My cxxversion and stdheaders

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 In various bits of code: I’ve been using these headers to solve the “__cplusplus says yeah, but actually compiling says go to hell” problems. Because sometimes the macro tells you one thing and actually trying to preprocess and link makes naughty hand gestures on the systems I encounter.

Finally, I’ve gotten around to sticking these in their own repo.

Which is much nicer than going: “Which project did I last update that in?”

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Thinking over my experiment, I think I can principally call it a success. Over the past ~three weeks, I’ve managed to not go out of my cottin pickin’ mind and want to flip my NT partition out a window. 

As someone that’s principally had a FreeBSD or Debian setup on hand for the past fifteen years, I’m going to call that signs of progress on Microsoft’s part. Because while there are worts here and there using a X session: traditionally they piss me off less than Windows.

Since the experiment began I’ve made numerous changes, but mostly small ones.

The freaky SD card freezes Explorer thing hasn’t happened in ages, so I can probably thank updates for that. Likewise I find turning my keyboard off before power down seems to result in less having to repair the damned thing. Pretty stable for the most part.

IIS is definitely slow as dog poop compared to lighttpd, but given how easy it is to lock it down to a specific network, I’ll forgive that.

The thing I miss the most is how copy/paste works in X. The whole thing about ^C/^V versus the mouse selection and clicking the middle mouse button is really helpful when you’re copying between a terminal and a note editor. The select / right click thing with modern Windows terminal emulators and console things, not so much. But that was also something I disliked about using Android and a monitor anyway.

Since modern Linux tends to treat otherwise available memory like a ramdisk, and buffers the crap out of it for faster file I/O, I’ve made a small tweak to WSL2 setup:

PS > type ..wslconfig
[wsl2]
# default is 80%, or about 12.8 if you’ve got 16GB.
memory=8GB
# Default is 25%, or about 4GB if you’ve got 16GB
# It’s a VHDX file used as swap: not system virtual memory.
#swap=?

Effectively limiting WSL2 to half my system’s physical memory. Otherwise I’ll find myself with 300~400 MB free in task manager. Some of the projects I work on generate ~20 GB of files and general nut punches memory.

That my desktop sessions on W10 usually burn up to 3.5 ~ 6.5 GB according to Task Manager, this further increments my desire that my next machine offer at least 32 GB of RAM. Because 640 KB isn’t enough for anything anymore 🤣.

As most of my interests revolve around an xterm session, WSL works pretty damned good for me. Enough so that using Xfce4 and Thunar vs NT’s DWM and Explorer aren’t as large an impact as the change from Davmail + Thunderbird to ActiveSync and Windows Mail.

Much to my amusement if I do the old “Send to” -> “Mail recipient” trick, I get an error message that there is no program for that. Actually, I can’t remember what decade I last actually tried that. But I’m pretty sure that XP or ’98 was still sexy at the time.

I’ve been happy to see that Windows Terminal has come along nicely. When I tried it very early on, I found it annoying because I abuse bash’s classic line editing instead of using notepad like shortcuts. No frustrations or interference with a release version of Windows Terminal; in fact my only negative comment is the fancy pane split stuff isn’t the same as tmux or screen, hehe.

Spending more time on Windows 10 than normal, I find myself reminded that it’s been about a decade since I figured I should learn how to use PowerShell. While I mostly skipped having to care about batch files in command.com, I have had no such luck avoiding cmd.exe in my life. And PowerShell frequently reminds me how nicer it is–if only I’d have the time to learn it as well as I do bash and general Bourne Shell voodoo.

My little experiment of using Windows 10 Pro instead of Debian Buster was meant to answer the question “Can I” use NT as my main development and work platform. The question of “Should I” however is a different one. That I haven’t gone insane is a positive. That I’ve tried at all of course indicates that I may be a tad more insane than normal.

But hey, I spent many years using Android as a desktop replacement, so I’m obviously crazy to begin with ^_^.

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How it works ’round here:

Willow: is like me, she doesn’t really care about thunderstorms unless the building starts to shake. But prefers pretzels to peanut butter.
Corky: will seek a comfy spot like under the couch, and all but will shallow the spoon. In fact he gets peanut butter just because of his sad expectant looks. He doesn’t like the pretzels I bribe Willow with.
Misty: tends to be scared of storms, either seeking to hide or be comforted. But still inclined to leap off the couch and trot into the kitchen if it means peanut butter. She loves pretzels, and all things considered food.
Yup. That’s how it is around here, lol.
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 Tested: How much does Bluetooth actually drain your phone battery?

And this is pretty much why for the last decade I’ve had virtually zero fucks to give about Bluetooth draining my phone’s battery. The difference tends to be limited if your device doesn’t suck.

Unless you’re optimizing for the worst case scenario: like fifteen minutes of phone charge is going to make the difference between getting home and sleeping at the airport kind of scenario. Pressuring you actually use it for something: it’s simply more bother to diddle Bluetooth than to charge normally.

Which also reminds me of why I use a Bluetooth speaker at work instead of my tablet’s speakers. For comparable volume blasting my tablet’s four speakers all day sucks down more charge than running the Bluetooth speaker.

Rather the real train to turn off Bluetooth IMHO is because you’re not using it more than a handful of times a year, or to limit your exposure to some one in a ten million asshats trying to spam you with pairing requests, lol

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 The Tech My Dad Banned From Our House

Interesting read. I suspect her dad must have been an interesting fellow.

For some reason I find myself remembering Ma mentioning my father counting out a roll of a hundred stamps as one of his quirks; I’ve always wondered how he must have gotten screwed over or otherwise ended up so pissed off once upon a time to go that far. Everyone has their quirks, pa’s notion of cutting vegetables to uniformed size at least made sense, but I’d have to have been positively mental at some event to ever do the stamps thing myself, lol.

As for my childhood I was probably fortunate. We pretty much had a computer and some form of game console my entire life, not that I will ever really fathom how our mother afforded the Tandy. I know Nanny and the local pawn shops was often involved in my brother’s drive for expensive things.

But for the most part tech considerations weren’t really imposed upon me. We had to deal with a rather tight income, but my widowed mother did her best to make her children happy. More effort than I think she should have, or more than we should have received, but those were her decisions. My brother and I certainly benefited from that side of our mother.

Should we say the tech side had both sides of that. If we could afford a PC game that I wanted, I’d probably get it eventually. If I wanted new hardware I’d probably be better off asking for a used car fund 🤣. Such was life.

Our first computer was technically my brother’s, but I was really the only one that used it very often. What really got my family interested was the Internet. WebTV was very limited but also a highly effective gateway drug to modern computing. For ma and me: it was a pragmatic thing to end up with a PC.  For my brother I imagine it was the ability to play video games and surf the Internet, but he had moved out during our WebTV era.

Someone at church that taught computer classes and such, gave us an old Pentium/32MB machine and even took the old Tandy 1000 off our hands. When it died: we ended up with our pastor’s old Packered Bell with a Pentium II/64MB. After that died, my brother naught a Dell simular to his Dimension, and ma paid him back until it was paid off. A snazzy 2 GHz Pentium 4 and probably 512 MB. Whatever, it finally had a hard drive big enough to actually install games and the best graphics card we had seen since the old Tandy!

It was these Pentium based machines where I actually had any competition for using the computer. Which was both a good and bad thing, but mostly a good thing. By that, I mean the only way we got broadband is eventually phone calls screwing around with her email was the last straw, because if my bitching and moaning wasn’t enough to drive that decision: our combined grumbles eventually did, lol.

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 If you really want to know anything about the reMarkable 2: I’d suggest watching this guy’s videos.

I kinda wish that more people spent such time on reviews, but I suppose that’s a bit excessive. Fro the reMarkable it makes more sense: being a device less typical and more specialized than your average consumer’s taste in electronics.

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 Here’s Doom Eternal running at 1,000fps with an Intel Core i7 9700K

Being a kid when the original DooM came out, and first experiencing it on console, since our Tandy was more at home with 8088 based than 386 based software, I find that kind of amazing and insane. My old i5-3570K and GTX 780 need the settings tuned just to ensure that the frame rate doesn’t dip in more demanding segments of the game, but does manage to be perfectly playable.

It’s hard to imagine Doom Eternal reaching 1000 FPS on current hardware. Not hard to imagine the first three games doing so, but that’s the virtue of time. I guess if you totally and insanely clock the shit out of a computer until you need liquid nitrogen just to avoid a halt and catch fire condition, some amazing shit is possible, lol.

Also not my fault if I’m suddenly tempted to reach for the 1993 version of DooM…..

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 Once upon a time I used to keep a copy of CD-Keys on floppy disk. On the theory I’d be more likely to lose the slip of paper or the jewel case than the actual disc. Most are still in a container in my closet.

Finally got around to fetching the old diskette out of my closet, and I find the dates interesting. In any case it’s time to migrate the files to modern media.

$ sudo mount /dev/fd0 /mnt

[sudo] password for terry:

mount: /mnt: WARNING: device write-protected, mounted read-only.

$ ls -l /mnt

total 84K

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 Armored-Fist3_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 BF2_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 BF2SF_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 CoD_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 CoDUO_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 Commanche4_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 DF1_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 DF2_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 DFBHD_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 DFLW_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 DFTFD_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 32 May 14  2006 DFX_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 Nov  7  2008 FEAR_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 30 May 14  2006 MW4-CL-MP_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 30 May 14  2006 MW4-IS-MP_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 21 May 14  2006 Quake4_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 48 May 14  2006 README

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 24 May 14  2006 RvS_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 SWAT3_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 SWAT4_Key

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 May 14  2006 SWAT4TSS_Key

$