Notices by lucie lukas "minute" hartmann (mntmn@mastodon.social)

genuine question, no snark, because i'm in the middle of copywriting research and i'm seeing apple launched an "iphone air": what's the benefit of a thinner iphone? esp. if there's still a pretty prominent camera bump?

currently riding a train with @holo_memory, so of course we had to try nerdy things like install Xfce4 on MNT Pocket Reform. to my surprise, it's mega easy. "sudo apt install xfce4", and then the beta (?) wayland version of Xfce4 is available on the GDM login screen (cogwheel icon). i just had to configure the display rotation and scaling in Display Settings. and messed a bit with the font, theme, icons etc.

Xfce seem to have settled for labwc as the compositor, which is a good choice i think.

except me, hehe > Tech leaders everywhere are buying into the FOMO

@pfr @Nux @genode we're working on MNT Reform Touch, which is not a phone primarily but could be an alternative for some smartphone use cases

@lanodan @whitequark yeah, but also i think hard dependency on GL libs? (buildroot says that, not sure if real)

tangentially, this kernel had CONFIG_UNIX disabled for unknown reasons. can't recommend

there's something special about running a full minimalist linux (or other) OS on an FPGA computer. can't quite put my finger on it

@whitequark but Xorg (also outgrown) is unhappy about that

@whitequark (not sure if wayland already has a good story for running on non-accelerated framebuffer)

this might not look like much but it's a big pain relief for me

omg finally solved this problem... it was unstable/sagging VTT / VTTref because 2022 me didn't consider that all that address termination actually needs to sink some current

have you ever seen that if you access a certain address in a ddr3 chip, it kind of crashes and needs to be reset to work normally again?

on our very recent shipments of MNT laptops to the US, i can see that a number of people had to pay "government charges" via UPS before delivery. there is no transparency on these charges, we can only see the dollar amount. the amount is never the expected 15% (EU->US agreement), but usually around 25%, in some cases more. even taking sales taxes into account it doesn't add up. so far no one can explain to us how the charges are calculated or how to appeal. this is beyond frustrating. any ideas?

@jfred i don't think that is the case. UPS is not a postal service, but a courier. only traditional postal services have halted small parcel stuff because normally the bulk of them didn't need customs processing because of de minimis <$800 rule, which suddenly went away, and they don't have the infra to handle all the new declarations.

@jfred deutsche post dhl is postal, dhl express is a courier. two different services.

forgot to order a longer 50 pin fpc cable, otherwise i could show you how my nifty mPCIe shaped pcb for converting the FPGAs rgb output to eDP actually fits niftily in the mPCIe slot instead of floating in the air

yaay, graphics on the eDP panel made by linux on vexriscv on kintex-7 fpga module

also i was reminded that falstad.com/circuit is really cool, the scopes even have a spectrum analyzer :0

used my MNT Pocket Reform today as a signal generator to debug some analog circuits in the ZZ9000AX (sound card add-on for our Amiga graphics/network card). looks like desoldering U4 op-amp fixes weird input distortion that some AXs have

interesting, ffmpeg 8.0 brings pure compute shader based decoding (vulkan 1.3). i wonder if that works on rk3588/panvk https://ffmpeg.org/index.html#pr8.0