The soundtrack of World of Goo 2 is amazing. It’s quite epic and melancholic at times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAUwyCOaGoc

It doesn’t fit the “cuteness” of the game at all – but there are a lot of contradictions in that game anyway, it’s an important aspect.

I’m 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, there’s 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 “chase” 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 I’m 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 don’t have the stamina to constantly fiddle with this stuff. I’m running my own X11 window manager, it’s highly specialized, and using just “some Wayland compositor out there” is a huge step backward that I’m not willing to take. I tried, it’s just painful and annoying with zero benefits.

So … it was fun experimenting with Wayland a bit, but I’m now back to waiting for things to settle down considerably.

There’s 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. ✨

I’d be totally lost without KO Myung-Hun’s website and Open Watcom v2. 🙏

(I’m making a little tool to dump floppy disks to image files. I know these programs already exist – I’m doing it for fun and to learn. The task itself is not complicated, but finding the correct docs is.)

https://movq.de/v/13597a4d87/os2dump.jpg

I needed to create a ZIP file under OS/2 2.1 and what’s the easiest™ way to do that?

Use WinZip under WIN-OS/2. 🤦

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/2’s history. 🥴

https://movq.de/v/221699e4ef/a.jpg

Sometimes I come across a file that still uses tabs for indentation and then I find out that I haven’t touched that thing for over a decade. Boom, time flies. 😳

A little improv on double bass with a live echo effect, turned out better than expected:

https://movq.de/v/0a0969059a/2024-06-25–19-59-29–58376.ogg

Still a noob, but I can see some progress and I enjoy playing very much. 😊

(Use headphones, probably sounds like crap otherwise.)

Not gonna lie, hacking on dwl is fun. Not sure if it’s worth it (is Wayland really going to win?), but it’s fun. 😅

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 that’s beside the point.)

Afaik, that’s not possible on Wayland. slurp exists but there is no standard way (yet?) for it to query the window tree. It’s different for each Wayland compositor. slurp’s 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 – 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 weren’t so strict. On Wayland, everything has to become an official protocol (that each compositor then has to implement individually) or it’s going to be an incompatible, unofficial, compositor-specific solution.

Both approaches have pros and cons. Wayland is much more idealistic than the “wild west” 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 “pipes” screensaver: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20240611-00/?p=109881

(Hurts a little that he felt the need to clarify that “this was in the days before widespread Internet access”. 😅🧓)

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 it’s back. Crisp fonts, just like in the terminal. 💚

This is much easier for me to read. Maybe it’s because of my myopia. Everything is a little bit fuzzy anyway and font antialiasing on top is really exhausting for me.

YouTube introduces a “stable volume” feature:

https://movq.de/v/ad0dd48aac/a.jpg

Once filmmakers realize that people just want stable volume instead of SUPER LOUD SECTIONS (…andreallyquietones…), then maybe I can finally remove the limiter from my pipewire filter chain. 🥴

In case you need a profile picture: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

If you’re using jenny on Python 3.12, it will spit out a deprecation warning regarding datetime.utcnow(). This will be fixed in the next release.

I think I’ll be doing this again:

https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2022-07-01-oldcomputerchallenge-v2-rtc.html

The source code of “DOS 4” 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 “DOS 4” in quotes, is it 4.00 or 4.01? Probably the latter.)

More DOS 4 history:

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/dos/dos-4-0/

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

😅