Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Second Rate

    I suppose this is my inferiority complex talking, but I am so tired of being second rate all the damn time. I just want to be first rate for once in my damn life. Please, can't I just be first-rate? I'm working so damn hard to become first-rate at something, but everyone keeps sidestepping me in favour of someone else.

    Why do I keep facing this issue? Is it so much for me to ask for someone to actually pick me first rather than second? I suppose it's unreasonable for me to want this, but everything that I strive in, I'm always beaten by someone else. I suppose there is a reason for everything, and perhaps it's that I'm not working enough.

  • Sunrise Photos: Fairbanks, AK, USA

    The sunrise time has just moved far enough forward that it is convenient for me to go sunrise hunting before work. We had light clouds yesterday morning (2024-08-06) which made for many good photos. This morning was heavy clouds with some rain, but the clouds were high enough in the sky, and the rain patchy enough, that I was still able to get some good photos.

  • free as a bird

    Is it strange to request retraining for something at work that I think I can improve on? I've been getting great reviews on almost everything else, but there's a particular aspect that requires constant reviewing of written work and I don't think I'm doing it right. So I requested some retraining and it seemed to throw my manager off. I would have thought they would be fine with it, considering people don't take work seriously here. Maybe it's the old school social anxiety working up on me again.

    Anyway! Maintaining the garden has been taking over what little time I do have for myself. It's doing fine! Some of the laurel trees are even sprouting new buds! My main worry, though, is one particular plant next to the metal shed we have in the yard. I originally thought it was far enough that it could grow as the others have, but it looks like the heat coming off the shed might be taking it's toll on the poor thing. It's still big, but not sprouting any buds. I'll be relocating it soon, but the problem is where. There's no more space in the yard beside where it had originally been.

  • the weather is here, wish not

    Doing laundry. Empty mailboxes, wash going, a fan letting in cool forest air (this area is surrounded by protected forest), these are the things on my mind right now.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Sacha Chua's newsletter as temporal anchor

    Today, I read Sacha Chua latest version of the wonderful Emacs weekly news [1].

    Every new edition serves as a wake-up call, heralding the passage of another week.

  • Ancient audio formats

    When microcomputers in the 1980s got enough computing power and could start making sounds beyond beep-blop-beep and variously modulated sawtooth signals, several formats for storing sampled audio bitstreams emerged. Some time ago, I came across a few of them, and this text is kind of a summary of what I learned. Maybe someone else will also find it useful.

  • Comparisons on intel CPUs

    On the 80486 and earlier CPUs, these optmisations were significant, because the profile of all instructions changed. On todays CPUs, cache hits, speculative execution and branch prediction to fill the pipeline are more important. Danluu wrote a brief history of branch prediction on his website, I converted the page to gemtext: [...]

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Rob's (Mostly) Comprehensive NNCP Guide

      NNCP, or Node-to-Node Copy, is a suite of store-and-forward programs for Unix-based systems, created in 2017 by Russian developer Sergey Matveev. I first learned about NNCP from an excellent post by John Goerzen^, and I first gave it a try in early 2023. I now use it regularly to move files and execute tasks among my devices.

      There are already a few guides for NNCP on Gemini, but NNCP can be a very confusing application to set up and configure correctly. In-depth documentation seems to be lacking, both on Gemini and on the Web: some helpful tips are buried in the nncp-devel mailing list and are not present in any guide I've seen. I want to address some of those shortcomings here.