Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Humanity is done

    I strongly believe that humanity as we know it will be a thing of the past within my lifetime.

    In 2010 the average global temperature was 1.0°C above that from before the industrial revolution.

    In 2024 we've crossed 1.5°C. Yes, we have just passed the symbolic mark of the Paris Climate Convention. In just under fifteen years the global average has risen by 0.5°C.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: PHIMNOE Wordo: LOOKS

  • A MONTH OFF

    I was planning to take the last couple of months of the year off, or half-off, just not working on new products to sell. As usual it didn't quite work out because everything drags on too long, but I pretty much reached the point yesterday.

    But then it's not quite time off because it's really time for doing all the non-profitable jobs I've been optimistically listing for completion on weekends. I've got to attempt bodywork on my car (inc. learning MIG welding), solar power for my house, paint all the wood on the house where the old paint has flaked off, finish that backup gravity-fed water supply and satellite dish 4G antenna platform (the modem's signal has been dropping out from time to time since the 3G turn-off, though not too bad yet), and the eternal job of trying to make the rusty guttering on the house and shed work. Oh and fix the potholes in the (long) driveway _again_, fix the shed where my parts car lives, get rid of the bees that are spreading through the roof of my house again, and the ones in my parts car now. Fix the instrument panel in the ute again because my last effort failed - the intermittent short must be in the fuse box itself. etc. etc.

• Politics and World Events

  • Trump is God

    People voted Trump like they believe in god. Not a lot, they mostly don't think about it.

  • Diary of an Unemployed Citizen 004

    This morning, I was informed by the automated dispatch messaging bot that, due to my not accepting today's assignment within the sixty minute window (I was still sleeping), my dispatch offer had expired. I thought little of it. An unexpected day off meant working on some applications for decent jobs and even a hike with my mother. How so silly I can be.

    Not silly of me to be flexible regarding temp assignments as 'easy come, easy go'. Rather, silly to have assumed that such an automated system would be at all competent at its job. Sure enough, as the meet time came and passed, I received multiple phone calls asking me where I was.

    "Ah, well, I will be there in an hour's time, then"

    And my day's plans reverted. Such is a commonality of the modern temp job.

• Science

  • Stargazing 2024-11-29: Beehive Cluster (publ. 2024-11-29)

    After a long cloudy, warm spell, the temperature dropped down to around -27 deg F and the skies began to clear up. Last night (2024-11-28) the skies were very clear, but we were busy with Thanksgiving festivities, and I couldn't stay up any later after we got home.

    This morning, the skies were still mostly clear, except a few wispy Cirrus clouds. I was able to manage about 30 minutes of stargazing before needing to head off to work. Temps were still very cold but I put on my thermal insulated pants, a sweater, my winter boots, two coats, a scarf, a hat, and my electric heated gloves, and I was able to stay warm. Thankfully, my binoculars didn't frost over, which can happen due to my having to breath near them.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Yet More SIGINT Foo

    There are various misunderstandings of what happens when control+c is mashed in a unix terminal, this time when a shell runs a pipeline. The claim is that the SIGINT goes to the last process in a pipeline, and the other processes get a SIGPIPE.

  • Hooking Up an Old Serial Terminal to a NetBSD Machine over USB

    I recently purchased an old Wyse WY-55 dumb terminal on a whim, and I've been experimenting with different things I can do with it. I wanted to try hooking up the terminal to a NetBSD machine. I figured it would be pretty simple since NetBSD is among the most "Unix-y" of the modern Unix-likes, and it should still have good support for these types of serial terminals. As it turns out, the process *is* simple. The main complicating factor was that the computer I run NetBSD on does not have a serial port, so I had to use a USB serial adapter. Figuring out how to get NetBSD to communicate via the USB adapter wasn't very hard either, but I figured I would still document the process in case someone finds it interesting or useful.