Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • the oldest spread in the world

    more of a method than a spread, but seemed intriguing. gave it a shot without a question, just to see what happens. i got five pairs, which i arranged in two rows - three pairs on top, two below. the top three were: seven of wands with death, six of swords with judgement, and eight of swords with the high priestess. the bottom two were: ten of swords with strength, and the five of swords with justice.

  • so many critters, critters for me

    Bevy Of Beasties mk.II up on ttrpg page, and eventually I have one more set of 20 to type up and toss up.

  • Hello, maple 🍁

    I have a Japanese maple in my garden. The leaves are a deep purple-ish red. They form layers, a bit like a cedar. It makes a pleasing contrast to all the shades of green, and it spreads toward the top, so although it's not huge, you can sit under it. Lovely.

  • Big cave

    I helped the people in the caaave, said first daughter. I helped them to not get lost in there.

    It was cold in the cave, I said.

    Yes, she said. It was cold in there. I'm shivering, but that's okay. I like the cold a little bit.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Emacs Windows 2000 Screenshots (publ. 2024-05-24)

      I have a project going at work to restore an old aircraft simulator, which includes a network of Windows 2000 and QNX computers. They are running on the original hardware (mostly Pentium 4 IBM compatibles), except for a few parts I had to replace like hard drives, fans, and such. If you want to shutdown the whole simulator properly, without simply cutting power to the main bus, it takes like 27 steps to get all the W2K computers shut down, so I'm looking into automating that.

    • My TUIs

      The terminal font has to support unicode 15 for the TUIs using the 2x3 pixel characters and the terminal is configured for RGB 24 bit colors, when using terminal multiplexers (screen, tmux) you might not get 24bit colors.

    • Thin Client Wyse Cx0

      As I already mentioned in one previous post, for the last couple of months I have been using a thin client, Wyse Cx0, converted into a small, fanless PC with OpenBSD 7.5 and FVWM[1].

      I've got four of these clients for about $35, and I already sold two of them for $25 apiece, so it was quite a good deal, and to be honest, it is also quite a good computer. With a 1GHz Via Eden CPU, 2GB DDR2 RAM, and an 8GB CompactFlash Card in a 44-pin IDE adapter, it is in no way fast, but thanks to OpenBSD, it is still a very responsive and useful machine. As the poor old CPU is not capable of running any JavaScript-enabled browser, I use Lynx, Links, Dillo, and NetSurf, and I am not bothered by any social media, online video, or even any news portals. I can, however, still read documentation, write code, emulate Sinclair QL and ZX Spectrum, play podcasts, and chat on IRC. The machine is completely silent, and the power supply can provide just 35 W of peak power. So I don't bother to turn the Wyse off when I'm not using it; it doesn't disturb me even during the night, and it won't ruin my electric bill.

  • Programming

    • Little Languages

      Max Hallinan's post on "Little Languages" is one I keep returning to every now and again. The argument throughout is that we should be learning about concepts by playing about with them in isolation where possible. The emphasis here is on the play. An example given is to use pie, a language designed for teaching depedant types, instead of a language with the overhead of all of it's the other features. Would a learning platform or a book of programming concepts using these "little languages" be effective or popular?