Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • A VM so tiny that it even fits on a HP 12C

    Picture this. It's 1983, the year before the year of our Lord Orwell, and you are a 7-to-12-year-old kid living in a rather developed country who just found out that personal computers already exist and are spreading across homes. Of course, your family quickly lets you know that not only a home PC, but even a portable BASIC one with a single-line screen or a mere programmable calculator is something prohibitively expensive to buy for someone as young as you. But you still wanna learn at least something about computers as your bright and fresh mind (rightfully) sees them as the future of technology. You don't miss any tech-related TV shows in the time free from school and homework. When suddenly... You see a solution to your dilemma demonstrated right on one of those shows: a working computer model that fits on a sheet of paper. You quickly grab a pencil and a sheet of paper, redraw what they show on the TV screen, note the set of five very simple instructions and finally start writing your own programs. You enjoy the process even though you have to execute every step by yourself. Believe it or not, this is how a lot of German children got into programming in 1983, when "Der Know-How Computer" had been demonstrated in the WDR Computerclub TV show.

  • Star Wars Day

    So I'm a little late to Star Wars Day, which really takes place on May 25th, the anniversary of Star Wars' birth back in 1977.

    Nearly every year I have the intention of bingeing every* movie in that 24-hour period. Pretty much every year, I fail. This year, I decided I wasn't going to let it happen: there was a long weekend and May 25th was right in the middle of it. Granted I didn't TOTALLY follow through, I watched 1-3 on May 24th and 4-6 on May 25th.

    It was great. I fell in love with Star Wars again. I had been avoiding it for many reasons, not the least of which is I watched it as a child more than most people watch in their lifetimes. I memorized the script to all 3 movies (before there were more). I watched them over and over again and a kid: every other day was my turn to choose a movie to watch after school. Every time I chose Star Wars. That went on for months.

  • How I Try to Ethically Cite Dated Anthropology

    A couple of years ago, I wrote a paper about clowns for the DIY, Alternative Cultures & Society journal, titled "The Circus of Liberation: Clowning as Social Creativity in Insane Clown Posse's Dark Carnival" (Begg, 2024). In it, I argue that the Midwestern hip-hop band Insane Clown Posse (ICP) don't just dress up like clowns, but are using clowning as a technique to create an egalitarian working-class community.

    The anthropology of clowning is a weird, wonderful, and pretty dated sub-field. Most of the clown theory I was using was published in the 1970s and 1980s, and is itself often based on ethnographies of Indigenous peoples from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. All this is solidly part of the grandiose modernist project we now call classical anthropology.

    I love classical anthropology. It is a tradition with a startling humanity, which has given us universal concepts like taboo, kinship, and value. These gifts remain relevant today, and I think it is a shame that this body of work isn't more widely known among young anthropologists or taught in intro classes. But it is not always easy to work with, either. The research I drew on while writing my paper is full of analysis of taboos, symbolism, ritual boundaries and other stuff that, frankly, nobody cares much about any more. More urgently, a lot of classical ethnographic sources can be ethically dubious and may be full of unreliable cultural analysis.

  • calm weekend and DMT

    The days are gentler on me lately. After my letting go of my childhood trauma of abandonment, everything seems lighter. The first couple days were ecstatic, but reality comes back in.

    I am still alone, I still miss her. But the suffering is different, it's not as intense, it's not really suffering, more of a melancholy. Which is nice, like a rain in spring.

    I was really looking forward for this weekend. Alone, cleaning the house, fasting for a bit, using castor oil to help. I feel good. I'm generally not hungry, and I want to get back into the rhythm of eating when I am hungry.

• Technology and Free Software

  • My security day

    Made backups of three laptops and the external disk where we keep our media to one of our set of external backup disks, and took those to the office about 2 km away from where we live, exchanging them for the other set of external backup disks which we had there. One set is always outside of the house. Not sure whether that would help in an urban disaster like an earthquake or a flood, but it would at least help against a fire or a burglary.

  • Scanner art

    Last summer, after I had installed the newest linux version of the flavour I've settled with, my scanner stopped working and I found no workaround. A few days ago I made a new vigorous effort. It wasn't obvious and took a full afternoon of searching for arcane issues people have had some ten years ago, before things gradually began to fall in place. Finally the scanner was recognised, then after a few more tweaks I actually got it working. Although half the time it refuses to do anything, but that's just how it behaves. The solution is to turn it off and wait till the next day before trying again. Another solution would be to throw it away and buy a new one. But to dispense of clunky electronics I would need a car, which means taking a taxi or asking some friend to drive me. So I've kept the scanner since I bought it with my first computer in 2002. The brand is notorious for their planned obsolesence through software updates and other mischiefs. Actually mine is also a printer, but that part is even more delicate to get running, not to mention the price of ink cartdridges. I still don't have a camera, so if I want to share anything visual it will have to go through the scanner.

  • Koss PortaPros repair

    Something like six years ago I bought a pair of Koss PortaPro headphones. Yeah, yeah, they're overhyped meme headphones in some online circles. I make no miraculous claims regarding them, they simply sound clearly above average for the price to me (I forget exactly what I paid for them, at a physical Clas Ohlson store in Sweden, but I remember thinking it was surprisingly cheap). The build quality is not exceptional, but perfectly reasonable for the price. The foam earpads got stretched out and saggy over the years. Because they are overhyped meme headphones, it was easy to buy after-market replacement pads online, even larger/plusher "upgrade" pads, which I appreciate. But recently the cable on my pair wore out near the jack. For a few months it was still usable - very occasionally the audio would cut out or get scratchy, but if I wiggled the cable a little it would quickly be fine again. The situation slowly but surely got worse, of course, and eventually they became basically unusable.

  • Koss PortaPros repair

    I bought a replacement jack to rectify the situation, since the headphones were otherwise perfectly serviceable and soldering a jack to some wires is not especially hard.