Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • relief

    a few yellow reeds sway to the soothing rhythm of the wind. the yellow hue of the sun, illuminating their dance. the water, having filled the lake a long time ago, resting. at ease. still life, but alive. ever-changing.

    a bit of rain, then. clouds forming a veil over the warmth. no longer a dance then, a dreadful whistle filling the air. a call out for hope from the ducks, trying to find a shelter from the corrosion of water. the water that breaks into even the strongest mountain, one wave at a time.

  • Botanical garden of Gambarogno

    We went to see the private botanical garden of the Eisenhut gardening center in Gabarogno, across the lake and up the hill from Locarno. They claim to have about a thousand camellia variants and about six hundred magnolia variants. As we’ve been to the camellia park yesterday, we focused on the magnolia in bloom.

• Science

  • Observations on Paper Birch

    Paper Birch bark is an assortment of colors that is a gradual blend from white to reddish-brown. The white bark is a milk-white. From what I can tell, all the old, loose bark, i.e., bark that hasn't been pealed away by some creature, but that has pealed off naturally, is white. The next color in the gradient is white with a hint of yellow, which seems similar to floral white or antique white on ColorHexa [https://www.colorhexa.com/color-names]. Next is orange, maybe Burnt Orange. Then a reddish-brown or Burgundy.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Analog: Integrator, Capacitor Accuracy

    I added an additional integrator, bring the computer up to four integrators.

    I did some measurements of my feedback capacitors. I use two 500 nF capacitors in parallel, for each integrator, the target being 1uF. My measurements (averaging three readings each) showed some capacitors as high as 545 nF, and some as low as 497 nF. Some pairs were, added together, totally as high as 1047 nF whereas some were as low as 1030 nF.

    In the end, what I did was mix and match the capacitors so that the high capacitors were paired with low capacitors. In the end, I was seeing an average of around 1010 nF per pair, with a deviation of not more than 1.3% from the average. I think this is good enough. It is important to remember that our feedback capacitors don't necessarily need to be very close to any arbitrary target, so long as they are all close to each other.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Goodbye Offpunk, Welcome XKCDpunk!

      For the last three years, I’ve been working on Offpunk, a command-line gemini and web browser.

      While my initial goal was to browse the Geminisphere offline, the mission has slowly morphed into cleaning and unenshitiffying the modern web, offering users a minimalistic way of browsing any website with interesting content.

  • Programming

    • worldclock.py: A low-effort (but hopefully useful) OFFLFIRSOCH contribution

      I am once again sharing a simple Python script (using only modules in Python’s standard library) for the OFFLine-FIRst SOftware CHallenge.