Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Sunrise Observations

    Lots of pink, as well as some yellow pink and some dark-pink, on the bottoms of flat clouds over hills to the East. The "pink" has a hint of orange. The clouds are puffy but flat, and not very thick. I can see the silhouette of a radio tower against the sunrise.

  • Tanana Ice Shard Forest

    The first half of my lunch break walk, up until about 12:30pm, was partly clouded and a little chilly, but then most of the sky cleared up, and the sun beat down warm and bright. Perhaps the most interesting feature was a "shard forest" I discovered along the bank of the Tanana River. Along a large swath of the bank, and maybe 10 or so feet out from it, the ice had partially melted. Remaining from the melt was many, many shards or spikes of ice, each about three to six inches long, that stuck up either from the water, or from a thin layer of snow on the water. The shards were criss-crossing each other, and in places they interconnected in flake-like or tree-like patterns. The shards were generally bent over such that the whole thing formed a mat or forest about three or four inches above the water. I realized my timing was fortunate, because the heat from the sun was causing the mat to rapidly disintegrate, so that every two or three seconds I could hear and see a clump of them collapse with a crashing noise.

  • Spruce Cone Study

    I found a fully opened, dried-out spruce cone on the ground. I observed that the scales are arranged as a set of spirals stacked above each other. This stack is six spirals deep, not counting a small flower-like set of scales at the top, which are shaped similar to a rose.

  • on the hunt for grandparents

    recently i came across a series of video lectures by Robert Paul Wolff on immanuel kant's critique of pure reason. 8 videos, 1 hour each, 2016 youtube uploads. I was immediately charmed by Wolff's alternating balance of theory and anecdote. I also found myself shamed by his Lecture-4 admonishment that I should be reading The Critique of Pure Reason alongside watching the lectures, and not just listening to the lectures contextlessly. ehehe... guilty. but this guy is just so captivating to listen to. I had to learn more.

    I searched Wolff's name to find his age, alongside his other works. well, he passed away in january of this year. he was 91. I just missed him. and I mean... i REALLY just missed him. it turns out this guy kept a super active blog. https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/ Comments are on, and he even read and responded to them sometimes. he checked his email. I mean, wow. if i had found out about him a year or two earlier, i could have reached out to this guy. i mean, i dont know id have much in particular to say... but his life overlapped with mine.

    his last blog post is from Nov 24 of last year, reminding commenters that the new president hasnt been sworn in YET. the comments are full of obituaries, tributes, and condolences, from jan 7th onward. from his colleagues, friends, students, longtime followers of the blog. someone copy-pasted the obituary his son Tobias wrote for him. (Wolff co-authored two of his books with herbert marcuse... pretty cool.) shortly after that, the comments section descends into trolling and other wildly inappropriate commentary to put in a virtual grieving space, because of course it did. internet. lets just brush past that part.

• Politics and World Events

  • Free Speech

    Supporting, enabling, or platforming bigotry and harassment is just as bad as supporting or enabling other forms of censorship since they are threats to free speech.

    No one did a “Voltaire” to support Khomeini’s “free speech” as he used his words to proclaim death to Rushdie. Everyone recognized that Khomeini’s words were murderous and stifling. That level of awareness is just as necessary when dealing with MAGA and Fox News. False balance is destroying us.

  • Sims 4 challenge: The Children of Cheesus

    Your Sim has no real direction in life. One day, they make a grilled cheese sandwich and have a revelation. They immediately decide to quit their job and devote their life to spreading the gospel of Cheesus.

    [...]

    Where your Sim lives and how is up to you. I started in an "abandoned" (off the grid) farmhouse, but you can start on any lot in any world.

    You can set cult outfits or not, as you choose.

    Mods are fair game.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Perfectionism in design

    Ouch. That hurt. Especially today.

    Today I spent the day pre-emptively improving the design of some data analysis thing I'm building, but don't yet have a working prototype for. I came home feeling defeated and frustrated. This has happened again and again, almost every working day, for the last three weeks at least. Looking back, I see that I'm focusing on making the design perfect this whole time. I could surely make a crappy version of that thing right now in an hour, and it's perfectionism that keeps me from it. Three weeks for an hour.

    Perhaps the lesson is not that perfectionism is bad, but that perfectionism is only good after you have something to show. Make it *exist* first, make it good later.

    I say this because, interestingly, I was able to get the glossary up and running yesterday from scratch in less than 24 hours. I had never touched XML before, had never written gemtext, and have no experience writing scripts to manipulate strings. Yet here it is. The glossary is readable, the formatting is fine, it has nice links and quotations and everything. This is certainly less scientifically interesting work than what I need to do for the PhD, but that does not mean it's less difficult. Yet here it is, in less than 24 h.

  • openBSD on my work computer

    I'm writing from my newly installed openBSD machine.

    (that part is working, writing and publishing on gopher!)

    It's my work laptop, and I am not sure if I'll be able to use it for this.

    I have a working openBSD server that works well for me, but I wanted to check if I was able to work regularly with it too.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Sharing our transient elpher menu

      Gijs [1] and I are sharing our Transient Menu for Elpher, entitled TMelpher.

      Elpher is the Gopher and Gemini Client, installable as an Emacs add-on. Here[2] is our attempt to make its menu always available using Transient

      The Readme file should make clear how to install and use our little tool.

      Happy Elphering!