Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Early Morning Practice

    My partner booked today off work. Probably tomorrow too. Sick. A vicious fever over the weekend, then she got better, and now she's feeling worse again. I told her I'd let her sleep in as long as she needed (wake up time: just before 11), and before work, since today is a WFH day, I decided to play a little guitar in the basement.

    I didn't want to use my amp, because even though I'm sure she can't hear me two floors up, I wanted to give her as much silence as possible. So I plugged into my old Pod 2.0, a large bean-shaped digital modeller from the 2000s that gets decidedly mixed reviews online.

  • Life's a beech: trees sometimes fall -- and they do it in unpredictable ways

    I own and manage woodland. One of the things that keeps me awake at nights is the fear of one of my trees falling and hurting somebody. Maybe even me. A couple of times a year I inspect the entire site, tree by tree, and mark for felling any tree that appears even slightly dodgy. Because it takes a while to fell dozens of trees, sometimes the ones I've marked are still standing a year or two later. Clearly I was wrong in my assessment. And sometimes a tree will fall, just for the heck of it, after I've decided it's perfectly healthy.

    There are tell-tale signs that a tree is on its last, um... roots. Extensive loss of bark, beetle holes, fungus infestation -- these are all worrying signs. Any tree that isn't in leaf by May is clearly dead.

  • what I've been up to

    I've been distancing myself from the internet in general, increasingly circumscribing the scope of what I allow myself to consume. Currently, I use newpipe with a list of channels I've collected, so as to avoid the youtube algorithm. I restrict myself to channels of "comprehensive input" for the languages I am learning, both in order to learn them better, and to distance myself from the anglosphere. Besides that, I recently got back to the habit of browsing z-library.

    Z-library is a veritable rabbit hole. I've found so many books in there on a variety of topics I am interested in, and many more which I didn't know I would be interested in. I went in looking for some books on chinese culture, and ended up reading about the ottoman empire as well as sufi mysticism. Also Tarot, more on that later.

    Doing this, I've had come to terms with using the english language as my vehicle for learning about the world. It is no secret that my relationship with the english language is conflictive. I associate it with imperialism, zionism, and genocide. Increasingly I've been noticing just how aggresive and belligerent the anglo-zionist empire is. This goes beyond a merely moral question. I have realized, for a few years now, how the english language has implicit the axioms of their way of thinking. I once wrote here about what I consider to be "anglo-thought", an elaboration of western thought. I think I need to revise some of what I wrote. I've been planning to delineate what I perceive to be the characteristics of these and other ways of thinking, a post that is still in the making. For now, suffice to say I am trying to unlearn as much as possible those elements of "western" thought that I have inherited through language and culture.

  • well that whole daily writing thing didn't work out

    last posted what, early february? now it's mid-may.. oops

    time with my partner went great. i love them so much. they left in march which sucked but obviously couldn't keep them here forever ehe.

    started work about a month and a half ago, shitty min wage retail but hey it pays the bills at least. doesn't leave room for much else but i'm dealing with that. badly. whatever lol

• Science

  • i'm doing citizen science and it's SO FUN and you can too

    I'm probably the exact target audience for a project like CoCoRaHS. I LOVE WEATHER SO MUCH. I am obsessed with it. I love rain. I love hail. I love snow. I love slight changes in wind. I am at best ambivalent toward rapid changes in barometric pressure, which remind me I have metal in my bones (when they go up) and moderate to severe osteoarthritis (when they go down). I'm the idiot who will happily stand outdoors in a rainstorm. I LOVE WEATHER.

    I also love KNOWING THINGS, with DATA, except I don't actually like ANALYZING DATA because it requires basic math skills and attention to detail that I don't really possess. But break it down small enough and I'm IN. "Read this rain gauge and tell us what it says every day" is a thing I can do.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Behold The Number to Roman Numeral Converter

    Yesterday, my 9 years old daughter asked me about roman numerals. After a "fun chat" and a small bash script she kind of understood roman numerals. I was left with the bash script so, today, I made a "gemtext" version and put it on my capsule in the "Fun stuff with CGI" [1] section.

    The script converts regular numbers into Roman numerals [2]. It takes a normal number (integer) as input and builds the matching Roman numeral by repeatedly subtracting the largest possible values, such as M, CM, XC, or IV. This is called the greedy algorithm [3] because it always grabs the largest valid symbol first.

  • What I've been up to lately

    I've been deep into semantic layers for the past... 6 months? Both at work and on my free time. It's a topic that I've been really excited about for a decade, since it aligns well with my career goal of let's make data easier to consume.