Software Engineer, Linux Enthusiast, OpenRGB Developer, and Gamer

Lemmy.today Profile: https://lemmy.today/u/CalcProgrammer1

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2021

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  • I’m not sure about FF specifically, but 99% of the time you’re connecting a microcontroller to a PC you’re doing so over a serial port (UART) of some sort. It may be a physical COM port or it may be a USB to serial adapter or even a purely virtual serial port over a USB connection, but the methodology is all the same. Unless you are running a serial terminal on that port (as in, a commandline on your PC served on the given /dev/ttyX interface, not a terminal emulator letting you read/write from the port), the microcontroller can’t just run scripts on the PC. Instead, you will want to write a script/program that opens the port and waits for a command to be sent from the microcontroller, then that listener script can execute whatever functionality you require. Note that only one application can have the port active at a time, so if your listener is a separate program from your event handler, you will have to close the port on the listener before running the handler, then reopen the port on the listener once the handler is done so it can start listening for the next event. Better to just make it all one program that is always running on the PC and does both listening for events and handling them so there’s only one program that needs access to the serial port.




  • Installing postmarketOS on it to turn it into a full fledged pocket PC. It now runs all your favorite Linux-compatible desktop applications except for those that don’t have ARM64 versions, and even then emulation layers can fix this. It’s not 100% as I haven’t been able to get Steam working (it starts but errors out before the login screen) though I have seen some people have success on other distros so maybe it’s a pmOS/Alpine/musl specific issue even though I was using distrobox with Debian to actually run it.


  • Honestly, Mozilla has been peddling adware for a long time now. The writing has been on the wall. It started with putting sponsored links to Amazon on the Firefox home screen, then the shitty Pocket acquisition and the stupid featured stories/recommendations garbage, then the full screen Mozilla VPN ads…Firefox has been adware for a while. Use a fork that removes the bullshit. Switch to LibreWolf.


  • I’m not familiar with KDE’s new feature yet, but if it only supports sysfs LEDs then it won’t control 99% of keyboards. Few RGB keyboards have drivers that expose this interface. Most RGB keyboards are controlled from userspace on their official software on Windows, and that’s also what most Linux projects that control RGB devices including my OpenRGB project do. I wonder if it would be possible to write an OpenRGB plugin/script that exposes a virtual /sys/class/leds/openrgb device that KDE could talk to, then translate that into OpenRGB calls to set the color on all available devices. It doesn’t sound too difficult.







  • I find 1080p to be too small these days. For desktop use I like 1440p or 2160p (4K). For video, I don’t notice the difference between 1080 and 4K too much but for productivity it is a massive step up. My laptop is a 14" 1440p screen and I have an older laptop with a 13" 1440p screen. I use both with 100% scaling (no enlargement) and it’s fine. I don’t think it’s hard to see and I love having the extra screen real estate for coding and multitasking. Being able to have 2 windows side by side and still have enough room on each for a decent length line of code is great. For my desktop, I used a 28" 4K for a long time and being able to have 4 1080p windows open is amazing. 28" 4K is the same PPI as 14" 1080p, and I am already comfortable with 14" 1440p so from a reasonable distance it’s no problem. I went to a 27" 1440p for a while on my desktop after that because I upgraded to a 144Hz VRR display, but just last fall I again upgraded to a 32" 4K 144Hz VRR and it’s great. No problem with reading text at 100% scaling from a normal distance and it’s amazing for games. I do notice games being clearer at 4K but I mainly got the 4K monitor for productivity as I missed it and now that 144Hz 4K was available I wanted it back.