THE WRITER MUST EAT -> patreon.com/trn1ty <-
| \ | | blah!
|\ | `\|\ | the rantings and ravings
|/ |(_|| | * of a depraved lunatic
<^
2024-12-01
: vaporware i looked forward to
in which trinity whines about things that never happened
1. PINE64 PinePod
announced 2022-04-01 via the PINE64 community blog
no release date given
just... ignored, without any further update
The PINE64 PinePod was, allegedly, a digital audio player using the chipset
found in the PineBuds Pro, which were announced in the same blog post and
released November 2022. It wasn't pictured in the blog post (and the PineBuds
were) and not many specs were given ("We haven't yet gotten the design of the
PinePod down, but I'll browse Apple's store for inspiration later today.
Regardless, I just feel an open stand-alone music player belongs in 2022.")
I bought the PineBuds Pro at launch and later, after their charging cradle fell
out of my pocket in a snowstorm and before any replacement parts were
available, bought a second unit, which then was broken in the washing machine a
year after the first one broke. The sound quality was good (though I am no
audiophile) and they worked with every device I tried. Like every other PINE64
product ever released they did have their hiccups - a chunky charger, barely
any warning when they were about to die, and buds that were just a little heavy
and would frequently fall out of my ears while I was cooking in a restaurant
(which is technically a food safety violation, but they only ever fell on the
ground and never into food, and I always washed my hands and stuff after I
touched them). But I always held a hope in my heart that in another community
blog post they would say something, anything more about the PinePod.
2. PINE64 unnamed bone conduction headphones
announced 2024-03-17
no release date given
just... ignored, without any further update
Yup, of the three devices announced by PINE64 using the BES2300 chipset (used
by the PineBuds Pro), only one came out, and the other two rotted in what I can
only assume to be a very cold development hell. These are with what I was going
to replace my PineBuds Pro, as they looked less likely to fall off my head in
the kitchen - plus, they didn't plug an ear, so I could communicate more
effectively. That's right - they /looked/ less likely - there actually was a
picture this time. The blog post said the OpenPineBuds firmware, an incomplete
firmware for the PineBuds Pro intended to eventually^TM replace the proprietary
stock firmware licensed from [vendor (I don't want to go through the trouble
of figuring out whom)], would receive updates to make the unnamed bone
conduction headphones work with the free firmware at launch, but I just went
through the git commits on OpenPineBuds and there were none that could be even
vaguely construed as supporting a second device.
I don't plan to purchase another PINE64 product until either the PineSkull or
the PinePod is released. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on
you, fool me thrice, shame on me, xkcd, et cetera.
3. Flipnote Studio 3D
announced 2013-03-13
eta "Summer 2013"
released in North America for Club Nintendo owners 2015-02-10
I saw the Nintendo Direct clip for Flipnote Studio 3D on my 3DS XL around the
time of release and was overjoyed. I had loved Flipnote Studio on my DSi XL,
having spend hours drawing probably something like a hundred miscellaneous
flipnotes practicing animation, storytelling, and shading. I uploaded YouTube
videos of my flipnotes by exporting them as GIF, using shady websites to
convert them to AVI, importing them into Windows Movie Maker (the newest
version, part of Windows Live 2012), and recording audio with my computer
microphone. It wasn't as sophisticated as flash animating but I hadn't heard of
that yet and was 9 years old. So I checked back on the Nintendo eShop at least
every week for the duration of "Summer 2013". Autumn rolled around, winter, and
it never came.
What I didn't know was that Flipnote Studio 3D /had/ been released in Japan,
and had become too big of a success. According to random Internet sources I may
have imagined, Nintendo didn't want to pay for moderation of the attached semi-
social media service Flipnote Gallery: World, and spent the year and a half
between the Japanese release and the International release stripping the
on-line features from the application. Eventually it did release, quietly, in
Club Nintendo, where for some points or tickets or coins or whatever it used (I
was a member but only remembered to use it every six months or so to register
the DS and 3DS games my grandparents had gotten me in the meantime) you could
get a voucher code to plug into the Nintendo eShop to download the unlisted
title. I didn't find out about this until 2019 or so.
So why is this vaporware if it did release? It released late and silently, with
fewer features than intended. It was a worthy successor still, but by the time
it came out I was over Flipnote and onto more trivial pursuits - I was 15 and
a verified creator on XVideos where I was posting hentai I had animated.
4. xi-editor
a video for it that got popular was released 2018-01-29
free software, developed openly
discontinued, "spritually succeeded" by the lapce editor which is
totally different
xi-editor was supposed to be a really, really fast text editor backend that
would "last the next 20 years". That never happened, which is predictable
considering it was free software from a Google engineer, but at the time I
totally thought it would happen.
xi was succsneeded by the Lapce editor which is an IDE (not an editor backend)
for macOS (not [whatever Rust supports]).
5. OpenXP
popular on 4chan for a bit
pirate software, developed on git and irc over tor
probably fell off due to not being shiny anymore
After the Windows XP / Server 2003 source leak in 202X every /g/irlie was
foaming at the mouth about a free software Windows XP. Software was ported to
XP in anticipation of this great new software eXPedition coming soon. Nothing
happened and like all /g/ projects it faded into obscurity.
6. ReactOS
lol. lmao
7. ZenithOS
see reactos
8. DuckStation
initial commit 2019-09-11 (nice)
free software, developed in the open
surprise relicense 2024-09-01 to non-free
DuckStation is one of those rare cases where existing software was vaporized,
which is really funny and I think still counts as vaporware. The creator
randomly decided it didn't want to share its toys anymore and changed the GPLv3
license to one that forbidded sharing modified source code - the reason given
being that the creator was tired of getting bug reports about modifications
breaking things.
Okay I'm tuckered out now.
: fuse-ext2 kept segfaulting
so I'm forking it and fixing its shit
fuse-ext2 is a baffling program. I had used it a couple times for moving files
between NetBSD and Linux and lately it's been segfaulting when trying to do big
file operations such as managing my ext4 audio drive. Alright, I figured, I'll
just open it up and see where the segfault is - and then I found a 5kloc tidy
mess of a codebase built with (shudder) automake. I've torn out all the OS X
stuff (because screw your stupid proprietary OS) and automake stuff (because
I'm not too high-and-mighty for Makefile, and because any operating system new
enough to have FUSE is new enough that it supports recentish POSIX without
shims) and am working on shortening the codebase; -2500loc and counting. Build
times are now counted in (single-digit) seconds rather than minutes after a
make clean and rather than a weird, half-baked debugf() after every function
call I'm figuring out how to put actually useful debugging in.
2025-04-01
: vaporware other people looked forward to
1. trinity's fuse-ext2 fork
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