Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Busy Squirrel

    Yapping at my door in the morning, the squirrel barks a few time to announce its starting time. Climbing the trees, the pine cone starts to fall on my tin roof, a loud bang each time. Making a mess I need to keep on cleaning for next week!

    This keeps me in a semi awaken state, where the dream world is more present. I've been dreaming a lot lately, something got unstuck. A dream of gravel on the road. I try to tell people not to drive, but some prefer to try their luck. Their car slips on their side.

• Politics and World Events

  • Independence Day Celebrations

    Today marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence. America considers this day as its founding date, and we celebrate accordingly.

    Independence Day is a federal holiday, and since it falls on a Saturday this year, many businesses gave their employees the day off yesterday. As such, we held a gathering with many of our friends last night. We live in a relatively rural area, so our guests brought several fireworks that they can't set off in their own neighborhoods. We could also see the city fireworks show from our front yard, which we all watched together.

    I'm glad we chose Friday instead of Saturday to hold festivities. This morning brought thunderstorms and plunging temperatures; at least two parades in the area were called off. Our family is staying indoors in comfort and enjoying the day together instead.

  • Markovian Parallax Denigrate

    good morning from Wormware Systems.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Hardware glue layers

    I used my hacking time this week on the operating systems and user software for my "lateral thinking with salvaged tech" project.

    I described it here before. I'm making a set of usb drives (or sd cards, cf cards, or boot CDs) to make junk computers into fun, useful, calm, daily-driver things for children and non-technical adults.

    Each livesystem-on-a-removable-medium has a single function for focused use. Everything possible is write-protected or ROM, so it's hard to break and never needs an administrator.

• Programming

  • PalmOS programming

    I thought that we'd be out of the rainy season once we got into July, but they haven't made the announcement yet in the news. We've had a lot of rainy and/or overcast days this summer and I have been enjoying them. I am not looking forward to endless days of sunshine and brutal heat. I have had seasonal affect in winter before and I don't want it in summer.

    For a while now I have wanted a PalmOS program to keep score when playing golf or straight pool. I didn't want to use Android or iOS so I searched high and low but I couldn't find anything for Palm that fit the bill. I therefore set about in making one myself and it was not at all easy.