Notices by blinry (blinry@chaos.social)

@lanodan @Truck Yeah, it's a cursor theme! :) I randomly made it 5 years ago, and often forget about it :P Only when people say "What's that turtle?!" I see it again :D

Here's the generator: https://github.com/blinry/cursor-generator

Very useful when your very long line of code doesn't fit on your screen, for example! :P

(Shout-out to @xssfox, who first did this on X.org! https://sprocketfox.io/xssfox/2021/12/02/xrandr/)

There are couple of surprises around window interaction:

- Once a cursor starts to resize/move a window, those actions are not possible for the other one.
- One cursor can open a menu, and the other one can use it, that one works pretty well!
- Closing a window with one cursor, while the other drags it, makes the second one *disappear*! :D

I mean, these are really hard UI questions to solve! Often, it's not clear to me what the correct behavior should be!

Okay, let's try some applications, and see how they deal with multiple mice! 😈

First up: Gedit, a GTK application.

Both cursors can place the cursor and select text, but movement from one cursor "interrupts" the selection of the other one. Not very satisfying.

Imagine how cool it would be if both had their own selections + cursors!! That would allow a really neat form of collaboration within the same document!

Next up: Chromium! It has a very pragmatic solution: It just *ignores* all cursors but the first one!

In the video, the arrow-shaped cursor can click on stuff. The turtle has no power here.

In Firefox, it seems like all mouse events are mashed together, and are seen as coming from the same device.

That means that both cursors can click – if the other one "holds still". Otherwise, I guess Firefox is very confused by a click on a link while the mouse is not in it! 😆

Selections feel strange – the last-moving cursor will determine the selection.

Also notice how, if one cursor hovers a link, *both* turn into hand icons!

Of course, we *had* to try a drawing application next!

Here's @tldraw (in Firefox)! :rainbow_heart_eyes:

Collaborative drawing at it's best! 💚

Finally, I tried attaching an additional keyboard and assigned them to a different "seat"!

That worked really well! In Weston, each "seat" has its own keyboard focus, so you can actually work side-by-side with two mice + two keyboards independently!

Also!!! The two seats have their own (independent) clipboards!!!! Whatttt! 🤯

I totally didn't expect this. But multi-seat as a concept seems deeply integrated into libinput + #Wayland! Now it's up to GUI toolkits and compositors to support it!

Tried it again, and the independent clipboards still seem a bit glitchy after all… :(

An issue asking for proper support in GTK was closed five years ago, for example… https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/1574

Side note: I think more window managers should support *this* feature!

Whoa: Weston, the reference compositor for #Wayland, supports multiple physical independent mice at the same time! 😀

"New mouse, who dis?"

(I'll write up how to do this later!)

In Hamburg, we currently have a "Volksbegehren" (petition for a referendum) for less annoying advertisements in the city, @hhwerbefrei

The proposal is to ban all ads that are larger than DIN A0, backlit, moving, or too many in one place!

We need 80000 signatures to have a citywide referendum. If you live in Hamburg and are older than 16, please support this!

Learn how: https://www.hamburg-werbefrei.de

"Here, take a Lua ruler! It starts with 1!" #mch2022

Put "Bad Apple" on @piko's giant LED cube hanging over the hackcenter at #eh22!

Greetings go out to @revisionparty! Neat medium for the "Wild" compo :P

2. Many things are fine without sweetening them!

Just putting cocoa powder in plant milk makes a perfectly delicious drink!

@piko's "too-delicious" sugar-free apple cake even sparked a long discussion on whether it was allowed :D https://chaos.social/@piko/114093751535823600

We got some 100% dark chocolate, which is some serious business – but I think I'm getting used to it.

I even got chewing gum without sugar or sweeteners (the brand is "Falim"), which just takes like nothing :D Not sure I'd recommend this…

@piko and I just finished 40 days of not eating sugar or sweeteners! Fresh fruit was the only sweet thing that was allowed – seemed unhealthy *not* to eat those.

We searched through the kitchen and put everything that was disallowed into a box. Was surprised by how many food items randomly contain added sugar. Having them out of sight definitely made this easier!

I used to roll my eyes at people who went "sugar-free", but still ate fruit – after all, they contain lots of fructose and glucose! But after trying it, I now think this is a valid thing to do, because *replacing* table sugar with fruit seems strictly more healthy!

Two takeaways from this phase:

1. Sweetening food with fruit works very well! We made coleslaw with cut-up grapes, for example. And in general, if something should taste sweeter, we added some sweet fruit, like banana or apples.

Next, I tried to do some rendering myself! This would give me a lot of control of the result – I could make subway lines more visible, for example!

Unfortunately, this seems to requires the following tower of technologies:

1. Download the raw OSM data.
2. Import it into a Postgres database using osm2pgsql.
3. Compile the "Carto" style using CartoCSS preprocessor (which seems unmaintained 😱).
4. Run the mapnik renderer.

I had trouble fitting all of these pieces together properly, and gave up.

So it might be nice to use the setup of someone who has figured this out after all.

On https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_on_Paper, I found a web service that comes really close to what I'd like:

http://printmaps-osm.de

Most importantly, you can set reasonable map scales like 1:10000, which some other tools didn't allow!

It has a maximum paper size, and some glitches when you come close to it, but I generated two overlapping images and stitched them together in GIMP…

I decided to generate a map at a 1:10000 scale (300 dpi), and then print it at twice the resolution, to have as many details as possible (and a small but readable font size).

So here is my intermediate result: A PNG, to be printed at 600 dpi, showing much of Hamburg at a 1:20000 scale (5 cm = 1 km).

It's 650 MB large :P Take some caution trying to view it!

But… it's really fun scrolling around and seeing what I can find already! :3

https://files.blinry.org/hamburg-20000-600dpi.png