| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-01-31, 07:26 in Free project idea: The File Decoder
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 Post: #101 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
I should have known there'd already be tools like this. I did look around a bit, but all the editors I could find were pretty generic traditional hex editors, or very specialised for x86/ARM binaries, rather than generic binary data files. That Hex Fiend PR looks pretty nice, except that if I'm reading PR correctly, they're using a Turing-complete language to parse rather than something purely declarative, which seems a shame. On the other hand, the Synalize screenshot looks like they've got a proper declarative grammar with a full GUI editor, which makes it look a lot scarier than it probably is. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-01-31, 11:22 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Post: #102 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
First JavaScript, now Rust, when will it end? The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-02-02, 06:59 in Mozilla, *sigh* (revision 1)
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Post: #103 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by tomman Also, Blink and Webkit might be legally distinct, but they're technically still very close. It's like getting to choose between a 10mm ring spanner and a 10mm open spanner. Also... ugh, Discourse. Really, Mozilla?! You had to pick which is probably the WORST forum software package in earth? Discourse is great. Normies get their fancy JS-heavy animated UI, and techies can use RSS and email without even touching a browser, even without a GUI. Posted by sureanem New versions of glibc use versioned symbols to support binaries built against old versions of glibc, so I'm guessing you're deliberately sticking with an old or hyper-conservative distro to avoid change in general or to avoid particular changes you don't like. It's a free country and you're perfectly welcome to use whatever version of glibc you like, but as general advice, you'll live a happier life if you can avoid getting angry at other people over the consequences of your personal choices. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-02-03, 07:26 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Post: #104 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by sureanem Why should I have to use 90s technology to read a forum when it can be made to work with 80s technology? Besides which, typical forum software (including this forum) is very wasteful and inefficient, labelling each post with an author and an avatar and a posting date and a permalink and all kinds of junk that most people don't care about 90% of the time, just because without some kind of client-side scripting it's not possible to have it show and hide. Also, you wind up with a bunch of posts concatenated vertically so you have to scroll past the ones you're not interested in instead of just hitting the 'next unread' key, and because there's so much wasted space you typically only get 10-20 posts per page, instead of being able to look at all of them and pick out the most-interesting ones. Don't get me wrong, webforums and imageboards have their charm, and foster interesting micro-cultures that wouldn't crop up anywhere else, so I don't want to *destroy* them. But it's not practical for a medium or large organisation to get anything done in a webforum. Why couldn't they make it work without JS, like Reddit, 4chan, phpBB, and many other websites do without any problems at all? Are you sure Reddit works without JS? I think Reddit uses even more JS than Discourse, or at least New Reddit feels a lot more sluggish and swapping-heavy than Discourse. I'm running Debian stable, which is a perfectly standard distribution. It is neither old nor hyper-conservative. My apologies, I shouldn't have assumed. Debian Stable is perfectly respectable and not hype-conservative, although the release process for the next stable version has already started, so the current stable is a *little* bit old. I have glibc 2.24, which was released on 2016-08-05. No other application has had this issue. Clearly, they are the ones in the wrong here for writing software that depends on running untested beta software to even start. As a counter-point, I recently switched my automated higan builds from Debian Stable to Ubuntu LTS because Stable's glibc was too old for a syscall byuu wanted to use (getentropy(), added in 2.25) and because Stable's gcc was too old for the compiler features byuu wanted to use (C++17). So yes, other applications do have problems with glibc 2.24. It's also unfair to say that versions of glibc newer than 2.24 are "untested beta software"; since then, glibc has had five stable releases: 2.25 through 2.29, tested by the glibc maintainers and in other distributions. Even if glibc is untested beta software, Servo is itself relatively untested beta software (number of official stable releases: 0) so it seems unfair to complain about the binaries of a project that expects most users to be actively developing and building from source. Just what is it that was added in the last two and a half years that didn't exist in the C standard library before anyway? To my knowledge, the last revision was in 2011, which was 7-8 years ago - far before my "old version" was released. And if they want to rely on nonstandard features, why can't they link them in themselves and write portable code? You *do* know that glibc is responsible for the kernel API as well as the C standard library, right? And that the kernel adds new, more efficient API calls every so often, and glibc exposes them to userspace directly, or re-implements existing functions to be more efficient. There's a certain noble minimalism in writing code that would work perfectly on UNIX Sixth Edition on a PDP-11, but it's not the One Correct Path. Especially for a project that (like Servo) is trying to experiment with making maximal use of modern graphics hardware, rather than being portable to an ASR33. If portability helps them access and try out more modern graphics hardware, like on Android or iOS devices, then that's good. More portability than that, like supporting old graphics hardware, or old OSs with old drivers, is bad for Servo because that's effort that doesn't benefit their primary experiment-with-modern-graphics-hardware goal. See, this is why I don't like Rust and why I don't like dynamic linking. Nothing but trouble. And for what? Saving a few kilobytes of binary size, that promptly get consumed by the bloated "standard library" you use? Static linking is awesome, until there's a security fix for OpenSSL and you have to redownload (or recompile) half your OS install. And then again next week for the next security fix. That said, Rust supports static linking perfectly well, it's just a bad idea most of the time. Many operating systems only provide their APIs as dynamic libraries (including Windows and macOS) so you can't build a static binary there. While you *can* statically link binaries for Linux, it's a bad idea on a glibc-based distribution because some authentication-related features depend on dynamically loading authentication plugins. If you know the app doesn't use any of those features, then go ahead, but it's not a safe default. If you really don't like dynamic linking, you might look into Alpine Linux, which uses musl-libc rather than glibc and I think promotes static linking. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-02-04, 12:46 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Post: #105 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by sureanem CSS technically allows things to auto-hide, but doesn't really provide the kind of nuanced interface that native apps and JS can provide. For example, I can click a menu name to reveal the menu then click a menu item, or I can mouse-down on the menu name, drag to the item I want, then release. CSS only really lets you expose information on-hover, and that gets really frustrating really quickly. I'd also disagree with "there's space to the left and right, so you might as well put some information there". That's clutter - give me the most important information, but don't show anything more unless I ask. Discourse has the tiny, round, soulless avatars, and wastes the infinitely more precious vertical space instead. Eh, one person's "wasted vertical space" is another person's "easy to navigate even while scrolling at top speed". The limit in posts per page isn't technological either, it's just an arbitrary default. Imageboards show the whole thread in one page without having any issues. Imageboards can show hundreds of posts on a page because they generally don't do any kind of formatting, just spitting out left-aligned blobs of unformatted text for the browser to stack vertically. Most actual forums try to make the page look a bit nicer by sticking things into a table, and they have to interpret fancy BBCode or whatever. That gets expensive - annoying on modern hardware, prohibitive on the 90s hardware most forums were designed for. I don't see why they wouldn't work for large organizations. If GitHub would go ahead and replace the "Issues" view with phpBB, would there be any noticeable changes but the theme? Or rather, why is Discourse better than regular forum software? If GitHub replaced their "Issues" view with phpBB, there'd be rioting within six hours, if only because issue-management relies on tagging and searching and phpBB's search is utter bollocks. Discourse is better than other forums because the front page of a Discourse instance shows you what's been happening recently in the community, rather than immediately forcing you to decide between development/support/general/off-topic categories. Discourse is better than other forums because when you go to write a reply, instead of giving you a big box to type in and a little window to review the previous comments, which are probably formatted differently and in a different order, you get a little (but resizable!) box to type in and the original thread is still visible behind it, looking exactly like it did before you hit Reply, so you can easily find the bits you wanted to talk about. Discourse is better than other forums because you can paste an image into the message-compose box, rather than having to find a third-party image host, upload the image, and figure out what crazy syntax this particular forum uses for inline images on an external host. Discourse is better than other forums because when post #297 quotes post #13, there's an automatic link back so the reader can see the full context without having to go hunting for where the quote came from. Also, the quoted post gets a link *forward* to the quoting post. Discourse is better than other forums because when a thread gets necro-bumped, it puts a little marker just before the bumping post saying "7 months later" or however long the gap is. There's so many reasons Discourse is more pleasant to use than phpBB, but it's not about any particular feature. Fundamentally, phpBB and other 90s forums said "a forum that's comfortable for humans is hard to implement for computers, so we'll compromise and make a forum that's only a little bit awkward for everybody." Discourse just set out to make a forum that's comfortable for humans, no matter how hard to implement it would be. Linux uses mailing lists which are arguably even more primitive and they still get things done. The thing about LKML is that there's already a pretty big barrier to entry in the form of "having to understand the Linux kernel", so requiring people to learn mailing-list etiquette isn't that much more of a hurdle. That definitely would *not* work for internal communication in a company or a charity or something, where most people aren't 30-40 year old nerds. There's also a good argument to be made that the rigid culture around the LKML excludes a bunch of talented people who would otherwise help make Linux even better. So even if Linux still "gets things done", maybe they'd get more things done if they used different communications infrastructure. But regardless, Discourse *is* a mailing list, so it's got that covered too. :) Fair enough. I'd still make sure to statically link in the getentropy() wrapper, since a build dependency is much less severe than a runtime dependency, but I guess it's a matter of opinion. The getentropy() wrapper basically *is* glibc. I guess somebody could write their own wrapper around syscall(3) with all the architecture-specific variations of type, alignment, and offset for the arguments, but it'd be a lot easier to just statically link glibc. I still think it's a bad idea. The binary is 306 MB big, and they can't be bothered to link in the standard library which is only about 527k (musl) or 7.9MB (glibc)? It's nothing to do with file-size, it's all about developer time. How many glibc assumptions would be broken by linking with musl? How many dynamic-linking assumptions would be broken by linking dynamically? If any weirdness does crop up, how difficult will it be to diagnose the problem, how difficult will it be to work around, how many problems will the workarounds cause? How many extra contributors will we get by supporting older Linux distros? It's *likely* there'd be no problems enabling static linking, but there's a risk, and very little reward if any. Therefore, it's safer to leave things as they are. Right, I forget that it doesn't only deal with funny GNU extensions. It could be a new kernel feature, but then why are they introducing hard dependencies on fairly recent kernel versions? They're writing for Windows too, and presumably they want their browser to work on older kernel versions (cough Android) When you say "they", do you mean the Servo developers, or the glibc developers? Servo just links with the current version of glibc, and when glibc supports multiple ABIs for a given symbol, the linker picks the newest one. Sometimes glibc adds a new API for a new syscall, and that obviously requires the corresponding version of glibc. Sometimes glibc makes an existing API use a different syscall, for efficiency or reliability reasons. For example, older versions of Linux provided a syscall to implement gettimeofday(), newer versions of Linux map a memory page containing that information into every process, so gettimeofday() is now a pointer-dereference instead of a syscall. The glibc API is the same, but the implementation is much, much faster (and a binary statically linked with a newer glibc would segfault on an older kernel). Sometimes glibc changes an existing API even without a kernel change, to make things simpler or more reliable. The old symbol with the old behaviour is preserved for compatibility with binaries linked against an old glibc, but new binaries get the new symbol, even if they might work perfectly well with the old symbols - old binaries on new systems are more important than new binaries on old systems. It turns out that Servo specifically is this last case. I downloaded a binary and checked what glibc symbols it used: Only 2.27 is newer than your glibc 2.24. The symbols requiring glibc 2.27 are: Apparently floating point math got overhauled in glibc 2.27. Looking at the glibc 2.27 announcement:
So a weird and rarely-used API got removed, and to preserve backwards compatibility, library functions using the new, simpler API got new symbols. As for the use of modern graphics hardware, isn't the goal of Servo to eventually replace Gecko? Is it intended to just drop support for anything older than Windows 10? Servo's not going to replace Gecko, no. Instead, bits and pieces of Servo are going to be grafted onto Gecko where they provide real benefit. For example, Servo's WebRender compositing/layout library is (I think) currently on by default for Firefox Nightly users on Windows 10 with particular versions of particular graphics drivers, and everybody else gets the current-gen compositing code. By the time Servo's tech becomes the standard build of Firefox, 2018 graphics tech is going to be old and crusty. The portability I'm asking for isn't anything insane like running on a PDP-11, it's that the binary releases should be easier to use than the source releases. If everyone's expected to build it themselves anyway, and the binary builds are broken, then why even release them? Might as well tell people to piss off and build it themselves if they want it so much. "Easier to use" isn't an absolute, binary quality. Servo's binaries are directly useful to a lot of people, they're less useful to people who have to acquire updated libraries to run them, they're even less useful to people who have to boot an x86_64 emulator to run them, and they're much less useful to people who only have a desert full of rocks. But you've got to draw the line somewhere. If the Servo folks felt they needed more testing on older hardware, I'm sure they'd put more effort into making their binaries more widely usable. But since they haven't, I guess they don't. And that's entirely their decision. You forget that static linking isn't the only one with security issues. How many security flaws have there been from LD_PRELOAD again? That's not strictly-speaking a problem with the idea of dynamic linking, it's a problem with a particular implementation of dynamic linking. It would be really easy to avoid LD_PRELOAD's risks by just removing that feature, but it's been kept around because LD_PRELOAD is so freakin' useful that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Also remember that the only thing that would need to be changed in such a scenario is the library version, it wouldn't be an update proper and wouldn't take much space to download. How do you figure? If a library has a problem on a static-linking-only OS, every binary that (directly or indirectly) uses that library needs to be replaced to get the update. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-02-06, 13:52 in Buying a new phone (not safe for tomman) (revision 1)
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Post: #106 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Right now, I've got a FirefoxOS-based smartphone, which I liked a lot, but apparently nobody else did. I decided I'd keep using it until it stopped working, because why throw out a perfectly good device? Today I noticed the Li-ion battery had started to puff up, which is apparently a firm sign that things are about to go very bad. I can't find a replacement, because apparently this is the only device in the known universe that uses a battery of these exact dimensions ("1ICP6/56/61" is the code), so I guess that means it's new phone time. Does anybody have any suggestions? I'd prefer a phone that's FSF-Free to whatever extent that's possible, at the very least I want the boot loader to be unlocked (unlockable?) so I can install an alternative OS like Lineage or at least explore de-Googlification. EDIT: For reference, I think these phones are what I have to choose from. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-02-06, 15:10 in Buying a new phone (not safe for tomman)
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Post: #107 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
> I went into sticker shock before I remembered those prices are in australian dollars. Ah for the glorious days of the global financial crisis, when every other country's currency tanked and for one brief moment, the Australian Dollar was top dog. > Used to have a Samsung J7, felt it was overpriced but functional. I've heard bad things about Samsung loading their phones with weird Samsung-specific extras, trying to "value add" but mostly making a mess. Did that happen to your phone, or not enough to notice/worry about? The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-02-07, 07:30 in Buying a new phone (not safe for tomman)
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Post: #108 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by BearOso I did some research of my own, googling for things like "unlock bootloader" and "lineage OS" plus various phone models. None of the phones in that list scored particularly well, but the Nokia 6.1 seemed to do as well as anything else. I've placed an order and it should be here in a few days. Thanks! The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-02-07, 07:33 in Higan: how to configure different emulator settings?
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Post: #109 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
I'm not exactly sure, but: - I don't think icarus and higan have conflicting settings, so they can probably share the same settings.bml - the only notable setting icarus stores is the location of the game library, and it's probably not a big deal if multiple higan installations share that particular setting. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-02-08, 12:46 in Buying a new phone (not safe for tomman)
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Post: #110 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
When I ordered my phone, I elected *not* to pay for overnight shipping, and so wasn't expecting it to arrive until Monday. However, when I woke up this morning, I found a "Your parcel is scheduled for delivery today!" message. I got all excited, showered and dresssed as quickly as possible since the delivery guy could arrive at any moment, and opened the package-tracking webpage they'd sent so I could keep up-to-date. I waited, and waited, and nothing happened. By 5PM I'd gotten pretty frustrated, by about 6PM I knew I wasn't going to get a delivery today after all. A bit after 6 I refreshed the tracking page to see "Delivery attempted: please check the Sorry We Missed You card for more details". I *knew* delivery hadn't been attempted, so I rushed out to check my letterbox. Completely empty! And of course I couldn't ring their customer support, because I didn't have a phone. So I sent them an email instead, fully expecting them to tell me to come and pick the parcel up at the depo, an hour or two's journey across the city and far from public transport. Meanwhile, a thunderstorm had cropped up, so I shut down my desktop PC for safety, and booted up my laptop for the first time in a while. I did the usual "install updates" dance, then thought to log into gmail, just to see if the package people had replied. Turns out, there was a bunch of other messages saying that my package had been dropped off at a petrol station nearby, well within walking distance! Petrol stations are always open late, and I really wanted my new phone, so I put on my walking shoes, grabbed my bag and walked out the door. Turns out, that thunderstorm was *bucketing* down. I stood just inside the door of my building, looking out at the downpour and wondering if this was really such a good idea. Eventually I said "what the hell", and strode out. I had an old, broken umbrella, but it didn't really do much - what with the wind blowing it about, and the driving rain, I still got soaked to the skin on the way there. But I got there, picked up my new toy, brought it back, and now I've spent an hour or two letting it apply system updates, trying to figure out how the Android UI works, uninstalling a bunch of Google Play integrated apps and installing replacements. - Sometimes "Back" is an arrow at the top-left of the screen, sometimes "Back" is a triangle button at the bottom. Is there some nuanced difference I don't understand, or is that just Android weirdness? - The middle button is "home screen" on a short press and "Open Browser" on a long press, the square button is "switch apps" on a short press and "split screen" on a long press; am I missing any other cool tricks? - The phone only has a USB-C port for charging and connecting with a Real Computer, but my Real Computers don't have USB-C ports. Is a converter cable a passive thing like USB-A to USB-B, or an active (expensive) thing like VGA to HDMI? - I previously only really used my phone for web-browsing, shopping lists, reading e-books, and listening to music. I've installed Firefox, Simple Notes, Book Reader, and Odyssey to do these tasks, and they seem to meet my needs. Are there any alternatives I should know about? - Are there any cool apps in general I should know about? The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-02-09, 06:22 in Higan: how to configure different emulator settings?
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Post: #111 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
"bullet 3" tells icarus where the game library is, so it knows where to put them when it imports them. "bullet 5" tells higan where to look for games when you pick a console from the Library menu. For example, if your library path is C:\Games\Emulation, then when you pick "Super Famicom" from the Library menu, higan will look in C:\Games\Emulation\Super Famicom. When you choose "Load ROM File", I guess higan (technically icarus, since that menu option runs icarus to choose a file and import it, then higan loads the imported game) always defaults to your home directory. I don't think there's a way to configure that path. > i noticed that it is possible to load these games ONLY if i load them with the B) method becasue the emulator load the games folder, NOT the .zip original roms. Is it normal? For higan v106, you can load special-chip games with "Load ROM File", but only games that include the game ROM and the firmware data stuck together, as described under Games with co-processor firmware. Most ROMs you'll find on the internet won't be in that format, so you can modify them to append the firmware yourself (they'll still work in other emulators, but it will confuse database-based ROM manager tools like CLRMamePro) or just load them by method B. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-02-09, 07:29 in Buying a new phone (not safe for tomman)
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Post: #112 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by creaothceann Originally I had "Google Assistant" installed, so holding down the middle button activated some text-to-speech thing which included Google search. Once I disabled that and disabled Chrome, Firefox was all that was left, I guess. Long-pressing the back button doesn't do anything for me, at least on the home screen. Long-pressing the wallpaper gives access to a settings menu not available any other way, so far as I can tell. I got a small Type-C to Micro B adapter with the phone, and bought an Micro B to Type A adapter, both are passive. I had a Micro B to A cable I used with my old phone, and which I was hoping I could use with my new phone. When I saw it had a type-C socket instead of micro B, I was very annoyed, so I put it on the charger and complained on the Internet. It turns out, the "charger" is has a type-A socket. I was sitting right next to a type-C to type-A cable while I searched Amazon to see if such a thing existed. My "offline" apps: Is battery temperature a thing I should worry about? I think my previous phone died of battery temperature, because it got super-hot if you locked the phone while the camera was running. But surely mainstream phones aren't so buggy? - Bubble Level Gauge (via F-Droid) Is that a thing you use a lot, or just a fun thing to play with?
I wound up installing VLC because apparently Android doesn't come with a video player, or doesn't come with one that doesn't upload all your videos to Google Driver or something. I assumed it was just a media player like the desktop version, but no - it's got a full media library, and even sorts tracks in an album by disc number and track number. I am very impressed.
I tried this, and it's... not pretty. I mean, it technically works, but 11fps isn't really fun. :/ I imagine it might be better suited to, say, GBA or GBC emulation, but anything besides Dolphin seems to be a quagmire of seedy knock-offs and open-source code repackaged with ads. :/
I installed this, and it was pretty great! I booted up Monkey Island, listened to that theme-tune, then just for kicks I immediately walked back to the island map instead of proceeding to the SCUMM Bar. My phone hard-locked and I had to reboot it. :/ Also, it's weird and sad that ScummVM isn't on F-Droid. I did briefly look into why, but apparently building native Android apps is a bundle of horror best left to professionals.
You download torrents on your phone? Isn't that... battery heavy, at the very least? Posted by sureanem It doesn't sync with Firefox Sync, as far as I can tell, and it's just another WebView wrapper, contributing to the ubiquity of Blink/WebKit. :/ Posted by NTI That is pretty neat, and I like being able to easily add a photo to a note, but there doesn't seem to be a way to export notes to simple files, or import from simple files, only an encrypted "backup". I lost all the notes on my old phone because I couldn't save them out, but I kept my contacts (and easily imported them into the new phone) because I could. CPU Info Also pretty cool, and very detailed. Thanks! Has anybody played with Termux? It seems cool that it's *possible*, but I'm not convinced it's at all practical or useful. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-02-09, 10:11 in Buying a new phone (not safe for tomman)
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Post: #113 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
At the very least, the GitHub "sources" include pre-compiled static libraries for ffmpeg, despite ffmpeg being under the LGPL2.1 so the sources must be available (and re-linkable). The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-02-09, 22:25 in Buying a new phone (not safe for tomman)
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Post: #114 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Bookmarks, history, saved passwords, open tabs. It's great to look at something on my desktop, then when I'm out and about, all that stuff is right in my pocket. Yes, I'm contributing to the ubiquity of Gecko, and if it ever attains dominant market share, I'll start using something else. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-02-11, 14:39 in Buying a new phone (not safe for tomman)
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Post: #115 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
More new developments: I've installed RetroArch, and gotten it working. Man, RetroArch is an impressive achievement, and it's great that there's an easy way to obtain and use emulators on Android without having to wade through Google Play, but everything about RetroArch always feels unfinished. For example, RetroArch has a nice Android-style UI with touch support and scrolling, but because it's a full-screen SDL app it hides the task-switching soft button, and the only way to switch to another app is to completely shut down RetroArch. For another example, it's so easy to download new cores that you can do it by accident while trying to scroll through the list, but the only way to *uninstall* a core is to use Android's "delete this application's entire configuration" feature. Another friend of mine turned me onto SyncThing, which is kind of like an open-source, decentralised DropBox. Now when I take a photo with my phone, the next time I walk into wifi range it should be automatically synced to my desktop at home and (if it's awake) my laptop, wherever they are. I stuck my RetroArch SRAM folder into my SyncThing directory, just in case I put a bunch of time into a game and don't want to lose my progress. After trying out OmniNotes, somebody recommended I try Markor, which is a text editor that supports Markdown and todo.txt syntax highlighting, and can store all its notes in the SyncThing directory instead of a custom app-specific database. I love the idea of plain-text file formats, and of having my stuff automatically synced around, but it seems that the "todo.txt" format is "simple" but flexible enough for somebody to track their whole life with it, while I'm *really* just looking for a way to keep a shopping list. I went back to OmniNotes once I discovered I could share an OmniNote to export it to Markor. A long time ago I wrote a simple J2ME toy, and I discovered a "J2ME Loader" app for Android. It works, although the pixel-art I designed for my 160x80 pixel Nokia 3510 (or whatever the resolution was) is near-illegible on my 1080p smartphone. I discovered Termux, which is a Linux environment in an Android app. It's a bit quirky and limited since it runs within the default Android filesystem rather than a traditional POSIX hierarchy (there's no /bin or /usr!) but it works, and now I have a button on my phone's home screen that will SSH to my home PC with my regular IRC and email clients. Lastly, I was surprised today to see an "Android System" notification offering to update me from Android 8.1 to Android 9. I said "sure!" and of course it did Weird Things. Two of the big features of Android 9 are apparently the "daily summary" at the top of the home screen, and the Google Assistant box at the bottom. Unfortunately both those things seem to require the Google app, and since I've disabled it (on principle) they just sit there doing nothing. Literally nothing: there's a big box labelled "Search" and when I short or long tap on it, absolutely zilch happens. No keyboard, no browser, nothing. And because they're not widgets, they're hard-coded into the home screen, there doesn't seem to be a way to get rid of them. Ah well, that's what I get for exploring the boundaries, I guess, I should be grateful that Google stuff can be disabled at all. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-02-12, 08:14 in Buying a new phone (not safe for tomman)
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Post: #116 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
> Try enabling and then disabling them to see if they go away. At the very least, the daily summary thing shouldn't appear, especially if you unticked all its items. As I understand it, the daily summary is today's date with a bunch of stuff stacking up below it (appointments, weather, etc.) Turning all that stuff off prevents it from appearing under the date, but the date itself is still there. Various combinations of enabling, disabling and rebooting didn't make much difference. > You should be able to swipe up from the bottom of the screen (the physical bottom, as though you were in portrait) to make it reappear. Oh yeah, that works! Thanks! > If all else fails, Nova Launcher is the go-to replacement and much better anyways. I tried out Nova Launcher, and it definitely solved my problems, but I didn't fall in love with it for a couple of minor reasons. First, It's a freemium app, so a bunch of features are disabled with big "upgrade to Nova Launcher Prime!" labels. Features I probably wouldn't use, so no big loss, but that's not really the kind of relationship I want to have with my software sources. Second, the default size for icons is smaller than the default launcher, making everything feel empty. There's an "icon size" slider, of course, but it's one of the features reserved for paying customers. I tried out a bunch of other launchers, though, and eventually settled on something called Lawnchair, which seems to be pretty much the stock Android 8.1 launcher with a few extra options. Given I was quite happily using the Android 8.1 up until yesterday, I think I'll stick with it. > Just curious, what kind of performance do you get on your device with different cores? Mostly wondering how Higan and Snes9x perform on it. I haven't bothered with SNES emulation, but I can't hit full speed with the Mednafen PSX cores. mGBA works quite nicely, though. I hope hex-usr makes a libretro core for bsnes 107 with all the performance improvements, when that gets released. It'll be interesting to see how it compares. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-02-13, 23:59 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Post: #117 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Link's Awakening remake for the Switch. A lot of the original game's charm came from the extreme limitations of the original console. Some screens were so packed full of stuff that the developers were forced to butt tiles against one another that normally would require an empty "wall" tile in-between. The game's "descent into madness" theme worked really well even the most simple and obvious things were low-res pixel art that required some amount of interpretation. From the few seconds of gameplay footage in the trailer, it looks like they're sticking to the original tile grid instead of making a full 3D re-interpretation, so hopefully the "so dense we nearly couldn't fit it in" feeling will still be there. It also seems they're using a very cartoony, abstract graphical style, so maybe the whole descent-into-madness might still work? Still a bit dubious, though. As Jistuce repeatedly points out to anyone who stands within ear-shot for five seconds, Nintendo's Metroid 2 remake didn't really capture what made the original game great, even though it was a good game in its own right. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-02-14, 01:07 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Post: #118 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
As I recall, Link's Awakening set that epic tone by starting with a simple and cutesy world, and showing that world crumble. So I don't think cutesy music and visuals are necessarily a mark against the remake, as long they can still be undermined. Heck, maybe they get even *more* cutesy and fake as the game goes on. That'd be pretty cool, and somewhat fitting. I hope the Bucket Mouse is still in there, though. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-02-14, 09:01 in Buying a new phone (not safe for tomman)
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Post: #119 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
I just got a notification from the new Android 9 "Files" app:Clear up 13 memes I'm not sure how to feel about that. (it turns out it's found a bunch of photos and album cover art that had visible text) The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-02-15, 09:27 in Minor complaint with higan on linux..
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Post: #120 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
In the video settings tab there's an option labelled "Adaptive Sizing". If it's enabled (which it is by default), when the video output resizes for whatever reason (you load a game for a different console, you toggle aspect correction, whatever) higan tries to resize the window to fit snugly around the video. if higan can't resize the window for whatever reason (you're using your window manager's "toggle fullscreen" mode to force fullscreen, or you're using a tiling window manager that doesn't support resizing) then higan *thinks* it's resized the window, so it draws the video at x=0, y=0, but of course it hasn't, so you just get the video showing in the top left. Turning off "Adaptive sizing" should fix the problem, or at least help, but if you want to keep it on, just manually resizing the window a pixel or two is enough to set it right. I don't think this can easily be fixed, though - the price of having a nice GUI on both Linux and Windows for a one-man emulator is that both platforms are a bit quirky. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
