Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Soil

    Is soil a solid or a liquid? Both, if we abuse the English "or" in the inclusive sense, rather than the exclusive that some might expect. Soil is solid, except when it is not, probably when there is too much water or maybe too much vibration. Humans like to noun things, which can pigeonhole when there is a continuum from soil with some water in it to water with some soil in it, and some interesting states between, depending on the exact conditions. Soil itself is a vague term; one might find phase diagrams with varying amounts of sand, clay and I forget what the third part was, the geology classes having been a while ago now. Anyways, those interesting states. Too much water and soil can suddenly liquefy, which is called liquefaction, perhaps problematic during an earthquake, or when one is too close to quicksand for comfort. Soil usually holds itself together by friction. Enough water can "unlatch" that friction and now you've got more a liquid with solid bits than a wet solid. Another cause of liquefaction is when there is too much water pressure, which may force the soil grains apart. Water pressure is a feature of dams, and probably should be managed correctly by those dam engineers.

  • [16] on the topic of working with music...

    maybe it's just the people i talk to, but they all seem to do fine when they put music in the background of their work. reading or writing isn't complete without something else going on in the ears.

    frankly, this makes me quite jealous!! i love music!! in fact, i'm always meaning to get into new things!! thing is, i haven't listened to music properly in a good while, because my work involves a lot of reading and research... and for some reason, words (research) on top of more words (lyrics in songs) make everything jumbled up!! it's like when you're writing, and someone is in your ear babbling away, and you don't know whether to listen to THAT or listen to your brain think of what to write next. i'm invested in both. when i pick songs that i'm really drawn to, i find myself invested in the music more.

    the easy solution is to not listen to music with words. and it works, i guess. been listening to masayoshi takanaka, and as always, it has been a fun time! but i want to branch out from instrumental stuff every now and then, you know? just a month ago i made the decision to completely abandon spotify in favor of physical media. specifically, i wanted to start my own .mp3 collection!! how fun!! and in the process of moving my stuff to spotify, i figured i'd really, really, REALLY wanted to revisit some albums!!

  • Unconscious Influence

    Back when I was studying painting in university I would regularly check out the art magazines to see what my contemporaries were up to. One of those magazines was of course the venerable "Canadian Art" (formerly ArtsCanada). It ceased publication in 2021 after a 78 year run but its parent body, the Canadian Art Foundation, still exists and makes some of the old content available online.

    Anyhow, one of the articles I remember reading was about the landscape painter Paterson Ewan (1925-2002, so not exactly my contemporary) written by Adele Freedman and published in 1987 [1]. And the main reason I remember it so well, is that it taught me something valuable about unconscious influence.

    Toward the end of the article - the last three paragraphs in fact - Ewan talks about how his latest 6 works reflected the influence of the relatively obscure American romantic painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. Well, all but one of the six. There was one called "Ship Wreck" that "didn't begin as a specific image, found in an old book or an old memory ... but just came out of [Ewan's] spinning head while he was working." An illustration of the painting accompanied the article.

  • We are on the right side

    While i have to admit that I am currently somewhat drunk I would like to reassure you, guys, girls and everything on the myriad facettes in between: The world might seem to enter a new dark age, but as long as you uphold the ideas of the universal declaration of the human rights, as long as you uphold the idea that a bright future may be ahead, as long as you hope that conflicts can be overcome... you are on the right side of history.

• Technology and Free Software

  • A custom introduction

    And I recently had a friend try and get into the local Search And Rescue group (he didn't, and by all accounts they were a bit dickish about it). That got me thinking about Dad. When I was a wee sprog, Dad did Search and Rescue, and did a bunch of the communications work for the local Civil Defence. Out in the shed, next to the darkroom he had for his photography, he had an electronics shack. When we lived out in the country there was always a huge aerial above the shed, and once a month or so, we would all pile up to the grandparents place for lunch and an afternoon running around the farm, while he wandered over to the local ham radio club meetings the next town over.

    All of which has got me thinking how I'd introduce myself if/when I wander over to the local club. I suspect, that about the time I would have got interested enough in radio to start picking it up properly, was when Dad started bringing the ZX-81 spectrum from work home for the weekends, and all of a sudden I was poring through books on how to get this little black box to do things with BASIC.

  • How to disable the built-in keyboard of a laptop

    These instructions will help disabling the driver of the built-in keyboard directly on the kernel, via grub.

    Usually, the built-in keyboard is managed by the i8042 module, which manages PS/2 keyboards and mice.

    Sometimes, the built-in keyboard is wired as an internal USB device, so it is managed by the module usbhid.

    In lucky cases, the module is proprietary. Here be dragons.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Removing this blog

      I think I'll make my second bear blog the wellness and health blog. Once I have more than two blogs, I lose focus on thing and it becomes too much. One will be my personal projects and fun things, the other will be more curated about health and wellness. I think this is a good split.

      See you there at both binarydigit.city and lizroboto.com.

      This blog will destruct in a few days <3