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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(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(this post is an archived version of a Twitter thread; original is here)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(this post is an archived version of a Twitter thread; original is here)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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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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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)

There’s a wide variety of devices out there which are capable of video playback – computers, music players, mobile phones, game consoles, you name it. However, all of them support a different set of formats and there’s no combination to catch them all. So if you want to generate a video, you will always have to pick a format based on a selection of devices that are important to you. To make this a little bit easier, I prepared a little tool for you:

• The Video Format Decision Helper

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I’m a happy user of the Fujifilm S9500 bridge camera since 2005, but lately, I noticed that it would also be really nice to have a second, smaller camera that I can take with me (almost) everywhere. This isn’t a problem in itself – there are countless compact point-and-shoot cameras at around 200 € on the market. However, most (if not all) of these suffer from too high resolutions and too small (1/2.5″) sensors. The days of the legendary F30/F31 with its large 6-megapixel sensor and unrivalled low noise are also long gone, so my »new camera« project was on hold for a long time. That was until february, when Fujifilm announced the release of its new compact F-series model, the F200EXR, based on the highly anticipated SuperCCD EXR sensor. After reading the first beta reviews and seeing the first example images, I immediately ordered the camera and it arrived just in time for my Paris visit, where I had the perfect opportunity to test the camera. Here’s what I found out.
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Over the last few years, I bought one specimen of all four generations of Apple’s iPod nano media player, mainly to make rePear compatible with each new model. (In fact, rePear’s main development target are iPod nanos.) Here are my thoughts about the benefits and drawbacks of each generation.
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For a very long time, this blog was run by WordPress 2.0.x – this was the current version when I started it, and I kept updating it for a while, but after I built the captcha, I stopped doing so. The reason is that I implemented my captcha as a direct hack in WordPress’ sources, not as a plugin, not even a my-hacks.php file. In the meantime, I some security holes appeared: I frequently found invisible spam injected into my posts. I have never found the actual hole through which they did this, but I disabled everything that could be problematic (all this Web2.0ey XMLRPC crap, for example). In particular, I excluded all hosts from a certain spam-friendly provider from my site. This helped a lot, until last week, when I suddenly found that my Windows 7 review has not only been altered, but replaced by invisible spam.

This was the point when I finally had enough – I upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.7 yesterday. To my great surprise, the test transition, performed on a local copy of the site, worked absolutely flawlessly. I could even re-use my theme without changes, which was my greatest source of fear. On the real server, there was still the little problem of the PHP memory limit which was too low for WP 2.7 (why on earth do they use more than 8 MiB, even without plugins and locales?!), but this has been fixed with a simple mail to my friendly webspace provider (thanks, Rafayel!).

Everything worked, except the captcha, which I reimplemented as a proper WordPress plugin today and activated just now. By the way, in the 22 hours without the captcha, I already got over a dozen spam posts. Sigh. Let’s see how long this installment of the site works :)