HakFoo

Currently using an X11 system, on an AMD GPU; the window manager is FVWM because I'm a nostalgic old git.

I use two screens, and most games tend to full-screen on one.

Had decent enough results with Proton via Steam on many titles. A few of them needed to be explicitly tagged "don't draw a frame around the full screen window" in the FVWM config, and I had a few where movies did that "show a test card instead of video" but no biggie.

I've recently had two harder nuts to crack. I'm using two games with Lutris: The SNK 40th Anniversary Collection (it was $20 cheaper on GOG than Steam at the time!), and Genshin Impact.

Both of them play fine, so long as you keep the mouse within the full-screen capture area. But if I leave the window (say, using a keyboard combination or pulling the mouse outside the capture area), the games go blank.

SNK shifts the black box somewhat off of its original position, and I think Genshin just goes blank.

I experimented a bit with SNK's "wine configuration" options in Lutris.

"Automatically Capture the Mouse in Full-Screen Window": This reduced accidental leave-the-screen problems, but still had failures if you used a keyboard command to switch windows.

De-selecting "allow the window manager to control the window" causes the window to turn into a weird Win95-esque "mini taskbar icon" instead of going black Pressing the "restore" and "maximize" buttons resizes it to near full screen but retains an ugly Win95 style title bar. Once you restore it in that mode, it's actually well-behaved-- you can move the mouse in and out of the window without it breaking (it seems to freeze when you move the mouse away, but that may be intentional) But still, the weird titlebar and it not working that way until you first "freeze and unwedge it" sucks.

Genshin, at least sometimes, could have its black box minimized and restored and come back to life. I've yet to try the Wine tweaks there.

I suspect the common theme might be that the games are trying to deactivate themselves when they lose focus, but not doing so gracefully. ISTR Genshin on Windows would minimize itself if you switched to another task, and I haven't tried SNK on actual Windows. I'm wondering if there's some unified fix that tells the game it's running in a single screen and when the mouse leaves, it just stayed there. There seems to have been some sort of "cage Wine apps in a virtual desktop" feature, but it seems to no longer be supported.

The wallpaper is one of the standard XBM images included with the X11 distribution (in OpenBSD, it's at /usr/X11R6/include/X11/bitmaps/mensetmanus).

The fonts are the Modern DOS collection (8x8 for the battery status, 8x16 for the terminal). The window titles use the classic bitmap Helvetica which has no antialiasing and gives it a unique "Vintage system" vibe.

I was going to give it a full CDE install, but the build guides don't seem to work right; I might switch to SparkyLinux for this machine because suspending fails just often enough to be annoying.

After a home rewire, I'm ready to bump up to 2.5GbE, and demote my old 1Gbps router/wifi box to "AP Only mode".

I want at least ~~five~~ six total ports, four of which need to be 2.5+ (three to different rooms, one for uplink, one 1G+ for the AP, and one "any speed is enough" for the networked printer :) )

It seems like the "mini-PC with a bunch of 2.5GbE ports running OPNSense" option fits neatly between "Build a router out of my old i5-2500K and some eBay NICs and ignore the USD450 electric bill", and "enterprise rackmount gear with Delta fans left over from people overclocking their Socket A Athlons."

I see a lot of machines of the form "fanless case with a little castle of fins on top, Intel N100 CPU, six 2.5G ports from I226 chipset". A representative example is https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806214512701.html

I suspect they may all be re-brands of the same basic product, but I wanted to know real-world experiences:

• Basic question: can anyone vouch for any specific one of these devices/sellers and confirm it worked for them?

• I understand the i225-v LAN chipset was much buggier than the i226-v and to be avoided; still the case? I see a few products that are like USD50 cheaper, with different CPUs and i225-based LAN.

• For routing/firewall duties (probably 4 PCs, 3 phones, a couple printers, and some smart devices) , are the bottom-of-the-line configs (8GB RAM/128G disc) suitable? Is the CPU sufficient? The N100 makes me laugh-- Intel doesn't even want to give it a brand name.

• Regarding WiFi, should I just block out that little Mini-PCIe slot on the board from my mind? I know that FreeBSD WiFi has been sort of a fourth-class citizen for years, but I was wondering if there had been a breakthrough, or at least a "here is one specific card you can buy for a largely drama-free experience"

• Weird question: Any problems with RF noise? I have had some devices where the power brick made a mess of a neighbour's AM radio reception, and I don't want to start a war with him. I figure when you're buying a device with a 60w wall-wart from a random brand, it might not be the cleanest.

I got a Sylvania-branded strand of 50 "warm-white" LEDs (plus two loose spares) for USD 2.50 at the local grocery store, which I'm pretty sure is cheaper than buying a bag of the bare LEDs would run. They also come in other colours (blue, cool-white, bright red, multicolour)

The individual LEDs come in plastic shells which can be cracked open to retrieve the goodies inside, and have plenty long leads that are folded over to fit the "bulb" mounting.

I'm going to be coming up from the US for a week in a few days. (When I booked the trip back in May, Canada seemed a lot less... flammable :( ) For me, a big part of leisure travel is indulging nerdy fixations in shops that there are no local equivalents for, away from the rest of the family asking "you bought WHAT?" until it's far too late to feel shame.

Any good suggestions for the following? (Extra points given for public-transit easy access; I enjoy a walking- and train-focused vacation)

• Anime goods shop

• Model-railway-centric hobby shop.

• Electronics-surplus shops/long-lived computer shops that have backstock dating to the era of George VI. The sort of place where you might find a LS-120 drive, weird Commodore stuff, or a cache of ISA cards.

• Neighbourhood-style coin shop (the sort of place that has albums for different series, and wouldn't take offense if I'm looking in the $50 range rather than the $50,000 range).

On a related note, I'd like to try to get some of the 1968-1986-or-so nickel "Voyageur" dollars-- do banks typically have caches of them if you ask, or are they definitely something you'll have to go to a coin shop for?

(screenshot of a rxvt window decorated with a fvwm theme. The title bar is rotated to the left and highlighted in red with white text, and reads 'marada@kalutika:~'.

The window is green-on-black and contains a vim session with the text 'You may not like it, but this is what peak desktop performance looks like.

Each window has a clear, square border around the edge. You know where one window ends and the next begins, and exactly where you can drag to resize them, even if you stack one Dark Mode window slightly ajar of another.

There's a titlebar that has a huge segment which can be clicked and dragged to move the window, rather than tiny icons and a search bar eating up all but a handful of pixels. The active window has a distinct colour you can immediately pick out.

That title bar is mounted on the side, so it's not consuming precious screen real estate when the trend is towards 52:9 aspect-ratio ultrawide monitors whichbarely have enough vertical space for one full-sized window.

It's generated by a Window Manager. Not a Desktop Environment. Not a Compositor. It draws windows and menus, and launches other programs. It does not include a mixer, stopwatch timer, Mastodon feed reader, or half the video drivers. It has a memory footprint of fourteen megabytes, and a configuration file format that hasn't meaningfully changed since Bill Clinton was in the WhiteHouse.

GNOME was a mistake.'

I've been using it recently on a machine that formerly used a tweaked version of the "Anonymous Super Turbo XT BIOS" and it offers subtle, modest improvements.

In my narrow experience, it fixed some freeze issues with Civilization when using a NEC processor, and the boot display is clean and more informative.