Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Week Notes 2

    I’ve been making my way through Caliban’s War, the second book in The Expanse. It’s still early on, but I’m really liking it! The scope feels bigger than the first book which is only fitting.

  • Experimenting with commonplace books

    I have started with the platonic dialogue of Euthypro's, downloaded from the Project Gutemberg, which deals on piety and justice. A dear subject to a Socrates that is going to be tried for impiety.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: YHINOPD Wordo: BLIMP

  • A Song

    golden strings on glimmering frame each line a shining column light as air, yet bright and fair depths that none can fathom

    bright star, bright star you burn the eye and every color of the bow is captured in your flaming glow

    he plucked the chord the notes were heard strong and crisp across the sky the heavens felt the chord he dealt the shock sent them to shimmering

  • Thunder Dreams

    I'm trying to convey an image of wonder-full fantasy, stories, grander-than-life or small an intimate, but rich in adventure, soul and wisdom. Would I be able to do just that? Surely not, but that's not stopping me from trying.

  • week 46 - trapped

    y'all, i've been feeling like i'm trapped in a small box, rattling inside it if it were possible to rattle in such a confined space. things are so rigid and stifling. i'm attempting to break out in various ways - being more expressive in my journal, drawing more, breaking the norm of what-i've-previously-set-up, messing with the text-box etc. changed the inks in my pens. as always, moved some tarot decks in and out of storage (and put out another batch into the to-go box). the upcoming week i'll drop my longstanding tracker box. it's very general - did i do something physical today, something for my mind, something social etc. can i check off some responsibilities and some hobby engagement? but even this staying-on-top-of the most basic stuff feels like a trap. doesn't help that i have a difficult start of the week tomorrow. three days of various medical stuff, near and far.

  • Sunday

    I've a new theory that hyperbole reflects dissatisfaction with one's life.

  • Spiritual Work Is Still Work

    If you're a spiritual worker, then I claim that you really should be charging for your work—at least most of the time, whenever possible and reasonable to do so, and also while taking charity/favors/exchanges/etc. into consideration. Likewise, if you're hiring a spiritual worker, you should expect to pay them, or at least give them something in exchange even if they do the work gratis.

    Consider: we pay doctors, lawyers, plumbers, electricians, programmers, writers, and artists; we should pay spiritual workers, too. Just as with any expert, what we're paying for isn't just to do something or other for us; we're paying for their expertise and training, the money they've put into books, classes, conferences, technologies, study, and so on. Then there's also the material aspect of it: supplies that get procured and used up in such work like herbs, incenses, oils, crystals, cloth, beads, animal parts, and more; the tools that they had to craft or find or buy that are used in the process; and the space in which they do the work. On top of that, there's also the time that we're taking they could be spending doing literally anything else, and also on top of the energy they spend, both physical and spiritual; they need sleep, food, clothes, and a roof over their heads, too, along with their own cleansings and work that they themselves need to hire others for (spiritual and otherwise). None of these things come about through well-wishing alone, and the fact of the matter is that this world runs on money and exchange. Work is work, regardless of the context, and work deserves recognition, and that recognition comes about with fair recompense.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Nachtigall: motivation and technical specification

    I tried a while ago to create a little program to detect both pitch and rhythm in sound then convert it to a specific notation. My use case is music trackers, such as lsdj or, more recently, the dirtywave m8. Too often, I can come up with a rhythm pattern that I can write on paper but not encode directly in the machine or a melody I can sing and record but that is slow to transcribe.

    My goal is to start the program, press record, wait a bit, get the notation I need for the tracker and move on with the song creation. While pitch detection has become easy thanks to libraries such as librosa and audioFlux, I struggled with some glitches as well as the rhythm detection. Leading me to shelf the little project.

    Well, I've been involving myself more with trackers and having that tool would make me much faster and happier at using them. So let's strip it down to make it less complicated, then build something functional.

  • Nachtigall: implementation plan

    We need to perform pitch detection. Like my quick research yielded in the past, a good way to do that is using the pYin pitch estimator. Fortunately for us, there are publicly available implementation of it. For instance librosa, a "python package for music and audio analysis", linked below, has a version of it. I also considered audioFlux, a "deep learning tool library for audio and music analysis", which has a nice pYin-based pitch detection example as well. But long story short, audioFlux's codebase has about 5 contributors while librosa's has about 100 and more recent signs of life. That deals with the muscle of the whole project.

  • Everything is slow and I don't know why

    When I try to log into the server using SSH it takes a long time. Why is that? `iotop` doesn't show anything suspicious. And yet, since Saturday 18:00, `munin` shows that something is up.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Explore the smol web with Marginalia

      When visiting the World Wide Web, we prefer the human made personal web sites, aka the smol web. These web sites were already hard to find, but since the dominant search engines have dropped them from their indexes and mainly focus on commercial shit, they have become even harder to discover.

      Marginalia is a search engine with a focus on the smol web. According to its Git hub page [2], the overarching goal is to elevate the more human, non-commercial sides of the Internet.

      Marginalia is a one person project, which makes it even more awesome.

    • The Exodus at Twitter and the Influx at Bluesky

      It has been quite a couple of weeks over at Twitter. Elon Musk, the site's owner, is basking in the victory of Donald Trump, whom he significantly bankrolled. He continues to promote white nationalist memes and tweets, right-wing agitators, the sort of content that would generally get him slapped with the f-label (pick one) if the legacy media had any guts (and as the last US election cycle has shown, they definitely don't).