Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Trying not to be cynical

    It's taken a long while to figure out how to communicate with the boss. He is ... excessively optimistic, I am rather cynical. I was about to write "by nature very cynical" but then I stopped and tried to remember if I've always been this cynical. I feel like ... no, I didn't used to be like this.

  • My favourite TV shows

  • My Favourite Films

  • Old New

    "New" or "modern" are perhaps terms to avoid when naming things. This will avoid awkwardisms such as "it was modern, back then in the whatever decade". Or consider the Ars Nova or "new art" that flourished in France somewhere around 700 years ago, which means you also need to know roughly what year this posting was made, or have other information as to when Ars Nova happened. Much context may be winnowed away over time. Clues might be added to orient the reader, such as "since Linux kernel 5.19", and not "since 5.19" which could be confused with version numbers of other softwares. Such clues were used in cuneiform, perhaps necessary as there the same word had potentially several meanings, or a sound could be written in several different ways. But have we made progress since then? Opinions vary. Take it away, Irving Finkel!

  • Food Forest: Taking Gardening From Occasional Chore to Obsession

    I have tried to write this post several times but I keep getting overwhelmed and tossing it out. My plan originally was to post a series of updates showing how our yard has transformed over time but I just haven't had the time to keep up with getting all that information and photography together in posts for the gemlog. You see I have planted so many things since this all started that I don't think I even remember everything I've put in the ground. So many plants.

  • Being cured

    This topic has been the subject of conversation throughout my life with multiple posses of friends.

    Bender and I went over time and again the idea of his that there are two types. Yes, I know it seems a bit black and white given my love for the grey and the muddled, but given the subject matter, the memories came to the surface and float there still, and besides, it's certainly not a poor concept.

    Bender and I went over time and again the idea of his that there are two types. There are those that stay. There are those that leave. The former remain to keep the traditions and some might say rituals of the village alive. They perpetuate its legacy. The latter are the banished. Well, according to our original conversations, not exactly the banished, but the ones who choose to leave (or are self-banished), though in the context of the quote above, I'd say the *choice* is heavily influenced by the cognitive dissonance involved in living and / or growing up in said village. The latter may choose to leave, but their choice is in line with their "rejection" by the former of the two types.

• Technology and Free Software

  • I Just Saw Real Magic on the C64

    lftkryo has DONE IT AGAIN and broke my brain with a Commodore 64 demo. It doesn't look like much for folks who don't know the internals of the C64 or don't read the screen at the beginning before the demo runs, but for those who know, it's amazing! I'm excited for the explanation video/post at some point. The demo is called "NINE" and is linked below.

  • February as Pareto Month

    The Pareto principle is valid for many systems. It is probably valid for the effect other people have on us, the clothes we wear, the packages we have installed on our laptop or desktop, and so on.

    The principle predicts that focusing on the vital few and dropping a big chunk of the other part doesn't significant change the overall outcome. This can help us to get rid of a lot of cruft, waste less time, and increase our overall well being.

    [...]

    The Pareto Principle probably is also valid for the packages installed on our laptop or workstation.

    * 20% of the packages require 80% of the dependencies

    * 20% of the packages are used 80% of the time

    * 20% of the packages cause 80% of the update-time

    * 20% of the packages cause 80% of the vulnerabilities

    With this in mind, it might be a good idea to evaluate the installed packages.

    Many operating systems and distros have some way to distinguish between manually installed packages and the other packages, either installed as dependency for one or more manually installed packages or installed as system package.

    Try to identify which of the manually packages are part of the vital few, and take a hard look at the other manually installed packages. According to the Pareto Principle you could uninstall several of these, without affecting much of the work you do on the system. Hopefully this also reduces the number of packages installed as dependency.

  • Dev Log 6 - Quite a Lot of Progress

    Initially, I wanted to do log posts that were sort of like tutorials as I built up this project. I have changed my mind on that and instead am just going to mention what has been done. I was going to write a dev log post a while back ago, but I decided to spend that writing time instead finishing up reading "Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid", which was on my list of things to do this year. With that book finished, it's time to write another dev log!

    A LOT of progress has happened in the last month since I posted dev log 5. By the time I had written dev log 5, I had some controller input handling managed along with some bank switching, but not too much in terms of that was handled. I also added a "credits" intro card that mentions that I am the creator of this project. For the moment, the RFC 3339 timestamp of the build time is placed on this screen.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

      Deep Web Konek is transitioning to new platforms for our official website. Moving forward, we will be hosted on the Tor network and Flounder, providing a more secure and independent space for our research and reports.