sudofox's journal

Austin Burk's journal, where I share little snippets of my writing, code, and dreams.

I feel really tired out and I'm also stressed about writing things

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Today I fixed the trim on the side of the family cottage and power-washed the siding and steps. I'm really tired out from it. Using a power washer will make your entire upper body sore if you're not used to it.

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I was also recruited to fix the audiovisual equipment at the Children's Center. I was repeatedly told that I'm a super genius or something like that. There were two issues: the projector had the cable plugged into VGA output instead of VGA input, and the mic at the back was plugged into a Line-In port which are not powered. I'm bringing some cables and cable ties from home tomorrow to help organize it a bit.

I think I'm facing burnout right now. I've been working non-stop on many different things and I'm stressed out about finances and other things. I also want to enter the Hatena 20th anniversary writing contest, but I'm worried about being able to do a good job writing.

I do not give up easily. I've always prevailed so far, though mostly because of people I know who help me keep my head up. For them I'm eternally thankful. ♡

Got a set of shelves, trying to push better XInput 2 pressure support for browsers on Linux

Shelves

My mom got me some shelves as a gift. We assembled them together :)

 

https://cdn-ak.f.st-hatena.com/images/fotolife/a/austinburk/20210714/20210714195922.jpg

https://cdn-ak.f.st-hatena.com/images/fotolife/a/austinburk/20210714/20210714223123.jpg

There are two units, totalling eight cubes.

Trying to get better native XInput 2 support for tablet pressure

I've started working on figuring out why browsers on Linux don't yet take tablet pressure into account for input events. I was previously trying to develop a USB driver using the WebUSB API, and then tried the WebHID API, but for some reason (even with what I thought were correct udev rules) it just refused to actually open the device to read data in. I think it's an anti-keylogging measure.

For Firefox, there is a not very well-known workaround to get pressure data in regular PointerEvents: launch the browser with the environment variable:

MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 firefox

However, it's not done by default.

I asked about it on Twitter and started discussing it with the maintainer of the linuxwacom driver.

 The thread goes into discussion about previous concerns and also contains links to relevant Bugzilla cards. I've commented on the Chromium card about lacking pressure data, but not on the Bugzilla ones. Hopefully there's something I can do to get the ball rolling on natively supporting this by default in the browsers -- that way, more people can use Sudo Haiku's painting tool.

Hijinx with the WebUSB and WebHID APIs

Trying to get pressure data in the browser on Linux

I've been working on trying to implement a driver for Wacom tablets using the WebUSB API, but it seems like HID devices are blacklisted. So I tried using the WebHID API but it seems like devices that can provide mouse/keyboard input are also blacklisted. So I'm trying to figure something else out to get tablet pressure data into the browser.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1134866#c10

It seems like it works fine on Windows but I primarily use Linux so it's difficult to test pressure sensitivity. :(

Job

I've been thinking lately that it would be nice to find a better-paying job. There's a lot of pretty big upcoming expenses and I'm running low on funds so I'm getting stressed out about it.

A lot of the job listings I find seem to be very Java oriented. Java...I can do it, but it's not my thing. Perl is my thing. PHP is my thing. JavaScript and Python? Of course! But besides a few Minecraft mods and Spigot plugins that I've written, I'm not super great at it.

My dream job is to get to do work for Hatena. I would like to maintain and improve Hatena's legacy systems. I know them outside and in (in that order). I've been working on updating my personal Hatena API documentation *1 recently, actually... It seems like it's fallen a little out of date.

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 f:id:austinburk:20210714100532p:plain

 

That's all for now!

*1:For what it's worth, there's a lot of things I only have a very tiny bit of information on, even just that something exists and nothing more

One month of Sudo Haiku: in retrospect

One month later...

(Copied and pasted from this entry)

It's been almost one month since Sudo Haiku opened! Hurray!!! 🎉

👥 Since June 13th, new users (289 total):

📝 Since June 13th, posted entries (7,713 total):

Other statistics
🖼️ 2,344 uploaded images
🏷️ 412 keywords
💡 Please make sure to invite the people that you remember from Hatena Haiku. Not everyone was closely-connected on SNS like Twitter or online at the time.

🎵🎶 Let's all Haiku together 🎵🎶

Code

I worked on this stuff between the previous update and when I went to bed early into the morning. Whew...

Paint Tool
- Flood fill tool has been vastly improved
- No longer fills multiple times if stroked instead of clicked
- No longer wipes out content inside of the fill area's border
- More efficient, should not slow down re-render as much
- Added another layer
- Started work on redoing the entire layer system as I found a better way to do it
- Performance updates
- Decoupled canvas updates from user inputs to improve performance
Hot Keywords
- Hot Keywords now only uses 2 days worth of data instead of 7.
- I hope to improve this, I need to both have enough keywords to fill the list, but also give added weight to keywords popular within a much shorter time span so that "good morning" and "goodnight" show at the top at appropriate times

https://cdn-ak.f.st-hatena.com/images/fotolife/a/austinburk/20210713/20210713071704.gif

Laptop

My laptop isn't doing very well. The keyboard is mostly not working, I had to disconnect the trackpad because the fingerprint reader started smoking and melting, the whole thing slows to a stop when disk usage is around 85%, there's a chip in the polarizer near where my terminal window usually is, the built-in webcam only works 20% of the time, the screen will lose refresh synchronization sometimes when USB devices are plugged in/unplugged or when the power fluctuates during a storm, the fan runs really hot even though I've cleaned it all out, and there's a weird white streak on the screen about 1/3 from the top.

https://cdn-ak.f.st-hatena.com/images/fotolife/a/austinburk/20210711/20210711235114.jpg

Released a big update to the paint tool!

Code

I really should give it a proper name, but I'm not sure what to use. Sudo Oekaki?

h.sudo.ne.jp

Hatena Blog issues

I'm kind of annoyed by the lack of feature parity in Hatena Blog. in the mobile Android app I can't backdate my posts, in the mobile site and mobile app I can't select what kind of link preview/embed I want to use, and half the formatting options are gone on the mobile. Isn't this supposed to be one of Hatena's flagship offerings? I bet I could improve the mobile site/app experience, given the chance.

Maybe I can just write a Hatena Blog client to use instead of the native one...but I feel like that would kind of be like spitting in someone's face. Then again, I've repeatedly offered to fix up the English localization for Blog and gotten turned down. I'd do it for free if only for my own benefit.

Super ready for the weekend

Code

This week is felt pretty long and I'm very ready for the weekend. I got the drawing tablet that my amazingtastic friend Purin sent me and used it to fix a lot of bugs in the Haiku art tool. The fixes aren't live yet but I'm hoping to push a new update within the next week.

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I've been using a Windows VM to test since browsers on Linux don't seem to be handling pen input well.

Smell

There's an odd smell in my house and I've been trying to track it down. I adjusted the fan down in basement this afternoon, so it's mostly dried out now, and I'm hoping that will help.

Podcast

My sister messaged me today and said that one of her friends had heard me on the latest episode of Reply All. Wow!

Roof

I have a company coming over on the 21st to take a look at my roof. Hopefully it won't rain too much between now and then.