Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Life goes on, people move on

    Then he got up and walked away. I was still questioning myself, mentally: how did a stranger trusted a phone to another stranger? Sure, I'm not a mischievous person, so I waited without fussing with his phone. I couldn't help but notice how the app wasn't pinned so if it wasn't me holding his phone, another person could easily mess with his Facebook and nobody-knows-what other apps he had (I know about Facebook because it was the screen before he opened the camera app close to me)

    Moments later, he appeared hugging a woman. Both were a couple (pun intended) meters away from where I was sitting. I pointed his own smartphone in their direction, pinched a bit to zoom, then I pressed the button to start recording.

    I tried to do my best: I'm no photographer but I do know some things about shutter speeds, ISO, angles, perspectives, light and white balance, scene transitions and movements, digital and manual stabilization. I don't shake (only when I'm anxious, and I wasn't anxious that day), so I could kind of make the camera follow them as if I was using a physical camera stabilizer with gyroscope and other fancy techs.

  • thoughts of an ex-poet

    A few nights ago, my boyfriend and I drove to a nearby observatory to look at the strawberry moon. For whatever reason, the observatory is currently closed, so we sat beneath an oak tree and watched it in silence. It was the kind of experience I could have written a poem about, but I found my mind as empty as the late-night streets. That is to say: very.

    All my life I have been a poet. I seem to have been born with words exploding forth from my lips or my fingers, scribbled on the back of elementary math worksheets or hastily typed into Google Docs. Poetry is the basis of how I articulate my experiences; I think highly abstractly, and the figurative and artistic nature of poems transcribes my thoughts into comprehensiveness.

• Technology and Free Software

  • In a previous post I recommended, even if you're using all free tools, sticking close to AdaCore's GNATPro choices for dependencies. But there is an alternative, the somewhat coherent culture that obtained in the Ada Software Repository circa 1991. Critically, note that this was applied to command-line utilities that transformed input files to output files (perhaps following the Software Tools philosophy), there may be hidden limitations. You could view this as retrocomputing, preparation for collapse, or plain contraryism.

  • Restructing

    In my experiments with multilingual capsules, I will probably stop at the variant with separate directories `/<lang>/`. It simplifies addressing inside *.gmi, you do not need to add the suffixes `-<lang>.gmi`, and there is less a mess in the directories.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • The Gopher server is back online

      The content is a little bit different, lots of dead stuff has been removed. It's mostly just the phlog now.

    • Freezr "P.E.B.C.A.K." ⌨️ GeminiSpace.Club next to expire ⌛

      Hello geminauts, for all the people still subscribed to "GeminSpace.Club", I must remind you that domain will expire on July 11. You have lesser than 30 days to switch to "Pebcak.Club".

      Besides that I update this server from FreeBSD 14.2 to 14.3, the operation went smooth and everything is running fine!

      Hopefully this summer I should have find to publish something, my side project is absorbing all my spare time… 😩

  • Programming

    • A Basic Timer Script

      I keep coming up with ideas for OFFLFIRSOCH in months that aren't March.

      When I play with twisty puzzles such as Rubik's Master Cube, I often want to time myself and solve the puzzle as quickly as I can. I own a timer that is activated by placing my hands on two sensors, but sometimes I don't have access to the timer or it's inconvenient. At such times, I usually go to a Web site that has a virtual timer, but that requires an Internet connection and a JavScript-compatible browser.

      Today I decided to write my own tool to output times. The following script simply takes the current time as a start time when I press the spacebar, then when I press the spacebar again, it subtracts the start time from the current time and outputs the result. Pressing any other key immediately exits the script. Prompts are printed to STDERR, so if I use 'tee' or a similar program to save my results, all I get are the raw times.