Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 14th May 2024 - Phlogging IN The Sky

    I am typing this while flyong 11861 metres above Bangladesh en route to Singapore. Feels weird saying it but the joys of modern air travel. I am using British Airways free internet for their travel clib thing. Currently on an A380. Huge and not huge at the same time. Take off was surprisingly simple althogh a lot of runway was required.

  • 5th April 2024 - Berlin Day 2

    LAst night ended up with enjoying some udon noodles and rather tasty but confusing to eat edemame beans. They were cooked in a nice spicy chilli oil and it seemed like you are meant to just eat the pod. However, this was so stringy that I couldn't. I ended up squeezing the beans out and trying to destring the outers. Hard work with just a fork and a spoon. Ah well. Tasted good. I then went off to a rather good craft beer bar. It had 20 beers on the board and they were delightful. I ended up listening to FLUX and chatting in com from the bar which was a bit strange but fun. I enjoyed several beers but when last orders was called decided to go for a rather strong 20%er.

  • 6th April 2024 - Berlin Day 3

    My last full day. Thankfully the weather made it a hot one. Unfortunately I did not have shorts with me. Just sweaty jeans.

    I headed out to the Stasi museum. This was in the central records office and rather creepy. The building is part of an estate of Stasi buildings. It was truely a time warp. Not just to the 80s but to the 60s. Everything wqs stuck in when it was built. Wood panelling, beige curtains, brown walls, brown everything.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ARDFLOB Wordo: FACIA

  • Remembrance of enlightened palms past

    The image at the bottom of this page [1] reminds me of the time I used to photograph enlightened palms [2], but it never occurred to me that one could enlight trees with fireflies (we don't get fireflies down here in Lower Sheol, which may be the reason why). The pictures I took with the Christmas lights used an exposure of a few seconds; I wonder how long an exposure was used for the firefly photo.

• Technology and Free Software

  • New Home

    rawtext.club vanished into the ether a week or two ago. The new website says it was total server collapse. Luckily, I'd just finished one of my periodic backups from the server to my laptop to my private git repo. I don't think anything was lost? And so, homeless, I looked for a place to get started again. And here I am. Glad to see you all again.

  • A Look at the POBSD Alternative OpenBSD Game Database Frontend

    Thanks to Hukadan's efforts, there is now a very nice and informative interface to explore the commercial, formerly commercial, or freeware games that run (or used to run) on OpenBSD. This post is a summary to show why this is such a great resource.

  • Tesla, Edison, and who actually fought the War of Currents?

    I used to think Thomas Edison [1] was a self-aggrandizing business man who took the credit for the inventions his employees made, and Nikola Tesla [2] was the real deal—a genius inventor who was actually responsible for most of our technology based on electricity. But now? Having watched the 4½ hour long video “Most Everything You Know About Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison is Probably Wrong [3]” (and yes, it's four and a half hours long!) I'm not so sure my assessment is correct. The long video goes deep into the history of Tesla, Edison, and the War of the Currents [4] where it wasn't Tesla vs. Edison, but Westinghouse (the company) vs. Edison (the copmany).

  • A list of wholly self-contained descriptors

    When I was younger, I had a few friends who were really into music, and it rubbed off onto me as well. People who insisted you listen not only to your favourite track, but the whole album of which it's a part. People who venerated their favourite albums, and who'd come to identify with them.

    I think that identifying with particular albums is a powerful tool for camaraderie for music nerds. If you pressed me on what my favourite genre is, I'd probably have a hard time telling you, but I'd have a very easy time telling you about some of the albums I've been listening to recently. And so, people use those spyware-infested web apps to generate album charts, displaying all your most listened-to albums by album art in a nice grid. Then, you download it and share it on your story, or whatever it is. People can look at your chart and quickly get an idea of where you are as a listener in the music landscape.

  • Break

    • Mid-May Mini-Break

      My partner will be away for a few days this week, and I always meticulously plan for these days: what I'll do with the extra time (project work, musical practice, writing, maybe zine-making this time), but also what I'll eat. Once you're in a long-term relationship, you become intimately familiar with the things that people will and won't eat. When I was living apart from her for a year a couple of decades ago, I had a bunch of go-to cheap comfort foods, because I was broke as hell, spending $30/week on food. I'd cook things like chili, or shepherd's pie, or do roast beef if there was a cut on deep discount. Easy to put together and make, serves lots of portions.