Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Tai Chi

    Highly recommended, made this winter less bad, probably on account of moving the body around more, which might otherwise be too occupied fiddling with a computer (writing a bad fugue at the usual glacial pace, adding at-rest encryption to the bespoke e-mail workflow, reading about selfish genes, etc). Tai chi seems easier to maintain than more robust exercise or stretching, and can be scaled up or down depending on ability, mobility, and how much time is available. Also you can start slow and then get bendier as the tendons get used to things. And with restricted forms you do not need to even move around much, handy if you're in a room and the power is off, as may happen during winters in locations where power lines are strung below tree branches.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: DILOYUS Wordo: AHOYS

  • pathways without hope; matastatic cancer.

    turn back now if you are sensitive to hopelessness and sadness!

    [...]

    specific chemo is available for the bone cancers however this comes with many side effects (of course) including ironically bone damage. additional treatments needed to treat the treatment side effects; again cost benefit equation?

    it seems that, despite some cancers shrinking, life expectancy is still less than two years.

    my impressions so far regarding those treated in UK with terminal cancer:

    - automatically put on a treatment pathway.

    - do not hear the word cancer but deposits, lesions, et al.

    - not routinely advised on life expectancy, we need to specifically ask.

    - do not receive counselling about the cost benefit equation.

    - do not get counselling about treating or not.

    cost = days lost to fatigue, debilitation, and loss of social contact.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Purposefully Optimising for Battery Life

    ## A basic experiment in how far sustainable behaviours can take us when using modern mobile devices.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Redesigned the Site

      It's been decades since I've last took an effort to organize the site. The first thing that had to go with the bright colors that made my (now older eyes) hurt. The site was also somewhat stale since I haven't spent those years not coding, I just couldn't update the site because the site generator (CobblestoneJS) was no longer maintained (by me) and I had switched my main blog[1] and fiction[2] over to Nitride[3].

  • Programming

    • Beyond Carbon

      The Green Software Foundation(GSF) recently ran a hackathon based on their Impact Framework(IF), which I took part in as part of a team. The IF is a modular observation and modelling tool for analysing software.

    • Online Documentation

      When we started Nitride in May 2021, we always intended to convert all our websites to use the new system. Admitedly, we started with the most complex sites because that would iron out the more complex problems we were trying to solve with Nitride. And there were some rather significant patterns to iron out over the years.

      But mfgames.com[1] was one of those lynchpins for the entire migration because if a program or library isn't documented, it can't be ever be done. And we had examples and patterns, but no good place to point someone who might be interested in using Nitride with something narrative instead of “look at the tests” or “look at these examples.”

    • Renaming MfGames.Crypto to MfGames.Cryptography

      For many years, “crypto” really meant only one thing in the programming world: cryptozoology. No, actually “cryptography.” However, with the advent of web3 and cryptocurrencies, the world “crypto” is becoming muddled and no-longer obvious of its purpose.

      Recently, BouncyCastle[1] has gone through a little refactoring themselves after starting with `BouncyCastle` then renaming themselves to `Portable.BouncyCastle` and finally `BouncyCastle.Cryptography`. Overally, we like the final name and it was inspiration for us doing the same.