Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — FHILSWU Wordo: TUMMY

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ACOJLMI Wordo: VEINS

  • 🔤SpellBinding — PEGHINC Wordo: FATSO

  • 🔤SpellBinding — CHIROPM Wordo: LAKES

  • 🔤SpellBinding — BDETNOK Wordo: WITCH

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ADENUXW Wordo: RUNES

  • 🔤SpellBinding — GHLMOTY Wordo: HILLY

  • Musings of 2025-09-04

    This is going to be a short one, folks.

    I'm already up way too late and I haven't taken a shower yet. Nor have I eaten dinner.

    Life is beautiful. There are so many things to be thankful for. I am ignorant of many of them; however, I do see beauty and goodness and truth in the world.

    Don't be a doomer. They cannot ruin existence itself.

  • Outdoor Updates for Fall 2025

    I didn't post anything in August about outdoor activities, whereas earlier in the summer I was sharing notes about flowers observed and such like. There were several reasons for this, but a big one is that I recently started jogging, and, as usual, the only convenient time I had available for that was during the lunch break. So, I was busying jogging during the time I might otherwise be looking at plants or taking notes. The weather is touch and go right now, with a lot of rainy days, so I'm trying to get out and do some jogging every time the conditions are half-way decent.

    A few notes perhaps worth sharing:

    Back in early August, I got to enjoy some good high-bush cranberry from the patch I know about out near the Tanana River. I just ate them straight off the bushes. I found some raspberry bushes out there as well, and the raspberries were tasty as always. I even got the family to come out and help me pick raspberries, though there were a lot less bushes than I had imagined, and we could barely fill up the bottom of one bucket.

• Technology and Free Software

  • THAT Ordered

    I finally ordered my THAT (The Analog Thing) analog computer from Anabrid. They confirmed that they had received the parts, and had started assembling the units, so it was safe to place my order. The cost of the unit — shipped to the USA, was $548 USD + $35 USD S/H.

    One obstacles was that I did not realize that my NetSpend pre-paid card, which I needed to use for the purchase, has a whopping 4% additional fee on international purchases, which came out to $23.32 in this case. I'm curious if that is unique to NetSpend or if regular bank debit cards all have that. Anyway, after my first attempt to place the order failed, I had to reload the card again to get the extra money available for that, which meant another $3.95 fee. Rather annoying.

  • EPPALOCK ROOPHLOCK

    I've still been keeping quiet here on the phlog. For much of this week at least that's because I've been on my longest dam holiday yet. One night in Tatura, near Shepparton, and two nights in Alexandra, with ten dams and reservoirs in between. Right now I'm at the eleventh, Atop the Eppaloch Dam. It's a dam that not only forms the expansive and picturesque Lake Eppalock, but is also accompanied by the nearby township of Eppilock. Which I guess is why I actually get phone reception here in order to send this from my "holiday latop", the Eee PC 701 which I haven't really used since my last proper holiday a couple of years ago, my rail adventure to Pyramid Hill etc.. Of couse I looked again at the traiin lines to Bairnsdale where I originally planned to go then, and of course again the line to Bairnsdale was closed for at least the next week, and the local line was closed for half the week. So I gave up on that nonsense and just went by car, which honestly is far less stressful, at least since my old Jag has been behaving itself very well so far (though wooden picnic bench!).

    Since I still haven't refilled my 35mm film stash, I've gone all modern and digital with my 2003 Olympus point-and-shoot. In fact these days holding that up might look even weirder to fellow tourists than using a film camera, but few other tourists go to dams in the first place, the main visitoors here are passing behind me towing flashy speedboats to the various boat ramps elsewhere at the lake's many offshoots.

  • Hardware review: ergonomic mouse Logitech Lift

    In addition to my regular computer mouse, by the end of 2024 I bought a Logitech Lift, a wireless ergonomic vertical mouse. This was the first time I used such mouse.

  • Hardware review: ergonomic mouse Logitech Lift

    The mouse works with a single AA / LR6 battery that with a heavy daily use for nine months is still reported as 30% charged.

    The lift connects using Bluetooth, but Logitech provides a small USB dongle that make it work out of the box on your system. The dongle can be stored within the mouse when travelling, or when not using it. There is a small button on the bottom of the mouse and 3 LED, this allows the mouse to be switched to different computers: two in Bluetooth, one for the dongle. The first profile is always the dongle. This allows you to connect the mouse to two different computers with Bluetooth and be able to switch between them. This works very well in practice.

    About the buttons, nothing fancy with the standard two buttons, there are extra "back / next" buttons easily available, one button to cycle the laser resolution / sensitivity. The wheel is excellent, it is precise and easy to use, but if you give it a good kick it will spin a lot without being in free wheel like some other wheels, which is super handy to scroll a huge chunk of text.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • DIY Gemini Servers...

      I am kind of tired of bending over backwards to code CGI games running behind a server built for an entirely different purpose.

      I am just going to write my own. This is easier than what I am doing now, opening and closing users and game state databases and loading the same stupid files for every click.

      The game logic is really, really fast with the game pre-loaded. User data is likewise in RAM. The only variable is the network.

      I could write a simple async server which could handle like 10,000 in-flight concurrent requests. It's likely an overkill, since I doubt I've had any concurrent requests so far. Or maybe a couple.

    • Beginnings

      Hello, small web. This is a fresh remort—fresh paint, fresh paths, fresh intentions. I don’t know exactly what this capsule will become yet, only that I wanted a place that feels slower and simpler than the big, busy web.

      The small web is the web I miss: low-stakes, human-sized, and mostly text. No banners, no tracking, no algorithmic nudging—just things people make and share. Here I’ll post short logs, tinker-notes (retro machines, Emacs, odd protocols), and whatever else fits in the quiet.

  • Programming

    • I'm glad that I know some C

      I've been writing code in C for about 20 years now. Never as a profes- sional C programmer and I don't dare saying "I know C", because of the many pitfalls. But still, I've been using it for quite a while now and I think that I have a "good enough" grasp of it.

      There are many reasons why I like it. One of them came up today at work:

      *Sometimes*, one of our Python scripts would fail with "too many open files". I was able to debug this in a relatively short time thanks to C. I won't go into the details, it's boring.

      But the thing is: I could quickly write a little debug example in C. And since this is C, it a) is (relatively) low-level and b) (mostly) does exactly what you tell it to. The problem at hand had to do with dealing with file descriptors and I could be pretty sure that nothing in the C library/runtime gets in the way. When an FD is open, then it's open, end of discussion. There is no garbage collection or auto-cleanup or what- ever -- these things exist in other languages and they can make debug- ging hard at times.