Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Some Books

    I've had a hard time reading, so I've recently tried to focus on shorter books. Here are one-sentence summaries of my latest reads, most of which are a revisiting of William Gibson's work.

    Neuromancer (William Gibson, 1984): I've read this about once a year since I was twenty, and I can't stop myself.

    Count Zero (William Gibson, 1986): I'll never forget the art-museum curator tracking down the diorama-making robot in space.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — EFLSTZU Wordo: FETED

  • Babies and Capital

    For capital, new people that come into this world, a.k.a. babies , have negative value. Either because of the credit debt created by previous people in banks inherited by new people, either/also because it costs a lot of money to maintain a baby.

  • review of Molecule 8.5ml Discovery Set

    in other news, my current fling called me 6 times while i was sleeping because i didn't text him back immediately... so i'm either going to the beach today or biking to get an elaborate bagel, wearing Molecule 03 now and not looking at my phone...

  • lost in lore

• Technology and Free Software

  • Barbarian - The Ultimate Warrior

    There's a fighting game from 1987 where barbarians chop each other's heads off. It was released on multiple platforms. It was quite fun to play back in the day. When I learned about the library 'pygame', I immediately wanted to make a remake. But I couldn't do it on my own... Much later I came across remakes with source code in BASIC: [...]

  • My Little Review for the RG35XXSP Retro Handheld Console

    This handheld retro-console was released in 2024 and therefore there are a plethora of reviews and videos about it, and you may already know everything about it. For the ones who hear about it for the first time, I can briefly say this console captured the attention cause it resembles very much the glorious Gameboy Advanced SP, with its peculiar clam-shell form factor.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Ban autonomous systems

      Here are a few links about dealing with the recent influx of server-killing bots attacking just about everything.

    • Oddmuse and the Butlerian Jihad

      So what about that old wiki software that's been serving me so well for more than twenty years?

      Back then, Recent Changes or a search for a page title was implemented as a GET request. The idea was that it would be possible to bookmark or share such links. But what has happened instead is that the web scrapers are losing themselves in a gazillion dynamic pages, trying to ingest them. And since searches and filters are expensive operations, this drives up the load of the system hosting the wiki.

  • Programming

    • Task queue in without Channel in go

      I don't know go, never use it before, but I want to learn it. I heard that go has something call `go routine` that can perform a task in another thread. Lot of people recommend using go channel, however it very complicate to me. So I thought "Why don't I implement download queue myself?"

      Lets start with translating bash to go. I used os.ReadFile (to read links file), split file content by newline, then I got an array of urls. To download those urls, os.StartProcess is used to spawn curl (Why use net/http when there are curl :P ). Wrap download function in a loop, single threaded download script is ready.