Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Helplessness In Situations

    Over the weekend, I was supervising 2 Bronze Duke of Edinburgh Award groups while they wandered across Cannock Chase. On the Sunday, I was woken up in a rather surprising way.

    "HELP, [Explorer] is having a SEIZURE!"

    I was half asleep, having suffered the clocks changing and doing the usual camping wake up every few hours. Mentally, I eventually worked out the word seizure and mentally said "Oh shit!". After a battle to get out of the sleeping bag, get some shoes on and find my glasses, I joined 2 other leaders outside this Explorer's tent. They were diagnosed with epilepsy and we knew about it on the medical records. She also had 'quiet' fits where she convulses a little but no flailing limbs. Thankfully, they have a twin who was on the expedition and was a dab hand on caring for them. It ended up with 5 leaders standing outside this person's tent while watching the twin provide masterful care.

    It felt weird not being able to help. You know there is lots going on but nothing will help. The person having the seizure was safe, warm and unlikely to cause harm to others. The only thing we had to worry about was their being sick. All we did was remark on how brilliant the twin's care was.

    The only help we could provide ended up being after the seizure. For one, the Explorer was out of it. They didn't know they were on camp or what happened the day before. I recognised the struggle with coordination and trying to string sentences together from when I have had migraines. It is bloody awful and almost like you are drunk. There was a lot of guiding that Explorer and their friends to get the basics sorted while they came back to reality.

    It was a real shame. In the end, they were deferred for their assessment. The Explorer had only done 1 day of the expedition and so they will have to do it again. Fingers crossed they have not seizures on the next expedition. On a selfish level, fingers crossed that I am not woken up in the same way again. At least when it is a child shouting that someone has been sick on them, there is less of a rush to get untangled from the sleeping bag!

  • itchy

    It's spring break at my day job, so I'm in the uncomfortable position of (1) being off my routine, (2) having a long to-do list of things "I'll deal with at spring break," (3) being car-less due to addressing one of those things on the list (a very necessary brake repair), and (4) "spring" being a loaded season for me, generally.

    All this results in me very much needing to write and also very much not being able to concentrate on any one thought for very long. I'm getting client work done, but not my own stuff.

    Some disjointed stuff from my brain meats:

    [...]

    On my Web site homepage, which also has a new domain name. Also on Playce, the little site I made to store links to games and retro movies and similar stereophonic multimedia events: [...]

• Politics and World Events

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ACIZQUL Wordo: LUMEN

• Technology and Free Software

  • How I Use Windows XP in 2025 [Ed: OK, but GNU/Linux so much better on that very same hardware; this is stupid to do...]

    I seen a recent post on Reddit about using Windows XP securely, so here are my recommendations:

    First make sure your machine is at the very least behind a NAT/Router that has a firewall, and make sure you aren't port forwarding things to your Windows XP machine unless you know exactly what you're doing.

    I would then disable UPnP (Printer & File Sharing Services), and 100% disable Remote Desktop stuff, including in the Windows Firewall if the exception is still checked in there.

    You can disable some of this by going to Control Panel > Add and Remove Programs > Add/Remove Windows Components, and unchecking IIS, Networking Services, and Other Network File and Print Services.

    Then, go to Control Panel > Switch to Classic View > System > Remote Tab, and uncheck "Allow Remote Assistance invitations to be sent from this computer" as well as "Allow users to connect remotely to this computer".

  • Studying computer science at the end of history

    Some of the coolest computer people I've met over the last few years have been students of creative and critical studies.

    Sometimes people ask me what I'm studying, because ostensibly that's one of the stock phrases neurotypical people pull out when they're trying to fill the air. I have a few rehearsed answers I like to give. One of them is that "I'm an environmental computer scientist." If we're being honest I'm a lot more of the later than the former in practice, but I like to keep the word "environmental" in there as a safety measure. In my mind, telling someone I'm a computer scientist is a bit like driving a car at highway speeds into a wall, and "environmental science" is my crumple zone.

    The truth is I find being a computer science student incredibly embarrassing. I blame my industry, my colleagues and myself for a lot of the problems we as a society are facing today. Obviously it's more complicated than that, and I do think an amount of self-criticism is healthy and productive in any space, but a problem I keep having is that I really don't have any alternatives, except maybe… to use computers less? While I think I resonate a bit with the degrowth movement, "use computers less" is the sort of take that necessarily comes from a place of privilege.

    To an extent I have to believe this comes from a place of insecurity more than anything because I can't say that anyone's ever picked on me for being a CS major. Most of the time people say nothing at all. When people do say something, it's often to the effect of "I could never." Like engineering, people think working with computers is hard, and I disagree. Computers aren't *hard,* they're *scary*.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • One year on namno.duckdns.org! [Ed: Well, it is Microsoft spyware, nothing else]

    • Interesting P2P projects

      Twister is a decentralized P2P microblogging platform that stores usernames and post metadata on the blockchain. Data is shared over a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) using a modified BitTorrent library.

      The author ceased development in 2020, but the network is still active.