WSLg is short for Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI and the purpose of the project is to enable support for running Linux GUI applications (X11 and Wayland) on Windows in a fully integrated desktop experience.
WSLg is going to be generally available alongside the upcoming release of Windows.
2021, the year of the Linux desktop!
This is great. It was announced long ago, and is almost here. Very exciting. I would very much like to stop using X servers such as VcXsrv or Xming. However, it looks like WSLg is designed to run Linux GUI apps as one-offs. Thatās not what I, personally, need.
We already have Windows Terminal, WSL, and there is a windows-native vim. Thatās pretty much all the Linux apps I use. The reason I use an X server is because I use i3 to tile and manage all the terminals and vims in a keyboard-only way that is efficient in terms of screen real estate usage and speed. If WSLg can run a window manager in full screen mode on just one of my two monitors, then Iām all in. If not, then I may have to keep using VcXsrv, which will be disappointing.
All the time I have shit-talk ideas. And I always feel compelled to do things if they are new, big, might accomplish something, etc. I realized, hey. Iām very much allowed to do something that isnāt new and just creates some art even if itās poop.
So I got PICO-8 and I started making a cute little shmup. Itās not going to be anything special or revolutionary. Iām expecting it to be less fancy than Galaga.
So far I made a little spaceship that flies around. Then I spent way too much effort on the star field in the background.
Weāre shooting now.
Is the ship flying up or into the screen?
It looked okay until the shooting starts. It feels like the bullets should be going into the screen like Star Fox, not up the screen like Galaga.
Yeah, this is because when I searched for starfield drawing algorithms, the one I found and implemented was the Gyruss style even though the game is going to be Galaga style. I guess Iāll have to change it if itās too disorienting.
Come for Stanley Kubrick shooting the shit about programming documentation manuals in 1984, stay for his cat passed out on the desk:
Found a cool font library that was relatively easy to port to PSP (aside from the LLVM FPU bugs, but thatās another story). Decided the best way to try out a font library was a scrolltext demo, so without further adoā¦
Love that DISCO font.
The font is called Monoton-Regular. Or were you referring to the sine wave bouncing?
No, the font itself is what I was referring to.
I set up a script to periodically pull a couple random wallpapers from the unsplash API, and put them in my rotating-wallpaper folder.
Great move, I hadnāt changed my backgrounds in a long time. Feels like I got a new computer.
Did the same with phone, highly recommend.
Not hitting an API, I just harvested a bunch of jpgs and set up a rotating-wallpapers folder.
TIL after over a decade in the field, episode #24601: /dev/shm/.
Itās a ramdisk, just sitting there waiting for you!
mount | grep tmpfs also shows /run/user/$UID, a good place to cache things.
Iāve had this on the brain lately:
Of course. Scrape some webpage, use git to store the diffs. Runs in a github action.
name: Scrape latest data
on:
push:
workflow_dispatch:
schedule:
- cron: '6,26,46 * * * *'
jobs:
scheduled:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Check out this repo
uses: actions/checkout@v2
- name: Fetch latest data
run: |-
curl https://www.fire.ca.gov/umbraco/Api/IncidentApi/GetIncidents | jq . > incidents.json
- name: Commit and push if it changed
run: |-
git config user.name "Automated"
git config user.email "actions@users.noreply.github.com"
git add -A
timestamp=$(date -u)
git commit -m "Latest data: ${timestamp}" || exit 0
git push
I recently learned a lot of GitHub Actions stuff. Using it for CI/CD on the in-progress new GeekNights website. I was not aware that it had a cron schedule mode! I thought you could only fire an action off on Git events such as push, merge pull request, release/tag, etc.
While this technique is very powerful, and I may use it, it might require paying for GitHub. GitHub Actions charges by minutes of compute time used. The free plan gives a somewhat good amount, but probably not enough for this. Itās probably cheaper to just have a cron job running on a Raspberry Pi or VPC that scrapes, commits, and pushes.
I think for very short scrapes youāll be ok, if youāre not using Actions for much else.
Free tier gets 2,000 minutes a month:
64 minutes a day, or about 2:40 an hour.
Iāve had one running the last day or so, 3 times an hour. Itās been taking 14-20 seconds per run, so I think Iām good. That one baby scraper uses up a lot of my minutes though! Might switch to RPi or VPS just because.
Yeah. Itās enough free minutes to support about one active project. As soon as you add a second project, or if your project becomes very active, then youāre in the money zone.