Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — CYILOSG Wordo: YULES

  • From a utopian romantic comedy to a long-term policy direction

    Now that I have seen ChatGPT 4.0 Turbo generate a cute dystopian-utopian romantic comedy, that got me thinking. One of the greatest benefits I so far enjoy from artificial intelligence is that AI helps me organize my otherwise very scattered thoughts, and also functions like a mirror through which I can evaluate my own thinking.

  • Mid-February Break

    January and February are always the roughest part of the year. If you're like me, there's a bit of time off at Christmas, then there's Easter, and in between, a whole lot of nothing.

    So this year we took a couple of days and made a long weekend. On Friday we drove across the province to my in-laws' place, settled in. It's been a cooler weekend, closer to normal temperatures. ~ -10 to -15 C. Bright and sunny, though. The midday sun warm.

  • Kids cave

    I organized and led a kids caving trip on Saturday, 1000-1700. It was a blast. Daughter and another adventurous 2-year-old, a 6-year-old, 10-year-old, me, Evy, and 4 other adults. We all got as far as the main fork. I took the older kids on to the right toward the tower domes to chimney around before we all headed out.

    The water was high. It was -4C at the entrance. Daughter and the 6-year-old girl cried---they got cold changing out of soaking wet clothes before we hiked up to the cars. Hot chocolate, fleece blankets, and snacks revived them. The 6-year-old and 10-year-old are cave crazy now. I'll take them in more caves.

  • Academiology V: Place

    I remember the feeling of vertigo when I first landed in my new home, three years ago. It was a strange place in ways that can be hard to explain.

    The place I came from was deciduous. The leaves were green from spring to fall. They grew orange and red in autumn, and turned grey in the winter. The trees of my hometown, primarily ash and maple, were what I came to understand as nature in and of itself. A tree looked like a brown trunk, splintering off into many little branches, each dotted with egg-shaped or characteristically Canadian-looking leaves.

  • A day passed

    Hey

    I don't have much to say

    I still like writing here. Last month I didn't write. I'm not sure why.

    It wasn't my best month. I got some progress on things I'm working on, stabilized my sleep schedule, and made slow progress on everything. Most things are slowly moving. My life isn't fully stopped like it was 2 years ago.

  • The Case of Mistaken Identity

    While leafing among some of the weightier tomes in the Baker Street library, the meditations of one Sherlock Holmes were about to be interrupted. Holmes was never a person who was fond of being interrupted once he had trained his mind trained on a subject. The fact that he was about to be interrupted, had he known that he was about to be, would have most often resulted in a fusillade repertoire of interrogatives which would no doubt, have the singular purpose of ascertaining why this interloping was presently necessary. The key to escape a certain tongue lashing was to be certain that whatever it was that breached Holmes’s concentration was more intellectually and immediately interesting than whatever it was that Holmes was presently engaged in doing.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Time Management System

    No, this isn't about Getting Things Done or anything productive.

    Roguelike games may have many actors (usually monsters trying to murderize the hero du jour (the hero can be modeled as a monster, only with keyboard input)) and the desire that actors move or attack or cast spells at different speeds. This yields the problem of scheduling all these things without the code being an unworkable mess.

    One method is to assign some small integer cost to each animate or actor or anything that has scheduled behavior (dart turrets, off-board artillery, the weather system, etc) and when that cost zeros, the whatever it is makes a move. Exactly how to integrate this into a game system varies, as there may be global affects that adjust the flow of time, spell affects to apply to certain things, etc. One can also make the number go up until it triggers, but same difference (unless the numbers get so large that they overflow because the game ran for too long).

  • Communications

    Two topics: first, how to cause material objects to change location by acts of will; second, how to spread immaterial objects to other receivers.

  • We still need usable Git-backed site distribution

    A couple of recent posts by Ploum and Dominique discuss the necessity (or at least the convenience) of strengthening the publication of Gemini or Web sites by using Git repositories. I believe that, for it to be actually usable, this way distributing content would need well-defined specifications, mechanisms and practices. Since that is precisely the goal of the gwit project, both posts strengthen my conviction that gwit is still relevant and worth the effort.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Zond updates 02-2024

      Zond is my SSG for Gemini, and is used to build this capsule. It's been reliable for me for a few years now, but there are always some tweaks to be made. I'll be doing a new release in the not so distant future. There won't be a lot of changes, but some of them are nice little fixes to various small papercuts that have been there for a while.

      Zond is written in Rust, and it leverages some Cargo magic to optionally build a `bootstrap` binary while it's building the main binary. This `bootstrap` will install the program, compile shell completions, translations and Unix man pages and install all of that into a prefix of your choosing, making packaging a breeze. However, there were some incorrect semantics in my Cargo.toml file which led to certain dependencies which are only used by the bootstrap binary always being compiled, even when you had this feature disabled. It didn't affect the size of the final binary but it did slow down compile times. This is fixed, and I took the opportunity to bring all of the other deps up to date as well.