2022-06-11 - Tech - Raspad - Bits and Bobs

- - - - - - - - - - - - — - - - - — = - - -

This being a further and farther report in a series in which a semi-techie solarspinster seeks to spiff up a Raspad for a primary information prosthesis. Special problems include: very occasional internet, off grid low amp power, and wide temperature differentials.

Calendar Cruft

A gaping hole currently exists for *any* GUI Chinese calendar in POSIXland. I’ve been looking. Once in every distro repo there was a dear panel doohickey called lunar-applet. As implied, it was a simple pop up lunisolar calendar. It had the basics on tap, terribly convenient. Attempting to install said applet, I found its dependencies are so obscure they no longer exist in repo either. The documentation on said applet is spare and rare. I’m not sure it’s worth making as a yak conga line project.

lunar-applet

The trusty old CLI C lunar conversion library front end is called lunar. The lack of imagination in titles here is indicative of the lack of options. Lunar works conversions until 2049. Not terribly far away these days, that. And the date format of lunar is, shall we say, idiosyncratic, even with the Chinese language option set.

lunar

The technosocial dynamics at play here are difficult to explain for an Anglosphere context.

The simplest issue is that most Chinese calendar users will use an Android or iOS app. So much so sad. Failing this, there are numerous web options of mostly middling quality and dubious infosec integrity. (The “year 0” issue alone mussed up Eastern-Western calindrical conversions for DECADES, and sometimes still does, unbelievably.)

The deeper issue is what my less charitable side would call 崇洋媚外。 If it’s western, it is better, goes the commonplace exoticism. Less commonly held uncritically these days, surely, but operant mimetically by the staunchest Make China Great Again zealot. Anyone intimately familiar with cultural cringe will grok this. People like to pretend that computing is a technical space of consummate novelty. But the reality is that from system architecture to the QWERTY keyboard, computing’s deep roots have created enormous cultural gravity. This goes from crusty rust on the bare metal such as C and JavaScript to the basic issues of conventional UX. In the face of this gravity, the “rest of us” either give in or make do.

An infamous example of this dynamic lately has been Chinese newspapers. When set by type, these continued to be vertical text. But editors found implementing vertical text with most publishing programmes such a frustration that most overseas Chinese newspapers have gone ltr horizontal, despite sometimes voceferous dissatisfaction. Coders in Sinosphere land are less wont to rock this boat than they might be in the Anglosphere. The self selection effects which can make Wikipedia such an object of ridicule work overtime here too. And stupid mottos such as 破古立信 work as well to cow objections to wholesale cultural suicide in the name of capitalism as well as once under communism. (／保守份子）

Apropos, that means for calendars it seems I shall have to somehow finally roll mine own code. Making a yearly calendar is an old tradition. But a spreadsheet, no matter how pretty, can’t take the place of what I searched futily to find: a plug-in for Thunderbird or a programme which Does It All:

A preconverted spreadsheet from 1900 to 2049 is ridiculous given current processor power. My interests demand a full cyclical and linear lunisolar dating spread from 7ky BP to 7ky AP. 51.6 kiloyears would be better.

The programme should allow for system notification alarums and such for repeated dates native to our calendar. iOS finally implemented this in a perfunctory way. I’m frankly surprised to find no option for Thunderbird or Evolution.

The 聚包樓通勝 (basic yearly almanac) is an humane format, but its data ought to be implemented in a decent CJKVZ calendar programme too. There are religiophilosophical data not in the almanacs worth adding, too. Date output should switch primacy between the new 蕐曆 long count standard to dynastic era dates to 天干地支 by preference. If one wants to know the 八字 on the day 王羲之羽化ed, the calendar should show it.

Vertical rtl text throughout. And not kludged using LF shuffling like most vertical text apps. Because. Period. There is a firm web standard for vertical text, usually poorly implemented in browsers if at all. But this might effect a decent UI appearing natively as vertical.

Of course, all this is way beyond me. But I think an elegant solution might be possible, givens it of finagling.

Thunderbird Is Go

Thunderbird is the venerable project from Mozilla. It has all the bells and whistles from feed reading to email to calendar, and as such exuberantly violates the Unix philosophy. It appears that Seamonkey has been folded in, which more or less broke the camel’s back for trim CPU cycle time. Nimble it is not. But Thunderbird carries on the Netscape Communicator mantle, more or less, in a way comfortable to those of us from that dawn of the web. Whether bells and whistles means completion or gratuity is of course a matter of perspective.

I’d be happy to use Alpine if I could figure out how it might better interface in an Agena way with other needful doohickeys such as system alarums. Through Anacron I suppose?

Thunderbird, thanks to swallowing Enigmail, has good PGP support. Along with a consummate calendar, this is a helpful integration.

Gooey GUI

A lack of consistency and ease for GUI styling is one obvious defect of the *nix archipelago. Whether GTK or Qt run through which DE via what WM… all determine to what degree one must endure the sundry GUI peccadilloes of the assorted devs. For a tablet this creates several issues, as corralling interface kludges becomes a rather spotty affair.

To wit by example, I still have certain GTK3 windows which insist on scrollbars as thin as a needle. I have trouble using these with a mouse, never mind touch, and my mouse use is fluent. I can only surmise such elements are aggressively anti-accessible by cruel jocular intent. May Heaven bless anyone with moderate motor or sight disability who wishes to use Linux.

The solution is yet another compleat DIY, it seems. I shall have to create a deep theme which encompasses all major GUI dimensions: from window defaults on maximize, to wider icon density, to eliminating drag and drop, to consummate dark mode, to touchscreen calibration, to CJKVZ optimization… Eventually I shall write. It all up as a gumbo recipe.

I know such tweaks can triumph. Malleability is a central POSIX strength, for those stubborn souls who can herd all the yaks. Sometimes solutions are ready in the GUI. VLC allows readily tweaking the GUI, which I did yesternight. Spreading out the controls and enlarging the icons a wee bit allowed much more comfort in UX.

-EOF-