Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The Planck moment from Her cosmic finger-flick

    The arrow of time points forwards, yet directions are quite pointless from a cosmic perspective: to which direction is "upwards" when you're wandering through the spacetime continuum like the lonely twin Voyagers?

    Satellites are free falling towards a cosmic body without ever reaching its surface (and that's the very definition of "orbiting"), because they got enough horizontal/perpendicular velocity to circumnavigate the cosmic body's sphere of influence they're submitted to. However, there's no such thing as "perpendicular" direction (not in the classical sense) when it comes for chronological movement, because everything is undergoing a single yet complex vector: that very arrow of time. Things are chronologically free-falling towards the inescapable _some-when_, without any means to circumnavigate it.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AYGLOWD Wordo: SURER

  • one tiny gesture

    in my head I tell you 
    that one tiny gesture 
    that miniscule display of humanity 
    was more comforting I'd like to admit
    the void I've been screaming into 
    answering
    even if for a moment 
    even if 
    and the layer of sadness it inevitably caused
    the layer of hesitation, questioning 
    who even are you
    to strike a crack in the delicate shell
    shielding my isolation
    like I haven't been hammering
    from the inside
    all this time
    

  • iPhone, GoPro, tears

    I have a GoPro which I used to take a nice 6s video of a young whale when we went to the Maledives in 2024.

    [...]

    So I use my Linux Laptop to connect to the phone. And my wife's Mac is mounted via wifi, and it has the external hard disk where the videos should go. Current transfer speed is 1.3 MB/sec.

    Sometimes I do feel the bars of the golden cage. 😔

• Science

  • How to Unbias Dice

    The procedure assumes that each coin flip is independent (a given flip will not influence future flips) and that the probabilities of each result do not change from one flip to the next.

    Why does von Neumann's method work? Suppose a coin yields heads with probability p and tails with probability 1-p. Because each flip is independent and has constant probability, we can find the probabilities of all possible ordered result sets from two flips.

• Technology and Free Software

  • What I'm playing 🦉🏹 Gunfire Reborn, the looter shooter distilled

    Gunfire Reborn is a looter shooter with an Asian aesthetic and a short, but extremely replayable campaign, which runs for less than an hour. It supports four-player online co-op, but this time, I was running solo. In short, it's the full Borderlands experience without the questionable writing and Randy Pitchford.

    You travel across multiple lands to purge the corruption (an ARPG classic), fighting terracotta soldiers in their crypts, sniper birds in the desert, samurai fish at the shores, and polar bears up in the frozen mountains.

  • 🚲 Canyon Battery Replacement

    I’ve been one of the unlucky people caught up in the Canyon eMTB battery recall. Four models of batteries, used in a selection of their eMTBs, had defective cases that were liable to cracking. Probably not the sorta thing you want in a big-ass battery that’s liable to get wet, or muddy, or muddy and wet.

    I tend to ride most weeks, and bar the absolutely shit design of the mounting screws at the top of the battery – which threaded themselves IMMEDIATELY, and have been a liability ever since – I can’t say that I’d noticed anything wrong with my battery. It comes out after every ride, I clean it, and it looked perfectly fine to me. So I had a look on their website. They’d posted close-up photos of the sorts of failures to look out for (micro-cracks along the edges, and especially around the screw mounts) and sure enough, on reeeeally close inspection, I could see some teeny-tiny cracks along the case.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Who's looking at this? 🤔

      Who are the geminauts? Do you have an idea of who's reading what you write on here? I've always assumed that readers are mainly a geeky bunch, but not exclusively. I'm unconsciously writing for those imaginary people.

    • Hello world

      Wow, so smol