Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: CELYTXN Wordo: ROBES

  • When it rains, it pours!

    Ever get that feeling that the universe has singled you out, specifically, to be the unluckiest person on the planet? Because that's where I'm at right now!

    [...]

    After making that post, several people reached out to me via email wishing me well and even telling me their own stories of their health dilemmas. I honestly cannot thank you all enough for doing so! It was really nice to wake up to some pleasant messages on my Sunday morning, if a little surprising that some people out there actually take time out of their day to read what I type here! That's both humbling and a little scary. But thank you all very much! You're all awesome.

  • You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger.

    You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger. - Buddha

  • Long Hair and Spirituality

    It will never not make me smile whenever I see That Kind of New Age Woo Guy go on about how long hair is somehow inherently spiritually powerful and that cutting one's hair short (or just shaving it off) is somehow debilitating or emasculating(???)—right up until the moment I remind them that Buddhist monks exist, or that ancient Egyptian priests in the Greco-Roman period (famed for all their magics and god-summonings) shaved their heads and bodies assiduously, or that spiritual practitioners who just go bald are a thing the whole world over. The amount of stuttering they usually produce makes me feel they've run out of some sort of engine fluid.

• Politics and World Events

  "Greater Change is a charity that is kind of bringing the microlending model to bear on homelessness in the UK. It identifies financial precariousness and resilience as the issue it wants to focus on (while acknowledging the need for changes in housing availability and other issues that feed into the wider problem)." gemini://rrees.smol.pub/greater-change

  • Greater Change

    Greater Change is a charity that is kind of bringing the microlending model to bear on homelessness in the UK. It identifies financial precariousness and resilience as the issue it wants to focus on (while acknowledging the need for changes in housing availability and other issues that feed into the wider problem).

• Technology and Free Software

  • /tec/ minibase datacore

    there have been some proposals to directly link derivations to torrent infohashes. without the mutable DHT BEPs this is difficult and not so interoperable, but probably still a good idea for a different purpose. before we consider that mystery, we can still make use of another application of bit torrent that still delivers a lot of value. namely, p2p distribution of `/nix/store` snapshots. we call one of these snapshots a "datacore".

  • Looks like I've found the most optimal MCU board so far

    As my journey into the world of MCUs began, I knew for sure that it wouldn't stop on AVRs. In particular, if you remember my previous post, I mentioned some other chips at the end of it, namely ESP8266 and RP2040. Well, since then, I've had a chance to obtain some boards based on both of those (all clones, of course): ESP-01 (01S), WeMos D1 Mini and RP2040-Zero. I've yet to get much more familiar with the latter (I already like how easy it is to flash and how small it is in size for what it can do) but I can already say which one of these three became my absolute favorite, especially considering its price comparable to clone Arduino Nanos. Yes, I'm talking about the D1 Mini.

  • Technology and Nature

    This semester I taught Religion, Technology, and Magic at Rice – a course that explores how these connected and contested categories have been interplaying historically. A recurring theme of this course was the double position of technology as, at the same time, a reflection of our worldviews and the inspiration for the ways in which people perceive reality. Technologies mimic nature. However, what engineers try to reproduce is never nature itself but rather a specific understanding of nature at a given moment of time within given cultural constraints. At times, new technologies can cross this constraints inspiring a worldview shift.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • A Millennial Bides Farewell to their Old Internet

      Over on Business Insider (not a place I ordinarily frequent), there's a thoughtful and heartfelt article by Aimee Pearcey about the death of the child-centric platforms she grew up on. Writing, "Nowadays, at 28, I stick to just a few, far less joyful websites," Pearcey details the colourful and faintly anarchic places she grew up in: Club Penguin, NeoPets, and other sites of the early 2000s designed with kids in mind.

    • Unique Local Unicast Addresses

      Exciting stuff. These are presumably globally unique IPv6 addresses intended for local communications, and are not expected to be routable globally. The presumably part is because someone could end up using the same 40-bit global ID (and 16-bit subnet ID) as you did, and then your companies merge, and then you have a problem. This is more likely if you have companies to merge, and if the ID are chosen …poorly, such as 0, 42, 640, 0xDEADBEEF, and similar that have good cultural but bad random properties.

      RFC 4193 contains the details, but tooling here may help as IPv6 addresses are tricky and easy for humans (and code running on computers) to screw up. For example, someone had recently been given the equivalent of fde3:de56:900e::8c97::1 as the gateway address, and thus was asking others for networking help.

    • Cool firefox extension I found

      I have actually started reading homestuck 2 after years of ignoring it, and it's not that bad. But at page 666 flash^W javascript minigame wouldn't load because big archive with all the resources took too lond and connection would break.