Gemini Links 12/06/2024: The Rodent Revolution and Adding Twisty Puzzles
Contents
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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Homeownership Part Deux
And so the saga continues.... Last time out intrepid dweller was replacing the handywork of Ol'Cheal-n-Dumb in the kitchen... Today it was onto a newish appliance I had installed....
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'Tis Wednesday again already....
Suddenly so much to read, so little time.
It just figures this place gets busy just as - per the renowned ~tffb patron - Away From Keyboard gets even busier. Who did that song "Torn" from back in 90's times? Bingo.
(Well, not "Bingo" too literally, because I don't really know the lyrics, don't know what it's really about, just know I loved the tune overall.)
Turns out hole-digging wabbits are no easier than cats to herd - much more difficult, actually, given all the dirt and other assorted sediment in the way...
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Life in the garden
So last winter we decided to buy a feed station for birds. We have quite a big yard for our country but it's mostly grass since we both hate working on it. We do have a little patch of "wild" land where birds have some more cover. We bought a feeder for small birds with a little water basin below.
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🔤SpellBinding: CEILYUM Wordo: BHOYS
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Frames Of Reference- Chapter 23
I wish I could remember how exactly I made it out, what deep pocket of will I pulled from to subsist in those vital few moments, but when the world shatters like a mirror into a million little fragments, and the fuschia blooms like cold ice over your entire being, and the Plastic Men come to whisk you up and carry you off through the night winds with their little paws- well, recollection is in short supply.
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Politics and World Events
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The Rodent Revolution
So, the wife noticed Tuesday that there was an off organic smell in the basement. Not the cat box creeping back for the increased humidity but something else. Wednesday evening it was more pronounced and we went to investigate. There was a hint of the telltale dead rodent odor on the air but not a for sure, dead thing smell. Even so, we've had critters get into and not get back out of the dryer vent in the past and that was the first thing to check as there was the sound of some seeds rattling in the aluminum pipe again. Climbing behind the dryer and unhooking everything I set to work with the shopvac and assumed the worst, another chipmunk mummy and all the assorted grotesque crypt-keeper goodies that accompany this scent... I powered up the little machine, a cloud of concrete dust shot forth from the last job making it extra pleasant, and opened up the vent pipe... Nothing but some seeds and lint. We decided that due diligence was done and might have to let it get a little worse after prowling about with flashlights and all the lights on. There was a cloud of fine particulates in the air anyhow and it was, and continues to make for a scratchy throat.
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Technology and Free Software
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Converting stem locations from lat-long to XY coordinates
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Converting stem locations from lat-long to XY coordinates
In 2018 I wrote some code to convert stem locations within square plots from lat-long coordinates into XY grid coordinates. Recently I was asked to do the opposite, to convert XY grid coordinates into lat-long coordinates, so a colleague could combine multiple adjacent plots into one larger plot with a shared coordinate system.
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Trying Suspend-to-Idle
OpenBSD has long supported suspend via apm(8), using S3. This mode of CPU suspend has slowly been replaced by other methods - "modern standby (S0)".
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CP/M Days
Ok, I've had a CP/M machine operational for a little bit now, so it's time for more details. Information about the system can be had in a previous post[1].
[...]
In case you're not aware, CP/M has an available BIOS I/O concept called IOBYTE. It "creates a mapping of logical-to-physical devices that can be altered during CP/M processing"[2]. In several places this IOBYTE concept is said to be based on an "Intel standard", but I've been unable to locate documentation about any standard. I think, rather, that the so-called standard was simply to mimic the bottom-of-address-space behavior of the Intel 8080.
To make a long story short, CP/M is able, through optionally included BIOS calls, to use the IOBYTE function call to map serial ports. Modern software would handle port assignments in easily configurable ways, but CP/M software wasn't quite there. Most software requires patching, and that requires understanding of the IOBYTE setup.
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My plans with LoRaWAN
My last post was a while ago. That's typical to me. I work on my projects and then I take a long timeout of my tech activities.
Now I'm planning a new project which has been brewing in my brain for some time. It was a thought of how to participate with the ROOPHLOCH event for the first time. I want to send my ROOPHLOCH post over LoRaWAN.
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Finding PGP keys
Calling the public key a “key” in public key encryption was a bad and confusing idea. Calling it an envelope or a padlock or a chain woulda been way better, reserving the name “key” for the private key. This goes for both SSL certs and for PGP email.
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Internet/Gemini
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Image descriptions
I sometimes see text descriptions that are like “OK, so in the top left corner there’s a red shape and then in the center top, it gradually turns indigo”, trying to describe the image in a way that would be great for a printer or a painter or an ML image generator but not so good for someone who is looking for an alternate decription of the image! We have the PNG file, if you’re gonna scan it through line by line we can run scripts on the pixel data to do that for us.
Spatial relationships are often super important in real life but often not relevant to the meaning behind the image.
[Colors] are rarely something you need to bring up but feel free to do so when there’s semantic relevance to them, like you might write “The area is marked off with warning colors (yellow and black stripes)”.
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Adding Twisty Puzzles
I want to build many things on my capsule, especially in the "Twisty Puzzles" section. I first created that section in 2022, and an early piece of content there was one of the most fun and challenging CGI scripts I've ever written: a fully interactive Rubik's Cube, playable over Gemini.^ I also posted a beginner-friendly solution guide to solving Rubik's Cube.
Since then I've added almost no content to the "Twisty Puzzles" section, and it has languished while I focused on other content. I built out a Gemini-based todo.txt service in 2023, but the service that needed the most attention was chess. I felt bad whenever I worked on other CGI scripts, because I knew I needed to fix several bugs in the chess service, and it received more traffic than my other services. That bad feeling would often demotivate me.
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OFFLFIRSOCH 2024 round up
It's the first of April, which means two things! One, you should believe even fewer things you read online than usual. And two, the historic first ever OFFLine FIRst SOftware CHallenge has now drawn to a close. I had no idea what sort of uptake to expect for this new challenge, given that it necessarily targets a smaller audience (not everybody who phlogs/gemlogs also codes), but I am happy to report that OFFLFIRSOCH was welcomed with enthusiasm despite the awful name! I am aware of a total of twelve submisions. If I have missed or forgotten your submission, please reach out to me! EDIT: Now up to thirteen!
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Firefox slow?
As you may already know, nearly all the web browsers today are based on Chromium, an open-source project sponsored by Google and is the foundation for the popular Google Chrome browser.
In addition to Google Chrome and Chromium, popular browsers such as Opera, Vivaldi, and Edge are all based on this. This creates a virtual monopoly in the web browser marketplace.
Mozilla Firefox is the long-run competitor to Chrome and other browsers that came before, such as the Microsoft Internet Explorer. In fact, Firefox is a continuation of the good old Netscape Navigator, which in turn was based on Mozaic.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.