A Shell and a Screenshot Tool

Two new projects this week, both of which started as "wait, can I just build this myself?" and then took over the whole week.

What I worked onCopied!

• utsushot: on Tuesday I thought of a package that nobody has made yet, so I made it. It takes supersampled screenshots on Wayland by spinning up a temporary high resolution phantom output, grabbing the frame, and throwing the output away. So you get a screenshot at 2x or 4x the resolution your monitor actually runs at. Works on niri through a nested compositor, and on stock niri I got true window supersampling working through a per surface scale boost. Written in Rust. It already has 2 stars which is 2 more than I expected.

• xsh: I said I wanted to dive into operating systems, so I started writing a shell in C. Started Thursday night with getline echoing back at me, and by Friday it had fork and exec, arguments, cd, a custom prompt, pipes, redirection, N pipes, append redirection, colors, an alias table, and Ctrl-C that kills the child instead of the whole shell. That last one took embarrassingly long to get right.

Doing this next to the OS labs is a cheat code. We did syscalls and fork/exec in the lab and then I went home and used the same things for real.

• Dynamic island for noctalia v4: I was bored. It looks really good. Pushed it to a dynamic-island branch with instructions in a DYNAMIC_ISLAND.md.

• Three PRs merged upstream this week, all opened a couple weeks ago: deno #36375 (the repl was breaking on regex literals), react-spectrum #10396 (selectOnFocus wasn't selecting the autofocused item), and headlamp #6675. Nothing new opened this week, they just all landed at once.

• hermes (private, not ready to be released yet): an agent I run over Telegram with a single user allowlist, so it's only me. Runs a morning cron. Still figuring out what I actually want it to do.

• places on this site: a list of places I want to go. Each one stays a stock photo until I actually get there and replace it with my own. Sar Pass is the only real one so far. I keep adding random things to this site and over-engineering it, but who cares.

The OAsCopied!

Groww on Wednesday, for an Android intern role. An LRU question in Kotlin, which was a completely different experience from every other OA I've given. Was actually fun.

Then Roblox, and that one was unlike anything I've ever seen. It starts with an "experience" inside the Roblox player itself with puzzles that I think were testing general mental ability. Then a pile of behavioral questions. Then two LeetCode medium-ish problems at the end, which I did in C++. Fun out of 10.

Also Amazon wants a hiring interest form filled by today, Money Forward has an interview on Monday, and Microsoft and Visa both came on campus so I applied to those too.

No results from anything yet. Just OAs going out and silence coming back.

The hawky.ai thing I wrote about last week actually started this week, with a WhatsApp message on Monday morning while I was in class.

Still stings a bit.

GSoC final submission opens tomorrow. Most of my work is done, blogs and status reports are filed, so that part I'm not worried about.

What I found interestingCopied!

• ghostty : fast GPU accelerated terminal with native UI on each platform.
• Tide-island : a smooth interactive island for Hyprland. This is what put the dynamic island idea in my head.
• ppsspp : PSP emulator written in C++, runs everywhere.
• HKMP : Hollow Knight multiplayer. Genuinely did not know this existed.
• obfus.h : a single header that obfuscates your C at compile time.
• iitk : a much better campus map for IIT Kanpur with a fast search engine. Makes me want to do this for our campus.

RandomCopied!

Some thoughts hit me at 7am on Tuesday about being stuck in a loop, chasing cheap dopamine, getting motivated for a week and then landing back in the same place. Not going to write the whole thing out here. But it felt a little more real this time, and a little more like something I'll actually hold to.

Went from 799 to 808 followers on X.

My friend haruki told me to play Sky with her, so we played Sky. I did not expect to like it as much as I did. It's just very calm, which is not a thing I have much of right now.

Also got into Hollow Knight properly, made it out to the Fungal Wastes.

Streamed some Elden Ring in VC with parthil, chish and quantinium. Deaths were at 400 by then.

And then at 3am on Saturday the four of us found DisDubs, which is a group dubbing game inside Discord. You pick a scene, everyone gets a part, you perform it over voice chat, and a bot records each person on their own track and hands you back the clip. We did Attack on Titan, Arthur Morgan, Thor, a Spongebob one, and something called Basement Boogeyman that was just screaming.

I have not slept properly all week. Three hours on Friday.

Also downloaded Skyrim, and Bloodborne, which is PS4 only but runs on PC through ShadPS4. I will definitely not have time to play either of them. They will sit there for months.