Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 08 June 2025

    This was one of those "murky" weeks... after i finished my project last week i now had the duty to bring more of our salespeople online and fix some of the surfacing bugs. Well, it was somewhat of a success, now at least a bit over the half of our salespeople are using my system and most of them are quiet happy.

    Now... i am thinking if i can build a terminal variant of this app just for the lols (and perhaps one or two of our sales-guys who like "the old ways"). CouchDB is pretty friendly as it can be easily controlled via curl, and - at least in theory - just a bit shell scripting should suffice to make up a quiet useable system... well, lets see what the next, somewhat short week will bring.

    Today we were at the local "Pfingstmarkt" and spend some time there in a rain free window, junior is now really keen on riding carousels, so we spend most of the time (and most of the Euros) with this activity. Other than that we moved our furniture around to enable us to start applying new wallpapers tomorrow... a task i really am not looking forward to.

  • What if English had an ஃ?

    ஃ is a letter in the Tamil language, pronounced roughly like 'uck'. Every schoolchild and foreign learner is taught this character, usually just after the twelve vowels. But ஃ is not a vowel. Nor is it a consonant. Nor is it actually used in spelling any words in modern Tamil.

    ஃ originally represented a breathy 'h' sound used in Old Tamil and its other archaic Dravidian sister-languages. This sound no longer exists in modern Dravidian languages, but the ஃ was recycled as a grammatical marker. Today, it is used to represent sounds from foreign languages that Tamil doesn't have, like an English 'f' (ஃப) or the breathy 'kh' in Genghis Khan, which would be written கெங்கிஸ் ஃகான், reading like: 'kengkis ஃkaan'.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Using Nitride - Pipelines

    I found a good way of working on a project is being able to see the end product. That means forging a minimal path from the start to end, and then going back to flesh it out. Interestingly, this is the opposite of how I write novels because, in those, the journey is the important part. Not so much with development projects.

  • Game Ramblings

    I was big fan of Splitgate 1, I played it a ton. One of those rare fast paced FPS games, nowadays most FPS games are slow and sluggish. Well, at least to me, a Quake player.

    I was excited to play Splitgate 2 but the game has some issues with mouse sensitivity: It keeps over/undershooting and just being weird.

    Then people leave the matches immediately if things don't go their way. I don't get this.