Posts on Notes

Practical intro to fiber-optic networks

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 08:30:00 +0100

I was looking into how to link a remote point in my mansion to the network and checked how it could work with a fiber-optic connection, since the router had a SFP+ socket.

TL/DR: I’ll go with a SFP+ bidi single-mode connection.

First of all, stay safe. Don’t look directly into a fiber with your eye. The light/laser is not powerful, but why do it? You won’t see anything anyway, as the light is in the infrared.

Installing Fedora on MacBook Air A1369

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 19:38:00 +0100

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.

Fixing the function keys of a Kinesis keyboard

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 00:15:00 +0200

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. Long story short, they hate contributing to e-waste but that “seems to be the next step”.

Refurbishing a Kinesis Classic KB133

Thu, 08 Sep 2022 01:00:00 +0200

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. I switched to a normal totally-boring keyboard I found in the basement. Then I fell in love with the big and accessible Gui key!

FOSDEM impressions

Wed, 27 Feb 2019 10:50:00 +0100

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. Luckily the next speaker and his colleague were also waiting, so we got a 1-1 (or more accurately 2 on 2) on quantum computing. That was quite cool.

Polishing Pitivi's viewer

Fri, 15 Feb 2019 00:38:00 +0100

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. We thought it would be easier to resize the viewer by simply dragging the bottom-left corner of its container. Harish Fulara made time at the end of his GSoC 2018 internship for this, after he finished his main task, and it works great! — 25609f3a

Polishing Pitivi's ruler

Sat, 23 Jan 2016 03:28:00 +0100

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. For example, if you have 0:00:05.000 and then 0:00:10.000, you have to look quite a bit until you notice what changes from one to the other. In this case the “10” should be highlighted because that’s different than the previous timestamp. This way it’s easier to see what an interval represents. Jeff liked the idea and the commit went in.

How to use the x264 encoding presets when rendering an XGES project

Sun, 08 Nov 2015 01:11:00 +0100

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:\

Pitivi moves from Bugzilla to Phabricator

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 17:31:00 +0200

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.

We decided to make the switch official, so we updated the documentation on the wiki and website to link to Phabricator, closed the Pitivi Bugzilla “product” and closed the remaining bugs in Bugzilla with a custom made script. The script also linked each bug to the proper task in Phabricator.

The War Against Deadlocks, part 2: GNonLin’s reincarnation (the other thousand Deadlocks)

Thu, 15 Oct 2015 17:20:00 +0200

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.

Setting up Supybot with the Bugzilla plugin

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 15:59:00 +0200

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.