Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • my first novel

    The shadow lights up my face and stirs in me a giddy happiness. I can't stop myself from hiding the faint trace of a smile ever since she appeared, breaking through the cold, damp morning of this tender winter, when the earth is still drinking its first drops of rain. There are rays of light piercing the mist like needles through cotton, striking the translucent glass of the window in my studio, where, at this hour, I try to begin my first novel.

  • Halloween Is Over, Time to Prep Winter Wear

    Hopefully folks got some good candy, saw some good decorations and costumes! I saw a group of adults dressed up as the Minions yelling "BANANA" over and over again, but on the bright side, I got a box of 48 full sized Snickers bars! I also got to hear "The Monster Mash" about a half dozen times, so things were good. The ladybugs have been pretty bad these last few weeks though, including today... Already had to rescue about 10 of them from my office today.

    I was really hoping my next post would be written at a computer I don't own, like a public library computer, but I don't have that system in place yet, heavily based on the system I mentioned in my journal post "Finally Found My Human Calculatable Hash Function". That system is nearly done though, so hopefully my next post can be done via that system.

  • Infinite Time in Heaven and Infinite Souls in Hell?

    Suppose that God could create a universe at time t=0 containing a countably infinite number of sentient beings (hereinafter "persons" or "people"). He sets up a one-to-one correspondence between the people and the positive integers: every person gets a unique integer, and all the positive integers are used.

    At t=0, everyone is suffering the torments of Hell, and believes that they will continue for all eternity. Everyone would choose nonexistence over their current state, if that were an option. At t=1sec, person #1 is released from Hell and taken to Heaven, where they will enjoy eternal happiness; none of the other occupants of Hell knows that this has happened and that their suffering might end. At t=2, person #2 is translated to eternal bliss; and so forth.

  • Monday-2

    Kind of a slow day on the home front, but that'll be changing mid-afternoon, as three vocalists will be arriving to rehearse for a performance tomorrow night.

    My wife and I have agreed that our process enabling others to perform with us is causing us too much heartache and misery, so we think we've come up with improved parameters and/or expectations of others, because we honestly don't need others to put on a great show.

  • BEASTARS is GOOD

    First of all, everything hits harder when you are sleep-deprived. Lucky for me I didn't sleep at all last night. So today at 6am I started watching BEASTARS. I found out about it through the title song for season two because it is a song on osu! So far I love the show, but when I watched it I got really immersed. It made me feel the atmosphere of the show.

• Science

  • Wilting flowers and resource management

    Some interesting research shows that (1) plants reuse resources from wilting flowers, and (2) the resources are stored away with a view toward a long-term resource strategy.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Intention and Implementation

    One of the most fun parts of a project, for me at least, is in the inception and planning phase. Sure, it has its own share of headaches, especially when other people are involved (as I well know as a software engineer), but it's one of the most fun parts of a project. There's this joyful optimism and hope that pervades that kind of work, where you get to plan out all the amazing things you want to do, figure out how it could be done (at least at a high level), map out where you want to go, and the like. There's this sort of sky's-the-limit feeling that gets you super motivated and energized about it.

  • Playdate: The Keyper

    Today, I bought The Keyper on Playdate. I also completed it today.

    Normally, people would think that is terrible. However, with the Playdate, it works well. The Keyper tells the tale of a nephew who's uncle has died/disappeared and is offered the job of being caretaker for a large building. You start and discover all of the keys are missing! Oh no!

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Self-hosted web browser bookmarks syncing

      This blog post is about Floccus, a self-hosting web browser bookmarks and tabs syncing software.

      What is cool with Floccus is that it works on major web browsers (Chromium, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi and Microsoft Edge), allowing sharing bookmarks/tabs without depending on the web browser integrated feature, but it also supports multiple backends and also allow the sync file to be encrypted.