Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • slammed

    And so begins my least favorite part of being a school librarian: The part of the year where everyone else slacks off except for exam prep, but I am absolutely slammed.

    Book fair ended last week, so this week has been genrefying the fiction section, re-assembling all the furniture after a month of art show/book fair, wrangling overdue books and end-of-year fines, and wondering how it is I'm ending the year with a processing and cataloging backlog that is twice as large as the one I started with.

    Of course, no one else in the building sees the problem. It's almost summer vacation! Why is Molly so stressed?!

  • A Hiking GPS

    There has been some talk in telem (local BBS) on zaibatsu.circumluar.space, about old hiking GPSes. The thread is on the RETROCOMP board, titled Garmin eTrex Venture, and was started by solderpunk. It make me recall the Garmin GPS 12, which a friend of mine had in the late 90s. It was the first GPS unit I had ever seen, and the idea that one could track their location using satellites was amazing to me back then. It still is, I'm just more used to it now.

    The thread also got me recalling that I have always wanted a hiking GPS that isn't connected to some privacy-robbing cell plan. So, I took to ebay as solderpunk had done, with the goal of finding a unit in the $20 range. I came out with a Magellan eXplorist 210. After some odd drama with the USPS (the thing took a few days to show up on the tracking radar, then it sat in Kansas City for a couple days, then it sat in Columbia for two more days for no apparent reason, before finally arriving here four days after the projected delivery date), it is finally here.

  • Tanana Observations 2025-05-07 and 2025-05-09

    I am enjoying some especially striking and beautiful cumulus clouds off in the far distance, near the S and E horizons. The particular AZ and EL of the sun at the moment — the sun looks to be around 45° above the horizon — are making the tops of the clouds very bright white, and the bottom of the clouds dark gray. Many fine details, including many streaks of white, are visible coming down along the sides of each cloud.

  • Driving to Grabovac

    Today not much happened. We ate breakfast, packed our stuff and drove to Grabovac. The roads were small and progress was slow. The 125km took us a long time. And when we arrived, we had a siesta two hours long.

    Claudia isn’t feeling too well. At first we thought she had picked up a stomach bug somewhere but then we saw that the bottled water she was drinking (Donat) contained 1000mg of magnesium! She drank one and half litres of it for a few days. And as they say, beyond 250mg/day it starts getting weird and closer to 2500mg/day it gets dangerous.

• Technology and Free Software

  • BIAS IN THE ONTOLOGY OF TOOLS

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Nice personal website

      This is kind of a scrapbooky thing that collects all kinds of stuff about having a nice personal website if Gemini is too restrictive for what you want to do.