Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • wrong direction

    I travel in the wrong direction 
    the distance between us greater
    
    
    yet I feel closer to you
    
    
    in this place of unfamiliar faces
    where I can be anyone, anything
    

  • Requiem for a Season

    The Blue Jays played the Orioles in a double-header today, the fate of their season riding on these two games. Before the games, the Blue Jays were in a precarious position: any combination of a White Sox and a Guardians win, or a loss from them, meant elimination.

    By mid-afternoon the Jays had lost, and were officially eliminated from postseason contention. A season that started off so hopeful after losing an all-time World Series to the Dodgers last year came to a crushing halt.

• Philosophy

  • Who Are You Such That You Live Here: Ethnoautobiography as a Research Design

    A practice is not yet a method; someone must defend it before a committee. I will argue that ethnoautobiography became a research design in a small set of dissertations that invented its protocols while using them. I will walk through its dimensions, three working examples, and where it meets autoethnography.

    The origin story is a question. An Indigenous colleague asks Jürgen Werner Kremer, a white German psychologist working on Native land in California, who are you? Kremer has two answers available, a curriculum vitae and an existentialist biography, and neither answers what was asked. His colleague wants his people, his place, his ancestors, the stories he carries. Kremer's diagnosis is that modern European selfhood is built by not knowing those things, a severing from place, ancestry, community, history, dream, and spirit that he calls normative dissociation. We are cut off by design, and the design makes it feel normal.

  • Calibrating the Instrument: Ethnoautobiography and the Question of Whose Best Counts

    Every appraisal of practice comes from somewhere. I will argue that reflexivity is a methodological requirement rather than a courtesy, and I will show it through ethnoautobiography, the method Jürgen Werner Kremer and River Jackson-Paton set out in their 2013 book. Their one-line definition is worth memorizing: ethnoautobiography is "storying the self in participatory visions."

    The method braids three strands that usually sit in separate departments. First, autobiography: your own life story, told deliberately rather than assumed. Second, ethnography: anthropology's disciplined attention to culture, turned inward onto your own formation, except the community under study is the one that made you. Third, participatory and Indigenous epistemology: the claim that knowing is relational, embedded in ancestry, land, and community, rather than the detached view from nowhere that modern science pretends to occupy. Braid the three and you get a procedure for surfacing how ancestry, culture, and position shape what you know and, just as much, what you fail to notice.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Finding distraction in a calendar

    This started out as a post on my phlog [1], but it started getting too long there...

    I distracted myself from a couple of tricky work situations that have no obvious solution by giving some thought to how I can improve my calendar.txt system.

    One of its weaknesses is that there isn't any way to add recurring events. I'm not much of a coder, but I thought it should be possible to script a means of adding events, including recurring events, without opening the txt file. This would be especially useful on my phone, where I experience some friction getting into the txt file with termux and vim.

  • Rube-Goldberg Machine

    The LLMs have been posttrained to emit structured JSON describing the function they want to call and the arguments to pass - the harness parses the JSON, hopefully does some safety checks, and executes the corresponding internal function.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • ROOPHLOCH 2026: @parking lot - FAIL!

      And now for something different. Had to hop in the grocery getter to get me some groceries. Thought I would phost an ROOPHLOCH quickie.

      Speaking of quickies the 420 kids are going for one...a quickie, that is. Young love, ftw, w0rd!

      Well, since this outdoor, offgrid parking lot is more ordinary than ordinary, I havn't much to comment on, aside from the vehicular nocturnal horzontal activities.

    • ROOPHLOCH 2026: @Hahamongna Watershed Park / JPL

      OK, lets try this QR / projector phost again. This time I am coming to you live and direct from Hahamongna Watershed Natural Park over by Jet Propulsions Laboratories (JPL).

      There is a frisbee golf course here. I never played no frisbee golf. Curious. Lots of squirrels and holes on the course. Prolly some rattlesnakes as well. I see lizards. Also people walking around the trails. There is shade and bugs here. I've never been inside the JPL facility, but I think there are times during the year when they open it up to the public. I should research.

    • Git over Gemini

      To help increase the functionality of the smolweb I added support for git pull from Gemini based hosts...and then added the server side support to my git frontend script.

      This isn't new. I found a project that added the gemini based transport for git over on GitHub but it was written in Rust and I currently am out of harddrive space to install the Rust tools so I rewrote the solution in Python. If you're running Linux, BSD or OSX you already have Python installed and the code was simple enough to not use any non-standard libraries.

    • been awhile

      It's been awhile since I've updated. Not just here, but any where and any thing beyond a quick thought on blue sky. I had a genetic test last fall that revealed a high cancer risk and had a subsequent surgery to reduce said risk so I've been pretty down for the count. But, now I am starting to feel back to normal a bit. Aside from the usual level of crap that comes with being chronically ill anyway.

• Programming

  • Log Log scales and natural logarithm

    On slide rules, the natural log of a value on the LL3 scale is shown on the D scale. The LL2 and LL1 scales also work in this way, except that the value on the D scale must be divided by 10 or by 100, respectively.

    The LL scales are meant to be used for calculating powers.