February 16, 2020

Yet Another GIMP UI Rework (2020 Edition WIP)

After all these years, I’ve come to the fact that GIMP is now a lost cause. It used to be a ‘Photoshop alternative’, but after years of stagnation it’s now having its butt kicked by even another open source image editor (Krita).

Nonetheless it’s still one of my all-time favorite editor, mostly due to nostalgia’s sake (I was a well-known tutorial writer back in the 2000s for the GIMP, you know, back when written tutorials were still a thing). And I especially take joy in reworking its UI. This, I do admit, is due to that fact that its interface is so godawful that ANY changes you make to it is an improvement. Whenever I feel bored or depressed, I rework

I did a GIMP UI rework some odd years ago. The project never finished due to time constraints, as I had other obligations to attend to. But that was when designers were creating UIs on Photoshop (I shivers as I remember those times). I think I blew like a week on that project. Fun times, hah.

Times had changed. We have dedicated UI design tools these days. I spent like a few hours on Figma already have more progress than I did in a week with the last project. And this was done completely on Linux! Something that was impossible the last time.

Here’s a quick sneak peak of the current WIP.

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February 11, 2020

Oscar 2020

In case you’ve been living under a rock, you must’ve heard about Parasite, the critically acclaimed movie from Korean director Bong Joon-ho, who just took home the highest honor at the Oscar last night. The first foreign movie to ever take home that gold statue.

As an Asian, this news made me profoundly proud, but from an academic point of view, I am somewhat disappointed that Parasite won. Don’t get me wrong there, it’s a fantastic movie, and it deserves this title more than any of the Best Picture winners in the last 10 years.

But this year? I don’t know.

I’ve always thought the first foreign movie to take home the golden statue for Best Picture would be something along the line of Forrest Gump, or Inception, something that blows everyone’s mind everytime time you rewatch it, something that you remember forever as one of the greatest movie ever made. Parasite, while being an exceptional movie, is definitely not something that you’d remember in a few years time.

And you can’t use the ‘but there’s no better movie released this year’ to justify its win either.

Competing against Parasite this year is 1917, the one-take movie that would probably go down in history as one of the greatest masterpieces ever made. Literally everyone who was lucky enough to experience it in the theater confirmed that it is the greatest cinematic experience they have ever had in their entire lives, and that is to put it lightly.

February 4, 2020

Home Computing – Centralized

I recently came across a sale post on facebook for a number of decommissioned Wyse thin clients. The guy was selling it for $20 a piece. Normally I’d just scroll past that but I for some reasons I was feeling especially low-bally that day so I asked, half-jokingly, if he’d be willing to part way with some of them for $10 a piece. To my surprise, he actually said yes. I guess he probably bought a shipment from China thinking it was some kind of SFF workstations. Anyway, long story short, I now have 4 Wyse thin clients that I don’t know what to do with.

Or do I really?

I’ve always wanted to get into building a homelab, and this just give me more motivation to do it. While I do have a home ‘lab’, I don’t really have a real home server to put inside it. I had an old Q6600 antique that I use from time to time to watch DIY videos but let’s face it, it can never cut it as a real home server.

I’m thinking of building a dual xeon server with a healthy amount of RAM as a central server, running Proxmox or ESXi, serving the thin clients that I will be distributing around the house. So far I think I could replace my father’s, mother’s, my wife’s and maybe even my workshop current computer with a simple thin client. Not only does this setup saves a lot of space downstairs, it may actually provide a performance boost for my parents as they’re current using very old computers.

Xeons are super cheap these days, as do ECC RAM modules. The only pricey part is perhaps, the motherboard.

(to be continued…)

February 2, 2020

Unix bash script to install all Google Fonts to your computer

Having access to all Google Fonts is crucial for any designer these days, so this script is pretty much essential whenever you make a fresh install of your OS.

Credit to Quinton Pike on Github

Install

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/qrpike/Web-Font-Load/master/install.sh | bash

Uninstall

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/qrpike/Web-Font-Load/master/uninstall.sh | bash

November 27, 2019

Hackintosh build log:

Current status: SUCCESS! (see update Feb 20 below)

So I have an old Dell XPS 8500 with a Core i7-3770 and 0NW73C motherboard which I’ve been using for several years.

If anybody remembered, this desktop was dubbed “The Pre-built Hackintosh of 2013“, which was the reason why I bought it  back then.

I ran Sierra and High Sierra on it for a while, but for the last 2-3 years I only had Windows and Deepin installed. I wanted to put OS X on it once more but was waiting for a proper NVIDIA web driver (it was running a 1050ti), but alas Apple and NVIDIA couldn’t come to an agreement.

So last week I decided to swap out my Gigabyte 1050ti 4GB for a Gigabyte Aorus RX580 8GB (I’m lucky the Green cards hold their values better than Red’s) in hope of better compatibility. However I’m still having troubles getting even the installer to work.

Things I tried:

• Making a vanilla Catalina installer with latest Clover (using this guide)

  Result: got to the Apple logo with progress bar, but as soon as the progress fills up I got a blank black screen.

• Making a premade Mojave installer with TonyMac UniBeast Mojave

  Result: still got a blank screen but if I wait for it to go to sleep and wake it, I can get to the installer screen with Disk Utility + Install Mojave etc., but clicking on any of the entries will hang the computer.

Update Jan 30/2020:

Managed to get Catalina installed using the vanilla install method (with Clover). However this was done with the integrated graphic. Also, WiFi, Bluetooth and Audio aren’t working yet so I need to tinker with it some more when I have the time.

Update Feb 03/2020: SUCCESS!

So everything works now, apart from the Wifi/Bluetooth card (Dell DW1703, which is actually an Atheros AR9485 in disguise)I could easily grab a Broadcom card to replace it, but it’s not worth it for me since I could only get them from Aliexpress and they take months to reach where I live (Vietnam). Plus I have no real need for Wifi/BT on a desktop anyway.

Audio did take a wee bit of work, I had to go into System Preferences to get the icon to show up, and change the layout to 11 in config.plist. But after that it just works beautifully.

So, to recap. Here’s all the steps that I did:

  1. Download Catalina from the App Store
  2. Put it on a 16GB flash drive by using the /CreateInstallMedia command in the terminal
  3. Install Clover 5103 on the flash drive (and copy some essential kexts while you’re at it, I only had Lilu, WhateverGreen, AppleALC, VirtualSMC)
  4. Pop the flash drive into my XPS 8500 and boot from it (Legacy mode)
  5. On the first screen, fire up Disk Utility and format the 512GB SSD with APFS
  6. Install Catalina to the newly formatted drive, then restart with the flash drive still connected
  7. Upon restart, boot into Clover on the flash drive, and choose to boot from the SSD instead of the installation media, you should be able to get into a fully working version of Catalina running on your computer at this point, albeit the drive is not bootable on its own yet.
  8. Install Clover into the SSD.

That’s it, that’s as vanilla as it can be for a Clover installation. If everything goes well you should now have a fully functional XPS 8500 hackintosh!

Update Feb 10, 2020: Successfully added Gigabyte Aorus RX580 8GB to the installation! (Need to disable Legacy OPROM in boot option otherwise you will get a blank screen)

I will create another post soon with more details

November 7, 2019

Good bye Mr. Snowball

2005:
Wasn’t particularly an eventful year.
Lots of things hasn’t happened yet.
The first iPhone wasn’t due for another 2 years.
I wasn’t even in college, just a kid fresh out of High School.
And yet one thing made that year particularly memorable to me, to all of my family.
This guy right here.
I still remember vividly the day he came into our lives, such tiny little creature, with piercing blue eyes. So small and yet nothing seems to be scaring him. Footsteps, loud noises, nothing could even make him turn his head.
(We soon found out that’s because he’s completely, utterly deaf  which is also why he never had a formal name, because nobody could’ve called him. He was simply known as “The Snowball”)
Then he’d proceed to spend the next 14 years of his life brightening up our days, without fail.
Today is no different really. After spending most of the days being awesome, he took a hearty meal from his favorite bow, went back to his favorite box, took a nap, and decided not to wake up again.
Today is a beautiful autumn day. I guess if you could choose how and when to go, today is as good as any.
Still, it’s never easy losing a friend who was with you for almost half your life.

2005-2019
Rest in peace buddy, you may have left our lives, but you will never leave our hearts.