<![CDATA[<p>A problem that's getting bigger with each day is that we're making technology easier but it's also getting more and more "evil" with big tech companies collecting and selling our data for monetary gain. </p>
<p>So then we turn to alternatives (Usually free software and GNU/Linux) which is a good thing, more people caring about their online privacy. </p>
<p>The problem is how we approach these new users. We want it to be easy for them but in the process of making it easy for new users we're also making it a nightmare for experienced users and slowly making GNU/Linux just as bloated as those proprietary operating systems. </p>
<p>What do I mean with "bloat" since that term is kind of a meme by now? </p>
<p>Nowadays most of the software we use is bloated. The websites you visit likely have a lot of JavaScript in them (Facebook, Google, Discord, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) which forces us to have bloated web browsers for viewing those pages slowing down older computers. Additionally this also requires a GUI program which some users might not want. </p>
<p>But even if you avoid the web there's still bloat in a lot of software. A lot of software on GNU/Linux now is packaged using Universal packaging like Snap packages (Canonical), Flatpaks (Red Hat), and AppImages (some random idiot).</p>
<p>Now since soydevs decide to package using these and since these are universal, every single package has </p>
<p>-to have support for every distro which obviously is very bloated and probably moreso than .dmgs containing a binary on macOS or a .exe since there are more GNU/Linux distros than macOS versions/Windows versions. </p>
<p>Thing is, when you're trying to keep your system minimal for multiple reasons (Could be old hardware or </p>
<p>you simply like minimal software) these packages are just not an option. You might say, "Just compile from source" (as if I'm not already using Portage) </p>
<p>And yes, I can definitely see your point but the problem comes when software is *absolutely proprietary*, because you can't exactly compile software without the source code in your hands. </p>
<p>Now proprietary software is NOT minimal, obviously however whenever you need to install a piece of proprietary software you may in some cases be forced to use one of these bloated packages since the proprietary software developer is too lazy to actually use the distro specific package managers or AT LEAST provide a tarball for the user. </p>
<p>So what are these universal package formats good for? Well, they're good for Windows/macOS normies who are used to things <i>just-working</i> without any tinkering. But problem comes when everyone starts adopting-</p>
<p>this new fancy packaging format. Because once these become standard (I definitely predict they will), you will be forced to use them (unless the software is free and open source). And even then, you may be forced to compile it from source yourself if you want to reject universal packages. </p>
<p>TLDR; By using bloated universal packages and making it easy for the normies, you're making it harder for minimal GNU/Linux users/experienced users who REALLY hate universal packaging. </p>
<p>So please, if you're going to distribute software, please provide packaging for the distro's native package manager.</p>
<![CDATA[<p>This is a notice for spDE users. It now comes with newsboat and this RSS feed built in. There may or may not be a keybind but you can access it from the terminal by running 'newsboat'.</p>
<![CDATA[<p>Today I wanted to talk about something else. I guess it's kinda related to my previous post titled "Stop making GNU/Linux user friendly.. sort of".</p>
<p>Modern software has this problem, a very huge problem. "Bloat". Now bloat can be caused by many different aspects. Programming language, po-</p>
<p>orly written code, unnecessary features, etc. but the main one I wanna talk about is called "Electron".</p>
<p>Now if you're not familiar with Electron, it's basically a minimal version of Chromium designed to create individual desktop applications from</p>
<p>HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This makes it easy to create desktop applications as long as you know a lot about web development.</p>
<p>In fact many desktop applications you might be using (Almost all of them are proprietary) use Electron.</p>
<p>Examples of these are: GitHub Desktop, balenaEtcher, Discord, Spotify, and yes, even a text editor, Visual Studio Code or as I like to call it, "SoyDev Code".</p>
<p>Either way, JavaScript is a VERY bloated language and is often obfuscated making it harder to see spyware, even if it's TECHNICALLY open source.</p>
<p>Now JavaScript is becoming more popular in web development and this fact is pissing people who want a minimal system off.</p>
<p>So to make it worse, since Electron allows you to turn HTML+CSS+JS into a desktop application, this means JS will be used for software as well.</p>
<p>You might say, "I have a fast computer so I don't care if the software is bloated or not" and while that's a fair point, what if someone doesn't have a fast computer or just simply likes- </p>
<p>minimal software. Then they're essentially forced to use this bloated slow application just because a developer was too lazy to actually learn another language.</p>
<p>TLDR; The web is extremely bloated and since Electron turns "the web" into a desktop application, software on the desktop is getting bloated too.</p>
<p>So what do I want? I want developers to STOP using this Electron trash. It really is not difficult to create a nice desktop application.</p>
<p>Thank you and have a good day!</p>]]>
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<title>What you can expect from Project 081 0.6</title>
<![CDATA[<p>This is an update for Project 081 users (if there still are any). As this project has slowly died I would like to finally finish it as I have been</p>
<p>working on other stuff like gentoo-install, spDE, my RSS feed, sfetch and various other projects.</p>
<p>After I spent more time with Linux and stuff my older Mac OS X project kinda.. died. So therefore my goal is to finish Project 081 soon so that</p>
<p>it's as good as it can possibly be. All the assets are (hopefully) complete however it has yet to be "compiled" together into an image for the user.</p>
<p>So while you wait, here's a list of a bunch of changes i've made to Project 081 as well as a few I'm going to do.</p>
<p>- Project 081 0.6/1.0 now comes with sfetch</p>
<p>- Project 081 0.6/1.0 might come with an RSS reader as well as my feed.</p>
<p>- Project 081 0.6/1.0 will FINALLY fix AirPort for iMac8,1 users.</p>
<p>- Project 081 0.6/1.0 will hopefully boot on all systems.</p>
<p>- Project 081 0.6/1.0 will hopefully be a single image with a single package that determines what to install based on sysctl hw.model</p>
<p>- Project 081 0.6/1.0 will be an even smaller image</p>
<p>- Project 081 0.6/1.0 will have a preinstalled image available.</p>
<p>- Project 081 0.6/1.0 will FINALLY come with drivers for newer Apple keyboards</p>
<p>That's basically what you can expect, if you have any more suggestions please create an Issue on GitHub.</p>
<![CDATA[<p>So today, 2022-03-11 depending on your time zone marks 20 years since Arch Linux was released to the public.</p>
<p>I would like to show some respect by creating this very post. Arch Linux is still one of the best Linux distributions today and I use it on a few machines.</p>
<p>Even though I personally use Gentoo, Arch Linux was what got me into minimal Linux distributions and bloat-free software so I believe we should give it the respect it deserves.</p>
<p>So thank you Arch Linux for being "different" and being minimal. Although I don't agree with some of your decisions such as switching from OpenRC to Systemd, you're one of the most popular distros and managed to get many people away from the bloated</p>
<p>Linux distributions to something minimal and DIY. You even basically created Linux elitism by making an OS</p>
<p>that's difficult to install. Happy 20th Birthday Arch Linux and thank you for reading this.</p>]]>
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<title>It's time to stop using Adblock Plus (seriously stop)</title>
<![CDATA[<p>One of the most popular types of browser extensions have been ad blockers.</p>
<p>Now there are so many ad blockers, most of them being absolutely terrible that it can be hard to pick one.</p>
<p>But fear not, just look for the highest rated one right? Well.. No. Because on most browsers Adblock Plus is the highest</p>
<p> rated extension and therefgore it's also the most popular. </p><p>But little do most users know that ABP isn't what it seems. You see, big tech companies pay the creator(s) of ABP to not block their ads.</p>
<p>You might say, these are what ABP calls "Acceptable Ads" but NO, these are not just whitelisted until you manually disable them, these are ALWAYS whitelisted.</p>
<p>Now, let's talk about what "Acceptable Ads" are. These are ads that ABP deems "Acceptable" and they likely get paid to make these "Acceptable". </p><p>The reason this feature exists is obvious. Most normies don't spent time "tinkering" with their software and therefore probably use the default settings.</p>
<p>And "Acceptable Ads" are also enabled by default. So the user installs ABP thinking they're getting privacy and an ad free experience when that's not really the case.</p>
<p>Guess what makes it worse? ABP doesn't tell its users that they're being paid money by big tech companies. And because ABP is one of the most popular if not THE most popular ad blocker its users are going to trust it no matter what. </p><p>So what ad blocker should you use? Well, you could go with the least bloated option which is to edit your /etc/hosts file but manually adding entries is extremely time consuming and ultimately not worth your time so instead you can simply use the "uBlock Origin" extension which is available for Chromium, WebKit and Firefox based browsers. </p>
<p>uBlock Origin despite having a bad name in my opinion is definitely the best ad blocker. It's 100% open source and free as in freedom. Its filter is also public and if you really want you can add it to your /etc/hosts manually. It has no "Acceptable Ads" trash which means money doesn't decide what's going to be blocked. </p>
<p>It also has a bunch of other nice features that other ad blockers lack such as preventing WebRTC leaks and disabling JavaScript, cookies, trackers and other stuff that you might not want. It's definitely one of the best browser extensions and I highly recommend it. </p>]]>
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<title>rchat 0.4 is here (Now available on Arch and Gentoo)</title>
<![CDATA[<p>rchat 0.4 has finally been released. This release doesn't bring much of note except a few commands.</p>
<p>However, you can now install rchat easily on Arch Linux through the AUR and Gentoo using my ebuild repository.</p>
<p>To install rchat 0.4 on Gentoo, add my overlay, you can find out how to do so by following this link: https://github.com/spoverlay/splay.</p>
<p>To install rchat 0.4 on Arch, simply install the AUR package. You can use an AUR helper like 'yay' if you want. Usage with 'yay' is 'yay -S rchat'.</p>
<p>For other GNU/Linux distributions, you can head over to my GitHub and download the latest version. Or clone it using Git.</p>
<p>The latest release can be found here. Simply download, save to /usr/bin/rchat and chmod +x /usr/bin/rchat.</p>
<p>In addition to this, patches are now available. At the time of making this post, there's a .Xresources patch available for 0.5</p>
<p>Please be respectful and don't abuse the new feature.</p>
<p>- To install rchat 0.5 on Gentoo, add my overlay, you can find out how to do so by following this link: https://github.com/spoverlay/splay.</p>
<p>- To install rchat 0.5 on Arch, simply install the AUR package. You can use an AUR helper like 'yay' if you want. Usage with 'yay' is 'yay -S rchat'.</p>
<p>- For other GNU/Linux distributions, you can head over to my GitHub and download the latest version. Or clone it using Git.</p>
<p>The latest release can be found here. Simply download, save to /usr/bin/rchat and chmod +x /usr/bin/rchat.</p>
<![CDATA[<p>Good morning/evening/night gigachads. Today I wanted to speak about a problem. As you've probably read from the title which is 'Everything I want to use is Chromium', everything I want to use is Chromium.</p>
<p>No matter if you like Chromium or hate Chromium, it is a problem because centralization is a problem. In this case, centralization refers to a product with a marketshare so far above everything else, it's slowly killing any and all alternatives. </p>
<p>Back in the day, There were really only two web engines; Trident or whatever it was called (IE), and Gecko (Netscape/Firefox). This used to be a problem in the late 90s and early 2000s because Internet Explorer was about as dominant as Chromium is today. However as the mid 2000s came around, it was fairly balanced and you could get by with either web browser.</p>
<p>In 2008, a brand new "fancy" web browser came around called Google Chrome. Little did we know back then but this web browser would later end up essentially destroying the internet. Not the web browser itself, although it's pretty terrible and normies tend to use it, but rather the web engine it had, named 'Chromium'. Now Chromium is based on another web engine called WebKit. The problem is that Chromium is controlled by a big tech company and even worse, a big tech company with advertising as their main goal.</p>
<p>Now, Chromium is a free software project but since Google, the evil advertising company has the final say about what goes into the project and not, it's not something you should depend on. Chromium ended up being (and still is) the fastest web engine. This led to new websites relying more and more on Chromium. And as the result of that, most web browsers created nowdays are based on the Chromium engine.</p>
<p>Slowly, Chromium gained massive marketshare and fast forward to today, it's by far the most popular web engine out there. Essentially what we've done is given Google the power over all of our free software projects.</p>
<p>Not only that but with massive marketshare came web centralization. Google, the evil company has a monopoly on advertising, hosting and video sharing and even web searching. Who is to say they won't use their monopoly and power for evil in the "free software" project Chromium which is in most web browsers today?</p>
<p>Mozilla, the creators of Firefox and other free-software projects like Thunderbird don't have advertising in mind and rather try to encourage a free and open source web. However due to bad decisions and Gecko being slow, Chromium has taken over and now Mozilla is really struggling to keep the Firefox project going.</p>
<p>You might say, "just fork Gecko" and while that would be valid, Gecko is REALLY difficult to work with and that's the problem. You can't just easily create a browser based on Gecko because it's too difficult and time consuming. </p>
<p>Now, I'm not gonna go too in depth on this but many DESKTOP applications are also becoming Chromium. The reason is that soydevs have essentially stopped making regular Desktop applications and are instead using something called 'Electron'. Electron is basically a minimal (but still EXTREMELY bloated Chromium) which is even worse because even if you avoid Chromium for your web browser by using a Firefox based browser like GNU/Icecat, Tor, Firefox, Waterfox, Librewolf, etc. you'll still have Chromium based applications on your system.</p>
<p>It's getting really common. balenaEtcher, Discord, Spotify, Telegram, etc. desktop clients are all using Electron/Chromium.</p>
<p>So what do I want? I want a decentralized web. To support this, we need to somehow grow Firefox and Webkit based browsers' marketshare so that the marketshare is more even. So that, if Google eventually destroys Chromium and makes it a spyware monopoly, we have another engine to fall back on.</p>
<p>A good way to do this would be to bring back the old 'Choose a browser' prompt Microsoft was forced to show every time Internet Explorer was launched on Windows 7 and 8.</p>
<p>To contribute to this, I've decided to BAN myself from ever touching anything based on Chromium or Electron. Chromium might be great, or it might suck but I refuse to support a bloated, centralized web. If you wanna support a decentralized web, I suggest you do the same.</p>]]>
<![CDATA[<p>Some GNU/Linux users are very serious about maintaining a minimal system. They use software like dwm as their window manager, written in C with very few dependencies (definitely check it out).</p>
<p>But even then, they keep using a bloated piece of software just to run an X session.</p>
<p>That program is 'xinit' or 'startx' as some people call it because that's the command you run to start an X session. To me, there is absolutely no reason to keep using such a bloated program when minimal alternatives exist. In fact, it's really easy to switch to a better alternative.</p>
<p>If you're running Wayland then you can ignore this post/throw that bloat in the trash, it's not for you. For the rest of us Xorg GNU/Linux chads, I'm going to walk you through a simple program called 'sx'. I've known about this program for months but never actually bothered to try it. As I quickly found it months later however, it is REALLY easy to switch over to sx, even on a system that's already fully set up.</p>
<p>To get started, change directory to wherever you want and 'git clone https://github.com/Earnestly/sx.git'. Now 'cd sx' and run 'make install' as root.</p>
<p>Now that you've got sx installed, it's time to start using it. If you're not sure how to use it, you can simply check the 'man sx' page.</p>
<p>To start a server, if your .xinitrc is in ~ then you can probably just run 'sx sh ~/.xinitrc'. You can use the exact same .xinitrc with sx as with xinit. Now, if you've moved your .xinitrc then it's the exact same command, just change the path.</p>
<p>If your X is configured properly and the .xinitrc is written properly, your window manager should start just like it did with xinit. Now, sx is just 36 SLOC of POSIX compliant shell so if you want you can easily make changes to it.</p>
<p>Unless you require very specific settings though, which is quite rare you probably don't need to modify it anyway.</p>
<p>sx does however have a few problems although I've only encountered one with dfmpeg/ffmpeg where it won't record. It's not a huge deal and it's probably just a dfmpeg thing. If it is and I manage to solve it, a new version of dfmpeg should be released soon.</p>
<p>Either way, sx is really everything you need an 'X starter' to do. Nothing less, nothing more.</p>]]>
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<title>Smartphones are only smart because you're dumb.</title>
<p>Smartphones are evil. They're slowly turning us into braindead robots who only know how to consume but slowly lose the ability to think and to make decisions. They slowly require their smartphones to make decisions because their brains are becoming more and more useless.</p>
<p>Now, the problem people who understand how technology is bad for them is facing is normies. Normies don't understand how the technology they use affects them and they don't have any clue how it works. All they know is that it gives them a constant dopamine fix.</p>
<p>"Smart"phones are good for one thing; giving smartphone companies and government agencies all your data and slowly bluepilling everyone who uses them. They're forcing expensive pocket-sized pieces of glass and spyware onto people which are all running only proprietary software which likely will spy on you as is the case with nearly all non-free software.</p>
<p>"Smart"phones are slowly taking control over YOU and are now starting to "think" for you. This is a problem because it means you're slowly becoming useless, slowly becoming braindead. You are slowly becoming property of the big tech companies who made your device. The software is all proprietary (non-free) which means you have absolutely no idea what's going on.</p>
<p>You just have to trust tech companies and most people unfortunately do it without actually thinking for themselves. They think big tech companies are out here being nice trying to make the world a futuristic dream or something.</p>
<p>Now, for many Android devices and certainly Apple's hardware, you can't just replace the proprietary OS and proprietary bootloader with free software. Because they're not gonna allow that. You may be able to run a more free OS but you'll still have non-free software running on the glass and spyware you possibly paid thousands for.</p>
<p>So you pay them thousands for a phone which can do almost nothing compared to your computer, then they still spy on you and slowly devolve into a braindead robot.</p>
<p>Smartphones must be stopped before humanity is ruined.</p>]]>
<![CDATA[<p>Today I'm starting a new 'series' of blog posts essentially about how certain companies are evil. This one will be about Apple as I'm pretty sure you can tell if you even read the title of the post.</p>
<p>Before you call me a biased RMS fan who runs a FSF approved distribution, never goes outside, has Stallman posters and hates everything that isn't free software:</p>
<p>I am far from biased, in fact I used to run macOS as my main desktop operating system, used an iPad years ago and since 2020, have been maintaining a Mac OS X 10.4 retro project.</p>
<p>Even then, I believe Apple is an evil business, moreso than many other tech companies for one reason. No it's not their high prices. Actually it's worse than that. We can laugh all we want about the $1000 Studio Display stand but really, that's far from their worst. The real reason I hate Apple is because they manipulate the consumer.</p>
<p>If your first reaction to this is "HOW" then Apple managed to do it on you too.</p>
<p>So why is Apple evil? Apple is evil because they manipulate the consumer into thinking their products provide privacy for the normie (Which most Apple users are).</p>
<p>Need a good example? Simply watch their newest (at the time of writing) video called Privacy on iPhone. In the video they in sort of a weird way claim Apple and iPhone devices specifically allow you to disable app tracking. So why is this evil? Isn't this great for privacy?</p>
<p>If the normie consoomer who doesn't know any better tries to disable app tracking using whatever features Apple the evil company provides, Apple gets all that data for themselves. Now of course they claim they don't sell your data but how are you gonna know? Almost every piece of software written by Apple is ABSOLUTELY PROPRIETARY which means you have absolutely no idea what it does with all your data.</p>
<p>And while they have access to your data, the normie consoomer thinks Apple cares about your privacy and only wants the best for you. This means people who are now starting to care about privacy go out and buy iPhone devices thinking they're good for privacy when they're really not.</p>
<p>Sure, iPhones may be better than Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi and the endless other companies when it comes to privacy but to think they don't track you is really stupid. A general rule is, if something's not "free and open source software" it tracks you. Apple stops other companies from tracking you but they track you themselves instead. At the end of the day, the data is still collected and sent to Apple so it really makes no difference in the end.</p>]]>
<![CDATA[<p>Yep, I'm back with yet another rant because we totally don't have enough of those yet. I hope the next few blog posts are going to be.. more positive but I feel like this must be said.</p>
<p>This one is about free software and open source. This is probably my first blog post that has made be.. extremely angry while writing it. In fact I had to edit the finished post 5 times just because I kept insulting the people who support 'open source'. So please..</p>
<p>Stop using the term 'Open Source'.</p>
<p>By supporting 'open source' you're not supporting software that respects the user's freedom. Instead you're supporting 'fake' freedom. Open source is just as evil as proprietary software. The only difference is that the source code for the application is public. You don't wanna support proprietary software with a nice mask on, do you?</p>
<p>If free software is what you <i>actually</i>support then please use the term 'Free software' or 'Libre software' instead. If you support 'open source' then you're supporting companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple and many more who don't care about your (free)dom but only the 'collaborate' aspect of open source.</p>
<p>They like open source because they get YOUR (as in people who write code for the project) work and code for nothing in return. Open source is important but it's just part of freedom.</p>
<p>In addition to this, many people who are unaware of the free software movement/project think these big tech companies are nice people who care about their users when this is far from the truth.</p>
<p>Open source does not guarantee the user's freedom. This is why tech companies support 'Open source' but not free software. Free software is evil to them because they want control, something free software doesn't and cannot allow.</p>]]>
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<title>Why I switched license from MIT to GPLv3</title>
<![CDATA[<p>Like I said last time, I wanted to make some more positive blog posts so here goes, I guess!</p>
<p>In this blog post I wanna sort of explain why I switched to the GNU GPLv3 license after having used the MIT license for such a long time. I also hope this will be my last FSF/GNU related post for a bit but usually I just write about whatever is on my mind.<p>
<p>- So why did I switch license from MIT to the GPLv3?<p>
<p>It's fairly simple. Both are free software licenses but the MIT license and most other licenses are missing one specific point that I really like and it's the main reason I switched.</p>
<p>Most other licenses including the MIT allow anyone to fork the project and redistribute it just like the GPL but the problem is the license can be changed to whatever the fork author wants. This also includes a proprietary license which goes against what I want out of a license. I want to <i>prevent</i> non-free software, I don't want to <i>help</i> non-free software.</p>
<p>- How are you helping non-free software?</p>
<p>Essentially I'm writing their software for them, so then they can just fork it and make proprietary spyware out of it. This has happened to many different projects and you can thank these licenses that don't prevent a license change for proprietary firmware and other nasty stuff that (probably) runs on your GNU/Linux box. Some people may argue that the GPL is actually non-free because it <i>doesn't</i> let you fork under another license but I heavily disagree</p>
<p>At first it may seem like that but as soon as someone forks your software and changes the license to a non-free license you have MORE proprietary spyware so in the end you're causing more problems than you're solving. The GPL essentially tries to end proprietary software by providing a license which guarantees freedom like I stated in my <ahref="/articles/post13">previous post.</a> which is something I support. So that begs the question. Should you switch to the GNU GPLv3 license?</p>
<p>Now, I would like to add that if you're heavily against the GNU project or the Free Software Foundation due to Richard Stallman, then you probably do not want to use the GPL. And most of the time the people who choose to NOT use the GPL for this reason cannot actually find a justifiable reason for their choice. I don't know about you and it's not my decision but either way the GPL is just a <i>software license</i> and therefore it really doesn't matter who wrote it. Just know that by using a license that doesn't prevent/stop non-free software, you're making the world a worse place.</p>
<p>If your goal in addition to providing users with freedom and a great piece of software then the GPL is probably for you. The GPLv3 license guarantees freedom for anyone who uses the software. Therefore <i>in my opinion</i> by using the GPLv3 license you are making the world a better place by stopping potential proprietary software.</p>
<p>That's all for this blog post I guess, bye.</p>]]>
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<title>Are GNU/Linux users elitist or are normies too stupid to learn?</title>
<p>Windows/macOS users often call me an elitist GNU/Linux user but is that really deserved? Well, I personally don't think or care too much about people's opinions on me. After all, I have better things to do and since it's so common to call GNU/Linux users 'elitist', it doesn't really mean anything to me.</p>
<p>However, since this is so common I wanted to find this out for myself. So let's think for a moment here? Why do I write blog posts just like the one you're reading?</p>
<p>Well, for me it's because it allows me to say exactly what I think whenever I want. It's a nice way to (sometimes) express your anger at something. However I don't really view myself as an elitist. After all, I write blog posts like this one and write guides like <ahref="https://speedie.gq/guide02.php">this one</a>. I went out of my way to help <i>new</i> GNU/Linux users in this case install Arch.</p>
<p>If I was an elitist I'd tell you to 'RTFM' like every Arch user ever. Instead I went out of my way to help you get started with Arch.</p>
<p>What I'm not about to do however is read the 'FM' for you. If you aren't capable of reading plain English then I will call you exactly what I view you as, <i>an idiot</i> or <i>a normie</i>.</p>
<p>In addition to this, it ALWAYS seems like the people calling <i>me</i> an elitist are part of this group. People who will complain about something being difficult without having the patience to read and perform. They will call anyone who uses software that they view difficult to use (for example Gentoo, Arch, or suckless software) an elitist. They can't seem to find one reason why anyone would actually want to use said software except to look cool on the internet.</p>
<p>Now I'm not gonna deny the fact that there do exist <i>some</i> elitist GNU/Linux users but they're the exception rather than the rule. Most people who use this (in the normie's eye difficult) software do it because it's more efficient once you know how it works. A good example of this would be Vim.</p>
<p>The 'real' elitists (in my opinion) are the normies since they consider anyone who uses X software an elitist even if only a few (but loud) people have an elitist attitude about the software they use.</p>
<p>The normies are proud to be normies. Just like we are proud to use this 'hard to use' software.</p>
<p>The difference is, we try to teach the normies this 'hard to use' software but instead of actually learning anything, they simply call us elitists. Therefore, I personally consider the normies the actual elitists.</p>
<p>To be clear, if you don't understand how to use X software then that's perfectly fine. What I do have a problem with is proud stupidity. Normies are always proud to be normies instead of learning. They take pride in being stupid.</p>
<p>That's all for this blog post. Have a good day!</p>]]>
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<title>Return of the rchat (rchat 1.0 is out)</title>
<![CDATA[<p>It's been a while since I've updated rchat. Earlier today I decided to improve rchat since I noticed it had many flaws that I thought I could improve on.</p>
<p>rchat 1.0 brings many improvements. :help, :changelog and :history now have colors, Borders now scale based on the size of your terminal window.</p>
<p>In addition to this, you can now use ~/.config/rchat/rchatrc to set options. This might be useful if you wanna set settings without using commands. You can also set the border character using the ':set sep' command. :help, :changelog and :donate commands can be used without joining now.</p>
<p>You can reset all settings using the ':reset' command. You can also open my donation page by using the ':donate' command. Fairly small but very useful release. If you want to install it, you can clone the <ahref="https://github.com/speediegq/rchat">rchat repository</a> and run <code>make install</code> as root.</p>
<p>Gentoo and Arch repositories should be updated soon.</p>
<![CDATA[<p>Since yesterday I've been working on a little website overhaul (mostly fixing errors and improving index.php) so this is just a quick blog post telling you about it.</p>
<p>Normally I wouldn't make a blog post about small changes like this because... I mean it's a website, it's supposed to be updated and changed frequently.</p>
<p>I've made some changes to the layout however and removed a few buttons. For example, my forks and dotfiles can now be found <ahref="dotfiles.php">here</a> instead. This was done to keep the front page clean and to the point. I also removed some project links but they're still up, just in the <ahref="projects.php">Projects</a> page instead.</p>
<p>I added some fancy 90s style buttons as well to the footer of the front page because I thought they were cool. Let me know what you think about them and feel free to suggest more (License must be free to use). I also renamed a few blog posts but they're all still up. I plan on archiving a few blog posts but they won't be deleted.</p>
<p>That's it for the website update. Thank you for reading and have a good day! Hopefully next blog post will be a little more useful! 😃</p>]]>
<![CDATA[<p>It's been a bit since a proper blog post was made so today I'd like to rant about ATI who clearly are not capable of making a graphics card that works under GNU/Linux. Sounds familiar? NVIDIA? Actually, NVIDIA is still better at this because at least their GPUs ACTUALLY WORK under GNU/Linux.</p>
<p>So anyways. Yesterday I installed Arch Linux on my laptop which has an ATI Radeon 5650m. It's some old Packard Bell machine from ~2009. The RADEON 5650m is not a fancy graphics card but it should be more than enough to have transparency in terminals with.. usable performance. Especially since it ran Windows 7 well (At least as well as such a spyware trash operating system can).</p>
<p>As always, installation boots fine, I install xorg-server, xorg-xinit and <ahref="dwm.php">my build of dwm</a>. Of course, this works fine and performance is good enough but as soon as i install <code>picom</code> and run the usual <code>picom &</code>, the entire computer slows down to the point where it's almost unusable and terminals take 10 seconds to spawn.</p>
<p>It's not an <code>st</code> issue either because <code>dmenu</code> also takes AT LEAST 10 seconds to open. Absolutely ridiculous for a simple run launcher/menu.</p>
<p>You might say I'm biased because it's only one computer and it might be broken or something, alright fair enough so I tried on another computer. I installed Arch Linux on my Early 2008 iMac which has an ATI Radeon 2600XT and a Core 2 Duo processor. This Mac runs Mac OS X Snow Leopard great and Mac OS X Tiger through <ahref="project081.php">Project 081</a>.</p>
<p>This time I also followed the Arch Linux Wiki on ATI graphics cards and after an install of Arch and dwm, the thing is still unusable just like the Packard Bell laptop. Windows take ages to spawn and when they <i>do</i> spawn, are really <strong>really</strong> slow.</p>
<p>So I kill <code>picom</code> and right away, the computer actually works and terminals spawn instantly. Every single computer with ATI graphics have had TERRIBLE GNU/Linux support making them unusable if you want transparency.</p>
<p>Now, if you didn't know, AMD bought ATI and as such, ATI branded GPUs are no longer being produced meaning this isn't really a big issue if you only use new computers. In fact, my main desktop has an RX 570 + 580 (used for gpu passthrough) and it runs GNU/Linux with my dwm rice perfectly so AMD actually did <i>something</i> useful.</p>
<p>So to end this blog post off, If you want an older laptop/desktop to use with GNU/Linux, avoid ATI. If the computer is new enough to have an AMD graphics card then you are probably fine. You would probably also want to avoid NVIDIA due to their terrible proprietary drivers (although hopefully this changes now that kernel modules are "open source") leaving Intel as the best choice for GNU/Linux.</p>]]>
<![CDATA[<p>Alright so, how do I even start with this one?</p>
<p>I usually don't do software reviews but I think it's time to start doing some. I've been using dwm since around December after switching from i3 and it really doesn't get any better than dwm. In fact, I haven't switched window manager once since then (other than trying bspwm and some others for a short time).</p>
<p>dwm is by far the best window manager for GNU/Linux. Many beginners see it as difficult but it's actually really easy once you get the hang of it. And dwm like other suckless programs have very clear benefits which make it so great.</p>
<p>I've used i3, bspwm and awesome (which wasn't as awesome) and very quickly came to the conclusion that dwm works best for me. <strong>So, why should you use dwm?</strong></p>
<p>Well, it all comes down to the suckless philosophy which is basically to write minimal software that only comes with the basics. Then, it's up to the users to create patches (in the form of .diff files) to add features to the software. This is an advantage because it means you don't have a bunch of features that you don't want to use in your codebase. But it also means there are no limits in terms of what you can do with the software.</p>
<p>Most window managers have a configuration file with set options that the window manager can read. This means you're sort of limited in what you can do with the window manager. dwm on the other hand is customized and modified by editing the C source code directly. Not only does this keep the software light and minimal (through not reading a bloated configuration file), but this also means you have no limits in terms of what you can do because it's all C code that can be modified in any shape or form.</p>
<p>The C programming language is also very minimal meaning you don't need to install a bunch of dependencies (Looking at you, Xmonad and Haskell) so if you run a GNU/Linux distro like Gentoo where everything is compiled from source, you won't have to worry about waiting 2 hours just to get a window manager installed.</p>
<p>People who are new to dwm and probably use i3 often say it takes a long time to make a change to dwm just because you have to recompile the source code but that's complete nonsense. To install my build of dwm which has way more patches than most people's build, you run 'make clean install' and it's done within one second. Even on older hardware, it's only going to take around 3 seconds.</p>
<p>But now, let's talk about the window manager itself and the features. Let's start with what it's like right after compiling and installing a unmodified build. You will reach a pretty minimal and plain desktop with a bar at the top.</p>
<p>In order to spawn a terminal (and make changes to dwm), you press ModKey+Shift+Enter. ModKey is by default 'Alt' but most people change it to the 'Super' so that it does not conflict with keybinds your applications use.</p>
<p>dwm comes with three layouts by default. A tiling layout (layout 0), a monocle layout (layout 1) and a floating layout (layout 2). Because dwm is a <i>dynamic</i> tiling window manager, windows are managed based on one of these layouts. You can add more through patches but this is what the default build comes with.</p>
<p>The tiling layout is a 'Master and Stack' layout. Half of the screen is dedicated to the window you last spawned (Master) and the other windows have to share the other half (Stack). The Monocle layout is very different. In the Monocle layout all windows are available but they're stacked on top of each other. The focused window is the only one visible. Finally there's a floating layout where all windows are floating. They can by default be moved around by holding Alt+Left click and dragging it around. Windows are spawned on the top left which is pretty ugly so many users including myself choose to patch in a center patch which means windows spawn in the center of the screen instead.</p>
<p>Something that I certainly noticed and that you will too if you're coming from i3 or something is that Alt+Shift+q does not kill the focused window but rather your ENTIRE window manager. To actually kill the focused window, you do Alt+Shift+C. This was something I just could not get used to so I ended up changing the keybind. It's definitely something that could be confusing if you're new to dwm.</p>
<p>As for RAM usage, dwm is basically as good as it gets. This is mostly because dwm is written in C and less than 2000 lines of it. Don't get me wrong though. dwm doesn't have any less features than other window managers. In fact, it actually has MORE because of community provided patches that can be found on the <ahref="https://dwm.suckless.org/patches">suckless dwm website.</a>. These can be used with the GNU <code>patch</code> command present on basically every GNU/Linux system and are created with the <code>diff</code> command.</p>
<p>Patches are basically snippets of code from other people's dwm forks that contain additional features. For example, not every wants transparency but if you do, there's an alpha patch available which adds it to dwm. dwm can be as minimal or as bloated as the user wants, that's what's so great about suckless software.</p>
<p>So, conclusion then. Should you use dwm? If you want an experience that's nearly limitless and allows you the most control then yes. If you're the kind of person who wants the least amount of dependencies or a window manager as fast as it gets, dwm is probably for you.</p>
<p>However, if you don't like tiling window managers and don't want to control everything using a keyboard then you can just head back to your Ubuntu + GNOME environment that you are so familiar with. As for me, I'm going to continue maintaining <ahref="dwm.php">my dwm fork</a> because it has improved my productivity by a lot. My computer is much faster with dwm than it ever was before and consumes much less RAM.</p>]]>
<![CDATA[<p>Alright so, rchat 1.3 has finally been released. Hopefully it does not break any existing patches. If it does then.. well, they should be updated shortly.</p>
<p>So, what changed with update 1.3? Mostly fixing bugs but I did replace <code>~</code> with <code>$HOME</code> as it works better. But in doing so, I introduced a massive bug and it's likely the dumbest thing I've done so far.</p>
<p>Now, to make this easy and quick, I decided to use <code>sed</code> to replace all instances. Normally this would be fine but the problem is, I ran <code>sed -i "s|~/|$HOME/|g"</code> which was a problem because if you are new to the terminal, $HOME is a variable defined on every GNU/Linux system. This means <code>~/</code> was replaced with <code>/home/anon</code> because <code>/home/anon</code> is my $HOME directory/variable. This meant rchat was broken for everyone except the people who happen to have their user account named anon.</p>
<p>So of course, this release fixes this issue and nothing more.</p>
<p>If you are on rchat 0.5 or older (Latest release on the AUR as of 2022-06-29, <code>pacman -R rchat</code> and follow the instructions on the <ahref="rchat.php">rchat page</a>.</p>
<p>If you are on rchat 0.5 or older (Latest release on the splay overlay on Gentoo as of 2022-06-29, <code>emerge --deselect rchat</code> and follow the instructions on the <ahref="rchat.php">rchat page</a>.</p>
<![CDATA[<p>I should probably start this "review" (calling it that would be stupid) off with a stupid little disclaimer; I am not an audio professional or ALSA expert. I am simply a regular user of a free software operating system.</p>
<p>I mainly use my audio devices for consuming content, editing videos and listening to music. That's it. I'm sure there are a few things that an audio professional would disagree with me on and that's fine.</p>
<p>In case I haven't made this clear enough before, I'm not usually a PipeWire/PulseAudio user. I find it kind of pointless because ALSA allows me to do pretty much anything I want and requires no setup except proper kernel options.</p>
<p>However, recently I switched to Arch on my ThinkPad X220 and because it doesn't offer any USE flags like Gentoo does, I'm forced to use either PipeWire or PulseAudio with Firefox. Not many developers support ALSA because not many people use only ALSA which means it is getting harder and harder to use ALSA for a lot of people. So what is the PipeWire experience like?</p>
<p>PipeWire to me is pretty much just PulseAudio-Improved. It's still an additional program I usually don't need but I can understand why it exists. A lot of audio related work would be an absolute nightmare to do on only ALSA so for most people, having an easy to use solution would probably be a good thing.</p>
<p>PipeWire is just that, you install it and it works. On Arch, you have three PipeWire related packages available, <code>pipewire</code>, <code>pipewire-alsa</code> and <code>pipewire-pulse</code>.</p>
<p>pipewire-pulse seems to be a compatibility layer for software that requires PulseAudio, and it also allows you to use software like pulsemixer to control it and pipewire-alsa allows you to control PipeWire using ALSA tools (such as alsa-utils) similar to pipewire-pulse. They're both probably worth installing.</p>
<p>I initially had to use PipeWire because it was a dependency for <code>firefox</code> which is the web browser I currently use but I decided to try using it for the rest of my system.</p>
<p>After installation, it requires no extra setup. You can use the same mixer you did with ALSA or PulseAudio if you installed the extra packages. PipeWire is mostly compatible with PulseAudio.</p>
<p>As for audio quality, I tested using both speakers, headphones (wired) and headphones using Bluetooth and they all work great. Usually I'm not a fan of wireless/bluetooth but I had to try it out. Bluetooth works significantly better on PipeWire compared to PulseAudio and even ALSA so if you are a fan of Bluetooth audio, you will definitely want to go with PipeWire.</p>
<p>On PulseAudio, the audio is very much out of sync and sometimes doesn't even want to connect properly. On PipeWire, it "just werks" after it's installed and connected properly.</p>
<p>I also tried compiling PipeWire on Gentoo and found that it compiled faster than PulseAudio so if you're trying to go for a minimal system, even though ALSA would be more minimal, PipeWire is a better choice.</p>
<p>Now let's briefly talk about Wayland support. I've heard PulseAudio support is terrible if not completely broken on Wayland but I cannot test that for myself because I'm not a fan of Wayland. If you're a Wayland user, you would probably want to do some more research into this or avoid PulseAudio entirely.</p>
<p>With all said and done; Will I continue to use PipeWire?</p>
<p>No.. sort of. I'm going to continue to use PipeWire on my ThinkPad because it is running Arch. I will however continue to use ALSA on my main machine running Gentoo because I don't see the need for anything else.</p>
<p>But do I recommend PipeWire? If you're going to use a binary based distribution, absolutely. It is a lot better than PulseAudio in many ways. However if you're using a source based distribution where you can choose to use only ALSA and that works for you then I would say continue to use ALSA.</p>]]>
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<title>OH NO IM BEING CANCELLED ON TWITTER WHAT WILL I DO???</title>
<![CDATA[<p>A fairly new thing in internet culture recently has been "cancelling" people. It's a really cringe meme sort of created and spread around by these stupid Twitter users who don't do anything but tweet for 5 hours a day.</p>
<p>Let's imagine a scenario where we have Twitter users trying to cancel someone who has an internet presence elsewhere and also uses Twitter:</p>
<p>Usually what happens is they (as in the stupid twitter users) target someone who has an internet following elsewhere (although this does not have to be the case) who has a public opinion on something that isn't the most common and then try to link it together with something that is now in modern times considered socially unacceptable.</p>
<p>Then they will attempt to make the general public stop following or supporting them for having this usually pointless opinion "cancelling" the target in question. On the surface, to me, this seems like the usual nonsense created by Twitter users but actually, internet normies keep falling for it instead of being a strong internet chad who stands by their opinions no matter how unique, disgusting, or even illegal they are.</p>
<p>In modern day internet, it is socially unacceptable to criticize anyone who's even slightly out of the norm in terms of race, gender, sexuality or anything else, even if it's completely unrelated to the problem because they simply will not or cannot seem to stop connecting unrelated issues to people's identity.</p>
<p>What the targets in this case always seem to miss however is that they are pretty much cancelling themselves. The target will choose to think that THEY are in the wrong and because the Twitter users all follow the norm, they will say the same thing over and over again.</p>
<p>In reality no one is forcing the target to quit doing what they're doing except themselves. Instead of choosing to stand up for themselves and what they said, they chose to end their online presence because of one (likely small) thing that they said. If you want to avoid getting cancelled, it's really easy. Just do not care about what the stupid Twitter users think about your opinions.</p>
<p>No one can end your online presence except yourself and the owner of your platform (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or yourself if you have a website). Acting like you aren't in control of your own social media profiles would be correct. But giving control over YOU and your internet presence to other people is a sign of weakness.</p>
<p>Simple advice; To avoid being cancelled, simply don't let anyone push you around on the internet, think for yourself and most importantly, stand up for your own opinions and actions, no matter what they.</p>
<p>That's it for this blog post, have a good day/night!</p>]]>
<![CDATA[<p>For some reason, people feel the need to ask me why I ban certain software. Why I ban myself from trying new software for seemingly made up reasons. In this blog post I explain the reason why I choose not to use certain software.</p>
<p>First of all, when I say 'ban' I simply mean I refuse to install or even try said software. This can be due to many different reasons however usually it's software that goes against my philosophy completely.</p>
<p>If you've been following my blog for a while, or know me on some other platform, you know that I only recommend free (as in freedom) software and this is for good reason. With free software, the user is in control, not the developer while with non-free software, the developer has a lot of power over the user and can hide malicious features in the software that will not ever be discovered.</p>
<p>So a lot of software I ban is automatically banned from my life due to freedom violating features. A good example of this would be Windows 11 which recently started changing the search feature in the start menu without the user's permission. For example, back in June during Pride month, Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to add a rainbow to Windows 11 users' search bar.</p>
<p>No matter what your opinion on the LGBT community is, there is no excuse for this and it's a great example of how you, the computer user is not in control. For this reason, I only promote free software and personally only use non-free software if absolutely necessary for hardware support on my computers (such as Intel ME or firmware for wireless).</p>
<p>Other software I choose to ban because of what the software was designed to do. A good example here would be Flatpaks, which aim to destroy the GNU/Linux operating system by creating distro independent packages that contain all dependencies no matter if they're required on the system or not. The goal is simplicity but this also means they're throwing minimalism and user choice out the window.</p>
<p>I've ranted about these a lot in the past but by banning terrible software like this, I'm doing my part in preventing this kind of software from taking over people's computers. Normies are not willing to do it because they value convenience above everything else, the only people who do this are the enthusiasts and activists and that's a shame.</p>
<p>When using a piece of software, you should expect it to leave YOU in control, but most of the time with stupid software, the developer or even the software itself is in power, not the user. It should also provide proper privacy, none of this <ahref="post12.php">fake privacy</a> nonsense. User data is very valuable and as such, this requirement is not likely to be followed any time soon.</p>
<li>Minimal software with actual effort put into them.</li>
<p>Most software nowadays has one goal; Create the application as quickly and cheaply as possible so that it can make money. Most developers do not care about the code quality at all, instead saying 'Well we have modern computers anyway so who cares' and moving on with their day writing terrible software. As a result, most software nowadays sucks and normies do not care.</p>
<li>Normies taking the matter into their own hands.</li>
<p>Because companies who produce this terrible software get paid either way and because normies don't care, the companies will continue producing this terrible software and the consumers will continue consuming the products without a second thought. The consumers will blame it on 'Oh the future' or 'It is so convenient' but it's a serious issue. Problem is the normies are too busy looking into the future to care. We must convince the normie to value quality software over garbage and to stop using terrible software.</p>
</ul>
<p>So, while we can't get normies to stop using this terrible software, we can definitely do our part. Thank you for reading this blog post, have a good day!</p>]]>
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<title>What happened to spDE? (And announcement)</title>
<![CDATA[<p>Today's post is going to be short, and more announcement-y than usual. If you tried using spDE after around April, you may have noticed that it seems to no longer work. No this was not a failure on my end, it was done on purpose.</p>
<p>So first of all, if someone tries to use spDE right now, the script will quit with seemingly no error reported. This is because of a line I added to the start script on purpose. You might ask, why destroy the script on purpose?</p>
<p>The line was added because I had updated my builds of suckless software causing the builds to no longer compile. In addition, a few changes to distro repositories broke the script on Void GNU/Linux and Arch GNU/Linux based distributions. While this would be an easy fix, I had switched software too meaning the scripts were very out of date and as such not useful anyway.</p>
<p>So to prevent users' from destroying their GNU/Linux systems, I decided to break the script on purpose before it has a chance to install anything knowing that I would probably update or rewrite the script at a later date. Well.. It is July now and it is still broken and unmaintained.</p>
<p>This is where this announcement comes in. I have plans to completely rewrite spDE in a more maintainable way so that things can be added, swapped out and ommited without any trouble, both by the end user and by contributors in order to keep the experience as simple as possible. In addition, I'm going to provide great documentation (a lot already comes with <ahref="dwm.php">my build of dwm</a>) so really, spDE is going to be an install script for my build of dwm, any dependencies as well as other software I use with it. (music player, file manager, bluetooth, status bar, etc.).</p>
<![CDATA[<p>As we all (hopefully) know, especially the developers who read my blog, GitHub is by far the most popular Git service out there. It is also 100% free as in beer and offers a lot of features, even free hosting (although it does not allow the usage of PHP).</p>
<p>However, this comes at a price - Privacy. GitHub is not as nice as it used to be. GitHub used to <i>only</i> be a Git service but once it became popular, big tech does what big tech does best and decided to put their disgusting, money hungry hands on yet another product and this time it was GitHub because in 2019, Microsoft bought GitHub meaning everyone was right in expecting a huge downfall.</p>
<p>GitHub was definitely not perfect before it was purchased by Microsoft however if you are familiar with Microsoft and their background, you know their intentions were to dominate the programming and developer space. And why wouldn't they? They have created the C# programming language (and others), have a very popular code editor called Visual Studio and more recently, Visual Studio Code which is built using Electron. Guess who designed Electron? GitHub.</p>
<p>In addition, GitHub has their own IDE/text editor called Atom which just like Visual Studio Code, is also an Electron application. These two text editors, Atom and Visual Studio Code would kind of compete, and by buying GitHub, Microsoft would have complete control over both of these projects. After users of Atom got worried after Microsoft purchased GitHub, they said that they would keep both editors alive.</p>
<p>They did keep their promise for a few years but a few months ago, Atom was put to rest in a blog post named 'Sunsetting Atom.' which now makes Visual Studio Code even more popular. Microsoft does have the right to do this, and there will likely be forks of Atom, but it is clear what they want to do. They want the Atom users to move to Visual Studio Code.</p>
<p>So why did I mention this? Well, it's because you can no longer trust GitHub. Because it's now a Microsoft product, they want full control as they always do. Users have been worried for years and so have I but because I have so many projects, moving has been quite difficult and time consuming. And this is someone who is not a developer. Now imagine an actual developer behind many popular projects. It is a hassle and Microsoft knows this. Therefore most users are going to keep using GitHub as the time is just not worth it to them. And after going through this, I can kind of see why.</p>
<p>So, let's say you've had enough of Microsoft and their stupid proprietary services. Let's say you want to completely de-Microsoft your life. Where and how are you going to host your code?</p>
<p>Even though it may seem like everyone uses GitHub, it is not the only option out there. Another popular option is GitLab but just like GitHub, it is also spyware and offers even LESS features. It may not be owned by Microsoft but it is just as evil. If you are making the move, avoid both GitHub as well as GitLab.</p>
<p>If possible, avoid any services that are not usable without JavaScript. If you do this, it is possible to use the Git service with LibreJS which means you don't have to run any proprietary code just to view and use the website. For this reason, I chose Codeberg.</p>
<p>All of its JavaScript is free software and although LibreJS does block a few scripts, they are free software and can be verified as such. In addition, if you still want to block those scripts, the website will remain functional as those are only used for the text editor.</p>
<p>Codeberg also does not force you to use some obscure authentication making Git (the command line utility) difficult to configure and use. Codeberg "just werks" with minimal configuration. I prefer to use an SSH key to authenticate but there are also other methods available. Codeberg has a very similar layout to GitHub so there is basically no learning curve. It also offers some really useful features that GitHub does not such as being able to download patches/diffs for commits. This is really useful for me personally when comparing older commits to new ones of my software or reverting changes.</p>
<p>Moving repositories over can take some time and it doesn't allow you to automatically transfer over repositories like GitLab does however once you go through with it, it's really quick. You just create the repository, clone the old repo, clone the new repo, copy everything, commit and push. It can all be done with the command line Git so if you want, you can maybe even write a script to do it automatically.</p>
<p>Either way, I cannot recommend Codeberg enough and I am going to move all my repositories over. Many of my repositories have already moved and you can now find all my suckless builds, rchat and more there. I hope to be able to fully move soon, and although it's a lot of effort, it is going to be worth it.</p>
<p>That's it for this blog post, have a great day!</p>]]>
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<title>Vim: You're wasting your life away if you don't use it.</title>
<![CDATA[<p>Just a short blog post to break the silence.</p>
<p>Maybe the title of this blog post is a little rude to people who don't use Vim but it is true. When I say Vim, I don't specifically mean just Vim, there are many good forks of Vim out there such as Neovim which is what I use. However the productivity benefits of using a mode-based text editor like Vim are so great that I personally believe you're wasting your time (and therefore life) away by not learning and using it. In fact this entire website and this page was written in Vim (and later Neovim).</p>
<p>Vim has actually changed the way I use technology. It may sound strange; how can a "simple" text editor change the way you use your technology? The answer is simple. Vim forces you to learn a bunch of keybinds to get things done. But this is way better because it means if you know what you're doing, you can perform actions REALLY quickly and efficiently.</p>
<p>As soon as you use Vim, you'll realize how efficient it is and you will try to find and use software that follows the same philosophy. A good example of this is vifm. It's a file manager that tries to be Vim like and therefore efficient. And because you already know Vim, it doesn't have a massive learning curve anymore.</p>
<p>This is the main reason why so many developers like Vim. It's really efficient when you know how to use it and it doesn't get in your way. For example, to delete the line I am on using a regular GUI text editor, I may use my mouse to select that line and then I will simply delete it. In Vim, I just have to press <code>dd</code> and the line I'm on is instantly gone.</p>
<p>Another perk of Vim is that it comes preinstalled on almost all GNU/Linux distributions. The only distributions I've used that don't have Vim by default are minimal distributions like Gentoo, Arch, Artix, Void and similar distros.</p>
<p>This is useful when you're using SSH for example. When you're using SSH, you are usually not able to use GUI applications. Being familiar with a fast, powerful text editor that works in the TTY or through SSH is very important.</p>
<p>If you want to learn Vim, install Vim or Neovim and run <code>Vimtutor</code> in your terminal.</p>
<p>By learning Vim, you will ascend from your soydev-ery and turn into a REAL programmer or writer.</p>]]>
<![CDATA[<p>I may be three days late to this but I have an announcement to make. I AM TOO AWESOME FOR SMARTPHONES! You heard me right, I have decided to abandon my smartphone. But how, HOW are you going to live without a portable tracking device with plenty of spyware to keep you too busy and consooming to care?</p>
<p>Well, simple. I simply don't consoom content when I am not home! In my opinion, it is not terribly difficult to make use of your time and at the same time not use a phone. Nowadays there seems to be this idea that when you're bored for just 5 seconds, you're supposed to pull out your phone and waste your valuable time away watching others waste their life away on social media, then go home, depressed, in a loop that repeats until the end of your life.</p>
<p>It is pretty clear to anyone who follows my blog that smartphones have permanently damaged society. It can partially be blamed on the fact that smartphones are so small, anyone can just bring them up quickly without any effort. However I would put most of the blame on the addictive social media that big tech companies (the same companies that produce the phones we buy) make us use.</p>
<p>Most if not all social media is designed to keep you using it for as long as possible, while tricking you into thinking your life is great and absolutely nothing is wrong with it. This is because it is an easy way to gain control over the user and his habits. This allows social media to take over anyone's life.. However that anyone is not going to be me.</p>
<p>In the last few months, I've been spending time deleting accounts and recently I deleted my Twitter account. I decided to do this because I absolutely hate Twitter and don't want a presence there. However instead of having a simple 'Delete account' button like social media from yesteryear had, if you want to delete your Twitter account you have to first deactivate it and then wait a month for it to become 'fully' deleted. (Really just hidden from the public website, the account likely still exists). If this isn't a great example of how social media is really social destroyer, I don't know what is.</p>
<p>Compare your one friend who uses all the spyware social media to someone who never or rarely uses the internet. Which one is more interesting to talk to. Who is going to pull up their phone and check their Snapchat notifications every 30 seconds? People who use social media constantly are just boring people, who absolutely suck, and have nothing interesting going on in their life to talk about, so they have to rely on social media to fill the void.</p>
<p>Thing is, No longer using smartphones really will not change my life in any way and the reason is, I was never wasting my life away on social media on my phone in the first place. I just.. never fell into the trap like so many other people have. However, I am doing this to send a strong message to everyone I talk to. I want to let everyone know that you DO NOT need a smartphone to live. By not bringing and using my phone everywhere, I'm bringing attention to the fact that I don't use a phone.</p>
<p>Not only does this give out a good message to everyone, but it also gives others a reason to talk to me. Nowadays it is uncommon to see people not bring their phone. In fact it is so uncommon YOU are the minority if you do not have a phone. Society EXPECTS you to have a phone. If you don't have a phone, everyone will look at you, shocked, like you're an alien from another planet.</p>
<p>So to end off this blog post, I would like to mention that if you find that you need your smartphone to live a life, consider doing what I am doing and will continue to do. Throw your phone in the old junk drawer filled with crap you've got in the basement, run outside, and enjoy the beautiful air and trees you've got out there. Talk to people, have a conversation, and find things to do.</p>
<p>Wasting your life away on social media and using smartphones is not normal. Just because society makes it seem that way does not mean it actually is. You do not have to take my word for it, you will notice the difference within a day. You will be a much more interesting person to talk to, others will be more likely to talk to you, because you stick out and most importantly, you've escaped the big tech for loop.</p>
<p>Do good things with your life. You only live once so use the time you have wisely. This blog post is now done. Thank you for reading! Throw your phone in the trash like me and get a life!</p>]]>
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<title>SHILL POSTS ARE BACK! fontctrl (Fonts on GNU/Linux-Improved)</title>
<![CDATA[<p>THE SHILL POSTS ARE BACK! Fonts on GNU/Linux absolutely suck so I wrote a script in suckless fashion to fix them. So, what is wrong with GNU/Linux fonts and how does title related fix the problem?</p>
<p>First problem is manually installing them. This in itself would not be a problem but the issue here is that there are about 3 million different paths where a font should go because of conflicting standards.</p>
<p>fontctrl addresses this issue because it introduces two modes. Global and user. When you install a font globally using fontctrl, it will be located in /etc/fontctrl/fonts/. This of course requires root so the solution was to add a '--user' flag which will install it for the current user only. If this mode is used, the fonts can be found in ~/.config/fontctrl/fonts/.</p>
<p>Secondly, if a font is on the system, it can be really really difficult to keep track of it. After all, you probably have many many fonts, so good luck finding and removing the fonts you don't use. fontctrl fonts are not truly installed unless they're enabled similar to something like eselect.</p>
<p>After a fontctrl font is installed, it will be enabled. Enabled really just means symlinked from the */fontctrl/fonts/ directory to the actual font directory. This means the font is just stored locally in the fontctrl/fonts folder without being available to the system unless enabled. This allows fonts to easily be managed.</p>
<p>What makes fontctrl special is that it leaves the manually installed fonts and fonts installed using a package manager separate and does not even touch them. fontctrl <i>only</i> manages its own fonts. This keeps your system clean, as fontctrl will not conflict with another font manager.</p>
<p>Finally I should add that fontctrl is written in less than 200 lines of code, which makes it stable and less likely to fail. No features other than the base features are planned in order to keep the tool as stable as possible and it already does more than most people will need anyway from a minimal font manager.</p>
<p>If you want to try fontctrl for yourself, you can find more information about it <ahref="fontctrl.php">here.</a> Gentoo ebuild should be complete soon! Expect a mpm package in the near future as well. Thanks for reading, have a good day!</p>]]>
<![CDATA[<p>As the title says, I am going to stop developing rchat. I will be accepting pull requests and issues but I am not going to be contributing code to it anymore. It isn't all sad, but the reason for this is because of <ahref="https://donut.gq/rautafarmi">rautafarmi</a>. rautafarmi recently decided to switch over from the old, crusty messages.txt method to using JSON. This meant rchat would have to be completely rewritten to use this new API, because it was not designed with it in mind.</p>
<p>Which is why, I am announcing its replacement named 'iron'.</p>
<p>iron is a fork of rchat but heavily trimmed down, with a clean codebase, much more suckless in design and of course, makes use of the new rautafarmi API. This means it isn't compatible with the older messages.txt method, but I hope instances migrate over to the new JSON API instead.</p>
<p>iron, unlike rchat also fixes many bugs. In rchat for example, if you disconnect from the internet while its running, rchat will print a bunch of crap on the screen. iron checks if the user is connected to the internet before it attempts to draw anything on the screen and, of course fails if the instance cannot be connected to.</p>
<p>Like rchat though, iron only comes with the bare minimum in terms of features. For example image sending support is not in it by default, there is a separate patch for it. iron patches can be downloaded and applied and they will extend the feature set of iron. The idea is, give the user a clean, stable base that they can build on top of.</p>
<p>This is where rchat failed, eventually it got too many features. iron doesn't have auto-updating, it doesn't have image integration, no link opener, no :news, no :changelog and no :help commands. iron only has the bare minimum necessary to send messages and recieve messages by default. It is up to the user to add more features through patches. He only has to apply what he actually uses.</p>
<p>Because of this philosophy, it is possible to keep iron stable, and alive without constantly pushing bloat to its codebase, requiring even more updates to fix the bugs created.</p>
<p>Another note I want to add is that iron no longer has a default instance. This keeps the users secure, because if the default instance gets compromised, the default build of iron is not going to compromise its users.</p>
<p>As of writing this blog post, all rchat patches have been ported over to iron, with additional patches being created. Anyone is allowed to contribute patches that others can apply, as long as they're licensed under the same license as the iron project itself (GNU GPLv3).</p>
<p>Finally, it should be noted that as of writing this post, the only official instance is the official instance, <ahref="https://donut.gq/rautafarmi">rautafarmi</a>. If you are using an older instance, ask them to migrate over to the new instance, or keep using the older rchat. I will accept pull requests and issues on rchat for this reason. rchat should be stable enough for regular usage though!</p>
<p>If you want to try iron, you can download it <ahref="iron.php">here</a> and there should be a Gentoo ebuild soon. As the page says, to install iron, clone the repository, cd into it and run <code>make install</code>.</p>
<![CDATA[<p>As you've read from the blog post title, I hate nonfree software like anyone with a brain should. Problem is, most people don't have a brain. But to fight back against nonfree software I have decided to move over to the 100% free/libre software web browser, GNU IceCat!</p>
<p>But what makes GNU IceCat special, and why should you use it? Well, truth is we all should use it, we just can't all use it. This is because GNU IceCat blocks <strong>all</strong> nonfree JavaScript.</p>
<p>IceCat blocks nonfree JavaScript because it allows the programmer to hide malicious features in the code and because it is obfuscated, even developers will struggle to read the code and understand what it does. Reading obfuscated JavaScript is like reading paper that has gone through a paper shredder - it doesn't work.</p>
<p>Tech companies take advantage of this fact to hide spyware and other tracking in their code. After all, a normie can't read and understand JavaScript code anyway, what are the chances that they will find out what antifeatures the software has?</p>
<p>To fix this problem, a Mozilla Firefox extension was developed named 'LibreJS'. It checks all JavaScript in a HTML document for a license. If one cannot be found, it will be treated as nonfree and blocked by the extension. This is all done before the website loads so no spyware has time to load on your system.</p>
<p>GNU IceCat takes this extension, plus adds some fixes caused by missing JavaScript, turns off telemetry (spyware), hardens security and adds some extra extensions. This makes it a bit more usable in comparison to installing Firefox and the extension with nothing else added. It also makes it more secure, because telemetry is disabled and it has been hardened because let's face it, Firefox has terrible default settings, especially for privacy.</p>
<p>This means, as long as no security settings have been changed, IceCat is one of the best browsers for security and privacy. LibreWolf may have slightly better security, however LibreWolf also doesn't come with LibreJS and has telemetry on by default, just like Firefox so it's really not worth using, you might as well just be using regular Firefox.</p>
<p>Moving over is not going to be easy, because of the way the modern web works, however I hope that I will be able to use the internet reasonably well, even while blocking nonfree JavaScript. Thank you for reading, and have a good day!</p>]]>
<![CDATA[<p>This might actually be my last blog post.. sort of. Now that I have your valuable attention, please read the rest of the blog post!</p>
<p>So, a few days ago I started working on a website redesign. However I quickly realized that it was more work than it was worth. So instead, I decided that it would be easier to straight up start from scratch. No, not completely from scratch, that would be ridiculously time consuming.</p>
<p>However I decided that it would be easier to create the HTML manually, from scratch and then copy over the text (such as blog posts) from the older page.</p>
<p>Anyways, let's get to the point of this blog post which is, I need suggestions regarding the redesign. Anything. What should I implement, what kind of design should I go for? This time, I am able to use PHP for the header, which I will likely end up doing however as always, speedie.gq will stay as an anti-JavaScript website and as such, I am not going to add a single line of it even if it makes my website look nicer.</p>
<p>Here are some ideas I've got myself:</p>
<ul>
<li>About me page</li>
<p>About me page, which will contain information about me, and the software I use.</p>
<li>Separate 'Projects' category (for example, https://speedie.gq/projects/speedwm)</li>
<p>Right now, project pages are all over the place and difficult to find. Therefore I think it would be much easier to have a projects category.</p>
<p>There are now many blog posts, and the one you're reading only makes the problem worse. Because of this, I need a way to make them easier to sort and keep track of.</p>
<li>Header and Footer done using PHP</li>
<p>In my opinion, this is the most important part. Otherwise, If I want to change one thing in the header, I have to manually edit <strong>every single HTML file in the website.</strong> Doing so can take a very very long time.</p>
<li>Atom feed</li>
<p>I might start offering Atom feeds alongside RSS feeds if the benefit makes it worth it.</p>
<li>Separate feeds for Projects, Wii and philosophy/politics/opinions on the state of the world/technology</li>
<p>This blog currently has way too many blog posts that don't really matter a few months after the event. Removing all the 'rchat <version>' posts from the main blog and uploading them to a separate 'Projects' feed is going to make it much cleaner and easier for the user.</p>
</ul>
<p>As for web design, I don't really know what I want to do yet. Will likely go for a minimal design though, as minimalism tends to hide the flaws of not using JavaScript fairly well!</p>
<p>If you want to give me suggestions, you can join my IRC channel (Libera.chat network, #ff or #ststid'kwtn), or you can <ahref="mailto:speedie@duck.com">>send me an email</a>. That's it for this blog post, your suggestions are appreciated, thank you for reading and have a good day people!</p>]]>
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<title>Forwarder Factory is over. (Please read the blog post)</title>
<![CDATA[<p>So let's stop wasting time, very important (but not good) blog post today. In short, Forwarder Factory is done, it's over. Now, so I can get this blog post out quickly, I am simply going to repost the huge and last Discord message I sent in the #announcements channel in its entirety. I know I said I wasn't going to make another blog post before the redesign but I <strong>need</strong> to get this out.</p>
<p>Original post: "So.. I've known this day would come for a very long time and unfortunately, today is that day! In the end, Forwarder Factory is (finally) over. I want to take some time into writing an announcement for you so that you're not lost. If you even remotely support me, please read the entire thing!</p>
<p>Before you start screaming "But what about preservation", note that the GitHub repositories will stay up, along with the Forwarder Factory organization. The YouTube channel will also stay up, however I will be removing the invite for the Discord server and replacing it with a link to a direct download. All the GitHub content is going to be mirrored to my Codeberg (speedie), and will get its own repository. I suggest you fork either the Codeberg or GitHub repositories to make sure they stay up if I decide to one day delete them, or if GitHub thinks I am breaking the terms of service (it is a Microsoft product we're talking about).</p>
<p>Myself and my staff have been thinking about and debating this for a very long time, but I can no longer take the daily conflicts and other maintainence issues that come with owning a server/IRC channel like this. Yes, I could in theory transfer ownership but the FF name has already been through way too much so I don't feel like giving someone else responsibility for a mess I created is fair. <strong>So the goal here is to eventually archive this channel and Discord server.</strong></p>
<p>Recently (about an hour ago as of posting this), the server suffered yet another conflict, specifically about moderation. While this is not the direct cause, I would consider it the final straw as I have been thinking about leaving the internet/ending the server and IRC channel for a very long time now, months actually.</p>
<p>I want you to know that this is <strong>not</strong> the fault of any members here. And if it must be then it is every staff members' fault. I should take most of the blame but it is a waste to dedicate my last announcement here to that. To be honest though, I've been expecting this to happen for a very long time as I said earlier and the reason is fairly obvious looking back.</p>
<p>This server has been through a lot of drama, has had staff joining and leaving, raids and more over the last 1.5 years or so that it has existed for. For example:</p>
<ul>
<li>The raid early on, back when I only had one staff member and got up at 3:00 PM.</li>
<li>Domzuq mod abuse.</li>
<li>Myself calling OBS Studio soyware.</li>
<li>#based-general, the now long gone Discord channel which was supposed to be a place for special people to talk, but ended up a wasteland disaster.</li>
</ul>
<p>The last one, #based-general is in my eyes the root cause of this. What I now call "the #based-general mentality" which is a term I just invented while writing this basically spread to the rest of the server. The biggest issue however, is how I am not a good leader. It is this fact and lack of moderation by myself that caused this.</p>
<p>First of all, I am very sorry for potentially taking away your (definitely not) favorite place to talk. However I no longer think I should be the one leading the Forwarder Factory project and as such, I would like you to go to a better community that is focused on what it should be; the Nintendo Wii console and modding it.</p>
<ul>
<li>If you are here for the Wii specific things such as my forwarders, consider joining the r/WiiHacks Discord server. They are essentially us done right, and stay on topic well.</li>
</ul>
<p>Again, <strong>all Wii repositories will stay up.</strong> Any Discord specific content is also going to be uploaded to these repositories to make sure nothing gets lost. That's what we tried to prevent in the beginning, right?</p>
<p>Either way, with that being said, if you'd like to keep up with me and/or my projects, I have a website at speedie.gq where I post the current information. In fact I may post this on my website too! As for the staff members here, simply ask them!</p>
<p>I would like to give a big thank you to:</p>
<ul>
<li>Gabubu for being an awesome friend, moderator, forwarder creator and of course helping preserve rare forwarders.</li>
<li>Damaj301damaj for being an awesome friend (and very funny guy), moderating and finding awesome rare WADs for you people of this server/channel.</li>
<li>emilyd for being an awesome friend and teaching me about free software such as dwm, as well as writing contributions such as sblorgo, helping me with HTML and more.</li>
<li>nezbednik for being an awesome friend, helping complete the Homebrew Channel collection and making the IRC channels we created possible.</li>
<li>Lilium_Snow, who is no longer here for being an awesome friend for years, creating graphics and thumbnails for me, including all the Forwarder Factory icon/banner stuff, testing projects, and much more.</li>
<li>Domzuq and DomzuqTR, who is no longer a part of FF for their contributions of rare Wii stuff.</li>
</ul>
<p>..and everyone who watched one of my videos, tried one of my projects, installed one of my forwarders or joined the Forwarder Factory Discord server/IRC channel. You guys rock and we will miss you a lot.</p>
<p>I would also like to apologize to Domzuq for joking around with his IP and I would also like to apologize to bloodythorn and the r/WiiHacks community for letting them down (the server invite is/was in #affiliates).</p>
<p>I personally have very mixed feelings about this, however I feel like it is the right thing to do. Remember; all good things eventually end. The end of Forwarder Factory is today! If you have any questions about what is going to happen, you can DM me on Discord or /query me on IRC. I am going to be somewhat active on Discord until the end from now on to make sure everyone gets a chance to say something to me!</p>
<p>Thank you for everything, everyone!"</p>
<p>Yes, thank you everyone for the support, I appreciate it.</p>]]>
<p>We're back up better than ever! Right when the canonicucks thought I was gone for good, I rise from my grave and bring you a new website and blog post. Okay, okay on a serious note I have some very important news to share with the people who (still) follow my blog.</p>
Solving the existing problem with speedie.gq</h3>
<p>Maintaining the speedie.gq website has been a struggle and it only gets worse with every blog post and page I create.</p>
<p>I thought about my alternatives for solving this or at least improving on it, things like using Markdown, writing a simple shell script to append text or even stupid static site generators, but in the end I decided to go with PHP. And it makes sense, PHP is a solid option and has been around for years.
<p>It has a major flaw in what I am trying to accomplish with it and that is server-side code that the user can't see. Of course the source code for the PHP is public and available for everyone.</p>
<p>I have and will continue to publish all changes made to the PHP to <ahref="https://codeberg.org/speedie/speediegq">the Codeberg repository</a> but you have no way to verify that the code is identical to what is running on the server. I am not sure if there is any way to prove this to the users of my website but if there is, let me know and I'll gladly provide.</p>
<p>This is much more convenient than manually editing <strong>every single HTML document</strong> on my website any time I want to change a single character.</p>
Hosting</h3>
<p>GitHub Pages which I used to use up until yesterday has one flaw which would stop this plan right away; it does not support running PHP in any way. I presume this is for ""Security"" reasons, like what if some script kiddy runs <em>dangerous</em> code on our servers? Either way, I had to stop using Pages for this to work out.</p>
<p>My friend offered to host my website on her VPS and for a while I accepted but because I felt bad for wasting her bandwidth and space and because it's not as safe to rely on others, I decided to get my own VPS instead.. It's really cheap and while I *do* plan on self-hosting eventually (need to build a computer to host on), I felt this was a good solution.</p>
<p>I installed OpenBSD on it because it is a great system for building secure servers but importantly it uses LibreSSL which was something I really wanted for this website.</p>
Issues</h3>
<p>OpenBSD works a little differently than the GNU/Linux I am used to so this took a bit of work to figure out. Most of my issues were PHP related because it's much harder to set up on BSD.</p>
<p>While the website still has a few flaws that I plan on fixing very soon (https://speedie.gq/projects doesn't lead to projects.php and instead results in an 'Access Denied.' from Apache), the website seems to be work fine.</p>
Website rewrite</h3>
<p>So, let's talk about the website itself.</p>
<p>First of all, just take a look around. The website has been rewritten from scratch, this time using PHP for the header and footer. This allows changes to be easily made to the header for every single document (there were a lot of them) saving time.</p>
<p>As for other changes, blog posts and text guides are now in the articles/ directory. This was done to keep the root less cluttered which is important when you are going to be hacking on the website for a while. Images are still in img/, CSS is still in css/ and the header/footer is in the php/ directory and projects have been moved into the projects/ directory. I may do more with PHP in the future but right now it is only being used to include the header and footer.</p>
<p>I also decided to archive blog post 1 through 10 due to them being either irrelevant, misleading or just bad to read. You <em>can</em> still read them but they have a little warning attached.</p>
RSS that sucks less</h3>
<p>I finally spent the 10 minutes necessary to make my RSS feed valid. Readers like Newsboat now display the right time and date which was not the case previously. It's a small thing, but equally small is the time it takes to fix the problem I had created.</p>
Wen replace domain name?</h3>
<p>Not sure yet, if Unfreenom decides to take away my .gq domain name I am likely going to buy a proper domain that doesn't do stupid stuff like this. I won't do it otherwise due to the pain of switching domains (and changing GitHub name once again).</p>
<p>If you have any questions about what has been going on, please consider <ahref="mailto:speedie@duck.com">emailing me</a>. I don't bite but respect should be earned.</p>]]>
<![CDATA[<p>I know what you might be thinking but eh, this happens weekly, might as well get it over with.</p>
<p>Decided to release speedwm 1.5 today and in my opinion, it makes all previous versions irrelevant, not because this one is so great in terms of features but because it's so much faster.</p>
<h3>Master, what changed then?</h3>
<p>Tired me at 10 PM joke out of the way, what changed, what made 1.5 worth the release?</p>
<p>In my spare time I had waiting for the bus, among other things I decided to rewrite all of my status modules. I also wanted to see how many <code>if</code> statements I could get rid of. Answer? All of them. None of my modules have a single if statement in them now. I also cut the line count for most of them down by at least half, which is a good thing for readability, because fewer lines means fewer possible mistakes and fewer possible bugs to destroy the software.</p>
<p>I would also look like a hypocrite if I was promoting well written software while having terrible code myself. Pretty much all commits after the 1.4 release have been bug fixes. ..Except a few.</p>
<p>One important thing to note is that speedwm_run is no longer used, and speedwmrc is not used either. If you want a speedwm config file, copy <code>docs/example.Xresources</code> to wherever you want it and add <code>xrdb /path/to/that/file</code> to ~/.config/speedwm/autostart.sh. To start speedwm, you simply run <code>startx /usr/bin/speedwm</code> or add speedwm to your .xinitrc. Those of you using a display manager already know what to do.</p>
<h3>Get this slow trash off my system.</h3>
<p>From that h3 I'm sure you know where this is going. speedwm 1.5 removes the old stellar xsetroot (well, now speedwm -s <text>) status script and replaces it with a partially integrated fork of dwmblocks. dwmblocks is a lot faster than the status script I was using previously. Because it still uses status modules though, you can still configure it in shell so no extra skill is necessary.</p>
<p>The old script also didn't allow updating each module individually meaning you're going to constantly waste your resources on reloading status modules that don't need to be reloaded all that often. The new status (written in C) solves this because it allows you to specify how often each module gets updated, and it can also be updated manually by sending a signal.</p>
That's all, glowies.</h3>
<p>That's all I have to provide for today. I am tired and don't feel like writing a proper blog post, but I will hopefully have something worth reading out tomorrow.</p>
<![CDATA[<h3>Think before you talk, or you end up looking like an idiot like me.</h3>
<p>If you've been following my blog for a while, you might remember an old blog post of mine titled 'Everything I want to use is Chromium'. Like the title says, In the blog post I complain about every web browser using the same web engine; Chromium. In the end I said something that I would later regret though, because of course I did.</p>
<p>"To contribute to this, I've decided to BAN myself from ever touching anything based on Chromium or Electron."</p>
<p>While I have partially held that promise (I haven't tried Electron and I have no plans to do so), I am now back on Chromium based web browsers. Feel free to unsubscribe from my feed now.</p>
<h3>With that said..</h3>
<p>Now that I successfully managed to lose my last readers, I am gonna continue talking to myself in this blog post. Why did I start using Chromium again?</p>
<p>It's because Firefox sucks. That's the answer. Very surprising isn't it? Okay, okay here's the thing. If the year was 2010, I would be sitting here shilling Mozilla and everything they have ever produced because they truly used to be great. I have been a fan of Firefox if you will for years. They're one of the only (sort of) mainstream free software web browsers.</p>
<p>But lately they've been going down a dark path. From the privacy issues, to the Facebook partnership, to Google being the default search engine, to their controversial blog posts (I know a thing or two about that) and many more.</p>
<h3>We get it, why is Firefox no longer usable?</h3>
<p>Long story short, Mozilla Firefox is riddled with bugs, making it about as stable as alpha tier software.. that has existed for almost 20 years. First annoying issue: Firefox being unable to open more than one new window at one time. As Firefox reached version 100, it stopped properly opening windows. I use a lot of windows and few tabs, so this really impacted my usage of it. As you know I use a tiling window manager and I liked being able to put one Firefox window on another tag and another on my current tag. This was useful for writing the website you're currently reading.</p>
<p>With my mouth filled with the bad taste of the bug I just mentioned, it doesn't help that the web is getting increasingly harder to use with the Gecko web engine. Piped and Invidious? Page crashes really often. searx? Loads much slower than on Chromium, and this is not even a JavaScript heavy website in the first place so there is no excuse for the slowness.</p>
<p>The final straw for me was Firefox taking what feels like years to start up. I would press my keybind to start up Firefox and sometimes wait up to 20 seconds for it to start. It was all up to luck, really. As if it makes it better, when it doesn't start, you'll assume you didn't press the key or something so you'll do it again, and again.. and again. When Firefox finally starts up, you'll have 20 different instances of Firefox and you'll be using up all your RAM and CPU. Not ideal.</p>
<p>Ever since I experienced these issues, I went looking for a better web browser and eventually said, 'You know what, I don't care anymore I'll try this out.'.</p>
<h3>Chromium.. doesn't suck? WHAT?</h3>
<p>I ended up trying Chromium (specifically ungoogled-chromium but it's nearly identical) and it only ended up being the fastest, most stable web browser I've ever used. It just works, without the slowness, without the horrible bugs, without the 20 seconds startup time, without searx and piped not loading pages properly. It all just worked, and it worked great.</p>
<p>Realizing I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to switch to a web browser that doesn't fail me on a daily basis, I cut my losses, realized I eventually had to write this blog post and removed Firefox from my system.</p>
<p>Is Chromium perfect? Far from it. For one, the Manifest v3 garbage is going to be a major blow to extensions in Chromium. Plus, Chromium is nearly impossible to customize in any meaningful way. Sure, you can change the colors and stuff like that but good luck doing more advanced things. To my knowledge it's not even possible to remove the account icon from the bar, which is why Chromium is the GNOME of web browsers. (Except, GNOME actually sucks)</p>
<h3>To be fair..</h3>
<p>I never said Chromium was a bad web browser. I didn't really dislike Chromium for that reason. The reason I refused to use Chromium was because it is slowly becoming the one and only web engine. Slowly, all other web engines are becoming more and more irrelevant. This is partially why Firefox sucks so bad. But I am done with Firefox constantly screwing me over.</p>
<p>A week or so after I started using Chromium, I realized I could now try Qutebrowser, which is Chromium based but similar to browsers like Vimb in that it uses Vim keybinds for navigation. I ended up enjoying this web browser a lot and while it is slower than Chromium, it is significantly faster than Firefox and is now my web browser of choice. It is written in Python which probably contributes to that extra slowness over Chromium, it's not really noticeable during usage but you will notice it when you start it up.</p>
<p>It also has no extensions just like Vimb and suckless surf and all of these browsers, but it's really /comfy/ to use, especially for someone used to Vim.</p>
<h3>But.. but.. what about webkit?</h3>
<p>Not gonna go into the Webkit engine here too much but it is even less usable than Firefox in pretty much every way. Sure, web browsers like Surf that use it start up nearly instantly but it has so many flaws and tends to crash when even a slight bit of JavaScript is in the website. And as we all know, it's really difficult to avoid JavaScript in the year 2022.</p>
<p>Even loading basic websites, like searx, and even 4chan, a website which has barely been updated since 2003, both surf and vimb tend to crash almost instantly. I tried with a vanilla build of surf as well and still crashes. Because of this issue, and media playback barely working if at all, webkit is not the engine for me.</p>
<h3>So.. conclusion?</h3>
<p>I know you're probably expecting a 'I switched back to Windows' or 'I work at Apple' blog post next but.. yeah, no that's not gonna happen. I still use exclusively free software and that's not changing. Ultimately, Firefox has gotten a lot worse since I made that initial blog post, so I gave in and started using Chromium.</p>
<p>Thank you for reading, I will now await my check in the mail from Google Inc, see you next time where I install Windows on my ThinkPad and switch to VS Code and Microsoft Edge.</p>]]>
<p>Today I want to talk about getting into GNU/Linux and free software, how I got into it and how you can get into it yourself. But because my "started using GNU/Linux" story is so short, I'm gonna also talk about how I got into certain software like dwm and Gentoo, since normies tend to call this stuff difficult.</p>
<h3>My first encounter with GNU/Linux</h3>
<p>My first encounter with the GNU/Linux operating system was in 2011 when I found out about this new "fancy" operating system called Ubuntu GNU/Linux. People like myself reading this blog post right now might say "DOnT yOU hATe UbUnTU?!?!?" but back then, it was very different from what it is now.</p>
<p>Back then, it was a fairly nice system. I didn't end up sticking with it as you'll read later, because it wasn't able to run most of my software. For this reason, I went back to Windows 7 and forgot about Ubuntu and the wonders of GNU/Linux and free software.</p>
<p>Either way I kept using Ubuntu for a few months (not sure why I didn't stick with it after that) and used the absolute garbage that is Wine to attempt to emulate the Windows experience I was familiar with instead of attempting to learn new software. Probably the most common mistake any new user makes.</p>
<h3>Most easy distros are terrible</h3>
<p>In 2017 or so I went back to trying out various GNU/Linux distributions like Elementary OS and Manjaro, all of which are absolute garbage distros that barely work. While it may be different now, I can't help but stop and ask; Why are all "easy" distros so bad?</p>
<p>The answer is going to be different depending on who you ask but since you're reading my blog, I'll answer it. It's because they try to make the wonders of GNU/Linux something that it isn't. They try to turn it into a free version of Windows, rather than making 'the ultimate OS'. </p>
<p>This stupid direction made all easy distros end up using this stupid software that takes the bad from Windows and nothing good and what you get is an absolute mess which is going to break within a month.</p>
<p>Long story short, lasted a few weeks and then went back to Windows.</p>
<h3>Freedom is hard to resist</h3>
<p>However, freedom was hard to resist so I kept trying out various distributions in my free time but never ended up finding anything I actually liked. Eventually I got sick and tired of Windows doing stupid Windows-y things and installed Ubuntu.</p>
<p>After all, it had been years since I last used it (2011) but maybe software support has improved, I thought. Yes, software support had improved but everything else SUCKS. It was slow, had terrible default applications, grub broke all the time, kernel was missing, X doesn't even start properly, and many many more issues.</p>
<p>I then later reinstalled Ubuntu in the hopes that I had messed something up. User error is normal, I thought. After that, I didn't really encounter any more issues and I was able to do most things just fine on my computer. I still don't know why it just NOW works properly.</p>
<p>After a while I started learning to write basic shell scripts, because that's what you do when you have free time and want to learn how to use your computer properly. It's a great way to learn your system.</p>
<p>While watching some bad YouTube guides on the basics of shell scripting, I saw this one guy with a really cool desktop. "WHAT.. WhAT?!?!? IT TILES???? WAOW". Through a simple search and some reading on window managers, I installed i3-gaps on my then Ubuntu system and switched to using it. I really started to like customizing my system, and I loved efficient, quick keybinds for everything.</p>
<h3>Distro that sucks less</h3>
<p>Ubuntu was of course holding me back from the customization I wanted to do, and had thousands of packages even after removing all the GNOME garbage. I had already been experimenting with Arch for a while on my old iMac.</p>
<p>Out of boredom, one day I decided to install Gentoo in a virtual machine. It was more as a challenge more than anything, because as I understood it, this distribution was difficult to use and install. (Now that's false, but that's another issue)</p>
<p>Eventually, when Ubuntu yet again broke, I decided to install Gentoo on my system. It took a while due to the weak processor I used to have.</p>
<h3>suckless software</h3>
<p>Around this time, I was told about suckless software; specifically dwm. It basically looked like i3 but more convenient to use. It also seemed like a great window manager because it was configured through source code meaning it's very extensible and hackable.</p>
<p>So for my new Gentoo system, I installed dwm instead of i3 and started configuring it. You can actually still use my dwm build from then, it can be found <ahref="https://github.com/speediegq/dwm">here</a>. This made my computer feel so much better and so much more usable and extensible. I cannot recommend learning software like this enough.</p>
<h3>Then to now.</h3>
<p>Not much has changed. Sure, I've switched to/from software but I'm still learning about the system and software I use. There really is no end to learning about technology and software. It keeps going as long as you're interested in learning further.</p>
<h3>How can I get into it too?</h3>
<p>My number one tip for people trying to get into GNU/Linux is this; don't give up too early. Expect to face challenges but be smart and attempt to work around them.</p>
<p>And as I mentioned above, instead of trying to run your spyware software, try to run free software compatible with GNU/Linux rather than the Windows-only software you're already running.</p>
<p>Finally, don't expect to learn everything instantly. You learn as you go, and you learn from your mistakes.</p>
<h3>The most generic conclusion in history</h3>
<p>I am now a Gentoo GNU/Linux user. Overall, it's been a great experience and I love the freedom and customization I can do to my desktop. I'm able to make it anything I can imagine. It truly is great and it's the peak of computing; well, other than writing your own operating system.</p>
<p>Thank you for reading the blog post, have a good day!</p>]]>
<![CDATA[<h3>Finally something worth your time?</h3>
<p>Time for something a little different than usual. Today I'm going to talk about my next project that I am working on as we speak. It usually starts with 'boo this program sucks, let's write something that does what I need it to do better than the current options and this time, it's no exception.</p>
<p>As you know, I've been working rather heavily on my dwm build; speedwm. I've been trying to <em>iron</em> out bugs with it and generally make it the window manager (or computer setup in general) of my dreams. After I reached 800 commits just a few days on the new speedwm repository alone, not to mention the many more on the old repositories, which adds up to over a thousand commits, I realized that I am trying to improve something that doesn't really desperately need improvement.</p>
<p>Now that I'm fairly happy with it, I am going to start a new project. I might work slowly on speedwm, and hope to have a 1.9 release out soon but I don't plan on making any more massive changes to it. So as usual when it's new project time, what happens is I think of a piece of software that sucks and then I try to make something that fixes the flaws. What is it this time?</p>
<h3>Make music great again</h3>
<p>Yes, you heard me right. I am going to write a music player. Or rather a mpd frontend, because it would be stupid to reimplement something that already works well, right?</p>
<p>Now, I am listening to music through cmus as I am writing this blog post for you, and I have to say it's generally a great music player. It's light, fast, Vim-like and fairly polished and clean. Unlike the mocp I was using earlier, it has a UI more like.. you know, a music player than a file manager which is one of the reasons why I much, <em>much</em> prefer cmus. So why does this need change then?</p>
<h3>cmus is not built for window managers</h3>
<p>Yeah, I said it. One of the problems with cmus is how difficult it is to manage it through the command-line. There is cmus-remote, however even with this you often have to use lots of slow awk commands to get the format you want.</p>
<p>I plan on solving this by adding window manager/status friendly syntax which allows the user to specify a format, no slow awks or seds in your status script.</p>
<h3>Lack of extensibility</h3>
<p>None of the music players/mpd frontends I've looked at are extensible enough for my taste. I want to be able to make it extremely minimal or command-line Spotify without any delay or external programs.</p>
<p>It doesn't help that cmus and a lot of other music players don't seem to be maintained very much. Most of them seem to be written for TTY users, and don't have a lot of fancy features. This is not great when you want a light (but feature rich) music experience.</p>
<p>I plan to solve this by keeping the base small and clean, as well as a very well documented codebase unlike suckless software. While I for the most part like their philosophy, I am not a fan of how they refuse to add any meaningful comments to their code.</p>
<h3>Cool planned features</h3>
<p>None of these have been implemented yet but I might end up implementing them. Some as modules, some built into it.</p>
<ul>
<li>Vim-like default keybinds but of course ones that can be changed. Extensibility is one of my goals for this project and is one problem I have with cmus and the countless other players.</li>
<li>FLAC support. This is an absolute must and I will not release it before FLACs play perfectly. I am a sucker for lossless music and those mp3s can go back to history.</li>
<li>Cover art previews. This is not an absolute must, but it would be really nice to have sixel/ueberzug/w3m previews for this player.</li>
<li>Different approach. Instead of using patches like I do for most of my software, I plan on providing a simple base with a plugin system. If I end up writing it in POSIX shell, I could simply <code>.</code> plugins in the config file. This would be easy to configure and very customizable.</li>
<li>macOS and BSD compatibility. I want support for many operating systems, and a mpd frontend has no reason not to work on macOS and BSD. That said, I may need some help implementing macOS stuff, please contact me if you're willing to help and test it for me.</li>
<li>Usage of ncurses?</li>
<li>Maybe this could've been mentioned earlier, but I want wide image support. I won't implement stuff like Kitty image previews, but feel free to PR for it :)</li>
<li>External piping. This could for example allow anything to be piped into programs like fzf, dmenu or rofi.</li>
<li>Playlists. Simple as, I suppose.</li>
<li>Auto downloading metadata using something like Musicbrainz.</li>
<li>Few dependencies. This is not a requirement because the target userbase is window manager users like myself, not TTY minimalist LFS users, but it would be nice to save Gentoo users like myself some compile times.</li>
<li>Perhaps ability to download a music video or something similar. This is really just for show and probably wouldn't be very useful in practice so I don't think this will happen.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Ideas</h3>
<p>If you have any ideas for this project, please consider emailing me it. I want to make this project as good as it can be.</p>
<h3>Naming?</h3>
<p>I have no idea what to name this mpd frontend, if you have any suggestions feel free to send me a suggestion.</p>
<h3>End.</h3>
<p>Going to end the blog post here as I've already rambled on and on about how music players suck and what I want it to do. Thank you for reading and have a great rest of your day!</p>]]>
<![CDATA[<p>2023 is basically here and that means 2022 is over. Happy new year to everyone who follows my blog. March is going to mark 1 year since the first blog post, but there's still a good while until we reach that milestone.</p>
<p>Anyhow, I was planning on making a long blog post about 2022 and how.. mixed it was but because I had too much fun, I did not have time to finish it. I didn't really like what I had written anyway so for this year, a small blog post like this one will have to do. What a shame?</p>
<p>Nothing is really going to change as 2023 comes around. Blog posts are still going to come occasionally like normal. Either way, since I bothered to make this blog post, I might as well talk about some things that don't really deserve their own blog posts.</p>
<p>First of all, mph (the music player project I announced last blog post) is still alive, I did not cancel it like a lot of my other projects. While I had to stop working on it for a bit because I ran out of time and had to fix some critical bugs in other projects, I have implemented a basic plugin system for it now and I'm in the process of implementing basic playback.</p>
<p>Secondly, another project of mine, fontctrl got a 1.2 release recently. The release adds support for batch font installation, and can now also take stdin which is probably useful. I highly recommend you try out fontctrl if you're a user of a minimal GNU/Linux system that does not have a GUI font manager already.</p>
<p>I have also been making a few (small) changes to speedwm, mostly keybind related. There's now inset support, and it has been updated to the latest suckless commit. Documentation has also been updated and there's now a KeyPress/KeyRelease option which should fix various bugs. Finally rounded corners have been removed because they were buggy and ultimately don't look that good so I removed them. Users who want rounded corners can use picom instead which does rounded corners better than speedwm ever did. Plus it also allows rounded corners for the bar which speedwm never did.</p>
<p>speedwm-extras (separate project) was also updated slightly, specifically audioctrl and btctrl, which now work much better.</p>
<p>As for the final update, the donate page now has a Vultr referral link, which if you use it will give me $10 in credit or about 1 month of free server uptime. Feel free to use that if you want to support me and get yourself a VPS.</p>
<p>Either way, that's it for this blog post, and next blog post (in the next year) will be post number 40! Happy new year everyone, and have a good day!</p>]]>
<![CDATA[<p>So.. because I keep getting questions about Project 081, even though I don't really work on it much anymore, I thought I'd make this blog post as an update on it as well as why it's taking so damn long. Also if this blog post comes across as negative, I'm sorry, it's 5 AM and I'm tired. Suck it up.</p>
<p>I will be honest here, I hate working on Project 081, and this is not because I think the project is bad, or even because its ABSOLUTELY PROPRIETARY (hopefully one day we get the source code for Tiger). It's because it's a massive pain to test it or even to create a basic image. As I mentioned in the issue on the GitHub repository, testing the project has been a challenge for multiple reasons. Here are just a few:</p>
<ul>
<li>Different hardware.</li>
<p>In order to even test this project, you <strong>need</strong> a real Mac compatible with it. Now, we know what machines are compatible to some extent and we know what hardware those machines have but attempting to emulate that hardware is a massive pain and basically impossible.</p>
<p>That leaves owning the actual hardware, of course. Now, while I'm sure others are willing to test for me, even having to fix a syntax error in a Bash postinstall script or something would need the image to be updated. This means the user testing needs to download it, write it to a USB, test it, tell me what happened, and very likely repeat it over and over again. This sucks!</p>
<li>Creating the image.</li>
<p>Confession time here, the image used to be created on Windows which had no way to automate it whatsoever. This meant making all of it from scratch which would take ages.</p>
<p>Even on GNU/Linux, mounting macOS disk images is a bit of a pain, but there it can at least be automated using a shell script. This would also be convenient because.. it's my operating system of choice.</p>
<p>Making the image on macOS would be ideal, because we can still write shell scripts there and the operating system supports mounting it natively. However this means macOS is <strong>required</strong> to even create a basic image, which sucks because I no longer actually use it as my operating system of choice. The best option, but still sucks.</p>
<li>Works on X, broken on Y.</li>
<p>This is the number one issue with Project 081 right now. If you've seen the <ahref="https://github.com/p081/Project081">GitHub repository</a> for Project 081 and actually read the README or Issues, you'll without a doubt know that Project 081 doesn't even work on the MacBookPro4,1. This has been a known issue for a long time and a great example of this problem.</p>
<p>Now, Project 081 0.6 will partially fix this by only installing what your system needs based on the output of sysctl hw.model but still, this sucks too.</p>
</ul>
<p>That's not to say Project 081 0.6 is cancelled. I did say work on Project 081 ended on my page a while ago but that notice was removed after I realized that fixing this problem was fairly trivial. People have been asking me about the state of Project 081 though so clearly there is some demand for a new version.</p>
<p>For now, there's an open <ahref="https://github.com/p081/Project081/issues/6">progress tracker for Project 081 0.6</a> which spawned out of <ahref="https://github.com/p081/Project081/issues/4">this issue regarding blue screen.</a> The goal is to eventually fix this issue and get a proper version out but before that can happen, I need to get a script or something working so that this massive waste of time can be automated. That would only leave testing, which takes a bit part of the pain away.</p>
<p>Well then, to end this blog post off, I would like to mention how I'm very surprised that Project 081 is still (somewhat) in demand. Especially since it has not been actively worked on for over 2 years now. Yeah, insane I know. Time flies when you're.. ..not having fun.</p>
<p>If you have any more issues on any hardware, consider making an issue on the p081/Project081 repository as I do not want to have to make yet another release after this if I can avoid it. Thank you for reading this and have a good day!</p>]]>
<pubDate>Sun, 15 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
<description>
<![CDATA[<p>Now, unless you're some big channel that uploads every day or something like that, you've no doubt experienced the absolute pain that is YouTube refusing to promote your videos.</p>
<p>Even if you're someone like me who doesn't really care that much about getting views or something and just casually uses the platform once a month or something to post stuff occasionally, you've no doubt noticed that if you upload videos in a short timeframe, no matter what it's about, it's almost guaranteed to get more views than anything you just post and forget about.</p>
<p>This is just a theory but I suspect Google and YouTube wants you to constantly push out new videos every day, even if it's total crap not worth 30 seconds of your time. As you know, I tend to only upload videos once a month or less, and that's for multiple reasons.</p>
<p>Firstly, I don't have time to push out content daily about the new cool dwm patch or whatever. Not only is it not very useful for the viewer and basically acts as filler, but it's a waste of time for me as well. Secondly, YOU don't have time to watch this filler garbage content that only exists to make YouTube push your content to people's feed.</p>
<p>I think a good example of this is if you look at my Forwarder Factory channel, which is now completely dead because I have zero plans to upload anythng to it, but anyways all of the old videos were successful and got plenty of views, despite the content of the videos being mostly crap.</p>
<p>I then of course stopped uploading to it for reasons I don't need to specify and 4 months later I broke the silence a nd posted something to it. Got 487 views which is absolutely nothing in comparison to what the earlier videos got. YouTube likely refused to promote this video because I hadn't been posting consistently up until that point.</p>
<p>Of course, this isn't always the case and we don't exactly know how the YouTube algorithm works because of course it is not free as in freedom software. Some topics combined with good timing are basically view magnets. My Windows 11 sounds video got over 100,000 views just because at that time Windows 11 had just leaked and almost no one had covered the topic yet.</p>
<pubDate>Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
<description>
<![CDATA[<p>So, I am considering installing BSD on my computer, specifically FreeBSD. Or maybe we should call it FreeBaSeD, whatever.</p>
<p>Now as you guys know I of course use Gentoo GNU/Linux as my desktop operating system. It's definitely my favorite distribution because it doesn't seem to have all the flaws other distros like Arch have. I haven't had many issues with Gentoo, I mean Portage is quite slow because it's written in Python but for the most part it has been really reliable and I am typing this post from Gentoo. However most other distros don't seem to be very reliable, not to mention some "recent" events are really encouraging me to switch over to a different operating system.</p>
<p>Either way does this mean I'm going to switch from Gentoo to FreeBSD? Does this mean I'm no longer a Gentoo user? No, it does not, no. But why do I want to use BSD and not GNU/Linux? It's because recently the normies have taken over GNU/Linux and written mandatory garbage for it. One recent example is how Rust (the programming language) is now part of the Linux kernel. While it isn't mandatory yet, drivers and other basic stuff is probably going to be rewritten in it soon, just because the Rust programmers who have no business in the kernel development space can't even write a single line of C. There's now also other stupid software like systemd, Flatpak, Wayland and all this software that takes everything we like about GNU/Linux and throws it in the trash.</p>
<p>BSD has some of this stupid software, such as Wayland for example, but for the most part BSD seems pretty clean of the years of trash piled on top of GNU/Linux. I know I've rambled on about how GNU/Linux sucks and I haven't even made this blog post worthwhile, so for real though, why FreeBSD? Well simply, FreeBSD seems to be more like what GNU/Linux was.. you know, 15 years ago before the normies discovered it and ruined it for all of us (yes, even them). It seems to follow the UNIX philosophy much closer than GNU/Linux does these days. I should also add, the BSD community doesn't seem as horrible as the GNU/Linux community, which is of course a plus for various reasons. This may be because normies haven't found it yet, or maybe its users just want a functioning computer. Regardless, it seems like a much better place for someone like me.</p>
<p>Either way, this was just a short blog post on why I don't <em>really</em> like GNU/Linux, and why I may consider switching to a system with the BSD kernel. I have another one coming up very soon, as despite not being forced to make blog posts, I still want to put something up so you don't think I'm dead or something. Either way, if you have some experience with BSD, feel free to let me know if there are any huge problems with it but because I use for the most part (Still have the Intel Spyware Engine™️ sadly) free software, software support is not really a huge problem for me.</p>
<p>I feel like this post is slowly becoming filler so yeah, might as well end it.</p>]]>
<pubDate>Thu, 26 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
<description>
<![CDATA[<p>This is just a brief blog post regarding some new somewhat important news for this website! speedie.gq has received a wiki, which anyone may edit. No, this is not some bloated wiki solution, it's done using purely PHP and CSS, and articles are written in Markdown! This is great, because speedwm documentation is already written in Markdown and has been for a while. Not only that, but speedwm has it's own separate wiki, because a lot of information is speedwm related.</p>
<p>Now, I want to get speedwm 1.9 out soon, especially since it has been two full months since the last release and over 100 commits since then, but I want to move some documentation over to the speedwm specific wiki first, as I think the man page is growing very, <strong>very</strong> big. That is not great, not to mention any documentation in a tarball cannot be updated as the release has already happened. Not ideal, is it?</p>
<p>Also, a speedwm wiki was pretty much necessary at this point. While you <em>can</em> pull request to the speediegq repository on Codeberg, there's a lot of delay and work involved in that, when all you want to do is say, fix a simple typo or something like that. However not only can you edit existing articles written by me, but you can also create new articles if you feel like something is missing. While this is speedwm documentation, a lot of it also applies to dwm, so if you're into hacking on dwm you might want to check out the wiki!</p>
<p>As for the more general wiki, it's far, FAR from complete so far. In fact there is only one article. But I plan on slowly expanding it as time goes on. With that said, you may be wondering what wiki solution I went with. Did I write my own? What wiki solutions are there that aren't absolutely massive and terrible?</p>
<p>Of course, <ahref="https://github.com/panicsteve/w2wiki">w2wiki</a>. w2wiki is written purely in PHP and CSS, and articles are written in Markdown as stated previously. I have to say I really like w2wiki and I have no plans to use something different. I will say, I don't really like the default CSS, however we're not soydevs here, so I changed that to fit the theme and minimalism of the regular speedie.gq website.</p>
<p>Anyways, that's just a small post for today, I have two more suckless related posts coming up relatively soon, but after that I hope to write some more classic blog posts. I have been relatively busy with real life of course, so I haven't had time to write anything proper, although I have a relatively good amount of ideas.</p>
<p>That's it for today, thank you for reading, check out the <ahref="https://speedie.gq/wiki">general wiki</a>, as well as the <ahref="https://speedie.gq/projects/speedwm">speedwm wiki</a> and have a nice day!</p>]]>
