Vbank usage demo in Lua with TIC-80 - 2025-11-08
Tic-80 Vbank is an hardware video, fantasy simulation, and this is a usage demo in Lua
A simple tic-80 fantasy console card in Lua scrtipting language, that display some possible effects of vbank() usage. That's an equivalent to Amiga, hardware video bitmap mixing. This kind of video mixing technology still exists on several ARM SoCs. At least seen on AllWinner and Rockchip SoCs.
Vbank are
- Two independant 16 colours palette layers
- Can be modified independantly, during TIC() main function, or even BDR() rastersync function, allowing nice effects
It replace former OVR() "overlay" function mode. See this old demo
TOC
XFCE on Wayland including some tips about keyboard on both Wayland and X11 usage - 2025-09-05
Since fall 2024, XFCE (4.20) start to work experimentaly on Wayland, in current state, some tips are still needed.
This is a WIP, some information can still be usefull
following previous article about using Waydroid on X11, I finally managed to have XFCE working on Wayland. It's in experimental state since XFCE 4.20. It looks like labwc package was just missing in my case, or that's maybe due to recente update of some XFCE components on Arch. I use mainly Arch Linux ARM on a RK3588 SoC since about 6 months.
Update 2028-09-01, I managed to have XFCE4 working on Wayland on this hardware, probably due to recent XFCE updates. It use labwc as compositor, that depend itself on wlroots. Still have some limitation (keyboard forced to english, no mean to switch (keyboard and iBus should depend on labwc or wlroots layers), parameters not available at least on menus, no screensaver/locker, see also one of the XFCE4 author's blog entry for more details), so I will wrote a new article about some tweaks in this case
ToC
Waydroid: Android on X11 (and Wayland) with RK3588 ARM 64bits computer (aarch64) - 2025-08-10
Using Android on a Linux computer, especially on ARM 64bits (Also called Aarch64) where all appliations will work natively.
As XFCE still doesn't work (at least in my case with Wayland, and that's my prefered desktop, I still use X11. I want to use some Android application on my Desktop computer. However, Waydroid, the Android virtual machine for Linux is made for Wayland display (so the name Way(land) + (An)droid). Weston is of good help to make it working.
Update 2028-09-01, I managed to have XFCE4 working on Wayland on this hardware, probably due to recent XFCE updates. It use labwc as compositor, that depend itself on wlroots. Still have some limitation (keyboard forced to english, no mean to switch (keyboard and iBus should depend on labwc or wlroots layers), parameters not available at least on menus, no screensaver/locker, see also one of the XFCE4 author's blog entry for more details), so I will wrote a new article about some tweaks in this case
WARNING!! Waydroid start some components at root level, it may contains some Google ads/private data or NSA spies, that's probably better to use it on a VM or a system without sensitive content
If you have other Aarch64 hardware you can skip this, but in my case, I use since about 6 month now a Rockchip RK3588 based (ARM 64bits) Radxa ITX board as main computer There is relatively good management of Vulkan 1.4 and Zink since this summer in GIT version, a stable base is available in Mesa 25.2.0 since 2025-08-06) for the Mali-G610 MP4 GPU included in the SoC. the RK3588 NPU start to be managed by the Rocket driver since 2025-07-28 in mainline Mesa, will be available in this first state in following release of Mesa.
ToC
Pétition contre la loi Duplomb - 2025-07-22
Les moteurs de recherche donne une pétition crée par un mort avant, celle qui a obtenu plus d'1,7 millions de signatures
La loi Duplomb, autorisant à détruire d'avantage toute forme de vie, et provoquer des cancers chez les agriculteurs et travaileurs agricoles, ainsi que les consommateurs, tout ça pour enrichir quelque magnats de l'agrobusiness, à été passée en force à l'assemblée nationale, par une procédure évitant tout ammendemant.
Une pétition citoyenne contre la loi Duplomb à dépassé les 2 millions de signatures sur le site de l'assemblée nationale. Elle n'est malheureusement non contraignante, si on était en démocratie, plutôt qu'un « système représentatif » ça se saurait. Cependant, plus il y aura de vote, plus il y aura de pression et de démonstration de la volonté populaire, et moins ils pourront dire qu'ils apprécient la démocratie. Et tous les systèmes éléctifs par suffrage se valent pour les mauvais résultats.
Je ne sais pas pourquoi, et d'autres cherchent, les moteurs de recherche mettent en avant une pétition crée par un mort à la place de la pétition a succès.
Autre chose étrange que l'on pourrait attribué à un bug ? En regardant à l'approche des 1,7 millions, je suis tombé le 22 juillet 2025, vers 19h40, sur un résultat de 1 699 998/100 000, je recharge alors la page après 2 ou 3 secondes et... 1 699 994/100 000, avant qu'elle ne passe definitivement au dessus des 1,7 millions.
« Le suffrage par le sort est de la nature de la démocratie, le suffrage par choix est de celle de l'aristocratie » — Montesquieux
Raylib - 2025-05-03
a C multimedia library with GL/Vulkan and WASM support
Raylib is a nice compact and very portable multimedia library. It manage hardware acceleration and compatibilities problems.
We will see here how to build it (in may 2025).
Emulating RISC-V system with Oreboot and Barebox, using Qemu or RVVM - 2025-02-07
This is a short post about the installation of usage of OreBoot bootloader and Barebox on Qemu and RVVM RISC-V virtual machine and emulators.
- Qemu is a multi-architecture virtual machine / emulator, it manage VirtIO, KVM (kernel virtual machine functions), allowing maximum hardware leverage, and runs on various architectures and system.
- RVVM is a virtual machine / emulator specialized in RISC-V guests, it is generally more fast and efficient than Qemu, as specialized on RISC-V, with a very efficient JIT dynamic translation. Contains a VFIO PCIe passthrough to take benefits of hardware acceleration. RVVM can also work in WASM
- TinyEmu is a light RISC-V (32/64/128bits) and x86 emulator, it can runs with WASM with the help of JSLinux. This demo doesn't have vsync implemented, as requestAnimationFrame() isn't used in JS to WASM bridge. See also The barebox Porter's Guide
- Barebox is a bare metal style bootloader/payload
- oreboot is a Rust language reimplementation of Coreboot a platform initialization firmware (sometime called boot firmware), that can replace the closed source BIOS firmware, or be used on various kind of hardware systems. It also contains it's own implementation of SBI, called RustSBI, instead of C made, standard RISC-V OpenSBI (Open Source Supervisor Binary Interface). RustSBI alone only support LinuxBoot payloads for now. Awesome-RustSBI has interesting links. RustSBI Prototyper is a prototype to create alternative RISC-V Secure Bootloader based on RustSBI. Nice complete Rust language interactive textbook (FLOSS)The Rust Programming Language and the helper Rust by example.
- Platform System Interface (PSI) implements various of them
Precompiled version are available here:
- https://iaota.institute/riscv/emulation-qemu-riscv.bin
- https://iaota.institute/riscv/sbitest_qemu.bin
It will take about 2.8GB in your home directory, subdir
~/.rustup/toolchainsfor installation of needed toolchain.
LXC on Arch Linux and elsewhere - 2025-01-05
The Linux kernel containers (LXC) is a nice and efficient mean to run containers. Far lighter and more efficient than Docker ones, it is well integrated in GNU/Linux system environment.
LinuxContainers developers community followed, Aleksa Sarai Incus interface, a fork of Canonical's LXD. It have both a cli and a web interface, like the very powerful Proxmox, maybe not reached the same level (in january 2025), but can be installed on your own linux, instead to having to work on a proxmox specific server. Both have their pros and cons.
I will present here all installation process step by step on Arch Linux to make LXC container working:
- In unprivileged mode (for security)
- With both busybox, the very light Alpine Linux as container (8 MB rootfs, thanks to light Musl libc and Busybox), Arch Linux or Debian.
- Crossarchitecture compatible containers (ARM (32/64-bit), RISC-V (32/64/128-bit), and x86 (32/64-bit), should work the same way with Loongson or PowerPC, as soon tempaltes are available.
Disclamair:
- The official Linux container documentation, Getting Started that could be really generic and miss some point in my case.
- The official Arch Wiki give lot of possibilities, that could lost the user, I have to navigate and search myself to found a working solution that fit my needs and willing.
- This Stan's blog blog tutorial helped me resolved some not well documented parts about the bridge.
eyes3d in Lua with TIC-80 - 2025-01-03
A simple tic-80 card in Lua, that display 3d eyes, following light or mouse, à la Xeyes 👀, but in 3d.
Block AI bots an efficient way - 2024-12-14
With hipe on useless AI technologies, including ChatGPT or some other inefficient AI models, Lot of malicious companies, thinking they will found El Dorado, try to take profit of all datas they can obtain on the web, without respecting Netiquette conventions.
Suchir Balaji, a whistleblower that described OpenAI illegal reusage of other creator content has been found dead in its US partment, see "Police rules out foul play in death of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji"
As a result, more and more web service see their traffic grow insanely with most part of these bots, often saturing services like a DDoS. Search Engine crawlers generally limit their request to 1 time every few seconds to avoid overload of web servers, but recent AI bot crawlers scan as fast as possible. ClaudeAI is one of these famous bots. Until recently they at least respected "User Agent" field, that describe the user agent used, allowing web services to select which user agent they want to serve to. But as most services are blocking these chat bots due to their non-respect of crawling conventions, some newcomers to Internet, think that hiding or forging User Agent as a user Browser would be a good solution to still thieve datas to train their models.
As a result, services start to block too much things and Web users start to complain to not be able to visit regular web sites, detected as AI bots, they are blocked. And a fun sideffect, is that ibots train on bader and bader result after every new generation, degrading AI database quality that degrade the content etc....
Here are the methods I used to block an efficient way a large part of badly managed AI bots without blocking end Users.
Snac2 (or Snac) lightweight ActivityPub server - 2024-11-22
Snac2 is a lightweight ActivityPub server, it rely on SQLite DB by user and files on disks, that's all. Don't overgrow like some other servers (Pleroma). It is wrote in C language without unfinite libs dependency, so fast, reliable, not a myriad on unreliable/unmaintained/backdoored language modules.
For reference, installed size of Arch Linux binary (daemon and command) for release 2.64 is:
- aarch64 (ARM 64-bit): 540KB
- riscv64 (RISC-V 64-bit): 329KB
- x86_64 (AMD 64-bit): 425KB
So this can run coupled with nginx on a really light Solar Powered SBC (There are a lot of very efficient and cheap ARM or RISC-V SBC available now).
C64 Assembly - 2024-11-17
Tools, basic knowledge, hello world
Starting on Commodore-64, generally called C64 (MOS 6510 that is a modified version of 6502, will use 65xx here) assembly on Linux. This 8-bit microprocessor is relatively limited and simple, as Z80 microprocessor, and used on several popular platforms, including Commodore PET/VIC20, Apple][, BBC, Oric 1/Atmos/Telestrat, Atari 400/800/5200/XL/Lynx, NES and SNES or PC Engine/TurboGraphix. The power of the most interesing of these computers are in association with their audio, graphics and video co-processors.
This document, is based on the usage of generaly available and FLOSS, xa assembler, xda65 debugger and VICE emulator, on GNU/Linux platforms.
ToC
Retrocomputing - 2024-11-12
This picture of "A Mirror of Time" ("Зеркало времени", 1976) animation by Vladimir Tarasov looks a lot like "Q.bert" video game (Warren Davis and Jeff Lee for Atari and Gottlieb, 1982)
This page is about retrocomputing, see also Fantasy Console for virtual neo-retro computers ^^.
Bootstrap Arch Linux by chroot - 2024-11-10
How to install Arch from a Debian or derivative (or other arch), using bootstrap archive and chroot.
Also added some tips for Manjaro-keyring problems, this arch derivative is well known for that.
The command pacstrap also help to install arch, the official tutorial explains how to use it
- This one too, but has an error at least on EFI mount point (boot/efi partition must be mounted in /boot, not /boot/efi and contain an efi (or EFI, FAT is not case sensitive) directory.
- Another one UEFI with LUKS encryption
WIP: Still doesn't manage to have a bootable UEFI+GPT, systemd-boot UEFI Boot Manager, bootable system (See also Archiwiki systemd-boot dedicated page)
Han scripts - 2024-10-07
About Chinese Han first level cultural sphere, Han characters and CJKV, often wrongly called CJK
The Chinese cultural sphere include mainly countries using or having used Han script, that is China (both Mainland including Hainan island and (Taiwan+Fujian special administration islands, self-called Republic of China, not recognized by UNO and wrongly called Taiwan by NATO countries), Japan, Korea, Viêt Nam, and few other countries where Chinese is an important language; Malaysia and Singapur.
漢字 or in simplified shape 汉字 (hanzi in modern standard Mandarin Chinese, one of the several Han languages among Chinese languages), meaning Han (ethnie) script is the script of the main Chinese population, in China for several milleniums. There are not hyeroglyphs (Egyptian script), even if they have in common, as most of all of the planet scripts, pictographic origin.
Beside China, the Han charactees was also the main script used in Koreas (漢字 hanja), Japan (漢字 kanji) and Vietnam (漢字 Hán tự) until the middle of 20th Century. They are often called CJK instead of CJKV, don't know why, Korea as Vietnam don't use them anymore in their everyday script, Vietnam still used it officialy until 1954, the time of French decolonization, where Korea, if I'm not wrong stopped to use it with japanese decolonization in 1945.
Inside 18th and 19th Century China, Mongolians and Tibetan used, probably due to Manchu influence all over China, decoration with rounded shape longevity han character (寿 shou, some thinking that's the near rounded character happiness), also used as first character to describe sushi (寿司) in Japan. They are still used today in independant Mongolian Republic, or by Mongolians of China and Russia too, and by Tibetans, or several mixed culture of Tibetan, Mongolians, Turkic or other minorities cultures.
Cartography - 2024-10-04
Several kind of maps useful to everybody.
ToC
Fantasy Consoles - 2024-09-30
Fantasy consoles are 8 or 16 bits like virtual machines, with programming language and that often include tools to add graphics, audio and music. This is a funny world, and a good mean to develop an interactive or multimedia application a quick way. Limited resources, often very simple script language (like Lua as an exemple), allow to quickly prototype things, by only going toward essential things.
Animation References - 2024-09-25
This page is about animation in general... only 1 entry, need more things :)
You can still go to my animation page on my old website for more informations, softwares etc..
RISC-V, Web, Emulation and Assembly - 2024-09-19
This page contains resources about RISC-V emulators, simulators, available distributions and simple and cheap solution to have displayed output
There are a lot of possibilities in this, inluding, for hardware RISC−V display, some LCD screen, HDMI output with closed driver or open driver, with often limited GPU support (work in progress). There are some FGPA based solution with open sources solution.
- Writing this, I found after few months a page with similar resource and goal here: RISC-V Guide, seem to not be not updodate, but still have some interesting information to get.
Using Zola - 2024-09-19
This blog runs with Rust made static site generator Zola
As official documentation, is less than limited, I had to read several 3rd party docs to undederstand how to use it.
Update 2025-01-03, after few months of usage:
Zola use tera language for template and TOML for configuration files. So it's easy to understand for Ansible users or Python developers as example.
Function can be put in a specific kind of templates called shortcode, it can then be called in article or templates with {{ name((id) }}, where name is the name(.html/.md) of the file that contains the shortcode function template itself. The official documentation is nice on ths part.
For templates, Zola use Tera languages, about the same used in jinja2 files of Ansible.