Arch Linux is for Rust Lovers
🖊️ Austin Riba ⌚ 🔖 linux rust 💬 0
Arch Linux is a great distribution for people that love Rust and Rust tools, by the way.
That one Time we Snuck Into Romeo Pier
🖊️ Austin Riba ⌚ 🔖 other 💬 0
Old Romeo Pier was demolished in 2018.
Two decades before that a group of bored teenagers from in and around Half Moon Bay, CA decided it would be a good idea to sneak out onto the long closed to the public pier at night.
The Technium - A Great But Little Known Podcast
🖊️ Austin Riba ⌚ 🔖 code 💬 0
Recently I stumbled upon the 9Front website while doing a bit of research on Plan9. This only increased my interest. Seriously, check out the 9Front website. It’s pretty wild.
But the dog needs walking, so that day I decided to do a search for Plan9 in the podcast app to see if I could keep the mood going.
That’s where I stumbled upon the Technium Podcast a show where two dudes drink something and talk about new and old tech. Not exactly a novel concept, but I was almost immediately impressed. Their episode on Plan9 was well-researched and entertaining. The level of technicality is pretty high, something that is very hard to find in podcasts. If you aren’t already a programmer, some of their shows might be difficult.
Other episodes I enjoyed were on the APL language and Smalltalk
Sadly they seem to have stopped doing the show - their last being titled “LLMs eat software development” which is a bit ominous. I looked them up on YouTube, only about 400 subscribers. They deserve many more!
View .fit Files in the Terminal With f2i
🖊️ Austin Riba ⌚ 🔖 code rust astronmy 💬 0
Ever wanted to preview astronomical .fit files directly in your terminal without the need for DS9? Neither have I, but no matter - now you can.
It’s also just a crazy fast thumbnailer. Python is great but Rust beats it out if you can get it to work for you. In this case, ndarray and cfitsio were up to the task.
Messing with AI Bots for Fun with django-llm-poison
🖊️ Austin Riba ⌚ 🔖 python code django 💬 1
The internet is filling up with AI slop and you and I dear reader, are unwilling accomplices to this rapid decline. Big tech may have created the models but the models are trained on our words. Social media posts, forum rants and of course blogs like this one, all hoovered up into the LLM.
At least in some cases, we have a choice of whether to continue to feed the machine.
The Arch Linux Subreddit is Horrifying
🖊️ Austin Riba ⌚ 🔖 code linux arch 💬 1
This is not a rant about elitest arch-using neckbeards (I am one!) being mean on the internet. No, the Arch Linux Subreddit is horrifying because it provides a glimpse into just how absolutely busted some of it’s user’s machines are.
I’ve been using Arch for the better part of 10 years. It’s been rock-solid the entire time. But I keep hearing about it’s supposed instability. Well, now I understand why. This is a lesson in why no matter how good your software is PEBCAK nullifies all.
As a perfect example consider this thread: How Often Do You Run sudo pacman syu?
A Repository of Themes for the Cosmic Desktop
🖊️ Austin Riba ⌚ 🔖 code linux cosmic 💬 2
System76 recently released the first alpha of their new desktop environment, COSMIC. It has some neat theming capabilities, something I’ve missed since who knows how long ago when GNOME started removing the ability to theme GTK.
The COSMIC settings app already provides the ability to import and export themes. So I thought it would be cool if there was a place where people could share thier creations. Like the gnome-look.org of old, before it was completely gimped.
Since no such site existed, I made it myself!
Landed a PR for COSMIC and I'm Irrationaly Excited About It
🖊️ Austin Riba ⌚ 🔖 code linux cosmic 💬 0
My parents gave me my first computer when I was 14 years old. I played a lot of Unreal Tournament at the time. At some point I heard about this thing called Linux that actually played UT better than Windows. So my dad drove me to Circuit City and I bought a box full of CDs that was Redhat Linux 8. What followed was weeks of running a nearly inoperable computer as I formatted and re-formatted the disk every time I ran into some issue I couldn’t fix - which was a lot.
Bender DD 2: Running Gnome Apps Outside of Builder
🖊️ Austin Riba ⌚ 🔖 code linux bender gnome 💬 0
Builder is pretty neat as an IDE for GNOME. For bootstrapping a new GNOME app, I found it to be downright amazing. Once I started getting down to writing actual code however, Builder’s limitations started to become apparent. Christian Hergert is doing an amazing job writing an IDE but wow, it must be an uphill battle trying to turn a GTK text widget into a full blown text editor. Honestly if it used embedded Neovim it could be perfect; Builder does have VIM emulation which was almost good enough, but the undo stack is buggy and caused me to lose 30+ minutes of work at one point. The second time it happened, I started to look for ways to work on Bender outside of Builder.
Bender Development Diary 1: A Webdev Goes Native
🖊️ Austin Riba ⌚ 🔖 code linux bender gnome vala 💬 0
I’ve been writing code using Linux as my main OS for over a decade now. Despite this long and fruitful relationship I have yet to do any real native development for this beloved platform.
I tell you what, I can whip up some damn good JSON APIs. But it’s time to try something new. I’ll be creating an application for Linux. Specifically for GNOME. Using GTK.