Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The Raiders Poet hat

    When I was young I very much wanted this hat. It looks beautiful in real life as well. I'm not sure I could carry it off but I think I still probably very much want it.

  • Buddhism, the Second Precept and Piracy

    Recently I've started researching Buddhism with the intention of following the teachings of the Buddha myself. However, doing so has presented something of a learning curve. One source of this learning curve is that these teachings do not necessarily always reflect the modern world. One area where this is apparent is the second precept: "Abstain from taking what is not freely given."

    At a first glance this precept may seem as simple as an instruction not to steal. In other words, do not deprive somebody of material goods. But I think that this precept is probably deeper than that. For example, using coercion or other underhanded means to obtain something would probably be covered by this precept even if it is not strictly stealing.

  • Becoming more selfish

    I'm a very selfless person. No. I don't mean that as a good thing.

    I am a person who has been, intentionally and unintentionally, hollowed out by a lot of other people over the course of my life

    At this point I frequently feel like I only have volition if I'm alone where no one else's will can push on my mind

• Science

  • News and Links (publ. 2024-08-16)

    This new study indicates that "galaxies found in denser regions of the universe are as much as 25% larger than isolated galaxies", but these results cannot be explained "current theories of galaxy formation and evolution". Now, the results are the output of complicated statisical analysis as well as a machine-learning algorithm, which estimates the size of galaxies, and I'm guessing that is based on a lot of assumptions. In any case, this is another demonstration that secular astronomers and cosmologists are still struggling to figure out the most basic tenents of their supposedly scientific model, such as how galaxies form and evolve.

• Technology and Free Software

  • netbsd

    fellow SDFer, nm03, asks a question on his phlog[1] about the speed of pkgin upgrade being really slow.

    By an incredible coincidence, I actually installed netbsd 10.0 on one of my HP laptops just last Saturday. I figured I would talk about my impressions of installing netbsd.

    but first, I don't really have a good answer for nm03. My observation is that updating netbsd with pkgin is definitely slower on my laptop than the Fedora operating system it replaced. I definitely noticed that download speeds were rather slow for me in North America averaging around 600-700KB/s. Downloading updates from Fedora is at least twice as fast. However, I don't ever think it reached to the level of taking an entire day. But then again, the netbsd "full" install from the CD ISO is incredibly sparse and I'm not sure I even had 700 packages to download.

  • Cars

    Phew, 5th gen 4runner owners really don't know how good they have it.

    We already knew that the 6th gen 4runner would lose the storied 1GR V6 engine but it's becoming clear that Toyota has really cheaped out for the North American market.

    Recently, it has come to light with the release of the 4th generation Tacoma truck, that Toyota didn't actually install frame mounted bumper stops and instead relied on shock-mounted bumper stops.

    For those that aren't into off-roading. Frame mounted bumper stops are used to prevent excessive travel of the front control arm over serious and harsh elevation changes. They do this by having a piece of rubber physically block the up and down movement of the lower control arm as it goes over harsh terrain...which prevents the shocks and the springs from fully compressing to their limit.

  • Lieu for niche search

    “Let me google it for you” was a bad reply back in the days; these days telling somebody “to google something” is insulting because we all know how aggravating it is to spend time and energy against privacy invasions and sifting through the AI slop and the grifters. Life is short and there’s no time for this.

  • JSON feed for indexing

    A while ago I wondered about self-published indexes. We have software to generate feeds. Why not software to generate indexes? Back then I proposed a JSON format. Today I finally took a look at JSON Feed. I think it has everything we need.

  • Offline BBSing

    Meet Felicity. Felicity is, first and foremost and like many who live predominantly off-grid, a gardener. She spends her time taking care of her plants and tending the soil around the self-built shed in the middle of the bush she calls home.

    Felicity is also captivated by "the relentless fascination of the computer." [1] She has a small low-power machine that every so often she uses to tinker with the code for the microcontrollers governing her solar array and battery bank and monitoring the various aspects of her garden. She also just likes to engage in fun programming experiments, an activity she finds relaxing in the same way that others find knitting.