My Blog

Mon Apr 29, 2024

Earlier this month I signed up for the tildeverse. I was experimenting with gopher on SDF and on tilde.institute.

My programs, Easter and Wrap, were developed remotely on their machine.

Easter will give you the date of Easter for any given year. Unfortunately, I don't recall where I found the algorithm.

Wrap was such a great idea that I spent a full day debugging my source, testing my environment and building a man page before I discovered the fold command.

Maybe I learned something.

Both programs are available for download from Programs on SDF, and are available on my Gopherhole at Programs.

Sun May 26, 2024

Well my vacation is drawing to close. Back to work on Tuesday.

I spent a couple days replacing my hot water heater, so at least I got something accomplished.

I played around a little with "Command-Line Rust" and I'm not that crazy about it to be honest. Maybe it will grow on me, but it isn't really designed to be an introduction.

I leveled another toon up in "GuildWars 2," and played a bit of "Dungeons and Dragons Online." I even fired up the Mac G4 and played a little "Maelstrom" and "Solitaire."

I think I had the most fun playing around trying to get things to work on my system.

Windows calls "MS Edge" for help regularly in the UI and leaves itself running after you exit it. "MS Edge" is not my default browser; however, I didn't want to risk breaking my Windows 11 installation by attempting to remove "MS Edge."

I had been issuing "taskkill /f /im msedge.exe" from the command line, but considering how often I screw up and select "Help", I made a cmd file for it. I figured I'd create an icon for it to make it easy to launch.

Next problem. You can't pin a shortcut to a cmd file to "Start" or the "Taskbar."

The workaround I found was to create a shortcut to the cmd file, and edit the target to launch with

"C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /C killedge.cmd"

Next problem, it defaults to the terminal icon. While I like the icon, I already have the same icon for Window's Terminal and MSYS2 which I use for my blog and my website. I didn't need another copy of the same icon on my taskbar. I figured I'd go ahead and find an icon. So naturally I ended up needing to create one.

I copied and image of the "MS Edge" icon to the clipboad and trimmed it down to an appropriate size. I created a new image in "The Gimp" from the clipboard and added a new layer with transparency to edit.

I ended up needing to refresh my memory on how to draw a circle and a line using "the Gimp." After some research for the circle:

1. Choose the "Select Ellipse" tool.
2. Click and Drag to the desired size and release while holding SHIFT.
3. Choose "Select->Border", set your border size and type and click "OK."
4. Click on the foreground color and drag it into the outline.

For the line:

1. Choose the "Pencil" tool.
2. Click on the starting point.
3. Hold SHIFT and click on the ending point.

After that was done, I had to flatten the image before I could export it as an ico file.

Finally, I could select my shortcut properties and change the icon, right click again and choose "Pin to taskbar."

I could have gotten things done quicker with "Paint," but then I wouldn't have learned anything about "The Gimp." It will also make modifying the icon easier in the future. I'm looking forward to going back to Linux full time once I'm tired dealing with Microsoft's improvents.

Fri Sep 20, 2024

Last month, I finally splurged and bought a Linux laptop.

I settled on the System76 Darter Pro with 16.0GiB running Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS. I'm trying out Budgie for my Desktop Environment.

I'm slowly working on migrating towards using it for development.

Wed Oct 30, 2024

I'm been using my System 76 Laptop as my primary machine for a few weeks now. It is definitely serviceable for the sake of programming. I'm not terrible happy with it's performance for games, but I wasn't expecting a laptop to be great for that.

I've mostly been using Budgie even though it still has deficiencies. The main thing I can't get around is it doesn't appear to handle dock apps well.

In other news:

I actually found an example of a complex root online while searching for a fortran issue and checked my roots program on my website and found a bug.

In my graphic I indicated I was using arcsine to get θ, I was actually using arccosine and failed to correct the sign of θ if b was negative.

I switched to using arcsine as indicated in my diagram and check the sign of a to determine if θ should be negated. Hopefully that fixes a 20+ year old bug.