. Gemini: “Show me your data?” You: “No.” Sheets: also no, but in Swiss.🇨🇭🔐 End-to-end encryption, zero-knowledge, even file names get the Swiss-bank treatment. You open a spreadsheet - Big Tech immediately cries. Somewhere in California, an AI whispers: “But… my training data…” Privacy 1 : 0 AI https://proton.me/blog/sheets-proton-drive #Proton #Privacy #Encryption #CyberSe…

Rankings for Week 17 https://www.espn.com/fantasy/football/story/_/page/FFWeeklyPlayerRank25main-46028352/fantasy-football-rankings-2025-nfl-week-qb-rb-wr-te-dst

Ever wondered about the inode trunctation in #cpio formats and what that might mean for the integrity of your archives on modern systems?
No? No, I didn't think so because that is nerdy as fuck!!! 🤓
Nonetheless, I typed this up. No need to… umm… thank me. 🤪

GNU cpio and inode truncation considerations
GNU cpio and inode truncation considerations. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

Just today, I tried asking GitHub Copilot to fix a non-existing bug in a Hugo website (so, HTML, CSS, toml: no archaic file formats).
It happily hallucinated not recognizing that there was nog bug, proposing CSS changes that didn’t do anything useful (because no bug, remember!).
#genAIgoingGreat

Amazon plans to let authors offer their DRM-free ebooks in the EPUB and PDF formats through Kindle Direct Publishing, starting January 20, 2026 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/10/amazon-chan…

Amazon changes how copyright protection is applied to Kindle Direct's self-published ebooks | TechCrunch
Amazon says its Kindle Direct DRM-free titles will be available as PDFs and EPUB files going forward.

@… Mise Š jour: j'ai renommé le filtre en «native-slides.lua» puisqu’il peut être utilisé pour tous le formats nativement supporté par Pandoc, y compris PowerPoint.
Ça marche déjŠ très bien, parce que Pandoc s’occupe de tout ;-)
Il me faut juste prendre en compte les notations spéciales de Pandoc pour diapos (notamment les pauses et les colonnes) d…

@… Mise Š jour: j'ai renommé le filtre en «native-slides.lua» puisqu’il peut être utilisé pour tous le formats nativement supporté par Pandoc, y compris PowerPoint.
Ça marche déjŠ très bien, parce que Pandoc s’occupe de tout ;-)
Il me faut juste prendre en compte les notations spéciales de Pandoc pour diapos (notamment les pauses et les colonnes) d…

#WritersCoffeeClub
9. How does the means of publication change a work? print? digital? audiobook? something else?
---
9. I do only digital so my answers are limited. I wouldn't change my preexisting work to fit the publishing format (I am naive enough to believe it fits most formats I need 'as is'). But creating a new work (or recreating it) would get a lot from le…

'graphviz' is a suite of programs for drawing graphs (In the nodes/edges senses, rather than upwards and to the right sense) - and it uses a file format called 'dot'. Lots of things generate dot output (such as systemd-analyze I mentioned) and it's really easy to generate from scripts and things. 'dotty' is probably the most common program in the suite.
There are some newer formats and programs - but this one is probably the most universal.

Rankings for Week 12 https://www.espn.com/fantasy/football/story/_/page/FFWeeklyPlayerRank25main-46028352/fantasy-football-rankings-2025-nfl-week-qb-rb-wr-te-dst

I hadn’t planned to do this today, but I just added a new filter to pandoc-lecturenotes https://github.com/mxpiotrowski/pandoc-lecturenotes, which allows you to produce slides in any of the formats supported by

I hadn’t planned to do this today, but I just added a new filter to pandoc-lecturenotes https://github.com/mxpiotrowski/pandoc-lecturenotes, which allows you to produce slides in any of the formats supported by

Rankings for Week 16 https://www.espn.com/fantasy/football/story/_/page/FFWeeklyPlayerRank25main-46028352/fantasy-football-rankings-2025-nfl-week-qb-rb-wr-te-dst

Rankings for Week 15 https://www.espn.com/fantasy/football/story/_/page/FFWeeklyPlayerRank25main-46028352/fantasy-football-rankings-2025-nfl-week-qb-rb-wr-te-dst

So farewell then Microsoft Office.
I haven't used you really since the 90s.
From this distance: it seems like you just kept getting worse and more exploitative since then and trapped millions of people in abusive relationships with tech.
It made me laugh when you went monthly-payment subscription-only, and then laugh even more when suckers actually ponied up for that.
It's fun when people say they don't know how to use Libreoffice, even though Libre is more like the original MS Office (before it was shit) than Office 365 was.
I wish you fare well on your transition to your new identity as #microSlop #office #CoPiliot #ai #enshitification #poem