Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • reprogrammed

    Sometimes the past is begging to be forgotten. Just for a moment, the perfect blend of events align themselves, and it's as if a particular memory, a certain habit, or addiction can be let go of, completely and without traces.

    My mind incredulously wants to hold on, attached to what has been mine, or has been me for so long. But the release is to clear and simple, my past doesn't need to haunt me anymore. I can fully let go without looking back.

• Politics and World Events

  • A Call to Those Outside the US

    With the recent election of our illegitimate president here in the U.S., I am calling on everyone outside of the U.S. to call in to your government officials to make sure you take defensive measures against us. While I would appreciate that you prepare to take refugees in from the U.S., I know that it doesn't always work out that way. But the one thing you could do is to harm the U.S. economy and world-relations as much as possible so that the U.S.'s Trump Cult has some incentive, and some punishment, to change.

    [...]

    Unfortunately, the fight is going far beyond mere Tarrifs and trade wars, as if those weren't bad enough. Our illegitimate President Trump has threatened Canada, Panama, Mexico, and is continuing to threaten religious leaders that speak out against him, immigrants, Trans people, and Jews who do not support him. He uses his mob to intimidate his political and civilian opponents, inducing silence among politicians for self-preservation, and the most aggresive of his mob are the ones he just pardoned after being sworn in, sending a clear message that he will pardon anyone who breaks the law, and harms others, in defense of him.

  • Isaiah 44:12-17: The Folly of Idolatry

    Idolatry, in the most literal sense of the word, means to manufacture some kind of figurine and to worship it as a deity. Properly speaking, the idol is supposed to represent the divine being, and by worshiping the idol we are worshiping the divine being. But in reality both the god and the idol representing it are products of our own imagination, or twisted representations of our own desires, and there is no difference between the two. When viewed from this perspective, it is not difficult for us to see the contradictions, waste, and ridiculousness of idol worship.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Hobgoblin State Machine

    Technically "Hobgoblin" should be "Hierarchical", though the article referenced below uses "communicating machines". The hierarchy is probably a corruption from graphical toolkits that expose, say, a keyboard event to a program, and, should the program not handle it, the event is run along some tree or hierarchy until something does handle it. However, sets of state machines can be wired up in different ways. There may be a ring of hill forts—ever on guard against goblin attacks—and adjacent forts react to a "alarm fire lit" message with "raise our own alarm fire", along with various other internal state changes.

  • Untitled Jan 2025 (CW: personal venting)

    7 months ago, I became unemployed (again). I used to work as DevOps since I started my career 12 yrs. ago (time flies).

    I used to really like it, my career... I liked it so badly that I "developed" (pun intended) burnout just after 1½ yrs. of unresting routine. Burnout led me to the psychiatrist, which led me to anxiolytics, which rendered me "unproductive" just after a few weeks, which led to my "layoff". It took me 3 yrs until I could find an established job again, which was my most recent job that lasted for 5 yrs.

  • Pagination

    The Daylight DC-1 just got a “Calm Tech certificatiton” but I think there’s something missing. (Hopefully fixable in software so no-one need to throw out their new plastic ewaste devices just yet.)

    Apps that can stay still, that can show me one page at a time and then calmly go to the next or previous page, that’s relaxing. Discrete steps and cleary defined modes. That calms me down.

    Apps that are all gradiated and fiddly and zoomy and jittery and thinks my palm means that I want to zoom and scroll, that freaks me the heck out.

  • The keyboards rabbit hole

    Many of us went down new rabbit holes during and after the pandemic (Gemini, cough, cough...). For me one of them was keyboards. I just wanted to share how, after almost 30 years, I significantly changed how I use them and what I expect from them.

    I believe it was the agressive influencer marketing around mechanical keyboards that got me thinking first. Thinking why they were unnecessary that is. I had been using membrane keyboard forever and I was doing just fine after all.