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
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Post #4503426
Cleaning costs, or, examining the OpenBSD -fret-clean flag - Dr. Brian Robert Callahan: https://briancallahan.net/blog/20260811.html
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Post #4353917
"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." How building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight - Alistair Davidson: https://www.mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html-first/
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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
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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't. So in a nutshell, what does it involve? Since the early 1990s we've been using vector fonts (in Apple's TrueType font format, & variants thereof) so the shapes remain sharp no matter how tiny or massive you draw it. This does mean software needs to "rasterize" these vector for display. What else? 1/4?
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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
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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's put a fair bit of effort into implementing typography... I find it important to be aware of these sorts of things!
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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
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Post #2768754
People &amp; blogs - Piri @ Manuel Moreale: https://manuelmoreale.com/interview/piri
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Post #2768753
Don&#39;t put aria-label on generic elements like divs - Manuel Matuzović: https://www.matuzo.at/blog/2026/aria-label-generic-elements
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Post #2768752
I feel your pain Sara - Manuel Moreale: https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/i-feel-your-pain-sara
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Post #2768751
The $500 Price Increase - Ernie Smith &quot;Tedium&quot;: https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/17345764/plex-price-increase-self-hosting
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Post #2768749
Scroll quadrāgintā duo - Mike &quot;Shellsharks&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&#39;m Loyal to the IndieWeb - Brennan Kenneth Brown: https://brennan.day/last-online-620-weeks-ago-why-...
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Post #2768748
TIL: Symlinking NixOS Dotfiles - Alex Kladov: https://matklad.github.io/2026/05/21/symlinking-nixos-dotfiles.html
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Post #2768745
Studying GRUB&#39;s VBE video-driver for i386 PC machines... There&#39;s a method for printing its state as human-legible text. The info&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; format the target&#39;s metadata. Passing each resulting ent...
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Post #2768744
I don&#39;t have a lot of time this morning, so I think I&#39;ll briefly discuss what would be involved in applying the next few sound effects I see mentioned in the USB spec I&#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!
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Post #2768743
Last night, as I took a break between relistening to seasons of The Magnus Archives, I rewatched some of childhood animations. Howl&#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; 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&#39;s why they made the story about toys!
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Post #2547320
The Boring Internet - Terry Godier: https://www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-internet via https://roytang.net/links/2026/#59a9d38399b8111912e0a4439e68ecab
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Post #2268693
Material Design, Modernism, &amp; design politics: https://www.imaginarycloud.com/blog/material-design-is-a-political-choice/ &#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.&#3...
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Post #2237587
Can any of my followers help?
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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; it appears I successfully gave my intended impression! Got some laughs too! I&#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; its missing the live performance aspect. Feel free to use this as a basis for your ow...
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Post #2169246
Unpolished human websites - Joel Chrono: https://joelchrono.xyz/blog/unpolished-human-websites
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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&#39;s interested? I&#39;ve developed a CSS engine to help you: https://git.nzoss.org.nz/alcinnz/stylish-haskell And I&#39;ve just gotten around to blogging about it: https://odysseus.adrian.geek.nz/misc/2019/06/24/my-css-engine.html
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Post #1743423
Looking back... I resumed discussing GRUB &amp; USB on March 14th. Look forward to some necroboosting!
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Post #1743421
RAIN-PSP 0.1 - mr (in 2021): https://preposter.us/single-michigan-helium-network/rain-psp-0-1.html
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Post #1743418
Why Is Everything Proprietary These Days? - Kev Quirk: https://kevquirk.com/why-is-everything-proprietary-these-days
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Post #1743415
Over/Under #63 with Michael Harley - Lazybear: https://lazybea.rs/ovr-063/
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Post #1743413
Canvas-ing the Web - Eric Meyer: https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2026/04/27/canvas-ing-the-web/
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Post #1743409
As for the &quot;terminfo&quot; command itself... If there&#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 &quot;ofconsole&quot; as synonymous with &quot;console&quot;) otherwise outputting an error message, updates the encoding flags, considers updating the screensize, &amp; possibly invokes a helper to br...
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Post #1743408
Studying GRUB&#39;s &quot;terminfo&quot; command, there&#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; stack-based interprets any following %-prefixed chars echoing all others to the output. Both lexer passes are aided by a shared helper, &amp; there&#39;s additional support routines for ope...
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Post #1743406
I recently spent a couple days discussing all the effort that&#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; concatenate all the corresponding strings. Often we go to pains to make this human-legible using generic tools, but we don&#39;t need to. And often leave it to the kernel (a small buffer aside) to actually con...