Recent Posts

Back in March this year I dipped my toe into trying out Zensical as a replacement for MkDocs/mkdocs-material. At the time I had success with using it as a drop-in replacement for a project, and following that used it for a couple more. All was good.

In that post, towards the end, I also said:

The next test will be to try the docs for something like Hike. They're a little bit more involved, with SVG-based screenshots being generated at build time, etc. If that just works out of the box too, without incident, I think I'm all sorted.

I did try this, but ran into a problem: the screenshots took ages to build. At that point I decided to put the PR on the back-burner and only use Zensical for more static-like sites.

A couple of days ago I noticed that v0.1.0 had been released, and with it this claim:

This release closes the major remaining compatibility gaps with MkDocs, including support for many of its most widely used plugins. You can bring your existing MkDocs project to Zensical and continue using the workflows you're familiar with.

With this I was reminded that I'd not gone back and tried to use it again. So I took the Hike PR, upgraded Zensical, rebuilt the docs and... pretty much as fast as MkDocs! The result, style changes aside, looked the same too.

Given that it seemed to be working fine, I decided to start again from scratch with my current pet project of choice: Rogallo. I removed MkDocs/mkdocs-material, added Zensical, tweaked the Makefile, ran make rtfm and... crash! The error being along the lines of:

RuntimeError: Python error: FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '[...]/site-packages/zensical/templates/.icons/simple/cplusplus.svg'

I tweaked a couple of things to eliminate anything particular about my environment (in the case of Rogallo, SmolServe is used to run Zensical, to ensure there's a test server available for making the screenshots, so I wanted to ensure that it wasn't some fallout from that setup), but the problem remained.

I then hit the issues and did a quick search; it turned out it was a known issue and, in my case, was easily fixed with a quick make update (resolving the issue that markdown-exec had a small bug that had subsequently been addressed).

So, as of today, I've swapped Rogallo over to using Zensical for its documentation and, so far, it looks to be working out well. From my perspective the claim of it being a drop-in replacement is 100% true.

My only quibble: I wish they supported a zensical.yml configuration file. From what I can tell it's zensical.toml or mkdocs.yml, so no satisfying mv mkdocs.yml zensical.yml to be had here.

I think I can cope with that, though.

Introduction¶

An occasional collection of things I've recently found on the Internet and added to my bookmarks.

The Russian Bot Collapse Report¶

Many people were talking about how lots of accounts went quiet when the Russian data centres were attacked. Does the data support this?

TurboLisp¶

A new Common Lisp development environment. I need to try this out at some point.

What's getting pwned right now¶

While the whole thing smells of being vibe-coded (I don't know if it is, but it has that look/feel), this does seem like a handy thing to keep a link to.

SteamOS 3.9¶

SteamOS 3.9. By the looks of things, this is the first version of SteamOS that lets me hook the Steam Machine and the Steam Frame up together to play some PCVR.

Story of Your Life¶

A PDF of the short story that is the basis for the movie Arrival.

Emacs turns 50¶

All my tools are getting old, just like me...

Why I Resist Generative "AI"¶

Pretty good essay on one person's reasons for resisting GenAI.

Frame Control¶

Useful-looking application that lets you manage all sorts of aspects of your Steam Frame, from a desktop/laptop.

No, Transformers Won't End the Human Race lol¶

An essay on how a lot of the doom related to AI, and the impact it could have on us, is tied up with hype about AI.

Manifestos, Fear, and "Loser Thinking"¶

So Proton is currently having a meltdown...

Base¶

A macOS-native GUI for working with SQLite.

X is bad, though¶

A good takedown of the current crop of "eh, X is kind of good again" noises some people are making. This fits in well with the reasons why I nuked my made-in-2007 account and why you'll never find me back on there ever again.

I've just updated Peplum to v1.1.0. For anyone who might not have run into it before, Peplum is a simple terminal-based browser and reader for Python PEPs. I first released it in January last year and it's been pretty stable since. Earlier today, though, I noticed it falling over due to an unexpected value in one of the properties of a PEP.

So this release fixes that issue. It also drops support for Python 3.10 (which is now end of life) and CI now also tests with Python 3.14 and 3.15.

Peplum can easily be installed with uv:

uv tool install peplum

Once installed, simply run peplum.

Back on Monday, I finally received some lens inserts for my Steam Frame. I originally registered my interest in getting some back on September 20th, got an email to say they were available for purchase on October 1st, and ordered them the same day. They finally turned up on the 26th (two days ago). Considering that the Steam Frame is still a pretty new device, and I imagine the company were still getting fully set up to handle all of this, this felt like a good turnaround.

The company I used this time around (I've used others for my Quest 2 and PSVR2 headsets) was VR Optician. In my case I was ordering actual prescription lenses. While I am mildly short-sighted, and also have to contend with astigmatism, I can mostly get away with using a headset without correction. It's not ideal, but it's also not impossible to play and read in the headset. In fact, for the last few weeks that I've had the Steam Frame, I've got used to it.

On Monday evening I took a moment to fit the lenses and give them a very quick try-out. Oh, the difference! It's not a surprise, of course, but I was already impressed with how clear the Frame is; with the lenses in place it felt like a whole new headset again.

I ordered the "slim/comfort" versions, as opposed to the "advanced eye-tracking/VRChat" versions¹. I don't need advanced eye-tracking (at least for the foreseeable future) and I'm very unlikely to ever need to be doing anything in VRChat. Despite being the "slim" version, they obviously add some extra bulk to the lenses.

I can't say I'm currently noticing a difference in how they feel with respect to my eyes (although this week isn't one that's giving me much opportunity to mess about in VR), but there is a noticeable extra bit of "pinch" on the sides of my nose. Hopefully, with a little more time in the headset, I'll find a sweet spot when it comes to comfort.

As for whether it was worth the £69.00 plus shipping... yeah, for sure. They correct my eyesight, let me get the most out of the headset, and they let me do it in a way that protects the actual Frame's lenses (both in terms of giving them a less-expensive cover and by removing the urge to try and wear glasses inside the headset).

Rogallo v3.3.0 has been released. This update adds the ability to ignore some types of errors you may encounter when navigating Geminispace.

The update was prompted by the fact that, yesterday, the certificate for AstroBotany expired. Rogallo, quite rightly, alerted me to this and didn't carry on with loading the content. But it got me realising that it's easy enough to inspect the situation, realise that it's just a blip that will be fixed pretty quickly, and meanwhile you just want to get on with watering your plant, etc. At that point, Rogallo didn't allow you to do this.

So v3.3.0 adds the ability to ignore some errors that might crop up when visiting a capsule.

When an error is ignored, it is only valid for that host, that port, and that particular error for the duration of your Rogallo session. If you close Rogallo and start it again, you'll be shown the same dialog when visiting that host/port.

As a reminder, if an error is being ignored for the document you're viewing, the verification icon in the document title will indicate an error with its background colour:

If you click on the icon (if using a mouse), or use the AboutThisPage command (bound to F7 by default), any ignored errors will be shown along with the other document information.

With all this in place, all being well, if AstroBotany has a wee certificate update lag again in the future, I should still be able to visit the Koi pond without a problem.

Well, okay, with an ignored problem.

Another little update to Wasat, this time bumping the version to v1.11.0.

After this morning's change, I made a start on the work I wanted to do on Rogallo and quickly realised that most of what I had planned was better done in Wasat itself. The short version is: rather than maintaining a just-this-session ignore list in the application, it made more sense to handle this in Wasat.

So this release adds an ignore_security_error method to the client that lets you -- for the current session -- ignore a particular type of error for a given host/port pair. This makes for a lot less work needing to be done by the application making use of Wasat. Now it's just a case of¹:

from wasat import Client, IgnorableSecurityError

client = Client()
uri = "gemini://expired.example.com/"

try:
    response = await client.request(uri)
except IgnorableSecurityError as error:
    client.ignore_security_error(uri, error)
    response = await client.request(uri)

Obviously, the code in Rogallo is a bit more involved than the above, but that's the gist of it: try the request, if it fails with an error that can be ignored, ignore it and try again.

Since getting into Gemini, one of my daily rituals has been to tend to my plant in AstroBotany. This morning, when trying to visit there with Rogallo, I was greeted with this:

In other words: the certificate has expired¹. At this point, the error dialog isn't that useful. It's pretty much designed for dealing with capsules that are using self-signed certificates -- where TOFU is being used and so it would normally make sense to just forget and re-establish trust. With an expired CA certificate, the act of forgetting does nothing, it'll just fail again.

While it's technically fine to simply refuse to progress, in this case, it's not exactly friendly to the user. What would be sensible would be to allow an "Ignore" option. This would, I imagine, ignore the problem for the current Rogallo session -- ideally with some sort of indication that the capsule is suspicious at the moment. Also, the dialog that gives you this option should show all the certificate details so the user can make an informed decision.

The issue here is that, until now, Wasat has dealt with security-type problems by raising a single SecurityError exception. Aside from dumpster-diving the description in the exception, there's no way of knowing the nature of the security issue. v1.10.0 addresses this by adding and raising many different exceptions:

• CertificateExpiredError
• CertificateNotYetValidError
• CertificateRejectedError
• CertificateRevokedError
• CertificateUntrustedError
• FingerprintMismatchError
• HostnameMismatchError

All of these inherit from SecurityError to maintain backward-compatibility.

While this change doesn't alter the way that Rogallo handles this situation right now, it does at least set me up for tackling the work I have planned.

Back when the whole new Steam hardware ecosystem was announced, I remember there being a fair bit of talk about how one of the benefits of having a Steam Frame and a Steam Machine would be that you could either play some VR games standalone, or when you wanted to play something a bit more demanding, you could stream from your Steam Machine. While a bit expensive if you were creating your setup from scratch, the idea of a PCVR gaming setup that is all based around one ecosystem was very much appealing.

Fast-forward to the drip-feed availability of the Machine and then later the Frame, we ended up with a pair of devices that actually didn't really work with each other... yet. Reddit was, of course, mad at Valve. Personally, while I did end up with both devices, I was okay with this as it was obvious that work was under way to make this a reality and that it wasn't too far off.

Then, yesterday morning, I noticed that SteamOS 3.9 was released. This entry in the release notes caught my eye:

Improved support for Steam Frame wireless adapter

I had about 90 minutes to kill, so I thought I'd give things a go. I updated the OS on the Machine and updated the Frame too. After that, I "unboxed" (it was still in its little paper jacket) the wireless adaptor and plugged it in, and the Machine recognised it right away. At this point, though, it got a little muddled. I wish I'd kept notes of what I was doing, but from this point on I sort of had to make things up as I went along. What I was expecting was for SteamOS, after I'd paired the Frame (something it prompted me to do), to do anything and everything else to get me playing a game, streamed to the Frame, seamlessly. That part didn't happen. There was no prompt to install SteamVR, it wasn't even clear if I needed to or should. I did anyway just in case (and that took a little bit of faff; I seem to remember that a straightforward search of the store for SteamVR actually didn't show it -- but I forget how I found it in the end).

At this point I tried to follow my nose to see if I could get anything working. My intention was to try out Gunman Contracts, which had been very disappointing as a Frame-native experience. Would it run better with the Machine doing the work? Here's what happened when I tried:

1. First time I ended up with the game running on the Machine, displaying flat on my TV, and with the Frame saying it had timed out.
2. Second time I ended up with the game running in 2D/flat mode in the Frame.
3. Third time I finally got it running on the Machine, but as a VR game streamed to the Frame.

I can't remember the steps I took to get there (again: I only had a short amount of time and hadn't thought to make notes as I went), but once I had this going things seemed to work well. As for the performance of Gunman Contracts itself: eh... it was visibly better than native on the Frame, but it wasn't great. I did some tweaking to the settings and eventually got it running in a way that felt pretty responsive.

I feel it's a game that needs a lot more work to make it run comfortably on the Machine, let alone native on the Frame.

One thing I did seem to notice was that it's really tricky to pull up the game's menu while you're playing it. It seems like you're supposed to press down on the d-pad, maybe. But I found that sometimes it was just a press, other times it was a press and hold for a second or so, yet other times nothing worked. I'm left wondering if it's sensitive to your location in the game. I need to do more experimentation there.

Getting low on time, and battery on the Frame, I decided I had to try another game that I really want to be able to play more of again: VTOL VR. That installed and ran up just fine. In no time whatsoever I was up and in the air.

Things did get a little confused at this point though. In attempting to take this screenshot, I accidentally managed to do the SteamVR "recentre my view" gesture (press and hold the Steam button on the controller). This resulted in me being sat on top of the canopy and turned through 90 degrees. Now, I seem to remember that there is a way to recentre yourself in the VTOL VR cockpit, but I couldn't remember the button combination off-hand. I also seem to remember there's a way to do it via an MFD menu but, given I was sat on top of the canopy, I couldn't reach that.

So, in conclusion: it does seem that we're now at a point where the Steam Machine and Steam Frame will talk to each other, and you can play games on the Frame where the Machine is doing the heavy lifting. This is good news. On the other hand it does seem like there's a lot of tidying up to be done with this new VR ecosystem, and I suspect that plenty of games need to take the new Frame controllers into account too.

When I next get a chance I'm going to go through this process again, and try and keep notes of what I do and what the results are.

I've just made a very small update to blogmore.el to fix a small bug, and also to update some deprecated code.

The blogmore-new command inserts the result of expanding a template into the buffer when making a new post, and I've not touched that template since I started writing blogmore.el. This includes not updating it when I switched much of the frontmatter-handling code over to proper YAML parsing. The problem here was that the title didn't get quotes around it, which became an issue if there was something like a : in the title; any subsequent attempt to modify frontmatter properties would throw an error.

So this release ensures that the title and the date get quoted right away. I guess, at some point, I should rework this code so that it uses the frontmatter-handling code to set up those properties and, instead, just uses the template for the main body.

I've also changed all uses of things like when-let and if-let to use when-let* and if-let*. It seems that, as of Emacs 31.1, the former are deprecated.

Today I learned that there's a version of XScreenSaver for iOS. I haven't used XScreenSaver in years; probably decades at this point. Not because I don't like it or anything; it's just because I've not had a GNU/Linux desktop machine in that long. But the chance to install the app on my phone and scroll through all the different graphics demos is too good to pass up.

I noticed this because I saw xscreensaver-official/xscreensaver pop up in my feed on GitHub.

I, of course, added a star to the repo because the owner asked nicely.

Now I might have to throw the Mac version on my Macs.

Or, you know, turn one of my older MacBooks into a Linux laptop and use it there (something I keep meaning to do).