Technology Posts

Welcome back to another one of these development posts! It's been almost two years since the last one, so there are plenty of changes to talk about. Primoprod is more polished than ever, but a couple of questionable initial design decisions made it harder to work on than before.

Wayland is the shiny next-generation display server protocol that finally lets the Linux desktop move away from the cludgy abomination that is X. Although it was initially released in 2008, it's only recently that it has matured enough to the point that Linux distributions have begun to default to it.

This article is also published in The FOSS Albatross.

Rust is the hot new language on the block (as new as a language from 2006 can be) that boasts reliability and efficiency.

How does it do this? Well, Rust has something that no other language does — it guarantees memory and thread safety while maintaining the same high performance of C or C++, all the while having high level features such as pattern matching and functional programming!

This article is also published in The FOSS Albatross.

More than 60% of all internet traffic is video — YouTube and Netflix are 20% alone! In fact, during COVID, so many people started to watch so much video that that number climbed up to 25%, even as they reduced the quality and size of the videos they served.

This much traffic costs lots of money for internet service providers, who carry on this cost to the streaming service.

And so, media companies, including YouTube and Netflix, have banded together as the Alliance of Open Media (AOM) to develop a video format to reduce the file size of videos: AV1!

This article is also published in The FOSS Albatross.

You're a web developer and you need to make a website. How should you build one? Do you start writing static files right away to be served immediately, or do you start setting up a project environment?

This article is also published in The FOSS Albatross.

Windows is a beloved operating system with absolutely no flaws whatsoever. It is the pinnacle of engineering — sheer perfection in its design.

This article is also published in The FOSS Albatross.

Git today is a beloved technology developers all around the world now use to track the history of a project through revisions. Obviously, it's not magic — if you look at the hidden files in a Git repository, you'll find a .git folder at least as big as the rest of your repo.

This article is also published in The FOSS Albatross.

Click. Milliseconds after you press a link, your screen flashes white. Elements slowly load in as a page full of search results appears in front of your eyes. How does this magic work? How does your computer know exactly what to show you when you press a button on your mouse? Let's go on a journey through your system to see exactly what happens.

This article is also published in The FOSS Albatross.

All FOSS projects must have a license before other people can use them — but which should you choose, and what are the consequences behind each one?

This article is also published in The FOSS Albatross.

Known as an easy-to-use and flexible programming language, Python nevertheless still has plenty of tricks you can use to make your code prettier and faster to write. No matter if you’re new to Python or have years of experience, read more to find a tip for you!

This article is also published in The FOSS Albatross.

It's a given that no matter what you do while browsing the web, Big Tech has their grubby fingers all over your data and tracks every site you visit, selling it to advertisers and other shady actors. Preventing this is almost impossible, short of something like Tor Browser behind a VPN in a virtual machine, which is slow and cumbersome.

This article is also published in The FOSS Albatross.

Do you have a dream? A dream where you call the shots for billions of other people and how they communicate with each other? Well, we've got the guide of the decade for you, taken straight from personal experience. In just four easy steps, you'll be able to corner the tech industry yourself!

This article is also published in The FOSS Albatross.

Ever been linked to a GitHub page to download something and couldn't figure out what to click? This short, simple guide will help you get to wherever you need in 4 easy steps.

This article is also published in The FOSS Albatross.

Throughout the past few decades, video games have evolved from an art medium restricted solely to specialized consoles to one enjoyable on all sorts of platforms, including everyday devices such as PCs and phones, replayable for the years to come.

However, for all of the beloved games that are locked to consoles, what option do you have but to let them die out as discontinued second-hand consoles grow more and more expensive as they break down?

Introducing…emulation!

SPOILERS if you haven't completed it.

Assume all part 1 commands here are run in the home directory. Assume all part 2 commands are run in the part2 directory.

Six months have passed since the first progress report. Since then, a flood of changes have made it in, including hundredth-class Android support!

This report will cover from where the previous left off to the present day: 21 August 2021 - 15 January 2022.

In the computing world, Linux is already extremely widespread — it's near-ubiquitous on servers as well as many appliances such as smart fridges, cars, or even Mars helicopters . If you have an Android phone, you're running Linux already. So why not give it a shot on your computer, too?

The iNet Wireless Daemon (iwd) is a lightweight and stable Wi-Fi manager for Linux systems. However, some configuration is needed for it to work properly on WPA Enterprise (802.1X) networks. For YRDSB:

Welcome to the very first Primoprod progress report! In a similar vein to quite a few open source emulation projects (such as those I follow myself using emufeed), I'll be releasing these tidbits in lieu of daily Unstagnation shorts sometimes.

In this hopefully small series of development notes, I'll be laying out my experiences learning web development as an absolute amateur.

This report will cover the beginnings of the project to the present day: 16 July - 20 August 2021.

Python is a flexible programming language that is well-known for its simplicity and numerous features that make programming in it a lot faster. This article presents just a few that might speed up your productivity a little bit.

There are a variety of services out there that make it easy for anyone to set up their own "cloud". From Google Drive for storage to Medium for blogs, there are unlimited options in putting content out there. So aside as a learning experience, why would you take on the burden of running a server on your own machine?