it's 25th, how has December been

I got to get to the two Dell Latitude CPxH I have.

One has been in my family and the other I bought because the former had keyboard keys not working. The keyboard issues are something that historically one could sometimes fix by twisting the whole case of the laptop. Dad suggests it may be fixable by remounting the keyboard.

That other one I bought had the keyboard work well but the Touch Stick in it has issues about going all the way upper-right or all the way lower-left, unless pressed hard in the opposite direction. I had to install the pointing device driver and in it I can disable Touch Stick separately from Touch Pad.

I expected the former one to have a broken HDD and the other one to lack a HDD. But they turned out to both have HDDs. The former one had Ubuntu 6.XX with the familiar login prompt sound and the other one had an empty installation of Windows 98 that I subsequently reinstalled, also having a sticker for Windows.. 95, which seems a bit odd.

I am sad about the Track Stick not working in the good keyboard, I will probably still hope for the former's keyboard to work after remounting. My intention is to have one with working keyboard and full mobile with display, and the other just be a server or having an external keyboard&mouse and display, if i ever get a monitor i could use with a native resolution.

Aaand I just ordered myself another one in fully working condition with a HDD for 119PLN.

I've been implementing uploading to Sourcehut Pages in pure PowerShell and .NET

That one you can find in full in recent posts.

For that I first intended to use the .NET TarWriter and GzipStreamer straight from Powershell, but got confused about how these work and for troubleshooting I switched to Visual Basic .NET for implementation of the utility cmdlets. Now after I got them working, next time I will want to use them on the ThinkPad Helix 1gen of mine I will be rewriting them into pure Powershell, as I'm not going to install Visual Studio 2022 Preview on there.

I've been toying with VB6 a very little

That's the primary reason why I chose Visual Basic .NET for compiled .NET cmdlets. I want to learn the successor to get more familiariity for the predecessor. (Although, it turned out to be quite much cooler in .NET compared to C#, as well, so I enjoy my choice.)

sdomi inspired me to take it up, herself enjoying it, for writing programs that will work on all subsequent Windows versions.

So far I had researched into writing a Gemini client for it, with help from sdomi and Lili I got to sufficiently recent OpenSSL DLLs for Windows 95/98 by Blackwingcat.

I will sure get back to that once I start using the Dells more.

I also somehow really want to try having a W2k Server or W2k3 Server installation on a thin client if not on one old PC.

While an old LGA775 PC i wanted to use turned out not to have integrated graphics (and I don't know what may be on one disk there, so can't just set up blind unattended win install) so i won't be able to on it for a while, I got this 10ZiG 56xx / RBT672 thin client that while lacks the IDE flash inside, can boot well from a pendrive and W2k seems to have no problem about that.

However I was also planning to put up some access point for Wireguard that would have OpenBSD, I could hardly even do that on W2k3 as that's still old version. Oh and I wanted to try to have a serial tty to the aforementioned PC, but making an OpenBSD image with serial tty pre-set was too much of a hassle. I could do that easier with, like, Alpine apk overlays, but i didn't feel like anything other than OpenBSD. Unless.. maybe I should check if NetBSD serial tty pre-set would be easier to do...

For my OKI 320 Elite, that I haven't even yet tested since the purchase, I could use a CUPS server besides a Win98 one...

About the old PC again, I have a Mimo Vue 10.1" Capacitive Touch Display, USB (UM-1080C-G), it runs out of the box on Windows 10 and (without touch) it should also be out-of-the-box Plug'n'Play on Win2k... so I hoped to install W2k Server with it, but it didn't. Maybe it needs a graphical installer to show up? Or maybe neither of my installation medias even booted huhh

More VB.NET: an app to do JPEG compression neatly with live preview

Another thing that's in an earlier gemlog post.

I wrote myself an app that starts with a dialog to open a file, loads the image up, and then shows a live preview of the selected JPEG quality for it, however in a 1:1 cropped PictureBox. I mentioned some stuff to do in the earlier post, but I furthermore want to add, and have in my notes:

a "Save without closing" option on the StatusStrip

aside from a save dialog on close

but also a mode to automatically load the image in clipboard

and subsequently putting the output in the clipboard as well (on close!)

when putting a thing in the clipboard on close, flash replace the window contents with a big "Clipboard!" splash for some 10ms or so

a Hold checkbox on the StatusStrip, so that once multiple output formats (like webp) are added, you can have the preview not refreshed until you uncheck it

each format to have its last quality setting stored during run

Render as a Task, with the Task being assigned to a variable and disposed on a new one as it only makes sense for one to be up at a time

now i got a thought that maybe preserving the last output for each format as well in memory could be neat

preserving Exif, maybe an editor even.. we'll see how easy the libraries would be

I should close the source file that I've loaded up with an OpenFile once I got the image in memory

option to accept standard input besides just clipboard

option to in-place write (especially if I do the Exif part)

loading file from command-line argument

Trying to put up some zines about how git-pull refspec works, and about Gerrit's push options/percent-parameters and Change-Id matching

I really got into doing them some, although over half of them is still too draft for publishing. I was writing them while reading up on the things. I really enjoy how they came out though. I hope to refine that bad half, maybe make some of it textual even, and publish it.

On one I got sidetracked into gitrevisions a bit too much, wanting to nto be picky aboout anything i mention, which turned out to be a bad approach for git.

I love how I can make them 1200px-wide at jpeg q5 and take up just 30KB,,

yea i wish i could use the newer cooler formats but backwards compatilibity

and i wish it could be jpeg xl or jpeg2000 but these.. are.. getting dropped by our Chromium overloads (i mean, the former one, the latter just.. yknow)

Things I should get back to

I should put up some Android API 10-18 APKs on my Blackberry Q20 Classic

That thin client has a connector inside that's pretty atypical but turns out (on the internet) to be usb. I should order that connector plug and solder myself a usb inside. I need to exercise soldering. Oh wait I have a real shitty cheapo soldering iron that I never used yet, I wanted to get with someone into an order of three Pinecils to split the US shipping but last time I was a fouth, anyone?

I have that other thin client that i disassembled to do something besides just putting in a hdd, it has some issues, has been sparking for me it think, gotta get back to what the hell was it about it and get it one piece.

I really need to proceed with the eavesdropping of our shitty Tilgin router that INEA gave us, to replace it with an OpenWRT-d one

I should set myself up a Raspberry Pi for using that UGA Mimo display. Although maybe first I will use it with a Windows thin client... Maybe I should go for W2k3 instead to maybe have the touch 3rd party driver support that XP got?

Whoa cool, Obsidian for gemtext!

Yea so while it saves the files as '.md', it doesn't join the paragraphs not interleaved with an empty line. I just need to repeat the note's title as a '#' h1 and it's a ready-to-go gemtext! No line-breaking no nothing, just perfect. Much better than, like, WordGrinder.

I sure do hope no unintended nbsp will sneak in, breaking gemtext syntax at like links like i had before for some browsers (i had my gemlog post become a github issue in a major thing)