Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Quick Jot

    I made some progress on my little solo rpg quine idea this weekend. I'm using the hex generation rules from the welshpiper.com[2]. I also picked up the icons from the HPS Cartography Kit[3]. I've gotten as far as marking the major and minor encounters.

  • [11] a clueless idiot's loose leaf tea checklist

    been interested in loose leaf tea for a good few days now :) !! here is a list of things!!

  • Ending Eld (an exercise in writing poetry quickly in simple meter)

    I am a son of the end of time
    who cannot be a man,
    yet somehow poisoned as I am,
    I tremble as I stand.
    
    
    Can I cut out the rotten mass
    where once I had a mind?
    Perhaps I shudder just to think
    of all therein I'll find.
    

  • Steven universe: vCJD edition chapter 5/ Entry for side F of vCJD

  • it begins: gardening season is here

    I dislike tilling. I avoid it whenever possible. But the side garden left me no choice. I needed an efficient way to disrupt a whole lot of Glechoma hederacia (aka "creeping Charlie" and a whole lot of other names) without disrupting two dozen asparagus crowns, a row of peonies, or a thriving colony of Asclepius tuberosa (aka "butterfly milkweed").

    I dislike tilling, but I'll do it when it's the best tool for the job, and this time it was. The Glechoma hederacia in the front garden is getting sheet mulched, though. No reason not to.

• Politics and World Events

  • The Central Problem with Collective Enfranchisement of leasehold flats

    Much of the problems with leasehold in the UK relate to the unmutualised character of most blocks of flats: the building as a whole is not owned in some sense by those who own the flats. There are a lot of problems downstream from this, but the key one is that a lot of the mitigation strategies for flat owners with pathological landlords are fairly ineffective.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Vendor Lock-in

    In the 90s we were so aware of vendor lock-in. Like, “if I uninstall the app, I can no longer open the documents I wrote in it”. The app makers of today seem to have taken that worry as a roadmap. All the silo social networks (like Facebook) have the ultimate vendor lock-in: “if you uninstall the app, you’ll lose your friends”.

  • Back to reality

    Below I am pasting the text I sent as part of the last newsletter to my subscribers. It relates strongly to a topic I regularly cover here, so I will leave it here as an addendum:

    Previously writing to you about my quest to dedigitalize... [...] returne from simulated reality to just reality, I started from the desire to own tangible things. So I would like to clarify that it was not exactly about gadgetry. It was about a longing for the veracity of the material, for the authenticity of the experience. It was about a sense of anchoring, which used to be easier to achieve in my opinion.

    The nostalgia for the touch of wood, paper, or the weight of metal objects stems from the proliferation of plastic as the material for everything. A material that is cheap, versatile, but perishable and foreign to the touch. The longing for the genuineness of human contact, is linked to the spread of maintaining communication via the Internet as the primary form of contact. Such contact is limited to the exchange of messages without the vastness of non-verbal information, and as such also leads to a sense of alienation.

  • mojibake

    The interest was probably on account of anonradio misbehaving, though the wacky metadata is more likely due to some track having data in encoding A being displayed in encoding B, unrelated to other problems with the system. Complex systems can exhibit multiple unrelated failures at the same time! Encoding problems is one of the few places where including a screenshot helps, as different viewers will see different things if their software assumes different encodings than that of others.

  • Analog: External Amplifier Noise

    I write "amplifier/inverter" because an inverter is just an amplifier where the feedback resistor equals the input resistor. So, I'm still not really clear on whether I want to have dedicated inverter modules, or just a way to easily switch over an open amplifier to inverter mode. The latter makes more sense in principle since open amplifiers can be used in conjunction with multiplication to get division.

    To try to do that (the latter) I have the raw output of the amplifier going to one terminal block pin, and then there is a 100k resistor going from there to the other output terminal block pin. My idea is that I could have the 100k resistor output on its own patch panel socket, and then I could just patch the resistor output to the feedback (IN-) port, to get the inverter.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • The Web without an audience

      In the digital world, everyone strives for your attention. Advertisements, content creators, flashy websites, news outlets, other people on social media... and the list goes on.

      Even you may have found yourself craving for those sweet precious likes, while posting cute kitty pics on the web (no hate, we have all been there one way or another).

      And I must admit I’m not immune to this issue, either.

      That said, I don’t want to talk about the already very much discussed “dopamine” hellholes of social media. Instead, I would like to focus more on how we perceive creativity and its value on the WWW.

      We are so used to thinking that our creative work is only as good as the amount of approval it gets (in the form of likes, shares and comments), that every time I start writing, I can feel that subtle pressure: “Will anyone even care about what I want to say?”. As if the number of interactions was the only indicator of the value of my work. A constant chase for validation which in the end can only hurt, by making us second-guess our ideas, maybe even steering them towards what’s more popular, rather than staying true to ourselves.

    • Five years on Gemini