Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • I'm also not paid enough for the rest of this

    More work, more work hell, more things added to my ~duties~ and more shite making me the villain dealing with homeless folks hiding in here, stashing stuff in here, being aggressive and I am /still/ not paid enough for this shit.

    Or enough to cover the eye exams + new glasses the household is getting, but at least I can drop those on credit and we have a (household) payment plan sorted.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ADFLMNR Wordo: SPROG

  • April 11, 2024 - Saint Leo I (W)

    Simon Peter, if thou lovest Me, feed My lambs, feed My sheep.

    Psalm: I will extol Thee, O Lord, for Thou hast upheld me: and hast not made mine enemies to rejoice over me.

    Glory by to the Father. Simon Peter, if thou lovest Me, feed My lambs, feed My sheep.

  • The Girl Tech IM-Me and My Desire for a Modern Version

    Recently I’ve become aware of a device from the early 2000s called the IM-ME. It’s a handheld instant messaging tool created by Girl Tech, a company that was known for producing tech toys aimed at young girls during the late 90s and early 2000s. They are perhaps most well known for their voice activated diary (or their annoyingly catchy slogan.)

  • Ancient language scholarship

    As I keep mentioning in all my posts, I like to learn languages, and I have been studying Chinese, modern and classical, for the better part of 5 years. I have also dabbled in a number of other languages, such as German, Russian, and Latin. Recently I've been getting more and more into the ancient world, the history of it's sciences and religions, among other things. By the ancient world I mean mostly the Hellenic period down to the flourishing of Islam. Actually that's closer to the medieval period than the ancient one proper, but of course, nothing is as fragmentary as our conceptual delimitations suggest, and to have a more or less complete picture implies going back all the way to archaic Greek, Perisa, and even India (I have long been interested in the Sanskrit language as well). Just outlining this scope of study comfronts me with a very wide variety of languages to consider. I've already mentioned Sanskrit, and that one is at the fringes of the region that I've set myself to learn about. Latin, though at the western extreme of the (geographical) continuum, is a lot more present since we have inherited much through them and I have the advantage of speaking a romance language as well as my previous, albeit far from complete, study of it.

  • The Case of Mistaken Identity Part 7

    “Well, Watson, Ms. Stoliz appeared in the doorway like a lovely version of a wraith shortly after you left. Indeed, as I was involved in my studies, I actually mistook her for your premature return. Since you were out on the errand on which I sent you, I had no door greeter and lacked the proper kind of screening necessary to filter those who come in the office on desultory, impulsive urges. Ms. Stoliz, has, so far, provided the outlines of a case she feels that I am a good fit for, and it involves, somewhat ironically, the labyrinth machinations of the church both as a political and spiritual entity.”

  • Adler Tippa 1 (EN)

    So I've cleaned and serviced my nice litte typewriter, the Adler Tippa 1 (from 1965, according to the serial number database - typewriterdatabase.com).

    I'm writing this page on my Olivetti Dora, because I like the design better. But in direct comparison, I must admit that the Adler does a very good job in actual typing. It is fast and easy going, much better handling than this Olivetti. Now what to do with it? I certainly can't start my own collection of typewriters. I need the space in the drawers for some work and study-related things.

    Sell it on eBay?

• Technology and Free Software

  • Why would you write a search engine?

    I dunno man, I saw a post on fedi where somebody was talking about doing it and it seemed cool! The first iteration was all backed by a gigantic JSON file which quickly grew too large to handle. The current version has been ported to PostgreSQL which is obviously a little more suitable!

    After the SQL refactor, I started tinkering with boolean search terms. My implementation is inelegant but works okay! It simply iterates over each word in the query and checks the next word. On an and or an or, it puts the next and previous word in an array and does some SQL sorcery to pull the data. On top of that, it pre-calculates n-grams[1] during the indexing process to enable "phrase search" with quote marks.

  • Profectus Browser Alpha 0.2 Update

    I have released a minor update to Profectus that fixes DPI scaling on Linux environments that use Wayland...

  • Fidget spinners

    Sometimes the fidget spinner will hit into your fingers, causing insignificant pain.

    Then, as time goes on, it will rotate with more and more friction. Eventually, it will spin so badly that you won't bother picking it up again. It will stay somewhere on your desktop, occupying minimal headspace until you loose it overnight without even noticing it.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Seeking Autumn: Activity and Motivation in Geminispace

      I started my gemlog in December of 2022. To be honest, it felt a little like coming home, since I kept a journal in the very early days of the internet, inspired by mc and others. I kept my HTML journal for a little over two years - first on a community network, then at a revolving series of sites based on where I could get space and who was offering. And then, in late 2001, our scene, of teenagers keeping journals and oversharing their lives to online friends and whoever stumbled in, vanished. Well, not really. It's hard to pick an end date. We woke up one day, looked around, and it was gone. At that point I'd been posting on Facebook for a half a decade, less and less as every person I'd ever met requested we be friends. With that said, I can point to an event that preceeded it, and which was predictive of the current and unending social media age: the move to LiveJournal.

  • Programming

    • gwit implementations

      A few days ago I was contacted by +mala. After learning about gwit from a toot by Ploum, he launched himself into testing whether a MicroPython-based implementation of a gwit client would be possible, taking the example commands in the gwit spec as a reference. For such a limited platform (esp. regarding cryptography), he was able to figure out a good chunk of initial site retrieval, and he has documented his progress in a public Python notebook. Good luck and keep the good work!

    • Vim visual block mode for column editing

      The visual block mode in Vim lets you edit text simultaneously across adjacent lines, similar to the "Alt-drag" feature in modern editors, but there's more you can do with it.