Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Assembloids on the Alice Matra, Part 2

    Since the initial setup, the project has moved past the point where it merely 'works' and into the phase where it starts to behave like an actual game. Thanks to some extensive train rides :-) No distractions, barely any internet and plenty of time.

    The first major step was proper scoring. The original idea of simply clearing windows is not enough on its own. What matters is how a window is completed. I now distinguish between partial and full faces, and scoring reflects that. This sounds like a small change, but it adds an important layer of feedback and makes each placement decision more meaningful.

    From there, I spent some time on presentation, although always within the limits of the machine. I wrote a faster converter to bring in a proper title screen. It is still firmly within the semigraphics constraints, but it gives the game a clear starting point and a bit of identity instead of dropping the player directly into the grid.

  • The feedback loop that wasn't

    I've held my current position for more than a decade. It's a great job really. Yet the workplace as a whole is so dysfunctional.

    We've been begging for a product owner for years yet nothing formalises. Decision making have mostly been haphazard and emotional rather than rational and a lot of work has been done only to never get utilised or getting dropped just before merge or reverted after being shipped to production.

  • Keeping house while drowning

    As you might have gathered from my gemlog, I am struggling a lot with mental health at the moment. Specifically being burnt out by traumatic events, emotional as well as physical. So it is no surprise that keeping my household in shape is a real struggle. It's a struggle that I kept loosing for the last 5 months but slowly, I begin to work my way out of it.

    A friend of mine who struggles with similar issues has borrowed me a small book - "How to keep House while drowning" - since it has helped them a lot.

    I have to be honest I didn't finish reading it yet but even the first few takeaways are things that are already helping.

  • night trains

    I reach a leg out
    adjust the window with my toes
    to feel the cool night air 
    gentle on my face
    

  • Shokz Bone-Conduction Headphones

    So I am not an early adopter and a bit of a skeptic. But this reminded me a bit of the old Bone-Fones of the 80s, something I wanted to try as a teenager and seriously could not possibly afford...

    I've been ignoring these for a few years now, but recently a friend got me to try his and I was seriously impressed by the quality. So I got a pair, and am not regretting it at all.

    There is nothing in your ears to gunk them up or cause pain or irritation, a definite issue with headphones. And they don't put you in a dangerous situation if you are driving, biking, or avoiding being pushed down the stairs in your favorite city.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Spring Cleaning

    I've been clearing cobwebs off the Doomsday codebase recently.

    The project has been on hiatus. I last worked on this code 5-8 years ago. It's amazing how much of it I've forgotten. Doomsday represents a solid 20 years of invested time, and it shows. There is so much stuff: an amalgamation of Doom/Heretic/Hexen, a complete GUI framework, a smaller widget framework for the game menus, a scripting language, a document processing tool, partially finished next-gen renderer, scriptable 3D model system, and heaps of UI for configuration and package management.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Spring Cleaning, Part 2

      Keeping with the theme of spring cleaning, I decided to spend some time improving the machinery that runs this gemlog.

      The posts have been individual files in a flat /gemlog/ directory, but after six years things have gotten a tad cluttered. It made more sense to have year/month subdirectories that keep the files neatly organized. The topic indices were also moved to their own subdirectory.

    • Another gemlog script

      This reminded me that I'm still a little bit annoyed every time I write something, I have to choose a filename, put the link, datestamp and title into the index.gmi, check that it works, correct my typo in the link, correct it again, etc. So I should write a script for this since my gemlog structure is slightly different. And writing it myself was a 10 minute job, having no error handling because that's just how I roll. If anything breaks I can just fix it by hand.

    • Announcing md2gem 0.1 -- a cross-platform, best-effort converter for Markdown to Gemini Gemtext

      I've written before about [getting back into Gemini], despite its limitations. One of my concerns is, and always has been, the lack of expressiveness of the _Gemtext_ document format. Gemini isn't limited to Gemtext, although a Gemini client has to support it, to claim to be in any way compliant with the specification. There's a certain amount of interest in publishing using Markdown, although it's fair to say that not all Gemini enthusiasts endorse the idea, and some are vehemently opposed. Still, with an increasing number of clients supporting Markdown, -- including my own [Caztor] browser -- it seemed reasonable to me to offer my ramblings in this format as well as Gemtext. I don't expect to stop blathering in Gemtext -- the Markdown is an, um..., bonus.