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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Alternate perspective: I use the heck out of session restore, and it has driven me nuts that it hasn’t worked properly under Wayland.

    I tend to use different virtual desktops for different projects, so being able to reboot (because of a kernel update and needing to load a module or something) without losing and having to rebuild that state is is super valuable.




  • Another Tears of the Kingdom here.

    I’m like … 5/3 subscribed between professional and personal obligations for the next several months, so don’t have time for that in my life.

    When I got around to Breath of the Wild in late 2020, I arranged it so I could basically take a vacation from reality to Hyrule for over a week with it, and the experience was delightful, so I want to hold off until I can properly enjoy it.

    I did similar things at the ends of periods of over-obligation with Fallout: New Vegas and Skyrim (earlier, but both years after their release), I’m a sucker for disappearing into an open-world RPG as a vacation.


  • Relevant place to ask: I’ve been trying to find a reference for the earliest Emacs that could host a terminal emulator or subshell in a window.

    Multics emacs appears to have had both split windows and a character-at-a-time input and output mode as far back as 1978 for use as a SUPDUP and/or TELNET client, which is currently the earliest I’m aware of. Ancient ITS TECO EMACS had splits pretty early on, and may have sprung the necessary character plumbing earlier - but I’ve never found any reference material to confirm/deny.

    It’s a fringe to a larger interest, which is that I’ve been trying to document the history of terminal multiplexers, especially in the Window (1986)-Screen(1987)-Tmux(2007) tradition (as opposed to the historical meaning which we’d call terminal servers). I’m slowly becoming convinced they came about after the advent of floating window GUIs hosting multiple terminal emulators. If you were super connected and could get access to one, sometime fairly early in the window between the 1973 introduction of the Alto and the surviving 1979 manuals the Alto program “Chat” could run multiple telnet sessions in floating windows (I’m also looking for a more precise date for when Bob Sproull made Chat able to do that trick). Several other early graphical systems like Blit terminals (1982 inside Bell, commercial as the 5620 in 1984) and early Sun Windowing System of early SunOS (1983) could also do multiple floating terminal emulators, so they were common by the early 80s.

    Because the 36-bit DEC lineage had pretty robust psuedoterminals all the way back into the mid 1960s ref, a lot of hackers did a lot of fun shit on PDP-10s with ITS and TENEX and WAITS, and Stanford and MIT had PDP-10s connected to fancy video terminals by the mid 70s, it’s IMO the most likely place for the first terminal multiplexers to emerge… if I could just find some documentation or dated code or accounts.





  • S9

    I’m still using my S9. Size is about as big as I want to deal with. Indicator LED is great. 3.5mm jack is great. SD socket for local storage. Camera is still fine. Qi charging is one of the few gimmicks that hasn’t turned out to be useless. Screen is drastic overkill. Design is a stupid friction-less glass egg, but that’s easily fixable with a minimalist case. Performance is still perfectly adequate.

    It’s long out of support, but I’m finding the market wildly un-compelling, and will probably just roll with it until something renders it unusable.



  • I’ve never been much of a poster (not even 2 posts/yr for the almost dozen years I’ve had a reddit habit), but I was a regular commenter in various specific-interest subs.

    I am, as a rule, no longer contributing content to Reddit, since they’ve made it clear they plan to finish their transition from “hosting communities” to “extracting value from users.” Frankly, it’s not as much of an imposition as I feared, because many of those communities seem to be broadly taking the same attitude.

    I’m actively trying to comment heavily here to to try to help establish communities. If I had a little more free time I’d do some posting and/or try to help spin some successor communities for my interests.



  • In the same kind of vein as imagemagick, Dave Coffin’s dcraw tool at least partly underlies almost every non-proprietary RAW image decoder, and some of the commercial ones (if they don’t use code, they use constant matrices and such).

    He’s not a sole maintainer to any of his major projects anymore, but honorable mention to Fabrice Bellard who initiated both ffmpeg and qemu among other notable activities.

    IIRC the Expat XML parser that’s embedded everywhere was basically on spare-time maintenance by Clark Cooper and Fred Drake for a couple decades, but I think they have a little more resources now.

    SQLite is a BDFL situation more than single-maintainer, but D. Richard Hipp still has his hands on everything, and there are only a relatively small number of folks with commit access.





  • Since you’ve used both, what are your feelings on FreshRSS vs. tt-rss?

    Around the death of google reader, I set up a tt-rss instance, imported all my saved stuff, and I’ve been using it continuously since (I’m technically in an unsupported configuration because I set it up long before docker became the preferred then only supported configuration, but it just keeps ticking installed like a normal piece of software on a rented VM).
    I’m generally super pleased, and it’s my primary mode of content consumption via browser + Android App, and I use the “note” and “share with note” features pretty extensively to plumb to some other folks with similar setups.

    Fox (the main tt-rss dev) is clearly an asshole, and there are some geopolitical complications because he’s a Russian national, but he’s made an excellent focused piece of software. I’ve considered looking seriously in to FreshRSS, but have a lot of inertia and at a glance it looks like it’s missing a few features.


  • I have a Wii (hacked, old enough model to have GC ports) that I keep out.

    I picked it up used and cheap with a sack of assorted accessories like 5 years ago because fussing with controllers in Dolphin was kind of a pain, and I had a lot of GC and Wii games I was interested in.

    A Wii with Homebrew channel and loaders, with a USB drive full of disc images hanging out the back is very pick-up-and-play for GameCube and Wii.

    I’m using it less lately because I’ve played through many of the things I was eager to try (and I’ve been too busy), but it’s still a nice object.

    I do have a modded OG Xbox (also bought used but closer to its time of relevance) that spent it’s early life in my possession being an XBMC media player for the household more than being used for games, and a wide array of even older computers (Amigas, 68k and PPC Macs, older PCs, some workstations that aren’t so relevant to gaming, etc.) stored away, but usually do that sort of thing under emulation rather than hauling the machines out unless I have a specific reason.

    Lately it’s mostly been 16-bit era and GBA games on an Anbernic RG351p that I can truly pick up and put down instantly, anywhere. Waiting rooms? Compiles? Sitting through some event a niece or nephew is in? Perfect idle.