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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Gaussian Splatting is a recent technique for taking a bunch of geolocated photos of a location & converting them into a digital 3D scene! Represented as splotches of virtual paint in 3D space. Could potentially be very useful... It works by repeatedly repositioning & recolouring these splats until they match your photos, taking advantage of how efficient it is to render these splats. Once trained it renders in real-time, & training is reasonably fast too. 1/2!
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Cleaning costs, or, examining the OpenBSD -fret-clean flag - Dr. Brian Robert Callahan: https://briancallahan.net/blog/20260811.html
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"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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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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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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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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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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@tante@tldr.nettime.org Personally I focus on showing that we techies aren't obligated to be excited about "AI", if you feel a need to be excited for new tech there's other options! And old tech is awfully impressive too! But at the same time... The controversy around "AI" keeps the conversation going, in a way I struggle to compete with.
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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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People &amp; blogs - Piri @ Manuel Moreale: https://manuelmoreale.com/interview/piri
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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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I feel your pain Sara - Manuel Moreale: https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/i-feel-your-pain-sara
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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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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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TIL: Symlinking NixOS Dotfiles - Alex Kladov: https://matklad.github.io/2026/05/21/symlinking-nixos-dotfiles.html
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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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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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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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The Boring Internet - Terry Godier: https://www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-internet via https://roytang.net/links/2026/#59a9d38399b8111912e0a4439e68ecab
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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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Can any of my followers help?
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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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Unpolished human websites - Joel Chrono: https://joelchrono.xyz/blog/unpolished-human-websites
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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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Looking back... I resumed discussing GRUB &amp; USB on March 14th. Look forward to some necroboosting!
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RAIN-PSP 0.1 - mr (in 2021): https://preposter.us/single-michigan-helium-network/rain-psp-0-1.html
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Why Is Everything Proprietary These Days? - Kev Quirk: https://kevquirk.com/why-is-everything-proprietary-these-days
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Over/Under #63 with Michael Harley - Lazybear: https://lazybea.rs/ovr-063/
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Canvas-ing the Web - Eric Meyer: https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2026/04/27/canvas-ing-the-web/
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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...