Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • New Instrument Time?

    Last year I started playing in a wind band again. I got out the old horn I bought twenty years ago when I came to this city, gave it a bath, oiled it, greased the slides. It worked. Good enough? I played my first concert with the band last June. The band decided to continue, and I decided to continue. Some people in the band wanted to form a woodwind quintet. The other horn players declined: busy summer schedules and prep for school. At the time, that left just me. I said yes.

    That was a good decision on my part, albeit one that's triggered a lot of work on my part. We had a couple gigs last summer and fall. We stopped playing again until the spring, and then we got a gig in the summer. And then, three more.

  • CLOUDED THOUGHTS

    I haven't been able to find time for writing phlog posts lately, in part because I've been wasting so much time getting distracted by thinking about topics for them, and about everything else in my life. My mind's been running away with itself constantly for the last week or so. So I've been building up a list of topics to write here about, but then I'm behind on everything because I've been daydreaming all day so I don't commit to actually writing about them.

    At least one idea is really quite productive because I think it's an answer to a problem I've been pondering for a couple of years now: how to cheaply contruct a safe ramp to the garage/service platform I built for my car (hoping to find a cheap used car loading ramp online later, which hasn't happend). From no memorable source of inspiration I suddenly came up with using walls of car tyres with compacted earth (a technique used for building "Earthship" houses or retaining walls) and lining them one behind another, each row one tyre taller than the last to make steps, then use concrete over the steps to form a slope I can drive over. I found one study which shows a tyre wall should easily be strong enough, and they're one of the few things that are free in life because tyre shops usually have to pay people to dispose of old tyres. I just need to devote quite a few days to compacting earth into a total of about 70 old tyres, since I'm not a hippy who knows lots of long-haired people to come over and help for free like the Earthship builders seem to. At least I think if I can borrow the motorised fence post driver my father recently bought, that will help out with the compacting.

  • Tackling my Masters degree at 60

    I have decided that at 60 I'm going to go ahead and work on getting my Master degree in History.

    I got my BA in History late in life (I graduated in 2015) so this will be another late one. It will also take a while since I'm paying for it without any loans which will mean one class at a time So by the time I retire I should have my MA.

  • the oddest occurrence

    last night in my dream 
    you kissed my foot 
    the oddest occurrence
    yet in that moment
    the shockwave it sent
    

• Technology and Free Software

  • Notes on moving from GitHub Pages to Codeberg Pages

    When I initially set up my personal website, I started on GitHub Pages. While I don't particularly like GitHub:

    * I already had an account, and know how to use it

    * I was facing a bit of analysis paralysis around choosing a web host and feeling blocked

    Since I just wanted to get started with, you know, actually making the site, I decided to stick with GitHub Pages initially, in order to get things up and running, with a plan to switch later.

  • Toby's tinylog

    Small weekend #3dPrinting #diy #maker project: adding corner protectors for my solar panel so I can take it camping. Whipped up the design using #FreeCAD then sliced it with #PrusaSlicer and printed it. It was a tight fit as I didn't leave enough clearance, but gently heating the printed part up with a flame torch and then sliding it into place worked well.

  • More fun with PalmOS

    I think they're going to announce the end of the rainy season tomorrow. It was announced for western Japan already and judging by the change in weather we've had, Kanto (Tokyo, Kanagawa, etc.) is next. Gone are nights with a cool breeze, replaced by days like today where it was muggy and still and gross. Also, the cicadas are back and will be for the next few months. I am already looking forward to the autumn.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Keeping this short

      Been a minute since I have left any thing here. Life has just being doing what it does. A lot on my mind (my daughters birthday would have been the 5th, so been a bit down).

      Want to say thank you to ALL the Gemcities users. We just hit the 100th user! On average, 80% of the people who have gemlogs on Gemcities have content on them. That is not a bad ratio! So, again, thanks to everyone who uses the service!

    • OCC 2026

      Hello Gophicrucians! I've always felt the Old Computer Challenge ( http://occ.sdf.org ) was a bit moot for me since I do all my morning computing with a thirty year old Pentium 1 PC anyway, which is also almost always the computer I post to my Phlog from. But a while ago I picked up some old Sun SPARCstations (SS2, SS5, and SS20) from a genuine local UNIX greybeard doing a clear-out, and as I briefly noted in 2026-03-29.2Week_thoughts.txt, I've been thinking of getting NetBSD running on one of them. My experience with Linux (which apparantly now only supports SPARC v8 introduced with the SuperSPARC CPUs in 1992, or possibly only v8e or v9 and later) has been that trying to squeeze it into limited old hardware is an excellent way to figure out how things really work, and how to avoid all the extra modern software complexity and glitz which I find is typically pointless anyway.

      So my idea was to set up NetBSD on the SS5, or the SS20 if I could figure out why that's playing dead (but unless it's as simple as a power supply fault, I'm not too hopeful on that).

    • Retiring the Weight Log

      Since January of 2020, I've been logging my weight at least once a month, and usually every week. I now have a baseline of data spanning over 6 years of how my weight has changed. When I launched Rob's Gemini Capsule in 2021, I hosted a CSV file with the weight data as a kind of public accountability system.

      That file is now gone. The reason is that I switched from manual tracking with a CSV file to automated tracking with an app called "Lose It!".

• Programming

  • Burn notice

    Various roguelike have fire spells, a stick of firebolt being traditional to rogue(6), though back then the fire (or whether it was a staff or a wand) was just flavor.

    [...]

    though these days one might use inline functions to keep the code less indented. As to how deadly the game should be, AD&D 1st edition was quite deadly as compared to modern RPG that are more into the heroic quest where the hero dying on a random saving throw would be quite awkward. But he was the chosen one…

    Brogue adds some interesting effects, in that terrain features (grass, lichen, etc) can catch on fire and the fire can spread, with different spread chances for various types. Sometimes, rarely, the fire does not spread, though the point of the room in the screenshot is to set the grass on fire behind the player who has gone to get a key or item deep in the room. This is mostly survivable. Usually. The goal if there is a fire is to get to water to put the fire out, or to move through one fire square to an ember square and to hope that you can tank the fire damage and anything else that shows up.