Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Vaccines, man

    I'm mostly feeling better from the vaccine-sick but my sleep schedule is all off again, which stinks because I felt like I had just gotten to have a consistent amount of sleep for the first time in years and now here I am waking up at 4am again. I know I can get back there but lord is it annoying.

    Anyway I'm writing this on the pocket reform again, and every day I'm making it more the everyday machine I want it to be. I just need to run some kind of tiny vm so I can test out my x86-64 programming for the systems programming class and I think I can do basically everything I need for all my teaching from this little thing. Oh, right, so y'know how you need to name every linux system well I'm calling this one pod042 because I can't help but go with the automata reference.

  • Personal time and projects

    Yesterday, despite having barely slept, ending up being a pretty fun day. Me and my partner Tor went to go write and read and at a park we hadn't been to before, one that had just recently re-opened, and it was really gorgeous: some actual wetland interleaved with raised paths and spaces with benches, playground equipment, and even (can you actually believe this is portland?) bathrooms!

    We took a picnic table in the shade surrounded by green. So surrounded by green a fawn ran out if it and to a foot away from the table and the fawn and I stared at each other equally surprised before it seemed to register to them that they'd made a wrong turn and scrambled off like the awkward baby they were.

  • Moody and I don't know why

    The academic year starts in 9 days and still feel so anxious and unprepared (even though I'm orders of magnitude more prepared than I was last year). I'm very, well, moody I guess? I know I'm often a grumpy seeming person so this isn't super out of character. Sometimes I get like this because I'm chewing on something, when I'm trying to think through difficult things. So that's probably part of the issue: I'm thinking through a lot of things at the start of the year and that means I'm grumpish.

    I've been dealing with the grumpiness by focusing on cleaning this rundown apartment, trying to make it as nice as I can. While I've been doing that I've been listening to an old podcast/audiodrama called Alice Isn't Dead, a limited run series written by the head writer of Welcome to Nightvale.

• Technology and Free Software

  • $17.29 - What's In a Name - ROOPHLOCH 2024

    I'm writing again outside today to participate yet again in ROOPHLOCH 2024. At the moment, I'm grilling some frozen chicken breasts outside because chicken is a tasty addition to my salads that I mentioned in my online post "Making More Salads". I'm down about 15lbs since I wrote that post and should be able to fit my measurements for the tux for the wedding next month.

  • introducing the MINIbase and no se vende mesh network

    I have this laptop setup to function as a tiny server. Running NixOS and I'm working on building a bootable image for this XU4 I bought years ago to serve as a piratebox. I'll be getting these two setup to work in concert so I can test out network configs! I don't have any spare routers, so I'm kinda stuck making my own shitty ones out of old SBCs and USB NICs that I have collected over the years.

  • Pocket Reform Experience

    So this post is a little different than normal because I wanted to do a little bit more of an actual review of my experience with the pocket reform.

    Now, I've got the original processor module (the NXP i.MX8M Plus) in it that came from crowd supply which you won't even be able to buy soon, so there are some Your Mileage *Will* (not may) Vary caveats up at the front.

    Okay so first off I want to say that I love this little machine. My experience hasn't been frictionless but it's been overall really nice.

    To start with, the keyboard is an absolute pleasure to type on and as someone who has been using 40% keyboards for years the layout took a *little* bit of getting used to for touch typing but not actually that much. The kailh chocolate red switches feel great, they're *very* light but now that I've gotten used to them I'm no longer hitting like three keys at once accidentally and I can just appreciate the gentle thock sound. The RGB leds on the keys are fun. I kinda wish they were individually changeable but that's made up for by how cute the trackball interface to changing the color is.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Thinking about getting back to Gemini

      Thinking about getting back to Gemini. I miss the creativity I usually found around people building cool things for their capsules.

    • Added support for CSV format to my paste server

      Recently I build a snippet-service, file-dropper and temporarily bookmarks server [1]. This service is aimed at TUI web browsers like Lynx, Links, and eww.

  • Programming

    • Weird weird day

      Anyway, I've started a little project in common lisp inspired by some assignments that I want to give students where I'm kinda writing an interactive fiction engine. At least that's the goal. For the start I'm just implementing some small stories in common lisp and abstracting out parts as I'm going rather than trying to start with top down design.

    • for while

      What's the difference here? The 'for' loop tries to read the entire contents of the input into an array, and then loops that array, while the 'while' loop only deals with a single line at a time. Therefore if you only ever deal with a single line at a time, the 'while' form should be preferred to avoid catastrophic memory growth, or at best the process using more memory than it should. These days some systems have massive amounts of memory, so such a concern may seem minor or irrelevant—"why not just slurp the whole file into memory??"—which may be fine if you're in a hurry, and the files are generally small, but not if you want to be efficient with memory, or the files start getting too big, especially if the code needs to be run on a microvirt and not some horking huge system that a developer might typically use.