Watched the black and white re-edit by the director bluray of 90's Cyberpunk film Johnny Mnemonic. The film is still kind of a mess plotwise and falls into a lot of the traps of cyberpunk of the era (the yakuza especially) but holy shit does director Robert Longo's cinematography look incredible in black and white. I can believe he originally shot it intending that... even if there was absolutely no way the studio would have released it that way.

seriously it's German expressionist as hell

Also the I WANT ROOM SERVICE scene rules. What a way to communicate what a dick Johnny is.

#film #cyberpunk #johnnymnemonic

https://www.spurint.org/journal/2026/07/llms-and-xfwl4

So yes, I use Claude quite a bit while developing xfwl4.

welp, of all the products to have a developer embrace slop this is one directly aimed at my heart *sigh*

Literally used XFCE for twenty years at this point as my desktop environment...

Unfortunately, GE Proton, the popular third party Proton fork for playing Windows games on Steam has gotten into AI coding. >_>

Yes, I used AI for this work. No, it likely unfortunately will not be able to be upstreamed because CodeWeavers policy does not accept AI generated code.

*sigh* Valve's probably in on "AI" too for upstream Proton, but looks like it's time to find a different WINE fork that works for FF XIV and PSO through FFXIV Launcher and Lutris respectively...

Good to hear that upstream WINE refuses LLM contributions, though.

#Wine #Proton #AISlop

for all that hot crambo news, I guess :ac_bewilderment:

love how amateurish the ads in early PC Magazine are as they try to compete with the flood of multi-function cards littering the magazine and stand out (March 1984 issue)

#retrocomputing #PCMagazine #TheCRAMBO

Got a new avatar commissioned from Sam's Studio! :)

It turns out the solution to get Windows 98 SE to work with my 3COM graphics card was to not use the driver downloadable online but instead use the one off the Windows CD. The same also got me a better WDM sound card driver. It's kind of hilarious that vendor drivers are shit even on Windows 9X. XD

(This is also why I stopped using the popular Windows 98 Quickinstall CD: it installs a massive database of drivers with the OS, and giving Windows more choices seems to result in it choosing wrong. Better to manually handle them as they come up.)

#retrocomputing

trying to imagine being excited for the original IBM 5150 and failing

It's a machine mostly notable for how restrictive and limited parts of it are and historical value, but like, at the time it must have been boring. I cannot imagine getting jazzed for four color CGA graphics even at the time.

The first issue of PC Magazine from February 1982 has an article in it for nostalgia for the Altair 8800 from 1974.

Retrocomputing is relative, huh?

#retrocomputing

It also stutters like crazy under NT 4 trying to play back the opening FMV to Diablo, something that goes off without a hitch on 98 SE.

...maybe the S3 Virge graphics drivers for NT 4 have issues?

The depressing thing about Windows NT 4.0 is you install it and it feels incredibly snappy compared to Windows 98 SE on the exact same Pentium MMX 233 MHz machine... and then as soon as you install Internet Explorer 4 to make it compatible with later software depending on the DLLs from that the performance immediately goes to shit with visible redraws in Windows Explorer which don't happen under 98 SE. RIP.

also god the IE integration into the shell for rendering the UI was such a bad idea, Electron 20 years before its time (derogatory)

#WindowsNT #retrocomputing

Holy shit the Windows NT 4.0 startup and shutdown sound effects rule.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx0_pOqLnZI

#retrocomputing

Microsoft's deciding to pull Windows 11 part 2, possibly: https://tech4gamers.com/windows-12-reportedly-relasing-2026-modular-ai-focused-os/

Windows 12 could be released as early as this year...
Unfortunately, these are the only bright sides to this new OS. Microsoft’s Copilot, the AI assistant the company has been aggressively injecting across the ecosystem, will now be a core part of the next Windows iteration rather than a supplementary feature.
Some parts of the OS might also be locked away behind a subscription model that are expected to be “advanced AI services”, etc.
These AI features won’t come cheaply, with Windows 12 set to debut a new hardware requirement just as its predecessor did with the TPM 2.0 requirement. This time around, a dedicated NPU would be required, a specialized processor designed to handle AI tasks.

great, more avoidable e-waste for no reason other than juicing Microslop stock and computer sales

#Microsoft #Windows #Microslop #Windows12 #Copilot #FuckThis

https://universeodon.com/@memeorandum/116137883346850920

In which Dr. Onizuka in Shin Kamen Rider - Prologue (no, not the Anno movie, the other Shin Kamen Rider) reminds us of grasshopper telepathy and their true nation that will overthrow God. :ac_laughter:

#KamenRider #ShinKamenRiderPrologue #tokusatsu

Going to be honest: the experience of using Debian Unstable is like using Arch Linux with less quality control and none of the cool features of Arch.

It's a testing distribution, not an end product, and even as someone who used Arch for nearly two decades before switching to Debian Stable it just... breaks in wild ways and has constant updates to everything.

(The Pocket Reform ships with Unstable and the alternate Debian Stable community image has driver issues with the RK3588's GPU.)

I think I'm going to solve my problem of lack of bluetooth on the Pocket Reform by taking out my NVMe drive (which I'm only using for secondary storage compared to the onboard flash), replace it with an M.2 Slot E wifi card with built-in bluetooth on a M.2 Slot E to Slot M adapter (which works because E has less PCI-E lanes than M and is shorter), then replace the Mini PCI-E wifi card with a Mini PCI-E to microSD adapter. Absolutely reasonable solution. :ac_laughter:

Should hopefully get me a wifi speed boost too if all the janky adapters work out. 🤞

Weirdly, as far as I can tell, nobody has ever made a USB C Bluetooth dongle. There are Bluetooth audio dongles for USB C that connect to headsets on their own and present as USB headsets to the computer (meant for PS5?), but no actual USB C Bluetooth dongles.

I guess the presumption is that anything new enough to have USB C will have built-in Bluetooth.

Means I currently have a USB A Bluetooth dongle plugged into a USB A to C adapter in the side of my MNT Pocket Reform, which sticks out a bit too far.

(If I'm wrong on this, please let me know.)

Getting app ids for Wayland apps under Wayfire: use wl-info. This must be installed in the default folders for the application in /usr/bin because it has to drop a file into the Wayfire folder to get permissions by then adding the wf-info plugin to wayfire.ini after it's installed.

this is reminding me of the early days of PulseAudio (derogatory)

Side note for swaylock: adding the line color=000000 to ~/.swaylock/config changes the background color from white to black so it doesn't flashbang you if you have the same issues with bright lights onscreen as I do.