I’ve been pretty happy overall with my Arc A770. For the price, it performs well, and driver issues are mostly a thing of the past. My only complaint is that the anv Mesa driver doesn’t implement VK_NV_device_generated_commands which appears to be a requirement for some D3D12 games on Linux (Starfield being the one I had issues with). Luckily, it looks like there is a new non-NVIDIA specific extension to solve that and an open MR in the Mesa GitLab to add it to anv.

If you read the article, it is indeed full Linux because the 4004 is running a MIPS emulator that provides the necessary memory management features. Pretty much all of the “run Linux on some old chip incapable of running Linux” projects achieve it via emulating a more featured architecture that Linux supports, not by somehow compiling Linux to natively run on a 4 bit, MMU-less architecture.

Change for the sake of change is so dumb. I’m tired of pointless UI changes every so many years because some middle manager and their designers need to wow some dumb exec to get a promotion and they do so just by rearranging all the existing functionality because the product itself is already a complete solution that doesn’t actually need a new version. Sadly, this mentality even creeps into FOSS spaces. Canonical and Ubuntu wanting to reinvent the wheel with Unity, Mir, Snap, etc. GNOME radically changing their UI all the time.

I just got my passport photo taken on Monday at Walgreen’s and uploaded the emailed copy to the online renewal form. It was denied for being too zoomed in. Ugh! Why do they change the photo requirements for the online form?

You can view WiFi passwords for saved networks on pretty much every OS. There’s no reason to be secretive about entering WiFi passwords, at least to the people whose devices you’re entering the password on.

LibreWolf on everything that supports it (Windows/Mac/Linux) and Fennec F Droid on Android.

Linux on phones and tablets is a thing. Typing from my Xiaomi Pad 5 Pro running postmarketOS and LibreWolf.

How is the external display connected? I have never seen Freesync over HDMI work. The early implementations were AMD proprietary and the new ones require HDMI 2.1 which has some ridiculous bullshit about not being implemented by open source drivers. HDMI sucks, use DisplayPort if possible. If your laptop doesn’t have a DisplayPort connector, try a USB-C to DisplayPort cable, as usually the type C ports on laptops support DisplayPort alt mode.

I wish these implementations of secure boot were designed more to protect the SOFTWARE against “theft” than the HARDWARE against “tampering”. Let us wipe the secure boot keys, but in the process erase the firmware (or have the firmware encrypted so that erasing the keys renders it unbootable) and then allow new code to run. Blocking third party firmware on consumer devices is a shit move. It just creates more e-waste when the OEM stops updating it and the community can’t make their own replacement firmware.

Pretty much all ext4 except for a few Windows installs on NTFS.

True, but if you buy a finished product that uses the new chip that has secure boot enabled, you can’t flash your own firmware. From what I gather, the boot keys are burned into OTP memory so they can’t be erased or changed. The chip is permanently locked to that firmware.

Not really a fan of putting secure boot on. The only purpose that serves is locking the customers out of their purchased hardware. Raspberry Pi is clearly not targeting the maker market with those changes, they want that corporate money and are willing to stick the finger to hackers and makers in the process. Can’t make custom firmware if you can’t boot it.

RISC-V support is nice. I like the idea of being able to work as both an ARM and a RISC-V microcontroller while sharing the same array of peripherals.

I wrote a program to do just that

https://gitlab.com/CalcProgrammer1/TouchpadEmulator

Maybe this explains why my webcam indicator is on when no applications are using it. It’s been confusing me for a while now. I’ve double checked anything that I expect to access it is not, and it doesn’t seem to be locked because opening it works, but it sometimes boots up woth the light on. I am using Arch with pipewire so I’ll check and see if this is what’s going on.

Ugh, I got a fair return from buying to AMD right before Ryzen came out. I sold some of it and bought multiple different chip companies so now I have some AMD, some Intel, some NVDA. Oh well, it’s not a huge amount but still sucks. I hope they can come back if only because AMD needs competition to keep them from becoming the evil that old Intel was. I was hoping Intel would also be a viable third GPU competitor, I like my Arc A770 for the price and I’m hoping they don’t kill off the GPU division.

I second this, second disk is best as you can keep your old Windows drive in case you ever need to go back for any reason. Modern UEFI makes dual booting way easier than it used to be as the UEFI itself provides a boot menu so you don’t need to fiddle with dual booting using a bootloader like GRUB.

Linux works well on supported ARM platforms, but the problem is that a lot of ARM platforms aren’t supported. I recently got a Xiaomi Pad 5 Pro (had to import it as it’s a China-only model) and put postmarketOS on it. The experience is surprisingly good. Paired with a Bluetooth keyboard/touchpad, it is basically as functional as a normal light-duty Linux laptop except for the lack of x86 support, which mostly just means no gaming. I have been attempting to run Steam via box64 and FEX, but pmOS isn’t a supported distro for that so I have been trying in a Docker container and in Distrobox. I managed to get it started but it crashes due to steamwebhelper, and I think it’s a dependency or configuration issue. Otherwise, for browsing, coding, videos, terminal use, office, etc. it’s great and the battery life is amazing compared to my laptop. This is on a Snapdragon 870. Open source games run and they can hit 120fps on the 120Hz screen. I hope to see ARM support continue to improve, but I am worried about bootloader locks on these new ARM Windows machines.

Mastodon added text search a while ago.

I’m not sure about FF specifically, but 99% of the time you’re connecting a microcontroller to a PC you’re doing so over a serial port (UART) of some sort. It may be a physical COM port or it may be a USB to serial adapter or even a purely virtual serial port over a USB connection, but the methodology is all the same. Unless you are running a serial terminal on that port (as in, a commandline on your PC served on the given /dev/ttyX interface, not a terminal emulator letting you read/write from the port), the microcontroller can’t just run scripts on the PC. Instead, you will want to write a script/program that opens the port and waits for a command to be sent from the microcontroller, then that listener script can execute whatever functionality you require. Note that only one application can have the port active at a time, so if your listener is a separate program from your event handler, you will have to close the port on the listener before running the handler, then reopen the port on the listener once the handler is done so it can start listening for the next event. Better to just make it all one program that is always running on the PC and does both listening for events and handling them so there’s only one program that needs access to the serial port.