Gemini Links 22/02/2024: What We Pass On and HTTP Header Viewer
-
Gemini* and Gopher
-
Personal/Opinions
-
introductions
hey folks. I'm Eight, host of The Eighth World. We're a system, so we have multiple people sharing a body. check our profile for more information! occasionally others might post with this account, we'll give ample warning if this happens. ~bartender! one spiced cold latte, please. put it on my tab.
-
Coffee and caffeine
I drank large amounts of coffee for many years, using various brewing methods. At some point, I realised two things. Firstly, that although I can enjoy the taste and experience of drinking a good cup of coffee, in reality I rarely savoured the cups I drank, and was drinking it almost exclusively for the pharmacological effects. Secondly, that my consumption of coffee was one of the main ways that I interacted with the globalised economy. Given the massive disparities in economic strength and their origins in colonialism, I find it hard to consider my causing workers in some of the poorest countries on the planet to pick and prepare beans for me as anything but exploitative, even with Fairtrade, and given this and the non-negligible ecological costs involved in roasting and transporting, it came to seem ridiculous that I was engaging this costly world-spanning apparatus just so I could consume my caffeine in a tasty liquid form.
-
Introducing "Apollo days", some rough scheduling
Project Gemini - the internet protocol one - is officially considered (mostly for the purpose of yearly celebrations) to have began on June 20th, 2019. The original Project Gemini - the space exploration one - was conceived in 1961 and the first capsule flew in 1964, but the important milestone of the first crewed flight happened on March 23rd, 1965, as commemorated by our use of 1965 as the default TCP port number.
Imagine that you printed out two identical very long calendars, each resembling a measuring tape, that is as a long strip with dates marked at regularly spaced intervals, with time consistently moving in one direction. Call one of them the "internet tape" and the other the "space tape". Now suppose that you arrange those two tapes so that June 20th 2019 on the internet tape lines up precisely with March 23rd 1965 on the space tape. Having done this, what does today's date, February 21st 2024 on the internet tape line up on the space tape? I make it to be November 24th 1969. That's right, it's the day Apollo 12 landed on the moon!
-
Coffee
(This isn't exactly a response, or necessarily even in dialogue with winter's piece, but I have been thinking of writing about coffee for a few weeks and this article is what pushed me over the edge)
A lot of people really, really love coffee. I, ostensibly, really really love coffee. People who don't often find this kind of weird. "Isn't coffee supposed to taste like shit?" they ask. "Yes," we respond. "Then why do you keep drinking it?" they continue.
When I was a kid I wasn't allowed to drink coffee. Probably for a good reason. I always saw coffee as an "adult" drink, in line with beer and wine, things around the house I wasn't allowed to touch.
-
Highlander Rock-Paper-Scissors
Everyone throws rock, paper, or scissors.
First and foremost all duplicates destroy each other. There can be only one. Then, paper beats rock, scissors beats paper, and rock beats scissors.
If everyone gets eliminated in a round (if everyone throws the same symbol or if there’s a loop), no-one gets eliminated that round. (People eliminated previous rounds do not come back.)
-
The Case of Mistaken Identity Part 2
“The trouble with many people is that they have very limited imaginations, Dr. Watson. The mind is trained to pay no particular attention to detail because it imagines the ordinary. For instance, if a person sees a man with a shaven face, the person will conclude that the face is cleanly shaven so long as no stubble is easily perceived. This, of course, is an imagining as beard growth varies from man to man. If one were to pay closer attention, one would see that the grain on a given side of the facial skin is pulled tighter in a direction. This indicates which way the blade is habitually dragged across the skin. Once one notices this level of detail, one becomes acquainted with the fact that the skin shows signs of how long it has been since a shave was last had more quickly than the appearance of stubble.”
-
🔤SpellBinding — CDEGIOS Wordo: COYER
-
First day here
I enjoyed reading posts here, so I decided to join!
-
Oh, how I’m älting hexes and squares
Unsettled by the realization that the diagonal counting rule from Pathfinder:
When measuring distance [on a square grid], the first diagonal counts as 1 square, the second counts as 2 squares, the third counts as 1, the fourth as 2, and so on.
is more accurate than hexes for large-scale sailing/trekking, and the accuracy only goes up the more fine-grained your square grid is.(In a skirmish I’d probably rather use Fate-style zones or something.)
Hexes have a north-east problem. On flat-top, sailing straight east for two hexes gets you 6/7th of the distance sailing straight north for two hexes does. (Reversed for the abomination that is pointed-top hexes.) And here, the finer granularity exacerbates the problem.
-
Isaiah 22:11: You Did Not Depend On Him
The first half of Isaiah 22, up to verse 14, deals with a situation in which Jerusalem is under siege after a crushing military defeat, and there is little hope for the defenders. There is some uncertainty as to which historical event this is referring (see TBKC) but likely it is the attack of the Assyrians against Judah, in the days of King Hezekiah, in which the entire nation was overrun but the capital city narrowly escaped destruction (TBKC, Buksbazen). The first few verses speak of humilating defeats in which soldiers are killed without even putting up a good fight, and leaders are taken captive fleeing to save their own skin.
-
Reorg
Big reorganization at work today. I lost about a third of the people on my team, and gained twice as many. I lost a few tasks that I hate doing, and gained being on call for 2:00am deployments.
I'm not sure how I feel about everything. I worry a bit that the team is now is too big, or that the late night phone calls will burn me out. The changes are smart from a sense of what my team does, it is just tough with the people involved.
-
Pit Stop
Got the call from school at 12:10, my son had his insulin pod knocked off and would obviously need it replaced before he could eat lunch.
Work computer tells me I have a 12:30 meeting
Race through the house grabbing my car keys, a new pod, alcohol wipe, and insulin.
6 minute drive to school, calling them to make sure he's by the front door.
Arrive at school, get handed dead pod, rapidly move to a semi-secluded corner of the office.
-
What We Pass On
My older son has his pediatrician appointment this morning. He's finally old enough that they're starting to ask the questions about feeling down and depressed, which to his credit he answered honestly that he was.
It's hard for me not to lump all the blame in the world on myself. I was very conflicted on wanting a family because I saw how rampant depression was in my family, specifically on my mother's side. It was pretty evident in my grandmother, my mother, and her siblings. Now it feels like a horrible "gift" that I've given my son.
-
more snow
I took a walk this morning. It was cold, and I somehow misplaced my hat beforehand, but I took a walk anyway. With the additional snow over the weekend it made for a pretty slow hike. In spots, the snow was higher than my dog’s chest, but he didn’t seem to mind. It did, however, make for a slower walk than usual for the both of us.
There are spots where the snow weighed down the branches and they obscured the trail. These are some tall pines and not-so-tall hemlocks. Only because their boughs are laden with snow are they in the way, otherwise they’d be just low enough to reach if I were to swing my arms over my head. It’s fun to carefully shake the boughs – careful so as to avoid inviting falling clumps of snow down the back of my neck. When the snow falls off of them, they float back up to their normal height and I can pass below them.
-
Expectations
Over the years, I’ve had numerous places I’ve written my thoughts. On one of the blogs I had, only about 1/3rd of the posts were in the proper folder to be picked up by the static site generator. The rest were a place for me to write things that I wouldn’t necessarily share on the blog. In a way, this capsule has become the new version of that.
I was going through some of those old posts recently, and one of them was in response to getting my yearly review and getting only “Meets Expectations.” This was a year after getting a special Chairman’s Award for being part of the team that put the first top 15 bank on Kubernetes. I was still working just as hard, with 50 to 60 hour weeks. After our success with the online banking move, every application wanted to be on Kubernetes, and there was a flood of requests, and I worked my ass off to try and meet as many of them as possible.
-
-
Technology and Free Software
-
Internet/Gemini
-
I wrote a python script to upload articles to smol.pub
I wrote a python script to upload articles to smol.pub that can replace the smolpub.sh bash script.
It's still a work-in-progress, but so far it works both for posting new articles and for updating existing articles. In fact, I posted this same announcement using my own script.
-
HTTP Header Viewer
I noticed last night that Peter Lowe removed the browser header viewer from his website[1]... After a cursory Google search for another one, I determined that I *hate* everyone else's, typically because of excessive amounts of advertisements on the pages.
As a result I quickly hacked a page up on my web server duplicating the basic functionality of his. It's available at: http://gopher.zcrayfish.soy/browser_headers.sh
-
-
-
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.