Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Movies Game

    Put the movies in the right order according to their release year.

    * A movie's release year is the year that is listed on IMDB.

    * The game ends when you put a movie in the wrong place or there are no more years left.

    * You will not be asked to sort two movies with the same release year.

  • Since coersion

    I never expected people to understand this, but I am, and have been, under coersion from a Portuguese court decision, that degrades (a lot) my overall mood. This makes me very stiff, and with little softness in my interactions, and very much uneasy. I can just tell you this, good people go to prison; and probably, mostly the good people. The "system" makes the good people take the blame of other people. Making the good suffer the bad consequences meant for the people that have made bad actions.

  • Spending 💷

    I had ahead start at not spending this year because I was in hospital. I live in a country where healthcare is free at the point of use. Some people don't like this idea. WTF?

    I've had a bit of a spending shock because I started going back to the office, and I had to pay train fares, lunch, and snacks. Yes, the snacks were necessary. Antibiotics have messed with my digestion.

  • review bombing and star war

    I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but I wanted to talk about the idea of review-bombing. I think anyone thinking it's illegitimate is an intellectually dishonest person at the very least. Why? Because opinions are formed based on interactions, and they don't even have to be personal interactions. For example, if my family goes to a restaurant without me and has a very poor experience, is it not my right to share that I think this restaurant is terrible? No, I didn't directly do business or even necessarily go to the restaurant, but that doesn't mean you can censor my opinion. It's my right as a human being to form opinions based on any criteria I feel like.

    People hate Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, but does that mean they can't judge their products harshly because of the men who made them? Maybe Muckbooks really are great hardware. I still have the inalienable right to dislike them because of the parent company's stance on things like the Right to Repair, consumer rights, reasonable pricing, etc. Just because I've never owned one doesn't preclude me from having an opinion on them that I can share.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Efaz Bhuiyn's 3D-Printable Portable Workout Machine Turns Effort into Electricity

    Mechanical engineering student Efaz Bhuiyn has built a device to help busy people workout just about anywhere — and charge a phone while doing it: a 3D-printed workout machine that doubles as a generator.

    "I'm passionate about energy generation and renewable energy sources," Bhuiyn explains of the project's inspiration. "My Portable Workout Energy Generator […] turns the energy we humans put in to workout into electricity that we can use! This version is an attempt to make the project more lightweight, use less and cheaper material, generate more consistent output, and finally, allow interchangeable resistance gears so the user can swap out 'weights' for more resistance. The key point of this version is to try implementing this interchangeable system to be multi-compatible with whatever resistance gear the user designs by adding an idler tensioner."

  • LVDT Project: Precision Rectifier

    I keep wanting to give an update on my little LVDT project, but I have had a lot of trouble getting the precision rectifier to work. This is the part that converts the signals from the secondary windings into DC voltages. The schematic I was following was from a YT video called "How to Build a Linear Variable Differential Transformer Motion Sensor and Detector - DC To Daylight", and the schematic can be seen at time frame 6min 37 seconds. I followed that schematic except that I swapped in UA741 op amps for the LM324 op amps, as I happened to have a huge stock of the 741 op amps that had been given to me. I also used non-polarized capacitors to replace what appears to be polarized capacitors in the schematic. I built the circuit on green protoboard, using screw terminal blocks for input, output, and power connections.

    The top two op amps are supposed to produce a positive DC voltage based on the input from one of the secondary windings, while the bottom two are supposed to produce a negative DC voltage based on the input from the other secondary winding. From the beginning, the top channel worked fine, but something was wrong with the bottom channel. The bottom channel had a weird minimum voltage output of -140 mV, i.e., it would output -140 mV even if the amplitude of the input signal was 0 or 50 mV or 80 mV.

• Programming

  • Lost in Translation

    There are a lot of "color comments" in the source code for ex-vi, which may lead one to wonder how the code works at all, or has as few crashes as it does. However, some of these comments may be lost in translation.

    [...]

    People adding features to vi (myself included) are contrasted with Girl Scouts as bringing neither anything desirable to the table nor do they have the wisdom to not cram yet more features into vi, especially where some maintenance coder is trying to fixup several decades of inconsistent and frenzied hacking ("innovation and progress", as some would have it), and thus resorts to venting their woes into the comments.

    The "neither welcome nor wise" is broadly applicable to the computer industry as a whole: look to websites with new and innovative dark patterns, software updates that break workflows just because, features that raise "that's nice, but how does one turn it off?", or whatever hype cycle the Clown Suite is presently on.