Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • front porch talk

  • Inventing Chords

    Hugo Riemann came up with some pretty complicated ideas, which one might simplify to some form of functional harmony (the I-IV-V-I progression) or a means to get around the circle of fifths, descending (I-IV-VII-III-VI-II-V-I). I here is the Tonic (T), V the Dominant (D), and IV the pre-dominant (PD) though some label this with S instead. One complication is that other chords can stand in, so III if you squint at it might be a Tonic, or possibly a Dominant, as it shares tones with those chords.

  • Folding Kayaks - Another Failure of Capitalism

    For some reason I became obsessed with folding kayaks. I think I watched a YouTube video of someone dragging a large bag to a riverbank, undolfing it into an amazing-looking kayak, and exploring abandoned ruins not accessible by land...

    Now, I've never kayaked, and am not particularly a water person. But over the next few days I watched a few more videos about Oru kayaks, with some serious envy.

    That is, until I saw the price. The ones I appreciated are well over a thousand dollars! WTF. I even looked on Craigslist, but even at half-price it's pretty nuts for something that will last for maybe a handful of outings. And will likely be stolen as imaginary me leaves it hidden while exploring Chernobyl or something.

• Politics and World Events

  • Mark Carney is Your Nightmare Boss

    Years ago, there was a reality show on cable TV called *Undercover Boss*. I only ever caught it a few times, but I remember really enjoying it.

    In my memory at least, the episodes went something like this: some higher-up in a company - the CEO, plant owner, someone in upper management, etc - wants to learn about the day-to-day operations of the business. Maybe they're looking for 'efficiencies', maybe they think their employees are slackers, or maybe they just want to see first-hand the unvarnished truth of how things get done at the place they run.

    With hidden cameras recording, they walk into the workplace posing as a new trainee, and their new 'co-workers' start to show them the ropes. It's all based on subterfuge, which makes the whole thing kind of creepy; part of me suspects the show's creators wanted it to be a subtle warning to employees everywhere: *watch what you do at work, because your boss might be secretly watching you!*

    But more often than not, the end result is something wonderful: the undercover boss, confronted with their own complete ineptitude, begins to appreciate how much hard work and skill these jobs really demand, and how knowledgable, dedicated, patient, and helpful the workers are.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Prototype taxonomic name checking function for SEOSAW

    The WorldFlora R package[4], developed by Roeland Kindt, provides code for querying a downloaded copy of the WFO database and providing taxonomic information. The key features we want for SEOSAW are: check the validity of taxonomic names in tree inventory data, fuzzy find accepted names to catch spelling errors, and provide accepted names for synonyms.

  • Listening to Music Locally

    Years ago, when my family finally got a halfway capable computer (32 megs of RAM, Windows 98, to give you a sense of the era), I joined the modern world and started ripping all my CDs. I would've been 17 and had built up a little collection of mostly classical.

    I don't remember how big the hard drive on that machine was, but it wouldn't have been big. That said, it didn't stop me from ripping CDs and getting mp3s over ICQ from friends and going on the then-nascent Napster to fill in the gaps. Napster was never really a big thing for me, my tastes veering from what most of my peers were listening to, but for listening, I used what everyone else used: WinAmp.

  • tmux panes

    In all that time, I was aware that you could do multiple panes within a tab, but I could never work out why you'd want to. I was either on a small screen where it didn't make any sense, as I needed the full screen. Or I was on a bigger screen in which I'd have more than one window open; a browser, a terminal et cetera.

    My normal working space is currently a building site so I am moving around my home, escaping children who are on school holidays and working entirely on a 14" laptop. This is a funny middle space between the 11" tablet I do personal stuff on and the proper 32" monitor on my desk. The kind of middle ground where having a full screen tmux split into two vertical panes is really useful.

    My precise usecase was a 3/4 left pane with my editor and a 1/4 right pane with a watcher running tests on changes.

  • systemd timers for the Butlerian Jihad