I finally did it and moved to a more appropriate "home realm" for a #FreeBSD enthusiast. Thanks @stefano for offering this!
Moving followers worked flawlessly, restoring all my settings was pretty quick, but of course all my old toots are left on https://techhub.social/@zirias 🙈
So I guess I'll introduce myself here by writing a little thread, adding a few of my works that someone might find interesting. But first a bit of "who am I":
I'm a "professional" software architect/developer (mostly #dotnet platform in the day job), FreeBSD hobby-admin and ports committer, #C64 fan (and occassionally coder and even musician), and apart from computers also interested in music (playing a few instruments myself), traveling, cooking, sometimes sports, sometimes politics ... but probably won't toot about any non-technical stuff (or, very very rarely).
Let's start with my most recent opensource dev-project:
#qXmoji is an #X11#emoji#keyboard. Although it uses #Qt for its GUI, the mechanism to "type" emojis is pure X11. This means any X11 client can receive them (whether that client can correctly display them is an entirely different issue 🙈) ... not even #XIM awarenesss is needed.
The mechanism to inject fake "emoji keyboard events" is quite hacky and dirty, but it works!
Also quite recent: #dos2ansi. This is a very versatile converter for #MSDOS#ansiart (and other "text") files to a format using #Unicode and only standard #ANSI#SGR escape sequences, so, suitable for today's terminals like #xterm. It includes an ansiart viewer which is "just" a shellscript, leveraging dos2ansi, xterm, less and some nice original #IBM fonts to do its job. So, maybe something for the #retrocomputing fans.
Unfortunately this project is stalled, I hope to find the time to continue it. Here's a #C64 conversion of an old #Amiga type-in game found in some german magazine (AmigaBASIC). It's pure #mos6502#assembly and actually adds lots of features to the original (like a score, like music, like fast scrolling and fast movements ... btw the sound/music code is also hand-written, no tracker used).
One of my "dream projects" (maybe after retirement 🙈😁) would be to create yet another :commodore: #C64 OS. One that works on a vanilla unextended machine.
There are quite a few around of course. To make something meaningful, you have to think about what could give #retrocomputing enthusiasts an excuse to use their breadbin once in a while 😏
I think it should just support very basic #Internet service clients, like Email, IRC, BBS (via TCP), ... of course this means to require one hardware extension (apart from your obligatory floppy drive): Some #ethernet (or wifi) hardware. There are a few around, so "drivers" for those would be needed.
This sets the baseline of features required. Multitasking will probably be unavoidable (clients need to be able to do stuff "in the background", like e.g. respond to IRC PING messages). There's already a LOT of complexity attached to that requirement. You'll need an executable format with relocation info, and a program loader doing the relocation on startup of a new process. You'll need a concept how to deal with the tiny hardware stack (partition it, relying on apps not to overflow? copy it around on each context switch?). You'll need a concept how to dynamically allocate memory (probably just page-wise). And so on.
A windowing system IMHO makes no sense at all on that machine. The UI should focus on text (maybe a set of virtual consoles?). Support for GUI apps might be possible, but then only "full-screen". 🤔
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