Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Random Temperatures

    Whoops? Kinda got some stair-steps going on there. The weather simulation algorithm is from the "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Wilderness Survival Guide" (Kim Mohan, 1986) though I did throw in a bit of randomization on the temperature for each day, the above being the daily lows for Temperate zone Mountains. A more accurate simulation can probably be had by playing around with sin waves (maybe slow plus fast plus noise?) but weather simulation is a very deep rabbit hole that I'm mostly refusing to explore more.

  • return

    When I was a teenager I discovered the Grateful Dead. I had the first album, Working Man's Dead, Europe 72, and Skull & Roses on vinyl, and Built to Last on tape. I had planned on following the band, but didn't have the means to travel. Then Jerry died when I was 19.

    In the last year or so, I have rekindled my love of the Dead. When I was young, my favorite GD was early stuff. I didn't really connect with jazzy dead. Now, though, my favorite era is 1980s dead. I have a growing collection of concert recordings. Well, a collection of files, and some will balk at using the word "collection" to refer to digital music files. However, I travel for a living. I was on precisely 170 flights last year (2023). Carrying physical media would be a chore, and I don't have a lot of timw to listen at home when I am there.

  • Harvard Classics

    This year became for me a year of education and it seems it will continue to be, because I will go to university this autumn :D. As I wanted to read quite a lot books this year and I enjoy roadmaps a lot, I was finding something like a reading plan/guide which can provide me with knowledge in a "structured manner".

    So, Harvard Classics (also known as Dr. Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf of Books), made in the beginning of 20 century, is a collection of "best works of all times" (actually it is not author's aim, but rather to show the progress of human race since its beginning). It has 51 volumes (~23000 pages), which contains main speeches, documents, science papers up to 1900. Eliot positioned the collection as a way to gain basics (actually more than basics) of liberal education.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: EFIOPRW Wordo: SOGGY

  • Marrying a truth to a lie

    Having listened to two short episodes (from a series of bullet episodes) on New Discourses on the subject of truth and the blending of truth and lies into a difficult to untangle symbiosis in a single sentence/statement * I thought it worth writing down this thought:

    How often do we do this? How often do I do it? How easily and why do formal errors creep into my reasoning that lead to false conclusions, when it would be enough to be on guard to hit closer to the truth? How often do I commit such acts of manipulation by combining true reasons with false conclusions into one poisoned fruit?

  • This was supposed to be another post about plans for improvement

    I wrote a synopsis, written a lot and almost finished revising this entry. It was the longest entry I have written so far. But did it contribute anything particularly new? Not especially. So I stopped correcting it and started acting instead. As Jocko Willink said in one of the countless videos accurately summarizing our shortcomings and problems, (I'm quoting from memory, but the meaning I think I'm keeping full) "It's easy to take out pen and paper and write out detailed plans for how we will act, it's difficult to act. That's why we should always remember that the planning phase should take a few seconds, and then the plans should be executed." Of course, the point is not to take the thing literally, sometimes a few seconds is absurdly short, but I know very well this planning for myself, writing out points, only to end up with too little time, strength, will to act to actually put them into action. I've written a plan, the feeling that I've done something is already there. Only with action it's worse....

  • freedom through limitation

    trying to find freedom in limitation. the overwhelming stuff, overwhelming choices of activities don't play well with executive funcion problems. and so i'm trying to combine two concepts.

  • On Stoning

    Some religious thoughts for today. I'm not religious, but I do get the occansional bit of theology rattling around my brain. Today it's about stoning in the Bible. Not any of the offenses it is prescribed as punishment for, but the concept of stinging itself.

    "To stone" is a euphemism, albeit a thin one. It puts all the focus on the implement, draws it away from what is actually done. "Stone" it's a nice plain noun, and a passive one at that. The word calls to my mind the image as smooth round gray or lump sitting on the ground. inert. It fits easily into the verb position of a sentence, and still nondescript.It keeps quiet about what the action entail.

  • Weatherstation Update

    It has been a little while since I last wrote about my weather station–almost a whole year in fact. I wrote about how I would go about communicating between my raspberry pi and my micro controller. I decided I would use CAN bus to do all the communicating. It turns out though that CAN is really difficult and designed to work well when you have multiple devices communicating over the same wire. Think long distance i2c. Since I’m just doing peer to peer, CAN ends up being a bit over complicated for my use case.

    Shortly after writing my post, [Fripster] sent me a message saying that I might be better off using RS422. He was definitely right and I switched over to that right away.

  • Shitposting

    Don't forget to wet your dries, then dry your wets. That's the secret.

  • Ember Wednesday After Pentecost (R)

• Photos

  • Cloud Photos (publ. 2024-05-22)

    Last Friday afternoon (May 17) I was laying in the grass on the yard, and I observed some very dynamic activity in the cumulous clouds overhead. Massive clouds were changing dramatically over the course of seconds. For the last half of the show, I was able to grab some photos of interesting cloud shapes.

  • Mount Hayes...? (publ. 2024-05-22)

    I feel about 80% sure that this is Mount Hayes in the Alaska Range, based on the direction I was looking and some similar photos on the Internet. I used the "curves" tool in Gimp to make the mountain faces pop out a little more, as they were somewhat vague and bland in the original photo.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Organize your console with tmuxinator

    This article is about the program tmuxinator, a tool to script the generation of tmux sessions from a configuration file.

  • The Resurrection Ritual: Breathing Life into the 20 year old PDA (Palm Zire 72s)

    As some of you know, I'm a sucker for PDA's. They would let you be productive on the go, I could write texts, e-mails, read rss feeds, play games and so much more on a small device that you could carry around in your pocket. Seems very mundane now that everyone has a smartphone but in the 90's and early 00's, this was the bee's knees!