Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Hello.

    Hi, I'm Sherlock. I'm sure you know me. I'm here, investigating.

  • 136 000 volts can kill you

    There was this guy in the town I used to live. He was a "public figure" in a sense, but I won't give his name because you could probably reverse engineer where I lived with it. But we'll call him John. He had a name with that kind of energy.

    John was infamous in my town. He was by far our most prolific vandal of all time.

    His medium was permanent marker and city bench. Sometimes he dug a key into the wood to leave a trace harder to remove. He vandalized every bench in the city. By the time I left, I couldn't find a single bench that hadn't been touched.

    On these benches, he'd write messages and numbers in all caps. He'd list what seemed to be the amount of energy being put out by nearby power plants, along with a number of warnings. Sometimes kind of vague, like "danger!" and other times more direct, like "136 000 volts can kill you," and "research [historical event involving a power plant in the region]". Things of that nature.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: FUHILTG Wordo: CASAS

• Technology and Free Software

  • Numismatics for retrogamers

    **Fascinated by their minting, I have always kept a few tokens from the arcades I frequented without spending them.** But I only started systematically collecting them starting from the beginning of the nineties, when it became clear that most of them would extinct.

  • «Gran Premio F1»: When a video game speaks to you in Italian.

    «Gran Premio F1» was an Arcade Bootleg of Pole Position II. This short article will deal with how speech synthesis in Italian could impress us kids of the early eighties.

    If you used to live in Italy and hung out in arcades in the early 1980s, chances are you came across a «Gran Premio F1» cabinet. An Italian bootleg of Pole Position II.

  • Quote of the day - privacy edition

    Some people say that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. I saw the best response: "I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are questionable."

  • Eternal game engine stuff

    Lately, I have been quite busy again with game engine development on Eternal. I've implemented prelimenary support for loading and saving scenes in the editor. I do still have a little bug to work out with textures not loading correctly at times it seems. I also made a bunch of progress on optimizing and improving lighting. I've implemented a copy-on-change UBO mechanism that only sends data to the GPU if a field actually changed, and started moving all lighting data into these UBOs.

    In the past, lighting in Eternal used regular uniforms. The problem with those is that they need to be updated every frame, and can't be shared between shader programs. An UBO you only need to update once, and the data can be read from any of your shader programs without having to rewrite the data, so that's definitively much more suitable.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Serving a Website From a Git Repo Without Cloning It

      It's fairly common to use git repositories as a vehicle for serving websites. The webdev pushes their changes to some branch of a publicly available git repository, and some web server somewhere serves the current tip of that branch as the website. Github Pages would be the most famous example of this.

      The domani reverse proxy also supports serving a website from a git repository. It previously did so by automatically cloning the repository locally, and periodically pulling changes down. This worked fine enough, but I figured it could be simplified further such that no local state is required except the current hash of the desired branch. This post is going to explain how this can be done by first guiding you through git's internals a bit.

    • new user!

      new user here! i've always liked the idea of having a space like this away from the centralized internet - even tried neocities for a bit - but i always get stumped as to what to post. i journal irl, so there's no need for me to make a digital one for strangers to view, and most everything else i do is fandom related (and that gets posted to my tumblr). i really like the vibes of this place, though, and i hope to hang out here at least for a little while!