kepstin

@kepstin@glitch.social
75 Followers
221 Following
6.5K Posts

I'm kepstin, but glitchier.

I spend most of my time trying to make computers do things that other people want them to do, mostly in Linux. Big fan of Japanese anison, pop, and doujin music. Recently on a bit of a retro-computing bend.

I contribute to BigBlueButton (while working for Blindside Networks) and sometimes poke stuff into MusicBrainz

My backup account is @kepstin

pronounshe/him
beveragehot tea, black, with milk
🍍
Websitehttps://www.kepstin.ca/
kepstinJun 11, 2023
josefJun 11, 2023
instead of boring, electrically-interfaced optical drive emulators, we should have gone for the "car cassette adaptor" route and designed a 12cm diameter micromirror device which harvests energy from rotational inertia
kepstinJun 10, 2023
Show thread48kRAMJun 10, 2023

So, it's time to say "farewell" to some of my collection. Machines that I rarely use, and that I have a solid emulation solution for, need to find new homes. I'm a bit sad about this decision, but I know it's for the best, ultimately.

So... watch this space, I guess. I loathe to sell on fleaBay, so I'll bee seeking alternate forums for these sales. I've bought plenty of machines direct from folks on Twitter over the years so I know that's doable.

Anyway, I guess I just want to close by telling everyone "Don't let anyone tell you how to retro." You don't have to own 40 computers to enjoy Vintage Computing as a hobby. Enjoy these old machines, these old games, these old programs - any way you like. Support museums and retro arcades and spaces if you can, but don't feel like you have to. But do be part of the community, please. This hobby needs fresh faces - especially if they don't look like mine (white, male, and bearded)

[fin]

kepstinJun 6, 2023

I wonder if the UFO investigation division is where the US military shuffles off intelligence officers who they can't fire, but who they don't trust to provide reliable/accurate intelligence. Would explain a lot of things.

If you've gotten someone in intelligence who's fallen into conspiracies, and might turn important info over to potential enemies if fired, you just keep them busy doing something that can't cause any harm.

kepstinMay 22, 2023

Well, dang. The SSD in my laptop has died, in kind of an odd way. A bunch of data on disk has gotten corrupted or returns io errors when read, and writing to it also returns io errors. Of course, SMART status and self test say the drive is fine.

I think I might switch brands when replacing it...

My backups are good, but they only cover my home dir so I've got some reinstalling to do. Kinda bad timing, tomorrow is a holiday so I can't quickly pick up a new drive from a store.

Show threadkepstinMay 14, 2023
There's a lot of people in https://discourse.gnome.org/t/window-focus-call-for-testing/13277 complaining that the problem with focus is that they can't tell which window is currently focused on a static screen, and planned changes in upcoming GNOME versions make this *worse* by removing the darkened header bar on focused applications.
Window Focus: Call for Testing

The design team has been discussing alternatives to the app menu for indicating window focus in GNOME Shell, and we are seeking feedback on a prototype of the proposed new behavior. The Why Back in 2018, we removed the unique menu items from the app menu. However, we kept the menu itself, so that it could be used as a window focus indicator, and so it can show a loading spinner for apps that are slow to show a window. However, when doing user research over the past few years, we’ve noticed th...

GNOME Discourse
Show threadkepstinMay 14, 2023
I'm using the high contrast theme in GNOME to work around some of the usability problems - and when I tried it I realized that it doesn't actually do a very good job of increasing contrast!
kepstinMay 14, 2023

I'm not happy with the current design direction of GNOME. Changes are being made to design that are reducing accessibility and usability.

Accessibility: The high contrast mode isn't able to increase text contrast on buttons because it would require app developers to do more work in edge cases.

Usability: Widgets have fewer affordances to indicate function - e.g. buttons and text entries look identical now.

And people I talk to in the design channel don't see the problem.

kepstinMay 13, 2023

Aww, dang, looks like the Suikacraft continuation of the Isabella ("My Dearest Isabella") resource pack has been retired. https://github.com/yurisuika/Isabella - last released version supports up to 1.19.2.

Big appreciation to yurisuika for keeping it updated for the past 9 years. That resource pack, originally created by Bonemouse back in 2011, basically defined what Minecraft looked like for me :)

The entire resource pack is of course CC-BY-3.0 licensed, so it's possible for someone else to continue it.

GitHub - yurisuika/Isabella: A continuation of the Isabella texture pack for Minecraft.

A continuation of the Isabella texture pack for Minecraft. - GitHub - yurisuika/Isabella: A continuation of the Isabella texture pack for Minecraft.

GitHub
kepstinMay 11, 2023
Upgrading fonts while applications are running / using them is a … bad idea.
kepstinMay 11, 2023

It's kinda funny that you could repost https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2yPo4stVX0 today and say it was Teto's new SynthV AI bank and people would probably believe you.

(It's not, it's a 9 year old release made with the UTAU bank, but there was a *lot* of manual cleanup and tuning work done on the track to make it sound more natural.)

【重音テト】FIRST【UTAUカバー】

YouTube