Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Warner Estate

    I thought that the Warner style of housing was more common across London but it is apparently very local to just Walthamstow. I've always found the split house design to be quite intriguing.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ESHILMF Wordo: FIFER

  • Funeral for an E-reader

    I am burying (recycling) my Nook Simple Touch this month. I purchased it on sale from Barnes and Noble in May 2012. I continued to read books on it until August 2024, a useful life of just over 12 years. Aside from some simple hacks and rooting the first year (so I could test Android on it) for the first year or so, I ended up just using the thing as a basic e-reader. I only purchased a handful of books from Barnes and Noble through it since almost immediately I was downloading epubs on my computer and transferring them to the device from an external micro-SD card. I also wrote my own library (bookmobile) to download website articles, strip away cruft, and convert them to epub, which I then moved in bulk to the device to read on my commute or at home.

    This summer I traveled a bit by bus and train, and have been camping, at the beach, pool, the park, etc. I've brought the device around by throwing it in my backpack. I only travel with a single bag, no matter how long I travel for, even when I traveled around the world for a year in 2011. But alas, over time the plastic of the Nook got weaker, then the buttons started to go. They got stuck down, causing the pages to auto-advance. There is a second button I can use instead, but that one is also getting weaker, brittle, and it's only a matter of time til the device fails entirely. Possibly this thing has another 6 months or year or more left in it maybe. But I'm feeling like it's time. I'm finding myself browsing ebook readers on ebay and reading reviews. A Kobo Clara? A Boox Nova?

  • Early Pioneer Park Visit (publ. 2024-08-13)

    This morning (2024-08-13) I dropped by Pioneer Park around 5am. I was originally aiming to get some sunrise photos, but the clouds were too thick, and the view to the NE was not great in the various spots I visited in my walk-around. But I got a few photos of other interesting early-morning subjects.

  • The thing I still cannot explain

    This post is just a link to my gopher phlog post about my confession. And I still can't explain how I got out of this mess. I'm an agnostic but this maybe was a miracle.

  • AI as a New Crystall Ball

    For a long time, the most common approach to artificial intelligence was based on the idea of reconstructing the process of logical thinking. This approach belongs to the category of symbolic artificial intelligence[i]. To possess intelligence, in this view, means to be capable of connecting facts based on certain rules in order to discover new facts eventually achieving a comprehensive knowledge of the subject. An important tool in the field of symbolic AI is logic programming, the type of programming where a program consists of a collection of facts and rules that can be applied to reply to queries. The most well-known language designed for logic programming is Prolog created in 1972.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Mom wants a laptop

    A few years ago my mother regularly bought her clothing at HSE24, a German TV station which advertises clothes and jewelry the whole day/night. I told her how bad it was but my mother is very stubborn. Now she's on HSE24 again and buys her clothes there. A lot of them, in my opinion, though I think she needs some new clothing. And as long as she's not running out of money, that shouldn't be a problem. After all my mother is careful with her money.

    And because mom is always right, I made her an online account at "hse.de". But she still does buy by telephone calls to HSE's service number, because I don't want to show her the offers on my laptop the whole day. But because I needed some clothing too, I myself looked at Amazon's offers and showed them to her. That was a BIG mistake. Now she wants her own laptop and surf the web and especially Amazon.

  • Canceled items in my task manager

    I think it's sad if one doesn't have the option to cancel some of their todo items because it reflects one's level of freedom in what we do. I don't have statistics on what percentage of my personal todo items are reasonably cancelable, but it's obviously more than 25%. Maybe 70%?

    Because of what I do, I have more freedom than most people (it comes with more uncertainty and risk). However, I think someone who has a completely deterministic work can also give themselves enough freedom by being efficient and conscious about what they do with their personal time. It has to be done consciously and proactively to avoid problems such as revenge bedtime procrastination.

  • Programming

    • Alexandru Nedelcu ☛ Cryptographically Strong Random on the JVM

      When generating random numbers for certain use-cases, such as when generating keys / IDs, it’s recommended for the random function to be “cryptographically strong”. Otherwise, attackers could predict random values, enabling serious security vulnerabilities.

    • Karl Seguin ☛ Basic MetaProgramming in Zig

      While I've written a lot about Zig, I've avoided talking about Zig's meta programming capabilities which, in Zig, generally falls under the "comptime" umbrella. The idea behind "comptime" is to allow Zig code to be run at compile time in order to generate code. It's often said that an advantage of Zig's comptime is that it's just Zig code, as opposed to a separate, often limited language, used in other languages for similar purpose. In my experience though, Zig's comptime is still a world onto itself. There are limitations to what you can do at comptime, there are parts of the standard library designed for comptime, and even small parts of the language, like inline for, used only at comptime.