Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Food Forest Update #8 FREEZE!

    Gardening is full of failures, setbacks and sometimes a little bit of success. This was a strange winter here in central Florida. The temps were very warm all the way up to mid January. Normally things like bananas and papayas slow down and don't do much when temps cool off around December then start to wake back up in March when it gets a bit warmer. This winter I was harvesting ripe papayas, bunches of bananas and passion fruit all the way into mid January.

    Things then took a turn and we saw extremely rare cold weather from mid January to mid February. Followed by now having rocketed up to hot summer temps almost immediately following the cold. Most winters we see anywhere from zero to a handful of nights near or right around freezing. While a hard freeze can certainly happen here, it is quite rare. We not only saw a hard freeze but temps this low have not been recorded in this are for over 30 years and on the coldest night it stayed below freezing for almost 9 hours. The lowest it got was 23 F! That is crazy when you consider that it hasn't even gotten below freezing at all in the last 7 years and hasn't been below about 30 F in decades.

    This was a far sight more cold than any plants or people here have experienced in a long time. In gardening and permaculture circles and in this area people growing tropical plants talk a lot about microclimates. Well, this was such an unusual cold event that even microclimates weren't safe. What was so unusual about it was that on top of the low temps it was also windy, which is very unsual for this area when cold temps do happen. On a typical for this area near freezing or freezing night, a plant near a south wall or under the canopy of a larger more hardy species would fare well with that protection as the cold is usually pretty still so heat is trapped in the area and the damaging temps are very brief. This time however, none of those protected areas fared any better because the wind blew the cold air right into all of those pockets that would have trapped heat and it stayed that way much longer.

• Technology and Free Software

  • I am now on Urbit

    Hi again.

    So, i decided to look into urbit, and it was a unique experience.

    If you dont know what urbit is, urbit is more like an operating system. Built on top of an operating system. Created by tlon, now under the urbit foundation, it has a large community.

    The operating system is based on knock, a functional tree-like byte language. Most networking, commands and all or most the apps in urbit is compiled to knock. Because knock is functional by design, it has no state. Meaning that you can copy urbit directory (aka your pier) and put it on a different operating system, and continue where you left off, without any issues.

    Hoon, is the assembly language of knock. Hoon is not like a normal assembly program with registers. It is based on knock, therefore it goes against the most intuitive knowledge in favor of pure functional programming.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • The cost of social media

      I recently found a post by Rudy Fraser, founder and CEO of Blacksky. Blacksky is social media using the AT protocol, like Blueksky.

      [...]

      Either way, it seems to me that Blacksky is very expensive to set up and run, but popular Mastodon instances are also very expensive to set up and run.

      In the fediverse, at least, there's a low-cost way to ramp up starting with single user instances. I've tried the Mastodon alternatives Pleroma, Snac and GoToSocial on a cheap virtual machine for about €15/month or about €180/year. I'm currently running GoToSocial but this virtual machine runs more than just GoToSocial, so let's say the fedi aspect it's worth a third of this machine or about €60/year (and all the admin work is done for free, haha).

      The way I read Rudy Fraser's comment, it seems to me that a lot of the cost is the index which depends on the already existing data out there, irrespective of how big or small your setup is. Thus, there is absolutely no way to have a small-scale setup.

    • Without noise

      A day almost without (pseudo-) social media, without constantly checking, scrolling, replying. Without dozens of unnecessary small decisions, small losses in the battle for focus, purposefulness, power, and depth of thought on a topic (one topic, instead of constant distraction). I spent such a day on Sunday, focusing on family and friends. I spent such a day during the week, working physically outside the home. On both days, I did “click” a few times, scrolled for maybe a total of ten minutes each day, replied to a few posts or comments, but I feel that it is with this amount of interaction on the internet that I have maintained a healthy balance between my life and my “online life,” where I don't lose my energy, my daily potential, which I can use to do something worthwhile, even something as small as reflecting on my own reaction in a situation and improving myself, many, many times throughout the day. Not to mention bigger things, like creativity. I simply have enough attention, time, and energy for that. So again, a return to thinking about the human dimension, a return to striving to be in it as much as possible.