Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ALYNRSM Wordo: RIFLE

  • Valais

    The entire valley goes from east to west. There are mountains to the north, east and south. So in three out of four cardinal directions, the clouds already rained over some mountains. This region has the most sunny days in all of Switzerland.

    The Valais has two parts: the upper part is German speaking, the lower part is French speaking. The German speaking part used to lord it over the French speaking part. The region joined Switzerland in 1815.

    When I came here, I was about two weeks old. I don’t remember much. We left the Valais when I was at the age of learning to ride a bicycle. When is that? Maybe four years old? Not kindergarten age, in any case.

• Politics and World Events

  • Regulate

    To fix climate change, we need regulation change first and foremost. The richest, and the corporations, are doing more harm than random normal people are doing.

    Me making changes in my own life (on the “consumer level”) does have a couple of advantages:

    1. It helps a little bit 2. It cushions the blow in my own life, like if suddenly meat is rationed I’ll be okay because I already switched to plants in the 90s 3. It’s paving the way for more people to change, or for the changes to become regulation. Without drops there’s no ocean.

  • Is Buddhism in the West undergoing a transformation similar to that of early Christianity?

    Throughout history, spiritual traditions have been deeply influenced by the cultures they encounter. Christianity, for example, underwent a significant transformation as it engaged with Greco-Roman culture. This interaction shaped its theology, practices and worldview, leading to what some have called a 'Hellenisation' of early biblical Christianity.

    Today, a similar transformation seems to be taking place in Buddhism as it takes root in the West. Let's explore how the encounter between Buddhism and Western culture mirrors the historical development of Christianity, and what this means for the future of both spirituality and society.

  • Even if you personally don’t live all that much longer, your successor may very well live long enough to become the villain

    I went digging for a quote I remember hearing about Bill Gates way back when, and I found it.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Devices

    Aggregated list of smart devices and operating systems that can be installed on them.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Some End Of the Week Notes

      There was a time when KEXP's YouTube channel was my main source for finding new music. It's weird how live performances arranged by a radio station has a higher hitrate of becoming my favourite music than Spotify has. I would think that Spotify knows my taste in music better, but it's not very good at recommending me new artists.

    • Dev Log 4 - Implementing Graphics

      This post will have some animated GIF files, which the Lagrange gemini client seems to have some issues displaying, at least for me. My apologies for that.

      I wanted to write this a few days ago, but I decided instead to reimplement some of the code I was writing to make it more efficient, cleaner, and a LOT easier to maintain.

      An important part of Game Boy games is displaying graphics on its "Dot Matrix Display" (When you see "DMG" in relation to the Game Boy, that's what it means). Its video specs are very modest, with only 2 bits of color (4 shades of gray... well, crappy shades of green (I stole that joke from "The Ultimate Game Boy Talk", linked below, but it's quite true)) and a resolution of 160 pixels wide by 144 pixels high.

  • Programming

    • -My one liners

      Turning on only 'use feature "say"' requires a bit more work; one method is to put a "y.pm" file somewhere in the Perl library search path and therein, among other things, shove "say" into main, along with any other imports you want, and the other code you want.

    • “I told you three times not to use K&R style braces! Get with the program, Copilot!”

      If you count the BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) that came with every 80s home computer an “IDE (Integrated Development Environment),” then my first encounter with IDEs came in 1983. If you don't, then my first encounter with an IDE came a year later when I got EDTASM+ [1], a 6809 assembler that was a cross between ed [2] and DEBUG [3] with an assembler stuck inside. I can't say it was a pleasant experience, but if I wanted to program in Assembly on my home computer, that was it.

      My next IDE was a few years later with Turbo Pascal 3 on MS (Microsoft)-DOS (Disk Operating System). By 1987, I had an IBM (International Business Machines) PC (Personal Computer)jr and was actively learning 8088 assembly using PE 1.0 (a real text editor), MASM (Microsoft Assembler) and, of all thing, make (which came with the MASM development system and for me, was a godsend on a single-floppy system as by that time, I was doing multi-file assembly projects). I did not like Turbo Pascal 3. It wasn't the language, it was the limitations. Despite the speed, you were limited to a single file program. Oh, and all those lovely editing keys on the keyboard like “Home,” “End,” and “PgUp” weren't supported by Turbo Pascal 3.