Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Christina's January questions

    What if someone I don't know asks to "friend" or connect to me on social or business network site?

    I have not had this problem. Imagine I'd assume they were scammers and act accordingly.

    I feel there's no such thing as "friending," only befriending, which requires being, in the world.

  • Blackout

    Today, around about 18:00, with Junior sitting in my lap and working at my main computer suddenly everything went dark, with a low iiiiiuuuuuuh the spinning rust hard disk of the HP DC7800 "Convertible Minitower" (i have to write about it in another post) spun down and we sat there, in darkness while my wife let loose some vietnamese curses i haven't heard until now.

    Well, we live in an ancient house with ancient electric cabeling, but i was really sure i exorcised most of the gremlins out of the systems for about a year now. But, alas, here we were in the dark.

  • Bikes in 2025

    Some 3800 km. I expected it will be less.

    As for bikes, the half of commuting was on old Moultons from 1960 (generally on my Moulton Major but I also assembled a Moulton Safari replica - while this bike has repeating issues with old components it was also used quite frequently). The rest was almost excusively on my 2-speed Moulton TSR2 (it has carbon drive which is beneficial when commuting to work..).

    I also used the old Stride folding bike more that I expected and quite a lot rode my early 1980s Bickerton Portable. While this mean ~200 km in total it is still much more than I rode on my modern Brompton (~80 km in 2025). This is surprising as the Brompton was my main bicycle from 2021 when I returned to cycling.

  • Food Forest Update #7 - Ups and Downs

    Oh boy, where to start? This is update is quite overdo and a lot has happened since the last update. I have also been writing this update in bits and pieces over the last couple months so it may be a bit disjointed. I'll start with the big downer, PESTS! Towards the end of summer I was noticing some little white bugs on my sugar cane when I would pull some of the old dry leaves off. I was also seeing lots of ants all over the place. Now I know that these white bugs are mealy bugs and at least some of the ants are a symptom of the mealy bugs.

    Because I'm commited to never using any harmful pesticides, herbicides, synthetic fertilizers etc all I did initially to get rid of them was spray the mealy bugs off with a strong stream of water from the hose. I went out every couple days and repeated this for a week or two. This did not seem to have any discernable effect so I gave up the water spray and just figured I would let nature take its course. The sugar cane didn't seem bothered by the mealy bugs in the slightest. It was growing super fast and looking healthy as could be despite the mealy bugs. My hope was that eventually a natural predator would move in and their numbers would dwindle. Unfortunately, that didn't happen.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Researchers Propose Solutions to the Growing Environmental Impact of Wearable Electronics

    Researchers from the University of Chicago and Cornell University have dug deep into the sustainability issue surrounding wearable electronics for healthcare — and have come up with not only a way to quantify a device's likely environmental impact but some real-world ideas for reducing it.

    "More than 70% of the carbon footprint of a device comes from the circuit boards," says co-corresponding author Bozhi Tian of the team's findings, which included estimates of warming impacts of 1.1–6.1kg CO₂-equivalent (CO₂e) per wearable medical device on average. "Really what we see is that when we are looking for solutions to sustainability, we have to consider all components together."

    The team's research focused on electronic wearables designed for healthcare, including glucose monitors, ultrasound patches, and blood-pressure monitors, and projected a trend which will see demand for such devices approaching two billion units a year by 2050 — which, if the cradle-to-grave analysis of their environmental impact holds true, would lead to the generation of more than a million tons of electronic waste and 100 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e).

  • Various Project and Personal Updates

    Anyone who follows my feed might get the impression that I no longer have any interests outside of analog computing. It is a bit more accurate to say, rather, that I do not currently have much time for any other interests. It is easy for me to study analog computing right now because it is related to a lot of the things I do at work, and also it is too cold right now to do outdoor things during my lunch break. Outside of work, almost all of my time is taken up spending time with my family or taking care of them in various ways (e.g., evening chores). But I wanted to give some kind of update on progress in my various areas of interest.

  • Confession: I bought three TI99/4A computers.

    I don't know what came over me. I suppose TI machines had always intrigued me, just being so different and early (for 16-bit devices). And I've never seen one in operation.

    And so, while on EBay (shopping for a ThinkPad), I lowballed a TI listing, and was rejected. I then further lowballed (even more than before) three other offers -- thinking that maybe one will go for it, and... But, they all agreed.

  • Computing in 2025

    Desktop: Raptor Blackbird (POWER9 4core CPU, 64 GB RAM, SSD 512 GB, Fedora 41) - still the same

    Second desktop: SGI O2 (MIPS CPU 250 MHz, RAM 768 MB, HDD 32 GB) - still the same

    Notebook: NT Reform 2 (RK3588 CPU, 16GB, SSD 512GB, Debian testing)

    Phone: Fairphone 5 (Android)

    I usually don't carry a PDA nor the calculator these days. My PSION Organiser IILZ works as a bedside device (and alarm clock) and I often use reMarkable (bud now mostly for reading and for Kanji training).

  • Secondary Smartphone

    A while ago I was introduced to the concept of a secondary mobile device. The idea is that one's primary phone, the one that has an always-on connection to one's cellular network, is used strictly for actual communication purposes; another device, which can only access WiFi, is used to store things like games and social media. As someone who likes to embrace the Unix philosophy in his daily life, this system sounds quite appealing to me.

    The secondary-device paradigm isn't entirely new. Palm tried it in 2018 with the Palm Companion Device, but it didn't sell very well, likely because it was limited to Verizon and couldn't be used as a standalone smartphone. Recently, though, the idea has become popular in the digital-minimalism and social-media-detox spaces. A current example is the Clicks Communicator^, a full-fledged smartphone that markets itself as a companion device alongside one's current daily-driver smartphone.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • 13th issue of magazine about small web

      13th issue is out