First Advent of Code visualization this year:
https://movq.de/v/e14086cc1c/MVI_8057.MOV.mp4
Itās for day 8. Donāt look if you donāt want to get spoiled. If you donāt know the puzzle, youāll hardly understand what this is doing ā but itās fancy and colorful and fun to look at, right? š
This is Java 1 (AWT) running on a Pentium 133 on OS/2 Warp 4.
I admit that I only follow the groff mailing list to get the occasional email from Doug McIlroy in my mailbox: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2024-12/msg00025.html
āJunge, du bist zu dĆ¼nn. Du brauchst mehr Speck!ā
Okay.
I love Al and his bass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwnDKcoVHmY
My first PC as a kid had an amber monitor, so this feels right at home:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeuH0YmWkI4
š
TIL: The word āeldritchā, as in āeldritch horrorā, does not refer to some small village in England. š„“ https://www.etymonline.com/word/eldritch
German Techno v2.0:
Going through some old CDs.
Jam & Spoon - Angel (DJ Misjah Remix)
Iāve always liked this track, but ~30 years ago I didnāt have good headphones. Now I do and only now do I realize how ādenseā the atmosphere of this track is. š³ Guess my speakers back then simply didnāt render most of the bass ā¦ š¤¦
Whatās going on with the timestamps on HackerNews articles? š¤ A lot of them are off: https://movq.de/v/1341904fa5/s.png
Held another ātalkā about Git today at work. It was covering some ābasicsā about whatās going on in the .git
directory. Last time I did that was over 11 years ago. š
(I often give introductions about Git, but theyāre about day to day usage and very high-level.)
Iāve gotta say, Git is one of the very few pieces of software that I love using and teaching. The files on your disk follow a simple enough format/pattern and you can actually teach people how it all works and, for example, why things like rebasing produce a particular result. š
A nice afternoon. Mild weather (~23Ā°C), sitting on the balcony, working a bit on jenny, and spamming twtās. š
The bug in jenny that @aelaraji@aelaraji.com found:
Jenny has to look for the metadata fields, it must find the # prev = ...
line. To do so, I naively wrote something along these lines:
for line in content.splitlines():
if line.startswith('# prev = '):
...
Problem is, we use \u2028 a lot in twtxt feeds and Python interprets those as line separators as well. Thatās not what we want here. Jenny must only split at a \n
.
Now @prologic@twtxt.net had a quote/copy of some of his metadata fields in a twt. Like so:
# prev = foo bar
Perfectly legitimate, but now jenny found the # prev =
twice (once in the actual header, once in a twt), didnāt know what to do, and thus did not fetch the archived feeds. š¤¦
Should be fixed in this commit: https://www.uninformativ.de/git/jenny/commit/6e8ce5afdabd5eac22eae4275407b3bd2a167daf.html
Itās been a little over 14 years since Isis broke up and I have yet to find a band as good as them. Not a single song that disappoints (at least since the Oceanic album). Glad I could see them live a couple of times. // Isis - Grey Divide // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI2-8I3j4Vg #NowPlaying
The soundtrack of World of Goo 2 is amazing. Itās quite epic and melancholic at times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAUwyCOaGoc
It doesnāt fit the ācutenessā of the game at all ā but there are a lot of contradictions in that game anyway, itās an important aspect.
Iām putting all efforts to switch to Wayland on hold for another 2 years, minimum.
As we all know, writing a Wayland compositor from scratch is next to impossible. Luckily, thereās the wlroots project which aims to build a base library for this task. Basically every compositor except for GNOME and KDE uses it. (This is good! The less fragmentation, the better.)
wlroots is still very volatile, lots of changes with every release. Downstream users (i.e., the projects that write the actual compositor) have to constantly āchaseā changes in wlroots. dwl, my favorite compositor at the moment, has recently switched their main
branch to target the wlroots git version instead of the latest release. My understanding is that they have to do this in order to keep up with wlroots (maybe Iām wrong).
Everything is volatile and a moving target.
Why does any of this matter for me? Because I have to eventually fork dwl or at least keep a patch set, and I donāt have the stamina to constantly fiddle with this stuff. Iām running my own X11 window manager, itās highly specialized, and using just āsome Wayland compositor out thereā is a huge step backward that Iām not willing to take. I tried, itās just painful and annoying with zero benefits.
So ā¦ it was fun experimenting with Wayland a bit, but Iām now back to waiting for things to settle down considerably.
Thereās something special about writing your own programs for OS/2 in C and finally getting it to work after sifting through lots of ancient docs. āØ
Iād be totally lost without KO Myung-Hunās website and Open Watcom v2. š
(Iām making a little tool to dump floppy disks to image files. I know these programs already exist ā Iām doing it for fun and to learn. The task itself is not complicated, but finding the correct docs is.)
I needed to create a ZIP file under OS/2 2.1 and whatās the easiestā¢ way to do that?
Use WinZip under WIN-OS/2. š¤¦
I know there are native ZIP programs for OS/2, but WinZip is what I was having readily available, and that basically sums up much of OS/2ās history. š„“
Sometimes I come across a file that still uses tabs for indentation and then I find out that I havenāt touched that thing for over a decade. Boom, time flies. š³
A little improv on double bass with a live echo effect, turned out better than expected:
https://movq.de/v/0a0969059a/2024-06-25ā19-59-29ā58376.ogg
Still a noob, but I can see some progress and I enjoy playing very much. š
(Use headphones, probably sounds like crap otherwise.)
Not gonna lie, hacking on dwl is fun. Not sure if itās worth it (is Wayland really going to win?), but itās fun. š
In (old, pre-compositor) X11, windows were rectangles on screen. Every normal X11 client could query all windows and their positions. Tools like slop were easy to implement: You can use it to interactively select one of the windows on the screen, e.g. to make a screenshot of that window. slop just queries the window under the mouse pointer, it can then highlight it and read its position. Done. (slop includes more bloat/eyecandy, but thatās beside the point.)
Afaik, thatās not possible on Wayland. slurp exists but there is no standard way (yet?) for it to query the window tree. Itās different for each Wayland compositor. slurpās README includes an example for Sway; for dwl you need this patch; and selecting individual windows probably does not work at all on labwc (because those guys try to stick only to established protocols/standards ā an admirable goal).
This is just a small example. I think things like these slow down Wayland progress/adoption a lot. You could get a lot more done on X11 because the rules werenāt so strict. On Wayland, everything has to become an official protocol (that each compositor then has to implement individually) or itās going to be an incompatible, unofficial, compositor-specific solution.
Both approaches have pros and cons. Wayland is much more idealistic than the āwild westā of X11. The price is that it takes a hell of a lot more time and energy to push things forward on Wayland.
The little story behind the āpipesā screensaver: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20240611-00/?p=109881
(Hurts a little that he felt the need to clarify that āthis was in the days before widespread Internet accessā. š š§)
Wundervolles Hƶrspiel aus dem Jahre 2008:
Genau so isses heute immer noch. šš
Good old (bitmap) Helvetica works as a GUI font again:
https://movq.de/v/2456cfb05a/helvetica.png
This broke a year ago and I gave up on it. Now itās back. Crisp fonts, just like in the terminal. š
This is much easier for me to read. Maybe itās because of my myopia. Everything is a little bit fuzzy anyway and font antialiasing on top is really exhausting for me.
YouTube introduces a āstable volumeā feature:
https://movq.de/v/ad0dd48aac/a.jpg
Once filmmakers realize that people just want stable volume instead of SUPER LOUD SECTIONS (ā¦andreallyquietonesā¦), then maybe I can finally remove the limiter from my pipewire filter chain. š„“
In case you need a profile picture: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
I think Iāll be doing this again:
https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2022-07-01-oldcomputerchallenge-v2-rtc.html
The source code of āDOS 4ā was released:
https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/tree/main/v4.0
Not without issues:
https://www.os2museum.com/wp/how-not-to-release-historic-source-code/
(Hence āDOS 4ā in quotes, is it 4.00 or 4.01? Probably the latter.)
More DOS 4 history:
One of the Xfce devs tries to estimate how many people use his software and is a bit surprised:
https://alexxcons.github.io/blogpost_9.html
š