Mastodawn

@haddock For what it's worth wayland handles mixed dpi different than X11. By some perspectives it's worse.

http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/

But really despite that impressive technical writeup (it convinced me) I think the conclusion is that we want something from our display servers that neither Wayland or X11 is really able to provide.

We want mixed DPI. X11 can do mixed DPI wayland can't, we want a seamless multimonitor desktop, both X11 and wayland can do a seamless desktop but X11 loses it's ability to do mixed DPI and wayland is able to spoof mixed DPI better than X11 can(fractional scaling).

My personal opinion, I find wayland as a display server boring compared to X11 (that might be a good thing), the real interesting work in this domain is arcan. https://arcan-fe.com/about/ But arcan is one guy with a dream. I did not find it all that usable yet.

Mixed DPI and the X Window System

wok

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ephemeris Mar 6

@stsp Thank you so much for all the work you do.

I always feel like the 802.11 stack on obsd is surprisingly good and when I looked into it I found out it is largely due to one person who cared enough. Nobody really wants to deal with the insanity that is the 802.11 stack. But you keep plugging away at it. making things better for all of us one small commit at a time. Salutes.

ephemeris Mar 6

That stupid new california law requiring age verification, I finally read it and my conclusion is that on unix like systems compliance could be as simple as

echo $YEAR_BORN > ~/.config/ca_ab_1043

That is, all the required interfaces are already present, an os vendor does not need to change anything to be in compliance in the peoples republic of California. and if the user fails to run the age tracking, then it is them that is out of compliance.

For truly malicious compliance it looks like the application could then check for the age wherever it feels like it. "I tried, but I could not find any information at .config/ca_age_cat the user must not have filled it out"

But really, it is such a stupid law that it smells of a frog boiling scheme to me. "If we can get away with an easy change on the os vendors today, we can get them to do anything we want in the future.... for the children of course"

anyhow for grins and giggles here is the actual text of the law. don't lose to many brain cells.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043

Bill Text - AB-1043 Age verification signals: software applications and online services.

AB 1043 Age verification signals: software applications and online services.

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ephemeris Mar 3

@sjmulder You are probably not wrong, it is a very stupid law. but by my reading the OS only had to provide the age, an application may have to verify it. And the law does not say anything about when an application has to verify anything. so that never needs to be done.

My conclusion after reading it was that on a unix like system compliance may be as simple as

echo $AGE_CATAGORY > ~/.config/ca_ab_1043

It is an accessible user interface, applications can use a well established API to get the data, it shares as little as possible.

But really, it is such a stupid law that it smells of a frog boiling scheme to me, that is "lets see if we can get the OS vendors to do something easy now, for more intrusive tracking later... For the children of course."

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ephemeris Mar 3

@cks On the subject of mask + glasses fogging. I recently picked up some masks for a construction/demolition project and was pleasantly surprised with the way they had a flapper valve for exhale and did not fog up my glasses.

A question, not necessarily to you but in general: The masks are N95 rated; does the flapper invalidate infectious disease use? If not, look for the exhale flapper, they are great.

I really don't know, while I I got them for construction, I love how the exhale flapper does not fog my glasses. But my understanding is that a mask in infectious disease use a large concern is about the wearer not getting their infected mucus particles everywhere as much as not inhaling others infected particles. which the flapper would not do.

ephemeris Mar 2

Anyone else have a problem with the spell checker on firefox/openbsd? Or is it just me.

It barely works for me, it will identify the misspelled word but almost never provides a correction suggestion. I have gotten to the point of writing a short script that pulls from the select buffer sends it through aspell then back into the select buffer for me to paste back into the field.

On the plus side aspell is a much better spell checker than the included hunspell was. On the downside it's an involved process whenever I want to spellcheck something.

And on the griping side, I find myself spelling much better in general, so there is that.

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ephemeris Jan 21

@mk I have heard that one of the best ways to make an iron structure rust is a spray of salt water, the key apparently is the air, immersion does not work as well as a partial exposure.

This is mainly based on the practical engineering youtube channel. that is, I have not personally needed anything rusty and have not tried it myself.

ephemeris Jan 17

Ha, the infernal thing sort of works.

How we got here: I have a linux install I use as a gaming system. but the gpu fan map is not working correctly, But I can still change the fan speed by hand. And while I was poking at it trying to understand the system I had a terrible idea.

"Why are we using temp maps to control fan speed, wouldn't it be better to have a closed loop controller where you set the temp you want the card at and it figures out what speed to set the fan?"

Now completely derailed by my own nerd snipe. I know more about pid algorithms than I ever wanted to know. and have some janky python code that can keep my gpu at a atable temp.

The worst part is, the pid stuff is the easy part. but I also built a gpu heat simulator so I could get some intuition tuning pid variables before I inflicted it on an actual gpu. then I wanted to use a midi dials box to control the tuning parameters. then I wanted a curses interface so I could see the state. then I wanted to run the pid core separate from the control interface so needed a client server architecture...

Sometimes I am my own worst enemy.

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ephemeris Dec 18

@joakinen I don't disagree, but that is most of the point of object oriented languages right. You group the data and the functions that work on that data together. I mean complaining about that is like complaining that water is wet.

I always think of it like this, global variables, They have problems, but boy howdy are they convenient, just grab your data anytime any where. Too bad it turns into spaghetti, so we compromise, segment your functions into "objects" and provide data that those function can use like it's global, nice and easy for the common case and hopefully it adds enough segmentation to prevent total spaghetti.

ephemeris Dec 18

Pardon the rant, first world problems

One of the reasons I still use google translate, over something like deepl, is that when I give it a word in a character set I can't read(for example japanese or chinese) in addition to translating it will give me the word in roman characters. Which I really like.

Or at least I thought it would, for some strange reason it only does this on openbsd(firefox or chrome), on linux(only tried firefox) it is nowhere to be found, only presenting the speak feature. I have no google login(and thus no preferences), I am even sporting an openbsd user agent string on linux to see it this would help. It does not.

It is such a miner thing, but also so weird, (what on earth is obsd doing[or missing] to deserve this feature.) It's been bothering me for a couple months now.