You know software is written really well when it’s able to use all cores as needed, properly.
I keep getting impressed with what ffmpeg can do.
Antranig Vartanian
December 17, 2022
Category Archives: Tech
Antranig Vartanian
December 16, 2022
Well, it time to do upgrades on my server. expect this blog will be offline for a while as well.
How long were we up anyway?
root@pingvinashen:~ # uptime 9:41PM up 270 days, 18:36, 4 users, load averages: 0.15, 0.36, 0.38
Not bad, huh?
See you soon!
FreeBSD arm64.aarch64 on QEMU/UTM with better (but not perfect) graphics
A week ago I posted about Running arm64.aarch64 FreeBSD on QEMU/UTM.app on Apple Silicon, and looks like
- Many people liked that post
- Everyone asked about running graphics (Xorg)
It took me a while but in the end it was, again, a simple change.
All you have to do is to add this single line to /boot/loader.conf
efi_max_resolution="1920x1080"Now, QEMU’s display will not be 1080p, but it will be the following
VT(efifb): resolution 1024x768Here are some screenshots
Here’s also Firefox doing an HTML5 test. As you can see, it passed the exam!
However, I’d like to get more resolution out of this. If you know how, please let me know.
That’s all folks…
Running arm64.aarch64 FreeBSD on QEMU/UTM.app on Apple Silicon
Around a year ago I got an M1 MacBook Air for work. At this point, a lot of people that I know use these Apple Silicon machines.
While my personal machine is running FreeBSD, many times I’ve been in a situation where I need to run FreeBSD on my M1 MacBook Air, at least as a Virtual Machine.
For 9 months I’ve been running the AMD64 version of FreeBSD on QEMU/UTM.app using emulation. It gets the job done.
But whenever I want to do FreeBSD development, I need a fast machine. While M1 is pretty fast, VM emulation is still slow.
The problem is that whenever I booted the arm64.aarch64 FreeBSD on QEMU, it would use so much CPU on the host, that my battery would die in an hour or so.
After a lot of searching, I finally found this, this and this, which eventually got me to this page on the handbook
1. Set Boot Loader Variables
The most important step is to reduce thekern.hztunable to reduce the CPU utilization of FreeBSD under the Parallels environment. This is accomplished by adding the following line to/boot/loader.conf:
kern.hz=100Without this setting, an idle FreeBSD Parallels guest will use roughly 15% of the CPU of a single processor iMac®. After this change the usage will be closer to 5%.
Configuring FreeBSD on Parallels
So I tried that, and here you go!
Ahh, finally, I can do some work.
That’s all folks…
DND IRL
What does modern macOS and old-school Instant Messaging systems (like AIM or Pidgin) have in common?
They both support “Status”, you know, that thing we had in IMs, where you can set yourself to “Do Not Disturb” and your avatar becomes red.
macOS, as always, does not call that “Status”, instead they call is “Focus”, but it gets the job done.
So yes, I’d like an IRL (In Real Life) version of DND (Do Not Disturb). Maybe my ears should turn red, but most people would confuse it with some other emotions.
That’s all folks…
Bookmarklets are amazing, still
I don’t remember the first bookmarklet that I’ve used, but as far as I can tell, I’ve never stopped using them.
One of the nicest things of WordPress on iOS is that I can use 3D touch to write a post instantly.
Yet, somehow, I’ve been using a typical bookmark on my computer. So I’d click on the bookmark, which would open my WordPress instance, then I’d click on Add New Post.
Even if I had the Add New Post page bookmarked, it would be “somewhere” on my screen.
But with a bookmarklet, I can make it a popup, which usually would center, and there would be no distractions as well. Just content.
I’ve been running my own instance of Lobsters for a while (at letstalk.netter.am) and one of the niceties is Lobsters’ bookmarklet to submit links.
I realized that I should use a bookmarklet for writing posts as well.
So here it goes.
javascript:{window.open("https://your.wordpress.blog/wp-admin/post-new.php", "NewPost", "popup");void(0)}And just like that, I can write a new post instantly, as I did right now 🙂
Technically, the first argument can be any URL that you wanna have front and center. Hope this helps you to write/blog/tweet more.
That’s all folks…
iOS ships Dvorak, finally
I’m a huge fan of the Dvorak keyboard layout, but if there’s one thing I love more than “Evolved vs Engineered” solution debates, is that nothing wins the ”standardized” debate.
That being said, the main reason I never moved to Dvorak properly was always a device not having a proper keyboard. Sometimes it was my Android phone with a weird ROM, but most of times it was my iPhone.
However, I just learned that Apple shipped the Dvorak layout with iOS 16.
Here’s Lilith‘s iPhone running iOS 15
And here’s my iPhone running iOS 16
And I’ve gotta say, it’s not bad at all
That’s all folks…
Antranig Vartanian
September 23, 2022
I’m running two VMs on my M1 MacBook Air. An x86_64 FreeBSD and x86_64 LureOS (illuria‘s OS), both are emulated.
and yet, somehow, according to macOS, my browser is Using Significant Energy.
To be honest, I believe macOS, but the real question is, how did we get to a place where a piece of software is consuming more power than a complete Operating System?
The command command
According to the 2018 edition of The Open Group Base Specifications (Issue 7), there’s a command named command which executes commands.
Wait, macOS is OpenGroup UNIX 03 certified, right?
command running uname -aI tried tracing back the history, macOS is mostly based on FreeBSD, as we can see in their open-source code.
So I started tracing back the FreeBSD code, and I found the current one.
I found the oldest commit about command in FreeBSD’s source tree, but it said
Import the 4.4BSD-Lite2 /bin/sh sources
builtins.def
So I opened up the SVN tree of CSRG, and there I found this
date and time created 91/03/07 20:24:04 by bostic
builtins.def
However, if I knew how to use SVNWeb, I’m pretty sure I’d navigate around the /old/sh directory.
It’s funny, how this line# NOTE: bltincmd must come first!
Is both in the macOS code AND the CSRG code from 30 years ago.
That’s all folks…
BSDCan 2022 Talks and Scary Thumbnail
I don’t know if it’s YouTube that chose this thumbnail or if it was someone from BSDCan, but I’ve gotta say, I love it! xD
But in all seriousness, you can find my talk “Own The Stack: FreeBSD from a Vendor’s Perspective by Antranig Vartanian (ft. Faraz Vahedi)” on YouTube.
There’s a whole playlist, with each talk more interesting than the other.
Looks like I know what I will be doing this weekend ☺️