Gemini* and Gopher

• Science

  • My Celsius-Fahrenheit trick

    One equals thirty-four. Each 1 degree above/below freezing in Celsius is about 2 degrees above/below freezing in Fahrenheit.

    This is roughly accurate for human-scale weather temperatures. This trick tends to be off from the actual conversion by a few degrees, but it's good enough to save the effort of having to look it up.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Endless scroll

    The “endless scroll” debate was after it replaced pages where you’d scroll scroll scroll click, scroll scroll scroll click, scroll scroll scroll click. That was annoying while still not actually stemming addiction (at least for me). I’d still read through those megathreads on RPG.net, UI annoyances or no. The endless scroll it just took the clicks out of that process which was an improvement. But what I want is instead taking scrolls out of the process! So it’s tap, tap, tap, tap—like an ebook!

  • Internet/Gemini

    • THE LABYRINTH

      I've seen in a few places online people talking about setting up auto-generated labyrinth websites designed to endlessly trap AI crawlers in some rather petty effort to protest against them. In my experience crawlers seem to get trapped in my online services without me even trying - I even had to block a Gopher crawler that got stuck in GophHub for weeks. But anyway what really strikes me about this idea of an AI-consuming labyrinth is how the internet is already built, often rather deliberately, as a labyrinth to occupy us alleged human intelligences.

      I mused over this last night on the couch in one of my long sessions of thinking silently, naked, in dim light, while the room got colder as I'd turned off the heater in preparation for bed, after the usual opening dream of finding a girlfriend gave way in hopelessness to more academic concepts. Unusually I caught myself near the beginning and chose to write down my thoughts on a crumpled scrap of paper rather than let them float away harmlessly into the ether as usual.

    • Alt text on this blog

      Alt text is a description of images. By default, it is only shown by browsers that cannot show browsers – like text browsers or screen readers. So what about alt text on this blog?

      I think that alt text should be unnecessary on my blog because the text should carry the entire message. “Welcome to my Wall of Text!” 😄