So, where’s Chroma, the experimental window decoration Breeze fork? Still not released yet.

The main hurdle is the fact that Chroma previously overwrote Breeze; once you installed the Chroma repo Breeze would be kicked out like a bad room mate.

Not having both is obviously no good. If Chroma breaks and crashes Kwin, it will restart and attempt to use Breeze, instead loading Chroma… And we get into a crash loop, require users to drop to a terminal, and install an alternate DE or window manager. Blegh. Ugly.

(Not that I believe it would do that, but if I did it to one person I’d feel super bad)

The cheap and obvious solution would be to just open my project directory and do a find->replace for ‘Breeze’ and replace it with ‘Chroma’, and I’m sure that would instantly resolve all the issues – but it would completely undermine my ability to easily pull/push back to the main codebase if I mangle it.

What I don’t want the Chroma codebase to be

Essentially, I want Chroma to read as Breeze in code, and I want both codebases to easily share between each-other without naming breaking things.

So, where are we?

Right now Chroma is installing, but there’s some quantum fiddly-bits which get all timey-wimey; when you install Chroma you are presented with two Breeze decorations in the KCM. Because I’m still inexperienced with this stuff, I’m still in the process of tracking down where I must rename Breeze to Chroma to get it registering properly, but I’m taking my time because I don’t want to rename things needlessly.

So right now it should be done ‘any time’, once I realise what minor tweaks need to be made so we can get Chroma and Breeze co-existing nicely. I’ll also admit currently Chroma isn’t my primary focus, so more/less I’m just taking the odd hour when I need a breather to browse through the code and see what needs to be done.

The FOSS community is amazing, and as often we may hear it has problems there’s one serious issue I’m sure we all agree with; we will always have a need for more contributors. Every project is starving for people – I couldn’t name a single project which isn’t on some level.

What we lack in fleshy human caffeine-to-output converters we make up for with passionate members, and the people who are part of projects are more often than not the insanely dedicated heros who churn enough work to equal more than a few of their peers. A huge number of insanely important projects are usually headed up by single individuals.

In FOSS you very quickly get noticed when you contribute, even if it’s a small contribution to a high-profile project. Once you get noticed other projects may ask for you, people who belong to multiple projects will ask to introduce you to other teams, and before long you realize you’ve gone from doing a couple projects well to several projects poorly. This presents a whole new problem I have recently come to terms with: You can’t contribute to every project.

I got all sour-apples about it with myself, one of those “you idiot!” inner monologues. Last week I said ‘yes’ to another project, and today I sat down and realised I was wasting peoples time. The person who invited me was catching me up, in the hangouts people were being patient while I straightened out my facts, and I contributed nothing. Using my crystal ball labelled “common sense” I divined that I’d probably only get an hour or two a week to offer up. Not nearly enough for the scale of that project, at least when you must budget time like a precious commodity.

In my seat I wrote out a list of projects I have on the go, and realised the number I produced was “too many”. I slumped, because I wanted to contribute to them all and I had to do the worst thing ever: start looking at projects to step back from. It sucked.

The problem with being attached to a project which you’re not really contributing to is that it can be a severe detriment to the people who are actively contributing; they may ask you to take care of a task, and what should have been a 2-day knockout turns into a 2-week slog, causing delays and problems.
So, I’ve stepped back from a handful of projects I had joined up with; No fears for anyone wondering if “you’re next”, since I’ve already sent out messages to the projects I’m stepping back from. Right now, I want to keep focus on at most 3 projects.

I’d rather do a few things well, than many things poorly. Hopefully, over the coming weeks, the projects I’m still involved with will see a stronger push from my end again, and adequate waves will be made.

This year for Halloween I wanted to make a pumpkin-head scarecrow. The rest of the costume didn’t quite work out, but the mask did, and I took pictures of the process;

Mmmmm… Raw materials.

I had a Styrofoam dome which was the base; first thing I did was mark it up with the design.

Basic reference carving, got the shape out. I used a scalpel for the initial carving, but later I switch to a bread knife to speed things up.

First round of paper-mache. I used bathroom tissue, glue, and a small amount of water. I mixed it into a thick paste and painted the mache on. Taped a garbage bag to the side of my desk because Styrofoam was getting EVERYWHERE. Didn’t help at all.

The first round of paper mache dries.

Coated the inner side of the dome with straight-up glue. Still not sure why, seemed like the thing to do.

Close-up of the inside.

Paint base-coat. A nice pumpkin orange.

Pumpkins aren’t just orange; there’s some green veining under the skin in some places, and also areas which are lighter. So I added that to the pumpkin. Areas which are especially dark will be where I apply the spotting you see on some pumpkins to give it a more “imperfect” look.

An orange coat overtop the previous paint.

I add the spotting I mentioned over the darkened areas. I purposefully allowed some of the still-wet green paint get onto the brush so the colours would be less uniform.

I sanded down the larger green “blisters” and glues the straps on. Finished! If I feel like keeping this thing around for whatever reason, I’ll go a goat of glue as a poor mans’ sealer.

Complete Costume