The POSIX diff, cmp and patch commands are very versatile. Sometimes, you need to edit a part of a file and send only your changes to somebody else to apply. This is where these handy commands can help. This post describes concisely how to use them to compare files, create patches and apply them.

I got my Steam Deck almost a year ago. I got the cheapest 64 GB model fully expecting that I would need to upgrade its internal M.2 2230 NVMe SSD to something with more capacity down the road. Well, the day finally came. In this post I report the quick and painless process I followed to successfully upgrade the Steam Deck 64 GB SSD to a more than respectable 1 TB M.2 NVMe drive. Here are the steps involved in the process:

MangoHud is an overlay for monitoring frame rates, frame times, temperatures and CPU/GPU loads on Vulkan and OpenGL applications in Linux. It is also the default performance overlay used in the Steam Deck, and it is awesome.

I know the amount of people using Java for high performance graphics is not very high, but they are there, of that I’m sure. I’m actually one of them. Gaia Sky is written in Java, and even though it has its own rudimentary debug overlay, MangoHud goesfar beyond it. When I’m not editing in neovim, I use IntelliJ IDEA CE to do a little refactoring and deubgging. It is during these times that being able to run the JVM with MangoHud directly from the IDE comes in handy. But most IDEs do not allow customizing the launch command directly to use the mangohud /path/to/app approach, so how do we do it?

A while ago I published this post about a better figure shortcode for Hugo that enabled lazy loading. Today, I bring you yet another update on the same shortcode. This time around, the focus is on leveraging the HTML picture element, which enables alternative versions of the same image in different formats, leaving the browser to decide which one to use. You can serve the same image in, for instance, JPEG-XL and plain old JPEG at the same time. The browser will read the tag, and select the appropriate image depending on its capabilities. If you use a JPEG-XL-capable browser (Thorium, Pale Moon, Basilisk, Waterfox, LibreWolf, Firefox Nightly), you will be served the smaller JPEG-XL version, otherwise you will get the plain JPEG version.

Gaia Sky has been using the OpenVR API from SteamVR for the last few years to power its Virtual Reality mode. However, the API is notoriously poorly documented, and it only works with the SteamVR runtime.¹ That leaves out most of the existing VR headsets. Luckily, the main vendors and the community at large joined efforts to come up with an API that would be adopted by all and backed by the Khronos Group: OpenXR. Obviously, since Gaia Sky is actively maintained, it is only natural that a migration to the newer and widely supported API would happen sooner or later. But such a migration is not for free. Both APIs are wildly different, with OpenXR being much more verbose and explicit. In this post, I document the migration process and also offer a bird’s eye view of the layout, structure and components of an OpenXR application for Virtual Reality.

Edit (2024-01-24): Following a comment on Mastodon, I have added a reference on the good performance of lossless WebP.

Edit (2023-03-30): Added a couple extra images to test for high-quality encoding and illustrations. Introduce SSIM and MSE measures.

Edit (2023-03-03): Fixed mistake, as AVIF does in fact NOT support progressive decoding.

JPEG XL and AVIF are arguably the two main contenders in the battle to replace JPEG as the next-generation image format. There are other formats in the race, like HEIC and WebP 2, but the former is subject to licensing patents (and possibly not royalty-free), and the second is still in development and seems that it may never see the light of day as a production-ready image format anyway. The original WebP is not even a contender as it is inferior to AVIF in almost all aspects¹ (although it may be ok in lossless compression²), and you should probably never use it for photography anyway³, or at all if you are not ok with mediocre image quality.⁴

First, a quick browser support test:

If you are browsing this page around 2023, chances are that your browser supports AVIF but does not support JPEG XL. This is mainly due to the Chrome team dropping support for JPEGL XL against the opinion the community at large. In this post, I hope to convince you why this is a bad move. Below, I perform a quick analysis of lossless and lossy compression with JPEG XL and AVIF, and evaluate how they fare in terms of file size and visual quality.