Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Kennings

    Kennings are, for better or worse, less common in modern English than in Old Norse or Old English. Much of their use is poetic or imaginative, which is probably more suitable for the meadhall than what passes for a working environment these days. Time to invent some!

  • April 24, 2024 - Saint Fidelis of Sigmaringen, Martyr (R)

  • last day, last time

    today was probably my last time seeing my last remaining grandparent alive. i'm happy she was relatively lucid. she knew who i was, was very happy to see me, told me she dreamed of me. she asked about things and volunteered opinions, although she couldn't really hear or follow my answers too well, and fell asleep for most of my visit, exhausted by the small exchange we had.

  • Interesting Book: Sundials: Their Theory and Construction (publ. 2024-04-24)

    Sundials are, of course, not quite as common as they used to be, but they make for an interesting way to better understand the relationship between the sun and the tracking of time. There are a lot of interesting nuances to this such as the implications of latitude and longitude, the calculations of angles, understanding time zones, and the "equation of time". Today I started a little project to make a simple horizontal sundial on top of a square wooden board that I found.

  • Summer 2024 Semester: Sustainability

    With one week left in the current term I'm definitely settling into a nice groove with my schooling. Up until now I've been taking one eight week online course at a time, with the first two courses being almost pitifully easy. About halfway through my third term I emailed my advisor and requested to enroll in two courses per term, so that's what I'll be doing in just over a week.

  • Black Metal Kommando

    I'm also a fervent metalhead. I was born as an Epic Metal servant, then I start my journey through the folk, death, black metal. Here I'd like to summarize my preferred tracks, albums, bands.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: IMPYTUR Wordo: AROMA

  • birthdays

    Today is my wife's birthday. We're heading into the city to find tacos, some vinyl, and see some art installations for Design March. Is Design March[0] a thing in other places? I'm really not sure if it's a local-only or if it's world-wide. It's pretty neat: art installations in March all over the city. Except it's April, almost May, but they didn't change the name. No idea why.

    [...]

    Today is also the first day of summer in Iceland, so it's a school holiday. We'll go see some parades and there will probably be pop-up concerts. I have a holiday vacation day today, so it's going to be Fun Family Time™.

• Science

  • News and Links (publ. 2024-04-24)

    Possibly interesting from a YAC perspective, as generally-speaking recent geological activity is a problem for old-universe models, in planets or moons that are smaller and further away from the sun. SETI, of course, is hoping that the volcano could have provided conditions for life outside of earth.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Differentiating myself (and Smol Earth) from the Amish

    Gemscrawler adiabatic has suggested that the endpoint of the Smol Earth philosophy is more or less the way the Amish live and, hey, we already *have* the Amish, if you think they're so great, why don't you cut to the chase and go join them? On the basis of previous friendly interactions with adiabatic I am taking this as well-meaning and good-natured teasing to express a philosophical disagreement over which we might seriously and sincerely engage, so I'm writing a response. I'm not upset by the comparison, even though I don't think it holds. I'm supremely aware that I've done a pretty lousy job of trying to explain just exactly what Smol Earth is and is not about, so I can't be upset about misunderstandings of mischaracterisations. It seems a useful exercise to try to carefully and explicitly differentiate myself from the Amish. If I can't, well, heck, why *don't* I try joining them?

  • SFTP, VoIP, tea

    Yet another personal news digest: on the work-related SFTP and globbing adventures, attempts to get voice conferences working over HTTP, and tea.

  • Track Mastodon hashtags from your favorite RSS Feed aggregator

    Maybe you want to follow one or more of your favorite tags on Mastodon but would rather do it using your favorite RSS feed aggregator, such as FreshRSS, Feedbin, Inoreader, Feedly, or others.

  • Streaming ambient music

    I find it annoying jumping back and forth from Spotify, to Soundcloud, to Bandcamp, to wherever else to find music to match a mood or preference. About 10 years ago I got deeper and deeper into listening to radio via the internet. The nice thing about radio is you can just switch it on or off, or flick to another station if you don't like what's currently playing.

  • Profectus Alpha 0.7: Tabs and AVIF [Ed: This format is a software patents nuclear waste; but this Microsofter insists on this...]

    Profectus now supports all of the common image formats (png, jpeg, gif) as well as the next generation ones (jpeg xl, webp, and avif). The rest of the supported image formats are only supported because SDL_Image supports them, and many of them are actually used within geminispace. Avif is the final image format that I planned to add for the time being. I am now going to start work on document formats outside of images and other essential browser features. Spartan support is also still planned.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • The Problem With Full-Content Web Feeds Today

      Web feeds (Atom, JSON, or RSS) are much nicer if they have the full post content included. It allows users to read the post in their feed readers without any distractions that could be on the post’s page, be it advertisements, animations, sidebars, or creative choices which may look nice, but decrease the ability to read efficiently. It also means all content has been downloaded after syncing, which allows for reading offline.

    • Gemini Thoughts

      I realized I hadn't looked into Gemini in a while, started reading into its updates, and even attempted to get some clients working on Snow Leopard... The keyword here is /attempted/. Nothing requiring Go or Rust would work, as those langs wouldn't even install for me in MacPorts, so I looked at some that only needed POSIX shell, bash, or something like that. Of them...only AV-98 actually works. Everything else either needs to have some changes made to run on this setup, or needs something else that needs Rust/Go itself, or just doesn't run at all.