Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ADRKLOI Wordo: VODKA

• Politics and World Events

  • Not doing the thing

    I was reading stuff on fedi, as one does, wrote a reply, deleted it, moved on, read some more, wrote a reply, deleted it. In both cases I wanted say that the thing people were talking about seemed to me to be that pattern in capitalism where "not doing a thing" gives you less power over time, so people always end up doing something.

    Like "buy this to save money" instead of "don't buy this to save money" or "buy this keyboard to fight the pain in your wrists" instead of "work less to fight the pain in your wrists".

    If you advocate for not doing a thing, there's no money changing hands and therefore no ads to buy, no voice to gain, no political decisions going your way. Which is a slightly different explanation than greed and greenwashing for the failure of degrowth to take hold: If you sell flights and buy carbon offsets you'll always be growing unlike the competition that sells less flights to lower emissions. Even if the employees of the second company are feeling no need to grow, in the general population, their message will tend to get lost, their percentage of the market, even if enough for them, will continue to shrink, and eventually people will not have heard about them.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Analog: Patch Panel, Cabling, Case

    I'm now in the final stages of assembling the analog computer. I came up with a wire list and have wired up cables to the back of the patch panel. I also mounted the potentiometers, the IC/RUN switch, the ground lug, and the power binding posts onto the main computer case, an aluminum cookie box. The main computer case and the patch panel are separate and will be connected by two signal cables. I need to get a few rubber grommets to slide the signal cables through, but I'm planning to pick those up after work. Fortunately, my local AiH sells them in small quantities. So, It looks like I could have it up and running within a day.

    The patch panel looks a little funny for a few reasons, one being that I mixed in two different styles of banana jacks — the least expensive option for me due to what I had on hand. Also, I did not realize it at first, but the plastic on the cheapo Chinese banana jacks I bought from Amazon have almost no heat resistance. So, when I was soldering the wires onto the back, I didn't realize that the plastic around the plug was melting, causing the jacks to bend sideways. I messed up about 20 or 30 of them this way before I realized what was going on, and some of them are bent around 20 degrees of center. Fortunately, though, none of them ended up being shorted to the chassis, and all of them will still take plugs if I bring the plug in at an angle. This is rather embarrassing, but money is tight, so I don't know if I'll ever replace those or not.

  • Hacking dell poweredge to make it shut up

    the sounds it was making weren't that loud, but prolonged exposure time definitely resulted in a head ouchie even with my trusty active-noise-cancelling autism aid.

    so i went to the settings in the control panel thingie that dell calls iDRAC and was met with a disappointment. the minimum fan speed that i could choose was 40% of the maximum RPM. panel was saying it's around 15000RPM, so by thinking really hard i calculated the full throttle is something like 37000RPM, which, speaking in scientific terms, is fuckingalot. and there's seven of those beasts inside.

  • First time at FOSDEM

    This post is long overdue. FOSDEM 2025 is my first time at that event. Wow it's awesome. I've gone to local (to me) conferences before, but FOSDEM is truly on another level.

    [...]

    Arrived at ULB via tram. For me, a conference is mostly a networking event so I just hangs around the booths. Took a short while to figure out which building is where (the map is great, just still needs some time to map it to the real world). I was mostly walking around and visting stands. LOTS of fun and new projects. There's even "Fuck off Google" stuck onto a trash bin. Not sure if it's a FOSDEM only thing or ULB has that 356 days of the year.