Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • My Excitement for The Acolyte, Star Wars, and Starting Star Trek

    Back when the sequel trilogy was released, I was one of the many people that jumped on the hate bandwagon. Now that I have rewatched them and thought about them again, almost all of the storyline criticisms against the sequels are just really dumb. Most of the critiques that I personally have deal with the infuriating misplacement of jokes in TFA, and the weird lens focus shifting, also in TFA. Other than that, the storyline is actually pretty good and makes sense.

  • I’m a paranoid schizophrenic with surround-sound speakers

    I hear lots of things about PFAs. None of them good, and, as far as I can tell, they’re everywhere. I wish 3M the best of luck trying to phase them out of their products, unless they manage to screw up and replace them with things that are worse. I hear at least some BPA replacements are like that.

    I’m trying to imagine what life would be like if things that had PFAs in them weren’t in use, at least for our food chain and things we touch regularly. (I can’t say I’d care if PFAs were used in plastic tubing in a water-cooled computer of mine.)

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ACWILTD Wordo: ROOTY

  • Its Patsy

    The word “its” is a difficult and weird word since it’s the possessive case and possessive noun clauses usually do end with ‘s, like “Mary’s chain”. We don’t have anything similar in Swedish, either (we would write “Marias kätting”), so I have no intuition for this and it’s one of my most common English mistakes. I try to remember it by thinking that the other possessive pronouns don’t have apostrophes either, it’s “his”, not “he’s”.

  • Probably the best gravel in the world

    I got asked a rhetorical question the other day after I said that I believe that people and policies are to a large extent influenced by market forces, like advertising.

• Science

  • If the perfect system isn’t completely perfect, it’s not the perfect system

    When I think of modernism I think of the search for the perfect system, the grand unified theory, the silver bullet that holds everything together. An end to the patchwork of folk wisdom, replaced by a directed effort to put everything in order based on one foundational truth. Be it faith in the infallibility of the hadith, the primary colors clarity of plastic vision, or in the inevitability of free market forces.

    But the counterpoint to that is if the system built from the foundational truth ends up a mess that needs patching, then that foundation maybe wasn’t so true after all.

• Technology and Free Software

  • RISC OS 5.30, GCC 4.7 and Hello World

    Presently am I learning RISC OS 5.30 on my Raspberry Pi Zero W. I want to write some programs and I learned C back in University. I am familiar with C on POSIX systems but not on RISC OS. These are my notes to remind myself how things work differently on RISC OS.

    I found two resources helpful. First James Hobson had a YouTUBE series on RISC OS and C programming. From this I learned about allocating more space in the Task Window via the Tasks window display of Next and Free memory. Very handy to know. Watching his presentation it became apparent he was walking through some one's tutorial. This lead to some more DuckDuckGo searches and that is when I stumbled on Steve Fryatt's [Wimp Programming In C](https://www.stevefryatt.org.uk/risc-os/wimp-prog). James Hobson's series (showing visually) help and the detail of Steve Fryatt's tutorial helped me better understanding how things work on RISC OS.

  • Domestication

    That companies can become neither beneficial nor commensual got the label enshittification, though "user domestication" is an alternative if less known term. Not all companies will go down this route, as there may not be pressure for embiggened profits or whatever it is that darkens the patterns. Money, more often than not. The sequence "dependence, inability to change, capture" of user domestication seems similar to the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy found at Microsoft. Certainly not all companies engage in such shenanigans, nor do the bad ones do so all the time: The Corporation is perhaps overused as a punching-bag. Other domestications, if we may extend the term, involve things that may have been beneficial, and maybe still are, such as external digestion—more commonly known as cooking—boiled water, sitting in cars, the SmartPhone, AI. Some of these have or may become, for better or worse, obligatory or near obligatory, but there may not be much if any top-down conscious decision from, say, Zorg Industries to make it so. Where is the corporation to hate on if there was not one involved?

  • 👻 A Simple Script to Initialize nix-Based Projects

    These days any development I do for myself will use nix to, at the very least, define the development environment, if not the entire build process. I also always pin the `nixpkgs` version on a per-projecct basis, so that when I come back to the project 2 years later I don't have to deal with compatibility issues which have been sprung up in the meantime.

    Pinning nixpkgs involves going to the nixpkgs GitHub page, finding the latest tagged release (or choosing tip of master, if I'm feeling frisky), finding the _commit_ of that tag, and then writing up a `default.nix` file which pulls this commit down and imports it. Usually at that point I remember that `builtins.fetchGit` isn't good for this, because it will do a full clone and nixpkgs is massive, so I have to go back and switch it to `builtins.fetchURL`. But then `builtins.fetchURL` needs a sha256, so it takes an extra step to grab that.

  • Programming

    • Tracking down a bug

      I've spent the past two days tracking down a bug, and I think it's a library issue.

      So I have this program I wrote some time ago that uses Xlib [1] and for reasons, I needed to store a 64-bit value that's related to a window. This is easy enough with setting a window property.