Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Duke Of Edinburgh Award Expedition 1

    Once again, I was out supervising teenagers completing their Duke of Edinburgh award expeditions. This time it was the Bronze level qualifier and Silver level practise. We were wandering around Cannock Chase, a lovely area in the West Midlands of England. It is a sort of moorland with lots of forest, low hills and walking paths.

    I was driving the same rubbish minibus as last year while supervising a silver team as well as a bronze team. The minibus behaved and other than the whole having to rev it rather high to get shifitng, I almost enjoyed it. The teams did really well and I did not have to chase them too much. There was a noticable difference between their navigation performance on the Saturday and Sunday. I also did not have to change kit around to help those struggling or ensure the kit did not all end up with one other. I also did not have to get anyone up or hurry them along to leave site on the Sunday. A first! The bronze team were 4 girls and they did so well. Always cheerful and seemingly having fun. They walked at a great pace and I had to encourage them to take more breaks and do project work. The Duke of Edinburgh award expedition rules are based on time out rather than distance. For Bronze, this is 6 hours and 7 hours for Silver. This lot were Vlogging their expedition. The silver were a team of 5 boys and a girl. I remain unsure of their project. However, as it is a practise, I do not have to care. I did manage to surprise this lot as they had lunch on the Sunday. They had not moved much and I wanted to walk instead of sitting and waiting. When I came across them, they were sitting below a large tree in an open area. Half of the team were climbing the tree while the rest were cooking lunch. It is always nice to see some tree climbing.

  • Trailrunning with my basenji

    A couple of years back I got a running harness for my basenji with the intent on taking her for runs and hopefully cement a good habit for the both of us. Things didn't quite work out as expected. She did quite alright for the first run but on the subsequent attempts she would be of quite a different opinion on everything from pace to how many pauses were reasonable, to where we were running and so on. On rainy days I would get her ready and she would seem eager to go only to pull the handbreak on the driveway more often than not ending up with me disapointedly leaving her home and go for a run myself.

  • The nearby forest

    I’ve noticed this “grass mowing along the edges” in recent weeks and I approve of not mowing patches of grassland (or just mowing it once a year). Recently, in a cemetery, I saw a sign explaining it as deescalation measure: to mow the edges is to signify that the rest was not mowed on purpose. Otherwise, people will complain about the dilapidated state of things, wanting to see some imposition of order on the urban landscape. But apparently mowing the edges is good enough.

  • Bad health - Lost days

    Now I have written about my mental health issues in the past but this is about my body and my brain.

    For over a year now I am sufering from chronic fatigue. April 2025 I had my 4th covid infection. I have a child that brings all sorts of germs from school and I work in homeless care. So whatever goes around, I'll be exposed to it sooner or later. Vaccinations are good and none of my cases was really severe in symptoms but since then my body simply doesn't regenerate. I can do some exercise but the next 1-2 days I'm laying flat. Period.

  • Wikipedia naturalist

    Most of my friends pull out their phones even in the middle of the woods. I tend to roll my eyes and tolerate this. Merlin and PlantNet are certainly useful. But I grew up on field guides and conversations with more experienced naturalists. Instant AI-enabled possible-answers feel more like junk food info to me.

    That said, my favorite "field guide" recently has been Wikipedia.

    I don't usually look stuff up while in the field. I do what I've always done: make notes, maybe consult a book if I have it, then come home and do some searching. I Wikipedia from my couch, not from the field. I like Wikipedia for looking up various species, though, since it tends to be pretty thorough.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Realisation of a dream

    I always had a thing for smalltalk, first squeak and then pharo. Alas by brain is more wired for lisp. Emacs as an operating system lacking a good editor is a well known trope and I've been living in emacs for the most part last decades. But I've always had pharo envy for the extra possibilities afforded by the rich ui experience.

  • Pomera DM250 On Linux

    Today is a bank holiday so why not go and try getting a toy onto linux? Well, it is not a toy but a Pomona DM250. These are useful tools for writing text and calenders without having distractions. The DM250 comes in both a Japanese and a US version. The US version is ridiculously priced and you can get a Japanese version for cheaper. Both would have keyboards which are troublesome for me and so I was not too fussed. There is a bit of a ramp to get through the punctionation changes but I have done worse. When I heard about the US release, I was interested in the fact it essentially runs on debian with a reduced character set. It enflamed my portable ssh platform desires and with some unexpected bonus money, I thought why not. The original software is pretty great and well thought out as a whole.

  • Children using DOS

    My daughter started occasionally playing with the wonderful FUZOMA suite six months ago, which I've written about before. She boots it from a USB thumb drive in a 2008 ThinkPad. It's always a production to get it out, plugged in, plug in the external keyboard, etc, so she only used it a couple times a month.

    Her grandpa worried she will start school behind on computer skills because she doesn't have a tablet. So whatever, before we went on a seven-hour drive to my family reunion (without Evy) last week, I put DOSbox on this palmtop Windows 10 computer, and downloaded and unzipped some games.

    I haven't properly used DOS since I was a child. Anything serious, I do on a unix server via ssh, so I had a mini adventure getting my brain around the OS that powered the personal computer, for which I have spilled many words in yearning. How does it launch software? How do you navigate it?

  • Internet/Gemini

    • I reinvented my web presence

      At the moment, I have the CSS configured to use the default font families for client web browsers. Eventually I'd like to use custom fonts, like Iosevka (sans-serif, monospace) or JetBrains Mono, which I would place in the web root for the CSS to load locally. I think it's more polite, secure, and efficient to do it this way instead of loading the fonts from some remote CDN. I have to figure out how exactly to do this, which I'm sure I can find plenty of resources about on the web. Last time I tried I think the CSS was misconfigured and I was confused with using relative paths in the HTML and CSS.