Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Ellie the Gravel Bike

    Ellie is the newest steed in my stable. She is joining the ranks of Telos the 2018 Hyundai Accent and Florence the 2025 Triumph Scrambler. And... sorta Apollyon the 1996 Toyota Tacoma.

    Ellie is a brand new Kona Rove DL Gravel Bike. (Do bikes have years? Is she 2026 vintage?) She's... some kind of a hybrid between a road bike, and a trail bike. I'm not intersted in doing any crazy jumps or downhill at extreme speeds mountain biking -- and I'm not... super interested in being part of a lycralord roadbike peloton cruising through stop signs along the coast. So - something in-between. Something that can take me into nature, and keep up with traffic in the city. The Scrambler of bicycles.

  • Hello Again

    It seems I've forgotten this space. I kinda bounced around on other minimalist sites, but find myself here again. My author blog and a smaller, lesser known personal blog exist, but something about smol pub continues to draw me back.

    Mostly the "smol" part.

  • arXiv Brings Down the Hammer

    When I was in academia - doing my Master's degree, and starting my Ph.D. before dropping out - it was critical, I was told, that all my research was my own, all my work my own. There didn't need to be anything else said. You heard about students who were forced out of programs for violations of academic honesty. The deal was simple: in exchange for the poverty wages that was your stipend (I made $15k between my scholarship and fellowship), you did your own research, wrote your own papers.

    And in a sense, it's not hard right? You just have to do your job. I know a lot of people hated the writing side of CS, who outright struggled with it (Engish often not their first language), but as someone who almost majored in English, I loved it. My writing was solid and concise. I managed to get work accepted at a prestigious conference. I learned how to use LaTeX and love BibTeX.

• Technology and Free Software

  • UnderPOWERed

    Well, the upgrade to Fedora 42 ppc64le failed on my Blackbird. So I'm in the situation why my system does not boot (at all). I will have to open it, enable internal VGA and see what I can do. In meantimee, I'm on my MNT notebooks (ARM/Linux). Not that bad unless my Debian update failed today, too. I will see,...

  • Playing with Tcl/Tk (warning: AI)

    Do you remember the Tcl/Tk [1]? It's a programming language (originally make as a LISP which does not look as a LISP so it shouldn't scare people) and of course an interpreter. It was very popular in late 1990 and early 2000s because it have included on only the "tclsh" (a Tcl shell) but also the "wish" (Windowin Shell) - a nice thing to make GUI in the Linux easily (in reality, it ahs been ported and used almost everywhere including Windows, classic and modern Macintoshes and so on). It also was the default GUI toolkit for the Python (I think it still is?).

    Well, I also wrote a few simple GUI tools in the Tcl/Tk in the past. Some of them I still use or my (now very infrequent) research work, some of them weren't used for decade(s).