Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • radio

    I used to love listening to the radio.

    Back when I was at uni I was driving around a 1999 Holden Astra with no bluetooth, no aux, not even a tape player to use one of those 3.5mm to cassette adapters. Now that I think about it, there must have been a CD reader but I had no CDs and never acquired any either. The only source of mental stimulation that I had (other than surviving the city streets) was good ol' FM radio.

  • Ramblings on Plant Taxonomy

    For a long time, I've had a lot of thoughts about plant taxonomy. It's something I think about on a daily basis, given the amount of time I spend around plants, looking at them and pondering them. Taxonomy is interesting because here, we're trying to draw neat little human boxes around things that are, at the best, on a spectrum. Trying to figure out exactly the best way to do this and the best practices for it are a very interesting topic!

• Science

  • On Astronomy and Stargazing

    For years, one of the hobbies that has really defined my life is astronomy and stargazing. I have a nice telescope and I love spending time alone in the dark, straining to see what is out there. I've got a really nice set of eyepieces, I've worked to keep my mirror clean, I've flocked the inside of the tube, I've added a computer fan for temprature equalizaiton, and more. Suffice it to say, I love trying to see wee little faint fuzzy things in the sky.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Against Coyote Time

    Okay maybe this is platforming heresy but when I was little I hated the “coyote time” in platforming games. Still do. It’s there in order to make the game more welcoming and forgiving and I applaud that sentiment but what happened was: “Oh. I can’t reach the other side. Because I’m jumping too early. Because the game expects me to not jump until I’ve actually left the ledge.” So counterintuitive. It had the opposite effect and felt unwelcoming, punishing, scary, and frustrating.

  • Chaosium's QuestWorlds arrived today!

    This is a hardcover, with sewn signatures with their backs embedded in glue on the spine backing, and it is 6×8.5 inches. While I like the size, the fonts used in this book are much too small, and I'd rather have had a thicker book or a regular 8.5×11 inch book. (What is with Chaosium and absurdly small fonts lately? Both the *Basic Roleplaying: Universal Game Engine* and *Basic Roleplaying: Creatures* books have had unpleasantly small fonts.) The paper is not BRP:UGE's thicker cream, but a thinner plain white, and the book is printed in black and white. I don't mind the black and white printing, but I would have liked the thicker cream paper better. Oddly enough, in light of the plain white paper used, the book incorporates a ribbon bookmark, which I like. While published by Chaosium, it is copyrighted by Moon Design Publications, LLC. It is licensed under the ORC license.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Free domain names

      Are you looking for a free domain names?

      Freenom used to exist, but it doesn't work anymore.

      In case you know, Freenom was sued by Meta.

      I know dot TK. This was the predecessor service of Freenom,

      and dot TK was the best service at the time.

    • How I Create New Blog Posts

      Running a gemini capsule is fun, but manually creating a new post folder, writing the boilerplate and remembering to add the "Back to my blog" link is something I dislike. So I wrote a small bash script to automate the process.