Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Revitalizing an Amazon Fire TV Stick

    Anytime I go on a trip with my wife, we like to watch the 2014 Wes Anderson film "The Grand Budapest Hotel." We usually bring my laptop with us so we can play the film on the hotel's TV. However, the HDMI port on my Dell Inspiron 3153 is beginning to fail, so we need to use a different device going forward.

    Luckily, we still had an Amazon Fire TV stick from 2016 tucked away in a drawer. The model we own is the second generation, which runs a modified version of Android 5 Lollipop. Thanks to the developers at XDA, this version of the Fire TV stick can be rooted and flashed with an unofficial build of LineageOS 12.1. Interestingly, installing TWRP involves disassembling the device, removing a heat shield, and shorting two pins on the board!

  • Thinking in complete sentences

    2 weeks ago, I started working through Sam Harris' introductory course to meditation, after reading about Manu Moreale going through it as part of his experimental June.

    I didn't do it through the app because fuck apps; the content is dubiously legally available on Internet Archive. I'm 17 days in so far, and it's been... something.

    I want to work on mindfulness. I'm really bad about dissociating often, and not taking the step back needed to identify when I'm doing it. I've also written several times now about struggling to identify what I want; I'm hoping mindfulness will help me to better identify those feelings and connect to them. I'm not sure that's happened.

    Waking Up puts a big focus on a kind of external observation of consciousness. The instructor regularly pushes the idea of sensations arising in the same place as our thoughts; the feeling of the body in chair is felt in the same place as the noises of our environment appear, and this is the same place thoughts appear. It's a tough thing for me to conceptualize. I feel, at moments, like I might maybe have divorced the sensation of my hands from the shape of them, so that they simply hang in my mind, but it feels like I'm doing it wrong. And I'm not sure it's the type of thing I want to focus on, anyways.

  • less broken

    Sometimes creations are perfect as is, other times they are functional trash fires, or somewhere in between.

    I've been confronted with some significant life challenges of late, and in addition to the predictable consumption of large amounts of chocolate covered nuts, I've been doing lots of little physical and digital tidings up. Something soothing about fixing lots of loose ends, when the world is seeming to unravel.

• Technology and Free Software

  • DAW Mixer Chains

    Mixer routing in a DAW can become as complicated as you want it to be. First steps might be to separate out each instrument into its own channel, then route groups of instruments (strings, the drums, etc) into a channel, and then that group channel to the master. This allows one to adjust the volume on only the kick drum, or instead on the channel that is the group of drums. Effects can also be applied where need be, perhaps on a grouping channel so the effects need not be put on each and every instrument, to better avoid running into CPU limitations.

  • In need for simple software

    I'm still sorting my thoughts on this.

    There have been communities in the past that focused on "simple software". First of all, I do not yet have a good definition of what that actually is. Second, these communities/projects are either dead or they have problematic members.

    I have a feeling that we have lost some of these values and the general way of thinking. One of the results is that I'm getting increasingly frustrated with many modern software.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • A gemini server framework called LC19

      LC19 is the name of my gemini server framework for elixir inspired by rails. The main reason I wanted to write yet another gemini server from scratch is that I like the rails way of convention over configuration, and haven't found any for gemini. I also wanted to write it in elixir because I'm a big fan of the langauge. I'm aware of the phoenix framework for elixir but when I used it, I always felt that it was very complex and abstracted. Some things off the top of my head: