Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Who can fix it?

    As far as “fault” go, I keep falling into the mind trap of conflating “who caused it” with “who can fix it”. Ultimately what matters is who can fix it.

    And we don’t know who will—I agree that Industry and Politicians are more powerful than Consumers but neither of those three blobs are sapient, willful, soulful people. They’re evolved macroorganisms operating according to their own pressures and processes.

  • environment

    I think over the years I have become good at distancing myself from people with low selfesteem. I am still confronted with it occasionally because obviously we cannot always choose what we’re witnessing, who the people we’re close to invite into their lives and even confident people can go through rough phases. End of 30s is simply a rough time for many, it seems.

  • nice things done for me recently

    And I love that these things happen not due to any special occasion or to make up for something, but it's just happening voluntarily outside of birthdays, valentine's day, anniversary etc. and it's mutual. 3 years and counting.

  • My dream map projection

    I want a world map that’s… uh…

    1. Take a polyhedral projection, like octahedral or icosahedral (or even more faces, the more faces the better, it doesn’t have to be a platonic solid).

    2. Unfold. You now have something that looks like the Dymaxion or Butterfly.

    3. But rotate the continents so they look like they’re placed in traditional world maps. Careful: do not cut every li’l face, just cut out the continents, as big pieces as possible, and rotate them and place them.

    4. Add water! It’s not a sea map, it’s fine if oceans are distorted, it’s a land map! Add more sea! Make some sea distances smaller and some larger, just add endless distortion out at sea.

  • Wrong side of the bed

• Technology and Free Software

  • The fools on the internet hill

    So funny how much quieter it can get.

    The news has always been the cream of the eye-wool crop.

    The internet makes what normally - i.e. "in real life" - wouldn't be news feel like The News, hence how worked up people get about things they'd not get worked up about "in real life" because "in real life" such things would never artificially - for being grouped and prioritized by algorithms whose purpose is to increase profits for their owners - come up so much and/or convincingly that eventually everyone's suddenly going "HOLY XXXXXXX XXXX THIS IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN LIFE ITSELF!!!"

  • Taking care of some personal tech debt

    I maintain a backlog of what I call personal tech debt; quirks and inconveniences with my setup that I would like to fix when I have the time and energy.

    This month I've churned though a good chunk of it, and I'm quite happy with the results.

  • AoC, RISC-V, Z3, ginger

    Another news digest here. I keep logging things on Mastodon regularly, but its awkward and laggy UI keeps reminding me of Gopher, which does not suffer from that. I think it must be possible to do something about those lags, and actually I started writing an FF extension to remove the bloat at some point, but with the way Mastodon authentication and Firefox extensions work, it was basically an alternative in-browser client, so it did not make much sense to keep developing as an extension. I would consider working on and/or self-hosting another Mastodon client or ActivityPub server (and maybe a client to go along with it), but Mastodon is the one federated thing I decided to try without hosting it myself, and already working on an XMPP client library, so it seems more useful to focus the effort on that.

  • Posting is easy with tabs closed

    More shoveling. Not difficult. Tedious due to the various hidden (by snow) driveway cracks that'll bring a swiftly moving shovel to a dead stop, much to the bone-rattling chagrin of hands and arms.

    Downing a scone and some oatmeal cookies both for energy replacement, and to satisfy a bit of hunger without getting too full relative to our going out to eat tonight.

    Did you know that what you're absolutely certain "is" Objective Reality is (haha) a reflection of your faith about an objective reality, i.e. that "faith about" (you name it) generates the sense of "is"-ness (of you name it), and that so-called "ignorance" is (haha) pretending the reflection is(haha)n't merely a reflection?

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Mastodon

      I am a microblogger now! Decided to finally try out Mastodon, even though I still rather dislike the involved technologies. But to avoid interacting with them too much directly, as well as to setup a separate communication channel, I registered at emacs.ch and tried to use an Emacs Mastodon client, mastodon.el. Quickly discovered that there is a memory leak in my Emacs version, related to images, so now using the usual Mastodon's web interface. It is okay: somewhat buggy and awkward, but there are many worse ones.

    • Nostalgia

      Like most folks around these parts, I find myself missing the computers and internet of my past. But something about these feelings hasn’t sat right with me; I reckon that’s due to the association between nostalgia and conservative¹ ideology.

      Picking through all this, I realize that “nostalgic” isn’t really a great description of what I feel. I do not “miss the past” so much as I miss the future (a version of the present) that I thought would arrive, and which I have since accepted never will... This isn’t nostalgia, it’s mourning! And, sure, in hindsight it may be obvious that I was naive to believe that stuff about computers solving the world’s problems. It doesn’t matter — the past 20–30 years of technological development have’t gone how I thought they would, and I’m sad² about it.

  • Programming

    • Baking, Jingle calls, ray tracing

      In the past couple of months, I worked on rexmpp a little more: it had Jingle calls before, but merely transmitting RTP packets. Now it supports audio I/O (with PortAudio), codecs (custom PCMA and PCMU implementations, optional libopus for Opus), RTP (also custom wrapping and unwrapping). And it can use OpenSSL (in addition to GnuTLS) for DTLS-SRTP now. And alternative libraries for hash functions, so there are just two mandatory dependencies now (an XML parser and a cryptographic library), but they support multiple alternatives.