Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • nadeshiko

    we are in a land of stately pinks erupting pyroclastic, the stateless continent of a sooty god. but we, ourselves, are born of the steam: flame meeting surf, a violent expansion rather than a subtle extinguishment.

    you are sitting at a piano, poor posture and all, playing a monochromatic nocturne. you chortle because whoever would put a piano next to a bathroom. you close the lid, and set the wood alight. the strings start to snap.

  • fan of fans

    Bent alluminium scratching the carbon wings. I can hear it too. Last call of a dying machine. No silk branches or yellow stems will grow from the rusted ports anymore.

  • hey, there's that tffb jacka**, again

    news all around here, I guess

    I am in my new apartment, called Ben Nor Apartments. Once Senior independent living apartments, now converted into low-income/501 non-profit status, for broke fools like me.

    The place is geared for, and intended to be, a longterm apartment. Yearly lease, which I will renew for the foreseeable future, and the place itself is 550 sq ft, but may as well be 700 sq ft the way it is laid out. Just "right".

    A garden out front will be filled with lava rocks when I have the time and can afford it. The front patio sports a steel table and chair, where I sit and smoke and look at the drainage ditch/manmade "gully" to the right of my building (and outside my kitchen window!). It's like having that big Los Angeles river drainage thing in my backyard, just to a significantly smaller scale.

  • On the choice to remain

    I am starting this new capsule on a day filled with misery for myself, but not by any means more miserable than any other day in the history of our species, of our planet. I look around me and I see war and famine and death and illness and all those apocalyptic omens and I feel crushed by grief. I look at my life, I look at how small it is, how plain and empty, how bad I am at making the world better in the face of all this pain instead of worse and the black hole in me grows, and grows, and devours everything warm.

  • blog resist him

    Ever see the painting "Hands Resist Him"? It was the original "cursed" image of the Internet. Circulating in the mid/late-90s. An actual painting, spooky.

    Blogging is that, for me - a thing to avoid, so much (mentally) making me NOT avoid it.

    I took issue on Discuss.write.as just now, b****ing at anyone/everyone about how I bulk deleted (actually, one at a time) HUNDREDS of photos from Snap.as - which I've used since the week it was introduced, and after 150+ photos of deleting, I refreshed the page which ahd frozen. All the "deleted" photos, right back where they had started! No deletion occurred.

• Politics and World Events

  • October 7th Memorial Lot

    For my part, I have been disturbed to hear even Christians that I know talking about how the war between Israel and Hamas needs to be "de-escalated", which in practical terms means simply that Israel needs to give up and let Hamas regroup, rearm, and refocus their assault.

• Science

  • High-Bush Cranberry Leaf (publ. 2024-07-13)

    The high-bush cranberry patch I discovered last year is still around this summer, though it is getting crowded out by other vegetation, and also the leaves look a bit wrinkled from the dry first-half of our summer. If I had the time and permission, it would be nice to cut back some of the thorn-bushes and other vegetation pushing up against this cranberry patch.

    It has been difficult to get out to the Tanana during the lunchbreaks. A week or two ago it was raining a lot, and then after that we had some problems at work which made it difficult to break away during the lunch break. But yesterday I devoted my lunch break to sketching a high-bush cranberry leaf. They look kind of like maple leaves, though not all of the leaves have three prongs like this

• Technology and Free Software

  • FOSS tools for Sipeed Tang Nano 1K

    After a false start, I got yosys, nextpnr and apycula working together beautifully. A simple blinky synthesizes and places/routes in around 2 seconds (on my 10+ year-old equipment).

    The toolchain installs very easily, just following the github instructions. Make sure to compile yosys with the GUI enabled -- it is disabled by default! I normally use a Makefile, but the GUI lets you load your design into an FPGA-editor-like environment, and zoom in on various components and wires, in case you want to manually place anything or just learn about the FPGA!

  • Scattered thoughts on permanent availability

    Very stressed out about how notifications seem to be able to reach me all 24 hours of the day

    [...]

    * You need to be online to, say, have a live voice call, but you could spin up a temporary online server then and kill the process after you're done, and just schedule the call instead of having the service be constantly available, which is incredibly resource intensive.

  • Stack overflow

    The only reason I've ever had a stack overflow is because I did something stupid, accidentally getting into endless recursion. Today I ran out of stack without any recursion at all.

    It seems that Python has a limit on the number of function calls rather than the size of the stack in bytes. In regular Python, it's large, usually 999. It seems (if I'm reading the internet correctly) that the limit is there to protect you from running out of stack space in the underlying C implementation. If you really need more stack, you can say so, at the risk of getting some horrible error from C instead of a polite error from Python.

  • Looks Like YouTube Won...

    A few days ago, I opened up my RSS feed reader and noticed that the YouTube videos in the YouTube RSS feeds I'm following wouldn't load in my video player. I used a combination of mpv and yt-dlp to load and play YouTube videos for a while now.

    The issue seems to be that YouTube has changed API things to make YouTube video downloaders stop working.