Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Radio Romania International (part one)

    This is part one of a post about Radio Romania International, one of the few remaining major broadcasters on shortwave. I will include notes on how to listen to it online, then in part two I'll provide links to online receivers which you can use to hear it via shortwave, using just your web browser. This is because the current summer shortwave schedule only has a couple of weeks left to run, and the winter schedule will have different frequencies

• Politics and World Events

  • The issue with political discourse

    Hi there! It's been a while since my last Gemlog update. I stopped using Gemini for a while; I'm not sure why. Maybe I lost interest, but anyway, here I am again! I started writing a post in my physical notebook, but I lost motivation and gave up on publishing it. The draft is kind of related to this topic, so I might use some of the ideas from it in this post.

    [...]

    To give you some context, I live in Brazil, where elections for the presidency and the federal and state chambers took place last Sunday. The right wing won the majority in both federal chambers. There will be a run-off election for the presidency, since the candidate with the most votes, Flávio Bolsonaro, did not receive more than 50% of the vote.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Christina's 5 questions for October 🤔

    Google and other behemoths are difficult to get rid of, so my only useful advice is to make small steps. You can't fix this problem in one go.

  • last_words

    I’ve been interested in what happens to your online content after death for a long time. I recently asked some folks what they think about this topic. One conclusion is perhaps the correct one which is that it doesn’t matter. When you pass, your content stays online in one way or another via archives and/or, it goes away. Both are fine.

    [...]

    Without something more complex doing the locking/unlocking, you could still make something somewhat lightweight but it would require server side code like PHP. And, for the end user, the person with the last words, that won’t work. Because I’d want people with static sites to be able to have their last words available too. They may not be able to use PHP.

  • Musing about "AI"

    There was a biggish story on the BBC news yesterday about parents using AI tools to remove watermarks and upscale the low-res sample photos that school photographers send out. It featured on a 'phone in' that would normally have passed me by, and it was an interesting listen.

    Broadly, contributors fell into 2 camps: the outraged ("This is stealing!") and the nonchalant ("Problee shouldn't do it but whatcha gonna do?")

  • Open Camera

    I checked out Open Camera again after however many years because /e/OS uses it as the base for its camera app. Most of this review applies to both versions.

    It's actually pretty good! (Much better than Fossify Camera.) Automatic settings are fine most of the time, and you can manually set focus, exposure, etc. It can shift seamlessly between lenses on devices that support it (like the Pixel 5), and you can switch manually on devices that don't (like the Fairphone 4).

  • Another Palm

    We went from raining every single day, to sunny skies ahead for the foreseeable future. The weather reports on the morning news show little sunshine marks for at least the next week. Typhoons #28 and #29 are south-west of the main island right now, but it doesn't look like they'll make landfall which is just fine by me.

    One Palm I have a soft spot for is the Z22 (Zire), because I bought one new in 2005 or 2006. It's an underdog, I think: small, lackluster screen with only 256 colors, not high resolution, no expansion slot, no headphone jack and only two buttons on the front (not great for games). It was USD $99 upon release, and at the tail end of the PDA era, if I remember my history correctly.

    I got one this summer and used it in the US; a color-coded schedule was nice to have, and I could use Memos to keep track of steps walked and hours slept. It also makes for a pretty good ebook reader as it's nice and light. As soon as I got home to Japan though, the digitzer died. I sourced a replacement and surprised myself by successfully transplanting it to the old screen. Then I broke a critical part which sealed the PDA's fate. I couldn't find help anywhere, so in the fine tradition of throwing good money after bad, I bought another one.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • In conversation

      Step by step, slowly but surely, I am approaching the use of the internet that I have imagined for myself. As I have mentioned in previous posts, I want email to be one of the main ways for me to communicate. Right now I have a grand total of two correspondents. Not much, but I prefer quality over quantity, as conversations with my "penpals" are interesting and engaging.