Chris M.

 Ninja has been around for a while, since 2012 or so. Ninja is a small build system with a focus on speed.  https://ninja-build.org/ I had heard of it and an engineer I worked with at Cybex I think was using it as his build system. Ninja's goal is to be faster than GNUmake,   the de-facto make utility.  David Rothlis did some benchmarks on ninja  and the no-op build (a build with no or few changes vs. a clean build) is significantly faster with ninja. I just started hacking on Kicad  for fun. Kicad is an excellent open source electronics design tool that I've used to design and build several PCBs. Kicad devs recommended using ninja for builds as its faster. Why not? Ninja has been around for a long time, so it should be pretty well developed, and it's a good opportunity to see how it works. If it works well it could be a good thing to adopt across a number of other projects that are presently using GNUmake. So I'm off building Kicad, MacBook fans are c...

I've been meaning to try out running Linux and Windows virtual machines on my x86 MacBook Pro using qemu . I've been using Parallels for several years. Parallels is a nice application and works well but I'm always getting bugged to purchase upgrades. Parallels provides free updates on minor version upgrades only, say 13.0 to 13.1. With so many prompts to purchase upgrades it feels like Parallels could release a bit more minor versions and a bit fewer major versions. Rather than just purchase an upgrade to Parallels I figured I'd try out qemu via the UTM application . UTM wraps qemu with a helpful gui and comes as a packages Mac application. And UTM supports both x86 and M1 systems (as qemu also supports these systems). Creating an Ubuntu VM with UTM didn't go as smoothly as with VirtualBox or Parallels but it was the settings I chose that messed me up. Here are two things I ran into when installing Ubuntu on UTM. #1. Configure the qemu instance to use a 'Display...