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An artistic update

13 October 2019virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

I posted back in February about some of the stuff I’d been doing in Procreate on my iPad, and I’m overdue for another post! I haven’t been doing as much in the intervening months, as there’s been lots of other things taking up my time and I haven’t felt as inspired but I still managed to do a few.

I’ve quite enjoy using Procreate’s Acrylic brush, you can get some really nice layer and lighting effects with it, and I used only that brush for this one:

A painting of a window at night, from inside a room. There's sheer curtains over the window, a candle is on a small table at the right casting light, and there's a tall cupboard at the left in the shadows. — The Window

I don’t actually remember the brush I used for this next one, but I definitely took full advantage of Procreate’s symmetry guides so I could get it properly even:

A painting of a cybernetic woman, her eyes look like blue glass and she has green and very shiny "skin". She has a purple hood over the back of her head. — Cybernetic Woman

This next one is interesting, I was intending on the main structures that take up the top two-thirds of the image to look like a big craggy mountain range, but I showed it to Kristina and she can’t see it as anything but a tornado coming down!

A painting of a craggy grey mountain range in the top two-thirds of the image, with a river of fire making its way the whole way across the image, and a bunch of conifers at the bottom. — The River

I quite enjoy doing epic-looking landscapes, and this one ended up starting out in a very different place than it finished. It was much more brown, the feature in the middle was a river, and the sky was a sunset which I didn’t manage to get looking how I wanted. In the end it became very much inspired by the aesthetic of the Hive from Destiny!

A painting looking down a desolate grey rocky valley. A deep black rift runs down the middle with a sickly green glow at the bottom, at the left is a crystal embedded in the ground with the same green glow coming from it. At the right is a cave entrance in the valley wall with another glowing crystal. The sky is awash with stars, and the moon peeks from behind the valley peak at the far left. — The Emergence

The paintings above were all done from about March to half-way through May, then there was a bit of a break until July.

I decided to take advantage of Procreate’s drawing guide again, this time with the perspective guide. I was aiming for buildings in a futuristic city but the thing that I always struggle with is details and a sense of scale, so it didn’t turn out to be anything but big blocks. ? Still pleased with the shadows and sense of lighting though.

A very clean geometric painting of grey and blue city buildings. The sky is purple and the light is coming from the very right, the buildings casting shadows to the left. — City Buildings

This next one I did as “speed-painting”, and did it in about 45 minutes! It was a combination of the acrylic brush and a palette knife brush from a big third-party brush pack I bought.

A painting of a volcano erupting atop a hill, the hill is surrounded by taller mountains all around, and the sky above is filled with striated dark orange clouds. — Volcano

Then lastly, this one was done in August, again with Procreate’s symmetry guide on! I was going to give her a witch’s hat but couldn’t get it looking right.

A head and shoulders portrait painting of a white woman with piercing green eyes, long red hair, and dark green lipstick. She’s wearing a dark purple top, and there’s a bright light shining behind her that’s lighting up her shoulders and the very edges of her hair. — The Witch

I also had a burst of inspiration and got some more miniature painting done! I’m still working my way through the Dark Imperium box set I got nearly two years ago, but the main impetus here was Games Workshop releasing their “Contrast” line of paints. They’re essentially a base coat plus wash combined into one single coat, and they’re seriously incredible. Dark Imperium comes with twenty poxwalkers which I was dreading having to paint, but the Contrast paints made them far quicker to deal with! There’s twenty models (but only ten unique ones), and I’ve done half of them so far.

As part of doing this, I also discovered how much better the miniatures look when you apply a varnish to them! The Contrast paint specifically comes off a lot more easily than regular paint, so varnish is a necessity, but it also really makes the colours pop, they’re a lot more vibrant than without it.

I also finally finished off the Plague Marine champion that’d been sitting there mostly-finished for months, and I’m really happy with the base I did. I had a bunch of really old Space Marines from a starter painting box that a friend had given me, so I sacrificed one of them and cut him up to adorn the base, and it looks absolutely fantastic.

It’s fascinating seeing the evolution of Games Workshop’s plastic miniatures, back when I started (*cough*24 years ago*cough*) plastic was the cheap and crappy option, and the pewter (or lead as they were back then!) miniatures were much more detailed. Nowadays it’s very much the reverse, the plastic is INSANELY detailed — have a look at the full-size poxwalkers on Flickr and zoom all the way in — and the pewter ones are a bit shit by comparison.

There’s also a small-scale Warhammer 40,000 game called Kill Team that I’ve started playing at work with some people, and have bought the new box set that was released in September. It’s similar to Shadespire in that your squads only have a small number of miniatures so it’s much more feasible to get them painted, but it comes with a bunch of absolutely amazing-looking terrain. I put it together and took a couple of photos prior to it being painted, just to get a sense of the scale and what the terrain looks like.

A photo of some Death Guard and Space Wolves miniatures on the new Kill Team starter box terrain. The terrain itself is unpainted grey plastic but is towering over the miniatures and has a very steampunk aesthetic to it.

I’ve finished painting a couple of pieces of it, but it’s so big that I don’t have a large enough white backdrop that’ll fit the whole terrain piece! Photos will definitely be forthcoming once I do get said backdrop though. ?

More coding adventures: Migrating to TypeScript and Express.js

18 September 2019virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

Three and a half years ago I blogged about learning Javascript and Node.js, and then again at the start of 2018 about my progress and also learning React, and I figured it was about time for another update! This time it’s been moving from Sails.js (which is a web framework based on Express.js) to using raw Express itself and moving the language from Javascript to TypeScript (TypeScript is basically Javascript, except with type-checking).

At work, we migrated the codebase of the server that runs our internal platform-as-a-service from Javascript to TypeScript, and I figured it seemed like a neat thing to learn. TypeScript ultimately gets compiled down to Javascript, and I started by trying to just write my Sails.js modules as TypeScript and have them compiled to Javascript in the locations that Sails expected them to be in, but this proved to be a fair bit of a pain so I figured I’d just go whole-hog and move to raw Express.js while I was at it.

I did a whole heap of reading, and ended up coming across this absolutely excellent series of blog posts that takes you through using Express and TypeScript step by step. It took about a month all up, and you can really see how much code was removed (this excludes Node’s package-lock.json file because it’s massive):

$ git diff --stat a95f378 47f7a56 -- . ':(exclude)package-lock.json'
[...]
 151 files changed, 2183 insertions(+), 4719 deletions(-)

My website looks absolutely no different in any way, shape, or form after all of this, but when writing code it’s quite nice having all of Visual Studio Code‘s smarts (things like complaining when you’ve missed a required parameter when calling a function, auto-completion, and on).

Having moved to raw Express.js from Sails.js means I have a much better understanding of how it all works under the bonnet… Sails is great for getting up and running quickly, but there’s a lot of magic that happens in order to accomplish that, and more than once I’ve run into the boundaries of where the magic ends and have had to try to hack my way around it. Express by itself is a lot more widely-used than Sails too, so if I run into problems I generally have an easier time finding an answer to it!

Twenty years of VirtualWolf

28 June 201926 January 2020virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

Today twenty years ago marks the earliest point I can find of where I started going by “VirtualWolf” online! That’s over half my life. 😮

I had posted previously back in 2009 (back when this blog was on LiveJournal) about being VirtualWolf online for around ten years at that point but it was pretty vague in terms of dates, and I’ve since consolidated all my old websites and put them up online. Further digging reminded me that I have a whole bunch of other sites that I never actually finished — I should add those to archive.virtualwolf.org too, now I think about it — and there was one called “DevlinSlayer’s Imperium” from February of 1999 so it was clearly after that.

The earliest mention of VirtualWolf I can find is from my Realm of the Wolf site from the 28th of June 1999, and the name of the Myth II map I’d created, “Realm of the VirtualWolf”. Unfortunately that file has been lost and I cannot for the life of me find the original anymore. I was able to recover all but one of my Marathon maps from various places, but I can’t even find the original pre-compiled image files for the Myth II map. The only image related is the overhead map view from the website I created after Realm of the Wolf.

Since that point, it’s been all VirtualWolf, all the time. I’ve owned the domain virtualwolf.org since the start of 2002, and have made a point of ensuring all the old links to images I’ve posted here and on Ars Technica still work even now.

Here’s to me making a post in twenty years saying “Forty years of VirtualWolf!”. 😛

Ten years of marriage!

9 June 20199 June 2019virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

Ten years ago today, on a very cold and windy but at least sunny day at Dee Why headlands, Kristina and I got married!

TEN. YEARS.

I have no idea how it’s been ten years, it doesn’t remotely feel like it’s been that long. I’ve mentioned on this blog before, and on LiveJournal before it, that everything is so effortless, and it still remains true!

We originally knew each other from Everything2, which is still around but very much dead compared to the old days, and has been for many years now (my registration date there is May 2000). There was a bit of a mass-migration from E2 over to LiveJournal a couple of years afterwards, and I have a happy birthday wish from Kristina on one of my LJ posts from 2003! She said I was always “That guy in Australia who likes metal”, but we got to chatting more towards the end of 2007 and then on a whim decided to come visit in March of 2008, and the rest, as they say, is history!

With both of us being keen photographers we tend to be behind the camera instead of in front of it, but we’ve got a few photos together over the years!

Kristina and I — The first one of us together, in August 2008 in Boston the first time I visited (we don’t have any of the two of us from March when Kristina first visited Sydney). This was right before I trimmed my goatee entirely down because it’d started just triangulating outwards and getting all wispy.

Untitled — November 2008, we were up in the Blue Mountains when we got the call that the engagement ring was ready to be picked up!

Selfie! — This was taken in May 2014 when we bought the Fujifilm X100S. Kristina looks so hilariously unimpressed.

In the time we’ve been married we’ve been to:

And that’s not counting the day trips or single night trips of which there have been plenty.

Here’s to many more years of adventures to come! ❤️

New bathroom!

8 June 20198 June 2019virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

The bathroom in our house was always a little bit crap, it’d clearly been done on the cheap and many years ago, and we wanted to get a new one put in. Conveniently, my parents were going away on holidays for three weeks last month so we decided that this was a pretty perfect time to do it. We schlepped our stuff over to their place and stayed over there while the old bathroom was ripped out and a brand new shiny one put in! (We also got the second toilet redone in the same style, so there were no toilets at all hence the inability to stay at home while this was being done; also Beanie would have lost his mind when with the tradies being over all the time).

I borrowed a really wide-angle lens from a friend in order to properly take before and after photos, this is the old bathroom (the shower screen is filthy because we’d given up on cleaning it by this point).

A wide-angle view of a bathroom, the floor tiles are sickly grey and the grout looks dark just from being dirty. A cheap-looking white vanity with a single sink is in the middle of the photo, the shower screen around the shower is at the left and is totally soap scum-encrusted. The tiles in the shower are black with discoloured grout between them. A toilet roll holder is attached by suction cup to the outside of the shower screen next to the toilet, that's just visible at the bottom-left.

A wide-angle view of a bathroom looking towards the bath, the floor tiles are sickly grey and the grout looks dark just from being dirty. The bath is in the middle of the photo, with black tiles around it, the shower screen is at the right of the photo and the vanity is just visible at the bottom-left.

The grout on the floor was all dirty and discoloured, the tiles were really thin, clearly cheap, and also quite ugly, and the vanity was really cheap-feeling, and we’d had to clean mould out of the inside of the cupboards more than once.

Kristina was interested in doing the bathroom in a much more modern and minimalist style than we’d done with the kitchen, to try to minimise the amount of nooks and crannies that would need to be cleaned, and to ensure it didn’t end up looking cluttered. We decided on white wall tiles, and slate grey floor tiles, plus a wall-hung vanity and wall-mounted taps.

The guy who was overseeing the whole lot sent us daily updates on how it was going, and it was fascinating to see everything ripped out and just the bare frame and insulation after they’d finished on the first day.

The bathroom with no tiles or gyprock on the bottom half of the walls, just bare timber frame and insulation.

After that, each day’s updates were just more and more things being put in, we were able to come back on the Saturday of the third week though the shower screen itself wasn’t in by that point. On the Friday of the following week the guy came to install it, and with that it was done, and it looks absolutely amazing!

The fantastic new bathroom, a white wall-hung double-basin vanity and wall-mounted chrome taps are in the middle of the photo, a shaving cabinet with mirror above, and two lovely in-ceiling LED lights above that. To the left is a waist-high thin wall tiled in white, and that side of the shower screen starts at the top of the wall. The wall tiles are white and the floor tiles are a dark slate grey.

There is a towel on the wall that's a dark pink, and on the right of the vanity is a small towel ring that has a hand towel of the same dark pink colour.

The fantastic new bathroom, a white wall-hung double-basin vanity and wall-mounted chrome taps are at the right of the photo. In the centre is a waist-high thin wall tiled in white, and that side of the shower screen starts at the top of the wall. Next to the wall sits a white ceramic toilet, and the toilet roll holder is a chrome metal one that's attached to the waist-height wall. The wall tiles are white and the floor tiles are a dark slate grey.

The fantastic new bathroom, a white wall-hung double-basin vanity and wall-mounted chrome taps are at the left of the photo. In the centre is the bath surrounded by white wall tiles, at the right is a waist-high thin wall tiled in white, and that side of the shower screen starts at the top of the wall. The wall tiles are white and the floor tiles are a dark slate grey.

A dark pink towel hangs on the wall over the left end of the bath.

There’s lovely LED lights above the vanity, and the mirror is actually a shaving cabinet so we can put stuff into it and not have to be rummaging around in a dark cupboard. As we discovered with the kitchen and the drawers in there, drawers are far superior to cupboards for anything but really shallow depths.

We didn’t even get anything moved in terms of layout, it’s all in the exact same position as it was before, but it just feels so much larger and more spacious, it’s wonderful!

Configuring a virtual machine with Linode StackScripts

3 March 2019virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

I’ve been using Linode to host myself a Linux virtual machine since 2011, originally so I could run Jira on it (now long since moved to a cloud-hosted instance), since my entire job was supporting it back then, and also just generally to dabble with Linux and the command line. I started out with CentOS 5 as that’s what we were using at work at the time, and slowly installed more and more random things on it.

When I decided it was time to upgrade to CentOS 7 in 2015, I put together a page in Confluence noting down each thing I was doing, as I was starting with a fresh new virtual machine and migrating only the bits and pieces I needed to it. That was better, but still ended up with a bit of a sprawling page and me forgetting to update it after I’d completed the initial migration. I eventually shut down my whole Dreamhost account and moved solely to having my website and blog and various miscellany (15 years worth of images from LiveJournal entries and posts on Ars Technica, as two examples) hosted on the Linode. Unfortunately I wrote down absolutely none of how I configured it all!

As part of playing around with my YubiKey and setting up GPG agent forwarding, I discovered that the version of GnuPG that CentOS 7 ships with is too old to support agent forwarding from newer versions, so I decided to spin up a new Linode but with Debian 9 instead (since thatdoes support agent forwarding), and migrate everything to it. This time, however, I would do it programatically!

Linode have a thing called StackScripts that let you start up a fresh VM and run a bunch of commands on boot to configure it how you need. Over the course of probably two months, I built up a Bash script to install and configure all my various software packages at boot to a fresh Debian 9 machine to configure it how I needed, and with everything stored in a Git repository. That included also adding Git repositories with my Nginx and systemd configurations as well as running a script on my existing CentOS 7 VM to grab database dumps of my website and our respective blogs, as well as the aforementioned 15 years’ worth of images and other files.

The end result is a ~500 line Bash script that’s version-controlled so I can see exactly what I did, with any new changes I’m making since I cut over to the Debian VM being saved in that as well, and the same with my systemd/Nginx/everything-else configuration! As long as I’m disciplined about remembering to update my StackScript when I make software changes, whenever the next big move to a new VM is should be a hell of a lot simpler.

Art update, February 2019

25 February 201925 February 2019virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

As previously mentioned, I’ve been enjoying the hell out of my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, and have been doing a whole lot more drawing/sketching/painting since then. I moved my Mastodon account over to a much smaller instance, mastodon.art, which as you’d expect is very focused on art and has a lot of extremely creative people on it, and I’ve been getting a daily dose of inspiration. (As a side-note, I can’t recommend enough moving to a smaller Mastodon instance as opposed to one of the huge ones like mastodon.social… it really does feel much more like a community, and the local timeline is something you actually can keep up with and interact with).

I found a really good series of tutorials on drawing people and facial expressions, and drew this!

Four cartoon-style heads: a white girl with long blonde hair looking unimpressed, a bald Asian man looking shocked, a black man with big hair and a goatee looking sleepy, and an Indian man smirking with one eyebrow raised.

After that were a bunch more extremely munted-looking people which I’m not going to post, but then I eventually got my proportions better.

A portrait sketch of a pale red-haired woman with green eyes, smirking and raising one eyebrow.

One of the artist-types I follow on Mastodon is Noah Bradley, he’s done paintings for all sorts of places including for Magic: The Gathering! He said he biggest piece of advice was “Use more reference!”, i.e. have an actual picture/photo/whatever next to the thing you’re drawing so you can get the proportions and such correct. I took that advice to heart, and painted this picture of what ended up as a queen!

A painting of a white woman from the chest up, lit from the left side while her right side is heavily shadowed. She has long braided blonde hair and is wearing a purple high-collared dress. Behind her and to her left and right are glowing red eldritch runes, giving a faint red tinge to her outline.

She looks nothing like the original photo, of course, but it really helped to get the angles of everything correct. I also really started getting the hang of lighting, I’m so pleased with the light from the runes that’s reflecting off her hair, especially on the right.

Lily’s Christmas present was the first-gen Apple Pencil for her own iPad and she’s been absolutely drawing her heart out as well. One of the things she likes drawing are My Little Pony characters… she’s never watched the show but enjoys making up her own characters. She set me a challenge of making a character myself, with the theme of “neon”, and I took that opportunity to do some more practice with lighting (see the linked image for the full effect). I found an outline online and traced over that for the shape, but the colour is all me!

A side-on painting of a My Little Pony character on a black background, coloured in dark blue with neon blue lightning at the top of her hooves and a dark purple tail with a purple neon light running down it.

We also took my old teddy bear Neddy out, who I’ve had since I was a year old, and used him for some lighting practice.

Then my latest work was Maria Franz from the band Heilung! They do epic pagan/folk music and it’s absolutely fantastic (see the video of their live show). I introduced Lily to them and she’s now completely obsessed. She sent me a picture of Maria Franz that she’d traced over and coloured in, and I realised that’d be a perfect bit of subject matter.

A painting of a woman from the chest up, she has antlers on her head and long red hair, and has headgear that goes over her forehead, with tassles obscuring her eyes.

I had a picture of her open in Safari in split-screen view so I could get the outline and proportions right, and Procreate tells me this was nearly 10 hours all up! I’m absolutely stoked with how it ended up, and just seeing the difference between my earliest stuff and now is great, even though it’s only been two months. The “Use reference” mantra is one that I’m definitely taking to heart.

Five years of Beanie!

16 February 201916 February 2019virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

As of today, we’ve had Beanie for five years!

We got him as a rescue dog when he was a year old, he’d already had three previous owners before us, and the house he was living in when we got him had two other much larger dogs that apparently were taking most of the food and generally bullied him. The idiot woman who owned him also had him on some “raw chicken” diet where he’d have basically just raw chicken pieces, and his hair was all short and his tail was permanently very tightly curled — which is how he gets when he’s nervous or anxious — and didn’t wag at all for the first three or so weeks that he was living at ours.

A very young-looking Beanie when he was one year old at the end of our hallway in the midst of running back to us. — One of the very first photos of Beanie shortly after we got him.

He had quite bad separation anxiety, we eventually went to the vet and got some anti-anxiety medicine because he would scratch at the door repeatedly when we’d leave the house, to the point that he was scratching the paint off it. The medicine combined with giving him a marrowbone treat whenever we leave for a period of more than an hour or two has definitely helped, he now gets excited we’re we’re getting ready to leave because he often gets a treat. 😛

He’s never liked other dogs, and generally still doesn’t, but we were able to take him to puppy training session where he at least got some exposure to dogs around his size, and that led to our now-regular visits with Leo!

Leo, a Jack Russell, and Beanie facing each other about to leap at each other. — Leo and Beanie playing in Leo’s backyard.

Because Kristina and I are out of the house for a good 10-11 hours a day, we have a dog walker to comes every day after lunch to let him out and give him a walk. We have her come around anyway if one of us is working from home or sick, and he gets so excited when she arrives.

Beanie is a good boy, he never gets into any trouble whatsoever: he doesn’t chew things, he goes to bed at night when we do and doesn’t get out of bed in the morning until we’re up (or even after we’re up on occasion), if one of us is sick he’ll happily snuggle up on the lounge with us. One of his favourite things to do is to “up” at us, which he frequently does after we’re lying in bed and getting ready to go to sleep!

Beanie sitting up on his hind legs, smiling. — He thinks he’s people!

The only irritation is his bark… there is ZERO wind-up or warning, and it’s an extremely loud and sharp bark that gives you a heart-attack! If he’s bored he’ll find things to bark at which can be super-annoying, but usually a quick walk around the block will tire him out and he calms down afterwards. Given how destructive other dogs can be though, I think we have it pretty good with Beanie. 🙂

Installing Linux Mint 19.1 on a Late-2010 MacBook Air

9 February 201924 December 2022virtualwolfWordpress38 Comments

(Update December 2022: As suggested in the latest comments, this entire blog post is pretty much redundant now! Linux Mint 21.1 installs without a hitch, even using Cinnamon, and I have fully-functional brightness and sound keys straight out of the box.)

(Update December 2020: I successfully upgraded from Linux Mint 19.3 to Linux Mint 20 by following the official Linux Mint instructions. The only additional post-upgrade work I had to do was re-adding the Section "Device" bit to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/nvidia-drm-outputclass-ubuntu.conf as described below to get the brightness keys working again.)

(Update May 2020: I’ve re-run through this whole process using Linux Mint 19.3 and have updated this blog post with new details. Notably, no need to install pommed, and including the specific voodoo needed for the 2010 MacBook Air from Ask Ubuntu regarding PCI-E bus identifiers.)

We have a still perfectly usable Late-2010 MacBook Air (“MacBookAir3,2”, model number A1369), but with macOS 10.14 Mojave dropping support for Macs older than 2012 (it’s possible to extremely-hackily install it on older machines but I’d rather not go down that route), I decided I’d try installing Linux on it. The MacBook Air still works fine, if a bit slow, on macOS 10.13 but I felt like a bit of nerding!

Installation

My distribution of choice was Linux Mint, which is Ubuntu-based but less with the constant changes that Canonical keep making. The first hurdle right out of the gate was which “edition” to choose: Cinnamon, MATE, or xfce. There was zero info on the website about which to choose, I started with Cinnamon but that kept crashing when booting from the installation ISO and giving me a message about being in fallback mode. It turns out Cinnamon is the one with all the graphical bells and whistles, and it appears that an eight-year ultralight laptop’s video card isn’t up to snuff, so I ended up on “MATE” edition, which looks pretty much identical but works fine.

My installation method was using Raspberry Pi Imager to write the installation ISO to a spare SD card (despite the name, it can be used to write any ISO: scroll all the way down in the “Choose OS” dialog and select “Use custom”). Installing Linux requires you to partition the SSD using Disk Utility, I added a 2GB partition for the /boot partition, and another 100GB to install Linux itself onto. It doesn’t matter which format you choose as it’ll be reformatted as part of the installation process.

After partitioning, reboot with the SD card in and the Option key held down, and choose the “EFI Boot” option. The installer is quite straightforward, but I chose the custom option when it asked how to format the drive, formatted both the 2GB and 100GB partitions as ext4, with the 2GB one mounted at /boot and the 100GB at /. The other part is to install the bootloader onto that /boot partition, to make it easy to get rid of everything if you want to go back to single-partition macOS and no Linux.

Post-install

The next hurdle was video card drivers. Mint comes with an open-source video card driver called “Nouveau” which works but isn’t very performant, and there was lots of screen tearing as I’d scroll or move windows around. This being Linux, it was naturally not as simple as just installing the official Nvidia one and being done with, because that resulted in a black screen at boot. 😛 I did a massive amount of searching and eventually stumbled across this answer on AskUbuntu which worked where nothing else did: I followed those instructions and was able to successfully install the official Nvidia drivers without getting a black screen on boot!

(Update May 2020: I honestly don’t remember whether I had to go through Step 1 of Andreas’ instructions, “Install Ubuntu in UEFI mode with the Nvidia drivers”, but check for the existence of the directory /sys/firmware before running the rest of this. That directory is only created if you’ve booted in EFI mode. If it doesn’t exist, follow the link in Step 1).

I’m copying the details here for posterity, in case something happens to that answer, but all credit goes to Andreas there. These details are specifically for the Late 2010 MacBook Air with a GeForce 320M video card, so using this on something else might very well break things.

Create the file /etc/grub.d/01_enable_vga.conf and paste the following contents into it:

cat << EOF
setpci -s "00:17.0" 3e.b=8
setpci -s "02:00.0" 04.b=7
EOF

Then make the new file executable and update the grub config files:

$ sudo chmod 755 /etc/grub.d/01_enable_vga.conf
$ sudo update-grub

And then restart. Double-check that the register values have been set to 8 for the bridge device and 7 for the display device:

 $ sudo setpci -s "00:17.0" 3e.b
 08
 $ sudo setpci -s "02:00.0" 04.b
 07

Next, load up the “Driver Manager” control panel and set the machine to use the Nvidia drivers, once it’s finished doing its thing — which took a couple of minutes — restart once more, and you’ll be running with the much-more-performant Nvidia drivers!

At this point I realised that the brightness keys on the keyboard didn’t work. Cue a whole bunch more searching, with fix being to add the following snippet to the bottom of /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/nvidia-drm-outputclass-ubuntu.conf:

Section "Device"
  Identifier     "Device0"
  Driver         "nvidia"
  VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
  BoardName      "GeForce 320M"
  Option         "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"
EndSection

And now I have a fully-functioning Linux installation, with working sleep+wake, audio, wifi, and brightness!

I’m certainly not going to be switching to it full-time, and it feels like a lot more fragile than macOS, but it’s fun to muck around with a new operating system. And with 1Password X, I’m able to use 1Password within Firefox under Linux too!

New shiny: 11″ iPad Pro and Apple Pencil 2

1 January 20191 January 2019virtualwolfWordpressLeave a comment

I bought an iPad mini 2 back in April of 2014, which was the first mini with a retina display. It got fairly slow with the upgrade to iOS 11, and even though iOS 12 gave it a bit of a shot in the arm, it still ultimately struggled to do much beyond very basic web browsing and social media things — not entirely surprising given it’s five years old at this point. Apple announced the latest version of the iPad Pro at the end of October last year, along with an updated Apple Pencil, and all the reviews said the iPad was absolutely gobsmackingly fast (to the point where it beats all but the highest-end Core i9 15″ MacBook Pro in a number of CPU benchmarks), so I decided to finally retire the iPad mini and upgrade.

Holy. Crap.

It’s honestly one of the most impressive pieces of technology I’ve used in recent years; almost the entire thing is screen, there’s only enough bezel to comfortably hold the edges and no more, and it’s about as thin as I recall the iPhone 4/4S being, with the same industrial design. I’m still on the iPhone 7 so haven’t used Face ID before, and it works like magic. The screen has a 120Hz refresh rate as opposed to the standard 60Hz of most displays, and it means that everything feels just subtly more fluid and responsive. Everything I do on it is just totally effortless, it responds immediately without any hint of lag or hesitation.

However, I think my favourite part so far is the Apple Pencil. It’s much the same as the original in terms of usage, but magnetically pairs and charges on the right side of the iPad, and has an option to double-tap the Pencil itself to switch between your current drawing tool and the eraser tool. It has pressure and angle sensitivity, so can behave exactly like an actual pencil. Turn it sideways and use the edge and you can do subtle shading, and the harder you press the darker the shade.

The built-in Notes app has basic Pencil support, but I’ve been using Procreate — which I actually originally bought on my iPad mini but didn’t use very much due to it being a pain trying to do any sort of detail with a finger — and it’s so awesome. It’s absolutely not going to win any sort of awards, but I’ve done two things so far and am really happy with both of them.

The first was done with the drawing assist turned on and an isometric grid, followed by a whole bunch of layers to get the lighting looking right.

And the second is just a pencil sketch. Like I said, objectively it’s not very good, but not having done anything like this before, I’m still very pleased.

I had a photo open in Safari in split-screen view beside Procreate, the woman in my sketch looks absolutely nothing like the photo but it was more just generally to get the angles right. 😛 My having done photography definitely helped with the shading because I could easily visualise in my head how the shadows would fall.

I need to make sure I keep up the practise so I can improve!

I also remembered that GarageBand on iOS is a thing, and goddamn, it’s also impressive. It’s the same idea as in GarageBand on the Mac with adding preset loops of instruments and combining them together — or recording your own — but they’ve done an amazing job of translating that to something that’s usable with a touch interface. I’d made a couple of songs in GarageBand for Mac previously (nearly twelve years ago now, jesus), but not really anything since.

I bought a USB-C to 3.5mm headphone adapter for the iPad so I could use my big Audio Technica headphones — doing audio work requires very low latency, and Bluetooth has way too much latency, to the point where if you try to use Bluetooth headphones with GarageBand on iOS it’ll give you a big warning to that effect — and did a bunch of dabbling the other day, and made another new song!

I’m very interested to see what Apple does with iOS 13 this year, because the iPad Pro’s hardware is astonishingly capable, but it feels like the software could be doing more. I’ve hooked up our spare Bluetooth keyboard and dabbled around in that and it’s neat, but there’s not enough support for keyboard shortcuts even in Apple’s own applications . In Messages, for instance, you can use Cmd-↑ and Cmd-↓ to switch between conversations, but there’s no way to get the focus back to the input field once you’ve done so… you have to reach for the screen. There’s an official Apple keyboard cover that turns your iPad into something resembling a laptop, but I don’t know how well it would work remaining steady on a lap on a train.

All that said, I’m absolutely stoked with the new iPad, and am seriously keen to see the software catch up to the capabilities of the hardware!