Wait ... What ?_?

For long time, my Windows task bar has been disfunctional. I had to be quick-but-not-too-much if I wanted to reach those snapshots the UI shows you when you right-click on any of the docked icons. If not, the pop-up would disappear before I can enter it. Trying to access the tray icons was even worth: I'd need roughly 4 or 5 attempts to get any of those "quick-access" items.

For long time, I've been considering this must be a nasty side-effect of the sloppy focus emulation I had enabled. The fact that I have one task bar on the right edge of the screen clearly did not help. But I had noted that the horizontal task bar did not have this issue. It's on the secondary screen, hidden most of the time so that my Linux VM can shine through. So I finally search for a way to migrate the tray icons on the horizontal bar, but I couldn't follow the instructions. I clicked "lock all taskbars", but then I couldn't move them as the poster claims.

wait ...

Right click on any taskbar, then uncheck Lock all taskbars

it ... it has no checkmark here ... you mean ... it is already unchecked ? I was running the OS for years with taskbar that could follow my mouse cursor at anytime !_? And ... and yeah, of course this is why this PC has an issue with the taskbar popups ... Did you believe it ? Nah. That's not the reason. That's because the panel is *next to* the task bar rather than being *above* it. Yup. locked or unlocked doesn't change things. I can now click my icons but only on the other screen (that means, when my VM is hidden).

Unfortunately, that also means that clicking "Search" icon on screen A's task bar pops up a search box on screen B (:palmface:)

Leaving twitter

I've spent most of my spare time posting farewells to the people I was following on twitter. I have now more following on mastodon than there, despite starting not far from 400 followed people. The place has become aggressive to creative people with the TOS update of November 15th.

I created myself a bluesky account too, because it's clear most of the gamedev and pixelart people will / have migrated there. And a ko-fi supporter account for those who haven't migrated and possibly won't.

I'm glad I had decided to reduce my implication on twitter. I'm glad I had captured most of the key interactions already in 2022 when twitter became unreadable for non-subscribers, although I still have many posts linking to items trapped in twitter.

Because the harshest discovery of the week was that twitter archive does not feature any of the replies, likes and everything you *received* from others. Only what *you* did. That means any conversation is lost and any thing I could have said in reaction to someone else's post is missing key context. With over 14000 tweets in the archive and no more public access to the platform's content, automating recovery is not an option.

So I'll do my best to recover what I can manually, with the help of blogger archive. I'll post recovered things under the fromTwitter. I'll have some more key replies cross-posted as blogger comments (apologies to comments authors if they feel offended that I took that freedom. You have the right to make me remove them if you want to, of course). When possible, I'll augment the link to twitter threads with an abbr of what was said in the post.

And Mastodon ? Well, it will be about the same: the exported data has an 'outbox.json' and a 'media_attachments' folder, but that's it (apart for likes, avatar and bookmarks). inReplyTo entries will list some other's status entries (actually an URL with https://instance.domain/users/userid/statuses/tootid), but that URL is nowhere to be found in the .json file. We *can* get some stuff out of it though, like calling /api/v1/statuses/tootid/context, which gives json arrays ancestors and descendants, the second having all the replies. They have the initiator type xhr in firefox network inspector. And the thing I replied to is in /api/v1/statuses/tootid. That should be scriptable enough.

guest star: François Rimasson

C'est une histoire qui avait commencé mi-février 2021 avec un tweet ... une capture de vidéo pendant un lets-play de Fury of the Furries qui me fait prendre conscience que "#infinitepyramid hints from #furyofthefurries: make sures the spikes stand out." Et là, j'ai un François Rimasson qui répond

• I did all the graphics in 1993

J'enchaîne: You did a wonderful job, then. It has been my first good reference to get into pixelart. Huge thanks!

No kidding! I was already studying it in 2006 before I made my first NDS homebrew. And I was still using it last year.

Je dirais même que si "Badman II" a pu avoir des graphismes entièrement originaux (pour la 1ere fois), c'est grâce à l'étude des palettes de couleurs du désert et de la forêt de Fury. Donc Super-merci ^_^

Je le réaborde quelques semaines plus tard:

Tiens, à propos de Fury of the Furries, il y a ~10 ans, j'avais fait un petit test avec une de tes planches de décor pour illustrer mes outils (homebrew) de création de jeu sur Nintendo DS. Je n'étais pas allé plus loin vu que je n'avais pas les droits dessus.

Là (Mars 2021) mon gamin a l'air d'avoir bien accroché au "let's play" du jeu donc j'envisage de quand-même refaire une conversion aussi du personnage principal pour qu'il puisse s'entrainer le temps que papa ait terminé sa pyramide à lui.

est-ce que j'aurais ton autorisation de rediffuser ces graphismes au format NDS avec mes outils pour un tutoriel, ou est-ce que je garde ça dans le cercle familial ?

Et François de répondre:

• Oui, bien sûr, fais-en ce que tu veux, c'est tellement vieux, et si quelques personnes peuvent s'amuser avec ... je n'ai plus les planches de sprites originales.
• Je suis content que ça te plaise :)

J'ajoute : bin le côté facile avec Fury of the Furries, c'est qu'on a l'ensemble des fichiers .LBM directement dans le jeu. Evidemment, il y a peut-être des planches de pré-production que je n'ai jamais rencontrées.

Et donc on s'y met ... 

6 mars ... "oh birds! @F_Rimasson put so much pixels per spritesheet in Fury of the Furries that it used a buggy part of my conversion scripts that had never been used before ^^"

7 mars ... Hopefully, when you strip out the 'mask' sprites and re-align the sprites that were past the 'checkered' barrier, we're back to an acceptable amount. Actually, it would be perfect to illustrate UsingSprites::granularity.

8 mars ... I was about to suggest that 16-pixels and 4bpp sprites might be an Amiga sprites constraints, but it looks like Amiga sprites were actually 2bpp (https://stashofcode.fr/afficher-sprites-et-bobs-sur-amiga-1/), and likely did not need those mask pictures.

Bon, après ça, j'admets que les interactions ont été plus anecdotiques, avec quand même une phrase qui m'aura inspiré du monster design pour la castle zone:

• Il ne faut pas confondre un fantôme asperger et un spectre autistique

ok, c'est décidé: si je mets des fantômes dans ma zone des châteaux, ce seront des fantômes de légumes. des citrouilles, bien sûr, mais aussi des fantômes asperges qui te crachent de l'ectoplasme dessus.

takeout.google.com

• 

I have some photos-takeout-20230630T070258Z-001.zip ... presumably created when Google announced they would do cannot-remember-what to their albums service.

• it has multiple folders for the same blog, with date tags.
• it has 3030 files total. There are 30 pair of duplicates
  
• it finds some duplicates between files, but always in the same folder, like 2007-02-04-Bilou_s Book/biokid-4-superjump.png and the same folder with biokid-4-superjump(1).png
• all the files have the same date as the archive. Proper timestamps will have to be looked up into companion .json files
• there's obviously a maximum filename esp. for screenshots (40 characters ?)
• The date in the folder name seems to be album creation time. For this blog, I have 2007, 2011, 2021 and 2023
• There isn't any file with timestamp earlier than 2007. So where are the pictures from 2006 ? like http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5640/3676/320/indigo-hints.png or http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5640/3676/320/blending-example.png ? Apparently in another castle.
• The oldest entry for which images are available is http://sylvainhb.blogspot.com/2007/03/vous-courriez-jen-suis-fort-aise-eh.html http://sylvainhb.blogspot.com/2007/02/pour-faire-un-aarbreeeuu.html (unfortunately, that's missing the pictures-heavy http://sylvainhb.blogspot.com/2007/02/un-arbre-cachant-la-fort.html)
• whole chunks (like everything 2014 Q4) is missing

Got a new takeout today, of Blogger data. This one is bigger. 800+ MB while the previous was about 200 MB.

• timestamps are now only in milliseconds-since-epoch format
• time span between oldest and latest timestamps is 6284 days... about 17.2 years
  
• 5640 files for this blog (plus .json descriptors) and 2513 duplicates set... that means about every picture has a duplicate :-/
  
• it seems to have some of the missing files mentioned earlier, like bladorstack
• still no indigo-hints.png or blending-example.png, unfortunately T_T
  

I'll have to dig that more. I'll have to merge that with the "blogpress" tools and possibly make myself a "blogger taken out dashboard".

libntxm by asiekierka or libmx7 by sverx

For years and years, I've been post-poning the time where I could back-port my changes of the sound player library NTXM into the upstream github... And then in December 2023, I note that the library has been revived by one homebrew developer I'm following since March.

I asked whether they would be interested in a pull request for my effects system and she replied

PRs are always welcome! However, someone has already made merged pull requests to support more XM effects, so you might need to review their changes against your own.

Later on mastodon, she added

 I honestly recommend maxmod or libxm7 for gamedev use...

I know that other package released by Sverx quite a while ago. Since the time I was looking for a module player to replace mikmod, Sverx has decided to open-source it. I still have to code-study it. So no code exchange occured and nothing changed in my own dsgametools repository.

Early this month, she announced an interesting news: 

nrio-usb-disk, a tool to use the DS Linker Writer card to connect your Slot-1 cartridges to a PC as USB mass storage. This acts as an open-source replacement for the DS Linker "uDisk" tool, but this one supports any flashcart.

So she can use it to quick-cycle-develop and rebooted Nitro Tracker over USB (instead of uploading over WiFi as I do with runME). The PC is the USB host and the DS is device (via USB controller chip in Slot-2).

Given how fragile NDS development over WiFi has become with WiFi security ever increasing and the NDS hardware remaining unchanged, I might have to consider getting one such device myself and understand how it works for a safer future.

edit: the linker used isn't exactly new.

trivia: did you know Goodboy Galaxy programmer gecko contributed a few fixes to nitroustracker 0.4.9 ?

Le retour du bureau !

Enfin ... Le bloc-prise sur lequel mon bureau devait être branché est enfin réparé. Et c'était une bêtise en plus, au point que je me demande comment j'ai pu ne pas le trouver tout seul.

Difficile de comprendre à quel point ça me fait du bien qu'il revienne se mettre à l'emplacement qui est naturel pour moi, dans l'angle qui est naturel pour moi. Mes p'tites affaires juste là où je veux.

Bon, évidemment j'ai plein de cartons avec des affaires pas-encore-rangées à répartir demain ^^". Et ça en plus des inévitables cartons de ma fée entre deux activités.