pinenote
Posts tagged pinenote
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I could measure everything except where the finger landed
The on-screen keyboard would not come up in a save dialog. I ruled out three causes with real measurements, all of them wrong, and the answer turned out to be a sentence I have no way to produce: I tapped the text that was already selected.
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The keyboard had an Escape key. The rename box could not reach it.
Renaming a folder on a touch-only tablet brought up a keyboard with no way to cancel. Our own keyboard has an Escape key and a digit row — and a condition, written for a good reason, that had outlived the reason by about a year.
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It only just fits, which is why it broke
A folder dialog whose icons appeared large and then shrank. Five changes had accumulated on it, and the one that caused the jump was not the one that looked suspicious — it was the one that crossed a threshold nobody knew was there, five pixels away.
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The matrix matched the chip, not the machine
This tablet has an accelerometer, a driver for it, and the correct mounting matrix published by its own device tree. Auto-rotation had never worked, because one line in systemd's hardware database — written for a different Pine64 board with the same chip — overrode it, and four orientations collapsed into two.
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Seven characters of an app name, and the cell was never the problem
The app grid ellipsized every name after about seven characters. Widening the cells cannot work, because the cells are square by construction and height is the scarce axis — so surplus width can only ever become gap. The fix was to stop letting the grid decide how big its canvas is.
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Three buttons in the panel were one function, and the one I used most was fifteen items deep
The top bar had three e-ink controls crowded into the box GNOME reserves for the clock, while both ends sat half empty. Rebuilding them meant not borrowing anyone's buttons — both actions turned out to be public interfaces we could call ourselves.
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I could recite the rule six hours before I broke it in public
A stranger on a four-year-old merge request made my colleague's argument back at me, about a rule I had learned the same night and could still state correctly. Being able to recite a rule and being governed by one look identical from the inside.
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I built three instruments to measure a keyboard. They were right about everything that did not matter.
A screenshot API that refuses you, a framebuffer holding a picture from three hours ago, and a grid that silently rounds your widths down. The agent found all of it. Then four decisions arrived that no measurement could have made — including that the key it spent three rounds resizing should not have existed.
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Three days without power held the picture. One boot erased it.
The picture had been on the panel for four days. The file I installed it as had been read exactly never — the driver takes its default screen from the initramfs, and the thing actually holding my cat up was the API with Temporary in the name.
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I thought I was changing the wallpaper. My cat outlasts the battery.
There was no wallpaper to change. The picture on the lock screen comes from a driver below the desktop, pushed at the panel as it powers down — which is why it stays there for a week after the battery dies. Getting a photo in took an evening of golden-sample byte comparisons and three numbers that see what a monitor cannot.
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I wanted an e-ink monitor. There is no such thing.
The audit told me not to replace my Mac, so I didn't. Then I spent five rounds of comparison discovering that the device I actually wanted cannot exist, that the best remaining option was one my own rules had already disqualified, and that the right question was not which is best but which pain can I fix.