Apple is a marketing company. Once the device is not supported anymore, it’s called “vintage”. You should go buy a new one otherwise the experience heavily degrades. But these old laptops are still quite powerful―this MacBook Air 2011 model, for example, has an i7 CPU and an SSD, FFS. Luckily they can be given a new life with Linux. TL/DR: Installing Fedora 37 on a MacBook Air A1369 (2011) at the end of 2022 is tricky and close to impossible for normal users.

The Kinesis Advantage series of keyboards has a row of tiny function keys at the top. These cheap rubber keys are the shame of the expensive Kinesis keyboards. The latest version in this series, model KB600, has the tiny function keys made out of plastic, no more rubber―feels better. The Esc key in my ancient KB133 Kinesis was registering key presses only when I was pressing very hard. The Kinesis support was very responsive but they said they don’t have replacement parts for this old keyboard model.

I’ve been using a Kinesis Classic keyboard since 2007 when I got one at Google. I did notice some minor issues every few months, but it started to be somewhat annoying only after reading Michael’s list of the issues Kinesis keyboards have. Thanks Michael! I probably flirted with the idea of replacing the keyboard’s controller following Michael’s instructions for two or three years. But why do it, really.. Things changed last winter when the Esc key stopped working.

Earlier this month I got to FOSDEM in Brussels for the first time. Below is how I remember it. Overall it has been great. I quickly learned to look for a different room when there was a queue at the door. But this once I decided to wait in queue, hoping somebody would get out so I can enter. I and the person in front of me got close to the door, but unfortunately we did not get in.

In the Pitivi video editor, the viewer is quite important, as it shows the video. Our viewer also shows a discreet frame around a clip selected in the timeline, making it easy to resize and position the video of the clip by dragging. Below is the story of the viewer updates in the past year. Easy resizing It was a bit cumbersome to have to drag both the left and bottom margins of the viewer container to resize it.

In Pitivi, the ruler is displayed above the timeline to show the times corresponding with the current view. A series of H:MM:SS.XXX timestamps on a ruler might leave the impression that only trained professionals are supposed to use it. I had trouble reading the timestamps and looked for ways to make the ruler more useful. Read below for the story. Pitivi ruler, Dec 2013 Relevant parts Around the New Year 2013-2014 I thought about highlighting the relevant parts in the timestamp.

x264 has a few generic encoding presets you can use when rendering. You can see the list of presets and exactly what encoding options they specify by running x264 --fullhelp. You’ll most probably notice the following presets: ultrafast, superfast, veryfast, faster, fast, medium, slow, slower, veryslow. Ideally you’d always use veryslow when rendering, but you can't always wait for it to finish, so you go for faster ones. The ffmpeg wiki summarizes the difference between these presets:\

Using Bugzilla to manage Pitivi was a bit painful and we were looking for a replacement. Many projects seemed to switch to Phabricator lately, which looked like a very good platform for managing projects. We experimented migrating Bugzilla bugs to Phabricator, and we are pretty content with the result. The UI is nicer, we have a better search function, and the Git integration (with the code review component works great.

Read the first part on Jeff’s blog: The War Against Deadlocks, part 1: The story of our new thread-safe mixing elements implementation GNonLin has served our cause well for a number of years, but was left with indelible marks from the Old World. We grew increasingly worried with GNonLin’s common affiliation with Deadlocks, to the point where it was known as “the Baron of Deadlocks” by our battalion. We tried correcting it, tried reasoning with it, but alas—we only got “not-negotiated” caps errors.

Supybot is an IRC bot, an application which can connect to a specific IRC channel and do stuff there. For example, with the Bugzilla plugin, Supybot can report on the channel whenever a new bug is filed, or if somebody mentions “bug 1234” in the conversation, it will print details about bug 1234. Install supybot First, you have to install Supybot. If you are using Arch Linux, get supybot from AUR, otherwise read the INSTALL file.