Happy new year! Since I haven’t been posted in a while, here’s what I’ve been up to lately:

• adopted Wezterm as my terminal emulator, contributing a bunch of (mostly Wayland-related) patches in process
• figured out a minimal tool to make Xiaomi power strips work without the “cloud”
• saw a SIMD-accelerated tac line-reversing utility and immediately ported it to arm64 NEON/AdvSIMD
• helped out with firmware and EC (just testing with the latter) patches for the Thinkpad L430/L530
• developed a FreeBSD driver for the SPI keyboard/touchpad attachment in Apple MacBooks (currently only in my fork and only tested on the 2015 MBP, spibus-side prerequisites are in review)
  • related: got the Magic Trackpad 2 (which uses a compact packet format but similar surroundings to bcm5974) working too
• started learning PCB design with Horizon EDA
  • which has of course resulted in making some new tools for it
• found bugs in the mold linker and zlib-ng
• made new Wayfire plugins: wf-globalgestures, wf-dynspaces, wf-touchpad-gesture-drag (yeah, turns out 3-finger drag is easy with current libinput: it’s a hold-cancel-swipe sequence!)
• finally made a freebsd-embedded-hal Rust crate
• just now added dark mode to micro-panel where I’m writing this

Unusually, I do have a legit new year’s resolution this time: I should blog more! Want to publish some long-form things here.

Apple just announced a new image codec that's based on HEVC but it's not named BPG?! New proprietary thing? No, an ISO standard apparently, created by MPEG.

It's sad that Apple likes MPEG though. I wish they didn't hate Google and just adopted WebP.

WWDC is all weed jokes now, nice :D

Apple’s new iPhone 7 video is dark and weird and I have to say I like this aesthetic.

TIL there were watercooled Macs. Actual Apple Macs. From Apple.

I’m surprised they offered 256GB storage instead of a Lightning→USB-C→USB-A→SATA adapter

“Uses your iOS device’s… clock”

much innovation, very sensors

“iPhone SE”? That name reminds me of Windows 98 SE.

Apparently, in the US, you’re required to register your software if it uses any encryption, with some weird exceptions. Oh, and Google Play still wants your home address if you want to sell apps for money.

This is terrible. Developers must always be able to publish software without exposing any personal information and without dealing with any governments.

OS X El Capitan has a LOT of high-CPU-usage bugs! The last one I’ve experienced is the firewall checking Xcode’s signature for no reason. Before that, notifyd 100% CPU caused by tmux.

Feels like OS X is turning into Windows.

Apple doesn’t allow content blockers on 32-bit devices “for performance reasons.” How is string matching slower on a 32-bit CPU? It’s the ads that result in worse performance! That’s not “performance reasons” – that’s “buy our new hardware” reasons.

Which isn’t too bad though… It’s a reasonable way to push new devices to customers – they get the latest version of iOS with security patches (and old features still working) – just not the new shiny features. Want new features? Get a new device.

xhyve supports FreeBSD now! Converted my VirtualBox machine to a raw disk image using VBoxManage clonehd, started it in xhyve. (Had to Esc to the prompt, unload and disable-module vesa to prevent the “module vesa not found” error.)

Works great! Rebuilt the whole system (clean buildworld installworld buildkernel installkernel) in 32.783 minutes. VNC is a bit slower than VirtualBox’s display emulation, but that’s fine.

iTunes 2014: you can’t delete the U2 album they’ve added from your library.

iTunes 2015: you can’t unfollow U2 on Connect. (Well, you can, but their posts don’t disappear from the timeline, even after refreshing it a hundred times.)