Happenings in GNOME

Manuals contains the documentation engine from Builder as a standalone application. Not only does it browse documentation organized by SDK but can install additional SDKs too. This is done using the same techniques Builder uses to manage your project SDKs.

It should feel very familiar if you’re already using the documentation tooling in Builder.

In the past, we would just parse all the *.devhelp2 files up-front when loading. GMarkupParseContext is fast enough that it isn’t too much overhead at start-up for a couple hundred files.

However, once you start dealing with SDKs and multiple versions of all these files the startup performance can take quite a hit. So Manuals indexes these files into SQLite using GOM and performs queries using that instead. It conveniently makes cross-referencing easy too so you can jump between SDK revisions for a particular piece of documentation.

Enjoy!

You can get Ptyxis on Flathub now if you would like to run the stable version rather than Nightly. Unless you’re interested in helping QA Ptyxis or contributing that is probably the Flatpak you want to have installed.

Nightly builds of Ptyxis use the GNOME Nightly SDK meaning GTK from main (or close to it). Living on “trunk” can be a bit painful when it goes through major transitions like is happening now with a move to Vulkan-by-default.

Enjoy!

I’m from a small town in Washington State that is well-known for top-tier guitars. It was home to Boogie Bodies, co-created by Lynn Ellsworth previously of Charvel fame. You might remember some of the guitars they worked on including a number of EVH’s iconic striped guitars.

When the company split Jim Warmoth took his half to create Warmoth Guitars, which is still in Puyallup to this day.

My cousin happened to work for Lynn doing paint and so I was always enthralled with their custom guitars from childhood. A few years back I put a “parts-caster” strat together with Warmoth parts and just now did another iteration on it.

The body consists of Alder from Washington State with a 5A Flame Maple laminated top from the north. It is dyed green with a small amount of burst to the edges.

The electronics come from Klein Pickups who in my opinion are doing some of the best out there right now. These are the mid-scoops but I’m going to swap them out soon for some 1965 recreations matched to SRV’s Lenny this summer.

The potentiometers are your normal strat 250k setup though this is a 5-way switch so you can run additional combinations out-of-phase to cancel out some of that infamous “single coil hum”.

The bridge comes from John Mann which should be familiar to the PRS players out there. Unless you’re like me and you have a PRS Core 24 with a Floyd Rose tremolo instead.

The tuners are locking Schaller M6 which are my go-to choice. Honestly, I like them more than the top screw lock that my PRS has. Don’t know why, just do.

The most recent change here since I originally assembled this is a new neck. It is a super curly 3A Flame Maple with Ebony fret-board. You can’t get the same sort of Ebony you used to for scarcity reasons, so now days you just have to be really selective about which cut you use if you want it to look black.

The back of the neck really demonstrates the beauty of a curly flame maple. I prefer nitro finishes for necks so that is what you see. One thing I should note here is that I wish I had opted for a contoured cut at the neck bolt-on position for a bit more arm space.

For the nut I decided to do something different than I’ve played before and used the Earvana nut. So far I’m pretty happy with it but I haven’t noticed too much of a difference.

That’s about it!

Here are a few tone samples which are just quick single takes so try not to hamper too much on my mistakes.

Some clean-ish samples (compressor, chorus, reverb essentially)

• Clean Sample 1
• Clean Sample 2
• Clean Sample 3
• Clean Sample 4
• Clean Sample 5 w/ Out-of-Phase position 2

Some dirty samples (lead channel at about 1/3 drive, compressor and reverb)

• Dirty Sample 1
• Dirty Sample 2

Thanks for reading and listening!

It’s no secret I have way more projects to manage than hours in the day.

I hope to rectify this by sharing more knowledge on how my projects are built. The most important project, Builder, is quite a large code-base. It is undoubtedly daunting to dive in and figure out where to start.

Here is a sort of engineers journal (PDF) in book form about how the components fit together. The writing tries to be brief and to the point. You can always reference the source code for finer points.

There is so much more that can happen with Builder if we have regular contributors and subsystem maintainers.

We still need to bring back a new designer. We still need real strong git commit integration. We still need a physical device simulator to go with our architecture emulator. Our debugger API could use data visualizers and support for the debug-adapter-protocol. Container integration has a long tail of desired features.

You get the idea.

Lots of exciting features will happen once people dive into the code-base to learn more. Hopefully this book helps you along that journey.

Sometimes I build stuff other than software and this is a post about that.

My wife and I had to postpone our honeymoon for a couple years due to COVID. Last spring we were able to take a trip to Thailand and really enjoyed it. So much so that when we got back we had a desire recreate that sort of relaxed urban yet tropical feel we enjoyed so much in various cities.

We don’t have a lot of extra space at our house but we did have some in the back which was vacated by recently fell Elm which were diseased.

I’m not one to shy away from projects I’ve never done before so why not build a deck and pergola to fill out that space for entertaining and hacking?

The first step was to even the grade. When we bought the house it was already sloped but the grinding of Elm tree trunks added another layer on top of that.

That is a lot of work but to make something 8’×20′ we need to clear a lot more than this. Only to be made worse by root after root of dead Elm tree remnants. Pick axe and sweat.

That’s more like it.

We don’t have much of a frost line here so you don’t need to do the whole concrete-pylon thing for the deck and integrated pergola. But what we do need to do is ensure that we have a retaining wall to keep wet ground from touching the cedar for the deck.

The 2×4 cedar topper is mostly just there to match what will be the cedar floor of the deck.

A bunch of gravel of various grades under the cinders create something stable that drains water beneath the cedar 4×4 which will be our columns.

This is built as two 8’×10′ sections which are connected. That makes the math much easier in my head but also easier to source good wood. Above you see the rim and floor joists for the first side with the blocking yet to be done.

I lucked out that the cedar supplier gave me 12′ 4×4s instead of the requested 10′. That gave me 2′ extra to use when framing without having to first get the whole 10′ columns leveled. Later one we’ll take them out one-by-one and replace them with the columns.

Now we have the columns in place and the whole thing leveled. Blocking has started and will get completed before adding the floor boards. I ended up using screws at an angle from the rounded corners of the ceder floor boards using “camo hidden fasteners”. After seeing how they handled the winter that was definitely the right decision.

Thankfully I had help from my wife and emeritus GNOMie Cosimo with all this.

Now we have all the floor boards on. The cedar appearance board is tacked on the edge of the rim joist to hide the pressure treated lumber. The beams have been connected at the top of the columns. The start of a privacy wall is in place to see how it will fit together. Next up, all those rafters which I used some simple angle cuts and a multi-tool to extract pockets to interference-fit over the beams.

Lastly my wife did her design magic after gathering all the outdoor furniture together.

This year I have jasmine and honeysuckle doing it’s thing to hopefully start getting some of this pergola covered with leaves and flowers by summer. I also extended the privacy wall a bit more since this picture to have a lattice for the vines to climb.

That’s it!

A long time ago we had Devhelp integrated in Builder.

It got lost in the GTK 4 port because there was no GTK 4 version of Devhelp. Additionally, it didn’t handle the concept of SDKs at all. We went through great lengths in Builder to try to copy them around so libdevhelp could pick them up (with marginal success).

Builder now has code which can index various types of SDKs including Flatpak, the host system, and jhbuild. It does so automatically at startup into a SQLite database. That allows us to compare etags at startup and avoid a whole lot of extra work. It also serves as a convenient place to implement search going forward.

It looks like this

The path bar at the bottom provides a convenient way to navigate around without having to go back to the documentation tree. It looks like this

It also works when you’re using Builder as a “Text Editor with Plugins” replacement (e.g. the editor workspace).