Category Archives: Computers

Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook


The only books I buy new anymore are beautiful things that appeal to my niche interests, which might become unavailable because they are niche… so my pre-ordered copy of Lori Emerson’s new book Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook arrived today.

Lori Emerson is one of the few people really prominently writing seriously in a media studies/anthropological sort of way about the history of technology, and I constantly assert that there isn’t enough of that, so I’m excited to see a win.

I found her via the press for her first book, Reading Writing Interfaces, which is fabulous and thought provoking (and I only have a handful of quibbles with it, mostly around promulgating some of Apple’s dubious self-centering history that they seeded to writers and journalists in the 90s, even where she clearly knows better) and have followed her online posts as she prepared this one – We even interacted online once or twice in those; I’m acknowledged in her piece The Net Has Never Been Neutral that didn’t end up in the book because of a conversation we had online about how different parts of the audience would understand the world “Neutral” in subtly and problematically different ways when she posted an earlier version.

At a skim, Other Networks is much less densely academic and analytical than Reading Writing Interfaces; it really is a sourcebook of curated examples of technologies and instances of those technologies, with the necessary breadcrumbs to set up the interesting properties and comparisons with others. I’m a little disappointed that some of the deep musings about other ways the thing that is the Internet could have been largely didn’t make it in to the book, but, from an editorial view, they are different content for a different audience than what it ended up being.


It is also beautiful; the binding and the typesetting and the illustrations, right down to this lovely little foiled glyph on the back cover. My copy is sitting next to Marcin Wichary’s Shift Happens, which is a benchmark for beautiful books, and it looks good.

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MinisForum UM870 Slim

I picked up a little MinisForum UM870 Slim in a 32GB/1TB configuration for about $463 on sale (from nominal $580 sticker price) a few weeks ago, just to have a decent piece of fixed hardware on my desk at home. I’d recommend these things to a large swath of the desktop market, with a few model-specific caveats. Details below.

A Minisforum UM870Slim held in-hand to show size.
Easily in the 1L ultra small form factor class, 130×126.5×50.4mm is about 0.8L
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Pismo Powerbook

Picture of a running Pismo Powerbook, showing the "About this Mac" page and list of installed Applications

I’ve wanted one of the curvy bronze-keyboard G3 Powerbooks since they were new – I’ve always been kind of taken by the design language (half business, half iBook). I got to play with a university-owned Wallstreet for a while as a kid, so I remember them beyond looking in catalogs, and uh… I really like a bunch of classic Mac games and want a convenient late-classic machine to run them natively, because a few are glitchy in emulation.

So, I occasionally lowball bid promising auctions when one comes up somewhere. A few months ago (in late February) there were a succession of them on ShopGoodwill, and I tossed a $50 max bid on a Pismo in the 500MHz/128MB/12GB/DVD configuration in unknown electrical and OK but not perfect cosmetic condition. And, surprisingly, won. It ended up being about $67 with shipping/handling/tax/etc. Since working condition examples tend to be around $200, this seems like a decent deal. It survived the typically awful shipping, and, in long form below, it turned out to be a good buy.

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GTK3 is Still Awful

I got the upgrade to GIMP 3.0 yesterday, went to do a few basic image editing tasks, and it’s great they’ve fixed many of their long-standing issues and added things like NDE for filters, wider color depth, etc. … but I was so annoyed by the dialog-buttons-in-title-bar situation caused by the move to GTK3 that I stopped what I was doing and looked for a workaround.

Dialog-buttons-on-top is backwards from reading order, backwards from every other piece of software I use, and backwards from almost every other piece of software made in the last 40 years – I’m not interested in arguing if the GTK folks repeatedly doubling down on their weird bullshit is legitimate, I just want to be rid of it.

It turns out there isn’t really a runtime workaround on Wayland, your choices are force it to use the X back-end via `GDK_BACKEND=x11 gimp` so it will respect the gtk-dialogs-use-header=FALSE setting, or patch and rebuild GTK3. Because that setting gets overridden with the Wayland back-end. Unless you delete like 4 lines of code and rebuild the whole library, since the “technical reason” it had to be hard-coded for wayland is apparently just some bad behavior with CSD bars (which are also undesired behavior – I want consistent window controls and labels plumbed by my environment) that come up when running under gnome.

…And since you’re replacing your system gtk3 with a rebuilt library anyway, there’s gtk3-classic. Which isn’t packaged, so you have to build locally. From some random github repo and an AUR package. But it is pre-patched, and gets rid of a bunch of the other misfeatures like the search-instead-of-typeahead and some weird CSDisms at the same time.

I moved from daily driving xfce to kde in like 2017 because GTK3 was awful (and the KDE folks got their resource usage in check), and the stragglers (gimp, inkscape) moving to gtk3 is making me think about it again, because it is now even more awful. At least GTK3 is basically frozen at this point, so I won’t have to build the replacement too often.

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A Goofy 3D Printer Setup

TL;DR: I converted my Anycubic Linear Kossel to Klipper.
Using a hacked Chromebook as the host, which is great and I recommend hacking surplus education market Chromebooks for many of hobby projects usually done with an SBC.
Running in containers as a docker-compose project, which works but is dumb and wasteful.
Next I’m going to try to do some systematic performance experiments to it, but that’s for a later post.
Details below.

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Mac Desktop DynaComp DCF-803 Recap

DynaComp DCF-803 PSU, as used in Apple Centris 610/Quadra 660AV/ PowerMac 6100 Systems

Since finally being rid of my PhD work, I’ve been hitting a bunch of projects that have been on my TODO list for ages.
The oldest so far is this PSU which has been sitting for …decades… in my parts pile with some compatible machines, and I’ve always intended to try rebuilding it. It died with a “ticking” symptom some time in the mid-00s.

I finally got around to it this week, and it wasn’t a bad job. About $10 of parts, a few hours of work, and it’s back in action. Rebuild details below.

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PhD Complete!

It took another round of “longer than expected” because, while I passed my defense at the end of July, I had some requests to make significant changes to the dissertation before submitting my final copy, and that didn’t get wrapped up until early September with my advisor paying meaningful attention to what I was doing for the first time in years.
I ended up having to include a lot of the modern academic hype-spewing, stake-claiming bullshit I’ve developed a deep distaste for, but even with that I’ll admit it’s a much better document overall after the rewrite. It looks less negative than the earlier drafts, because they were largely written before my last “I give up, I’ll try one more stupid thing” experiment finally turned up something reasonably compelling.

The copy of record of the dissertation is published, here are local PDF copies of the deck from my defense and my dissertation. More information below.

Then I had several weeks of catch-up for all the many things in my life I’ve been shorting time to get done, while I was having the apparently requisite back-and-forth with the graduate school about petty formatting matters, but it is done.

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Finally wrapping up my PhD!

The largest reason I’ve been starving every one of my other interests, like posting here, for the last several years is finally wrapping up, and looks like it will get me a PhD in Computer Science.

Wednesday July 24, 2024. 1:00PM. 101 Davis Marksbury Building.

Title: Post-Capture Synthesis of Images Using Manipulable Integration Functions
Abstract:
Traditional photographic practice, as dictated by the properties of photochemical emulsion film, mechanical apparatus, and human operators, largely treats the sensitivity (gain) and integration interval as coarsely parameterized constants for the entire scene, set no later than the time of exposure. This frame-at-a-time capture and processing model permeates digital cameras and computer image processing.

Emerging imaging technologies, such as time domain continuous imaging (TDCI), quanta image sensors (QIS), event cameras, and conventional sensors augmented with computational processing and control, provide opportunities to break out of the frame-oriented paradigm and capture a stream of data describing changes to scene appearance over the capture interval with high temporal precision. Captured scene data can then be computationally post-processed to render images with user control over the time interval being sampled and the gain of integration, not just for each image rendered but for every site in each rendered image, allowing the user to ideally expose each portion of the scene. For example, in a scene that contains a mixture of moving elements some of which are more brightly lit, it becomes possible to render dark and light portions with different gains and potentially overlapping intervals, such that both have good contrast, neither one suffers motion blur, and little to no artifacting occurs at the interfaces.

This thesis represents a preliminary exploration of the properties, application, and tooling required to capture TDCI streams and render images from them in a paradigm that supports functional post-capture manipulation of time and gain.


So excited to be rid of this thing. It’s a genuinely nifty idea, and sort-of the idea I started out with, but I’m very tired of looking at it.

If any internet friends want to come watch me talk shit about it for ~1 hour, you’re welcome.
I’ll post my thesis and slides after it’s done.

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Firefox has a facility to use native file pickers via xdg-portals, which most of the internet will tell you is set in a key in about:config called widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal. Quite some time ago, that was split into more granular keys so … Continue reading

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Recent Intermittent Outages

There have been some intermittent issues with this site for the last few days because some shitheel has been hammering the server that hosts web-facing things for me with automated script-kiddy bullshit that my existing hardening didn’t automatically catch.

Roughly 10GB of it in the last week.
With user agents set to around 500,000 different Chrome versions.

I noticed because the (small) box has been OOM killing processes any time the stats tools look at the logs of this behavior.

Most of it came from one address (in the AliCloud IP allocation, as always. I’ll continue to half-pretend it’s just a compromised VM) so I cleaned up the worst of it by adding an nftables rule to drop anything from that saddr, and did a little filtering to the logs to fix the OOM situation.

I’ve also turned on some rate-limiting features in nginx, and rigged fail2ban to block repeated violators of the rate limit, so hopefully things are more permanently taken care of.

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