Uncategorized – asty.org

Unihertz, it’s Not Too Late to Save the Jelly Max!

Posted on August 19, 2024August 19, 2024 by chrisa

But they MUST embrace LineageOS (IMO), regular updates matter

I can already hear the reviews of the upcoming Jelly Max in YouTube – “….a great phone, probably the best so far from Unihertz, but one you probably shouldn’t buy…”. It drives me crazy to know that’s coming, but it will, if Unihertz continues their track record of not supporting phones with at least security updates – if not entire major Android versions – for 2 or 3 years minimum after release. It doesn’t have to be this way!

The Max has a lot going for it. It’s a reasonable size, which gets you fans right out of the gate – first a perfect screen size at 5″. Everyone else is …

Maniac is a nearly perfect game for just $5

Posted on August 9, 2024September 10, 2024 by chrisa

If you don’t mind excessive violence and a few input glitches, this game is an absolute gem

Maniac by Transhuman Design immediately reminded me of a conversation with my friend Murray about the GTAIII-era games back in the early aughts. He described one of the GTA games as his ‘favorite murder simulator’. Seeing how violent many games have gotten in the last few decades, Maniac may not actually stand out all that much of its level of blood ‘n guts, especially with its top-down perspective and cartoony graphics. What does stand out is how much fun it is, even with in the first minute of firing it up.

[Minor spoilers for post-game unlocks below]

Premise

The premise …

A new version of CMatrix? On my blog?

Posted on May 7, 2024May 7, 2024 by chrisa

It’s more likely than you think.

So as I said, I would push more updates. Since I have been re-homing my skills, I decided to tear apart the old CMatrix code and remove a lot of crufty stuff, including the need for all the ancillary fonts / utilities to see the symbols and the rather ugly default of standard Roman/English alphabet characters. I also added a pre-calculation option (-p) to see if it can improve performance on older or lower-end systems.

In order to accomplish this streamlining, this version does require ncursesw, AKA ncurses with wide-character support, in order to work. Given how long this has been around, I hope it won’t be too onerous of a requirement.

NB: This …

OK, I’ll update more frequently…

Posted on May 3, 2024May 3, 2024 by chrisa

I’ve been a bit of a perfectionist with my posts, to the effect of not ever posting anything it seems. I’ll do a bit better here and may post a few post fragments occasionally. I’ll just post to Mastodon/Twitter the larger ones. This is a blog after all!

Interesting reading I did recently: Installing Nix in a Qubes AppVM. Qubes and Nix together, it’s like chocolate and peanut butter – so perfect!

For those that haven’t given Nix a try, you don’t have to run the actual distribution (NixOS), it actually runs on almost every Linux distribution and each user can have their own setup. It’s quite incredible. Here is some intro documentation on Nix to whet your palate. …

Hello again

Posted on February 9, 2024February 9, 2024 by chrisa

Hello. Just a quick note that I’m going to try and push out some reviews/articles this weekend/next week.

Unfortunately I finally was bitten by the COVID bug as of Saturday, so it’s been a slow recovery. Even today 6 days later I still don’t feel the best.

Personal updates: no longer with Google. Made it almost 13 years. Trying to focus on the positive and how good things were for so long, and not how bad the end was. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn if you are a former colleague. …

I’m (Back) on Mastodon

Posted on April 12, 2023April 12, 2023 by chrisa

I have actually switched some time ago, but it’s a good time to point to my Mastodon Profile where I still (occasionally) post useful or interesting things. I had an instance in the past, but general fatigue of Social Networks made it stick this time, and I’m quite happy with the result. Mastodon feels like what the web felt like before 2000. Regular people putting out information they find interesting, and no corporate manipulation or obsessive monetization where ‘you are the product’.

Ironically though, what Mastodon really needs are people who are constantly publishing new content, whereas I generally use Social Media as consuming information.

Why is Mastodon great? Well it is a Federated space and comes with all the …