A happy reunion with Chris Crawford's hit geopolitics simulator Balance of Power (1985), with gameplay and code analysis.
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Let it snow '21
Amidst the holidays that perhaps aren't turning out exactly as hoped, one can take comfort in small tokens of continuity – like the fact that xsnow is still being actively maintained.
Continue readingChafa 1.8: Terminal graphics with a side of everything
The Chafa changelog was growing long again, owing to about half a year's worth of slow accretion. Hence, a release. Here's some stuff that happened.
Continue readingChafa 1.6.0: Wider
Here's another one from the terminal graphics extravaganza dept: Chafa 1.6.0 brings fullwidth character support, so in addition to the usual block elements and ASCII art, you now get some mean CJK art too. Or grab as many fonts as you can and combine all of the Unicode into one big glorious mess.
Continue readingChafa 1.4.0: Now with sixels
April 1st seems like as good a time as any for a new Chafa release — though note that Chafa is no joke. At least not anymore, what with the extremely enterprise-ready sixel pipeline and all. As usual, you can …
Continue readingChafa 1.2.0: Faster than ever, now with 75% more grit
For all you terminal graphics connoisseurs out there (there must be dozens of us!), I released Chafa 1.2.0 this weekend. Thanks to embedded copies of some parallel image scaling code and the quite excellent libnsgif, it's faster and better in …
Continue readingdesktop-file-utils 0.24 released
One thing one can do in this amazing summer heat, is cut the 0.24 release of desktop-file-utils. It's rather a small thing, but since the last few releases have been happening at roughly three-year intervals I felt it merited a …
Continue readingBattle of the Bilerps: Image Scaling on the CPU
I've been on a quest for better bilerps lately. "Bilerp" is, of course, a contraction of "bilinear interpolation", and it's how you scale pictures when you're in a hurry. The GNOME Image Viewer (née Eye of GNOME) and ImageMagick have …
Continue readingThe worst ANSI art renderer, except for all the others
Chafa (github) started out as a small piece of supporting code for an obscure personal project I may announce at some indefinite point in the future. Then I decided to release it as a tongue-in-cheek thing for the VT100 anniversary …
Continue readingWhat ails GHashTable?
I promised a closer look at GHashTable and ways to improve it; here's that look and another batch of benchmarks to boot. This time around I've dropped most of the other tables from the plots, keeping only khash and adding …
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