Dynomax Webpage

Setting up the RSS Feed

30 Sep 2023

Setting up the RSS Feed

I was planning to write some more stuff for the blog, but I forgot to set up a RSS feed to the damn thing in the first place! *facepalm*

From now on you can subscribe to my feed and get updates and all that good stuff, so if you are reading this I probably got this sorted out haha

There are still some old posts in the website blog archive, so you can check those too.

Being afraid of the Light (Theme)

02 Nov 2023

I recent years when I first setted up my systems I always had the imense urge to immediately change the default light theme for the dark one instead, being on my computer or my phone. It became a second tought and I never stopped to think why I was doing this in the first place, but recently I came to the conclusion that this "obsession" was more related to pre-confabbed ideas rather than actual facts, and after some time I can see why.

When I was 10 years old I started to get clues of nearsightedness, mostly genetic-related, and due to that wearing glasses became a second nature early on in my life, after that I started to be a little more aware for preserving my vision and at the same time the whole idea of dark themes started to be more adopted by computer users.

I also got into this because it strained my vision way less compared to the light ones. Of course that it is proved that light and dark themes work better for different people and different goals, but it is funny that I've seen some "dark-mode users" out there completely hate any app that doesn't support a dark theme by default.

The thing is, there is a big difference between modern and classic light themes;

Nowadays you are bombarded with boring flat, washing all-white themes with no real contrast or depth, they without a doubt hurt the eyes of the ones with impaired vision like me.

However, in a lot of classic systems there are a greater use of multiple shades of gray and pale yellow, wich make for a much more pleasant experience using the interface, taking Windows 95 as an example, at the time there wasn't a huge separation between Light and Dark, what it had was instead a better use of color palletes and overall UI design, the same can be said about older versions of MacOS and even AmigaOS.

At some time I went full on this dark-mode principle, installing Dark Reader for having every webpage pitch black and searching for custom dark themes for all my apps, but then I realized that this a bit much overkill, nowadays I don't hate on light themes and instead I go for a "mixed" approach, using some applications in light theme and others in dark theme.

This website itself is using a light theme approach, if you had seen my first iteration of this site it would've been a mix of black, purple and yellow. A complete far-cry of what I set up after, being more of a Y2K style.

Another thing that really helped me is the Night Light feature, when I was a kid I remember that my family PC had a anti-blue\night light filter, wich at the time was literally a piece of dimmed acrylic that was put in front of the CRT monitor to reduce eyestrain, at the time I didn't even understand the motivation to be using that thing (I was a literal child), but I was at least lucky to have such considerate parents in that matter.

Zoomers these days don't even know what these are.

Anyways, instead of focusing way too much of my time on some random ramble here, I will keep these blog entries a little more condensed, basically just to serve as a way to pratice more writing and just throw some toughts in my free time as I did now.

But yeah, in short dark themes can suck too so don't be afraid of some light from time to time.

About GTA VI and becoming older

16 Dec 2023

Recently I was thinking about the fact that Rockstar Games finally released the trailer to GTA VI, I saw the video the day it came out, however I had a rather strange feeling about it.

I basically haven't felt anything special about this fact, basically nothing. I just treated it like any recent game announcement and moved on with my routine, and then I asked to myself: should I really be caring about this or not?

I remember when the GTA V trailer came out 10 fucking years ago and I was really hyped for getting my copy on the Xbox 360, saving money for a year to buy it and watching gameplays on Youtube eager to finally get my hands on the game. I was a teenager at the time, all my colleagues at school were talking about it and it was something that kinda of connected most of the different tribes in this period.

Then it came the day that I finally got to get my copy, only to find out at home that it needed a external storage to work (a common thing in most late X360 games), leaving me even more anxious to play. I have hundred of hours invested in that game. The same can be said about GTA IV as well.

Anyways, leaving nostalgia away for a moment, let's move on.

After seeing that most of the normie gamer sphere is literally losing their shit over this game I keep asking to myself; am I getting too old for this type of hype-train thing or the AAA videogame industry have been such a constant disappointment in recent years that I simply stopped caring about any new big game being put out? Or both?

I say that because after frying my brain-cells for years with vydia, I'm getting in a phase in my life where gaming is not one of my main concerns, of course that I play some games here an there, but to a much lesser amount compared to when I was a teenager.

Funny that I am technically a "Zoomer" since I growed up in the 2000's, however I mostly find hard to really relate to anyone younger than me because all that they seem to know is Fortnite, Minecraft, and all those higly competitive and lootbox-driven FPSs and MOBAs. Could this new GTA be aimed mostly towards this new generation and I am kinda of missing the point because I'm becoming old? (I am literally in my 20s and already have white strands of hair T-T)

With GTAV being already 10 years old by now, it is safe to say that it was the first contact with the franchise for a lot of (young) people, and that is all that they know about the games. I was recently searching some old GTA stunt videos and noticed the huge amount of those clickbaity videos, with very saturated colors and exaggerated thumbnails. But basically only using GTAV, can this be because is what most young people literally grew up with?

Anyways, let's see how this new game will really be, I know for sure that I will not have the ability (both monetary and hardware related) to play it but I am curious to see where the franchise will go after this.

Thoughts on Thorium browser and furry developers

29 Jan 2024

Thoughts on Thorium browser and furry developers

Thorium is a Chromium fork developed by a young lad that also worked on forks of Atom, ChromiumOS and Gecko and even a Thorium build specific for Windows 7. But why am I talking about this?

As some people already know, some time ago Alex, the main developer of the Thorium project was involved in some drama related to his project; users reported encountering some "easter eggs" hidden within the source code; in short these were sexually alluring furry drawings located in a special chrome flag named "chrome://yiff" and also in some other places in the browser source code and on the dev's website as well.

To be honest these pictures were not all that bad (by today's standards), just some random pictures from the guy's yiff stash. But we don't need a genius to see what is the actual problem here.

Is important to add that after being quiet for some time, Alex made a blog post talking about the issues and taking criticism in a respectful way, while there was also something related to circumcision there I will not be talking here since it goes completely out of the path I am trying to get.

Even thought this isn't a issue related to security or stability, it was enough to create a somewhat big discussion about it and, of course, lots of drama. In my Telegram channel I even remembered Chris Titus reaction to the matter since he was using Thorium as his main browser at that moment in time.

The most important question is about if a developer should do something like this in the first place. Can you go and create a furry-centered browser? Yeah sure, but advertise it like so hahaha.

At least these main problems were addressed by the developer himself in his blog, which I adapted below:

Minors could be using the browser, and run into it.
The artist was not asked or given credit for their work.
It is unprofessional for a publicly available browser.
It potentially violates the dev's own CoC

I don't care if the person that is working on a project is a furry (and surprisingly there seems to bet a lot of them on the IT world), because just like with political ideologies if it doesn't infect the main product it's not really an big issue. However in the case of Thorium the browser gained a lot of traction due to the curiosity of people and even managed to get videos featured in bigger tech channels around Youtube, and as far as Alex said, the pictures were added when the browser was just a small project with a small userbase.

In another take Palemoon browser was also created by a furry and it does not involved itself in any issues related to that in particular or even in politics as far as I know, with the developer even going out of Patreon after the platform started openly supporting BLM since it went against his idea of a neutral platform, it seems like Straver is more of a old-school furry and keep things to himself and his browser politically/ideologically neutral as it should be.

In short I put Thorium in the "better than using Google Chrome" category together with Brave or Vivaldi, while still not being the ultimate best performance browser like it sells itself, it is a no-frills Chrome that still keeps Google services if you really need them (unlike Ungoogled Chromium), so it is basically a tweaked Chromium that still looks like the stock browser, the same can be said about Mercury Browser too but with Gecko instead. The only issue about it is the fact that the browser is maintained by just one single person, which can be a issue regarding security updates and such.

I hope that this episode can be a lesson to Alex in being more professional about his projects, and for being such a young developer I liked how he managed the issue by bringing to himself instead of covering it up, continuing to work on the project.

Am I going to use Thorium? I tested it but didn't saw the appeal, however you can give it a try yourself too. I personally liked Floorp Browser more but I still miss the Tab Group feature of Chromium sometimes...;

And I can already predict that this isn't the last time that I will be talking about furries in my blog, oh well...

Thorium Website

Alex's blog

Solved a XML Parsing Error on the blog’s RSS Feed

27 Mar 2024

I was setting up Newsboat and Akregator on my machine so I could add the website's RSS Feed to it and see it there was any issues.

I did not noticed that my post about Thorium was out of formatting and preventing the feed to load properly on some RSS readers.

What happened is that when using a HTML Escape tool to copy the .html blog text into the feed's .xml file, something went wrong and it formatted the words containing apostrophes, wich gave me a XML Parsing error.

It is a dumb oversight but I did not saw it until now, however it is already fixed.

EeeboxPC First Impressions

12 May 2024

I have some interest in messing around in old machines since I am basically surrounded by them in my daily life. Here I describe the little “saga” that involved a Asus EeeboxPC and a lot of free time.

At first my main goal at the time was to find a machine in which I could run Windows XP on bare metal. So I was in search for a ridiculously cheap computer just to mess around and see what I could do with it, and after some time I stumbled upon a used EeePC Box for R$300 (~US$60) in a small used PC store located in my city, which looked like a OK deal at the moment and since I had some money to spend I just went for it and bought the damn thing.

The machine specs are as it follows:

Asus Eeebox PC B202

Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz
2GB DDR2 RAM
250GB HDD
Intel GMA 950 Graphics
32bit Architecture

In the connection side of things, there are:

4x USB2.0 ports
DVI Output
1x SD Card port
Headphone jack
Wireless Adaptor port

As it turns out the machine was already “upgraded” since originally came with just 1GB of RAM and a 160GB HDD. It also had a custom bootleg Windows 7 build called Windows Lite, wich is basically a modded Windows with custom themes to make it look like Windows 11 and maybe scam some poor old boomer who might buy a machine like this.

I found it funny but did not used it since is I have a common practice to clean the hard drives of second-handed machines.

Linux and Windows XP/7

I installed stock 32-bit Windows 7 Ultimate just to make some tests for internet connection and such. As it turns out this model of EeeBox actually came bundled with XP, looked like it would fit better to use that instead.

I also wondered if Linux could make this machine run better, so I decided to put Debian in it for a spin. After some time getting screwed by the netinstall and the fennecky wireless connection of the machine, finally I could install it via the offline ISO. However I was kinda overwhelmed to see that it did not make a huge performance impact as I was hoping for, I tested it with some different Desktop Enviroments like XFCE and LXQT, however the best (or less worse) results were achieved with window managers like Openbox and IceWM.

The thing is: the Intel Atom chips are very slow for any modern internet browsing. Even some of the Celerons and Pentiums of the same era are more usable than these.

As I said, the wireless internet speed of this little thing is poor to say the least, and since I am not able to pull a ethernet cable from my modem directly into my room at the moment, anything web related feels like a chore.

On the media side, it can play streamed videos in 360p~480p dropping frames (in Invidious on Falkon and Palemoon), and some 720p videos if in a local file.

So instead I decided to stick with my original plan and install Windows XP for some good and old nostalgia.

After realizing that Windows XP is too quirky to boot straight from Ventoy I had to make a separate bootable USB just for this system using Rufus, luckily I had a old 4GB pen-drive laying around. After the install process I realized that the system did not recognized the graphics drivers, using a generic one instead, with this the aspect ratio was stuck in 4:3 at standard resolution instead of the 16:10 of my main display.

So I needed to search for the Intel GMA 950 driver. At first I thought that it was gonna be something simple and trivial, however I wasted a lot of time searching for it and in the end did not managed to install. I also tried to connect my USB Hard Drive to it and copy some old games to test, but it also refused to read it, probably some limitation with big storage devices or exFAT.

After this headache I decided to roll back to Win7 to sort things out.

On a better note, some 3D games and graphic drivers do work with no problems on Win7, and I even managed to run games like Max Payne and GTAIII on a tolerable framerate (on lowest settings). Max Payne took ages to load and boot into the game, and GTAIII had very unstable framerates below 25 fps, but older and less demanding games such as Age of Empires ran fine (which is not hard to guess anyway).

After some more search on the web I realized that it did not came with the original desktop mount, so the thing was kind of laying around on a corner of my table until I put it on a cheap vertical laptop holder.

Then I decided to give one more chance to Linux and went with Peppermint OS, being the first time trying a distro based on Devuan. This time I ditched Firefox and experimented a little with Falkon browser, which does a better job even with the slow connection. On the “Linux for old machines” spectrum I went curious for Puppy and Q4OS; I went with Q4OS but had some boot issues, Puppy Linux ran better, but I didn’t managed to get the “save session” feature working on the USB stick that I used for it.

I also tried Damn Small Linux too since the project came back from the dead recently, but it had similar results to AntiX and Puppy.

While trying Win7 again I kept having errors due to missing .dll files and Visual C++ libraries while trying to install software, I also tried to test some emulators to see if any of them work (spoiler: more .dll errors) and then I remembered about Batocera Linux. “Yeah! Why not make a retro console out of this thing?” I thought.

Batocera and Recalbox

Luckily Batocera have a older custom built specifically for old Atom chips, and it ran well at first glance. Of course that due to the abysmal low specs it couldn’t emulate PS1 or N64 games properly, but ran fine most of the 8/16/32bit games I like to play.

I tried installing Batocera directly on the Hard Drive via the USB so I could simply boot straight into the emulator frontend, however due to the Live USB nature of this distro I did not succeed so I was forced to install Batocera directly on the drive via a SATA-to-USB cable.

Another alternative to Batocera is Recalbox; both are forks of EmulationStation, a frontend for Retroarch. While Batocera have a older version aimed towards Atom chips, Recalbox have more recent images for 32-bit systems to install and also pack more pre-installed homebrew games.

Testing the two I prefered Recalbox since after flashing the image to a USB drive and letting the auto-install script do it’s thing on the EeePC, I can connect the USB in my laptop again as a mass storage device and copy the ROMs to it while also being able to copy files using a local network. Batocera on the other hand forced me to copy the files from a second USB stick while the system is running using the integrated file manager.

FreeDOS

So after having driver errors on Windows XP and 7, not being able to use the bloated modern web and having some issues trying to emulate stuff, I was open to trying more obscure OS’es this time…

At first I tried HaikuOS, but unfortunately I could not pass the first splash screen to boot it, IcarosDesktop couldn’t boot as well and ReactOS does not seems like it can offer that much being alpha software…

So I went with FreeDOS. Being honest my experience with DOS is very limited to DOSBox only, however I could turn it in a “retrobox” to run DOS software and games and also use Recalbox and Puppy Linux via USB drives.

This made me research and learn a little bit more about FreeDOS, and it has been nice. At first I was worried about not having sound due to the lack of Sound Blaster, but then I discovered how easy it was to install SBEMU to solve this issue.

One of the greatest points of this EeePC is how easy is to remove the hard drive bay since it only takes two screws and can be done without opening the whole case. However is way more convenient to use USB drives and SD cards in this context, so I repurposed the rather noisy 250GB HDD that came with it for other things. For installing it I used two USB drives instead; one with the install image and a empty one formatted in FAT32.

After some time messing around with it, I realized that it was way more convenient to simply use DOSBox on my main machine anyways.

Conclusion

Now I have this little “Retrostation” box in which I play some retro games on Recalbox and do some light web browsing with Puppy Linux.

Whenever I get enough room space for two or more setups I will try Windows XP again and build a “retro” space like the ones from LGR’s videos haha. In one of his videos he makes a XP setup using a similar nettop.

The size of this machine make for a very portable device, however I fell like I should’ve bought the bigger machine with a Intel Core Duo instead (that was being sold for basically the same price), it’s a shame that I did not knew about how shit these Atom chips are beforehand.

Well, at least I got another HDD with it so that’s a win in my book. In the future I will test if a SSD will make any difference in performance.

And this was the somewhat convoluted experience with this EeePC and what I have managed to get from it, since these were just the “first impressions”.

If possible I will post more related content from this machine on the website whenever I get more room for it.

Toughts on Linux in 2024

27 Aug 2024

Toughts on Linux in 2024 and beyond

Here I share some of my experiences with Linux from a “regular user” viewpoint.

My “Linux Journey” is similar to what most people relate online, more specifically for the following reasons:

I grew fed up on Windows shenanigans
I was curious about how the OS worked and decided to try something new

Going back to my teenager years, the only time when I heard about Linux before was when a colleague from the Sonic fan-site I was part of said that he used the system as a daily driver, since this fact was around 2013-2014 I would take a guess that probably was Ubuntu. But at the time I did not gave it too much attention since Windows 7 was around and got out of the way to run my Sonic Fan-games such as Sonic Robo Blast 2 in my old Core Duo family desktop (good times!)

I first started really searching and trying to learn more about Linux recently.

Youtube was the first place that I saw something bout the topic, if I’m not wrong was on the brazilian YT channel called Diolinux. One of his videos about Mint was enough to convince me to try the system on a Live USB two years ago.

After some time I finally decided to install it on my laptop, in the past two years I went back and forth from Windows to Linux mainly due to my work requiring specific tools that work better on Win10.

For example, when I was working as a graphic designer I needed to open Photoshop files and edit videos, in regards of PS most of the time I could get by using GIMP and Photopea instead, but for video editing using Kdenlive in Linux I ran into lots of problems with the program crashing, even using Flatpak and Appimages instead of the dated Ubuntu/Mint repositories.

Turns out that there was a bug that made the program crash when dragging multiple videos at once on Linux. When I did the same on Windows it worked fine.

And why Kdenlive and not Davinci Resolve? No GPU, that’s why.

There has been some other problems like that, such as the PCspeaker being enabled in Arch and Debian (Ubuntu seems to have solved that), and also ACPI errors on boot due to a outdated BIOS (something that also does not showed on Windows).

However, luckly nothing serious had happened in my experience so far in my system, just these minor annoyances.

And yeah, the Ubuntu-to-Arch pipeline is real haha. Regarding Arch-based distros unfortunately I had a really bad experience with Manjaro, however in EndeavourOS things went better but I was unlucky to install it one or two days before they implemented KDE Plasma with Wayland and I also had some display bugs since some features worked on X11 and others in Wayland. I spent some time in Arch but I grew fed up in updating my system every single day (that’s why I got back into Debian/Ubuntu).

Fedora? Never really used it so I am suspect to say anything about it. Maybe in the future I could try.

Nowadays I use Linux as a daily driver and I really don’t see any reason for changing back to Windows; I use 32bit Debian in my NAS, LMDE on my laptop and ZorinOS on my desktop.

In fact, recently I had more issues with Windows than with Linux.

For instance, I was unlucky enough to have a system crash due to a serious problem involving old Intel processors + old Nvidia GPUs on Win10 (hey, i’ts what I have on my desktop PC). In short the system froze and went into a boot-loop that I tought was a hardware issue, but what really happened was probably Windows Update trying to install a Nvidia driver update or something related to POPCUNT. I will never know for sure.

The most recent annoyance with Linux was related to USB Wifi adaptors, specifically from TP-Link since their Linux drivers are ancient and don’t work out of the box. So for my desktop I had to use USB anchoring and compile a custom driver from GitHub to make it work, however this driver only supports up to version 22.04 LTS (that’s why I went with Zorin for the time being), not sure about 24.04 LTS.

Anyways, I had the draft from this post sitting in my desktop for two months so I decided to post it now.