Elektrine lite

← Feed

alcinnz

alcinnz@floss.social

<p>A browser developer posting mostly about how free software projects work, and occasionally about climate change.</p><p>Though I do enjoy german board games given an opponent.</p><p>Header picture is of Mordecai from Lackadaisy by Tracy Butler.</p><p>Pronouns: he/him/whatever<br /><a href="https://floss.social/tags/noindex" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>noindex</span></a></p>

Posts

  • Post #4503426

    Cleaning costs, or, examining the OpenBSD -fret-clean flag - Dr. Brian Robert Callahan: https://briancallahan.net/blog/20260811.html

  • Post #4353917

    &quot;A lot of hype and noise is pressing us to extend the cowboy, wild-west phase of the software industry’s expansion. We should set that aside, and take ourselves seriously as a mature industry.&quot; How building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight - Alistair Davidson: https://www.mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html-first/

  • Post #4168290

    Batch rename files in your editor with vidir - Hund: https://hunden.linuxkompis.se/2026/07/27/batch-rename-files-in-your-editor-with-vidir.html

  • Post #4079069

    You might be surprised to learn how complex text rendering is, at least if you want to deliver an inclusive solution! Which early computers misleadingly didn&#39;t. So in a nutshell, what does it involve? Since the early 1990s we&#39;ve been using vector fonts (in Apple&#39;s TrueType font format, &amp; variants thereof) so the shapes remain sharp no matter how tiny or massive you draw it. This does mean software needs to &quot;rasterize&quot; these vector for display. What else? 1/4?

  • Post #3629055

    This blog is written in en-GB - Terence Eden: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/07/this-blog-is-written-in-en-gb/ via https://kevquirk.com/this-blog-is-written-in-en-gb

  • Post #3304097

    An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt - lr0: https://lr0.org/blog/p/arabic/ As someone who&#39;s put a fair bit of effort into implementing typography... I find it important to be aware of these sorts of things!

  • Post #2768755

    Interim Install Guide: KDE Neon User Edition for a professional digital painter workstation - David Revoy: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1145/interim-install-guide-kde-neon-user-edition-for-a-professional-digital-painter-workstation

  • Post #2768754

    People &amp;amp; blogs - Piri @ Manuel Moreale: https://manuelmoreale.com/interview/piri

  • Post #2768753

    Don&amp;#39;t put aria-label on generic elements like divs - Manuel Matuzović: https://www.matuzo.at/blog/2026/aria-label-generic-elements

  • Post #2768752

    I feel your pain Sara - Manuel Moreale: https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/i-feel-your-pain-sara

  • Post #2768751

    The $500 Price Increase - Ernie Smith &amp;quot;Tedium&amp;quot;: https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/17345764/plex-price-increase-self-hosting

  • Post #2768749

    Scroll quadrāgintā duo - Mike &amp;quot;Shellsharks&amp;quot;: https://shellsharks.com/scrolls/scroll/2026-05-22 Some links from it... Another Triumph For Blogging - Wouter Groeneveld: https://brainbaking.com/post/2026/05/another-triumph-for-blogging/ Save the Web by Being Nice - Andrew Stephen: https://sheep.horse/2024/4/save_the_web_by_being_nice.html Last Online 620 Weeks Ago: Why I&amp;#39;m Loyal to the IndieWeb - Brennan Kenneth Brown: https://brennan.day/last-online-620-weeks-ago-why-...

  • Post #2768748

    TIL: Symlinking NixOS Dotfiles - Alex Kladov: https://matklad.github.io/2026/05/21/symlinking-nixos-dotfiles.html

  • Post #2768745

    Studying GRUB&amp;#39;s VBE video-driver for i386 PC machines... There&amp;#39;s a method for printing its state as human-legible text. The info&amp;amp;fini method defers to the generic routine wrapped in additional finalizers. The palette-setter defers to a generic code, with signs they considered adding a dedicated codepath for indexed colours. The iterate method wraps an array, as well as several helpers to retrieve &amp;amp; format the target&amp;#39;s metadata. Passing each resulting ent...

  • Post #2768744

    I don&amp;#39;t have a lot of time this morning, so I think I&amp;#39;ll briefly discuss what would be involved in applying the next few sound effects I see mentioned in the USB spec I&amp;#39;m referencing... Simple 2D positioning can be achieved by adjusting the volume-ratio between 2 speakers. Going into 3D I believe would extend this principle to more speakers. Reverb would involve repeating previous sounds with some sort of processing to simulate echoes. 1/2!

  • Post #2768743

    Last night, as I took a break between relistening to seasons of The Magnus Archives, I rewatched some of childhood animations. Howl&amp;#39;s Moving Castle followed by Toy Story. We had some great ones, which are fun even for adults! Toy Story was the 1st feature-length computer-animated film, &amp;amp; it still looks remarkably good! Their tools at the time had some weaknesses, but PIXAR was aware of that enough to write around it. That&amp;#39;s why they made the story about toys!

  • Post #2547320

    The Boring Internet - Terry Godier: https://www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-internet via https://roytang.net/links/2026/#59a9d38399b8111912e0a4439e68ecab

  • Post #2268693

    Material Design, Modernism, &amp;amp; design politics: https://www.imaginarycloud.com/blog/material-design-is-a-political-choice/ &amp;#39;Google is a multinational corporation that represents a particular culture and Material Design is just another tentacle of the octopus that monopolizes the Web. That’s why, more than ever, movements like Web-Brutalism that have the boldness and the courage to question those “rational aesthetics”, dictated by science and technology, are very relevant.&amp;#3...

  • Post #2237587

    Can any of my followers help?

  • Post #2237584

    My talk went well last night! I gave a good performance with barely a stumble hitting a good length, got plenty of complements, &amp;amp; it appears I successfully gave my intended impression! Got some laughs too! I&amp;#39;ve just published a slight variant of my slides with a near-perfect transcript to https://adrian.geek.nz/alt-tech-futures.pdf I tweaked it a little so it presents well as a PDF, &amp;amp; its missing the live performance aspect. Feel free to use this as a basis for your ow...

  • Post #2169246

    Unpolished human websites - Joel Chrono: https://joelchrono.xyz/blog/unpolished-human-websites

  • Post #1976808

    Seeing the calls to switch to Safari or Firefox from Chrome (hey, have I told you about Odysseus?) I want to say once again that we should be developing new browser engines to fight the collapse in browser divirsity! We need the web to simplify! Who&amp;#39;s interested? I&amp;#39;ve developed a CSS engine to help you: https://git.nzoss.org.nz/alcinnz/stylish-haskell And I&amp;#39;ve just gotten around to blogging about it: https://odysseus.adrian.geek.nz/misc/2019/06/24/my-css-engine.html

  • Post #1743423

    Looking back... I resumed discussing GRUB &amp;amp; USB on March 14th. Look forward to some necroboosting!

  • Post #1743421

    RAIN-PSP 0.1 - mr (in 2021): https://preposter.us/single-michigan-helium-network/rain-psp-0-1.html

  • Post #1743418

    Why Is Everything Proprietary These Days? - Kev Quirk: https://kevquirk.com/why-is-everything-proprietary-these-days

  • Post #1743415

    Over/Under #63 with Michael Harley - Lazybear: https://lazybea.rs/ovr-063/

  • Post #1743413

    Canvas-ing the Web - Eric Meyer: https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2026/04/27/canvas-ing-the-web/

  • Post #1743409

    As for the &amp;quot;terminfo&amp;quot; command itself... If there&amp;#39;s no args it iterates over a global linkedlist reformatting it into human-legible text aided by a lookuptable. Otherwise it parses commandline flags, scans that linkedlist for the named entry (treating &amp;quot;ofconsole&amp;quot; as synonymous with &amp;quot;console&amp;quot;) otherwise outputting an error message, updates the encoding flags, considers updating the screensize, &amp;amp; possibly invokes a helper to br...

  • Post #1743408

    Studying GRUB&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;terminfo&amp;quot; command, there&amp;#39;s a suite of string-helpers defined in another file. A couple of which lexes (via another helper) the given format string once to get some stats, reformats the variadic args as an array, considers preparing a stack, &amp;amp; stack-based interprets any following %-prefixed chars echoing all others to the output. Both lexer passes are aided by a shared helper, &amp;amp; there&amp;#39;s additional support routines for ope...

  • Post #1743406

    I recently spent a couple days discussing all the effort that&amp;#39;s involved in parsing sequences of bytes into something more structured that computers can work with. The inverse operation however is fairly easy: We traverse all the objects we want to transmit or store &amp;amp; concatenate all the corresponding strings. Often we go to pains to make this human-legible using generic tools, but we don&amp;#39;t need to. And often leave it to the kernel (a small buffer aside) to actually con...