Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Tanana Photos, Tamarack (publ. 2024-05-11)

    Last Wednesday (2024-05-08) I had another nice walk by the Tanana, during the lunchbreak. I took these scenery photos: [...]

  • Enshitification

    How does it happen? How does a community of generally well-mannered people become a zoo full of vandals that requires hardcore policing, with automatic weapons?

    You could blame criminals and build higher walls and get bigger guns. But I think it is exactly the cause of enshitification.

    People inherently want to be a part of their community. We are social animals. And if we are rejected and have no hope, we apply whatever skills we have to express our frustration at damaging the system we have, be vandalism, theft, or just tossing garbage onto the sidewalk.

  • solarpunk, cyberpunk, optimism

    While browsing through some back cata-phlogs, I happened upon a post by ~solderpunk[1] discussing, among other related things, a perceived shortcoming of solarpunk as an idea and movement: a forced, odd sort of optimism. This is a critique I share, among some others. I've been chewing this over in my head for a while now, and I'm inspired to share some of my thoughts.

  • Book excerpts

    I recently spent some time deleting lots of old photos off my phone to free up space on its microSD card. This turned out to be futile on multiple points. For one thing, a solid 75% of all photos I have taken with it are of my cat, and obviously I don't delete *those*. For another, the thing's slow but steady slide into complete unusability due to interminable delays in every single action which each glances coyly at said microSD card apparently has nothing to do with it being near full and everything to do with a semi-recent update to Android doing something stupid with FUSE which users can't undo, so close to a big waste of time all 'round. I stipulate "close to" because while clearing things out I had the pleasure of re-reading a bunch of book passages which I had bothered to photograph while reading those books over the past year or two, and that made it worthwhile. At the time I took the photos my inner Luddite was probably grumbling that I should have been using a highlighter to physically mark the pages, but in retrospect, if I'd done that, I never would have revisited all those passages again in a single sitting years later, so maybe this is actually the better way. Anyway, I am reproducing them here for, hopefully, your reading pleasure:

  • Structural fun

    Six months on from taking the straw bale course, I've managed to make it to "first fix" stage on the garden room - which is to say, it's watertight, there is a roof, and I'm ready for internal fit out. Have a picture, in case the words are too... wordy.

  • How to measure ⅚ cup of oil, part III

    I just received a nice email from Muffintree14 thanking me for helping them make a recipe where they needed to meaure out ⅚ of a cup [1]! They were trying to measure out 200ml (milliliter) of something (they didn't specify what) and it turns out that 200ml is about ⅚ of a cup. I suspect they could have just used a regular cup, as that's 237ml. As long as you aren't baking bread (or other pastry-like food item) then it probably doesn't matter that much. Roughly speaking, 200ml is close enough to 1 cup that you might as well use 1 cup.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: FIMOPSR Wordo: DIDST

  • My cup doth not run over ☕

    Outside the US, I'm scatching my head. What sort if cup? OK, I admit, I do know that there's a standard cup size in the US, but why? If you don't want to use metric, the fluid ounce is fine for volume. More weirdly again, do Americans use a measuring device that's exactly one cup? I have a measuring jug with a scale up the side, and just guesstimate intermediate numbers.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Mind Maps

    I'm playing with something on my Linux system called Minder. It is an app for creating mind maps. Instead of creating lists, it gives a more visual representation of what you are thinking about, and linking them together.

    I am experimenting with different ways of organizing my day, and my thoughts, and my many tasks. There are TODO list apps. I've also looked at the Getting Things Done idea (I saw an entry for that on Idiomdrottning's capsule, see link). There is a Linux app called "Getting Things Gnome", that follows this idea.

  • Quests Progress Available!

    And if you've always wanted to delete your account, but were shy to ask, now you can do it! Delete account, i mean. There is menu item in "Options" page. But beware of the artful Lagrange, which remembers the association of the certificate with the authorization page. I recommend open the pages linked to the certificate in separate tabs, and unpin the certificate after deleting the account.

  • APRStoot

    I was asked in the guestbook by fellow HAM KF7MIX to write something about my amateur radio activity. To be honest, there is not much to write about, because I am not very active at the moment. My activity in fact peaked long before I even had my HAREC license and OK1ZXS callsign. Here in the Czech Republic, we have quite a plethora of free to use bands: CB where FM, AM, and SSB is allowed, 34 MHz, 77 MHz, 81 MHz, 172 MHz, PMR446, 442 MHz and 446 MHz. Although some of these frequencies are used by commercial users, on most there is a frequent HAM activity, even though purely unlis one. But people try to make DX (there are even DX clubs), there are regular contests (I've organized three of these contests, one was inspired by SOTA and during the ten years of its existence several hundred people attended), etc. So when I was in the college and had a lot of free time, I was very much into these free bands. I still have some diplomas and cups from this era.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • A phlog turned into a blog

      Some people have their phlog as a stripped-down version of their blog or gemini log. Jirka is doing the exact opposite: his phlog posts are converted into a blog[1]. I know, because I wrote the script that synchronizes and converts the plaintext content into LionWiki syntax.

      I wanted to do the same thing with my phlog, but without LionWiki, just with a simple Python script to display phlog text files that I upload every night from my primary server to a backup location[2].

    • going offline

      I think I ought to go completely offline for some time. the internet is slowly killing me in various ways. plus, without any distactions (literally any, the internet makes up for pretty much all of my distractions) maybe I'll even get something done! maybe even write the things I wanted to write. I think I ought to go a week completely offline.

    • Starlink update

      Multiplayer gaming is less reliable than it seemed at the beginning with Starlink. Warframe is frequently dropping members from my party and Shroud of the Avatar is showing party members to be lagging.

    • This page contains QOI images

      I'm working on adding support for QOI images in Lagrange out of boredom. QOI is a very simple lossless image compression format that is comparable to PNG and very fast to compress. This page constains a few QOI images encoded by different encoders to test my integration into the Lagrange browser. I'll upstream once I'm done.

    • MacOS x86 Precompiled Binary for Profectus

      I have just added an experimental precompiled binary for macOS x86 platforms. M1 will come in the future as soon as it's available on the free plan of CircleCI.

  • Software Releases/Announcements

    • AuraGem Search Crawls the Scroll Protocol

      I added this a while ago, but never announced it, so I'll announce it now: AuraGem Search now crawls the Scroll Protocol.

  • Programming

    • Sort Fail

      So about midways through writing some code, I wanted to display a high scores list sorted in an unusual way, by the absolute value, so that a score of -42 would appear next to that of 42. All very silly. What was not silly was that qsort(3) failed at this task: no idea why, no time to debug what had gone sideways. Probably some tricky thing in the *compar callback function (or not very tricky, if you've been working too much so therefore your error rate is high).