Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AUHMNRC Wordo: OUGHT

  • On... books? ...

    I don't do much these days. Other than repetitively complaining about the predictably horrid weather accompanying this summer's approach, my actions - aside, of course, from the vital needs that get met frequently without a great deal of care and attention - are almost confined between my two opposable thumbs holding a book. I'm ravaging through the ink like a bulimic fax-machine scanner, mostly too occupied with the empty space between the end of a chapter and the beginnin of another, too occupied to concentrate on those things that now come dangerously close, things without which my final year of art schooling wouldn't be complete. Sometimes, the opposable and rightly so opposed thumbs get substituted with a palm spreading its fingers and the pages open, and the other palm ordering its fingers to hold a cigarette.

  • Irreparable

    I have been on medical leave for the past month. I am in the limbo of extension period and the stress of not knowing if I am going to be dumped back into the workforce despite being basically exactly where I was when I requested leave has me in pieces.

  • On Measurement

    The claim on a new package of tea "1 Tsp of Tea Per 8Oz/200Ml Of Water. Heat Water to 205F/95C And Steep for 1.5-3 Minutes." left me wondering whether something had been lost in translation, or do people actually test these things? (Spoiler: no, most of the time, not really.) The temperature seems fine, a bit before a full boil, which one can learn how to judge fairly well by listening to the sound of the kettle, assuming that one can hear it, or by watching the bubbles, assuming you can see them. Or you could boil the water at somewhere around 1,000 meters of elevation on Earth, though 95C and 205F do not exactly line up with one another, and getting yourself, the tea equipment, and the tea to that elevation may be difficult. A more serious problem is the one teaspoon, into which tea does not well fit, unless matcha powder, and a few tries at a somewhat level teaspoon result in roughly 1.3 grams of tea on the digital scale. Maybe they like the tea brewed weak, because other tea instructions advise three to five grams of tea per six ounces of water. The five gram mark may be a little extreme, as around that point the leaves may explode to consume all the space in the teapot, or these days a coffee mug. Also the instructions do not mention whether there is a need to pre-wash the tea to clean off any crud. Many such details is how you get to books written on tea.

  • Thursday, I'm in love

    But it's fine. It's really about the only way I'd have time for this. And then a couple months ago we got ourselves entangled in a music fest coming up this weekend. I'll be both running sound at one of the stages, and performing on and off. It'll be fun overall, although I'm pre-dreading the "hell is other people" effects.

  • perfectly appropriate

    ...that I fine tune my new headphones while I listen to Hendrix fine tune his guitar at Woodstock 69 w/ the Star Spangled Banner. Also, good re intro into headphone world, as I have been without for months.

  • Multipurpose pineapple, R

    I went on my usual run. On the way back, I had to go through the supermarket for some shower gel, because we are out of shower gel.

    In the produce section (the produce section is always at the start), I put three pieces of fruit including a pineapple in my basket before I remembered I don't have a bag, I can't buy much more than about 4 items. Still, I stuck with my fruit selection. This has been a failure at doing a sensible food shop and gettting dinner.

    Pineapples are funny, of course. Having to carry home an armful of fruit including a pineapple is funny. Having a home pineapple is funny.

    This is a multipurpose pineapple. First, I will draw it a bunch of times (though this is a Complex Object and beyond my level) while it ripens a lot more, possibly by sitting next to a mango. Then, it can be fruit and a sweet and sour tofu stir fry.

  • tending to various needs this new moon

    with the new moon it's time for a personal reading, featuring a new spread. this one examines some basic psychological needs plus a little extra from kelly-ann maddox's most recent "tea and tarot" video on youtube (getting more of that joyous sparkle into your life).

  • The Fault in our Bars

    Sitting at bar's edge, I fancy a gambling machine, one to pump dollar bills into and make ~bartender rich, and on lucky days me richer. No such device is here, so black coffee gets drank with enthusiasm instead. Some avoid caffeine after noontime, I lather up espresso until past midnight and still REM sleep like I built a house before breakfast.

  • Crash on Demand

    Some while ago I read David Holmgrens "Crash on Demand" essay. Which I found to be an interesting take.

  • Norway

    It's cold, breezy and a real shit summer. The kids are departing from a safe world in academia, full of hopes and dreams of a bright and shining future. My mind is bleak, like the shitty weather and I wish I was wrong about a dark and difficult future, but I don't think I am. The road to the hellish abyss is paved with good food, drinks and merriment.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Tinkering with Emacs

    Earlier this week I got it into my head that I should update my Emacs config and try to streamline it. Instead, I ended up adding more stuff to it, and modularizing it. Upside is that I learned a little more Lisp in the process, and I'm not dependent on org mode and org-babel for my config.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Friction and Elsewhere: Rubbing up Against Mastodon's Rough Edges

      I'm a mostly uneasy user of social media, at least the real-names kind. Chalk it up to being found online by people I wish would forget me. Most people peg the start of the social media age with Facebook, 2005 or 06, though at that time it was still limited to those at academic institutions. At the time, that's where I was. I remember getting a Facebook invitation from a young woman I TA'd. I'd never heard of it. I signed up. Then, gradually, so did the rest of the world.

      On Facebook, it's all real names, and that's true for almost every other site as well. (aliases, for the most part, disallowed, fading with forums - too hard to build up a user profile on doug_the_puffin, olp1996, or pixiestix66)

    • Stats on some optimized small internet servers

      That's more like it. The gopher server, running over plain TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and getting about 1/40^th the requests, is finally accumulating less CPU time than Gemini (and the only reason it's not even less is my gopher server has to deal with wraping Unicode text [4]).

  • Programming

    • Coding for yourself is OK

      I’ve made tons of driveby commits since pandemic started. 100 contributions in the last year just on GitHub and probably just as many on other repos.

      So “even they can’t read programs written by others without 1000x effort” isn’t literally true.

      I also… I think “programming for the household” is actually awesome. Automating our own lives, autonomously, not squeezing our lives into someone else’s automation.