Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Hostname pedantry II and farewell to the Red Consensus

    All the way back in 2018, before the war, before COVID, before Gemini, before ROOPHLOCH, before...okay, actually, no, not before I built the Franken-Peugeot like I thought it might have been, and not before I wrote VF-1 either, but nevertheless quite a very long time ago, I made a phlog post entitled 'Hostname pedantry, or "GNU/Circumlunar"' (this was also before RMS's fall from...well, nobody could really say "grace", but...anyway). Therein I explained that even though the hostnames circumlunar.space and zaibatsu.circumlunar.space both resolved to the same IP address, and even though any Gopher content available using one name in the URL could also be fetched at the equivalent URL using the other name (Gopher having no protocol-level support for anything other than this), they were nevertheless logically separate entities and you were "supposed to" use zaibatsu.circumlunar.space for Zaibatsu specific stuff (e.g. phlog posts by anybody with an account at the Zaibatsu) and circumlunar.space strictly for "CS in general" stuff (e.g. for the Circumlunar FAQ). But I said that it wasn't a big deal and, in particular, I said that "the naked domain circumlunar.space will continue to point to the Zaibatsu, forever", because I didn't want to break any links or scripts.

  • Two kinds of reviews

    I feel like if the purpose of a review is to serve as a guide for which movies to watch, which books to read, which games to play, they need to tread carefully with spoilers. I usually don’t like writing these beyond a “I liked this one” or “I was a li’l disappointed in that one”.

    There is another type of review that discusses all aspects of the work, including endings and twists, not for the presumtive “do I wanna watch this” audience but for the purposes of creators of future works. So they can know what worked and what didn’t. And for non-creators (I know, I know, "those who can't, teach") who are just curious about literature study and aesthetic philsosophy.

  • Talking The Acolyte (with some ending spoilers)

    I liked The Acolyte a lot.

    I’m putting it A-tier if Andor is S and Ahsoka and Obi-Wan are B.

    I really like that it leaned a li’l more heavily into new ideas over reincorporation of old ideas. Every Star Wars project need to strike the right balance there because we need both; it needs to be the galaxy far far away that we’re all familiar with, and that galaxy needs to be large enough to still have new things to discover, and I like where The Acolyte landed there.

    Now, some of the following thoughts include ending spoilers so turn away now if you’re still thinking of seeing the show. (It's also maybe not gonna make sense if you haven't seen the show.)

  • windows, walls, brackets and BS

    So, the leasing manager stopped by because she had to get some serial # off the circuit breaker. Not an excuse on her, this is a 501 non-profit, they cover cost of electricity, needed it for entering the utility in my NAME but their DIME - no issue there. She saw the AC window unit was in the window, explained it was supposed to be in the wall unit spot (for a large AC) and I said I would comply and get it in there by days end. And I will.

  • The taboo of repeating names

    It’s fine to repeat names a couple of times even in a shorter article.

    It’s OK to mix it up a little bit, but sparingly. Some magazine writers and editors way overdo it.

  • Basic small-town cycling

    I'm recovering from a nasty cough that followed a series of compounding injuries. Finally, my body had to rest. Evy insisted on taking care of things so I could.

    I'm still very fatigued, and cough then wheeze if I talk much, but today I cycled our little girl to school before visiting the grocer and returning home to rest.

    We currently live with no cars. Evy's transmission (a CVT) gave out the week after my car was rear- ended. I'm awaiting brake work, then body work.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Hello summer 2024

    Hola! Happy Hacking to all hackers, DIY, Creators and tinkers out there. Is been a while! sorry a lot of things happened! some for the good and others not that good :). There is an update on gemini://hispagatos.org/post/novedades_de_hispagatos/ made by NerdRat about all the latest news for Hispagatos. Make sure you read it!

  • Get out of your echo chamber!

    We live in a nation in which, though we may all speak the same language, we live in two completely different realities. At the same time, we are seeing what sociologists call the "Big Sort," a phenomenon in which Americans are self-segregating themselves into like-minded clusters. This has been happening as the U.S. has seen a steady decline in mediating institutions (such as civic clubs, fraternal lodges, bowling leagues, churches, and the like).

    The media landscape has also become bifurcated since the advent of cable television and this trend only accelerated with the introduction of the World Wide Web and social media. Americans are no longer getting their news and opinions from a limited set of choices (remember, in the 1980s, most Americans only had four television channels and one or two daily newspapers).

  • Programming

    • Retro Coding Like It's 1999: My Journey into creating a Palm OS MiniGolf Game

      Twenty years ago, during my college days, I dabbled in developing games for Palm OS. The best result of my efforts was a strategy game.

      [...]

      Once all the technical setup was met, it was time to do some coding. Programming language of choice is good old C, I did try to incorporate some newer concepts, like Coordinators. Mainly ensuring a separation of concerns. 'Old' C does have some annoyances, like the need to declare your variables on top of your current code block. When going through other Palm OS projects on GitHub, looking for references on how stuff was done, something I often saw was huge monolithic blocks of code in one file. That's something that won't fly anymore in any modern development team. But I guess most of those projects back then just had one person behind them.