Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ARILNOH Wordo: SEEDS

  • 26th December 2024 - Christmas '24

    Yesterday was rather mad. My brother, sister in law and niece appeared with their 2 schnausers. This meant there were 4 dogs along with a 2 year old. Perfect recipe for chaos!

    Yet, there was little. My brother's dogs have improved greatly. Archer still demands strokes galore but Figgy has become a much calmer dog since his snip. All 4 dogs were much nicer with no growling or worrying about Figgy going for the others.

    My niece was very sweet. She kept playing with presents as she opened them. It made for a long morning but she was having a lovely time. It seems the Brio aeroplane I got her was a hit. She loved playing with cars too. I got to spend some time playing with her again. She is really nice to spend time with now. You can see the imagination coming into action as she plays around. Particularly when she opened the Bluey figures from my parents. They were a big hit. I managed to get a very confused stare when I didn't know the name of Bluey's little sister. It made me laugh. Turns out that is her favourite character.

  • Counterpoint

    Or, the "business logic" of 15th century music composition. Still relevant if you want your music to sound like a 15th century chant (as corrupted by harmony or anything else you've studied or accidentally picked up) or want practice in melody writing, as the counterpoint is ideal when both lines are good and go well with one another. This can be difficult, and it is possible to write horrible sounding music that yet passes all the rules. Actual compositions may show various errors that a strict grader (e.g. a computer program) will fail. This is much like a grammar checker that I once fed some Tolkien to, and the checker was, like, "this is bad English, instead you should …". Maybe grammar checkers have improved since the early 1990s, or will they still ding Tolkien's prose as problematic? More useful might be to read and write enough prose or music, which worked well enough for many before (and after) grammarians and music theorists came along.

    Traditionally there are "species" of counterpoint that isolate and simplify particular aspects; in theory this will help the student chunk the particulars of note-against-note, two notes against another note, four notes against another note, and suspensions where one note is held over another and sometimes resolved downwards, if dissonant. Once these are learned, to some degree, (Beethoven was not a good student) one can move on to free counterpoint which makes use of all the species, and more, in any voice, plus other complications not typically handled in counterpoint exercises: cadential formula, modern harmonics, etc. Think of counterpoint rules as training wheels: good reminders of where the ground is, for the inexperienced, but something to move past when no longer necessary. However, music is more abstract than a world coming up to hit you, so you may need to review the various rules now and then. One might also be a bit unsteady after getting back on a bike after a while.

  • Snowshoeing

    Well we ended up with about 25cm of snow, quite the white Christmas after all. My wife and I did get out for some snowshoeing. We went while it was snowing - so there was no one else on the pristine trails. I uploaded some images of the snowy scene: [...]

  • 26 December 2024

    Well, Christmas is over now and everything is returning a bit to a more "normal" mode - at least for a few days until the new year and its celebrations are hitting. Junior really enjoyed his first "real" Christmas very much, last year he was too young to really "get it", but this year... well, it was good.

    It looks like this was a good year for the gopher sphere if you look at the stats of the "Observable Gopherspace Universe Project"... who would think that this part of the net would actually see more or less persistent growth in todays world? May this be a sign that more people are become dissatisfied with the direction information technology is moving? Or am i reading too much into it?

  • Life imitating art

    Bunny and I went out for dinner and at the restaurant there were TV (Television)s tuned to a sports channel. It was rather surprising to me to see that it was ESPN (Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) 8—the Ocho [1]! And here I thought it was just a fake TV channel from the movie “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story [2].” It's odd to think that a Cornhole [3] tournament beat out baseball and the Tour de France!

  • water line

    The water pipe at the lake is leaking, so I don't have a lot of water to the house.

    Need to dig 4 feet of gravel and see what the problem is. Hopefully it's a loose joint, but it might be a bigger problem. I have all the tools here, and a good ammount of pipe to fix it all. The problem is, I don't really want to dig. I'd rather hire someone else to do the digging, I do the fixing and filling back the hole.

  • CHRISTMAS CREATIONS

    Christmas and Boxing Day were quite nice. At home alone, the main tradition was my tinkering away at my little projects. In fact I finished off my Christmas present to my mother, which wasn't ready in time to give it to her in advance when I met her in Portland. The commercialisation of Christmas tends to ignite the deeply-repressed anti-capitalist radical within me. Largely irrelevant as a religious festival in this country, Christmas is the time of year where people are obligated to buy junk for people who don't want it. My mother gave me a large coffee mug even though she knows I don't have hot drinks, and some Christmas-decorated salad tongs even though I doubt she really thinks I do any entertaining here. But I did also get a rare second-hand copy of the official owners workshop manual for my car, put together by Jaguar New Zealand at the end of the car's production run in the mid 1990s, which I'd requested explicitly (to much complaint from my stepfather who had to find it - but that's what you get if you ask me exactly what I want).

    My resistance to Christmas consumerism is effected by my building return presents myself (for my mother, since my father is well ahead of me in anti-Christmas sentiment and won't even hear mention of the day's significance), rather than buying junk in the stores. This is a fun challenge, although with about the same outcome of giving away things the recipient doesn't really want. It's true that my mother's house is now becoming more of an archive of my electronics projects than my own, not least because I'm obliged to actualy finish her ones properly (although it's true some never did quite make it beyond something of a Christmas-day tech demo where "if I could just get _that_ to work it would do this:").

• Science

  • Mushroom Identification Guide

    Here the identification has been outsourced, for better or worse, to the whims of the store owner, the procurement process, any relevant regulations and inspections, and so forth, much like "what to eat" has been outsourced by most cells in a body to some number of other cells. Similarly, "okay to eat" has been outsourced by societies that more or less isolate themselves from nature. Something like a cell wall, only bigger and more abstract.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Fixing a Touch ID keyboard after upgrading to macOS Sequoia

    After upgrading both machines to macOS Sequoia, I noticed that Touch ID stopped working.

  • AI is not inevitable

    I recently got laid off from my job as a technical writer, along with my entire team. It was a sad affair, and one that was almost certainly driven by the greed of the American parent company (though they'll probably insist it was about efficiency... or something).

    Now, I can't be sure as I no longer work there, but I suspect the higher-ups that are left were seduced by the idea of replacing a lot of people with generative AI. It's the new hotness, after all. It's quite an impressive technology at first glance! You put in a prompt and the machine spits out something that sounds pretty close to human. Indeed, it was human once. These responses are an approximation of an answer a human might have given to the question asked. Kind of. Maybe. The reality is that it gives you a block of text that sounds pretty convincing until you poke it a bit too much.

    As a tool, generative AI is not without its uses. It's pretty good at producing boilerplate text and even code. Where it falls short is knowledge. Generative AI, by definition, knows nothing. It can't produce results that are backed by understanding or research because that's not what it's designed to produce. It can only produce an amalgam of existing responses from its training data. Proponents of the technology will swear that it's more complex and smarter than this, and in truth it is, but this is the essence of it.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Selfhosting @ home & staying online - at all costs

      Without trying too hard to doxx myself, I'll have you know that my apartment comes with "bundled internet". That is: I need not (and should not) care about my internet connection, because there already is a router present in my apartment that I can use.

      Any john or jane doe would not care - after all, they "just need internet", sometimes. I do not consider myself to be part of that demographic though; I need internet _all the time_ for previously mentioned reasons.

    • Farkle - removing posts from Antenna

      I've removed posting results to Antenna to help clean up the timeline. I tested on DSN but disabled that as well for the same reason. you can subscribe to the page directly if you'd like.

    • back on the surface

      After a few years off social network and a hiatus off the surface web, I'm back!

      A few years ago, as I am working from home, I realized that anytime spent on social network, couldn't be able to billed to anyone but myself.

      I then realized that even after work, spending time on social network felt like work, not for myself, but for the owner of these networks.