The steam deck will be unlocked and open
The steam deck is a portable gaming console scheduled for delivery in a few weeks that will be able to play most everything in your steam library. It will be like a nintendo switch but for the thousands of games available on your PC. Valve answers questions about the steam deck here. and they confirm this will basically be an unlocked x86 machine running linux.
I hope they can sand off the rough edges of running a modern linux OS. Big companies have claimed they were 'protecting the user' to excuse locked bootloaders, hardware restrictions, DRM, and all sorts of user hostile features. Most people don't care, which makes my life difficult because it matters to me and I have a hard time finding hardware that isn't infested with user-hostile hardware.
Despite their reliance on Proton (basically telling developers to continue developing for windows and letting the linux guys try to blindly figure how how to make it work on their machines) this FAQ is encouraging.
I'm adjacent to the target demographic. I'm not in the market for a hand held gaming device but I'm interested in the way it's developing. If it finds the support they're aiming for, I'll pick on up. I just really hope this doesn't fail like valve's other forays into hardware (the steam controller and the steam link).
I fully expect the worst from the gaming press as pointed out in the 6th entry of this post.. I expect complaints about battery life, poor performance when running demanding games at non-recommended settings, and a concerted effort to make it usable with windows (because an ever rotating handful of new DRM infested EA games will fail to work immediately in proton). If they can capture enough market share it might prompt huge game publishers be more careful about linux compatibility. If I could guarantee this by purchasing a steam deck I would do it today.
Offline documentation
Over the holidays I've been doing more recreational programming on my laptop in places with spotty internet.
I've written a handful of scripts to manually sync source code with my desktop when I'm home but when I'm travelling I often need to do a quick lookup of something like the list of pathlib methods and offline documentation is frustrating.
Python can do introspection but it's annoying and not as readable as the online docs:
In [1]: import pathlib
In [2]: pathlib.__doc__
In [3]: print(pathlib.__doc__)
None
In [4]: from pathlib import Path
In [5]: print(Path.__doc__)
PurePath subclass that can make system calls.
Path represents a filesystem path but unlike PurePath, also offers
methods to do system calls on path objects. Depending on your system,
instantiating a Path will return either a PosixPath or a WindowsPath
object. You can also instantiate a PosixPath or WindowsPath directly,
but cannot instantiate a WindowsPath on a POSIX system or vice versa.
In [6]: help(Path)
<finally some useful information>
You can also use pydoc to run an html server on a local port but the results are the same:
pydoc3 -p 1234
Looking online for other sources of offline documentation led me to devdocs. This is a website that lets you 'install' documentation for various programming languages for later reference. I was dubious about their claims that you could visit the URL even when you don't have working DNS but it worked on my laptop. Their FAQ explains how it works:
So basically magic. You know, the black kind that makes me wonder how many advertisers are using this to track everything I do, even when air-gapped. Still, it's a cool hack.
The mozilla developer network has a nice github repository with all their web documentation. If you do a shallow clone it's 271M of markup that compiles to html as you browse. To get this run:
git clone https://github.com/mdn/content mdn_content --depth 1
cd mdn_content
yarn start
I think there's more than enough for me here to look up all the weird markup rules for html but it can be hard to parse.
The gold standard of offline documentation is rust. In addition to thinking very hard about the deployment and reproducible build problem, they also seemed to have applied the same attention to documentation. The same utility that downloads or updates your compiler version will launch a page in your browser with documentation for your current version, using all the markup you find online:
rustup docs
The first page contains links to 10 free books with just about everything you'd want to know about the rust infrastructure.
Know you want something in the standard library? Just add an argument:
rustup docs --std
Just need to look up something in the book?
rustup docs --book
Every time I return to rust I'm pleasantly surprised.
How to survive gnome
Gnome is the most common desktop environment for linux and I hate it. This article explaining how to fix all the terrible defaults just reinforces this view. I've used a half dozen linux desktop environments and settled on xfce4. xfce a basic DE that stays out of my way and hasn't really changed in the last decade. That being said, I don't really use it anyway, 99% of my time is spent alt-tabbing between alacritty and firefox.
Bad comic art
There are online forums where people gather to highlight bad comic book art, try to fix it, and places where they try to make it worse
I like it because it highlights the mistakes of professional artists and the results can be hilarious.
The infrequently updated blog.