Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • eat the colonizers

    Close up, quackgrass reminds me of corn: a tough central green stalk with leaf blades that fold away at intervals, sharp and fibrous.

    (Aside: seriously, go look at a field of corn sometime, covering the edges of your vision to hide anything that might give you a sense of scale. Corn is grass. It's just mutantly large grass. It's grass that has been exposed to the green ooze in the Ninja Turtle movies. It's terrifying.)

    But quackgrass doesn't root like corn. Corn stalks put out several shallow roots, grasping the dirt like mangroves. Quackgrass grows from long, rubbery white strings underground - its rhizomes. The rhizomes can be a meter long or more. My chickens will eat smaller pieces, but the long ones they leave lying on top of the soil.

    Quackgrass is quick to part with its stems and leaves. They snap right off at ground level, making you think you've weeded. Nice try. The rhizome will send up a new set by breakfast. Of these meter-long roots, the plant only needs a couple centimeters' worth to start sending out new shoots again.

  • unlocked

    newly unlocked desires
    never explored 
    growing eager
    
    
    no longer still and hidden
    slumbering safely 
    beneath the surface
    

  • Constantly Miscommunicating

    It's been a while since I've been here. I keep forgetting this place exists and I keep remembering it does and randomly popping in so "Hi Guys"

    I feel like I come here to vent and I shall make it a point to come here more often just to chat and meet with you fine and interesting people.

  • Greymarket - Chapter 1

    So my last post was a rant. I want to do something different now. I have a book I have been writing for a while - finished an act of it and I am realising just how much I have left to learn. I thought "Hey, why not share it with you all"

• Science

  • Intersecting rollercoasters

    There are plenty of self-intersecting coasters - those don't count. Nor does it count for the queue to wind amongst the track (although this is also great, particularly on The Wicker Man). No, I'm talking about intersections of two or more completely separate attractions, and I was surprised to find it doesn't seem to be a big topic of conversation. Where are the protracted flame wars about whether in-park monorails count as rides for the purpose of intersection? I was expecting to find IRDb (well actually I did, but it's about infrared remote control codes).

• Technology and Free Software

  • Printed Circuit Boards --- then

    Recently I came across a little electronic something, which has one of the oldest printed circuit boards (pcb) I ever attempted. And "printed" is essentially wrong in this case. Allthough photo transfer of a circuit board on transparent film was wide spread, I never got into that. This particular piece was hand drawn on the cleaned copper side of a prototype board, then etched (FeIII-Cl, yuck!) and cleaned. Every hole was drilled manually. I did not even put solder on everything to prevent oxidation, before I added all components and cables.

  • Keeping track of thoughts.md as a webpage

    I have a file called `thoughts.md` on my laptop, where i keep track of things that i ought to write down™ lest they become eroded by steady march of entropy, so that i have a central place where i can forget about things. But, and this is important, that file is on my laptop --- only.

  • spellbinding.sh

    I made a small client for the SpellBinding game that makes submitting words faster. It is a shell script with a read-submit-print-loop. The dependencies are basic POSIX utilities (awk, printf, read, sh) and the openssl program (available from package openssl on Debian).

  • Mandatory email and phones

    There will be a few others of these. But we really need to be able to articulate why this kind of creeping formalisation and presumptuousness is bad.

  • ASCII Chessboard, No HTML Required

    Sometimes, when I have absolutely nothing to do, I play with ASCII characters in vim. Today I made an ASCII chess board with black and white chess pieces. I'm pretty sure I'm not the first one to make an ascii chessboard and I won't be the last. I thought it looks pretty nice so I wanted to share it on my blog.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Ongoing Antenna migration

      As many will be aware, the creator of Antenna has recently announced he intends to discontinue the service.

    • offpunk and reddit

      i've omitted the rest of the error message as it's pretty much saying the same thing, there's something wrong with teddit's certs. i found out that teddit.net[1] was a reddit proxy focussed on privacy. sadly it's been abandoned since reddit made their api private.

      after chatting with ploum on the mailing list[2], i was told about the `redirect` command.

      unfortunately it appears to be the default redirect for offpunk

    • For now, one last time with the Brazilian SYN attacks

      Both Dan Lyke [1] and Andrew Knutsen informed me of the ariticle “Anti-DDoS Firm Heaped Attacks on Brazilian ISPs [2],” where it's reported that a Brazilian tech firm that had been performing DDoS attacks against Brazilian networks has been taken down, which seems to back up what I was told a few weeks ago [3].