I wonder what modern(ish) CSS features can be relied on to actually work in ebook readers. For example, can you use flexbox to build page layouts that are responsive to screen and font size?

Kobo has two renderers, one based on QtWebKit 5.2, the other on a (fairly old version of) Adobe RMSDK, both from around 2013-2014. And RMSDK doesn't correctly implement the CSS spec - it throws out the entire stylesheet on a parser error instead of only the declaration which failed to parse.

From that cutoff date, I can *maybe* use flexbox in the Kobo Qt renderer, but if so it would only work with the "-webkit-" prefixed properties, and those would break the styling in RMSDK.

The document "Humidex : a method of quantifying human discomfort due to excessive heat and humidity / by J.M. Masterson and F.A. Richardson." (1979) published by Environment Canada is an amazing look at small volume technical typesetting in the late 1970s.

The majority of the report is typewritten. Several data tables generated by computers are printed using dot matrix printers. All of the graphs and graphics are hand-drawn. The maps are photocopied then additional lines are added by hand. The cover and title page, along with labels for the graphs and flowcharts are done by hand with dry-transfer lettering (i.e. Letraset).

Then the final document was assembled using a photocopier.

(this post brought to you by me forgetting to change this to use "zstd -19" instead by editing scripts/Makefile.lib)

Fun fact: If you build a Linux kernel on a 32bit x86 box with "zstd" compression enabled, the build will fail because it tries to compress the kernel with "zstd -22 --ultra", but that set of compression options requires allocating more memory than is addressable by 32bit applications on linux.

Honestly the weirdest thing about the X mess is that if Musk is involved in decision making in the US government, then deleting content he doesn't like off X actually *is* government censorship.

The first time I can remember installing Linux must have been when I was around 10 years old. Installing Debian from floppies on a 386. Needed ~3-4 floppies to start the installer, since the machine didn't support CD-ROM boot.

They helpfully had a menu in the installer so you could tell it what io port and irq the 3com 3c503 card was on. Had to manually set the graphics card memory size for the super vga card and monitor timings for x11 to work.

Imagine you are in the 70's, and you want to build a character cell terminal with japanese kanji support. how even would you do that?

The main goal is of course to use as little RAM as possible, so no full bitmap framebuffer. Traditionally, you'd use 2 bytes per character cell (one byte for the character code, one byte for "attributes" - bright, blink, inverse, etc) for about 4KB of ram to hold a screen of text.

The character set that it would make sense to use… is probably Shift JIS? I'm betting that existing Japanese terminals probably used JIS X 0201, an 8-bit code containing ASCII + "half-width" katakana. Shift JIS extended that to a variable length code with 2 byte codes for kanji from JIS X 0208, and all the two-byte characters would take 2 character cells on the display.

For simplicity, you could require that kanji are aligned to even columns.

After that… you need a rather large ROM to encode the images of some subset of the ~7000 characters in JIS X 0208. As a reference, the MSX series of computers used a 128KB rom for the JIS 1 subset, ~3000 characters at 16x16px. Plus some extra logic or rom for a lookup table, since you can't directly address the rom based on the character code.

Dunno how easy it would be to get that fast enough to handle looking up 40 characters per scanline on the fly. If needed, an extra 80 bytes of ram would be enough to store the rom addresses for a row, calculated during hblank.

Waiting for a FedEx package that was out for delivery 2 days ago.

The first day, their payment system screwed up so the driver couldn't confirm that I had paid the duties/fees.

The second day I got on the phone with customer support to get the payment sorted out, but the driver didn't show up.

And now it's the third day.

Home assistant is not prepared for people to live on Mars.

of all companies, you'd think that *cloudflare* could handle a single data center going down due to a power outage.

Hi folks on tenforward! I'm gonna be moving my home here, hope to have a good time with y'all.

Some things I like - watching Anime (and Star Trek) with my friends - J-Pop, Anison, and Doujin music - vtubers - retro-computing.

Some things I do - software developer - work on BigBlueButton open source video conferencing system - developer/packager for Exherbo Linux distribution - contributor to (and auto-editor on) MusicBrainz.

I live in the capital of Canada, prefer he/him pronouns (or they/them ok too), I'm a "Millennial" who no longer feels young, and I was recently diagnosed with ADHD.

#introduction