Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Preparing for hard times

    Gopher writer gallowsgryph wrote about concern that financial hard times were coming due to a family member's health scare. I especially enjoyed the realism of this paragraph:

    Solar power is great when you can get it, but we live in stormy Tornado Alley. Rainwater collection is great, as long as you know how to use and filter it properly. Growing food is awesome, as long as you take care of your garden. Repairing things is great, so long as you can do it right.

    I'd squabble a little with the rainwater part. One of the places I lived in without running water in my youth had a nice sloped roof, so we caught rain in a collection of scavenged buckets, and used it without filtration to flush toilets, wash dishes, wash clothes, and mop. The thing is to keep the mosquito larvae out.

    Pooping in a bucket and covering it with sawdust is also not a bad way to live at all, especially if you get your hands on an invalid's bedside commode or build a nice support for your toilet seat. I'm not living that way right now, but we do compost, which keeps our trash from stinking and decreases how much must be hauled away.

  • Dusk at the cemetery's plaza

    Sunday dusk, I was sitting on the wooden bench at the plaza near the town's cemetery. There was this man, an elderly man, who came and sat on the same bench as me. Something slightly felt off with him, but I couldn't tell what it was, but all of a sudden, we started to talk.

  • Watched a movie

    I started movies again after some time recently I watched Old Boy a 2003 Korean movie. I found it pretty interesting really had me thinking me thinking and guessing. Have a few favorite parts of the movie but the one I still remember the best was the 3 minute fight scene without any cuts.

  • Alaska Range from UAF West Ridge (publ. 2025-04-19)

    After participating in a Good Friday service (2025-04-18) I stopped briefly at the lookout parking spot at UAF West Ridge (8:15pm). The sky was partly cloudly, but I had a great view of some mountains in the Alaska Range, which is about 60 miles S of Fairbanks. There were some spots covered by clouds or by downpours of distant rain, but in between those the view was crisp and vivid, with many mount ridges showing as white patches with dark blue shadows. One mountain to the south had multiple ridges jutting NE, in a mostly parallel formation. Looking at OpenTopoMap later, I believe this must have been the long ridges about 10 miles north of Keevy Peak.

  • Forays into my friends' heads

    The adage goes something along the lines of "to make music, one must listen to music".

    I've observed that I'm a very comfortable type of music enjoyer. I don't really explore out of my comfort zone. I don't really even explore new work of artists I already like and listen to. I'm content with the things I have already found. From the basis that listening to music should be an enjoyable experience, this fulfills that goal.

    However, if I want to make music, it should help that I expand my horizons a bit, and expose myself to stuff I haven't listened to. And suddenly, I was struck by the drive to actually do so.

    I've asked people I know, friends and colleagues, to suggest me an album they like and find interesting. One album is a pretty palatable chunk of music - a (typically) 45-60 minute sitting is perfectly doable. Multiple tracks from the same musician(s) provide variation in style and approach that asking for just a single favourite song from people couldn't capture. Also, asking for favourite songs might expand the to-do list quite quickly, as it's very easy to add to. But one album is good, it'll get you started. And from the musicians' side, it gives an opportunity to tell a story in all that time.

  • Palm Day cometh

    When the clock strikes midnight on December 31st 2031, Palm clocks will stop. From what I could gather, digging around on the WWW, Palm OS was not programmed to go past that date. All is not lost, because the devices themselves will continue to work.

    In my digging around on the WWW, I found this: https://garyc.me/calendars/ "You can recycle your old calendars by using them again!" On that page we see the year 2032 will have the same layout as 2004. So, come 2032, I shall turn the calendar on my Palm device back to 2004 and continue on my merry way. That is, if no one has come up with a patch by then.

• Politics and World Events

  • The Contradictions of Mark Carney

    A few chapters into Mark Carney's 2021 book 'Value(s)', I must have had a sour look on my face, because my spouse asked me what was wrong. I explained what the book was, and started to read a couple paragraphs out loud. She winced and cut me off almost immediately: "What is this, a textbook?"

    It was a fair question: Value(s) often reads like course material, with Carney rattling off a history of markets, theories of value, and responses to some of the many economic shocks and crises endured over the last couple centuries. It's generally pretty dry stuff, often repetitive, and the rare attempts at humour - there was something about soy latteccinos, for instance - don't really land. At points I got the distinct feeling that Carney was intentionally trying to weed out any casual readers. A 2021 review[1] of Value(s) in The Times complains that "Carney never seems sure who the book is for".

• Technology and Free Software

  • Blog Questions Challenge: Technology Edition

    To tell the truth, I can’t think of a time I wasn’t interested in technology. We always had a family computer growing up and it seemed like magic to toddler me.

    I grew up playing all sorts of games. One that especially stands out looking back was a mod for Half-Life called Digital Paintball. My dad was big into paintballing at the time (I even remember him bringing me along to a tournament or two!), and part of the hobby for him was hosting a Digital Paintball server.

    I think the main reason this game stands out to me now isn’t so much the game itself but more that it sort of introduced me to the kind of unique shared experiences that tech makes possible. At this time we had enough computers around the house for both my brothers and I to all play together. Sometimes it was online on our dad’s server, but more often it was just us messing around together on the LAN.

    It wasn’t just games though. By the age of three I was basically impossible to film because any time the video camera came out I’d drop what I was doing and run over to gaze through it. As I got older my dad introduced me to some of the basics of web design and programming and things sort of kept going from there.

  • My new favorite android virual keyboard

    Recently I got a new phone since because everything nowadays relies on js frameworks my old one is too slow at opening apps. While searching for a virtual keyboard to replace stock one I have found Unexpected Keyboard.