Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: BUEILNC Wordo: GORSE

  • Going Flat

    I took the motorcycle out for a bit longer of a trip yesterday. Mostly I ride this bike as a commuter for my 4.3 mile trip to work. On this day I was off to the barber. My barber is actually an old friend of mine who I've known since we were in 7th grade in school, which is a lot of why I make the 40 minute trip every 6 weeks or so to hang out and get a haircut and beard trim. It helps that he's also the best at what he does of course.

    The ride out was uneventful, but it marked my first time taking the highway for a significant stretch and served as a sort of test run for longer trips. At 70mph this bike feels rock solid, right at home and I'm sure it (and I) could do a nice long day at this pace if needed. If anything the bike is even more eager than me to go fast, and at this speed it's just past halfway to it's full capability, a speed which I have no desire to experience any time soon. But it made for a successful test and encourages me that we'll be doing some inter-state travel in the future.

  • Mi Gyaowyrduhn.

    I woke up this morning laying on my side in a rather large puddle of drool. Puddle is an accurate term, unfortunately. I got to sleep in today and so that meant I woke up when my husband's alarm went off, I fell back asleep, then woke up again some time later, realized that today was the day to snooze, and did that immediately. Once I was officially awake I took care of my immediate concerns and then I began my workday morning routine by heading to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. That brew would have to wait, however, because as I made my way down our hallway there was an attempt made on my life. A rude, slimy, plant eating asassin somehow got into the house and was making his slow journey to my end. Thankfully, he was a slug and I am fully grown adult human being so his jump scare tactics were fairly weak (corporate tried to edit this and say "...so his jump scare tactics were strong enough to elicit a gasp" to paint him in a sympathetic light, ridiculous). Still, I made my way down to the swamp where my husband was bathing and I told him the details of the situation. He understood the task laid out before him without the need for me to even finish my story. He is a man of God after all. He went to the kitchen and grabbed a paper towel, absolutely radiating with a sense of duty, and marched towards the perpetrator hand extended. There was no fight. The would be killer was hurled outside in a great show of shame and failure, for all his relatives to witness.

  • Things to look forward to

    Tomorrow is my last day at my current job, and I'm looking forward to it. I'm ready to do something that's not retail. There's a gym at the new office, and I might go early to take advantage of it. I feel like I need to work out more.

  • Humping right along

    Hello Wednesday. Hope you're doing well. I must say, an unexpectedly moist start to you - or so the pitter patter sound against the neighbor's wall facing the window of the bathroom I was in half an hour ago suggested.

    (Why does the vim spell-checker not recognize 'pitter' as a word? Hmmm....)

    No chemical sleep "assistance" last night, i.e. neither ethanol nor THC. Plenty of muscle/tendon/joint/whatever pain throughout the night. Not the blindingly kind: just the long, drawn out, achey-every-time-you-turn-and-sometimes-when-motionless kind.

  • all about love

    finished reading "all about love" by bell hooks last night. i'm not sure why i only started collecting quotes halfway in, probably because i knew i'll re-read the book anyway? there was some solid gold in the first half as well, e.g. how you can't be both committed to the lies of patriarchy and to love at the same time.

  • You are

    playing games again?

    How many times have I told you not to.

    You should rest.

    Oh?

    You aren't gaming?

    Well either way stop doing whatever you're doing and start doing work, alright?

    You have been slacking off lately.

  • Dairy Denial and Complexities of Diet

    I get aching bones when I’ve had too much dairy. The weeks where I had a little bit here and there, it seemed okay. But if I make tacos, I get achy bones for a day or two. The taco are ground meat, topped with shredded cheddar and sour cream, wrapped in a mozzarella shell. Lots of dairy, and lots of delicious. But then the next day I wake up with pain that feels like it’s in my spine.

    I had also found a very simple ice cream desert (egg yolk and heavy cream) that was fairly pleasing to the palette. I think I have to cut that out, too. It’s too easy to overdo it. I also worry about the effects it might be having that I’m not noticing.

• Politics and World Events

  • Edge of the World Ripples

    What to say when you have stood on the edge of the world for long enough that you can see it's outline? There! There it is! I know that practically no one else sees it.

  • Data Information Knowledge Wisdom

    This is possibly one of those things that I find obvious/assume that everybody is aware of. It definitely veers towards the philosophical edges of data science.

    We are currently working on a knowledge graph at work. Trying to make the knowledge that has been accumulated over several years of curation of pediatric cancer cases more accessible to curators, clinicians and researchers. More accessible computationally speaking that is - governance of access is an entirely different subject. For the moment though, we have a lot of knowledge tied up in reports and case comments.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Finding Little Gems

    Since returning to Gemspace, I've noticed it seems more vibrant, more alive. There are now a good number of Capsules with interesting content. It's not just "tech demo's", like a lot of the earlier ones were. There are definitely more non-technical Capsules in existence.

    I'd like to do something useful, something valuable, with Gemini. I am a technical professional, so I tend to lean towards that, but I'd like to use Gemspace as a conduit to explore and develop my non-technical interests. A good example of this is Shizy's Stargazing Journal. [2]

  • Exploring RISC OS 5.30 on a Raspberry Pi Zero W

    Back on April, 27, 2024 [RISC OS Open](https://riscosopen.org) [announced](https://www.riscosopen.org/news/articles/2024/04/27/risc-os-5-30-now-available) the release of RISC OS 5.30. This release includes WiFi support for the Raspberry Pi Zero W. This may sound like a small thing. WiFi is taken for granted on many other operating systems. This is the news I've been waiting for before diving into RISC OS. My Pi Zero W running RISC OS **just works** with my wireless network. That is wonderful.

  • Object-orientation and other dumb ideas

    Daniel Lemire has posted some great articles and is always interesting to read. Here is his short take on OOP, a stupid idea based on nothing that went so viral that opposing it would cost you your job, your friends, and your reputation. Includes a guide on how to spot these brain viruses as they spread near you. Look around and spot some current idiocies around you, and post your observations here, if you dare!

  • Just zeros and ones

    Someone made the claim that "every game is nothing but pixels", possibly in jest. The conversation involved reducing computer games to a minimum, and maybe pixels are some sort of minimum that every game has? To this audio-only games were mentioned, or that one might interface with a game via punch cards or a print-out and response form to fill in: play by mail games, for example. A generous definition of pixel might include the game of Go, though writing yet another grid-based game was rejected by the author of "Hunt the Wumpus", where the caves or really graph nodes (spoilers!) connect as a dodecahedron, and where most play the game through some sort of grid-based pixel interface.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • First Post

      So after joining tilde.club and setting up my gopherhole and gemini capsule now it's actually time to write something... Since this is my first time, like ever, of blogging/phlogging/... I guess I'll just tell about how I got here.

      I'm born at the end of the 80's and although I've had a computer my entire life and access to the web most of my life I actually never heard of the text based protocols like gopher or gemini. It was already a long while I was getting fed up about where the web was going, being the ad-ridden, tracking shithole it currently is, but I only started remembering how awesome it was when I was young. Geocities was a thing and having a website was considered cool (and nerdy).

    • Offline News

      Newspapers are a wonderful way to share information. They are self-contained, need no electricity, last as long as the paper they are printed on lasts, and are not subject to retroactive censorship or deletion. Of course they also have downsides: they take up physical space, they consume paper, bad information cannot be corrected in situ, and readers cannot track events in real time. Personally, I feel the benefits of physical newspapers outweigh the problems, and I wish more of them were still around.

      Separately, it's well-known that the Internet is one of the biggest consumers of energy in the modern world. Much of that energy use comes from huge amounts of data and information being processed as close to real time as possible. Several applications require such real-time analysis, but many people spend all day constantly refreshing Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and other social media platforms looking for the latest comments and entertainment. To me, that's not only a waste of time, but a waste of energy--often perpetrated by people who claim to believe that our warming climate is a serious global emergency.

    • A mostly offline May

      My wife and I did a little bit of travelling in early May. This caused a 10 day break from my usual computing routines as I didn't bring any smol-capable devices with me. Once I got back, it was just so easy to delay returning to those routines, even though I had constant nagging voice in the back of my head reminding me of all the stuff I need to get done for Operation Blazing Star. I decided to indulge myself a bit and spent most of my free time last month doing other things. I'm back behind the keyboard for June, though. Somehow the year is already nearly half way through!

      In preparation for next month's Finnish bike tour I am trying to get a lot of riding in, and I'll try to start doing some rides with two panniers full of a my stuff to try to make them an accurate simulation. I did a ride a few weeks ago to a neighbouring city, about 50km in total, which was the longest I've done in a little while. It was a really pleasant ride. Nice mix of paved and dirt/gravel surfaces, with some roads included, but not much. Most of the route ran alongside a river, but there were occasional forest detours. I rode past an international airport and tried not to get too distracted watching jets coming in to land.

  • Software Releases/Announcements

    • Heads-up with GMID 2.0

      GMID removed support for "CGI", if you update and you have a CGI voice in your config this will prevent GMID to start or work.

    • gmid 2.0 first alpha

      It took quite some time. Last September I was thinking I would have 2.0 ready for December, and here we are. Better late than never I guess.

      This time I decided to do a round of public testing before releasing 2.0 itself.

      I decided to call this an "alpha" rather than a first RC to better convey the idea that I'm still open to change (even in incompatible ways) the new feature set before the release. It works perfectly for me, but since it's used by other people as well I felt the need to wait a bit and gather some feedback.