One by One

One by One

September 6, 2024

Hello!

-[ Create ]-
Hang the DJ

Last week I mentioned my "My personal Zane Lowe bot" as a means to supplant the Swedish Lime Slatted Disc of Poor Royalty Payments' algorithm, with some ~~poorly hacked together~~ hand-crafted, bespoke, artisinal Python.

My "weightings" are a little "off," shall we say. I keep getting "horrible muck" in my ears, or songs designed—or at least aspirationally crafted—for TikTok, with durations well under 2 minutes.

ZaneBot3000 needs more work. Or maybe the music industry needs to pander to my desires and release better songs. It can't be my code!

If it is, version two will fix all of this!

Into the Time Tunnel

I wrote a blog post that was originally at this point in the newsletter. But it kind of ran away from me, like they do, so I migrated it to the blog.

-[ Consume ]-
40 years apart

As long as Paul Jenkinson keeps making The Spectrum Show, I'll back him on Patreon and consume the results. For many weeks, I have watched with nostalgic memories of games from yesteryear and amazement at the continued development of new titles, pushing the 48KB rubber-topped wonder even further.

Technologically, a world away, I sat down on the sofa with my son, taking turns with the modern laptop as we watched the latest Frost epic "Guardians Before Dawn" Rust (not that one) movie.

We've watched a few of Frost's videos over the years. Mainly after I had a months-long binge playing Rust (not that one) on Linux, just before FacePunch Studios dropped the Linux build completely. Probably for the best, to be honest, Rust ~~(not that one)~~ can be a massive time-sink.

Anyway, Frost makes some incredible "cinematic", "unscripted" feature-length movies set in the Rust (you get it) universe. If you've ever played Rust (ok), you may also appreciate the effort, sound design, and videography that goes into putting these together.

The three seas

Jay and Mark - AKA "Map Men" are back with another excellent video, this time about the colonies and their silly mapping antics. This is one of the only channels I watch where the trifecta of content, commercials and comments are all worth consuming.

~~Borland Turbo Pascal 7.0 For DOS~~

Borland Delphi 1.0 for Windows 3.11

During my "research" for a blog post mentioned elsewhere in this newsletter, I found this delightful, nearly decade-old video of David Intersimone ("David I") running Borland Delphi 1 on Windows 3.11.

-[ Comment ]-
Sticky Latvian Memories

Last week, I asked if anyone had sticker suggestions to decorate (cover up) my work laptop. Newsletter proofreader, amateur detectorist, competitive prime-number computation enthusiast, and AI wallpaper generator; Simon, reminded me of Sylvia Ritter's stickers.

I ordered some immediately, and they arrived here in Blighty a few days later—VAT payment included despite, not because of, Brexit. They're lovely. I am at an impasse, though. I can't bring myself to stick them on anything!

The stickers reminded me of a wonderful party in Riga, Latvia, signaling the Ubuntu Summit finale last year. There's a lovely photo from the event of Graham, Till, Martin, and me in the inaugural issue of The Source newsletter from Ubuntu. All the cool kids have newsletters, but some of us host on open-source software.

We all descended on an art/community space turned into a nightclub. While the music played, Sylvia Ritter's artwork, other iconic mascots, and wallpapers were projected around the walls. I have never seen such a massive Disco Dingo!

Anyway, get some of Sylvia's stickers.

Four ratios is enough for anyone

This week I found it surprisingly difficult to set a modern laptop display panel to a square (1:1) resolution (video mode). I'm not talking pseudo or close-to-square modes like 1280x1024 or those monster LG Dual-Up "square" (not square) displays that my Linux Matters co-presenters Mark and Martin both have.

I mean, the honest-to-goodness horizontal and vertical numbers of pixels are equal - 1:1.

I can make external displays do it, especially if those displays aren't really displays but capture cards. However, the internal panel on my modern ThinkPad Z13 refuses to display anything when asked to do 1:1.

As a result of this journey, extra information is now living rent-free in my head. Some I knew already, and other "facts" were stumbled upon this week, pushing more important things out.

gtf generates modelines. gtf 1080 1080 60, for example, makes one that looks legit.
xrandr has --newmode, --addmode, --output, --mode and --same-as that should work to add functional modelines for square (1:1) resolutions, but don't.
edid-generator could, in theory, patch the EDID data loaded at boot time for square resolutions, but it doesn't.
The EDID spec before 1.3 used bytes 38-53 for "Standard Timing Information". Byte 1, bits 7-6 were used for the X:Y pixel ratio. 0b00=1:1, 0b01=4:3, 0b10=5:4, and 0b11=16:9.
The EDID 1.3 spec was updated in 2020, so in bytes 38-53, Byte 1, bits 7-6 now define 0b00=16:10, not 1:1 anymore.
I conclude from this nonsense that 1:1 is now the laptop display ratio outcast.

Now you also know this detail. You're welcome.

Thanks for reading.

-- popey

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