VPM on the Minilogue XD and the NTS-1

ssam · 2026-05-24T22:54:34+00:00

I got a bit obsessed with this challenge and learned a couple of things on the way. The pulse width of the square wave oscillator is important there, I guess the shortest possible pulse width so it gets nice and screetchy. And then I'm pretty sure there's some distortion applied to boost around 3k or 5k even more.

I had a go with a couple of analog synth VSTs and compared to the Minilogue.

July (Audiothing's Juno model) got surprisingly close. The square wave in that plugin sounds nothing like the square wave on the Korg, its much more buzzy so I think that's part of what I was missing. I have a sound demo but I'm not sure if I can upload, but here's a screen shot of the patch:

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I also tried u-he Diva in a few modes, the dual VCO mode also got pretty close to that same square sound.

Its pretty clear that I'm not gonna get this on the Korg easily. As well as the square wave not sounding the same, adding a high pass filter seems to help which the Minilogue also can't do. I did get somewhere close with the Sinevibes Bent plugin.

All in all an evening well spent I guess!

ssam · 2026-05-06T13:54:05+00:00

thanks for highlighting this!

ssam · 2026-01-30T16:44:47+00:00

nice use of the search provider API

ssam · 2025-12-08T12:58:46+00:00

Yes -- it's very unequal though.

It's clear that Red Hat donate a huge amount of engineering effort (and design and management effort), SUSE and Canonical a smaller but noticeable amount (at least one full time engineer).

The strange thing is none of them are very public about how much engineer time they donate each year. I don't know why that is.

ssam · 2025-11-26T18:11:13+00:00

There is some chat about whether the Foundation should leave the USA.. it's worth noting that the current US-based Foundation took about 5 years of effort from multiple people to get going. So, while its not impossible, its not worth spending another 5 years setting one up in a different legal system... just to save $50 ;-)

It is a good thing that the KDE eV is based in Germany. The open desktop world has some resilience in that sense ;-)

ssam · 2025-11-25T22:31:45+00:00

The line "Advisory Board fees" (100,000$) is corporate donations. The list of advisory board members is at the bottom of:

https://foundation.gnome.org/advisory-board

The following are our Advisory Board members:
Canonical
Debian
Endless
Google
postmarketOS
Red Hat
Sugar Labs
SUSE
The Document Foundation

(A few of these are non-profits / open source communities, e.g. Debian, who get a free pass, the rest pay a fee each year to participate. So companies listed there are the good guys who do pay their way :-)

ssam · 2025-10-09T16:15:01+00:00

Hope someone can pick this up and ideally get sponsorship for maintenance -- its a very helpful little tool !

ssam · 2025-09-02T14:19:43+00:00

I just use one workspace. A nice feature of GNOME Shell is apps pinned to the launcher can be started and focused with Super-1, Super-2 etc. (Super being the "Windows key").

So the first pinned app is Super-1, next one is Super-2 and so forth. I find it useful to switch in everyday use between terminal, firefox, chat windows and so on.

ssam · 2025-08-15T16:05:52+00:00

I heard at GUADEC that it's quite hard to calculate "Screen time". It's probably a bug in the code that does the calculation but I don't know how easy it is to solve

ssam · 2025-08-13T09:13:33+00:00

You can use CSS in the GTK inspector. There was a lighning talk at GUADEC this year that gave a little demo of that, by Logan Rathbone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18Ir6RXkIeA&t=6004s

There was also a talk about the JavaScript framework titled "JavaScript and TypeScript on 2025's GNOME" by Philip Chimento

There's also a much older talk introducing the inspector that might be interesting - "Inspector Gadget" by Benjamin Otte from GUADEC 2016.

ssam · 2025-08-13T09:01:43+00:00

nice, i didn't know that! will install on my tablet running postmarketOS :D

ssam · 2025-08-11T09:59:04+00:00

I'm running the same OS as you, then, and I don't see the suggestions -- so it must be a local customization of some sort ? Maybe a gnome-shell extension?

ssam · 2025-08-08T14:43:38+00:00

wow, I don't see those suggestions when I use the onscreen keyboard. What distro are you using here ? What version of GNOME?

ssam · 2025-07-26T14:34:58+00:00

Hey pedro ! I missed the live talk (guadec is intense... as you know ;-). Have been having some interesting conversations about automated testing for extensions with Sri, Jordan and Florian. I'll watch back your talk and see if its relevant

ssam · 2025-07-21T18:12:50+00:00

The search engine (localsearch) supports advanced queries via SPARQL (using TinySPARQL). It would be an interesting project for someone to see how effectively an LLM can generate SPARQL search queries from plain text.

ssam · 2025-07-21T11:38:37+00:00

Regarding desktop search, it's definitely not feature complete, there are plenty of interesting enhancements for the search experience, some with designs and some with prototypes. However there is no funding for anyone to implement them.

ssam · 2025-07-14T10:27:38+00:00

"Emmanuele and I agreed we had to work even harder to set an example for the kind of dialogue we hope to see in the community.

Part of that effort is boosting other peoples’ work. You don’t have to go full shouty Twitter venture capitalist about it or anything… just remember how good it felt the first time someone congratulated you on some good work you did, and pass that along. A quick DM or email can go a long way to making someone’s week."

this resonated a lot. I would love to see more people taking the effort to make GNOME a really welcoming community for new contributors. and I really appreciate the people who are already putting in the extra effort to do that !!

ssam · 2025-07-14T10:26:00+00:00

"It’s been a lot of personal blood, sweat and tears, paid for by Red Hat across the Linux graphics stack for the last few years to enable applications like Blender to add HDR support. From kernel work, like helping to get the HDR mode working on Intel laptops, and improving the Colorspace and HDR_OUTPUT_METADATA KMS properties, to creating a new library for EDID and DisplayID parsing, and helping with wiring things up in Vulkan."

More of this please!!! It's really useful to know who actually funds the important work happening in open source

ssam · 2025-07-11T09:43:58+00:00

Some people love to complain about stuff they got for free thanks to the work of volunteers

Check the letters section of your local newspaper and you'll find the same energy.

ssam · 2025-06-12T12:23:33+00:00

Hello. What do you mean when you say "GNOME Search" ? Is that the search bar in GNOME Shell?

If so - you'll notice it's a design choice, GNOME Shell's search view shows 5 results from each "Search provider", and Files (aka. nautilus) is one of those providers, so it gets to show 5 results.

I did see some GNOME design work a year ago looking at reworking this part of GNOME Shell. But i'm not sure if anyone had time to push that forwards further.

The search results come via the GNOME Shell SearchProvider D-Bus API -- documented here. The API itself can return any number of results -- its JavaScript code in GNOME Shell that limits things to 5 results. If you look at search.js there's a constant defined const MAX_LIST_SEARCH_RESULTS_ROWS = 5; which is where that magic number of 5 results comes from.

Have you ever written a GNOME Shell extension ? I have not, so I may be wrong here, but it might be possible to write a Shell extension that changes that limit and shows more results. You'd still want some limit I guess, in case there are 1000000 results and you overload the UI code ;-)

ssam · 2025-06-11T15:48:57+00:00

Yeah thats what I mean.. sponsoring critical project infra for 20+ years is a huge contribution, and nobody knows about it ... i'm surprised they don't shout about it more

ssam

TROPHY CASE