Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Watershed Moment

    Publius was making remarks on the water supply in England, in particular how even some Financial Times producer-consumers were aware that the privatization of the water supply may not have been the goodest of ideas: a natural monopoly where Market-addled Mammon pursuit is favored over such things as keeping prices affordable for "those people" and such tawdry things as basic maintenance, what could go wrong? Enter nationalization, which also may not be the goodest of ideas: a one size fits nobody institution can be as incompetent as ten or so dividend seeking C-suites, especially if what passes for leadership these days all went through the same MBA programs: we might coin Thatcheritis for the condition?

  • What keeps us alive; a poem (tho/en)

    sounds of silence
    and loudness alike.
    history of the world
    in clear jewel cases.
    

  • Traveller RPG Book Binding

    In 1977 I bought a set of the Traveller Role Playing Game books. They are getting a little worn, and I don't want to damage them further. I purchased PDFs of the classic Traveller books on CD a few years ago. I wanted a more useful copy and decided to print the first 3 books and bind them with double ring spiral binding wire. I chose the 1981 books for a slightly more modern version.

    I was interested in making an interesting cover for the book. I started with two 12" x 12" sheets of 1/16 inch plywood and ebonized it with India ink. After it was dry, I covered the first with masking tape. I then laser etched the front cover with the design. I then painted the etched area of the red and white to match the original covers. When I pulled the remaining masking tape off, I had a little touch ups to fix, but otherwise it worked well.

  • wonder

    my body is not a wonder
    it is a tool
    
    
    worn and weary and 
    sick of serving
    

  • Museums and modernism

    I watched 'Night at the Museum' with my family recently: a good adventure movie, not bad for my eldest, aged ten, but not able to hold the attention of my youngest, who is six.

    It made me think of the museum of my past, the Melbourne Museum when it was still located with the State Library of Victoria. This is a beautiful, neoclassical building, first opened in the 1850s, with a domed reading room reminiscent of the British Museum Reading Room added in 1913. I loved to visit as a child, and as a teenager I made trips to the city to research assignments in the library.

  • On choosing to believe

    I've been thinking a lot about where belief comes from, not the least because what I believe about the world happens to be a mishmash of many things. One of the things I think I believe is that you can choose what you believe. I don't think you necessarily have to choose, because there's a number of ways belief can come to you, but I do think choice is one of them. How? To be honest I'm less convinced of how but I do think I have a strong argument for why.

    To believe something is to have conviction that it's true. One way you could develop this conviction is by seeking evidence, but you might not find it. People believe all sorts of things that are not supported by evidence or cannot be supported by evidence. For example, the existence of God, who may be considered to transcend physical reality, cannot be supported by wholly physical evidence (in my humble non-theologian opinion). The other obvious way is that some people have simply believed their whole lives; they were introduced to it as children and have never been given the chance, the space, to believe something else.

• Technology and Free Software

  • memorizing every phone code in brazil (feat. hulk hogan)

    a year ago, i accidentally purchased a yearlong subscription to geoguessr when all i wanted was a one month subscription. i resolved this problem by, rather than sending an email to customer support, playing a lot of geoguessr. oops.

    for those unfamiliar, geoguessr is a game that drops you into a random street view location and tasks you with identifying your location on the map. you are scored based on how close your guess was (higher is better). depending on the mode, you can move around to try to gain additional information, but with time limits involved, the more pieces of info you can make use of, the easier the game will be. as a result, there are various "metas" that players will learn to, say, know which eastern european country they are in based on the shape of the bollards on the side of the road.

    now, this was not my first time playing a lot of geoguessr. back during a four-month stretch in 2023, i played enough to at least identify the location's country correctly 90+% of the time without usually needing to move around too much (this is not very helpful if the country is, say, russia or brazil, for obvious reasons).

  • More GUI Annoyances

    Scroll bars that are too thin and require near microscopic precision to use. The target area for the cargohold scrollbar is not as bad as it appears, as the active area is about eight pixels wide (0.26% of the screen) which is larger than the display size of the too thin scrollbar.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Gemini chat group sessions

      Anyone care for a group chat on there? I have a new tab with the stream page opened to see the roll update real-time, and I'm using the initial tab I started with from the capsule's front page to use the submit button for real-time messaging. Give it a shot, so far a user by the tag is_v, olive, and a regular from here half_elf_monk have hopped in!

    • anyone wanna give gem chat a try?

      I'm on there rn with a user that's popped up with the tag "olive" i'm ethnet0 there, check it out. I have the stream page up in a new tab for a chat roll, and im using front page of the capsule in initial tab for the submit button so I can chat realtime.