Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • If you can't have any puddling without eating your meat, what happens if your pudding does, in fact, contain meat?

    If you can't have any puddling without eating your meat, what happens if your pudding does, in fact, contain meat? How Bunny and I came to be discussing pudding during lunch is lost to me, but we did. In particular, we were discussing what the British call “pudding,” which is entirely unlike what we Yanks call “pudding.” Over on the other side of the pond, the Brits have Yorkshire pudding, a baked bread product, blood pudding, which is in fact a sausage made of blood, and plum pudding which, of course, has no plums what-so-ever in it.

  • Still Learning Morse Code

    Those looking at my list of posts for the last year, might wonder if I am still involved in amateur radio. First of all, very recently I renewed my General Class (USA) license, KL1TL. Second, although I have had no involvement in club activities recently, I am still working steadily at learning morse code. I only can spare about 5 or 10 minutes a day for this, in a good week, so progress has been slow. But usually I get in about 20-30 minutes of practice per week.

  • Chris's "Damned-near Instant" Vegetable and Veggie Protein Soup

    One skill I've developed over the years is slacker food prep. Because who wants to spend a lot of time in the kitchen, am I right? Sometimes you can get something really filling and flavorful with minimal prep time and few ingredients. It's an added bonus when those ingredients are cheap.

    Recently, I discovered the life-changing magic of textured vegetable protein A.K.A. TVP. It's cheap, easy to store, and easy to prepare. So I had this thought the other night. Can I find some dried vegetables online and make a filling and delicious soup from them with TVP for protein? To answer that question, I went online and bought me a 2 pound (smidge under a kilogram) bag of dried vegetables. These were sold as "dehydrated vegetable flakes for making ramen or simple vegetable soup".The mix I bought contains the following: [...]

  • Charles Bukowski: “The Laughing Heart”

  • Mary Oliver: “The Summer Day”

  • Calibrating Power

    I like this. I would like to think that this is something I do, but always find difficult to describe in an eloquent, succinct way. It's a way of dealing with the world as it is. There's waaaay to much shit happening to worry about excessive puffery when there is no power behind it, when there's no danger involved. And given that billionaires in our society hold a great deal of power, it does mean that almost everything they say should be examined with a great deal of caution.

  • Clarification of puddings 🍮

    There'a a few things I may be able to clear up.

    The main meaning of pudding is a sweet course at the end of a meal. You could also call this dessert, but that's usually a restaurant menu term. My grandmother called it 'sweet' or 'afters'.

    The archetypal pudding course food is a steamed pudding. You won't see it eaten much, but it helps to understand why all the non-sweet puddings got their name. Steak and kidney pudding is a different thing to steak and kidney pie. The pudding case is stodgy and spongy, whereas the pie case is pastry.

  • Seeking warmth

    Cold weather came upon us quickly this year. I thought it was going to be hot forever, but we're already in the single digits. It's very cold in the mornings and after the sun goes down, and it goes down rather early too. It sits low in the sky these days, seemingly so far away.

    With the amount of sun we have each day though, there's no danger of seasonal affect, and during the day it's warm enough, so I'm enjoying the break. I think we had six months of warm weather this year, so it's nice to wear a coat and gloves again.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ADEINOZ Wordo: SUEDE

  • Subspace Rhapsody

    The first time through "Subspace Rhapsody" my reaction was: OK, that was fun. Better than "Immortimas" but not on the level of "Once More With Feeling" or even some of the Magicians musical episodes.

  • Week Notes 4

    Short update this week because of the Thanksgiving holiday.

    It’s been a great week filled with family time and awesome food. Sitting here and reflecting on it makes me realize how much I have to be grateful for.

    A couple weeks back, I figured out how to get my blog building with Hugo on my phone using Termux and I’m giving it a test run this week. If you’re reading this, everything worked! The process isn’t that different from how you’d build a Hugo blog normally, but I may still go over the details later.

• Technology and Free Software

  • BCHS: BSD, C, httpd, SQLite

    BCHS is a software stack for web development. It uses a BSD based OS (operating system) as the server's system, in my opinion the best suited OS for servers is OpenBSD because it is designed with code correctness and proactive security in mind, it has it's own software ecosystem made to work best together, software we will be using is httpd, LibreSSL and clang. httpd is OpenBSD's own http server, it is much more minimal than something like nginx or apache, it has everything we need and it's already there. C is the simplest programming language, it's basically just a portable assembly with a set of development tools and libraries. We won't be using SQLite as we're just making a simple static website.

  • Automated Certificate Management Environment Transport Layer Security Application‑Layer Protocol Negotiation Challenge Extension 🤓🤓🤓

    To add TLS encryption to your website, you have to generate a public and private key. The private key **must** be signed by a certificate signing authority to avoid MITM (Man-In-The-Middle) attacks by transferring trust from the server that says *bro, im totally w3.org, trust me* to the certificate signing authority, which actually tests (**challenges**) the server to prove that it owns w3.org.

  • QuickEdit

    Full-featured text editor for Android. Good in a pinch on my phone, better on my tablet with either the onscreen or a Bluetooth keyboard.

  • VMWare Fusion

    VMWare Fusion worked great on my Intel-based MacBook for work for years. I ran Windows and Linux virtual machines, sometimes several at a time. It more or less seamlessly integrated the Windows environment into macOS, and the Linux VMs I ran were stable. I wouldn't say I loved it, but it did the job. I'd give it 4 stars for that period of time.

  • AI and Plagiarism are Siblings

    Optimist or pessimist on AI? The optimist has a kind of childlike sense of wonder, excited about the future of technology and the expanding utility of AI. The pessimist has a kind of depressed perception of disgust at the awful things in store and the false promises of AI's future value.

    I'm depressed and frankly disgusted. When I see AI generate a fourteen-fingered man, it's like looking at a gnarly car accident. It's not at all like witnessing a young person improving their painting skill with a bright future ahead of them.

  • Programming

    • Perl 5 Is Pretty Awesome, Actually

      Perl 5 was the first programming language I really mastered. There are lots of things to love about it in 2024.

      Stability

      Perl 5 is stable. I have Perl code, some of which I wrote, that is nearly old enough to run for the US House of Representatives. Yet it still runs on a recent Perl 5, with few or no changes. I was writing Python professionally during the 2 to 3 transition, and I'm still butthurt about how terribly that transition went. And I suspect that lots of code running on Python 3 has subtle little bugs hiding and lying in wait for the unwary, especially bugs related to strings and the change to the division operator.

    • Advent of Code 2024, Day 4

      I lost time because of two blunders:

      * In part 1, I thought an “XMAS” can change direction along the way instead of only going straight.

      * In part 2, I thought any kind of crossing was allowed (including horizontal and vertical lines) instead of only two diagonals.

    • Advent of Code 2024, Day 11

      For part 1, I used brute force. My original solution used list slicing and concatenation instead of list insertions. I find insertions harder to read, but I found out that they are faster when I tried to apply the same code to part 2.

      For part 2, I knew I needed some kind of memoization. The Sierpisnki triangle, cellular automata, and bifurcating graphs came to mind. After I had the details right, I lost time because of a bug: instead of w, I had reused n as a variable name in my helper function. This messed up the recursion; it seemed as if my function flat out refused to be executed with (17, 25).

    • Advent of Code 2024, Day 10

      I lost time in part 1 because I had accidentally implemented part 2 already. So to solve part 2, I had to undo my fixes.