Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • that's that done

    Vegetable garden's weeded, vegetable garden's tilled, potatoes are planted, carrots too. Cucumbers'll wait a few more weeks, we might still get some cold. A light water, and then rain later in the day. Nice to have something ticked off the spring to-do list.

  • Kingdom of the Dead

    In the last week, I've been faced with a lot of death. My father's health has been rapidly worsening. A friend experienced a horrible death in her family. Another friend of a friend died by suicide. And it all felt pretty normal.

    I feel like people my age see death as occasional tragedy -- a strange anomaly that shouldn't happen if the world around them is functioning properly. One of the healthiest things I think I ever saw was when travelling somewhere in Southeast Asia, and I saw families burning their dead by the river in the centre of town. They were kids running around, a monkey threw something vile at me. Life was just happening all around us as these folks went through the ritual of saying goodbye to the dead.

  • Narrative Adventure Game Gem: If On A Winter's Night, Four Travelers

    It was probably 1-2 years ago that I incidentally came across the game "If On A Winter's Night, Four Travelers" (short: IOAWN4T) on itch.io. The premise sounded intriguing and I saw all the praise that people heaped on it in their comments and reviews on itch.io and Steam. It wasn't until my recent re-discovery of adventure games through ScummVM that I took the time to play it, but boy what an experience!

  • Changes

    June is just around the corner, and that means we will be at the halfway point of 2024. This has been a quick year.

    I said I had a few challenges coming up this year, and I have overcome one already: I had never been hospitalized before, nor had I ever undergone surgery. The whole experience was, in the end, a good one in that I lost weight, I changed my diet and I had plenty of time to sit back and do a lot of reading and little else. The complete absence of any stress was very much needed.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — EVINPSH Wordo: CHAIR

• Technology and Free Software

  • Re: My cup doth not run over

    Yes, we have measuring devices that measure exactly one cup. It's used a lot in baking, particularly. We also have liters, teaspoons, tablespoons, and very rarely do I, at the very least, see the use of fluid ounces, but bottles of liquids, like pop (soda we call pop here in the Midwest US; although those in other areas of the US might call them soda pops, soda, or even just cokes; aka. colas), will have the fluid ounces alongside the liters. I rarely use pints as well, but I think milk and egg nog often come in pints, and probably alcoholic beverages too (I don't drink alcohol, so I wouldn't know).

  • Internet/Gemini

    • So much for saving the world from links

      ...browser and text readers can easily detect URLs not coded as html anchors, which has me thinking the species has become far too link addicted for one blogger to do anything about by attempting to make following URLs more difficult.

  • Programming

    • To split, or not to split: that is the question

      Yes! The line itself may be too long to fit into memory, or could consume "too much" memory. In this case, either wrap the input prior to reading it, fail (hopefully without the Linux out-of-memory killer killing another random process), or memory map the file, but that last option is even more fiddly and difficult. At that point you probably want a compiled language for the speeds and maybe someone has a library for it? Various modern software uses the quick and easy "split" route, and then some folks wonder why so much memory is being consumed…

      Years ago users complained about their gene parsing code; it turned out that they were passing duplicates of the array of genes around to lots of function calls. So some of this is not knowing better options that reduce memory use. Another problem can be giving the developers machines that are too fancy, as the resulting code may not work too well or at all on more typical consumer devices. A problem here is that developers may be able to "shop around" for a job that will give them a gonzo desktop system with all the memories. Someone was pondering legislation to restrict computers to some limited specification, but that would probably only drive computers underground, as one might suspect happened somewhere in the "Dune" universe.

    • trek(6) Style Input Handling

      trek(6) is based on an earlier teleprinter game and is still playable on such; output to the user is text, and commands from the user are read as lines. Unlike a teleprinter where there may have been two different ribbons to distinguish what the computer printed from what the user typed (and had echoed back to them) there is no distinction in trek(6) between input and output. At least for the version I have on OpenBSD; there are several varieties of this game, and some could easily gussy up the input or output to make it look different. Gemtext also does not have a means to show the difference between input and output, but you can probably guess from the following.