duckinator
- Name: Ellen Dash
Email: <ellen AT SPAMFREE duckinator DOT com>
Website: https://pup-e.com
Bluesky: @duckinator.bsky.social
Mastodon: @puppy@weirder.earth
- AKA: duckie, puppy
I do a lot of work with Python, Ruby, Rust, and C. I was one of the RubyGems and Bundler maintainers for a decade, from 2015 to 2025.
Notes
https://klarasystems.com/articles/automation-and-hacking-your-freebsd-cli/ — Info about some CLI tools integrating with libxo for JSON, XML, etc output.
Containers
This information is now on my website.
Problems Encountered/Things To Document Fixes For
(All of these are from a few years ago. I haven't re-tested them yet.)
These are some of the notable problems I encountered while settling into using FreeBSD as my main OS for the first time in over a decade.
Audio
!!! This has been made a lot more complicated and harder to debug by the fact that apparently PulseAudio got installed anyway and I don't know how or why, and it starts with Firefox for some reason even though Firefox used to work without it.
Initially, I had lots of general audio glitchiness. Intermittent static/buzzing noises. Using virtual_oss allowed me to record desktop audio (with OBS, recordmydesktop, etc). The solution appears to be using an 8ms buffer for virtual_oss and avoiding PulseAudio. (Any time I install PulseAudio, I have trouble keeping it from starting and taking over audio for the whole system -- which is a problem, given how poorly it performs on my system.)
NOTE: I am having trouble with intermittent audio glitchiness again. Apparently it wasn't a solution so much as an improvement.
OBS Studio
Tries to drag in PulseAudio by default.
PulseAudio has terrible performance on my system, so I'd rather not have it.
The OBS binary package pulls in PulseAudio unconditionally.
Making sure PulseAudio was not installed, then building OBS from ports with PulseAudio disabled works.
You can't use OSS with the "Desktop Audio" feature. Use the sndio input client source instead.
Install mesa-gallium-va and go into Settings -> Advanced or something like that and enable ffmpeg encoding to get hardware acceleration.
- Should probably also install mesa-gallium-vdpau although idk what it affects.
Blender is slow
Blender is slow, by default. As someone else on the forums discovered, vblank_mode=0 blender or LIBGL_DRI3_DISABLE=1 blender does the trick.
Even if I continue to need one of those kludges, I'd at least like to know what the cause is.
Disc Drives
I added a blu-ray drive to my computer, and ran into the following problems:
- I can't play, let alone rip, a blu-ray disc.
Ripping a *CD* (using abcde) takes upwards of half an hour(!) for some reason. On my girlfriend's computer, it takes roughly 5 minutes per CD. We swapped disc drives for unrelated reasons, and it still took half an hour on my system and about 5 minutes on her system. (TODO: Try seeing if it's reproducible on other OSes on my system.)