Edit (2024-07-03): The thesis has now been published and is available here (Open Access).

After almost 2 years since the submission of my Ph.D. thesis, I finally could defend it successfully last Friday (May 3, 2024). It has been a long journey, exactly 9 years since the initial acceptance on May 3, 2015. The road has been bumpy, especially since I had to juggle my job with the work I was doing on the side for the thesis, but in the end I think it was well worth it. I learned a ton, especially in the field of scientific visualization, which was completely new to me. I will share the author’s copy of my thesis shortly.

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.