Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • moss and mushrooms

  • 02 June 2025

    Man, this was a strenuous weekend! We decided that after we now have a nice looking bathroom, it would be really nice if we also could get back a fully functioning kitchen in the part of the house that is not currently falling apart (...a story for another time...), so we began planning how to get the kitchen upstairs...

    Well, let me just say, hauling kitchen components with my wife three stories upwards while junior is having the time of his life laughing at us while we are moaning, groaning, cursing and somehow managing to get this stuff moved is really a team-building exercise. Three days later and we are now a few steps closer to living like somewhat sane human beings with a working kitchen, running hot and cold water and - you wouldn't believe it! - a dishwasher.

    On other news: Either i have started to getting allergic to something recently or another damn cold is approaching me, today i woke up with a somewhat sore throat and feeling somewhat beaten down. I am loving it...

  • Time On Range

    I finally found a range for air rifle shooting which felt like it fitted in with my time requirements. There are 2 about a mile away. The ideal has no spaces on the waiting list. A shame as it was a turn up and shoot affair. The second was specific times for specific specialisms, e.g. rim shot, air pistol and air rifle. The timings were a bit pants so it was going to be one of last resort.

    I have ended up at a club which is 12 miles away by Warwick. An easy and pleasant drive away so not bad. The ranges are open from 9 until 6 each day in the summer half of the year. There is a social meet up bit on a Sunday morning. Seems to work. Ideal. I went down for a taster session yesterday to see how things worked out.

  • currants

    does my skull hold magic
    are there things brewing
    blooming 
    blossoming 
    or is the steady low hum 
    of routines
    habits
    repeating patterns
    taking over
    is there anything to see
    but withering 
    what will it take to get from here to there
    to turn the grey into flourishing 
    like the currants in my backyard 
    seeds carried by birds 
    spreading
    rooting wherever they land
    

  • DMT report

    How to prepare for a DMT trip, well I don't really know, but I started to do this and that, listening to my inner voice.

    I cleaned the house very well yesterday, so that was already done. I even went to take care of recycling and the garbage. Around here you have to drive your garbage and pay a fee to discard them...

    I came back home with about 1.5 hour before my friend was to arrive.

    I started burning two stick of incense. Then I though that I should smudge the house. I use Palo Santo and a feather and went around the house to cleanse further. I broom the floor a second or third time, and then started on the sitting areas. I wanted to have my chair prep for the trip but also I wanted a bed with cushions and blankets ready in case we needed to lay down.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ABYNSTD Wordo: PHOTO

• Technology and Free Software

  • I've just implemented a Forth system

    It started out innocently enough—I just wanted to know how to implement the Forth word DOES>. I ended up implementing ANS Forth [1] for the 6809, as you do.

    I've had a fascination with Forth since college. I have a copy of both the first edition and the second edition of Starting Forth [2]. I have a copy of Thinking Forth [3] I also have a copy of Threaded Interpretive Languages [4] with the Robert Tinney cover art [5]. I even wrote my own Forth-like langauge in college, which I used for a class project and a few work-relelated programs.

    But the one concept I couldn't figure out how to implement was the Forth word DOES>. As a user of Forth, using DOES> is pretty easy and one of those things never thought about, much like closures to a JavaScript programmer. But implementing it? That was a problem.

    So in April I set out to do that, using the 6809 (because why not?) with the intent of figuring it out. I made a stab with it a few years ago, writing just enough of a Forth implementation in C and got it working. Barely. I wanted to do better.

  • Programming

    • re: Common Lisp is a Dumpster

      This post was originally just going to be an email but got out of hand in scope so I published it here lol. I'd recommend reading Dmitry's post, there's good points and some interesting obscure stuff mentioned in there.

      [...]

      Talking about it “they still had to do a bunch of work in order to migrate from previous implementations to Common Lisp.” One of the main drivers behind Common Lisp was to allow you to take code you wrote on your PC or VAX and run it on a Lisp Machine without needing to rewrite or modify it and vice-versa, which was actually realized because Symbolics added a Common Lisp wrapper; and you could get Common Lisp implementations, or Lisp implementations with a Common Lisp compatibility layer, for any platform academics would've been using at the time. So write once, run anywhere, a decade before Java! So they were very successful, it was so successful in fact that all the Lisp dialects that Common Lisp was compatible with died out, and now no one understands how valuable the compatibility was for CL's adoption.

      Continuing that though and about it being “too old”, one thing I love about CL is that I can take pretty complex code I wrote for a modern implementation without compatibility in mind, and have run it *literally unmodified* on an implementation from 1992.[1] And that implementation (Macintosh Common Lisp) was actually written before ANSI Common Lisp was even standardized, so it was based on Common Lisp the Language 2 (1990).