I’m a fan of Pine64’s products. I own a PinePhone, have tried out the multi-distro demo image, and have even bought a keyboard (which is, unfortunately, not terribly great - it has mushy keys and is unresponsive) for it. I haven’t been able to replace my Android phone just yet, but when the PineTime was announced, I told myself I’d wait a bit for the platform to mature, then give it a shot.

In the meantime, I bought a FitBit Charge 4 (this was 2021-ish) which I used for about a year until now. The main features I liked from that watch were, in no particular order:

• Sleep cycle tracking
  • automatic sleep tracking, just keep it on your wrist and go to sleep. It sometimes detected me as sleeping while watching a movie, but other than that, very solid detection.
• Heart rate and calorie tracking in the app
• Small footprint, comfortable to wear
• Notification support (very hit or miss imo)
• It’s a watch and tells the time, of course

So, a bit ago I decided to give the PineTime a good solid test. At currently $27 plus shipping (!!) for a sealed watch, it was a clear next step, especially since supporting FOSS and data privacy are top-of-mind for me these days.

I’ve been using it for a week now - here’s my impressions.

Times are tough and the year is already going by too fast. Put it all out of your mind for a moment and take a break. Take a deep breath, too, while you’re at it.

Hi there! Welcome to the first post in what I hope will be a series about neat music. This series will mostly focus on music and things related to my specific tastes as a learning DJ-slash-whatever who grew up listening to way too much electronic and Japanese music.

Quick note, not all of these are recent releases and I don’t think all releases in these posts will be. These posts are meant to be focused on what I’ve discovered recently and think is worth paying attention to now, and in the future. And obviously, it means I like it! I’ll try to include (DRM-free, if possible) US purchase links for everything I can, and streaming links for everything else.

Terminals are cool, tiling is amazing, electron sucks, DEs suck and KDE is for psychopaths.

“Want to come check out my neofetch? Where are you going?”

It’s been 3 years since I switched to running Linux full-time on both my desktop and laptop. Of course, the first year or so was marred by a sub-optimal experience with an uncooperative set of laptops, trying to get them to do things they just weren’t designed to do.

I didn’t need to write this post, but I did anyway, because I felt the need to document my ~2 hours of ferocious searching to figure out why something went wrong.

I wanted to test WebGL and VA-API hardware acceleration on Wayland on Firefox, new in FF 75. VA-API has been implented on Wayland before (!) X11 (bug), which gives me a sliver of hope for the future of Linux, and I suppose shows where priorities lie.

This blog post describes how to enable WebGL, and the ArchWiki explains how to enable VA-API, but there are a few more bumps in the road, as it wasn’t all plug and play for me.