Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Meaninglesso

    I am creating this word ("meaninglesso"), which has the meaning/value of "*is* meaningless".

    So it applies as, for example, "It meaninglesso" which means "It is meaningless". Or, as another example, "Nabitleko meaninglesso" which means "Nabitleko is meaningless".

  • Wishlist

    City of Braunschweig, Germany. I quite liked it, they have quite a nice market with local products, nice old churches to play concerts in, and a good public pool and sauna.

    This is it for today. Typed on my trusted Adler Tippa 1 from 1968.

    (Originally typed on paper, photographed and posted on onetypedpage.com, then OCR'ed with my iPhone and posted here with almost no editing)

  • What has happened to optimism?

    I discovered science fiction at a very young age, getting hooked on TV shows like Star Trek, Doctor Who, Captain Scarlet. My parents were always keen to get me reading and though dad didn't think much of Doctor Who ("like tea from China" was his stock dismissal) whenever I came back from the library with science fiction books he seemed pleased that I was reading something to do with science. I spent my teenage years in the company of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke and other classic SF writers.

    A feature of the stories of that era was that there would, one day, be a world government. I took it for granted that nation states would soon give way to a rational system that would not allow arbitrary borders to prevent solutions to problems being found. I don't think it was a fringe opinion: there might have been doubt about how that future would be organised, but I think many people shared my assumption.

• Poetry

  • unbothered

    two iridescent ducks swim towards me
    expecting breadcrumbs I don't have
    they're unbothered by my lack of offerings 
    like I'm unbothered for a short moment
    by the lack of answers
    

• Science

  • Stargazing: binoculars targeting multiple stars around β CMi

    I heard a rumor on the forecast yesterday of mostly clear skies today (2026-10-08). So this morning I got up a few minutes early and took a look outside. The stars looked a bit fuzzy — I think there was still some thin clouds here and there — but good enough for some stargazing. I didn't have much time left before work, so I decided to use the 12x60 binocs, which allow for a short setup and teardown if I don't use the tripod.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Solar MiniServer Part 3 - Assembly

    Calculations and parts list are done. Now the screwdriver comes out. This part covers assembly in the order that turned out to work best in practice: batteries first, then the mechanics, then solar and fine tuning. At the end comes a first functional test, still without any software, using only the HAT's onboard tools.

• Programming

  • State Across Exec

    This of course Does Not Work™ as the state is not maintained across an execv(3) call of some sort. The intent is to on each self-exec to increase a counter so that an increasing amount of time is spent before the process is restarted. Without the delay a process stuck in a fast restart loop will spam the heck out of whatever it interacts with, which is typically bad: a waste of local resources, or worse a waste of remote resources to the point that they rate throttle or ban you on account of the abusive level of requests. The increase in the delay means fewer checks will be made if the service is unavailable for longer periods of time, up to some ceiling value or here the process goes away after a set count and must be manually restarted.