Chad Austin

father of three · Facebook · formerly Dropbox & IMVU · performance engineering · programming languages · Haskell · 3D graphics · the open web

[Chad Austin @chadaustin]

Partially repairing my friend’s SNES Classic.

https://t.co/bqsbDtmACw

[Chad Austin @chadaustin]

I published a tool to diagnose where the space in your gmail is going: https://t.co/AgleOx97C9

[Padraig Brady @pixelbeat_]

@chadaustin Great info on color in terminals Chad!
I'll link this from my old summary on the topic:
https://t.co/eQEH7SXN7q

[Chad Austin @chadaustin]

I wrote about enabling 24-bit color in terminals, which ended up turning into a history lesson. https://t.co/R3oPNSr8zc

[Chad Austin @chadaustin]

I wrote about a few minor reference-counting tricks: https://t.co/cZ1ZrpjNpf

[Chad Austin @chadaustin]

@icculus Just did that on my machines. Neither booted after the upgrade! For different, solvable but annoying, reasons.

[Chad Austin @chadaustin]

@bdurrett I saw that all over social media. "Unconventional method of publishing a book", "Misunderstood"

[Mike Chi @retrotink2]

Finally made the HAND368 less crappy. Now it's semi useful for testing PC resolutions on the RT4K.

Here's my notes for anyone else struggling with this piece of garbage:

1. The default VBIOS puts the graphics chip in "LCD" mode, which means that everything is scaled to 640x480 60 Hz. 🤡

You can download drivers here: https://t.co/0B2uSEDSUv. The Windows 3.1 package has 'ct . com' which switches it to "CRT" mode and gives you real 70 Hz and unscaled output.

The VGA output circuit still sucks, so it's massively dim. Crank up the gain controls on your display/scaler. 🤡

BTW - the built in LCD takes 70 Hz, SVGA and all sorts of resolutions without complaint. So the LCD mode lockdown is just stupid 🤡

2. Once the battery dies, you lose all CMOS settings. By default, the PS/2 mouse port is disabled. I wasted a week going as far as disassembling this to make sure the PS/2 pins went back to the SoC before figuring this out.

The fact that this isn't documented by the maker is just mean 🤡🤡🤡

3. The battery discharges even with the power plugged in. You'll probably need to hack on a better power supply to make this junk usable.

[Chad Austin @chadaustin]

@bengrue My garage is bigger than is even allowed here these days, but alas is already full of other interesting projects! You have one day: the rain is coming.

[Chad Austin @chadaustin]

51” Hitachi projection CRT on the curb. 250 pounds. Wish I had room!

[Chad Austin @chadaustin]

@nvll Woof. Hang in there!

[Chad Austin @chadaustin]

I moved over to Aras's instance - https://t.co/ryvewJC7Ik Same chadaustin@

[Chad Austin @chadaustin]

I was also surprised at AVR-GCC missing major optimizations: https://t.co/a1pmNdILIX

[Chad Austin @chadaustin]

@Donzanoid If you try it, keep us updated. Our Pi 3B in the living room has been a hit. GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Python, but not powerful enough for YouTube.

[Chad Austin @chadaustin]

@davidtgoldblatt @MagedMMichael @wakomeup I'm glad I stumbled upon this. I recently made the same optimization to strings in Watchman and wasn't sure about the correctness.

[Dr Eugenia Cheng --no advice please-- @DrEugeniaCheng]

A thread on asking questions in math talks.

This week I was at a 60th birthday conference, the first in-person conference I've been to since Covid that's more or less in my field, and I decided to do something radical: I decided to ask questions.

[Chad Austin @chadaustin]

@deplinenoise @jwatte just bought a supermicro board and mentioned some fan struggles, IIRC

[Chad Austin @chadaustin]

@mk_tbone @ChristerEricson Correct: no support for ACLs today. It’s been on the roadmap but we’ve put it off as long as we can get away with.

[Engineering at Meta @Meta_Engineers]

Let’s talk about source control: We’ve open-sourced #Sapling, a new Git-compatible source control client that scales to the largest repositories in the world.

We’re looking to raise the bar for #sourcecontrol & we’re hoping you’ll join us. 1/2

https://t.co/J1uO3pwDYs

[Chad Austin @chadaustin]

As excited as I am for std::source_location, it's a shame it standardized on const char* instead of std::string_view, requiring strlen at the call site for a length that's known at compile-time.