Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — CHLUPSM Wordo: TWILL

  • Ancom 2025!

    Using that anarchosocialist toolbox (being gay and doing crime) to eke out a good life while continuing to try to push for centralized climate regulation, a government repaired from corruption, and kick out the gazillionaires… “dig where you stand” and looking at the wider horizon.

  • May be this is what adulting is

    The day I left our house at age 17, my parent's house was never the same for me. The lack of in-person facetime kept drifting us apart. It's like we no longer speak the same language. The way they think is very different than the way I think. It breaks my heart. I do not loathe them. They still care for me. We just sailed away. Every meetup remins me of this. We never had fights. We never bad mouth each other. We do not tell the rest of our relatives or friends that we do not get along. We just keep a healthy respectable distance. And mind our own lives. And take our own decisions that the other party would not agree too. We agree to disagree. Or my be just let go. We are all so busy in our respective lives that this does even bother us.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Ode to a 1B

    I have several Raspberry Pis, but the two I use most often are 1B models that I picked up in early 2014. Right now one is running DietPi with a few basic utilities and no desktop. It's on this board that I'm currently writing this very post.

    The 1B is very slow by today's standards, with a 700 MHz CPU and only 512 MB of RAM. I ran DietPi's speed benchmarks on it, and it ranked at the very bottom. It does not feature Bluetooth or WiFi. It has an HDMI port, but it can also output RCA composite video--this is the mode I use, connected to a bona fide CRT television.

  • Update on Analog Stuff (publ. 2025-02-21)

    I'm still waiting to be able to make the parts order. I really need a multiplier now if I'm going to make further progress, due to the more interesting models I'm looking at.

    Something that has been bothering me is the large amount of noise at my work bench, which was being picked up by the computer, or even just the signal generator connected to the scope. It was about 600 mV noise p-p. After some investigation, I figured out that a lot of it was coming from an old computer running at the work bench. I moved that computer to a new location about 12 feet away, and that reduced the noise down to about 100 mV p-p. After than, I tried inserting a simple RC filter after the signal generator, and that reduced noise further down to about 40 mV p-p.

    I need at some point to build some kind of Faraday cage around the analog computer, but it is not a trivial matter as I would to find a metal box of the right size, remount the switches off the board, and figure out exactly how I would want to feed signals in/out of the box.

  • TIL less -w to highlight first unseen line

    What is basically does is, when you scroll through a file with `less', it highlights the first line that you haven't seen yet.

    Once you have used this, you'll will never run less without it. Just try it!

  • Made e-book more readable with Sigil

    Yesterday I started reading an new e-book. Unfortunately, all text was bold.

    My e-reader comes with the option to select a different font, but no matter what I choose, the text remained bold, only with a different font.

    To test if this was a problem of my e-reader, I opened the epub file in mupdf. Mupdf also showed all text in bold.

  • Productivity systems and outboard brains

    There are people out there who ask “Why do I need a personal wiki when my collection of text files are fine”?

    It is not assumed that a system will revolve around a single program such as Obsidian or Emacs’ org-mode, although many people quite reasonably swear by org-mode and put their entire lives into it.

    Here’s what to look for in a good system.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Simple Template Creator

    • STATIC SITE GENERATION WITH PHP

      I finally got back to the little website project that I've been putting off finishing for about six months. I decided to do it as a static site generator, formatting data which a shell script I wrote collects into a directory tree.

      If I searched online I probably would have found existing examples, but I preferred to go via the PHP manual and work out my own method from the bottom up. Here therefore is my own very short guide.