I blog about anything I find interesting, and since I have a lot of varied interests, my blog entries are kind of all over the place. You can browse my tags to sort them by topic and see which ones I frequently write about, or the archive has a complete history of my posts, dating back to 2008!
Besides my blog, I have pages for my creative projects, which are linked to on the navigation bar.
I write a lot about Linux and Android, Minecraft, and I like to rant about stuff. Generally anything that makes me curious. Also check out my Bookmarks for all sorts of cool websites about various topics I'm interested in.
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Week 2 of daily driving the PinephoneAbout two weeks ago I again put my SIM card into my Pinephone to see whether I can make it a daily driver device. The last time I tried this was nearly a year ago so I have that benchmark to compare it to as well as some new information now.
The stack:
The highlights:
The details:
This week, some news about Waydroid made its way to the r/linux subreddit and in the comments I saw a Pinephone owner write about their experience with Waydroid and none of his complaints had anything to do with it being slow or clunky or broken, which is about what my experience was the last time I tested out Anbox about a year ago.
So it prompted me to check Waydroid out, and... it works remarkably well! It really surprised me. Waydroid makes use of containers to run Android directly on your own Linux kernel, without emulation, and so it performs very well -- some Android apps even run more smoothly than their native Linux counterparts!
I wasn't expecting that the Pinephone was ever going to be able to run Android apps smoothly on a GNU/Linux system, but now that it does, and does so this well, this is a game changer in terms of the Pinephone being "daily driver" ready. Finally, I have a way to use Slack and Discord from my Pinephone, something that was basically not possible at all before!
Now, to be clear: even without Android, there are a very good collection of Linux apps that already work well on the Pinephone. Having the option of Android for the odd proprietary app like Slack or Signal is nice to have. Read on to the full blog post for how Waydroid works right now, what are some of its pain points still, and a few screenshots of my Phosh app drawer showing everything I have installed on my Pinephone.
For the past few years, on and off (sometimes more off than on), I've been working on a videogame called Sketchy Maze and had been taking screenshots of it along the way. This blog post will be a bit of a retrospective and a series of screenshots showing it from its very first prototype up to the state that it's in now.
I wasn't even sure I was going to get very far on this project. I had once attempted programming a game in Perl and lost steam after barely having a working prototype. I had dabbled a few times getting started programming a game but then decided my brilliant idea of an RPG game wasn't worth all the programming. Stubbornly, I never wanted to just use a game engine like Unity or Unreal but wanted to program it all myself. And programming from scratch is considerably the harder way to go, so your game idea had better be worth it in the end!
The game idea that won out is a personal and nostalgic one. Back in the 90's when I was growing up with videogames like Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario Bros., I would often draw my own "mazes" or levels like on a 2D platformer game, with pencil and paper and then "play" it with my imagination. I'd imagine the player character advancing through my maze, collecting keys that unlock doors, pushing buttons that activate traps somewhere else on the page. I'd write little annotations about which button did what, or draw a dotted line connecting things together. My mazes borrowed all kinds of features from videogames I liked, all your standard platformer stuff: buttons, trapdoors, conveyor belts, slippy steep slopes, spikes and water and whatever I wanted.
So my game concept was basically:
See the full blog post to read how I even got this started and see screenshots of progression between the "Before and After" pictured below. My first target goal was just a stupid simple white window that I can click on to turn pixels black and save it as a PNG image. If I could get that far, I could do all the rest.
It's been a while since I last wrote about my videogame project, Project: Doodle, which has now been given a proper name: Sketchy Maze. There have been a few releases of the game since I last wrote about version 0.4.0 and they bring some exciting new features!
On forums like r/privacy people often discuss the role of open source software when it comes to privacy and end-to-end encrypted messaging applications. The general consensus is: a privacy focused app must be open source so that people can get their eyes on the source code and audit it for security vulnerabilities, verify it's doing what it says in the tin and without any secret government backdoors built in that would undermine the security and reveal peoples' private chats.
These are all well and good: if the source code is not open, you can't verify the code isn't doing something sneaky like uploading your encryption keys to the service provider or whatever. But, open source alone isn't a silver bullet to help guarantee the security of the app:
In this post I'll address a few common tired things I hear people on r/privacy say in regards to this topic and how it's never quite that simple.
Have you ever wondered basically how blockchains work and what it means to "mine a Bitcoin" and why it's a time-consuming (and energy-intensive) process to mine one? In this blog post I'll summarize what basically drives blockchains and how they work, from my understanding of them anyway.
If you're anywhere close to a novice web developer or have ever hashed a password in your life, you already know the basic technology at play here. And even if you haven't, I think I can get you caught up pretty quickly.
The explanation I give below is surely super simplified and is based on my reading of how these work, along with several "Create your own blockchain in under 200 lines of code" type of tutorials which you could find for Python, or JavaScript or anything. It doesn't cover how the decentralized networking aspects work or any of those details, but just the basics on the cryptography side.
Among my many diverse interests, one thing that fascinates me is to contemplate the nature of the universe and what Reality is made of, or at least, what my perception of Reality is made of and how the inner mind works.
To that end, topics such as quantum physics, simulation theory, and esoteric writings from the world's oldest religions like Hinduism and Gnosticism are interesting to me, and I like to talk crazy about that sort of thing from time to time.
In this post, though, I'm going to write strictly about visual perceptions that I've experienced at different times in my life. Many are related to psychotropic compounds, including cannabis, but now I'm able to experience some crazy things just by meditating while sober too.
Stories on the full blog post:
I didn't find this documented very many places but it's possible to get a VNC server running for "remote desktop" to access and control your Pinephone display from your laptop.
Quick list of related technologies:
grim
command.wf-recorder
.Mobian already packages grim
and wf-recorder
so these are just an apt install away, and these are documented
on Mobian's wiki. But wayvnc is not yet packaged in Mobian and you gotta build
it from source code yourself.
Follow the directions on the git repo, including cloning down the neatvnc and aml dependencies. The README has instructions to build it for Fedora and Arch but the Debian instructions are missing! I found by trial-and-error the dependencies I needed to install to build this program for Debian:
sudo apt install gcc meson ninja-build pkg-config libpixman-1-dev \
libdrm-dev libxbcommon-dev libwayland-dev
I ran the built binary like wayvnc 0.0.0.0
to start the server and connected
with the TigerVNC client from my desktop.
It has a couple of quirks to watch out for:
-r --render-cursor
options to get the cursor to work. Thanks,
anonymous commenter!This is a general idea or concept I've had kicking around in my head about a way that a federated social network could work, wherein the user's own local device controls their identity rather than having a username on somebody's server.
To understand what I'm talking about, first let's run through what a federated social website even is. Briefly:
How would it look? With typical websites, there's a database and everyone has a user ID in it along with their email, username, bio text and whatever other details, and each website has their own database. What if you could move that user authentication to the client side? So instead of, "I log in as @kirsle with my password, so your back-end database can attest to my identity" it's instead "I'm telling you who I am, using a profile stored on my phone and not on your database."
The technologies to make this work on the client-side apps would be:
Now, what kind of site would this support? Not a site like Twitter or Instagram where users have a timeline and you host decades worth of pictures for them; these sort of sites require too much back-end state around user accounts.
Think instead of a site more like Reddit. Reddit is a "forum of forums" with tons of sub-communities but it's all on a centralized site. Imagine instead, that instead of subreddits on one site, each subreddit was its own separate server altogether, each server operated by different individuals on the Internet?
The server only hosts the forums and comment threads, not the user profiles. The user profiles are kept with the client app. If a server disappears, only its discussions are lost, not the users too.
So with my "self-authenticated client app" I could connect to a dozen different servers, each hosting their own communities, using my own local device identity to seamlessly authenticate to each server and post messages to their boards. The long-term state of each server, then, is only to do with the forum messages and less to do with maintaining profile pages and timelines. If a particular server decides to shut down and close up shop, nothing is lost, no user accounts were centrally tied to that server, users will just find replacements for their particular community discussions.
This idea is free for grabs, I don't think there's any money to be made from it, and I wouldn't mind if somebody made it a reality, I'll probably be too lazy to develop it myself. :)
The Adobe Flash Player is finally dead, and so the Flash animations I made back in high school don't play in Chrome anymore, so it was finally time to convert them to standard videos. Fortunately, there was such a thing as a "Standalone Flash Player" that could open my .swf files and it runs perfectly on Linux under Wine! So I just used vokoscreen to record the playback as a video to preserve these old animations for posterity.
The Kanian/Azulian War is the best animation I ever created in Macromedia Flash 5 when I was 15 years old. It features two classes of character I made up, the Kanians and the Azulians, going to war with each other and was inspired by various Newgrounds Flash cartoons that were popular in that era, such as Mario vs. Sonic.
Here is the Flash cartoon, featuring my awful voice acting. Read the full blog post to understand just what the f*ck is going on and who the Azulians and Kanians are, as I imagine this cartoon won't make much sense to people who weren't in my head at the time I made it.
0.0017s
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