Notices by linear cannon (linear@nya.social), page 7

anyone have recommendations for things to do in vr? (caveat: linux. most things i've tried work fine though)

after having a valve index for 3 years we finally actually have it permanently set up in the living room with a dedicated pc so we can use it whenever, instead of having to scramble to set up a space and make it work with one of our computers whenever we want to use it

i've been playing boneworks and bonelab and having a good time. i also like screwing around in h3vr but it doesn't keep my attention long. i really wish that Receiver 2 VR was a thing that worked - i would play that for hours on end - but they didnt finish the vr version up and it kinda sucks

@natalie yeah i've got hl:alyx (or technically my wife does, index was registered to her account, but family sharing) and i'm going to play through it at some point

considering i seem to be on a "fix all my half-working computer stuff" kick, maybe i should try fixing the gentoo install on my power9 box

i gave up on that last time i tried and just installed alpine linux, but that was mostly because i just didn't have time/energy to fix it, and i've got plenty of those things at the moment (this vacation is nice)

i got distributed builds with icecream working across most of the x86_64 machines in the house

it is indescribably pleasing to kick off a build and then hear all these computers spin up their fans in unison

this also unlocks interesting potential in that rebuilding world on my gentoo machines is something i could just do on a whim now

didn't we already discover, several times over, that storing unrelated data in unused bits of a pointer is a bad idea

why are cpu manufacturers going and introducing that as an explicit feature now

sometimes i remember that i am plural, and a few things in my life make ever so slightly more sense until i forget again

new cursed artifact: pentium mmx 200 that seems fine at first and then destroys your OS when you least expect it

@lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me e.g. the verbatim search "OnPnpNewDevnode" gives me almost nothing to go on in kagi, but gives me juuuust slightly more in google, and that tiny bit matters

@lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me kagi is usually pretty good about finding things in archive.org if that's the best place to look for them, especially if i've set it to look for pdfs (and because i've raised its priority, which is a thing kagi lets you do)

but it still misses out a lot

and there's stuff archive.org doesn't have (or doesn't have indexed) which google finds in google books / scholar, and kagi does not

trying to [write / sorta-reverse-engineer / understand] windows 95 drivers in 2023 is actually really difficult because there is almost no information remaining on the internet

on any given topic i can only find just enough information from old forum posts or mailing lists to assure me that, once, long ago, there were answers, and tools, and ways to learn.

yet the answers themselves are not to be found

my saving grace is that i have managed to get a pdf copy of what i believe is the exact "how to write a driver" book that the authors of the driver i am trying to re-write used

and i believe their driver began as a carbon copy of all of the example code from that book, shoved together into a single project

most of the rest of the functionality looks like stuff that started out in the userland side of the stack (which i have source for), and was eventually #ifdef'd out and moved into the kernel driver (conveniently with a comment to that effect in some instances)

now, the trick is, i'm not actually rewriting the windows 95 driver at the moment. i was thinking about doing that, but even with the stuff being released under MIT license, i decided if i'm going to be writing a kernel driver based on something partly reverse-engineered from a binary, i'm gonna have a different target for the driver to quash potential accusations of impropriety.

so i'm targeting NT4 instead, since it still uses tools from the same era, will run the exact same unmodified .dlls and binaries, but has a dramatically different driver model

... i was also getting fed up with win9x crashing on me constantly, and NT4 is proving very stable after updates, with only one BSOD that was due to the hard drive dying underneath it

in theory i could use newer versions of windows but why would i do that

technically, i do have access to 8.1 and a machine that i could, if i wanted to, put this PowerVR card into, but i simply do not want to

the newest i think i'd be willing to go is xp. and i do have an xp machine around, but it's a UMPC so i can't exactly go sticking a pci card inside

it's really funny that i've been able to run a usable matrix server (conduit) on a literal 486, but i can't run a usable matrix client on like. basically anything but my phone and the two non-POWER desktop computers i have with a manufacturing date greater than 2010 (and my 2008 laptop if i am desperate)

i want a matrix "client" that just lets me connect, like, AIM, to it

i dont want a matrix "bridge" that tries to synchronize the AIM world and the matrix world, in order to let me use AIM to speak to both AIM or matrix users (or the other way around).

i want to connect my 20 year old AIM client to my matrix server and use it as a matrix client

my use case is not "connect matrix, irc, and AIM users all in the same room"

my use case is i want to send my wife a screenshot of a weird thing i found on my windows nt 4.0 computer, and we both use matrix, when it's not possible to use a matrix client on a computer that is more than 15 years old (or which is newer than that but slower than a 15 year old pc)

hey! hey you! wanna run a native matrix client on a brand new POWER9 workstation? (or at least a client that pretends to be native even though it's a web browser?)

well, tough luck. all you get is iamb. nheko might work if you let it sit for about a week after you log in, but good luck with that

and if you think you can get away with using a browser client, i hope you like google chrome!

microsoft should open source windows ce

do take note that this is not a call for harassment. it is wrong to read it as such.

the right to spread the knowledge of the harm caused by someone (especially a public figure), so that people can take action in order to protect themselves and others around them, is not harassment. many people who would perpetrate harm would prefer to frame it as such, but it is not.

i do not think people should respond to RMS's harms by harming him in return. he should not be ostracized. he should not receive hate mail. people who are comfortable doing so should continue to have respectful discussions with him.

but i do think that it is appropriate to take steps to limit the harm he can cause - such as ensuring he does not remain as figurehead in the free software movement, wielding an amount of power in his words that i do not think he comprehends that he has.