Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The End of 2024

    In a few hours from now, 2024 ends. I don't have a lot of emotional attachment to the new year, mainly because it is just an abstract point of time for a calendar we've created over the centuries. But, it isn't a bad time to look back and see what I have and haven't done.

    Overall, 2024 is probably my worst year ever. There was a lot going on, but I'm not going to go into the details of those because it doesn't really help anyone. Needless to say, it was rough for me, mentally and physically, professionally and personally. And a whole bunch of other “-ly” I can't really think about.

    Warning: This isn't a happy or positive post.

  • Another new year, more auto-generated resolutions 📅

    A few times now, I've provided resolutions for people who can't be bothered to decide on them for themselves.

  • Perry Rhodan

    Not too long ago I wanted to buy some Perry Rhodan ebooks.

    Who is Perry Rhodan? It's a series of dime novels going back to the sixties. Shortly before the landing on the moon, this German series of A5 booklets, each more or less 60 pages long, started to appear. The main character is one of the astronauts landing on the moon. On the dark side of the moon, they discover aliens, and with this technology they return to Earth, end the cold war, explore the galaxy, gain immortality, and on and on.

    The series has slowed down somewhat. They're on a biweekly schedule, now. Not too long ago, episode 3300 was published.

  • Reflecting on 2024

    my first goal was more mindful computer use. I'm not quite where I want to be yet with this - for example, I'm writing this post during a plane flight home after the holidays, and I instinctively hit my hotkey to open firefox in spite of there not being any wifi to browse the web. I still have days where I waste too much time on youtube. That said, I still have made progress. I'm not obsessively checking some problematic sites, and I've put in a lot more work on code and reading rather than mindless scrolling.

    Helpful, also, has been the changing of the spaces in which I "hang out" online. I'm getting a sorta-social experience from having joined tilde.town and started posting with the gemini protocol. I've had some interesting conversations with cool people (though I need to send more emails out), and I even attended town con in october, meeting several people and putting faces to names in an experience that was intensely valuable for showing me how I like to socialize, and how people like me behave in person. It has been wonderful.

    I still want to reduce my intake of scrolly sites, though. I've noticed over the course of the year that my worst days often coincide with the days I spend the most time on youtube watching videos in particular. Learning how the break myself out of the loop of clicking on the next video, or better yet, not go on in the first place, will be the next big step for me.

  • Celebrating

    Hey bartender, could I please have a whiskey neat? I've been craving one for a while.

    It's been an interesting year for me. I hope for you too. My career and personal life trajectory changed significantly this year. I hope it was for the better. There are many unknowns, as I have to find a new place to live, integrate in another social mesh. But I am coming back to a somewhat known territory with friends and family not too far by, so that's a plus. I raise my glass to hopefully more meaningful, pleasant moments together now that I am in the area.

  • Soon To Be New Year

    New Year is always a weird time. It marks the end of the weird period between Christmas and New Year, where time is infinite and yet short and meals are just whatever you can scrounge. It also marks the need to return to work and the start of when you should retrain your sleep pattern. Well, New Year tends to scupper that so I always return to work tired and confused. Thankfully this year, the second of January is a Thursday so not a lot is expected. I just have the niggly issue of a problem I caused and was unable to resolve before starting the Christmas break.

    Of course, New Year enables us to reflect. 2024 was a fairly good year personally. Financially, I felt able to afford to go away on holiday. That lead to trips to places I had wanted to go for some time - Berlin and Singapore. Both are interesting places and well worth a visit. Workwise, 2024 was mixed. I made a lot of progress with one of the projects I lead. Hopefully things go ahead commercially and we get the go ahead to start the hard part. The other project I lead is of pain. It is a mature state one which I did a lot of work on years ago and just keeps giving me political issues. Nothing technically problematic beyond a coating process issue. Just politics about drawing notes and other nonsense.

  • [music] 2024-12-31

    australians know there's this all-night tv music program called rage that runs on friday & saturday nights, and as a kid i would often fall asleep on the couch watching music videos. i bring this up as this they are gutting a body of water album reminds me of indie music playing as i hazily drifted off or woke up on some of those 90s weekends. nostalgic but with a fresh weirdness, i dig it.

    a dose of sickening breakneck with gross, rasping vocals, Cicada's Wicked Dream is definitely punk but it also feels to me a little bit death metal in spirit. i enjoyed it a lot. for such a bad time it's a good time, if you know what i mean.

  • Retrospective 1

    End of year looms and I'm catching a quiet moment before the next meal among friendly faces. Let's reflect.

    I've missed my arbitrary article production target. Even after adjusting it a little while ago, the priorities in those busy days preparing meals and exchanging with people that I haven't seen in ages makes it so that writing does not make it to the top. But so is true with all my hobbies in those times, even reading. And prioritising family and friends is sound I believe.

    It does itch a bit to have missed the target I set. However, the goal that target was designed for has been reached. I now have a much clearer view of what I like to write and what I want this little space of internet to be.

  • On the Road by Jack Kerouac

    Recently, I finally managed to finish reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac and wow did it take a lot of effort to make that happen. Usually when I'm not feeling a book I just stop, but I decided to soldier on here because it's gotten so much praise and been put on so many pedestals over the years. Personally, I very much disagree with all of it. At most, I see the book as having some historical value for the influence it had on other writers when it came out as well providing a window into the Beat community. However, it seems to celebrate a lot of crappy behavior that I found very offputting.

    The book is told through the eyes of a young man in his early 20s named Sal Paradise. He's a bit directionless and has a hankering for some meaning in his life. Unfortunately, he tries to fill that void through his friend Dean Moriarty. Dean seems fun going to jazz shows all the time, hanging out with all sorts of ecclectic people, and is constantly chasing women. The book tries to portray this as a good thing and generally exciting. For the longest time a lot of people looked at all of this as a celebration of being young and spontaneous. I don't see this at all. Maybe if I was an immature 20-something I could look at things this way, but pushing 50 I take the view that the people in this book mostly needed to grow up and get a job.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Pervigilium Anni Novi

    I'm sitting here pondering about what to write. I still had an unfinished phlog entry from mid September stored here that I will never finish. I do not only suck at writing, but I always feel like there is nothing to write about. Nothing ever happens in my life or at least nothing worth mentioning.

    That is also where the - now deleted - entry started off, with some rant about me entering zombie mode and surrendering to consumption without creating anything.

  • I have a PGP key now

    You can find links to it in ASCII-armoured form in my Gopherhole and my Gemini capsule, and it's also discoverable via WKD and autocrypt, which Posteo make blessedly easy!

    It's not my intent to make a big deal out of this or to push anybody else to do similarly. This post is, like the previous one about the VF-1 1.0.0 release, just me celebrating getting another small thing pushed off my year's TODO list at the last moment.

  • I have a PGP key now

    I finally bit the bullet and did this, and it wasn't half as bad as I expected! I'm happy to see ed25519 seems widely supported these days, and I was astonished to receive an encrypted email only a few days after my key became available via WKD/autocrypt thanks to Posteo's support for these things, before I had put the key up on any of my spaces.

  • This is a subspace for NNCP.

    NNCP (Node to Node Copy) is a set of Unix utilities for store-and-forward file exchange and remote command execution. It is a spiritual successor to UUCP.

  • Programming

    • A preference for deterministic tools over probabilistic tools

      Last month, I added code to my assembler [1] to output BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) code [2] instead of binary to make it easier to use assembly subroutines from BASIC. But I've been working on a rather large program that assembles to nearly 2K (Kilobyte) of object code, and it takes a bit of time to POKE all that data into memory.

      So I took a bit of time (maybe an hour total) to add a variation—instead of generating a bunch of DATA statements and using POKE to insert the code into memory, generate a binary file, and output BASIC code to load said file into memory.

    • FSM

      No, not the flying spaghetti monster, but rather finite state machines, reputed to help code avoid becoming spaghetti on account of too many globals to twiddle and who knows how many errors lurking down those dark branching alleys. Now, a good programmer can make spaghetti of anything, a variation of "I did not have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one", so what's a minimal FSM? Without a lot of abstractions (however useful those may be) to get in the way? A vivid mental image may help you remember abstract things, though we are not going full Rube Goldberg here, but will instead model a pumped storage dam. Basically, a giant battery.

      This being a nation of Mammon—John McCarthy's marketing term for "I need a grant", AI, has grown to "Microsoft and OpenAI Tie AGI to a $100 Billion Profit Goal"—we'll need a price for electricity. And we may need some notion of the water level in the dam. Think of these values as senses, much like how skin signals temperature: okay, too hot, too cold.

    • Re: FSM

      I had a professor who taught (among many other things) the algorithms and data structures course. He showed us FSMs in that class and was like: his is a secret weapon. Especially for solving text processing problems in a language like C. And text processing is a surprisingly large class of programming problems. I (not my prof) have some code running on someone's commercial infra right now that's more-or-less one big honking event-driven FSM, and ironically not doing text processing really. FSMs are cool.