Recent content in Blog on Victoria's Website
This blog has moved to a new section. Please be sure to update your feed reader to point to the new RSS feed as well. Old posts will remain in this path for the foreseeable future, though most have been brought over to the new section (unless they are woefully out of date). See this post to learn why I have made this change.
I’ve been playing a lot on my Analogue Pocket lately. It is a handheld game console capable of playing 2D retro games from consoles up to and including the GBA through the use of an FPGA to perfectly recreate the experience of playing on real hardware. Aside from being able to play with nearly no lag (especially compared to emulation), I’ve found that Analogue Pocket is better for my…
I first learned how to program at the age of 13, intending to write mods for 3rd generation Pokémon games—which incidentally are still the target of modding efforts today. I only shipped my first piece of software written for real users when I was 29. Yes, I spent a larger portion of my life knowing how to program and not doing anything with it beyond fiddling than I had spent not knowing how to…
To my surprise, I have a new app to announce. That’s it. That’s all it is. Stask is a task tracking app that uses a stack to manage all manner of work items, from massive projects to tiny trifles ordinarily not worth mentioning. Unlike a to-do list, only the top item is visible at any point in time; Everything that isn’t the current task is held below. New projects, sub-tasks,…
To-do lists are often touted as the solution to task management. It makes sense on the surface—what better way to keep track of what needs to be done than by writing everything down in a list? This mode of task management has sprouted into a massive productivity industry selling notebooks, bullet journals, and an untold number of apps all of which promise to help the user finally get their life in…
Longtime readers might know of my longtime project to write a text editor to suit my unusual tastes. After over two years of development, I am now happy to report that Parchment is now available! Parchment is a very unusual text editing project. Despite appearances, Parchment has always been intended to be my editor for writing source code for software as well as published text. In fact, I am…
So, you want to start a blog. You probably don’t care for success—which is good, because you’re unlikely to find any—but you’d like somewhere to post your longform thoughts, not only formatted in a way that is much more readable than in a chat interface or a microblog but also much more discoverable over the long term than the same text would be in either other type of service.…
Hypothetically, let’s say you are an unpopular blogger well over a decade after blogging stopped being something self-styled “serious people” took seriously. Let’s say on top of that that you are a software developer who prioritizes creating minimal solutions that users and developers alike can wrap their heads around. Cherry on top—let’s say you abhor LLM chatbots…
In the world of software development, I am an anomaly. I don’t use syntax highlighting, meaning my code doesn’t colour itself based on its structure. I don’t use a debugger, so I need to test my code carefully from a more holistic perspective. I don’t use code suggestions or completions, instead requiring me to look up function names from a manual if I fail to recall them.…
As my Mastodon followers can attest, I have been playing a lot of Pokémon Pokopia since its release earlier this month. Pokémon is probably my single favourite game series ever, and despite being wholly unlike any other Pokémon game, Pokopia has me firmly in its grasp to the point where I have accepted the inevitability that I will pay an extra CA$40 or so for DLC expansions whenever they are…
Telepipe, my grpahical command-line shell for Linux, is now available on Flathub. If you run Linux and use command-line software, I suggest installing Telepipe so it’s ready for when you need it. This release comes after two months of full-time work on the app. As part of the work, I wrote several posts on this blog detailing why I wanted to write it and as well as the decisions I made…
Those who follow me on Mastodon know that I have continued to work on Telepipe, my in-development command-line shell for Linux. For better indexing—and for those who have missed my more timely updates—this is a summary of the major changes that have been made since my last status report. First, as usual: bugfixes and small tweaks. I discovered just a few days ago an odd bug in Telepipe’s…
Two weeks ago, I introduced Telepipe to the world. This application exists to facilitate new ways to interact with command-line software by forgoing the terminal that I believe has plagued the command-line for too long. Development has continued since then, and so today I’d like to share some of what has changed, and what has been added. Quality of Life Least notably, some of…
Previously on this blog, I explained why the terminal falls short on delivering a good experience in using the command-line. In it, I stated that I think a better alternative is possible. What I neglected to mention is that I’ve been building one such alternative, and it is shaping up quite nicely. Telepipe allows you to run command-line programs with an ease not found anywhere else. The…
A massive subset of software developers, programmers, IT professionals, and computer enthusiasts swear by the terminal. Its popularity has even seemed to grow over time. I myself have not been immune to its siren song, having spent many years using a workflow designed primarily around using the terminal. Development of software targeting the terminal is as popular as ever, because many users…
A strange longstanding Linux-ism is that clicking a mouse’s middle button will usually paste some text at the focused text cursor. Unlike the expected behaviour of a copy-paste clipboard, it’ll specifically paste the last string of text with was selected instead of explicitly copied. To many longtime Linux users, this behaviour is expected. To newer users, this behaviour tends to be…
“Embark on the train or be left behind,” say the AI boosters. “It’s the future of software development,” say the vibe coders. “Just one more prompt,” says the gambler. I’ve previously written about how I loathe the use of AI for communication, and about how embarrassing I find the whole situation to be. I am a fan of neither the technology nor the…
It is a tradition on this blog. The big number goes up, and I reflect on what happened the past year. Arbitrary though it is, I do find it useful and fun to reflect on the year after the fact. I tend to jump between many projects and attempted projects, along with writing whatever I want on this site. As my current project tends to attract most of my focus, it’s easy for me to forget that…
Home Alone is a holiday classic. It is at once a film about how creativity can overcome serious threats, but also about the importance of caring for those around you even if they’re annoying and stupid, and it’s also about how harmful it can be to judge strangers based on unreliable information. These are good messages for a Christmas movie to communicate to its audience, delivered by…
I’ve been playing Metal Gear Solid recently. As is to be expected, it is quite an enjoyable tactical espionage action adventure. The sealth gameplay is a little basic, but it’s compelling enough that a lack of mechanical nuance doesn’t bother me. The action is a little simpler compared to other Metal Gear games, but that is to be expected when working with a 2D handheld. If…
Like many Nintendo superfans, I played a lot of Mario Kart World when it launched alongside the Nintendo Switch 2 game system. Like many of this game’s players, I stopped playing online after some time. Unlike most fans, I have a very different reason for having done so. Software development is difficult. Game development is even more so. As a software developer, you are usually building a…
If you don’t care for preamble, the patch can be found here. Pokémon Emerald is a timeless classic. It boasts a deep endgame that can keep players engaged for a very long time, but it has a problem. To be more specific, there’s a problem that has kept me from playing the game how I wanted. Analogue Pocket is currently my favourite way to play 2D retro games. Unlike other similar…
If you aren’t already skeptical of this “AI” thing, this article isn’t going to change your mind. In fact, if you’ve already thrown your weight with the clowns running this circus then this article will likely simply entrench you in your existing belief. There are people who have used these applications, prompted them for a response, received one, analyzed its…
I am writing this on Sunday, the 2nd of November 2025. As of today, Daylight Savings Time has ended in most of Canada. Clocks have rolled back, and most people woke up this morning an hour later relative to their previous waking time—except for me. In March of this year, I decided to skip Daylight Savings. As I can’t avoid the time change on my Internet-connected devices, this meant moving…
Replayability is a common metric when it comes to measuring a video game’s value, usually in terms of monetary value. This makes some degree of sense: playing video games as a hobby can be quite expensive. Players generally want to maximise their enjoyment as cheaply as possible. Game designers want to avoid having their game traded in to the game store—as they earn nothing from the sale of…
Since before computers existed, text has been the primary medium through which computer users have communicated. It’s been in use far longer than anyone has been alive, and its lengthy history has allowed it to become battle tested. There is, however, one problem with the way we use text that I would like to discuss today. Take a look at this: A paragraph of lorem ipsum inside GNOME Text…
Lua is my favourite programming language, and GNOME is my favourite Linux desktop. For me, using Lua to write apps for GNOME is the natural course of action—in fact, this course of action has led me to become the maintainer of LuaGObject, which is built specifically to allow Lua code to interface with the core libraries for building GNOME apps. This article is intended to be a comprehensive guide…
The World Wide Web has changed. It is a reactionary mindset that gives rise to the belief that change must necessarily be a bad thing, or that we must “return” to a certain ideal past. There was once a time where finding interesting places on this web would require surfing it, which is a laborious process. At the end of a web surfing journey, one would expect to find something…
In brief: version 0.10.0 of LuaGObject has been released. It’s also on LuaRocks. This release will likely contain bugs! Please report them! As previously discussed, LuaGObject is forked from an older project named LGI. Since its last release in 2017, development of LGI has gradually slowed down. Per discussions within its repository, another LGI release is highly improbable—the person with…
A former boss of mine was a big fan of Minecraft and Factorio. In a company Minecraft session, I watched him use various game mechanics to set up a quick auto-smelting system that would allow all of the players to quickly smelt items by placing them in a single chest. He spent the entire online session simply building machines out of the game’s distinct blocks, each to serve a practical…
Forking a free software project is often an ill-advised action. Forking a project just because you disagree with changes that are being made to it is a great way to give yourself an untenable work load as you try to hunt down patches to fix bugs in your aging and less-maintained fork. That isn’t the situation I find myself in. Lua is my favourite programming language, GNOME is my preferred…
This article discusses recent exterminatory rhetoric and its very real consequences on human lives. Discretion is advised. As of a few days ago, Pride Month has started in the US. While my local Pride celebrations won’t be until July, this current Pride month is quite loud and I would rather join the chorus if I’m to write something about it. I am a transsexual1 woman. I began my…
It has been over 5 months since I’ve written about Parchment, my in-progress plain text editor intended for general use as well as programming. I’ve made some progress on it since, and I’d like to share some of what’s changed. App Layout Parchment’s current layout. Parchment’s previous layout as shown in December 2024. The layout of Parchment’s top bar has…
This post is a reaction to ideas presented in a recent article on Game Developer, and one of the posts it was spawned from. Unlike other forms of entertainment media, the video game business is in a particular place. There was once a time where it dominated over cinema, television, music, and sports—and still had faster growth than all of them! Today, the situation is different. Not dire, just…
Someone posted again. Scrolling through my morning’s Mastodon timeline, I once again saw an assertion that the current version of GNOME was inferior to earlier versions. The stated reason was that current GNOME has fewer features. The exact wording was that it had thus “regressed” because of its design choices. Now, what I’m about to say doesn’t just apply to desktop…
Writing has a long history. Typesetting, the practice of carefully arranging characters on a written document, is considerably newer than writing yet by now also has a long history. Where letters are what generally signify the sounds that are made when speaking words, marks are used to dictate pacing and sentence structure. I may not vocalize a comma when I speak, but I certainly speak one…
When getting things done, or just doing things, failing fast is a great strategy for preventing unnecessary work. If something is going wrong, beating a hasty retreat can be the difference between living to fight another day and burning yourself out so badly that you can’t continue. Thinking back at my recent financials, I realize that I’ve applied this same principle to the a very…
Hello. This article is mainly aimed toward readers who use AI. Specifically, I mean those products of machine learning which are being hyped as “Artificial Intelligence” within the current zeitgeist. This includes diffusion models and others which are labelled “generative AI” (or GenAI) as well as large language models (LLMs) which are frequently bundled into chatbots or…
Role-playing games have a common gameplay loop. The player-controlled character embarks on an adventure, maybe in a cave or fortress filled with baddies, overcomes obstacles, fights a tough boss enemy, and then acquires some treasure. The treasure can be a new weapon for the player character to wield, some macguffin needed to complete some other quest, or plain simple money. Let’s take the…
I’ve been playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and its sequel Tears of the Kingdom lately. Both are excellent games (if perhaps an acquired taste in some ways) but there’s a common criticism to the latter which I think is emblematic of an attitude common in computer power users—one where they demand a solution to a perceived problem without considering how the proposed…
Due to popular misconceptions of what the word “daylight savings” means, allow me to explain my understanding. In the pre-industrial era, town clocks would be adjusted so that the clock would strike noon at solar noon, meaning the high point of the sun in the day was also the high point of the clock in daytime. The reason for this practice stems from how humans sleep—normally, our…
Hello. Just an update for anyone who might have read the site prior to today, January 28th 2025. This site has moved to a new domain, vtrlx.ca. Old links should redirect to the new domain. This is a change I’ve wanted to make for some time. In my experience, it should be much less confusing, as on multiple occasions folks have mistyped the old domain name thinking it was just my surname.
I’m an avid user of Mastodon, a microblogging social network designed to resist centralized control. It’s design is similar to Twitter—before its takeover—emphasizing short posts of a less serious nature. The design of most social media apps creates an emphasis on current content—posts and shares which are recent—to the detriment of older content. Even without an algorithm, checking…
A common complaint I see others make about software, particularly for applications and systems that have existed for a long time, is lacking customization or configuration options. The act of removing options from software is believed by some to be anti-user, or an act of dumbing down an app to appeal to those who are “less sophisticated”. Commentators will deride how modern developers…
I’m currently developing a text editor, dogfooding1 it as I go by writing computer code and blog posts2. I found that other programs on my computer would sometimes make changes to the files I had open in Parchment—usually because I’d reverted some changes through Git3—but because the version that was open in Parchment was older, when I would eventually save my work, the changes made by…
There are no good technology options for running your own blog. Should you choose plain HTML, you’d need to duplicate a lot of information in order to get indices working correctly. Double the duplication if you want to have an RSS feed. Let’s not forget to mention if the site has any common visuals present in all pages—that’d all need to be copy-pasted by hand. Mercy upon you if…
We begin with a metaphor. Let’s say, hypothetically, you found a bug in your residence. An insect. A creepy crawly critter that skitters about. It shouldn’t be there, or anywhere else in your home for that matter. The word “shouldn’t” is important here, because it can have multiple meanings. It could mean that the bug does not belong in your quarters, but it could…
When I initially went to write this post, I was of the assumption that I wouldn’t have much to write about; I though I had not done much this year. It was not until I took another look at this blog to realize how mistaken I was. I posted twice as many entries to this blog in 2024 than I have in previous years. Where at this point in 2023 I had only recently begun to pick up programming…
Late last year, I signalled my intent to take a different approach to creative work. I’ll post more concrete details in my new year summary post, but what I wanted to highlight here is the power of prototyping. To prototype an idea means to build a simple working version of an idea. As suggested by the “proto” prefix, it is meant to be a forerunner to something else. You’re…
This article follows a previous article on this site. To be sparse means to be thinly scattered. In the context of software, sparseness would describe the sense than an app doesn’t have much going on. There is a minimal amount of information to show, and a minimal amount of interactivity. To be spartan means to significantly restrict oneself, be it by forgoing nourishment or by prioritizing…