• 3 Posts
  • 117 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 30th, 2023

help-circle
  • I remember when I was a kid messing with Windows 95/98, I had this intuitive feeling of what was happening under the hood. Just like how you describe your theory. Honestly you’re probably on the right track. In theory on linux you can actually dive into the source code and try to figure out what’s actually happening, but that’s intimidating AF. Hard to say if the problem is between wine and the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM), X11, Wayland, KDE, or the GPU driver…

    I had a kind of similar problem with my display not outputting when it was connected. I had to use a DRM file in /sys and udev script to fix it, wrote a blog about it. If your monitors are still messed up after a reboot, it sounds like this won’t help you though.

    Also you made me lol to “wine strikes me more as an emulator”. It totes is. The “Wine Is Not an Emulator” name is a joke, the original name was “WINdows Emulator”, which they changed to avoid Microsoft’s lawyers.





  • I used a very similar method in a similar situation to albb0920. They describe it as vibe coding too.

    The exact chip that handles everything is undocumented, but similar ones in the same series have datasheets. A maintained version of the linux driver handily collated all of the available datasheets and configurations used by different motherboards. Between that and my microcontroller/hardware experience, that side of things wasn’t too bad.

    What I didn’t know anything about was writing an Illumos driver. I used the chatbot with a free claude account, compiling and running the code manually myself. I was impressed that it was able to build out the boilerplate and get something going at all. Course it took a few tried to get something that compiled and worked somewhat correctly. At some points I needed to look through the generated code and point out exactly what what wrong, but at least it would address it.

    Code running in the context of the kernel is definitely not something I would have autonomously executing by a LLM. The end result is absolutely not something I would want put into the official Illumos source.




  • Looks like it has an ARM CPU, a RK3588. Similar ballpark to a Pi 5 in CPU performance.

    Installing another OS would be technically possible but not easy, you’d need a Linux kernel with the RK3588 drivers already in it. Then there are differences between it and other RK3588 SBCs that could cause problems.

    Much like you wouldn’t want to install anything other than raspbian on a Pi, you’d be best off with ugreen’s OS even if others are technically possible.






  • I used an old phone with a broken screen as a webcam since covid untill it totally broke recently.

    However it needed some stars to align; I had a 3D printer to make a custom holder so it could sit on my monitor unobtrusively. I also luckily had a phone with a built in method to limit the battery charging so it could be plugged in 24/7. I was able to disable all power saving and permission features, so the app could run 24/7 without being killed by android.

    I used droidcam, which works with an OBS plugin nowadays. I got it to the point that I just needed to launch OBS and my webcam was on, no touching or fiddling with the phone at all.


  • God I hate that video, he explains everything so badly to the point of completely misinforming viewers. He’s talking about a special situation of AC current, but uses DC in the thought experiment. He makes it seem as if the field travels to the load in a direct path and the wires don’t matter. No, the EM field is completely based on the wire.







  • Great video, though I think it’s overstated how on-purpose these things were. I was only playing games in the 90s, but my understanding is the art was mostly authored on deluxe paint / on various PC systems/monitors. While also CRT, they would have much higher fidelity. I don’t know how much artists were drawing, compiling for the console and viewing on a TV to make pixel by pixel adjustments. Not to mention TVs varied wildly in quality, so it’s not like artists were ‘tuning’ their pixels for a particular CRT fuzz.

    There was more of a general understanding that the TV looked worse, and to not pack key details into single pixels. Stuff like dithering and drawing shadows were existing techniques in print, and still effective today on LCDs when you render at the correct resolution.

    I think CRTs were just better at displaying low resolutions generally. Watching a DVD on CRT looks amazing, on a 4k LCD it looks terrible. Even modern 3D games look amazing on a CRT.