Move semantics can be very useful to transfer ownership of resources, but as many other C++ features, it’s one more double edge sword that can harm yourself in new and interesting ways if you don’t read the small print.

3D Gaussian splatting is the emerging rendering technique that is overtaking NeRFs. Since it is centered around point primitives, it is more compatible with traditional graphics pipelines that already support point rendering.

During all these years using GStreamer, I’ve been having to deal with GstSegments in many situations. I’ve always have had an intuitive understanding of the meaning of each field, but never had the time to properly write a good reference explanation for myself, ready to be checked at those times when the task at hand stops being so intuitive and nuisances start being important. I used the notes I took during an interesting conversation with Alba and Alicia about those nuisances, during the GStreamer Hackfest in A Coruña, as the seed that evolved into this post.

Just a quick update on something that I've been working on in my free time.

I recently refurbished my old Nintendo Wii, and for some reason I cannot yet explain (not even to myself) I got into homebrew programming and decided to port libSDL (the 2.x version -- a 1.x port already existed) to it. The result of this work is already available via the devkitPro distribution, and although I'm sure there are still many bugs, it's overall quite usable.

In order to prove it, I ported the game VVVVVV to the Wii:

During the process I had to fix quite a few bugs in my libSDL port and in a couple of other libraries used by VVVVVV, which will hopefully will make it easier to port more games. There's still an issue that bothers me, where the screen resolution seems to be not totally supported by my TV (or is it the HDMI adaptor's fault?), resulting in a few pixels being cut at the top and at the bottom of the screen. But unless you are a perfectionist, it's a minor issue.

In case you have a Wii to spare, or wouldn't mind playing on the Dolphin emulator, here's the link to the VVVVVV release. Have fun! :-)

Maemo Community e.V. - Invitation to the General Assembly 2023

Dear Member,

The meeting will be held on Friday, December 29th 2023 at 12:00 CET on irc.libera.chat channel #maemo-meeting.

Unless any further issues are raised, the agenda includes the following topics:
1. Welcome by the Chairman of the Board
2. Determination of the proper convocation and the quorum of the General Assembly
3. Acceptance of the annual report for the fiscal year and actions of the Executive
6. Any other business

Requests for additions to the agenda must be submitted to the Board in writing one week prior to the meeting (§ 9.2 of the Statutes).

On Behalf of the Maemo Council, Jussi Ohenoja

Recently there was an large rework to the STB single-file image_resize library (STBIR) bumping it to 2.0. While the v1 was really slow and merely usable if you needed to quickly get some code running, the 2.0 rewrite claims to be more considerate of performance by using SIMD. So lets put it to a test.

As references, I chose the moderately optimized C only implementation of Ogre3D and the highly optimized SIMD implementation in OpenCV.

Below you find time to scale a 1024x1024px byte image to 512x512px. All libraries were set to linear interpolation. The time is the accumulated time for 200 runs.

RGBRGBAOgre3D 14.1.2660 ms668 msSTBIR 2.01632 ms690 msOpenCV 4.8245 ms254 ms

For the RGBA test, STIBIR was set to the STBIR_4CHANNEL pixel layout. All libraries were compiled with -O2 -msse. Additionally OpenCV could dispatch AVX2 code. Enabling AVX2 with STBIR actually decreased performance.

Note that while STBIR has no performance advantage over a C only implementation for the simple resizing case, it offers some neat features if you want to handle SRGB data or non-premultiplied alpha.

Bypassing paywalls is a sport for some. And it ain’t hard for Desktop Browsers. Just install a addon in your favorite Desktop Browser.

Unfortunately this didn’t work on a Android or iPhone phone. Nor on Sailfish OS with its Android emulation. Because over there browsers like Chrome and Chromium don’t allow extensions to be installed. Firefox does have some limited support for addons, but it can’t open local XPI files. Its addon menu doesn’t contain the addon and the addon website for it sees the running browser as incompatible.

Luckily you have Kiwi Browser, which is a Chrome based browser that did not disable extensions to be installed.

Once Kiwi is installed you can go to either chrome://extensions or kiwi://extensions, enable Developer mode and then open the zip file as explained in the Readme.md.

ps. For Sailfish I had to install an older version of Kiwi Browser, as the most recent version doesn’t seem to work.

I've often wondering what will happen when this horrific war in Europe will finally be over. I won't be discussing politics here, but what is mostly interesting to me is how (and if) all the companies who made high proclaims about not doing business with Russia will justify their getting back into the Russian market. They will probably count on the fact that the war will be long, and that people will forget what these companies' stance was. After all, the world has forget about all the companies who collaborated with the Nazi regime, so we can expect the same to happen with this war.

I recently needed some NAS and went with the “Synology RS1221+” barebone system. The system is competitively priced when compared to the similar “QNAP TS-873AeU-4G”.

Synology HDD

For storage, the sweet spot between price and capacity was at 18TB. Lets look at some options:

Toshiba MG09ACA 18TB270€Seagate Exos X X18280€Synology HAT5310-18T700€

Depending on the benchmark sometimes the Toshiba comes out on top and sometimes the Seagate. Both are similarly priced, so thats fine.
However, talking of the price the Synology HDD stands out by asking a 150% premium.
You might now wonder whether you also get a better performance or other features in return. Well.. guess which is the only 18TB HDD that is verified by Synology for the RS1221+?

The scammy part here however is that the HAT5300 series are just rebranded Toshiba Drives with a different firmware. So the HAT5310 likely is just the MG09ACA and the main difference is the profit margin.
Note that different firmware does not result in any noticeable difference in performance.

I went with the unverified Seagate drives and – as one might expect – there are zero issues with doing so.

Synology RAM

At this point you might say, well Synology just did not get to test more 18TB drives.
Well.. I found the 4GB RAM rather tight and wanted to upgrade to 32GB as RAM is currently quite cheap anyway.

The options here are

Kingston KSM26SED8/16HD50€Synology D4ECSO-2666-16G350€

I think there appears to be a pattern here. Again, both options have the same specs i.e. DDR4 2666, ECC SO-DIMM. Maybe Synology even rebranded the Kingston modules too, but I did not verify this.

While the DiskManager did not complain about the Seagate HDD, there is a warning when going with Kingston now. I guess this is because it matters even less.

To conclude this, I first want to emphasizes that both the Synology NAS Hardware and their DiskManager software work great with non Synology Hardware – just as one would expect of a standard x86 platform.

It is just a pity that they try to FUD you into buying their overpriced HDD and RAM.
Basically this is the same game as with printer vendors predicting ravages and annihilation when using 3rd party ink.

Want to revisit 2009's N900 tech demo but you got rid of your old toys long ago or don't want to bother digging them out of your desk drawer? The Maemulator to the rescue! It uses QEMU user-space emulation and some LD_PRELOAD magic + other in-process trickery to get it working on any modern Linux machine that has an OpenGL driver. Add multi-sample anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, higher resolutions, keyboard input and various fixes, and you are all set for a few minutes of fun distraction.