Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 17, 2023

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• Technology and Free Software

  • PineTime Six Months Later

    Figured I'd write a quick update about my PineTime since I still refer people to my older posts about it and there are some things that have changed since then.

    [...]

    At first I was worried that getting phone notifications on my wrist would be a distraction, but over time I've actually noticed that it helps me get distracted by my phone less often. A quick glance at my wrist is all it takes to see if a notification is worth unlocking my phone for. When it isn't, it saves me a phone unlock and the potential to get distracted by something I see on it.

    [...]

    I've been wearing my PineTime every day since I got it over six months ago. It's a really neat gadget that's frankly a steal at the price it's sold at. The fact that it's open source and so easy to tinker on is just a cherry on top.

  • Sympathy for the Copyright Devil

    Someone replied railing against the movement (or “brigade”) of artists opposed to ML art, as if they were the only problem, ignoring both the two problems I had just brought up, so I elaborated and it got a li’l long:

    As a writer and painter, I’ve long been opposed to copyright and have been releasing stuff under Creative Commons licenses for over a decade. So don’t misinterpret me as agreeing with the brigade.

    Livelyhood for artists is important but so is a livelyhood for everyone, and I’ve been arguing against the flawed “copyright is good for artists” position for decades—we’ve been having this exact same fight against copyright since Napster or even the cassette era. Gates’ infamous “Open letter to hobbyists” was in 1976, and that hasn’t changed.

  • Hardware accelerated playback on PineTab 2 (RK3566)

    Want to quickly document how I got my PineTab 2 to play 1080p videos smooth(-ish) with hardware acceleration.

    Enabling hardware acceleration

    With the defaul DanctNIX image, it was quite easy. Simply install `mpv` and ` ffmpeg-v4l2-request-git` from the AUR. Then, pass pass `--hwdec=drm` to `mpv` and you're good to go. This will replace replace the system's `ffmpeg` with your custom build. If you run into ABI issues (random crashes), you can try building MPV from source.

  • Programming

    • Consistent Handling of Git Repositories With Different Default Branches

      Typically, I develop on a feature branch, and when the feature is ready, there is an obvious branch into which I want to merge the branch. This branch is often called `master',`main' or `develop'. During development, I will occasionally rebase my feature branch on top of this branch, to reduce future merge conflicts, and to avoid falling behind on changes merged by other developers. I will call this branch the default branch from here on.

      To make common operations consistent across repositories, I want to use a `git default-branch' command that returns the name of the default branch, so that I can use commands like

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