Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Five Favorite Fairy Tale Adaptations

    I love fairy tale retellings! But I'm kind of picky about them. It takes skill to write a good novel, even if you are borrowing the framework for your story from an old story. I've picked up a lot of fairy tell adaptations that are either some kind of weird fable for an agenda I'm not comfortable with, too dark (a good fairy tale should leave you feeling hopeful) or just plain old boring. Much like the food critic Anton Ego in Ratatouille, if I don't like a fairy tale based book, I won't finish. This is a list of books I thought were worth the ink. I genuinely enjoyed them and some of them I have read many times over. Unless otherwise noted, I would be comfortable recommending these books to almost any child 12 or older.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: WDNPRUA Wordo: UNTIE

  • Callouts and Privacy in the Social Media Age

    Nat's gemlog on callouts is a good post on a complicated subject. It's something I hadn't given much thought to til recently because, prior to social media, my own spaces and communities were small enough, tight enough, that we knew who the jerks and trolls and such were. On a particular development forum I frequented in the mid 2010s, there was a poster who was a notorious jerk. People were "idiots", ideas were "stupid"; you know the sort, the kind of person who exists online in a particularly poisonous kind of way, expecting, if not to get their way, to at least be left to do their thing.

  • An economy of stolen recycling bins

    I was thinking the other day about another thing that happened to me back then and the implications are really interesting, so I thought I'd take the time to write it down.

    I live in a city that manages its citizen's trash for them. Every household gets a set of three bins: a black one for trash, a blue one for recycling and a green one for yard waste. It'd be cool if we had a compost program as well but I don't imagine I'd want to give up my compost anyway.

  • Animals

    This post has been a long time coming. I'm still not happy with how it turned out, and I think it's both less formal than my usual posts and probably worse-written. I also don't feel like it goes into the depth that this important topic deserves. So be it. It's stuff that I need to get off my chest.

• Science

  • Eclipse 2024

    My wife and I stepped out of our apartment this afternoon to see the 2024 solar eclipse. We live in Massachusetts, which wasn't in the path of totality, but it got close.

    Using our ISO approved solar eclipse viewing glasses, we were able to discern the moon creeping into the path of the sun. It was freaky when I first looked at it! In 2017, I didn't have a pair of eclipse viewing glasses, so I could only make do with pinhole viewers, and borrowing someone else's glasses for a moment.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Setting up a Portable EFHW Antenna in a Park

    I'm getting ready to operate portable with my QMX. For that I built and trimmed yet another EFHW antenna.

  • Emacs: Zeptoforth and Gnus (publ. 2024-04-08)

    It is usable now, but I need to implement the "#include" pre-processing directive, which is often used in zeptoforth code files. Current you can send a line, a region, or a buffer to the zeptoforth process, but you can't automatically include other files.

    Something that was vexing was deciding how to deal with ANSI codes, such as the ANSI escape codes the set a color when a compile error occurs. Dealing with ANSI escape codes and other ANSI commands is not a trivial project because it requires a lot of consideration of context and data buffering. The current system I using for implementing the serial connection is Emacs' built-in make-serial-process and associated functions. With that approach your output filter function gets a string containing whatever bytes you just received from upstream. So you might, e.g., get only half the bytes of some escape code. Coupling these challenges with the need to transform text appearance into Emacs faces and such, you quickly find yourself reimplementing your own terminal-emulator, which is not a small task.