Every community I care about is dead

  • 2 Posts
  • 265 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Everyone fully missing the point here. This is the banner image for !linux@programming.dev (that’s not where we are right now for the record), and it has a normal JPEG size of 7.7MB. When it’s served as WebP it’s 3.8MB. OP is correct that this is very stupid and wasteful for a web content image. It’s a triple-monitor 1440p wallpaper that’s used verbatim, and it should instead be compressed down to be bandwidth-friendly. I was able to get it to 1.4MB at JPEG quality 80, and when swapping it out in dev tools and performing A/B testing I can’t tell the difference. This should be brought to the attention of a mod on that community so it can stop sucking people’s data for no reason.




  • You can change the background color by changing the ["cre_background_color"] key in settings.reader.lua (again, I dislike needing to configure it like this). On my Android and desktop I set it to ["cre_background_color"] = "0xECECEC",, which inverts into a nice gray when I set it to night mode, then I invert all the image colors so they’re a normal color. Font color can’t be changed though, TMK. You can change font color with custom CSS snippets.



  • Have you tried KOReader yet? It’s not Material UI and doesn’t have any sort of “theme”, since it’s very focused on just showing your text, but it lets you extensively pick fonts and styles for your books, has dictionary lookups (tap and hold), page view, and it can sync with itself (available on the desktop and many physical ereaders). My main gripe is that it’s very configurable, and I don’t personally like many of the defaults. After setting it all up it’s quite powerful, and I use it on my physical ereader, Android phone, and desktop PC in roughly the same configuration.




  • JXL is the best image codec we have so far and it’s not even close. I did a breakdown on some of its benefits here. JXL can losslessly convert PNG, JPG, and GIF into itself, and can losslessly send them back the other way too. The main downside is that Google has been blocking its adoption by keeping support out of Chromium in favor of pushing AVIF, which started a chicken and egg problem of no one wanting to use it until everyone else started using it too. If you want to be an early adopter you can feel free to use JXL, but just know that 3rd party software support is still maturing.

    Something you might find interesting is that the original JPEG is such a badass format that they’ve taken a lot of their findings from JXL and made a badass JPEG encoder with it named jpegli. Oddly, jpegli-based JPEGs are not yet able to be losslessly-compressed into JXL files, per this issue - hopefully that will be fixed at some point.





  • Arch should be fine for university stuff. The main problem with Arch is not Arch itself, but all the software it tracks being very fresh. You’ll be pulling updates as they come down the line, and that may result in temporary bugs or day-to-day workflow changes - caused by the software developers themselves. I don’t think an Arch system is unusually unstable or prone to breaking, but last year they did brick everyone’s GRUB loaders by pushing an update too early (post-mortem here). It’s up to you, but if you want to err on the side of system/software stability I would go for Mint/OpenSUSE Tumbleweed/Debian.

    I don’t have any practical experience with EndeavourOS but TMK it’s just preconfigured Arch and it uses the default repos, so that sounds good to me. Vanilla Arch is not inherently better or worse, it’s just a more minimal starting point.