Gemini* and Gopher

• Science

  • In the name of sustainablity, I bought a power meter

    It's probably not difficult to guess that I own several computers. It's a part of my job and there's no real way around it. Remember, the cloud is just someone else's computer. Today as I'm walking through a local mall, I saw an extension cord with a power meter on it. You know what, that's a good idea. I've been thinking about adding some solar to my apartment to at least partially offset my power consumption. It'll be quite helpful to know how much power I'm using. Maybe I'll learn something. I bought it and hooked my PC and work laptop onto it - the 2 major power consumers in my apartment.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Reconfiguring NNCP

    Outside the occasional file transfer from a few core nodes, I haven't used NNCP much in the last several months. Recently I decided to leverage NNCP's remote execution feature to trigger downloads from many nodes, which led me to discover that my setuo is quite broken.

    To ensure compaitibility, I wanted to put the same version of NNCP on every node in my cluster, but the version I'd been using (v8.8.2) did not compile correctly on Termux. Some public keys had been copied incorrectly or into wrong parts of various nodes' configuration files. The result was a web of intermittently-working connections that sometimes couldn't spool packets and sometimes couldn't decrypt them.

  • Rainbow Island: Amiga music VS Arcade music

    How beautiful is the adaptation of the Rainbow Island theme done on the Commodore Amiga 500 by Steve Turner?

    I never noticed it at the time, because in the noisy arcades I frequented it wasn't easy to hear the clean sound of the arcade version of Zuntata.

    Then tastes are tastes, oh! But for me Graftgold beats Taito 1-0. Listen to the two versions and judge by yourself.

  • Extract a BASIC listing from a Commodore 64

    It's certainly not something for every day, but if you ever needed to extract a Commodore 64 BASIC listing from a .D64 disk image, this is how you can do it: [...]

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Hello world

      Here's a test post just to make sure I know how everything works. 🐋

  • Programming

    • rust docs before using rust

      For those who haven't read my first gem log, I started learning to program last year, and my first language was JavaScript. During that time, I was fumbling in the dark with the language. Looking back, I'm glad it was javascript because I _cannot_ imagine writing in Rust before reading the documentation thoroughly.

    • Lehmer random number generator

      Old pseudorandom number generators (PRNG) may have uses, say in musical composition where too predictable or too soon repeated numbers may be beneficial. Or maybe you are replicating an old game and want the authentic experience? I had been cargo culting the rogue 3.6.3 code around, but there are other old algorithms and seed values.

      The middle-square method (1946) looked too fiddly to implement, so next is the Lehmer generator (1951). The input values should be chosen with care if you want the least bad results, or use an existing implementation from, say, the GNU Scientific Library, probably available in a ports or package system near you.