Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Good evening, y'all

    Good evening barkeep, could I please have a grog? It is cold out there. Thanks letting me in.

    In another life, quite a while ago, I entered a bar not unlike this one, in a country whose language I spoke very little. I had come to that land for work, would stay there for a while and felt quite isolated, really.

    I entered that bar after struggling to decipher the menu and having identified an item that sounded really appetizing. The bar counter, visible from the outside, was empty that day. I thought that, despite my awkward language level, it would mean that my patronage would still be welcomed. Instead of sitting at one of the empty tables, I took a seat at the counter. As I was alone, I hoped it would make the presence of a stranger more tolerable if I would not occupy place that a group could want.

  • Port Of Miami Explosion -- thoughts on safety

    I've complained a lot about the fire hazards of lithium batteries. Recently a container with several EVs exploded in the port of Miami.

    The most likely cause is a Tesla that was previously flooded with salt water. However all the cars in the container (4, I think) had some damage, and very minor damage such as a fender bender can crack the battery case, turning a car into a timebomb.

    Part of the problem was blamed on the inability to shut down the battery on modern EVs -- there is thermal management, and battery management, that have to be on all the time. However the battery will blow without being on -- if exposed to air or water, admitted by vents or cracks.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Announcing TurboQOA - Streaming QOA Codec

    Something I have wanted to write but never got around to it, QOA (Quite Ok Audio) is a very simple, lossy audio codec by the same person who brought you QOI, the Quite Ok Image format. There is no real reason to use QOA. Until I found one and I find no one implemented it yet. So I did.

  • I'm adjusting my tin hat to talk a bit about Google banning people

    Another day, another YouTube channel gets demonitized. While it matters to the channel owner that the channel was demonitized, for this post, it doesn't matter which channel, because it probably happens many times per month. Maybe per day, given the sheer size of YouTube these days. And in every case you do hear about, the owner is going around in circles, with different parts of Google trying to pass the support issue to another part of Google hoping the person with the support issue goes away.

    It's not that Google can't fix the issue, it's just that it's not something that is easily done, or cheap. And it's not something any one employee can fix, due to how the whole software gestalt that runs on the computers and handles everything at Google works. And this I don't think is often talked about, or even known. Heck, it's an educated guess on my part, but with Google big on automation (because as they have stated often times, “humans don't scale”) they just can't (or won't) manually deal with the 500 hours of video uploaded every minute at Google (as of June 2022, which seems to be most quoted value I found with minimal searching).

  • Gnus: Hiding Future Thread Posts

    Often in mailing lists there are threads that I am not interested in. One can kill a whole thread with gnus-summary-kill-same-subject (C-k) or some other similar commands. But then the next time you login, you might see new posts on that the thread which you then have to kill.

    The recommended way of dealing with this in Gnus is the scoring mechanism. You can drop a thread subject to a very low score (tied to a particular group, i.e., mailing list) and then Gnus will automatically mark it read. You will see the messages initially, but they will be marked with the gnus-low-score-mark (Y) and will be hidden next time you view the group, or you run gnus-summary-limit-to-unread (x). The core function involved is gnus-summary-lower-score (L).

  • Internet/Gemini

    • writing on the internet

      i don't feel like writing on the internet much lately. i'm so bad at blogging (╥_╥)