Smooth Video for Intel Graphics on Ubuntu

Not sure why the makers of Ubuntu always opt for stupid defaults. I had to do some digging to figure out why the graphics drivers on my little media computer were causing tearing and horizontal refresh flickering when I was watching video.

Come on guys, vertical sync (vsync) should be ON by default on Intel graphics drivers. No one is using these things for games, and it’d improve the gaming experience anyways. This is a no brainer.

Put this in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf [source]:

Section "Device"
   Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
   Driver      "intel"
   Option      "TearFree"    "true"
EndSection

Sure, It Only Cost 5 EUR

Starting to muck around with the ExpressIf ESP8266 chip, which has been the darling of the IoT scene the past year. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize the carrier boards used 2mm pitch instead of your standard 2.54mm pitch. So I spent probably a good forty-five minutes building a breakout board. Fun times. Now to electrically split the copper strip down the middle and to actually program the thing.

esp-board-01

esp-board-02

esp-board-03

esp-board-04

esp-board-05