This year was the year of hardware upgrades for me: In January, I replaced my 13 years old i7-2600 desktop with a much more modern 7950X3D system, and a few months later, my 8 years old i5-6200U laptop showed its first signs of disintegration, calling for a replacement. A few years back, this would have meant that I needed to compare various models from various vendors, but that’s no longer the case: There’s one laptop vendor that’s so obviously superior to all others that it’s really a no-brainer (unless you’re on a really tight budget). This vendor is, of course, Framework, and so I got myself a Framework Laptop 13 (AMD Ryzen 7040 Series) and installed Kubuntu on it. Since this is the first time I use KDE Plasma as by daily driver, the following article is also partly a review of that desktop environment, not just the new hardware I run it on.
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After three years with my Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact, I got myself a new phone, and again it’s made by Sony: an Xperia 5 III (pronounced »Xperia five mark three«), the smallest version of Sony’s current high-end offerings. Here’s my first impressions after using it daily for a few weeks.
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(this post is an extended version of a Twitter thread; original is here)

Across three days in 2021 (and one cinema visit in 2024), I watched all three film adaptations of Frank Herbert’s »Dune« novel:

• David Lynch (1984)
• TV miniseries (2001)
• Denis Villeneuve (2021 / 2024)

Here’s a summary of what I found interesting when comparing the three.
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(this post is an archived version of a Twitter thread; original is here)

I’ve been rewatching all 11 »Star Wars« movies (the three Skywalker trilogies and the two spin-off movies) in the past two weeks, in story-chronological order (1-2-3-Solo-R1-4-5-6-7-8-9) and on Disney+ (i.e. in 4K with all post-release modifications). Here’s a few remarks.
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(this post is an archived version of a Twitter thread; original is here)

In the past few days, I helped debug an issue in a 486 CPU emulation FPGA core. Here’s the Twitter thread that describes the troubleshooting process.
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For years (actually more than a decade!), the world eagerly waited for a new game in the »Half-Life« franchise, well knowing that there may never be such a thing. So imagine everyone’s surprise when not one, but two games are released within a few weeks in March 2020! One of these is the official prequel to »Half-Life 2«, the VR game »Alyx«, and the other one is the somewhat inofficial remake of the first part of the series, called »Black Mesa«.
Since I’m a die-hard Half-Life fan, you bet I downloaded and played the finished version of Black Mesa on the very day it came out. 20 hours of playing later, I’m done and can give a verdict on how good it is.
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It started quite innocently with a few Twitter threads about retro DOS gaming. The question was why no games (or any other software, for that matter) that were designed for EGA graphics cards made use of the additional colors EGA could offer. It’s widely known that EGA cards had a reprogrammable palette and could show any 16 out of 64 available colors on screen; but still, all software of the time just used the 16 default colors that were already possible with CGA graphics. Some explanations to this phenomenon were discussed, but it was mostly centered around what was possible and not why. Falling prey to nerd sniping, I dug deeper and deeper into the topic, including writing test programs in BASIC and Pascal, and now I finally understand everything about color generation in CGA, EGA and VGA cards.

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I got a new phone for christmas, a Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact, to replace my old (well, not that old actually) Xperia Z3 Compact. After using it for a few months, I’d like to share my experiences with this phone.
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Following up on my quest to produce small executables, I turned my findings (along with much more information about general techniques used in size-constrained demosccene productions) into a presentation, held at Deadline 2017:

download the PDF file (5 MB)

How small can a valid and useful Win32 executable be? There already are a few tutorials about this topic, but these are either not working on modern Windows versions any longer or only cover the most basic »do nothing but return zero« program. The goal here should be to do something genuinely useful: a console application that outputs the contents of the Windows clipboard on standard output.
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