James Helferty @sirspate@mastodon.social

Got tired of playing with 6502 assembler, so I started reading up on 68000-based systems.

Amiga in particular caught my eye. It has an interesting Ven diagram of having a bios that they still charge for, while also having a ridiculous amount of information about how it's implemented publicly available.

It's kind of a shame no one's made a free replacement, if for no other reason than to make selling emulated Amiga games viable on modern digital storefronts like gog.com.

Just gonna say, moving a system from Ubuntu 14.04 to 18.04 is not going as smoothly as I'd hoped.

Full disk encryption meant I couldn't resize the boot partition directly, which is necessary because 14.04's default boot partition size isn't large enough to allow migration to 16.04. So I'm doing a fresh 18.04 on a separate drive..

Taking the opportunity to relisten to one of my favorite things Purple Motion worked on, "Mosaic Days"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-iRmQiQxRU

I really need to toss a bunch of demoscene music onto my thumbdrive for in the car..

Fell down an odd little rabbit hole this evening when I discovered that Purple Motion (!!!) was one of the composers for Cities: Skylines..

Two of my biggest annoyances are sort of out of my hands. One of them is a suspend issue; the device doesn't reliably come out of sleep, so a lot of the time I end up having to force a shutdown and reboot. The other issue is that suspend doesn't seem to actually save much/any power vs leaving the device on. So the upshot is I just end up shutting down the device each time.

(It's a good thing the boot times are quick.)

I've managed to mitigate two more annoyances with #pinebookpro debian install, and doc'd them in the forum.

gvim was instanely slow; I'm talking multiple seconds to refresh the screen when scrolling through a file. Turns out I'd selected vim-gtk3 instead of vim-gtk. Switching to the gtk2 build improved scrolling by an order of magnitude.

firefox didn't play primevideo. chromium did, so I manually installed widevine in firefox. Fixed prime, but others tell me netflix has additional issues. hm.

Attempted another software update on the #pinebookpro, and it looks like this time it actually updated. (Not sure why it claimed there was nothing to do last time.)

Playing with it a bit more, I'm finally getting the hang of some of the keyboard shortcuts. Biggest issues are with the trackpad (still seems drifty) and, oddly enough, the hinge. Another couple degrees would've made it a lot more useful for lap use--I have to put it on a table to be comfortable.

Postscript: audio has spontaneously decided to start working. wut.. No guarantee it won't go away again, though, I guess? sigh..

I was hoping I could use the #pinebookpro to replace my old (2008) macbook as my main portable machine. (Main requirements: rock-solid stable system, firefox working well, and working audio/video so I can play around with gamedev and old computer emulators.) Doesn't look like it's there yet.

My #pinebookpro arrived today; only just got a chance to start putting it through its paces.

I will say that the display and keyboard are really nice. (Tho the keyboard took a bit of configuring; I have the ANSI model but Debian comes set to UK mode.)

The rest of the experience has been somewhat.. growing pains? I think I might just set it aside for a while and see if they sort it out. (Audio's completely busted and the OS is very crash-prone. Trackpad is very drifty.. all feels kinda beta.)

This Mastodon instance sure generates a lot of 500 errors lately..

Merry Christmas, y'all.

The Boney M Christmas album doesn't get as much love as it deserves.

After checking the UK election results, I'm about ready for some gin.

It's a good anime season this time around. Between "Oresuki" and "Ascendance of a Bookworm," the table is set. But then you add in "Didn't I say to make my abilities average" and "Welcome to demon school" (which is surprisingly well done for what it is) and you have a very solid season. Crunchyroll has some real winners this time around.

(I'll even cut "High School Prodigies" some slack.. but not much.)

Yesterday I was listening to smooth jazz on an internet radio steam when it suddenly started playing Christmas music. It took me a minute to realize that somewhere in Asia it had just become Nov 1.

The amount of rain we've seen in the past 24 hours is bordering on ridiculous. And since I've been made aware of the sloppiness with which some of our shingles were installed, the addition of strong winds to the equation makes for a slightly stressful night.

I said I'd put some Halloween music on, after taking the kids door-to-door trick-or-treating. Wife was expecting The Monster Mash, but--

What is love? Baby don't hurt me..

I spent a couple of days at work researching and learning how gitlab CI and runners work. I now know exactly why I won't be using it after all. Instead of automating it, Imma just document it.

The number of times I've discarded a technology at a juncture like this annoys me, but sometimes it just seems like the more mature decision..

It was raining here today, and I was trying to get work done but the lights kept flickering in my peripheral vision. It was driving me to distraction because I was constantly concerned I was about to lose power.

A nervous mess, I finally took a break to check in on the family. Turns out they were doing some cleaning. Each time the vacuum went on, the lights dimmed.