www.rollc.at :: Hello, world

You were the Chosen One! It was said that you would bring balance to the browsers, not leave them in darkness!

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I like smart home stuff - in moderation. Some things end up too smart for my liking. So I got rid of my Homepods and got me a pair of KRK Classic 5s. These studio monitors sound great, and are fantastic value for their price, but have one annoying feature: the built-in circuitry that shuts them down when there’s no audio playing. It makes sense in a studio context, but sometimes I just like to listen to music quietly, and the shutdown threshold is just a little bit too low.

Some people have physically modded their speakers to permanently disable that feature, but I’d prefer to keep my warranty for now, and I actually do like auto-shutdown - just on my own terms.

Nothing reinforces one’s claim to a hacker badge than solving hardware problems in software (or vice versa). I wanted something like macOS’s caffeinate(1) command, except for audio.

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So I’ve participated in OCC v4 with my TiBook. Just like last time, I have some conclusions.

Conclusion (n.) - when you’re done thinking.

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To continue with our tradition of hand-me-down Macs, dkbox gifted me his ancient PowerBook3,5 (aka TiBook), which I’m now considering using as my main machine for the upcoming Old Computer Challenge v4 (update: conclusion).

The machine has pretty decent specs (for 2002): a 32-bit, single-core PowerPC CPU clocked at 867Mhz; 512MB of RAM; 40GB of spinning rust; a USB2.0 expansion card; and even digital video output via DVI! Most of that can also be upgraded/expanded.

This post is a bit of a free-form documentation of the machine’s quirks, a TODO list / what-if of a sorts, but also an appreciation of the era’s hardware, software, and design/aesthetics. I might update it at some point to reflect any fixes/upgrades I’ve done to keep it alive.

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Making up your own house rules can be a really fun part of playing board games. It lets you wear the shoes of a game designer - not just play the game, but also play with the game.

Sometimes changing the rules makes for some really spicy games, as even a trivial tweak can have a ripple effect and unexpected consequences. But we’re here to learn and to have fun - so let’s play, shall we?

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This is a reflection on PG’s famous essay, “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule”. The fact I’m writing this while in the middle of producing a live stream is only a tiny bit ironic.

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I use getopt almost exclusively in all software that I write by myself, and often insist on using it when collaborating with others, even when the language convention is to use something else.

The reason is simple: getopt is a part of the user interface, and user interfaces should strive to be simple and consistent. As an end user, I find it jarring when, for example, I have to run a script by specifying the interpreter by hand, or when the language-specific extension is a part of the file name. This is an implementation detail which should not concern me - the #! should take care of that for me. Similarly, getopt is over 40 years old, is supported nearly universally, and is easy to understand both for the user and the programmer.

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