Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • internationally tired

    there's boredom and tiredness and disconnect and overwhelm. trying a little tarot journaling to help me out - king of coins. i'm trying to be most efficient, make things slot into place, not waste any of my limited time here on this trip. this king could be a workaholic in his darker aspects, and it's not something i've ever had to really learn to navigate. my usual work is taking care of the house, and that happens in its own time. time here, tasks here, are oriented around and motivated by care for others. i want to see them, i want them to be able to see me, i want to be fair with my time. and i forget that actually it's not only time that's limited, i have other resources i need to be taking care of. like my own health and energy. and that's always been hard to prioritize when Others Depend On Me.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: PEHINOB Wordo: DEIGN

  • Embracing the universe like a blazing star

    I have been so busy throwing myself into implementing my plans and goals for 2024 that I haven't even gotten a spare moment until just now - and, frankly, I'm just forcing a spare moment into existence by sheer force of will slash discounting the future to justify the opportunity cost - to actually sit down and tell you what those plans and goals are. Which is probably fine, because in all likelihood you don't care terribly much, but I'm going to inflict it on you anyway.

  • Akebono, Musashimaru and Konishiki

    It's been a long time since I did an instalment in my micro album reviews series. This post *isn't* one, but maybe it'll get the ball rolling.

    In 1995, Hawaiian musician Israel Kamakawiwoʻole recorded a song called "Tengoku Kara Kaminari"[1] (meaning "Thunder from Heaven"), celebrating three American sumo wrestlers of Pacific Island heritage who were the first non-Japanese wrestlers in history to earn championship titles. If you know absolutely nothing about Hawaiian music (raises hand) but have some vague stereotypical notion of what "Hawaiian island music" might sound like, yeah, it sounds more or less exactly like that. I don't mean that as a slight, it's a genuinely nice song for what it is, it's sincere and sentimental and respectful and pays tribute to people and events that mean a lot to some people but are supremely obscure in the wider sphere.

  • April 20, 2024 - Blessed Virgin Mary on Saturdays (W)

    Hail, holy Parent, that didst bring forth the King Who ruleth heaven and earth for ever and ever.

  • Don't care what people think of you

    I've been told that I should "not care about other what think of you", that I should be the only one deciding whether I'm good, and all kind of similar things.

    Some people also added "believe in yourself" after it, which is a paraphrase for "have faith in yourself", which is a paraphrase for "please be stupid when thinking about yourself, in the way that I'm telling you, and ignore that I have no reasoning for it". That is not the subject of today's rant.

  • The Cxyyziian Continuum

    Hrmph, you humans sure are strange. I found this odd book lying on the ground next to a strange smelling cigarette. I must say I am somewhat intrigued...

• Science

  • Mars Has Leap Years

    A year on Mars isn't 669 or 670 sols. It's 669.6! So how often does Mars have a leap year?

    Each year is 0.6 sol longer than it should be. Or 0.4 less. I don't know. And I don't know why it "should" be an even number of sols either. But such is the cosmic law and the punishment for disobedience is leap years.

    We have a choice here. Either we celebrate the new year at 670 sols and end up ahead, meaning we'd have to reduce the number of days some years. Or we celebrate at 669 sols and need to catch up some years.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Blogging, Phlogging, Two Worlds

    Ever since I got a working copy of MarsEdit going on my MacBook, I've been using my DreamWidth blog far more often. Admittedly, most of it is because of how much easier it is to just throw down thoughts and post them, but then why not do the same for my phlog, since it's just as easy in most cases?

    Admittedly, it's because I see my phlog as more personal than a blog. I talk about random things on the web, like making an entire partition disappear[0] because of a loose connection inside of my MacBook, or weird thoughts of making Windows Vista my daily driver OS for a while.[1] It's also trivial to put links inline in the rich text editor (Cmd+Shift+A to add link from clipboard), as opposed to the multistep process in BBEdit when I'm writing a phlog post.

  • An update on emphasis on gemtext

    It turns out that one of my most important concerns, is true: This will mess up screen readers, and be a nightmare for accessibility. Somehow I was hopping that a bold, or italic "a" character, would still carry the semantic value of the letter "a". After all it is an "a"—right? Well it turns out that it is not true; as I have been informed by feedback. (thanks Alexis)

  • Basking in the Sunshine of a Distraction-Free Mind

    I got my Super Nintendo on my 7th birthday and went on to have (and many times was an early adopter) every game console until the PS3. In college I modded consoles and built my own computers as I finally had the disposable income to do so. I switched my major from poli-sci to computer science and spent an inordinate amount of time playing WoW and Counter-Strike: Source online.

    I guess what I'm trying to say is that I've been hooked-in for a long while, even before everyone and their mom had a little computer hanging out in their backpocket.

    So, when smartphones came along I was gob-smacked. Here's this little device that's basically a mini computer in my pocket. I was enthralled.

  • but ofc the hardway

    I want to self-host all of the janusweb stuff, which ofc means I need to clone the repo and build it from source, right? First bug I ran into when I started playing with this, was that when I pressed spacebar it'd freeze up. This seemed to be because it was doing non-null checks on x and x.y.z but not on x.y. If you're interested in details, I commit'd that fix to a copy of janusvr with my changes.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Focus Time

      At the moment, one of the biggest challenges for me is finding focus time. Living with small children — the younger one is now 1¾ years old, or 20 months — there are certain rhythms and patterns to life that make it difficult to concentrate on any one thing. Interruptions are frequent and attention always divided.

      As you can imagine, this is extremely detrimental to programming. If I find myself with, say, only 5 or 10 minutes to write some code, it is difficult to make progress on any given task. And even if I do, chances are that I'll introduce a plethora of fresh bugs in the process. This is largely the reason why the Lagrange repository has not seen much activity in 2024 and I've just been slowly patching things up since v1.17. (Today, I fixed a regression with text selection markers in the mobile port.)