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

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  • I wonder if it might be an unreproducible moment in history.

    I suspect the Cambrian explosion of X11 window managers came from two things:

    • Propriatery and former-propriatery systems with unique look and feel (see, for example, Open Look/olvwm) There was also a tendency to copy any style you could (WindowMaker copied NeXTStep, IceWM mocked OS/2, and when those cute QNX demo discs came out, within days there were lookalike themes). It feels like the last major outside inspirations, MacOS and Win1,1 are converging on almost intrrchangeable insipidness.

    • The 1990s/2000s customization era. Machines were finally powerful enough to do mildly nifty things, but still attainable by hobbyists gluing together pixmaps and this bred stuff like Enlightnment E16 or Afterstep

    Do these forces still exist in 2024? It seems like Unix Porn today is a bunch of neokvetch windows without even a titlebar to provide a personal statement.


  • I think I’d be a lot more excited about Wayland if I felt like I can get a compositor that matches my tastes.

    I want to iconify things to the desktop, not relying on a taskbar-alike. Nothing seems to offer that. Hell, the taskbar is often a third party program.

    I want to double-click to shade. Labwc just added this, a feature that X11 window managers have been offering since the 90s.

    I want an aesthetic that’s got real depth and skeumorphism, rather that flat and featureless. Maybe something offers that, but there are plenty of X11 choices that have beveled buttons out of the box.

    The charm of Unix systems used to be flexibility, buy Wayland seems to be an extinction-level event for traditional window management. Nothing fills the gap of FVWM or WindowMaker. But gosh, I can get 92 flavours of tiling compositor and windows that ripple when dragged.







  • I’d love to know what the domestic spin is on this.

    What specifics is he promising this will deliver domestically? I can’t imagine Buenos Aires is on Putin’s shortlist even without the threst of NATO, and it’s not like Americans are goung to start beating the doors down for Argentine imports.

    There’s tactful good relations, and then there’s “sempai notice me”. Although, the Cosplay Crusader may well be familiar with that trope.




  • Gamescope seems to have done a good job of taming the SNK games. Genshin… seems to have fixed itself. For a while it was in a weird state where the game worked but the launcher beeped furiously though the PC speaker, like I was sending beeps to an xterm. Now it seems fine. I do feel like this is a lot more black magic than I’m used to with Linux-- I actually had to reboot to get to a consistent behaviour-- but non-native games do tend to play fast and loose.





  • This is the firmware I’ve been working on. Basically I wrote it because at the time (early 2023) there wasn’t a “good” keyboard firmware like QMK or ZMK for the CH32V305. Now it supports keyboards, joysticks, and a rudimentary pointing device made out of a PS2-style analogue stick.

    https://gitlab.com/hakfoo1/ch32v-keyboard/-/tree/fightstick?ref_type=heads

    That branch has the mapping I used. Note this firmware has a keyboard-centric assumption that switches are wired as a matrix (between two sense lines), even if that matrix is 1x24, rather than just grounding a sense line individually.

    The stick portion was one of those “Pandora Box” devices that was built into a cabinet and pre-wired to a crappy Android TV box.

    I bought it because I figured it was probably cheaper than cutting a decent looking cabinet and buying the buttons off AliExpress. That also meant it came with a predefined cable harness to fit the Android box. In the hopes of making it tidy, and reversible, I ordered a little throwaway PCB that accepted the existing 40-pin plug and bridged it to a nanoCH32V305 breakout board. Of course, I made a design mistake, so the PCB had bodge wires, so not much was saved.

    If you’re starting from scratch, you could direct-wire to the MCU breakout board.