Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • new year, new...

    Me? I suppose so.

    2025 was NOT a good year for me. Or anyone, really. Yet I managed to persevere. I don't want to dwell too much on the bad, so let's see what exactly I've been able to accomplish for my personal good.

    One thing I accomplished was to lose weight. A lot of it. It wasn't intentional; I just started walking to alleviate my anxiety. I would walk for 30 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes for lunch, and an hour and 20 minutes after dinner. I managed to cut down the walking to just morning and evening because the weight loss was sudden, too sudden. I lost a lot of good clothes because they were all too loose, and many of them couldn't be mended to fit me. 25 pounds! I feel lighter and better than ever before!

    Another thing I accomplished was to go out and be with friends again. It wasn't easy. Most of my friends are scattered across the country. The few still living here never had much time to hang out. Nevertheless, I persisted in going out, and one thing I remembered that used to unnerve me was that it's remarkably easy for me to make friends. I even had a couple of dates! They were duds, but hey, progress is progress.

  • The mind tv

    Stopping watching the tv created a desire to unplug further. I though at first it would be more of a digital cleanse, but something else happened.

    The So-Hum practice came back to me. It's a very simple practice, you recite 'So' on the inhale and 'hum' on the exhale. So simple that you can practice that all day. Instead of taking time in the morning to do this practice, I come back to it at any time during the day. Mostly during the in- between, when someone leave, when I am in the bathroom, while writing in the morning.

  • On noise

    I create noise Every time I write more noise is created

    It's also random noise No one search for the noise I am creating

  • Making Sense

    If it make sense it's not the truth yet Continue on your path until it doesn't make sense anymore.

    There you can rest, let go of your mind and realize your own essence

• Technology and Free Software

  • I bought a "new" ThinkPad!

    Lacking anything sparking much joy in my life, I bought myself a new ThinkPad.

    While dicking around with a RISC32 board that I got for free from AliExpress (a story for another time), I stopped myself from downloading yet another questionable chinese toolchain. I realized that it's irresponsible to do so on the same computer I use for banking.

    So I looked on EBay, and went down (or up) -- a rabbit('s) hole. All those ThinkPads I can buy!

    In case you are not indoctrinated, ThinkPads are the most incredible machines you can buy today. Screw Framework -- you can pick up a magnesium-cased machine with a relatively recent processor for a couple of hundred dollars. And you can get cheap parts, open it up and repair it. Or replace the LCD for a higher resolution one.

    Also (from experience) you can spill a liter of water directly onto the keyboard without any bad consequences. Turn it off, dry it out, and be more careful next time. Although I do not recommend it, true story.

    The first ThinkPad I got was during Covid -- a $75 T470 with an 6th-gen I5 with 16GB RAM. I did have to get a power supply, a couple of batteries, a caddy and a drive, so by the time I was done it was over $200, but still! It quickly became my main travel machine -- with most memory.

  • Japanese input on SHARP Zaurus

    I didn't know. There are some software ways for doing so but there is a button on the keyboard which switches the input from hardware keyboard to the most practical mode: one writes in Latin (Romanji) and software replace it instantly with Hiragana characters. When the space is pressed then the Hiragana is replaced with Kanji symbols (if applicable). If the space is pressed once more then menu appears with other possible Kanji and/or Katakana meanings. It's normal on the desktop but I didn't expected that it will work so well there.

    Thus, for now, my HARP SL6000N fills most of my needs in this area - I'm able to write the word I heart and to get the proper writing of it (and with help of the ZBDict dictionary also its meaning). If I see unknown Kanji I'm able to write it with use of virtual drawing pad (with some difficulty...). The only missing thing is pronunciation as I know no application or dictionary file for the Zaurus which has it.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Anticipating 2026

      The annual tradition of intro/retrospection is upon us, as 2025 wraps up and a new year begins.

      I don't generally like to share future plans because I can't commit to actually following through with any of them, due to limitations on time and/or energy. Sometimes it feels like future plans have a bit of Heisenberg's indeterminacy to them, in that you can either discuss them or implement them, but never do both. There's something to holding an idea close to the vest, enjoying that extra boost of excitement about revealing the surprise only once finished.

      Anyway, this is more of a note-to-self kind of post about things I'd like to get around to working on, focusing on projects at a higher level. Maybe this will give me some clarity as to all of these swirling ideas and plans that are challenging to wrangle during hectic everyday life.

      Handheld Lagrange and gamepad support

      I've been working toward getting Lagrange to run on the RGB30, which is a little Linux-based retro-oriented handheld. (That is, it ships with a bunch of emulators on the system disk and Emulation Station as the main UI.) Lagrange works rather well on it now. Would be nice to finalize the gamepad support for Lagrange version 1.20 and release an official build for the RGB30. I can see gamepad controls being particularly useful in TV & couch and HMD VR use cases, and you could also consider it an accessibility feature since there are gamepads for limited mobility scenarios.

  • Programming

    • Simpler sparse arrays: sparse_list_lite.py

      Sometimes I imagine that there are two kinds of people writing Python (or people in general): people who want to write all of their own code without importing any packages, and people who would rather import whatever random package claims to do what they want. (And I would be the first kind.) This is clearly oversimplified, however, and in practice I find it's usually more about balancing the pros and cons between the two options—readability, stability, optimization, etc.

      Recently, I've found myself working more and more with sparse data, or rather I find myself finding more and more uses for sparse representations of data (since any data could be sparse, given an absurd enough way to represent it). But then the problem was, the only package I knew of for working with sparse arrays was SciPy, which is about as far to the extreme of complexity as it's possible to go. Not only can `import scipy` take longer than a moderately sized program, but SciPy's implementation of sparse arrays seems to be particularly complex and (in my opinion) hard to work with. That's not to say that SciPy is bad, it's more a question of what I'm trying to use sparse arrays for, compared with SciPy. SciPy's sparse arrays are mainly intended for fast matrix operations, whereas I mainly use sparse arrays for lookup tables that are often only 1D rather than ND arrays. SciPy's sparse arrays can be good for lookup tables, using the DoK ("dictionary of keys" (what else would it be a dictionary of?)) format, but even then their approach has a number of undesirable features: [...]