Hacker News: chroma_zone

New comment by chroma_zone in "I have officially retired from Emacs"

chroma_zone — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 20:59:53 +0000

My experience with wxWidgets based apps is that they tend to not handle DPI scaling well. Audacity is a good example, IIRC that's one of the reasons they're moving to Qt.

New comment by chroma_zone in "Human Source License (HSL)"

chroma_zone — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 21:17:31 +0000

No mention in the README either. Sneaky

New comment by chroma_zone in "The beauty and terror of modding Windows"

chroma_zone — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 19:22:02 +0000

A lot of basic tweaks to windows behavior require those types of unstable hacks. The point is that developers or users who want to modify their system are forced into sketchy software.

New comment by chroma_zone in "The beauty and terror of modding Windows"

chroma_zone — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:58:14 +0000

Having spent a few years trying to write Windows utility software, it is really exhausting to be in an antagonistic relationship with Microsoft and have their updates constantly break your work.

The article mentions ExplorerPatcher -- the changelog [1] of that project is informative. Every release involves fixing a bunch of things that Microsoft broke, intentionally or not. Some of this is understandable given how it (necessarily) messes with low level OS components, but there is still zero transparency and you just need to roll with whatever changes. I can't imagine doing that kind of work anymore.

[1] https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/releases

New comment by chroma_zone in "Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers"

chroma_zone — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 21:44:28 +0000

The terms of those licenses are still relevant...

New comment by chroma_zone in "Leaving Google has actively improved my life"

chroma_zone — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 20:36:29 +0000

You may have turned this feature off (like I did) but by default Gmail sorts your emails into categories like Promotions, Social, Updates...

New comment by chroma_zone in "Windows: Prefer the Native API over Win32"

chroma_zone — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 19:17:56 +0000

Does Debian Stable count?

The page didn't include a download link, so I found it here: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/96.0/linux-x86_...

And yes, it runs perfectly fine on Debian 13.

New comment by chroma_zone in "Windows: Prefer the Native API over Win32"

chroma_zone — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 18:36:46 +0000

Sounds like the iOS model: your app only exists as long as you are alive and able to pay $99/year. This mentality is a nightmare for software preservation.

New comment by chroma_zone in "Instabridge has acquired Nova Launcher"

chroma_zone — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 21:39:37 +0000

I paid for "Square Home" a couple years ago and I'm very happy with it. It's highly customizable. The Windows Phone style layout probably isn't for everyone but it works well for me.

New comment by chroma_zone in "Our approach to advertising"

chroma_zone — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 19:43:06 +0000

At least put the ads in a consistent location so I can cover it with masking tape

New comment by chroma_zone in "The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2019)"

chroma_zone — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 18:41:35 +0000

TFix is very nice but unfortunately removes the software renderer described in this article. It's very difficult to get the original exe working on modern systems.

TFix also brings back the spatial audio / EAX support that was broken by Vista, which is a huge part of the experience IMO. Highly recommend installing and configuring OpenAL Soft for this game.

New comment by chroma_zone in "2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop"

chroma_zone — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 01:03:24 +0000

The Win11 start menu used to have a fun bug where pressing Ctrl-Minus would open search with the phrase "zoom out". No other shortcut did this. Just Zoom Out. No idea how a bug like that happens.

New comment by chroma_zone in "Tags to make HTML work like you expect"

chroma_zone — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 22:03:19 +0000

I usually add:

which gives you a nice automatic dark theme "for free"