Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ADEHINW Wordo: SEVEN

  • Burnout

    I've been meaning to make an entry for quite a while now, but for one reason or another I never get around to completing one. I surf the gopherscape every night before bed, and it's good to read people's entries.

    This has been an unpleasant summer so far: hot and humid and sticky, from sun up to sun down, everyday. It saps all my energy and it puts me in a bad mood. I am already looking forward to autumn and cooler weather, however that probably won't be until November, judging by last year.

    Recently I was watching a television program where a camera crew rode on a domestic ferry and interviewed people here and there. At one point they came upon an older woman in a cabin at the front of the ship. The woman was quietly reading by herself and she said she had been a nurse, had raised her children and had been busy all her life. Now she is retired and all she wants is time. Time to herself to do what she wants. This struck a particular chord with me, because I feel the same way.

    Earlier this year I said if I could retire tomorrow I would. That is because I am burned out from work. The corporate landscape has changed a lot since I was young, and I don't think I'm fit for it anymore. Let the younger generations take over so I can retire.

    Outside of work, I avoid the news except for things domestic. I'm tired of war, and deceit and gaslighting. At times it seems like the whole world has gone mad. Everything seems to be going so fast, and in a direction I personally am not comfortable with.

• Politics and World Events

  • Five good things, July 29

    1. Thankful for God's protection when the kids and I were in a car accident on Wednesday. Someone (absentmindedly, it appears) turned in front of me as I was going through a green light and I couldn't avoid hitting them.

    I prayed for protection before we left home that day, which I always do. Mainly because I've made enough absentminded (or just plain foolish -- gulp) mistakes myself while driving that I know it can be dangerous out there and the danger could come from either me or others.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Plan 9 is my cove

    Plan 9 is such a beautifully weird mixture of ideas... God I love it so much.

  • Fight On! Magazine ​#15

    And it includes the Caverns of Slime! So now there's a way to get them in print and PDF, together with a lot of other good stuff.

  • A 6502 on a $20 Tang Nano 9K

    Ah, after some fiddling, got a minimal 6502 system flashing an LED. Running at stock 27MHz, with 2K RAM and 2K ROM.

  • Monday, Monday

    The bigger challenges of moving off of the $$$$$ Mainframe onto the $ of Linux (code for Unix, BSD, etc.) always pop up when someone takes your claims seriously. Today it was converting 2m lines of IBM Mainframe Assembler code!

  • From the White House to Caesar's Palace: Trump at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference

    My first reaction to the news that Trump was heading to Nashville to headline Bitcoin 2024: I joked that he's scraping the bottom of the barrel for support. The truth is, it's surprising that he ever positioned himself as anti-cryptocurrency since, in a sort of takes-one-to-know-one moment, he clearly understood its utility, calling it "a scam" in 2021.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • building HTML from source

      I don't remember when I did it, but I downloaded the "source" for the jargon file, and was wanting to make it so it could build again. I remember trying to get it to build a long time ago and it would fail to build for various dumb reasons. ESR's tarball is missing a handful of scripts that the build scripts use, and there are some typos or broken xml in a few of the files. I fixed them as well as I could and commit'd all the changes I was making into a git repo, so if someone wants to pick up the jargon file using ESR's build system, they wouldn't have to redo this work. I also found that there were a few sections in the tarball that aren't included in the live version on ESR's website.

    • Greetings from Lynx

      I am back home from my holiday trip: I am sad the holiday is over, but also happy to be home.

      It is really warm here and I am finding it a bit hard to function. The house is fine (I have aircon), but I pretty much only want to go out in the early morning.

  • Programming

    • Chapter Ten: Embedding Janet

      Okay. In the last chapter we learned how to call C code from Janet. In this chapter, we’re going to learn how to call Janet code from C.

      Specifically, we’re going to learn how to embed the Janet interpreter inside a larger app — it doesn’t *have* to be written in C, as long as it has a C FFI. But we’ll stick with C as our lingua franca.

      Oh wait! I forgot that JavaScript was supposed to be our lingua franca. Oh no. Oh no. We just spent a whole chapter writing C code together and you didn’t say anything to me? Did you forget about the `(say)` function?

    • Back to the Rust programming language, again

      So, This is an another post about my struggle to push my little personal programming project forward. I’m currently trying to make a point & click game with 3D graphics. I started this project a long, long time ago mainly because I wanted to learn how a computer does images from 3D models and found this topic insanely interesting.

    • Chapter Eleven: Testing and Debugging

      I know that you’ve been looking forward to this chapter the whole book.

      Sure, compile-time metaprogramming or whatever is fine, but when do we get to talk about *automated test suites*? You haven’t even *thought* about skipping this one.

      I hope we can forego the spiel about the importance of testing — we’re both adults here, and I’m going to assume that if you’ve ever worked on a codebase in a dynamically typed language for longer than six weeks, you understand the value of a comprehensive automated test suite and an ergonomic testing framework.