smxi

Zen master #Roy on his new mossy rock ledges in the woods. The first photo is after a light snow covered the ground the day after the other photo, where he seems to have a new student, a sweet little calico who followed him and sat on an adjacent moss covered rock. Roy in snow is on the same rock the calico was on the day before. Roy left soon after the other cat sat on her rock. I assume like all true masters he is skeptical of students. Roy is the best cat ever.
#Caturday #Cats #CatsOfMastodon

#Roy chilling in the sun on #Caturday . While snow was exciting he's really a temperate climate kind of guy. Earlier he was studying the woods intently from his wood pile ledge.

Roy is a true Zen master, and I am but his humble student.
#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

#Roy lying between my arms early #Caturday morning. I don't know which of us finds this most relaxing, it's a tossup. You can always tell when Roy gets relaxed because his very long legs start to pop out. For my part, I often just fall asleep. I'm sure this is some energy and pheramone type exchange which is part of our bond.
#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

#Roy exploring the woods on #Caturday in the snow. Due to recent thaws then freezes the snow is pretty firm, otherwise Roy has trouble in softer snow because he's a large 6kg/13.2 lb cat, who has fairly small paws. So he usually sinks in unless there's a packed trail.

His clowder buddy here has much larger paws and thicker fur so he can handle colder conditions, and soft snow.

#Cats #CatsOfMastodon #catsinthesnow

#Roy sitting in his absurdly undersized box on #Caturday

I don't know why he likes this box so much, but wherever I put it, there he'll be, sitting in it.

As you know, there's something about cardboard boxes cats find deeply satisfying.

#Cats #CatsOfMastodon #catsinboxes

.#Roy stretching out and being very long between my legs #Caturday morning. He's had a lot to deal with over the past weeks so it was great to see him get so relaxed in bed.

He's been getting along with his 3 new clowder buddies, they go out on crepuscular expeditions in the snow together, and one he's getting to be very good friends with. Their favorite activity is something that resembles mma sparring, with boxing, wrestling, takedowns, and body slams.
#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

And here's #Roy demonstrating the solidity of his newly reinforced cardboard box house on #Caturday .

As you hopefully know, taller ledges are in general better than lower ledges. Roy is a strong supporter of all forms of ledges. As are many of his feline kin.
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#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

#Roy relaxing on #Caturday in his upgraded cardboard box by the window. This box started to collapse because the big cats were using its roof as a ledge, so I had to glue in wood supports to reinforce the box. This is how their ledges and boxes evolve.

Roy likes it in the box because he can peek at me or look outside, just by moving his head slightly. Here's he's peeking at me. As usual, his eyeliner gives him away.
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#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

#Roy leading our early #Caturday morning zen practice. His practice is much better than mine, but he does his best to help me with my bumbling efforts. Because of his gentle silent prompting I have seen far more deer and other winter wildlife than I would have.
#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

Two #caturday week firsts for #Roy

1. Going for a short walk in the snow, which he's been studying intently from his window ledges for two weeks. He seemed ok with -10 c/14f for a few minutes but then wanted back inside, but investigated a bit.

2. Meeting his new housemate, a big guy. 16 day gated separation, no real hostilities between Roy and the others so far . But this cat is the head honcho in this clowder so them getting along is important.
#Cats #CatsOfMastodon #CatsInSnow

#Roy is amazed at the things he didn't know existed and has never seen before in his life.

He's always been an urban guy, but now he's in a brand new world with bizarre white ground and a forest. He's seen trees in yards but never a forest. He's depending heavily on me as his clowder buddy to support him because this is a big change. Thursday night we saw a deer walk by at 4am! He had never seen a deer before.
#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

#Roy checking out a box that suddenly appeared on the floor on #Caturday . Something big is up for Roy and he can tell but no jinxing. Details in the future. It's really big.

#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

#Roy on #Caturday lying on my lap. For some reason he's started coming under the blankets too which is nice. He doesn't come all the way under, his head has to be free. Cats are very toasty, normal is 100.4-102.5 F / 38-39.2 C body temp. Having a cat on your lap while reading is nice.

#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

#Roy helping me bake #julekaker (yule cookies) on #Caturday. He was slightly puzzled by my somewhat frenetic behavior but decided finally to settle in and supervise from his kitchen ledge. Here he's doing his sneak peeking, sadly unaware that because of his black eyeliner you can see when his eyes are slightly open.

#cats #CatsOfMastodon

@jerry do my eyes deceive me or is the beast trying to grab a bag of Delectables licky sticks? If so #Roy strongly supports Gnocchi's efforts!

Here's #Roy a few days before #Caturday perched on a tree. I've been giving a badass squirrel peanuts on the top cross board of the fence. I'd just loaded it up and clearly Roy was scheming to finally catch his arch nemesis by sneakily waiting in the tree. But to give you an idea, that squirrel openly mocks and f's with Roy. He will follow a few feet behind Roy on top of fence lol. If you think of Roy as Wiley Coyote and the squirrel as Roadrunner you get the idea.
#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

@EpiphanicSynchronicity @ozamidas @anildash yes re excellent #i3 docs. When I was extending #inxi window manager and desktop support I installed everything available, in some vms. i3 had by far the best docs of anything I tested. Best man page, best web docs, so I figured if their docs are this good their code must be as well. Sadly the same could not be said for #sway, the wayland i3 clone. Maybe that's gotten better by now. i3 docs also inspired me to upgrade inxi docs and public data.

#Roy perched on his favorite high ledge taking a quick look back at me while staring out at the night on #Caturday evening after our walk. We went pretty far tonight, around a whole block.

How we started going for walks is a long story but suffice it to say he likes exploring and adventure with me as his wingman.

#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

Oh I nearly forgot. New #inxi 3.3.40 rolled out. This is mainly a critical bug fix for a feature very few people use (export to json/xml), plus a key name change. I have a rule that key names can't hold values, but I'd slipped and used BIOS or UEFI as the keyname, instead of firmware: BIOS. Plus a few small fixes. I tend to wait until there are enough updates to warrant a new release, but a bug that makes a feature always fail forced the early release.

Bug was a silly bad copy/paste, sigh.

#Roy peering into #caturday darkness from a window ledge.

#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

#Roy doing full cat lotus zazen on #Caturday. His practice is much better than mine. He often sits on a favorite ledge silently absorbing the world for an hour or more. Here he's just watching the world go by.

#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

#Roy getting some face and neck brushies right before getting up from bed on #Caturday morning. As you can see he's a huge fan. I'm using a boar's hair brush I got in a dollar store. Roy says "Just say yes to Brushies!"

#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

#Roy surveying his domain the day before #Caturday, looking quite regal. Unfortunately he has to share that fence with a big squirrel who thinks it's great fun teasing Roy. But the less said about the better as far as Roy is concerned.
#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

#Roy napping on #Caturday under his fleece blanket and on his blue blanket. I have to admit it surprises me when he lets me put a blanket on top of him but I think despite being a big fairly tough guy he likes snuggling under covers like this.

#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

The classic #x11 window manager and desktop site xwinman.org came up in an unrelated #inxi issue on #codeberg. I had used that site to create the original list of window managers inxi supported, but then I didn't think about it.

One thing led to another and I found most of the site, except the /archive/ section, which is at archive.org.

Since this is roughly my skill, I grabbed the site, upgraded it to modern responsive html/css standards: https://smxi.org/wm/

Try it on your phone!

#Roy sharing a #caturday moment with me. I'm under the blankets, and he's stretching out his paws towards me.

The only problem of course is when he's like this it makes it very hard to get out of bed since he's being so sweet, a problem many people who live with a cat are probably familiar with.

#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

#Roy relaxing on his favorite ledge on #Caturday saying hello before it's serious nap time. He's obviously wondering why I'm putting that weird flat thing in front of his face but also in front of my face, but has probably assigned that to the set of weird incomprehensible behaviors his hominid buddy engages in.

#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

#Roy sitting looking at me from his shelf ledge at the foot of our bed on #Caturday.

Roy believes that the world is a series of ledges with occasional (and very unfortunate) flat surfaces between ledges.

#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

With a faint whoosh #inxi 3.3.39 goes out the door. Some nice battery upgrades and more cpu variants handled. I got a flurry of pretty good #codeberg issues which led to most of the improvements and fixes. Also added a section to the inxi.changelog UPDATES: which are all the manually generated matching tables etc.

Ongoing #pinxi next #inxi updates. After the #Loongson data and upgrade, I decided to grit my research teeth and dig into #Zhaoxin x86 Via Centaur based CPU. As usual, I had to combine data sources to get the info on each variant. Now pinxi detects Zhaoxin, and gets advanced microarchitecture data for each known model.

Previously this was tossed in with Centaur data, which cut off when zhaoxin split from via (cpuid family 6 > 7). And was wrong too.

It's absurdly hard to find this cpu data.

Amazingly, someone showed up in #codeberg with an #inxi issue about #Loongson CPU support, something I have looked for data on for years. He provided 5 full sys-ci file pairs, which let me crudely emulate the cpu in test mode. Turned out the #MIPS detection failed because as of Loongson 3A5000 they have their own ISA, in other words it's its own type, forked from MIPS. Fixed the detection and many other glitches, added --loongson emulation flag, and now support works better than ever.

More battery updates in #pinxi next #inxi

Added more values and updated docs using kernel.org /sys/class/power_supply items.

They have been busy and added many new values.

#codeberg issue #341 prompted me to check what was available. Answer was a lot more! Most consumer systems won't have many of these, like battery temp, but now will show extra if it finds it. Also reordered and restructured fields to allow more clear ordering.

Fun fun.

Turns out 3.3.39 will be the battery upgrade release

@[email protected] I had to think about it. #xfce-terminal. I use #inxi almost every day but I always use the terminal, and inxi does many things. Since I use it to be a terminal only, I guess that's the closest I get to something that does one thing well on a daily basis. Also Kate but it does several things but it is really just a code editor. And #Filezilla. And often #acxi. I like using tools I made for my needs.

In #pinxi (next #inxi ) a full refactor of the venerable Battery module. A #Codeberg issue exposed the bad logic of the battery feature, which near as I can tell was roughly translated verbatim from the original bash during the #perl rewrite. I thought I'd redone all those but I missed battery section obviously. The only difference most users will see is fewer or more decimals. Issue was 0.01 Wh capacity and current charge. Which was prematurely trimmed to 0, actually string '0.0', aka true.

But wait, there's more #inxi cpu arcana!

Intel, for inexplicable reasons, decided to keep their family stuck on 6. Which leads to them running out of the 256 possible model ids (16x16). This leads them to resort to using stepping id to tell various series apart, which is a royal pain to track. I was hoping they'd stop and use 12 when they did 12th gen Alder Lake, but no such luck.

Why? I'm guessing some vendor hardcoded in family 6, or it's just a symptom of intel engineering problems.

4/

(#inxi arcana con'd)
Amd for family does this:
Extended Family : Family is:
Extended family + family.
So for say zen 2, cpuid shows 8F as family. 8 + F = 23, the hex of which is 17h, aka 16 + 7. 23 is what cpuinfo shows. 17h is what inxi uses internally.

Since this makes zero logical sense, I've had to update each family block with these 3 values.

I had zen 5 as Family 20, not 1A, cpuid BF, aka 11 + 15 aka 26 aka 1A.

Got that? Why isn't cpuid simply 1A? Who knows.
3/

Here's a peek into the arcana of #inxi research, which is then added to docs and tools, in #pinxi repo, in this case docs/inxi-cpu.txt and tools/cpu_arch.pl.
This is the data provided by cpuid binary. These are hex values.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPUID
Normally extended model 3 and model F would give 3F = 3x16 + 15 = 63. And that is how amd does their extended model : model ids.
/proc/cpuinfo shows this as an integer. So far so good.

But then amd does something which makes my head hurt:
(Con'd)
2/

Meanwhile on the #inxi front, https://youtu.be/bvHrJzB4-MQ?si=LCrrymqnQc5lVH4c
MooresLawIsDead got leaked specs for AMD Zen 7 cpus. With earlier zen 6 specs, this let me try to get support in before actual data appears. That's rare for cpus and gpus. I also realized I'd used the wrong family id for zen 5 cpus, which means advanced architecture data probably never showed.

This is an easy mistake to make because the way amd does their extended family id is different from how they do their extended model ids.
1/

With the quietest of whispers new #inxi 3.3.38 goes out the door. A few fixes, a few enhancements. But maybe the fewest changes in a new release. The main one was a syntax change for vulkan driver that made inxi show N/A always on newer systems.

Plus an actual sensors bug I found by pure chance. And an anonymous #OpenBSD dataset from a vm that exposed some invalid assumptions about values always being present for any given field name.

@dumpsterqueer you'll never miss github. All that happens when you move to @Codeberg is the signal to noise ratio skyrockets and you end up with mostly good issues. That's been my experience anyway.

At first I worried about losing all those eyeballs and followers but it quickly dawned on me their quality on gh was so low they were negatives.

My #inxi project keeps getting starred on gh despite having no commits for 1 yr and saying moved to cb. Not reading was my other peeve about gh users lol.

@arstechnica
Checked for #inxi gpu support. I'm not sure why this story was put out. Seems like every 6 months or so some site/channel discovers the #nvidia driver story. But doesn't research it.

Current status. Maxwell, Pascal, Volta (those 3 next legacy), along with Turing and newer (supported by #linux #kernel foss wrapper) supported in active driver branch (565.xx). The wrapper is not a driver.

Announced with git repo May 2022.

The actual foss driver is Nova. I think.
5/

@arstechnica I have to track nvidia drivers for #inxi and #sgfxi in *nix. What's surprising is how long it's taking to make pre Turing/Ampere drivers legacy. That was supposed to come over a year ago. Legacy does not mean no support. Legacy drivers get several years more support. There's nothing new here.

The cut happens because Turing and newer have moved most of driver into firmware. #Linux kernel will use open source wrapper to talk to firmware.
1/

Got a good #inxi #codeberg issue report. Graphics #Vulkan API item failed to show driver. Turns out that somewhere between vulkaninfo v. 1.3.255 and 1.3.296 they dropped the device driver summary data block. It was always also in a much larger and longer block but I'd never trusted the block name to be consistent. I still don't but there's no choice.This is fixed in #pinxi but sadly just missed the 3.3.37 release by a few days. Oh well. A #Mint user reported it after seeing driver: N/A always.

Found an obscure #Linux #distro #side that appears to be unique. That is, makes its own toolchain, which is what crazy from #frugalware said defines a base distro. Side uses #pisi package manager, #sysvinit and features #LXDE based #SDE with #pekwm or #openbox window manager.

These odd little distros generally help #inxi find and handle corner cases it had missed. In this case didn't have pisi pm/SDE handled.

Wish I'd noticed side before inxi 3.3.37 went out but this always happens.

And yes, just sent the #inxi 3.3.37 package off to #TinyCore - which is the last step of the process.

So that completes this 4 month release cycle. It would have been less but the monitor scaling feature of course turned into a rabbit hole.

But read the changelog if you are curious. It's long and thorough by design because it's the actual record of what changed, why, and what isn't currently doable. I use it often to find when why and how features are added or removed or changed.

New #inxi 3.3.37 goes out the door. Includes last minute workaround for 32 bit intel gen2 gpu eglinfo hang #mrmazda found. Probably a regression in i915 driver. And the big monitor scaling feature.
Full changelog here:
https://codeberg.org/smxi/inxi/src/branch/master/inxi.changelog

This is the longest between releases in quite a while so nice to get some nifty enhancements and fixes in.

This also introduces the improved option syntax for -b -e, which gets rid of a peeve of -F being impossible to explain.

Churning through an unexpectedly complicated series of updates in #pinxi next #inxi

Got the gpu monitor scaling handled which required fixing xrandr and wayland tool parsing and logic. False assumptions led to errors in output.

--force options were glitchy and inconsistently used and documented. Cleaning that up exposed more glitches, like --no-man not working in inxi due to opaque hash names.

It's surprising how fixing docs, help, and man exposes bugs in logic. Still polishing that up.

Just released new #pinxi (next #inxi ) has first draft of working monitor scaling support. The higher physical screen resolutions get, the more scaling is used. #mrmazda had off and on mentioned this as nice to have feature.

Not easy to figure out data sources but seems to work with #xrandr and wayland-info now.

I realized I could do scaling on my #xfce with #x11 which made dev a lot easier. Plus a good data file of #wayland scaled 3 monitor setup.

Updated graphics docs with new res section.

I should probably get off my butt and release next #inxi. There haven't been any real issues for a while now. Though #mrmazda had an advanced display resolution enhancement request but it takes work and thinking to do. And testing.

@jk your fundamental error was obvious in your Initial pist. You believe distros are little corporations competing against each other for supreme dominance.

This is profoundly wrong.

Distro means distribution. Of what? An often massive set of free software projects, #Linux kernel and #LibreOffice being 2 of the larger. #inxi being a smaller.