Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Realisation About Young People

    This is written after a long weekend training some 66 or so young people for their Bronze, Silver or Gold Duke of Edinburgh Award expeditions. It is half formed but a realisation I hit. This is not a missive about how they need to toughen up or any of that bollocks.

    I have been involved with the Explorers, 14 to 18 year olds, for a good 5 years or so now. I help with district events and so I have got to know most Explorers generally. This has lead to seeing some of these people develope from being nervous 14 year olds to confident adults. It is an interesting journey and I came to a realisation.

    Young people need a space to be as weird without being judged. They need to be able to try out different personas. School is often a brutal place where people are judged for everything and home can be an extremely isolating place. Scouts offers a regular place and time with around 25 people who are regularly there. This can offer a secure place where young people can try something and see how others react. The impact is relatively small and so the stakes are low. It is hard to be 'cool' as a scout. Uniforms are weird and the whole working towards awards and badges is geeky. This seems to present a perfect environment to become their true self.

  • punk is as punk does

    On the surface, I don't meet anyone's definition of "punk." I've always looked more like I'm going to a Bible study than a protest, riot, or even a concert. It's usually only folks who get to know me who discover just how much I enjoy subverting things.

    I got reminded of that again today when I mentioned to my mother and aunt (at church!) that I have successfully freed myself from Big Tech, and they remarked "maybe you should get a job coding!"

    This isn't the first time they've told me to learn to code. This isn't the first time anyone has told me to learn to code. If I had a nickel for every person who has told me to learn to code, I wouldn't need to learn to code, because I'd be independently wealthy.

• Technology and Free Software

  • The looming Discord IPO

    So... Discord might be going there. I like their offering. I even pay them about $10/month. What they offer works well. People get their own little communities to administer, with the tools to administer them well, with the self-written automations and bots to handle communities from a handful of people to many thousands. Read @isotopp@infosec.exchange’s perspective on Discord.

  • PDF bruteforce tool to recover locked files

    Today, I had to open a password protected PDF (medical report), unfortunately it is a few years old document and I did not remember the password format (usually something based on named and birthdate -_-).

    I found a nice tool that can try a lot of combinations, and it is even better as if you know a bit the password format you can easily generate tested patterns.

  • PDF bruteforce tool to recover locked files

  • What does "Clouds about .05" mean?

    I recently finished reading "My First Summer in the Sierra", by John Muir, specifically the edition published by the Standard Ebooks project[1]. I highly recommended it to fans of nature writing! I found it something to enjoy in many relatively short installments. The sheer intensity of Muir's exuberance in nature, and his poetic rendering of it, is such that you can't really just sit down and plough through it. Your mind kind of by necessity desensitises to it a bit if you try.

    One thing has been bugging me. Muir regularly begins his description of a day by reporting on the cloud cover. This is expressed as some unitless quantity which is a completely mystery. The only system I am familiar with for measuring cloud cover is in eights of the sky covered, also known as "okta". These are usually represented numerically with integers between 0 (sky completely clear) and 8 (sky completely cloudy). One could of course convert them to a proportion, but then we'd be talking about rather cumbersome numbers like 0.375. The majority of Muir's reports are something like 0.05, 0.10 or 0.15, which at first suggests a system based on the 20ths of the sky covered, but I noted one case of "only about 0.01" (clarified as faint, silky cirrus wisps, scarcely visible) and another of "only about 0.08", which suggests something yet finer-grained. How on Earth, though, does one measure proportion of sky covered by cloud down to a resolution of 0.01 in 1869, not in a lab but while camping and hiking through forest and mountain landscapes with a crew of shepherds? Does this scale not in fact top out at 1.0?

  • Internet/Gemini

    • smol.pub

      I have no real idea what to do with this space, but I do love the ideas behind smol.pub, so here we are. This space is currently so small there is a feed of every single person's posts. Twitter was like this at the very start, when it was still called Twttr and no one really knew it existed. I would post via SMS. This feels less archaic in some ways, more archaic in others. I like the idea of posting small thoughts into the void: no likes, no replies. Just posts and links, like God intended.