Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Not enough sun?

    As expected, the position of the solar panel, on top of the shed, didn't keep the system up for very long. This spot only really gets half a day of direct sunlight, and that's on a sunny day.

    I installed the pi in the shed at midday on Saturday with two fully charged 18650 batteries. By Sunday evening the batteries were dead.

  • creative held

    the creative 
    being held
    starts creating 
    ideas spark
    and sparkle
    joy found
    in tiny moments 
    shared
    

  • Re: Kipple and Impermanence

    This post really moved me.

    I, too, was struck by the concept of kipple and what an elegant and broad-reaching framing it was, and find myself thinking about it when encountering these day-to-day tasks.

    I, too, sometimes experience the effort of every single future repetition of a chore piling on top of me when trying to find the motivation to do it just once.

• Politics and World Events

  • Catastrophe Ethics

    How can our individual actions move the needle on a massive, complex, and systemic problem like climate change? How should we act in order to make the necessary impact? How *must* we act?

    What is our personal obligation to maximize the extent to which we're part of the solution, and minimize the extent to which we're part of the problem? How do we determine that obligation? Is it really an obligation, or is it something else, something softer and harder to define?

    Catastrophe Ethics, by Travis Rieder, isn't a book of answers. It's not even specifically a book about climate change, although the climate crisis is used as the canonical example of something he refers to as The Problem: the challenges that each of us experience in our daily lives as we try to get our arms around our personal responsibility for systemic and societal-level issues. Rieder explores The Problem through the lens of a number of different moral, philosophical, and ethical frameworks and perspectives. Although he teases the reader a bit in the beginning, it soon becomes clear that there are no easy or universal answers available.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Runar Tenfjord Releases an Open Dev Board for the STMicro STM32C5 — With Oberon-2 Support

    Norwegian engineer and electronics designer Runar Tenfjord has released design files and firmware for a permissively-licensed STMicroelectronics STM32C5-based BluePill-inspired development board with a twist: official support for an embedded variant of the Oberon-2 programming language.

    "[This is a] custom [STMicro] STM32C5 board in the breadboard friendly BluePill format designed in KiCad v10," Tenfjord writes of the board, which has been released through his company Tenko. "Note: this MCU [Microcontroller Unit] family is quite new and therefore not all variants of this MCU was available with the usual suppliers when this board was created. When other variants with LQFP-48 footprints is available this should be pin compatible with the layout of this board."

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Yet more noise on emails from other Sean Conners on the Intarwebs

      It appears that someone is wrong on the Internet [1], and if Hacker News is anything to go by [2], that person is me! [3] Or rather, it might Justin Prime who wrote that Stack Exchange post [4] about Gmail's possibly buggy support for periods in the local part of an email address.

      But one thing not brought up in the Hacker News thread is that Gmail supports custom domains. So if some other Sean Conner were to have Gmail support email for example.org, then I would expect seanconner@example.org (our hypothetical Sean Conner who is not me) to be distinct from seanconner@gmail.com (which is me). And now I have to wonder if this might be a cause for some of the issues being reported? Google is a Leviathan system with millions of moving parts where a slight mishap (like a timeout or some lost packets on a database lookup or even a bug on a system not yet updated) causes email being delivered to seanconner@example.org to end up being delivered to seanconner@gmail.com.

    • Updates - where was I all that time?