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Blog Introduction

Introduction

Hello everyone, and welcome to my blog! I am ADVANCE_LAB_00 (pronounced “advance lab zero”, as a reference to Evangelion Unit-00), and this blog represents the launch of a project that I hope to keep alive and see growing in the next years. I am a 25-year-old from Italy. My English is not perfect, but I love languages, music, and many other things. One of my biggest passions is gaming: I started playing when I was 7, and despite not having really played many games, it became one of my favourite hobbies. The series I have played the most, and in which I feel more confident and competent, is Pokémon. My first game was Pokémon Diamond, and since 2008, if not for a short period, I have never stopped playing Pokémon games. The focus of the “ADVANCE_LAB_00” project is, however, not just connected to my passion for Pokémon (which began to fade after the last few games), but in general to the Game Boy Advance world. Despite not being my very first console, I grew fond of the GBA SP hardware a...
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GBA games style Sway-WM configuration: Alacritty

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  Working on Alacritty wasn’t so easy, but not in the way you might think... The method is actually quite simple: there are several lines that control the colours, as well as those that change the font and size . This post is going to be short, but  there’s not much to say. I like having a transparent terminal, so I went for opacity=0.4 .  However, this opacity on a white background surely gives some visual issues. Indeed, I must admit that this is the part of the configuration that convinces me the least. I very carefully selected colours that could be readable enough on the screen, but it’s definitely not always the case... sometimes it’s quite hard to read. Other than that, this part was not inspired by any particular game. Maybe choosing a particular theme could solve this issue and add more creativity to the configuration. So, overall, this is the part that I’ll keep working on when I can, because for now I found a good compromise, but I’m not exactly 100% happy a...
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GBA games style Sway-WM configuration: Rofi

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    Rofi was one of the easiest things to customize. I am familiar with Rofi, since I used it on my other configurations too. My inspiration for Rofi was the game menu from Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance , because the colours stand out and I like the effect of transparency. 1.1 STYLING The styling part wasn’t hard, despite being my first time making more changes to the Rofi configuration file. I started from the default theme and played around with several values and classes until I found what I needed to edit to change the colours and the overall styling to my taste. While I like the Chicago95 icon pack , it doesn’t cover all of the applications, and Rofi is probably the one that suffers from this the most. Because of this, I decided to disable the icons from the list (which also makes the launcher more similar to the  Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance game menu),  but I also think it’s easier and faster to navigate the applications in the list with the icon right ...
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GBA games style Sway-WM configuration: Thunar

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    I chose Thunar because it is lightweight, and I thought it would allow a lot of customization. My inspiration here was the game menu of Mega Man Zero: 3 . In this case, I didn’t manage to recreate 1:1 (or almost) the entire menu successfully, but I still used it as my reference. 1.1 CHALLENGES Honestly, this was my first time customizing Thunar. I had a bit of a hard time finding how to customize it, so I looked up on the Internet, found some snippets of code, imported them into my gtk-3.0/config file, and played with the colours until I found the classes that I needed. However, that wasn’t enough, so I found out I could open Thunar in an interactive mode, which showed me many of the classes used in the application. I took note and managed to adjust most of the colours to the reference. 1.1.2 USAGE OF AI  I used ECOSIA AI to fix some smaller issues. Overall, I am not against the usage of AI in several cases, because it's a powerful tool that can transform uncertainty...
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GBA games Sway-WM configuration: SWAY config file

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  The Sway configuration file is the most important file for this window manager. This file includes keybindings, keyboard layouts, workspaces, and commands for launching programs. Basically, all of those things tend to vary according to the personal use of the person who’s managing the computer. The high customizability is one of the reasons I prefer most about window managers. Since I used Sway on my previous setup as well, I pretty much just copied and pasted the older configuration, applying smaller changes. Taking that into account, I’ll just explain my colour choice rather than focusing on other details. 1.0 STYLING My main inspiration was Pokémon GBA games : Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald and Pokémon Fire Red/Leaf Green.  Pokémon is my favourite series, so I had to find a spot for those games.  I realized that Sway windows have 5 different states (focused, unfocused, urgent, placeholder, focused_inactive). The number perfectly matches every Pokémon mainline releas...
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GBA games style Sway-WM Configuration: Waybar

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  Waybar’s inspiration is Metroid: mostly Metroid Fusion , but also Metroid: Zero Mission . The configuration consists of two files: the modules.json file, which lists the modules used, and the style.css file, which handles the appearance of the bar. 1.1 MODULES The modules used are purely personal. It’s not the first time I've used Waybar, so I copied most of the modules from my previous configuration. I like to use Waybar as a quick shortcut to the services and apps I need, even the ones I rarely use.  However, in some cases, I simply assign specific keybindings in my Sway config file (for example, slurpshot). In this configuration, I included Sway-workspaces on the left, date and time in the middle, and several applications on the right, specifically: Bluetooth , a system update script, a screen-recording script (specific for my Gentoo Sway configuration), volume control, network panel, battery , and a  poweroff  button.  Workspaces are essential for...
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