XENOBYTE.XYZ received some upgrades in the form of mobile layout changes, a redesigned projects page, a new gallery section with lots of A.I. generated art, the re-opening of the blog, and the removal of the (ex)official github account.

Pure creAItivity

Prior to the downtime, the blog used to show the full content of the 50 most recent entries in chronological order, some of which sported enough media files for the data consumption filters to start raising warnings not even 10 days into the month. By the time the old blog was last online, the server was spending almost 70% of it's monthly data transfer cap on the blog and news pages alone, since the site is currently dealing with the highest amount of traffic it has yet seen, counter measures were necessary to keep costs down during these most fucked up times.

The previous blog was also getting rather confusing to navigate, hence the slightly different layout and categorization changes ahead of the return of the full archive.

Lastly and most importantly, the removal of the former github backup account. Stating the reasons would derail this update post so I'll expand on the decision in a later entry, suffice to say, make sure to rely on the official xenobyte freeware repositories until then.
A new backup git host will be added next update, until then, remember that only the profiles listed in the contact page may claim to be related!

I'll be moving on to more interesting announcements as soon as the website is fully restored. Assuming the world is still around by then. Updating to v7.1.

XenoEmacs has been updated to include the avy navigation package and to enable relative line numbers by default, the hotkey to jump between rows relative to currently selected one remains C-u + linum + up || down while avy-goto-line was mapped to C-'. Comment out the (setq display-line-numbers-type 'relative) line in emacs.d/custom/general-conf.el to restore the line numbering to its previous setting.

On a sidenote, the autocomplete package for PHP, ac-php, seems to have an incompatibility error with one of its included dependencies called phpctags. To fix this, simply build the latest version of phpctags and move the resulting phpctags.php file to the ac-php folder in the .emacs.d/elpa directory.

Unrelated difficulties saw the site and its projects in a state of stasis since February and eventually offline around mid June. However, services like our private gitea instance and active client projects would and have remained online and fully operational as explained in the email our clients received prior to the downtime, which was originally planned to last just a few weeks but was further delayed to instead focus on finishing up a bunch of overdue updates.

The following are the more relevant milestones that were achieved this first half of the year, they'll all get a more thorough explanation once xenobyte.xyz is back to full functionality:

• Our custom server backend pocket_php has been completely overhauled and rebranded to Zenode. There's a demo available at zenode.org.


• Many features were added to the SkeletonGL graphics engine, including a proper initial template program with an integrated command line for faster prototyping. Both its sample applications were updated to the latest version as well.


• HEXMACS was rebranded to XenoEmacs and updated to work with the latest packages (as of 01/07/2022). Support for Rust was also added.


• xenobyte.xyz was migrated to a new VPS, had its style and layout updated, and its content revised.


• The gitea instance was updated to the latest version and had all our repos refreshed. Client repos included.

The blog and news sections are still being worked on, but they'll should be back online in the coming days, alongside the official announcement of a couple of previously teased projects.

Sorry for the inconvenience!