Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Re: Doing the Hard Part

    Funnily enough, it seems like I'm going in exactly the opposite direction as hush. I'm starting my final year of a bachelor's in software engineering, and I'm looking to do a master's in geodesy and geomatics engineering next. I'm talking with some profs at my university about possible research areas I might work on, and I'm probably going to end up working on radio astronomy. I'm also interested in working with a group in the physics department that's doing ionosphere research, so I may end up talking with them soon too.

    I've enjoyed software engineering: a lot of my classes were interesting, I did some internships that worked out pretty well, and I have a personal interest in technology. I guess I'm just hungry for something new. I was more a math guy than a CS guy back in highschool, and even now it's always been the more math-y parts of computer science that I've liked best, so I like the idea of going into a field where I'll have more opportunities to apply that.

  • beingness

    my long lived quest to stop "shoulding" myself and unpack capitalist messaging about productivity and personal worth and contribution is yielding interesting spiritual fruits. i feel like i'm much closer to really living/grasping what all the texts i've been reading for the last 20 years or so were saying. i'm much more comfortable just being. only doing what is necessary, what arises - without getting caught up in any stories about it, the world, myself. and then vibing. so much peace and easy happiness. it really is just... uncovering what's always been there, what always is there. under the mental garbage we get loaded with.

  • What does abolishing leasehold really mean?

    link to living document version, already more up to date than this gemlog post

    This year the British parliament enacted a ban on (some) leasehold homes, though the law is not yet in force. There is a massive fog of political messaging, wishful thinking and outright nonsense obscuring the abolition of leasehold. Despite the huge aggravation and agitation, there doesn't seem to be a written-up, widely-known plan for abolishing leasehold, and few people ask why not.

    Sometimes the implementation of the Law Commission's 2020 proposals, or Labour's 2024 election manifesto are taken as being synonymous with abolishing leasehold. They are nothing of the sort.

    Moreover it's not clear what abolishing leasehold even means, how it might be accomplished, or how feasible it is. The rest of this article is an attempt to clarify that.

  • From patterns to details

    In the dawn of a new world, one which faces not only a imminent overturn on the patterns of macroeconomics and geopolitics, but which comes with a decline in industrial production and energy availability, the so-called 'energetic descent' and 'deindustrialization', which many people still, much to my dismay, insist on denying, it is important to educate oneself in order to be prepared to face the world that is coming, for us and the future generations.

  • The start of a new university year

    There's something heartwarming about seeing students moving into halls and wandering around their new campuses in guided tours. Welcome banners are out and a new academic year is starting.

  • A Blog: A Pendulum

    So today I'm going to talk about a link I followed from Jedda's blog[1] to a post by one Scopique[2], which if I recall correctly is just one of those blog posts that I saw a long while ago and never got around to responding to. In it, he talks about pondering a custom blog software, after having grown bored with Wordpress.

    Aptly, he describes the desire to do this as a pendulum. My pendulum is at the other end right now. I have built my website all myself. I don't regret it. I have learned a lot doing it. It was also satisfying to build it all from scratch[3].

  • I Meant to, I Swear

    I have started to feel a certain—guilt isn't the right word, but something along those lines with how I have been writing here. Missing out isn't what it is either, but there's shades of it. I don't feel really bad, it's more like being back in school, you've just gotten home from class, and you're watching an episode of Stargate to unwind a little, but at the back of your mind you know that you have homework to do. Some project to work on. It can mostly be ignored, but it still spoils what you wish was rest a little.

    The way I see it, part of the fun of having my own little site here is being an active participant in the internet, in a way that's separate from posting on social media. In particular sharing links to things that I have read or seen gives a distinct feeling of adding to, of being a part of the Network.

  • Bored and Alone

    I find comfort

    in the cold glow

    of the screen.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Environment Variables and Eshell Part 2

    Didn't mean to make this a two part post, but I ran out of lunch-break time yesterday.

    Anyways, I see that the emacs-guix interface has a "shell" menu, which presumably mirrors "guix shell" functionality in some way, but it is broken at present. I have submitted a bug report. It also has a "set Emacs environment" command, but it does not seem to be quite what I am looking for. You pass it the path to a profile, and it supposedly makes the emacs environment match that profile. So, conceivably I could build the profile with guix shell, and then pass the $GUIX_ENVIRONMENT to the "set Emacs environment" command.

    Presumably I could also use the emacs-guix REPL to get a list of environment variables and then set those in Eshell, but I would need to do a lot more research to get there, for the correct syntax and such.