Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • even without words

    when you smile
    do crow's feet form 
    on the corners of your eyes
    do your teeth show
    or does that only happen
    when you laugh
    

  • "the safekeep" by yael van der wouden

    5/5 recent pick-up from an indie bookshop. honestly i just wanted something self-contained and idk literary? slam dunk, what a great story. i love how it slowly started taking shape with each new mentioned crumb of info, like the looming dread of a tragedy. and then how neatly and satisfyingly it all snapped into place. i lack the proper words for the nuances of grief, the parallels, overlaps. like... a house haunted with mirror reflections down long hallways. reflections upon reflections. also - great structure, felt almost like a Good Meal.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Playing with AI (and Tcl/Tk)

    Or being serious? I once wrote a Tcl code for structural analysis of 2D frame structures (for civil engineering). Initially it only should serve as a GUI for a command-line solver (whi I never wrote, actually). Then I improved it to be a standalone (albeit barely finished) tool.

    I did some work on it during the COVID times. Recently I have decided that it can be a good testing environment for AI development. This tool [1] will be useful for me if it will be finished but it will be no tragedy if it will not work (I have actual 3D FEA solver for my needs and a C/Gtk+ code for 2D frames - they are their issues but I have been using both for 20 years without main issues).

  • FVWM as main desktop again (sort of)

    Logout [1] once observed that there are no more active FVWM [2] users (sadly, even the fvwm.org site is now gone). There were people which used and tuned their FVWM environments for years but now they usually have been using modern desktops like GNOME.

    Well, it's very true. I have been using the FVWM since I have discovered the Linux (my first Red Ht Linux was 5.0, I think, and it had the FVWM 1.x ad FVWM95 by default). I of, course, used things like the AfterStep, the WindowMaker (for several years, actually), even the GNOME 1.x, and of course the Indigo Magic Desktop on the IRIX. But about 2004 I have started to use the FVWM 2.x on all my machines as my default desktop and it hasn't changed until 2018 when I changed my default home desktop from SGI to OpenPOWER (I have used the MATE on some notebooks before so I have started to use it also on my OpenPOWER machine).

  • AI Made My Photography Cringe

    This is the premise of a photography YouTuber name Tony Northrup. It struck a chord because of my own experience. He argues that traditional portrait methods like fast lenses for "creamy bokeh" (the out of focus area of a photograph) or telephoto lenses for subject compression are now "cringe" because AI has been trained on those kinds of images.

    As a portrait photographer, he claims young people now prefer portraits without those qualities. They want results closer to what you would get from a smart phone. Wide angle, little or no bokeh, no fancy lighting or daytime flash, etc. They don't want anyone to think Midjourney generated their photograph.

  • AI, Photography And Cringe

    As a side note, I posted this to the gritty and ucant Antenna instances but the michaelnordmeyer.com instance failed twice (reporting a timeout trying to fetch my index page). That's odd. Does anyone know if it will propagate there eventually?

  • So long 770...

    It's not easy to write, but my Nokia 770 *the very first pocket computer I have bought as a new) is no longer usable. Something is totally wrong here and while it boots (both from flash and the MiniSD) it always fails after a few taps on screen.

    I have no idea what is wrong and I see no way to repair it (re-flashing will neat I will have bare system without any apps and without possibility to install anything).

  • kitbashing nicer sidebar tabs

    I love vertical tabs. Given the -- frankly concerning -- amount of tabs I tend to open, they're a must for me.

    Thing is, none of the native, non-Chromium options quite fit me. Between Zen & Firefox lacking tree-style tabs, and Waterfox lacking container-synced workspaces, all of the options are a little too lackluster for my needs... So I did the only thing a linux user could -- I kitbashed together a solution. :)

  • Updated: IBM Plex Mono Lagrange Fontpack

    IBM updated its Plex Mono typeface from version 1.1.0 to 2.5.0, so I updated my Lagrange fontpack as well.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Re: fifteen years

      Solderpunk posted today [1] that the i-logout.cz gopherwhole exists fifteen years today.

      Remarkable!

      Congratulations, and thanks for all the fine work!