Tech on ZachIR's Human Den

Learning a Programming Language

Sat, 23 Jul 2022 23:12:09 -0500

I decided I wanted to learn a programming language. I was originally intending to learn something more similar to the ones I already know (C/C++, Rust, Python, Lua), but instead it was voted on Lunduke’s Locals that I should learn Scheme. I know a little bit of history about it; it is a Lisp dialect, which means (lots (of (parens))), which I am not a fan of. I know that Scheme was originally going to be the web scripting language, but companies wanted something that looked more like Java, so Brendan Eich invented Javascript (the bane of my existence). But I haven’t really tried to learn Scheme specifically, so we’ll see how it goes.

\[SATIRE\] Announcing Google Zero

Fri, 10 Sep 2021 21:56:49 -0500

[SATIRE] Announcing Google Zero

A Private Messenger Based on Signal

Google announced that, among the dozens (citation pending) of chat apps Google plans to unveil by Q4 2022, there will also be a privacy-friendly option named Google Zero, forked from the Signal source code.

“We understand that Signal has hurt many of its users with the underhandedness of implementing their own cryptocurrency and forcing it on users”, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told news outlets. “And Signal hurt us, too. We value everyone’s privacy, and so we are confident our new Google Zero platform will be a big hit among the cool cats out there.”

\[SATIRE\] Firefox Adds "Ok Google" Support

Mon, 06 Sep 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Firefox Adds “Ok Google” Support [SATIRE]

Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker announced over the weekend, that Firefox 93 will be shipping with a new feature: “Ok Google”.

“I just want people to know that we aren’t doing this because Google is paying us,” Baker replied when asked for comment. “We truly believe privacy is a fundamental right for people who agree with us, and so we want people to know that Ok Google will be opt-out if you dig around in the about:config page.”

Writing Blog Posts In Markdown

Tue, 24 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Writing Blog Posts In Markdown

I have found a new method for writing my blog posts, which I will be giving a shot today (and hopefully keep, as I just migrated my local copy of my website to it), where I have every page written in R Markdown, with a template.html file, which I use as the template for pandoc to compile everything into html. Additionally, the template.html file loads my main.css stylesheet, which means that I can have a separate stylesheet, and have it loaded for every page; additionally, every page has the same header and footer; as well, I don’t need much fanciness within the content of each blog post, so Markdown is a perfectly viable language to write them in.

Why Artix?

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Why Artix?

I may have mentioned this before, but I am an Artix Linux user by default (except when I am an OpenBSD user). I have tried many other Linux distributions (Fedora, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Arch, Antergos (RIP), Endeavour, Manjaro, MX, OpenSUSE, Debian, Devuan, a couple of LFS based distros, NuTyX and Venom). I think it's fair to call me a Linux power-user. No, I haven't ever gone down the CentOS (RIP), or Mandriva (RIP) based distros, but I am pretty comfortable with Linux systems. And yet, no matter how far I may roam, no matter what I try, I always come back to Artix. What can I say? The repos are excellent, I can go the minimal install route and not have to remove a bunch of crap, and leave unnecessary libraries littering my SSD, I have the entire AUR at my disposal (even though I typically have to write init scripts for the daemons I get from the AUR, like auto-cpufreq), I have the one ok part of systemd (logind) without the rest (I can choose either RUnit, OpenRC, or S6 as init systems).

Initial Thoughts - Gentoo

Sat, 14 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Some Initial Thoughts While Installing Gentoo

For those of you who don't know, I have been using either Artix Linux, OpenBSD, or a combination of the two, for most (if not nearly all) of the past year. Why? Because I love them, and they work. Well. But sometimes, you get bored with the status quo.

Sometimes, you want to try things the hard way. And if you're me, sometimes you take small benefits in smaller size and resource usage as an excuse to compile your operating system from source.

Terrestrial NeoVim

Mon, 09 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Terrestrial NeoVim

Well, I scrapped spacevim. It just didn't work out from me; even with the lazy loading, it was still pretty slow to start on my old laptop (although, to its credit, it was still speeding up a little a few days later). What surprises me, though, is that the 436-line, 27-plugin configuration of neovim is still significantly faster. Which, incidentally, is what I have been up to today.

Vim In SPACE

Sat, 07 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Vim In SPACE! - Trying a Vim Distribution

I have been a *vim-exclusive user since the late 2010's, which (un-)coincidentally was around the time I switched full-time to Linux. Specifically, neovim is my weapon of choice (based purely on a cursory examination of the mission statement and repo).

After finding out about Free software from a Richard Stallman talk (how exactly I got to said talk was a journey inandof itself), which led me to learning about GNU, and specifically GNU Emacs. At that point, I considered myself something of a software minimalist, so I decided Emacs was too bloated for my to try. Then I heard about it again a couple years later, from Distrotube, and I thought about giving it a try. It seemed to run just as quickly as vim on his videos.

Full Metal ALSA

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Full Metal ALSA - The Most Minimal Linux Sound Setup

In this post, I am going to tell you how I got "pure ALSA"* working on Artix Linux (I know this will also work on Arch Linux, and assumedly other Arch based distros, for as long as "apulse" and "lib32-apulse" are in the AUR).

*: ALSA is the only operational sound server on the system; however, as some applications require Pulseaudio, the command 'apulse' is used as a translation layer, so the applications think they are using pulseaudio, and ALSA behaves in a more friendly way, but it is still just ALSA.

\[RANT\] Modern Design Sucks, II

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0500

"Modern Design" is the Worst Thing to Happen to Websites

The Brave web browser advertises itself as loading web pages "three times faster than Chrome," a claim due very little (if at all) to rendering web pages faster, but rather due largely to blocking large chunks of javascript and ads from loading. The CNN homepage (which is usually the one referenced by Bryan Lunduke) takes a whopping 9.63 MB and almost a minute to download (at least on my crappy American internet). As a point of comparison, my homepage takes up 3.34 KB (according to Librewolf), and Luke Smith's landchad.net homepage takes up 88.4 KB.

\[RANT\] Modern Design Sucks, I

Tue, 03 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0500

"Modern Design" is the Worst Thing to Happen to UIs

If you've ever found an application, which you enjoyed using for years, before the developers suddenly pulled the rug out from under you and forced you to suffer under the plague of developers "modernizing the UI", where now, instead of a beautiful row of buttons, you now have a single button, affectionately known as the "hamburger menu," in order to add an extra step for everything you need to do, then you have been struck by Modern UI Design.