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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Well, the whole saga is longer. We got a bathroom redone and the sink never worked right. It dripped. I took the faucet apart several times trying to fix the drip, but eventually concluded the faucet itself was just cheap crap and couldn’t be repaired.

    So I bought a nicer one and replaced the faucet entirely. I was a bit intimidated by the prospect of replacing it ahead of time. Usually the drain and faucet “match”. (As in, the finish of them matches and if the finish on the drain is a different style/color/etc than the faucet, it’ll stand out.) And so they come as a set. But in this case, the drain that was part of the old/cheap faucet a) worked fine and b) was so similar in color/finish/style that you couldn’t tell it didn’t come with the new faucet. So I didn’t end up having to replace the drain, which made the whole process considerably easier.

    Oh, I did need to slightly modify the drain closure plunger to fit the old faucet’s drain… lever… thing. Heh…

    There was definitely a moment once I’d assembled the whole thing and was turning on the valves under the sink that I was a little worried it’d all explode and soak the whole bathroom. Lol. But everything’s been fine for months now!

    As for how long it took, probably three sessions of a couple of hours each to finally convince myself the old faucet was too defective to try to salvage. And then another thirty minutes to find a new faucet on Amazon and another three or so hours to replace faucet. And about the only roadblocks were the time I spent trying to fix the old faucet and the time I spent procrastinating before undertaking the actual replacement. Heh.

    Coming out the other side of that experience, I do feel like I understand the sentiment better now that “if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself.” And I think it largely applies even if you don’t have any particular amount of expertise. Someone who doesn’t have to live with the results may not really care about something like a dripping faucet. If they can check the “replaced the faucet” box, they can say “job’s done”, charge the customer, and be on their merry way. (And I’m not saying I blame them, really.)

    (Of course, that only goes so far. I wouldn’t think you ought to DIY things that might be dangerous, for instance.)







  • FizzyOrange got it right. “Screen grab” is nicely asking a graphical system (X11/xorg-server or a Wayland compositor or whatever) via an api to give you an image of either the whole desktop or some particular rectangular part of it. And you can do it 30 times every second (or more) to get a video. OBS uses such APIs to get video from the screen for saving to a file or streaming to Twitch or whatever. Various tools can be used to get screenshots and save them to files. Etc.

    Heck. On my work machine, because they require us to meticulously log the time we spend on individual tasks, I’ve got a script running that uses ImageMagick’s import command to grab screenshots of my desktop and save them to files once every 5 minutes so I can refer back to them while logging my time.

    And as FizzyOrange said, various Wayland compositors have workarounds for the fact that there isn’t (or rather wasn’t until recently) a way to do screen grab in a standard way that would work across all compositors which properly and comprehensively implement the Wayland protocol. I use Sway on my personal machines and it’s based on something called wlroots which has built-in a nonstandard extension to the Wayland protocol that allows screen grab. But once wlroots adopts the new standard way of doing screen grabbing, the nonstandard extension will be unneeded/obsolete.


  • Oh shit! I hadn’t heard they’d finally added that. That’s awesome.

    Maybe that means FFMPEG and Zoom will start supporting it soon.

    On my personal systems, I use Sway (a Wayland compositor). And I sometimes wish I could do screen grab with FFMPEG, but so far I haven’t wanted that enough to actually switch to X11 or use wl-screenrec.

    On my work machine, I’m on Ubuntu and I have to use Zoom and screen sharing is kindof a non-negotiable thing. (Plus, FFMPEG screen grab is nice to have on my work machine as well.) So I use i3-gaps on xorg-server. Except for those two things, I’d rather use Sway.








  • Honestly, “browser engine” and “lightweight” currently don’t belong in the same sentence. Unless you’re going for something with very little functionality compared to Webkit or Gecko or whatever. We can hope that changes with time, but I don’t think there are a lot of prospects.

    As far as “little functionality” options, there’s the Dillo browser. I’m not sure its engine is really easily “seperable”, so to do so might be some work. It’s surprisingly maintained. Its latest release is from 3 months ago. It’s definitely extremely lightweight. (Unless you’re comparing it against, say, elinks or something.)

    As for somewhat promising projects that are not yet anywhere near ready for prime time, there’s the Ladybird browser. Again, I don’t know how seperable the engine is. And I don’t know how lightweight this one is either.