Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 25 November 2024 - Westworld

    The bling is strong with this one. This may be the blingiest airport I've transited through yet. It's not trying to wow us with indoor rain forests or grand displays of architectural excess; no waterfalls or butterfly gardens here, as far as I can tell. Instead, the place attempts to lull you into parting with your hard earned Qatari Real by seducing you with sheer unfettered opulence. This airport speaks not to the gaudy ostentatious wealth of a recent lottery winner or tech-startup millionaire. Instead, this place has the air of the understated, cultured and cultivated sensibilities of old money. And not some Middle Eastern gilded fru-fru interpreration of old money -- it pulls out all the semiotics that telegraph "old-school, died in the wool, *western* old money".

    It would not be an understatement to say that the YSL, Prada and Chanel outlets -- whilst beautifully appointed -- are the white trash of the luxury brands on offer here. Burbury definitely is, although that is a given. Every signifier brand of serious wealth is tastefully on offer in the halls and concourses of this gargantuan Mecca of cultural and financial exchange. The architecture here is grand and the interior beautifully appointed, but it is constrained, refined and sources its beauty from being perfectly executed and exactly fit for purpose.

  • Atomic Habits Final Thoughts

    Well I did it, I finished a book. I'm actually ecstatic. I have been wanting to get better at reading and ever since starting a book club which forced me to read this book, I have been reading more. My initial goal was 5 books this year, and with the completion of Atomic Habits, I am at 3. I am reading 2, soon to be 3, books at the same time and plan to be able to meet this goal by the end of the year! Honestly incredible because if you asked me 2 months ago if I would hit my goal I would've laughed in your face. But hear I am, and I attribute a majority of my success to this book club as well as the principles taught in Atomic Habits

  • 🔤SpellBinding: UGHINPC Wordo: ROUSE

  • A confusing day

    One day before I leave on my short road trip, meeting her for the second time.

    I am in high spirit, it's a good morning. I can almost see the sky. I make some tea and decide to take a microdose. I almost take 2 microdose but remember that the friend who gave me these told me they were quite strong.

    I start my day, I had a bit of work to do, and shortly I relized that the micro dose were a bit too strong. I did what I could on the computer, then turned on my phone.

  • black+white photography

    i've been interested in photography for as long as i can remember. i received my first non-disposable camera when i was 11 or 12 years old, as a birthday present from my parents. the model was a minolta stsi, one of minolta's entry level slr cameras at the time. i shot on film up until 2007, but began making the switch to digital in 2006, after purchasing my first non-potato digital camera, a fujifilm finepix s9000. i haven't really been publishing any photos since 2013 or 2014, apart from just sharing with friends, but i still remain very interested in the hobby to this day. over the course of my photography journey, from capturing moments on film and digital, whether it be color photographs or some form of monochrome, black+white stands out to me the most these days. not because it’s better or worse than something like a color photograph, i treat both mediums as equal tools in my arsenal. over the years, i’ve seen an increase of posts on forums, reddit, etc, that ask why people shoot in black+white. some of these posts even referring to people who just set their camera to spit out a sooc/stright-out-of-camera black+white jpeg, with no way to regain the original color if wanted in the future. this is why i currently find black+white so interesting.

  • NPR's "Books We Love"

    I just spend an enjoyable time reading through NPR's book recommendations. Lots of interesting things and quite a few American books that don't seem to have had a UK publication yet.

  • Not Pagan

    Even though the term could arguably apply to much of what I do, I intensely dislike the term "pagan" as a descriptor.

    As many already know, the term comes from Latin "paganus" meaning "villager", with the supposed notion of someone being from a rustic, rural area. Although it's usually thought of developing in a religious sense as "non-Christian" (or "non-Jewish") as referring to people out in the country not taking to the spread of Christianity (which was largely a city-based phenomenon before spreading out into rural areas), some scholars argue that it's more likely to derive from Roman military notions of those from the country being incompetent soldiers, thus jargon for a civilian or non-combatant. From this, especially given the heavy military imagery of the early Church (think of how many early Christian martyrs and saints were Roman soldiers!), non-combatants were those who didn't fight for Christ. Either way, there's this latent notion in the term "pagan" that they're uneducated, non-civilized, non-cultured, and non-urban; there's also a similar situation with the term "heathen" (questionably "of the heath"), with similar connotations. But so many "pagans" I know are quite educated, civilized, cultured, and especially urban.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Boosting the 8-bit skills with AVR microcontrollers

    Yep, I've got a new hobby that eventually can bring me one step closer to one of my dreams. It started when I remembered that I had an old clone Arduino Mega 2560 board from a RepRap-like 3D printer build kit that I never finished and never will. Such boards, as you might well know, are usually programmed via the C++-based Arduino IDE but I decided to go with pure C from the day one and use bare avr-gcc and avrdude directly. I also purchased a bunch of smaller clone Arduinos (all Nanos, either on ATmega168PA or on ATmega328PB), a bunch of programmers (more on that in a bit), and a bunch of wires, keypads, displays, resistors and breadboards, as well as downloaded a bunch of pinouts and datasheets. And the journey began.

  • Emacs Wiki and it's still China

    Remember how two months ago I started seeing sudden denial of service events on my tiny server. Load was creeping up to 20, 30, nearly 40. This server has two cores so the maximum should be 2. I started writing about it on 2024-09-18 Emacs Wiki and China. And I started blocking entire networks instead of just blocking individual IP numbers because I noticed that the global networks of hosting providers and the easy parallelization they offered meant that the same requests would come from many different IP numbers. By blocking the entire networks, I was blocking the IP number ranges of service providers that rented out their services to these maladapted programmers. If my goal is serving humans that browse the web, I don't feel bad about blocking network ranges that are used by machines.

  • a compact calendar - corrected

    You might want to re-download the LibreOffice file though, unfortunately December 2025 was starting on a Tuesday where in reality it'll start on a Monday. Thanks to the eagle-eyed person who pointed that out to me.

  • Programming

    • RAIN MIDI 3000

      A somewhat cleaned up version of the previous "Rain Music" script is now available as the Perl module Algorithm::Gutter, though some other script will still need to be written to make use of the convenience methods.