An interesting article, but it seems like quite an oversight to not even mention dithering techniques, which in my opinion give much better results.
I've done some development work in Pico-8, and some time ago I wrote a plugin for the Aseprite pixel art editor to convert an arbitrary image into the Pico-8 palette using Floyd-Steinberg dithering[0]
I ran their example image through it, and personally I think the results it gives were the best of the bunch https://imgur.com/a/O6YN8S2
They don't explicitly state it in the article that I can see, but the PICO-8 is 128x128, and it appears that their output images were constrained to that. Your dithered images appear to be much higher resolution. I'd be curious what dithering would look like at 128x128!
Dithering is used quite frequently in PICO-8 projects at the “native” (128x128) resolution. Here’s an example from a few years ago: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=110273#p
Direct link to the image, though you may have to fetch it through a non-browser to avoid it redirecting back to the stupid HTML: https://i.imgur.com/y93naNw.png
(I don’t know how it works for others, but it has always been atrocious for me. Their server is over 200ms away, and even with uBlock Origin blocking ten different trackers it takes fully 35 seconds before it even begins to load the actual image, and the experience once it’s finished is significantly worse than just navigating directly to the image anyway. Tried it in Chromium a couple of times, 55 and 45 seconds. Seriously, imgur is so bad. Maybe it ain’t so bad in the USA, I don’t know, but in Australia and in India it’s appallingly bad. You used to be able to open the image URLs directly, but some years ago they started redirecting to the HTML in general if not loading as a subresource or maybe something about accept headers; curl will still get it directly.)
Dithering is sort of like having the ability to "blend" any two colors of your palette (possibly even more than any two, if you use it well), so instead of being a 16-color pallete, it's like working with a 16+15+14+13+12+...=136-color pallete. It's a drastic difference (at the cost of graininess, of course).
Dithering is still more important than is commonly known, even with 24-bit "true color". For example, imagine that you had a gradient that goes from white to black across a 1920x1080 monitor. 24-bit color means you only have 256 levels of color, so a naive gradient implementation will result in 256 discrete bands of different grays, each about 8 pixels wide (about as wide as this "w" character).
You might not thing that you'd notice that, but it looks surprisingly bad. Your eyes would immediately notice that there are "stripes" of solid gray instead of a smooth continuum. But if you apply dithering, your eyes won't be able to notice (at least not easily). It will all look smooth again.
In a situation like this, I like to use "blue noise" dithering, but there are scores of dithering methods to choose from.
> Outside DualSense controller having issues connecting to bluetooth
I've had this issue as well on KDE Plasma. I'm convinced it's some sort of bug within Plasma itself. If I use bluetoothctl to pair the controller, it works fine, might be worth giving that a try if you haven't.
I'm honestly dumbfounded this made it off the cutting room floor. A 1 in 9 chance for a given attack to succeed? And that's just the tests they came up with! You couldn't pay me to use it, which is good, because I doubt my account would keep that money in it for long.
I have never heard of this before, but watching through their Youtube introduction, this might be one of the best pieces of software I've ever seen. Assuming it works as advertised, this could replace a few things I've been hosting myself.
In case of OEM, the license is never directly owned by the owner of the machine; the license is tied to the hardware, and you're selling it on with its license key attached. If you activate Windows using a bought license, that license does not get copied into the hardware.
Sure, you can leave it in insert mode the entire time. I'm not sure that's really what you want though, as you'd effectively turn the editor into a basic notepad app.
> Other editors, if the content is not on the screen, will not perform the undo action unless the content is actually visible.
Really? What editor does this? Vim/Neovim definitely will undo the change with a single 'u' press, and every GUI editor I've ever used will undo the change immediately with a single ctrl+z.
Ah, thanks for the correction. I'm wrong on how common this is.
I just tested CLion, VS Code, and Sublime Text. I thought all three behaved as described, but only CLion did. I wish it was more common though, I find it a lot more intuitive and clear on what's happening.
Huh, that's interesting. I've only used VSCode and Sublime, never CLion. I'm honestly not sure how I'd feel going the other way, but I could see the behavior being annoying if you're not expecting it.
Just tried Goland and it works the way you describe. Emacs is immediate restore.
CLion and Goland are both JetBrains IDEs, so no surprise they use the same mechanism. FWIW, I like it and think it's preferable.
I've done some development work in Pico-8, and some time ago I wrote a plugin for the Aseprite pixel art editor to convert an arbitrary image into the Pico-8 palette using Floyd-Steinberg dithering[0]
I ran their example image through it, and personally I think the results it gives were the best of the bunch https://imgur.com/a/O6YN8S2
[0] https://github.com/aquova/aseprite-scripts/blob/master/pico-...