Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Glorious Saturday Morning (publ. 2025-04-14)

    Winter clings on doggedly here in Fairbanks, and despite much warmer temperatures, and some very sunny days, we are still getting occasional dumps of snow. But last Saturday (2025-04-12) was a beautiful day, and Emily and I were able to step outside for the sunrise at 6:25am. Our yard is not an ideal place to watch the sunrise, as the horizon is obscured in every direction by trees and houses, but one can still have a good experience sometimes.

    When I stepped outside at 6:25 the sky was mostly clear except for clouds to the NE, which were thick, but stretched outwards at the edges. There were gentle hints of pink along these edges. From these edges, the sky turned gradually into a white-blue, then a light blue, then a darker blue toward my zenith, and then light blue again toward the west. I observed some light pink color also near the horizon toward the south.

  • Analog: Comparator

    I was very busy with some other things for a week or two, but I am working on my analog computer again. Right now I am adding a comparator to the board. The Grappendorf schematics I have been following do not have a schematic for a comparator, so I started with the comparator design in the Analog Thing (THAT) schematics. However, THAT uses Schmitt-Trigger inverters, which require a 5V supply, and I didn't want to mess around with that. So, I decided to just replace those with another inverting op amp, and to feed the op amp signals directly into the DC212B analog switch inputs. These analog switches have protection built-in so current is automatically limited to a max 20 mA, so I didn't both with any kind of current limiting of my own, though perhaps that would have been the proper thing to do. The switches will work with +/- 15V supply and a GND connection.

  • Fisheyes, Mixtapes, and Innocent bystanders: A Love Letter To The Skate Video

    I vaguely recollect the first time I realized my relationship with skateboarding would be an on-and-off game. I was about ten or eleven, and I had brought my friends to the skatepark for my birthday. I had been into the whole thing for a while. As kids do, I got an adrenaline rush from playing a Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 copy on my PlayStation 2 that I found for four euros in one of those now-defunct crappy game stores. You know, the ones that used to sell big fat joysticks with a thousand and one shady emulated and pixelated games; you would hook it up to your boxy CRT television and play games ranging from frogger to Formula 1. Yes, I had that one too, it was in a Darth Vader design.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — AEFNRYU Wordo: OGRES

• Technology and Free Software

  • People who hate reading

    (looks at a message longer than 50 words)

    why are you typing so much?

    in *my* school i never need to read this much

    no this is totally your problem for typing so much

    i ain't reading all dat anyways @someone how's this game like?

    text wall again

    can you talk less i just want an explanation why are you so annoying

    shut up you nerd

  • Internet/Gemini

    • FormerWeb: Re-discovering Web 1.0

      Gemini is a reaction, a bi-product, of a broken Web. But is Gemini, and other smolWeb projects like it, necessarily the answer? Isn't our retreat into Gemspace just detaching ourselves from the reality of the modern Web; hiding away in our little corner while those issues that drove us here continue unabated in that "other place"?

      HansBrix wrote a post recently announcing their departure from Gemspace on the basis of this very idea. It got me thinking.