Notices by mcc (mcc@mastodon.social), page 16

I have just this second realized that computers are really complicated!!

After a couple months of understanding in principle how to get live timing data off my FPGA with Quartus SignalTap but not really having any experience with doing so due to no circumstances coming up that would give me a good chance to exercise my knowledge, I now have a problem which specifically requires using SignalTap to debug. So with a sense of excited satisfaction I fire up the IDE, pull up the relevant tool, and realize:

Wait! This is going to be an enormous pain in the ass!

@dosnostalgic DSW is lonely, and reaching out to its entire address book at once.

I bought shows at DSW once a decade ago and then moved out of the country. Out of the blue, they just sent me an email updating me on my balance with their rewards program. The email seems to believe my name is "Not Applicable"

@dosnostalgic Well my tone was intentionally jokey and obviously you're not obligated to focus on content just for my sake. But what I mean is I would love to know more about this game because it looks/sounds fascinating ("edutainment-adventure-horror…")

@dosnostalgic *Reading page* Hey uhhhh can I hear more about this

The weird thing about music is you can spend an entire lifetime creating it but the only thing you need to achieve immortality is to compose two really good minutes

Yes, I'm thinking about the soundtrack to "Sanxion" for the Commodore 64 again

@dosnostalgic Is it ok if the video essay is six hours long https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb-DtICmPTY

@dosnostalgic I was expecting, like, thematic references rather than using the Bible like a copy protection booklet

The opposite of "Dark Matter" is "Luminous Matter" which implies the opposite of the "Dark Web" is the "Luminous Web"

Working with Tusky has reminded me how great open source is if you're a programmer: If something's broken, you can just fix it. This is something you rarely notice on Android because Android itself, and all official Android apps, are a kind of pseudo-open-source where the source is available but it's real hard to build outside Google. You have to download Google's git extension tool and clone *all of AOSP* to build one app. They assume you're $GOOG internal and have access to the network drives.

A thing that's a big frustration to me is Microsoft bought my favorite Android keyboard (SwiftKey) awhile back, and roughly the moment they bought it they stopped ALL feature work on it. So I've got some minor but persistent UI complaints about SwiftKey, like you can't enable a language's accents without enabling its autocomplete, or you can't (since Microsoft bought it) disable Flow. These fixes will never happen, no matter how many people request it. https://support.swiftkey.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115002583005-Disable-flow-AND-gesture-

I wonder if there's an open source keyboard out there which *looks and feels exactly the same* as SwiftKey. Or how much work it would be to take AnySoftKeyboard (which seems pretty close) and patch it until it's SwiftKey-identical, so I could get the SwiftKey experience plus whatever minor features I want.

It's rough with keyboards because it's something you use so constantly it's like it's part of you. The thought of switching to something else is like thinking about replacing a limb.

It's frustrating because open source end-user software is of persistently lower quality than commercial, but in the long run —only open
source software exists—.

Every closed source program (and some corporate OSS) is on an invisible timer for either the company to get bored and shut it down* or one of the increasingly small number of Big Companies to buy that thing you rely on and set it on fire**.

* Why oh why did I trust BitBucket?
** Microsoft has already discontinued SwiftKey for iPhone.

@dosnostalgic

@dosnostalgic Wait… is this based on the Spielberg movie?

If I were operating a website, and my web server received a request, I would simply have my web server respond to the request. It would be easy for me

@dosnostalgic So I was super excited to try out raytracing Quake and then it didn't really look very different from regular Quake and then I looked it up and I found out the art design of regular Quake is entirely based around making every material out of nonreflective surfaces that would look appropriate in their necessarily-primitive lighting model, IE, the game is designed such that raytracing would have as little impact as possible

@dosnostalgic SimCity got weird