Gemini* and Gopher

• Technology and Free Software

  • “Strategies Against Algorithms”

    I just found out about this project a musician did this year, whereby he would personally send you a USB with his music on it. It doesn'tm exist anywhere online, and he rightfully assumed he would have a similar amount of listeners to his music anyway. Although, it seems he probably had to send out more than anticipated, from the sounds of the update on his site.

  • No screen without a matching TODO item

    My war against Screen and against Online is over and this is the peace treaty: No screen without a matching TODO item.

    I can spend any amount of time online or on devices or watching TV and do anything on there as long as I do this:

    Away from the screen, with the screen off or out of view, I look at my “to do” list on paper, I look through the whole thing (things I want to do onscreen or IRL), and I write down things I want to do. I can then go to the screen, “enter Screenland” so to speak, and try to do as many things as possible on the “to do on screen” part of the list. No gimmicks, no app limits or blocks or guilt.

  • install astrill vpn on arch linux

    short and sweet. i paid for astrill vpn while traveling. it was easy to setup on my phone, but not my arch linux computer.

  • OEM Production 2550L2D-MxPC

    I've been messing around with a little old PC I have laying around which I formerly ran pfsense on, it has an Intel Atom D2550 and two Broadcom BCM57788 gigabit NICs... When I bought the machine from Newegg in 2017, the only quirks folks in the listing complained about were LOUD CPU fan and the strange RAM expansion slots in the machine... The D2550 officially only supports 4GB of RAM, but at the time almost everyone did this with just one of the two slots, making me wonder why there's a second slot...

    Today I found out just how quirky this machine really is...

    The machine has UEFI firmware on it, but linux is unable to populate anything in the EFIVARFS, weird... I can get it to UEFI boot from the USB 2.0 ports on it, but I am unsure if it's IA32 or x86_64 UEFI boot. Attempting to get it to UEFI boot from the SATA ports is useless. Ended up using CSM booting, not a deal breaker, but I really dislike having GRUB on my machines. [1]

    The SuperIO chip on the machine appears to be a W83627DHG-P, and it's wired up rather strangely. I've noticed that out of the hardware monitoring capabilities on this chip the two populated temperature sensors NEVER change, and the fan DC or PWM control never changes either. When I investigated closer I discovered that the PWM control is tied to the never changing temperature sensors; the ACPI sensor on this machine also returns bullshit values too. I suspect that whoever wired up those sensors just used a resistor to always return a healthy looking value instead of real temperature; of course that's also why the stock fan was a source of complaint for the folks who used them: always runs at full speed.

  • On Doing It Yourself

    DIY is a major industry, even a kind of leisure activity, in the UK. Everybody has one or two "DIYers" in the family but, when I first became a homeowner back in the 90s, I'd never even changed a lightbulb. Eventually, though, I went on to undertake large-scale re-wiring, plumbing, gas-fitting, structural modifications, brick-laying, roofing, and plastering. Nearly forty years on, I'm still doing these things myself.

    I do none of them well although, in my favour, I'll point out that my house hasn't fallen down (yet). The first time I put up a shelf, my wife photographed the whole process from start to finish, certain that it would lead to some amusing catastrophe. It didn't; but when I look back at the outstanding incompetence with which I approached the task, I cringe in embarrassment.

    I've certainly suffered my share of amusing catastrophes since then. I once screwed my hand to a roof joist whilst installing a light fitting. This would have been bad enough on its own, but I had to unscrew my hand whilst balancing at the top of a ladder before I could get back on the ground. It seems funny now, but I don't remember laughing at the time. I've fallen off things, broken things, and set things on fire more often than I can recall.