Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Weekly links 6

    My recurring Weekly Links feature is not weekly. But it is as good as post as any to try, to see if my publishing script craps out because we've move to a new year. You can do it l'il script!

  • Rain forest

    It rains a lot in Washington state. Or maybe it's just winter.

    I live in Central Oregon, and I'm not used to the dampness up in Washington, especially not on the Olympic Peninsula.

• Technology and Free Software

  • 8th January 2025 - Chants of Sennaar

    I spent Sunday playing and completing Chants Of Sennaar. It is an adventure game which is mostly about solving puzzles. You awake from a stone slab as a mysterious person in a robe. You wonder around until you reach a door. You look at the door and spot mysterious writing. Looks a bit like it could mean 'open' and 'close'. You go through the door and see valves in various states. A sign suggests what state the valves need to be in but all in this mysterious language. What do you do with this?

  • Security Theater

    In my case it was genome sequencers, which back then were big bulky expensive things connected to a Windows system (or possibly DOS, or possibly both, where you'd pull out a drive tray, and flip it 180 degrees to load the other operating system that ran different software). The problem here was the the vendor insisted that the Windows system never be patched, set against the fact that an unpatched Windows system would last about 30 seconds on the network before being hacked. One solution is to keep Windows off the network, perhaps placing a ball of masking tape in the network port and then taping that over with a "NO!" label to lower, but not eliminate, the odds of someone incorrectly networking the host up. No network would mean all data transfers would be done via sneakernet, or to walk from computer A to computer B with a portable drive. The lab techs were not a fan of such.

  • Analog Basics: Integrator (publ. 2025-01-08)

    I am trying to familiarize myself with the basics of analog computing, i.e., setting up calculations or models with analog components, and the associated mathematics. For starters, here is an integrator I wired up, based on page 52 of the venerable 62-5032 RadioShack notebook by Mims: [...]