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Tue 03 March 2026

Today: animated bokeh – Wikimedia removing archive.today links – customizable 256-color palette in the terminal – OpenNTPD vs. chrony – fps display in DXVK games

  • James "Ancient" Brown inserted an old LC display between a camera's lens and sensor and can now do animated bokeh as well as interesting light field effects: Digital Iris (10 min)
  • Wikimedia removes all links to archive.today, a service similar to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, after archive.today was using users' browsers to run a DDoS attack against Gyrovague, the personal blog of Jani Patokallio. Additionally, archive.today apparently even modified archived pages to insert Patokallio's name in what seems to be a personal vendetta. Ars Technica has the details.
  • A proposal that terminals should generate the 256-color palette from the configured 16-color one, instead of using fixed colors that don't change with your theme. It's a great idea and has already been adopted by iTerm2, Asciinema, Ghostty, and SwiftTerm.

  • I've tried using OpenNTPD as a lightweight NTP server(!) on a Raspberry Pi and would not recommend it:

    • The version in Debian (6.2p3) is nine years old and refuses to sync your clock if it's more than a couple of minutes off, logging adjtime failed: Invalid argument, which is a problem if your machine doesn't have an RTC.
    • You can configure it to jump the time on startup by adding -s to the daemon options in /etc/default/openntpd, but in more recent versions this is simply the default and doesn't need an extra switch.
    • The constraint from config stanza to seed the time from HTTPS is unavailable "due to missing LibreSSL's libtls implementation".

    Instead, I chose chrony, which just works, and configuring it to be a server is as simple as adding

    allow

    to its config.

  • When running DirectX games under Linux using Wine/Lutris/DXVK, you can set the environment variable DXVK_HUD to display some additional performance metrics. For example, DXVK_HUD=fps shows a simple frame rate counter. Environment variables can be set in the Lutris options under "System options".