Category: Uncategorized

  • SEARX instance + logo refresh

    SEARX instance + logo refresh

    A long long time ago, I can still remember, how that music used to make me smile ♬ wait no– that’s not my story. Let’s start over…

    A long, long time ago, I deployed my own searx(sic) instance. Listed it and everything…even forked it! The idea behind it (the fork) was to contribute in the only way I could so far—design.

    Quick design recap: I’m not a designer.

    I keep mentioning this post after post, I’m aware. But it’s for a good reason; I have been designing more stuff lately and thus posting here and there’s more about it, pretending to be a designer carries too much responsibility of which I want none. Thank you, next 🎅🏿✌🏼, no designer title for me. The thing is though, I just zen out while I’m on the artboard and sometimes something good comes out of it. That’s it. If it’s good enough to help somebody else, why not share it with them and let it be good for them—Right?

    I liked the design I made, of course, I’m biased. But just as the list of designs I’ve done for other individual/organizations, I’ve never delivered any of them partly because of embarrassment and because it wasn’t code but mostly because it wasn’t code and I didn’t know exactly if that’s a thing (sharing non-code assets in GitHub repos. Plus I fear using Git because I don’t want to upload the wrong thing. The nomenclature is so ambiguous I rather stay off doing things by hand.

    Anyway, my instance started getting blacklisted, I think, because searches were starting to take forever, and during hypervisor maintenance I just never turned it on again.

    Fast forward to this week when I wanted to bring it up, but before doing so I stopped by the project to check how behind I was, it turns out, enough that I missed the redesign window, there’s little chances my submissions would be considered at all. That said, searx can be deployed by anyone, and I don’t see why anybody would be bothered to be given an few more options for their homepage logo—if they’re not using their own brand, of course.

    Because at the end of the day I didn’t make it for me, I made it for searx. I respected their accent colors, plus added one of my own and a third with neither. Since with searx comes with a couple of these images, I thought they were automatically selected in response to the browsers’ own response to the system’s brightness/time-of-day/or-whatever setting.

    That ain’t the case. So I scratch the first two I had designed and for a minute I thought about trying a neutral color, visible on most backgrounds, like gray, cyan, magenta. But those are sort of my go-tos already and I wanted black because I wanted it to be bold without being too loud (like cyan or magenta), so I just added a contrasting silvery border and gradiented the sh*t out of it so it looks “metallic but like it’s just a coincidence it ain’t really trying, y’know, maybe if you squint and take some molly” that’s was the explanation I’m told I gave. I don’t remember like that but whatever. To finish up the not-really-trying-but-behind-the-scenes look, it has subtle shadowing and highlighting so it jumps from the screen, but still looking flat, that’s the not-really-trying part I suppose.

    All three colors are visible on just about any background.

    In addition to the logos, I also created favicons in even more color combinations, they’re all pretty common so there should be something for everyone. I had a little bit of fun with the names so just ignore that. They will be renamed favicon.(ico|png) in regardless, so…yeah.

    Normally I use Firefox, but I tested in Chrome and saw for the first time ever the tab’s loading animation circling the logo, it looks very cool.

    Below is the original searx logo. It was designed back in the day during the great depression…I got after realizing that Google had came out with something that didn’t suck8, Material Design. I knew it was going to be the next Ubuntu orange the first time I saw it.

    Just to clarify, orange is not a good color, it has never been. It just so happens that Ubuntu, like Google, had a big enough user base than anything less awful that the normally hideous things surrounding it, and like Google, it too had an allegedly free entrance fee, thus their stuff get amended into the bible and to a country’s constitution or whatever their equivalent is.

    searx logo is OK, I think, for most people. I like the rounded font. The R could be wider but overall I think it could more condensed kerning1. I do have a personal issue the big X which is double the size of the R before it, it triggers my OCPD. I’m fine with an “X marks the spot” kind of situation, if some spot was indeed being marked with the X, then by all means, but in here, it’s so much bigger (and in color) that it kind of breaks apart the word into “sear X”. If keeping the giant X was crucial, I’d also add a second X in the proper size and (a closer) color to match the rest of the text, blur a little the giant one to make it seen out of focus or something, like some sort of shahow or projection from the X in the front. That’s just me though.

    I’m probably not making much sense, fake designers rarely do.

    Gray is a solid color choice for dynamically “lighted” pages, or whatever they’re called, and the gradient is nice because it’s subtle, kind of showing somebody out there was classy enough not to go with a contrasting gradient. Of the little shadow I’m not sure though, because it screams Material Design.

    1: Look at har with them fancy words. Honestly I’m not sure if that’s the correct term for how squished together the glyphs are.

    Designs

    ↓ DOWNLOAD HERE ↓

    To get the files click on this link then enter your social security number and other fun details like maiden name, and in less than 48 ho…just kidding!— It’s a direct, tracker-less link to a fileserver3. Alternatively, they’re on Github (github.com/vitaprimo/searx).

    ↑ DOWNLOAD HERE ↑

    SVGs and PNGs are included for each, as well as the original AFDESIGN (Serif Affinity Designer) file. SVG though the more arguably the more desirable neutral format, buf it doesn’t support many properties that aren’t a problem for PNG files. PNG files, on the other hand, we know they’re raster files in the end (despite some tricks Macromedia/Adobe Fireworks files had back then) so the whole document resolution was bumped up from the regular resolution of 72dpi to 400dpi.

    Original twist

    These are the first three new logos a year two years ago:

    Refresh

    On the (very late) December 2022 refresh4, kerning was tightened and hard corners on the letters’ quadrants were softened where possible for a roughly slanted/skewed rounded rectangle look/fit. The exception is the X because, well…it’s an X.

    Favicons

    The first three were eventually discarded. The designs are fine but they’re hard to be discerned on a tab icon where things are too tiny for shadowing tricks to work their subtlety.

    strawberry
    upstream offspring
    go clovers
    sex on the beach
    satin
    wordpress tutorial cliché

    3: BTW, if nothing of that raised an alarm for you, please get off the Internet and seek urgent Gullible Online+ON Help, it’s in the online aisle at help place. The + symbol is pronounced “more”. Ask anybody working there, if somebody says “oh, honey!…” and looks at you concerned, you’re on the right track. (…and that’s pity, not concern.)

    4: two years later according to GitHub’s commit dates; SEARX is deployed straight from GitHub making it the safest indicator for this.

    Domain name change and status of registration

    Person switch

    Among my mental ill, there isn’t Dissociative Identity Disorder. Speaking on behalf of a domain name/organization, the second person is needed. It’s a little jarring, though.

    Originally SEARX ran under our actual domain, vitanetworks.link, and it was properly registered on the searx.space instance directory.

    There even were some unfortunate times were it had to be taken offline which served to make us learn that instances reappear after they come back online.

    Unfortunately our instance spent too long offline, it seems, so it was removed for good. On top of that, we’ve been switching publicly-accessible services to our email domain, Antipostal.com, solely because it’s more memorable than the real domain’s domain name.

    Accessing the searx subdomain in any our subdomain will connect to the same instance. So far it has not had issues loading, but if there’s some sort of domain awareness/expectation, things might be bound to break.

    We’ll abstain from registering again, since we already did once, just out of respect only as we already “took a number” ; it doesn’t mean that the instance will be closed, hidden, segmented, etc.

    In the queue

    Our edge security is blocking so much stuff, namely most image search engines, that there was some urgency into getting SEARX back online, plus a whole lot of supporting stuff needed to be created for it thus this last time it was skipped delving into SearxNG5, but we do want containerize the instance so its connections can be better managed by the network once it’s singled out, because as opposed to our last instance, this time SEARX is running on a shared host.

    Additionally, morty appears to be running; the web tools show all connections are made through SEARX. But on SEARX, there’s no morty service (or filtron, though it doesn’t matter on this one because HAProxy handles that)

    5: I have this script that I use to setup systems, vprep, it’s very useful to me. Scratch that, it’s extremely useful to me and I absolutely need it. I started writing in originally as smaller individual scriptlets right the minute I learned what a Bash script was, so you can bet it was rudimentary. I’ve become much better at it and I’ve rewritten it a lot of it more efficiently very differently as a new script that will eventually get the old name when it’s ready. In the meantime as a private joke of how I would never do such a thing because how lame it is, I named it vprepng. It made me laugh to myself every time it showed up in the VS Code palette menu thingy. But when I saw searx did the same thing, but like for real, yeah… that wasn’t the best. This is a project I really look up to. 🙁

    Sensei’s Temple Announcements

    Tantric tempura ki sightings and tantric tempura ki focosasibi anrikho will be cancelled on Fridays this month because of COVID restrictions. In their place we’re adding a brand new Zen the virus away workshop that is completely effective for COVID treatment. It has had a 100% treatment rate where it’s been met. Attendees will be required to wear a mask during the first 15 minutes of the Sensei’s teachings, or about the required time needed to achieve the basic virus free7 technique that has been passed for millennial.

    7: i.e; virus free vs virus-free

  • Thicken your Firefox scrollbars

    Thicken your Firefox scrollbars

    TLDR

    This is quick fix for Firefox mostly targeted at media center Linux systems. The answer is in the picture below.

    While thin, elegant, graceful lines are lines as often sought consistently in design, don’t you sometimes wish you’d had a very girthy one to work with?

    There’s only so much grace you can have when you’re working in spastic scenarios, you need chunko, you crave for chunko.

    Translation

    When you’re using remote HID peripherals*, such as in VNC or Synergy, the adjustments your HID driver makes to have smooth ac/deceleration curves so content scrolls smoothly and pointers aren’t jerky is not available remotely.

    Two-finger scrolling is nearly impossible, specially in laggy and cramped 3m/10ft UIs, such as TV screens where at 60″, you only have a 720p-equivalent screen real estate, realistically.

    The better solution would be to do this system-wide, but in cases such as in the screenshot above where Firefox was running on Linux, the procedure to accomplish this varies by desktop environment, of which there might be endless options in just a single distro. And distros are abundant.

    *: HID = Human Interface Device. e.g; game controllers, mice, keyboards, motion sensors, etc.

  • rEFInd Logo Contest

    rEFInd Logo Contest

    A few months back I while customizing my systems, among the list of things I could mess with was the boot manager I use on macOS (and later on the first PC I build), rEFInd.

    It turns out I had to redesign all icons I needed on my own to match the look I was going for, and if I was going to do that, it just made sense to do the whole theme so anybody else could use it they wished. The whole set up process would go to waste otherwise.

    Late in the project I realized I had to design an icon for rEFInd itself, with my color scheme or rather lack thereof since it’s a grayscale/silverish theme and had to convey what rEFInd does or say something about it at least a little bit more than the its official logo ’cause, picture the following scenario:

    A friend of yours is helping you with stuff, you’re busy at another desk. They turn on the machine and rEFInd on an internal disk comes up, you need to tell them to load rEFInd on a flash drive but just by looking at the icons they’d have no idea which is it. The rEFInd logo says not much about it.

    In this hypothetical your friend also has to be a raging moron to be incapable of figuring out arrow keys, but you get the point.

    My project had already gotten out of hand at that point, not to mention that after finishing the logo for rEFInd and exporting what I thought was the finished theme, it came out horribly misaligned so I still have to correct that. With the rEFInd logo, my goals were (1.) to make it convey something about itself and (2.) being the what whole kickstarts operative systems, itself had to look kickass over all the other peasants logos it passed control over. Just kidding, some distros actually have some very cool logos.

    Unlike all the OSes which have guidelines and whatnot, on this one I was starting from scratch, so I had free reign which I guess would be an artist’s dream, but I’m not an artist, or a designer for that matter, I just stumble onto this and sometimes I manage to learn how to operate them, like Serif’s Affinity Designer. All that decision making without a structure in place is terrifying to me. But I started drawing a few objects and sort of got in the zone.

    I wanted to draw something like “micro”chips, the big chunky ones that were on old motherboards before they started painting them all black1 just for the fact that those are like the floppy disk equivalent on the save button; most people have never seen them but they know what they are.

    *: Coincidentally something that got lost on me since I switch to macOS in the Tiger days, I had little business left on the insides of computers from that moment on, except for servers which to this day are still very green, just not environmentally.

    I’ve lost count of how many people many people I’ve met who think “the Windows” is on those chips, not on the spinning where they know their data is. I don’t know how so many people manage to get to the same conclusion, but y’know, now that NVMe disks are not only mainstream, but they are mounted right in the motherboard where the rest of the chips are, those that held on being wrong got so far back that being right caught  up with them poking them in the ass that they could just ride it and get to the forefront of things. I’m picturing an arrow that’s reaching it’s own tail along the perimeter of a circle, if you’ve know idea what I’m talking about. To be honest, I’ve no idea either.

    Twinsies!

    Where was I?… Oh yeah, chips holding code. These I think would signify both where an OS would be in addition to the EFI code. Next is how to depict that this thing I’m describing searches for things. A magnifying glass was too easy, it occupies too much space which is wasted by the handle. An option would be those use by photographers that are like a little whiskey glass turned upside down, but that’s way too much complex for me to draw. I’m not skilled enough I don’t think.

    So I took another approach, why search if the word on its name is find. They are obviously not the same thing. Finding means you’ve already succeeded searching, and it would be reasonable to assume that if you found you’re good at it, and I circled back to the badass concept I wanted with a crosshair on top of a chip, it didn’t look cool though so I made it isometric and the whole concept of location and GPS got mixed in somewhere along the process and now I wanted to draw something like the little pinpoint you get on map apps but the map would be some random chips, in the end the pinpoint thingy got morphed into a tornado/hurricane-looking crosshair over a some random chips, like some of search and destroy bot in sci-fi movies. The hurricane has long trails of 1s and 0s. They don’t have meaning though, I just smashed them in the keyboard and copied them endlessly.

    “Binary trails” up close

    In the screenshot above, one of the trail tracks is selected, this go all around from the center all the way out, multiple conical gradients are applied to make the illusion of movement. In my head, this would be deadly-fast, binary gusts but circling around but the crosshair would turn very very slow because it’s so massive. That makes sense, right? No? Just me?

    Ohgawd, I think I’m my imaginary dumbass friend.

    I wanted to spell out the word rEFInd in little chiplets. It is not possible in a square artboard without making it too small so I made it look like pieces that falling in place, au Tetris, given there’s a fucking hurricane in the scene, it isn’t much of a hard sell. Then I wouldn’t have to spell it, because subconsciously people would naturally do it.

    Side note: I’ve noticed I’m sort of good composing lyrics and rhymes and prose (plus spoken languages in general) I’ve only done it as some form of a joke, but maybe it’s related, I’m badly dyslexic, ADHD, OCPD… I was going somewhere with this.

    I made a square design to fit in an icon space, but maybe you might remember my design is not in color, there’s only so much you can do in grayscale, when you designe in color, I learned, that detail-related restriction is not only lifted but it kind of turns into a requirement. Those trails for instance, are only in the color version. Additionally I wanted to give back to the author of rEFInd something he could use if he likes my amateurish designs, that is, so I made a wider, more standard, banner-style logo. I had space to fill so I rearranged the falling chips to spell the word without mind tricks, I committed to a falling shit so I still had to incorporate it. In the color version, which again was its own and fourth design, I sort of like motherboard pieces in layers, becoming like a lithographic Tetris-inspired assembly line boot manager. I’m not pleased with the color though, old motherboards were mostly very dark muted green, in my experience, but I’ve seen very shiny ones and recently in much more lighter green. Well, the server ones. Workstation motherboards I believe they’re all black now.

    I’m hoping to get nerve to contact the author to tell him about my work and since he’s the only person that could potentially have some use for it, ask him for feedback on the color. Fix it, deliver it, and I can get back to the theme I was supposed to be working on.

    Here’s the SVG images, compressed along with the PNGs here above and with @2x “retina” sizes that I forgot to disable in the export setting. In the end I left them go in the compressed file because… because. There’s no need to retina anything, resolution was set at 400dpi before the first artboard was even created.

    Here’s the zip: https://fetch.vitanetworks.link/intranet/static/embed/senseivita.com/fileserving/refind-logo.zip (15.9MB) — That’s my parent domain, no trackers, wait-to-click, email input… none of that crap. Opens in a new tab/window so you’re not left with a blank page.

    I’m still doing small tweaks here and the on the original Serif Affinity Designer file, so I didn’t add it just yet but I can just add it later to the same zip later.

    If you’re interested in the file, maybe contributing to it, I’d be happy to send it to you, if you happen to be Mr. Roderick Smith, I’d be honored to send them as they are/they’ll be. Though, I’d really like to deliver something a little more tailored to your taste so feel free to suggest different colors, objects to add/eliminate/move. I’ll send you the current files, then the corrected set. It’d really mean a lot, or just don’t, SVGs are basically copies. If I run into them on some website that’s all the validation I’ll need. Wow–that came out depressing, it’s not though, I’m pumped up.

    Either Mr. Smith, or another(the makes it sound like I am one) a graphic designer, just contact me—I can’t leave my details around because this thing runs on WordPress and y’know…I’m sure you’ll find it though.