Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Overconsumption

    A few days ago, a YouTube video about overconsumption appeared in my recommendations.^ The video specifically discussed TikTok overconsumption trends regarding women's purses and handbags, breaking down the excessive number of plastic storage bins featured in the TikTok posts and pointing out that the products they contain are completely unused. While the video was created by a woman and aimed at a female audience, I still learned a lot about what overconsumption on modern social media looks like.

    One of the video's main points is that bags have a kind of art all their own. What we carry with us, be it in a pocket, a purse, or a backpack, says something about who we are. If we want to express ourselves in a certain way, the things we take with us, and how we carry them, can play a big part in that expression. French actress Jane Birkin, whose namesake is the Birkin bag, was cited as an example.

  • biiicycle...biiicycle

    As usual, let me back up. I owned a bicycle before today. It was a Shimano my husband bought for me at Costco on the grounds that "it was on sale" and "the box says it fits people your height." Which I guess maybe? some of them? except the box did not account for my exceptionally short wingspan. Trips of more than about a mile were uncomfortable; more than about three miles was physically painful. I had to strain *just enough* to reach everything that it was unpleasant to ride.

    I did ride that bike a bit when he bought it. I thought it'd be fine. I've never owned a bike that actually fit me. My entire childhood was hand-me-down bikes from older and larger relatives and friends.

    Once we moved to the place I live now, though, I stopped riding. I am too old to adapt to a too-large bicycle, apparently; my arthritis is just not having it anymore. It sat in the basement and made spider friends.

  • sour

  • Slow Clinic

    I've really been enjoying "Accidentals" by Slow Clinic, as I start messing around with my own efforts. I've been absent-mindedly planning some things in my head. Running things in stereo by recording my good amp and running my old Pod into the guitar jack of my audio interface. I've bought a number of pedals recently (a looper, a reverb, a synth engine) and my initial little tests have sounded good. I've always loved musical soundscapes - in the classical world, I've always loved Bruckner, and his so-called sonic cathedrals - and this feels like something I can do, that I have the skill to do, that I don't need others for. The hardest thing is, as always, getting started.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ACLNOUV Wordo: TWIST

  • Molecule 05: Piney Cashmer

    Molecule 05: Piney Cashmere --> smell of cute [crucial update: my cat hates this one. she passive aggressively sniffs around me when i spray it & looks at my as though to say "why would you do that?"]

  • 🖼️ xkcd — Geologic Periods #3120

  • The Hum of Doing

    Ever since my departure from institutions of formal learning, my concern for academics had slowly waned and withered. I have not met anyone who likes examinations or assessments, not even those who excel in them. It is almost unanimously perceived as tedious and even the best of students would likely prefer another mode of evaluation. Despite its short sightedness and its attempt to reduce students to a quantitative measure, examinations still remain as the prevalent means through which we judge qualification and merit. Although I have reached a point in my life where I wouldn't have to take any more of these, at least within the confines of academics, it still bothers me in some ways.

    It was evident that this abiding concern had only little to do with the distress academia had caused me. In a test, I had always felt that I was constantly put in a position to prove my worth. To justify what pragmatic utility my existence had ultimately served. As much as everyone would agree such quantitative measures are woefully inadequate at even judging a phenomenon, let alone a person, we are still forced to contrive one out of necessity. Only numbers and magnitudes can inform action. And given the fact that we exist within a culture that views dissent from ceaseless doing as failure, we strive to be engaged. To compete and out do each other in whatever ways that are presented to us.

  • House Buying

    Recently I have done something I did not expect. I put in an offer on a house and got approved (subject to valuation) for a mortgage. A true surprise! Not bad going considering I started looking in early July too.

• Science

  • A Few Notes on A Brief History of Time (1988)

    I finished reading A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking a few weeks ago, and decided it would be nice to annotate a few quotes I bookmarked and clean up some notes I wrote. Especially since it's rare for me to be left with really memorable quotes or lingering thoughts on a book (that I feel are worth sharing).

• Technology and Free Software

  • How to connect to the UBC Secure wireless network on Linux

    Hello friends. For today's article I wanted to share a quick guide on how I managed to connect my Linux computer to the University of British Columbia's enterprise wireless network.

  • change as a medium in which i swim through + tiny silicon worlds inside of my hands

    speaking of- does it ever bother you that we are in Space + Time = SpaceTime? and that everything is all forced into being a linear experience because of it? we all have to die, we experience individuality, and we are forever trapped by the consequences of our choices/anticipation of the invisible future? god it's so weird. i find myself kicking back with a certain one of my associates,another one of relative (heh) philosophically dissociative intrigue, who shares the whole chronic third person perspective issue that i so often encounter. there are a bunch of youtube videos where you can learn about these concepts, i am more of a reader when alone but with others i dont mind the viddying. over the past year or two we have both learned so much about the following:

  • Transcribing "I Died Last Night"

    Part of the atmospheric experience of playing DreamWeb is its "game over" screen (I won't spoil it), and the melacholy music that plays each time the player loses. The music is the track "I Died Last Night" by Matt Seldon and Steve Boynton. That's about all I know about it, but I thought that the song sounded so cool, I wanted to try playing it, and, not finding any sheet music, I thought it sounded simple enough that I wanted to try transcribing it.

    [...]

    I learned a few intresting things about the track in the process of transcribing it, which are that it doesn't appear to be playable with only two hands, but I guess that's reasonable given that there are two authors; it is played almost entirely on the black keys of the piano; and that whatever piano they used was tuned very sharp. From the spectrogram it's nearly possible to just read off the tuning, but there are no A naturals in the whole piece! Judging from the frequencies of the G# and A#, it looks like the tuning is probably ~450 (i.e., the first A above middle C would typically be 440 Hz, but their piano seems to have had it at 450 Hz).

  • Install windows xp from CD

    I found windows xp installation cd in storeroom and tried to install it on qemu to see what it look like. It intresting how microsoft advertise their platform on installation screen, they said you can save file to CD because it support CD-R, CD-RW. (nowaday they advertise their cloud servics by poping up it's signin page every time I use their os.)

    The installation process took so long (it said "Setup will complete in approximately 37 mins", an hour pass and it still 37 min), I don't know its because my qemu setup is wrong or its some of MS problem.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • On Gemini Games

      Hello everyone! Im new to the geminispace , and I could not avoid to note that there are not much games here.

      [...]

      I would love you to read it and let me know what you think! I do believe that this would be a really nice addition to Gemini.

    • On Gemini Games

      One side of my relationship with computers since the beggining were games.

      I remember the first games for Windows 95/98 my parents bought to me, hours and hours playing Age of Empires, Dark Colony, Sub Culture, etc.

      Single Player games are awesome, and you can have an endless collection of truly masterpieces.

      However, lets forward a few years and I discovered multiplayer games.

      I was astonishing: I can play games AND socialize at the same time? Sounds like a great deal to me. Browser based games, in particular, were really nice, as you can hit the ground running in an instant, avoiding the download of any software - A rather interesting advantage due to the slow connection speed of the early 00s.

  • Programming

    • Optimi-Zi(n)g Sudoku-Solving

      One of the first program that I wrote in Zig (in September 2023) was a Sudoku-Solver, implementing the dancing-links (DLX) algorithm. I decided to revisit this program recently to experiment with benchmarking and try to increase its speed.

      [...]

      In an exact-cover problem, there is a bunch of constraints (modelled as columns of a matrix) and many partial solutions (modelled as lines of a matrix). The goal is to pick some solutions, so that all constraints are met exactly once. In the matrix-modelisation a 1 in a cell means that this partial solution meets the given constraint. Solving the exact-cover problem transposes to selecting rows, so that each column as exactly one 1 in it.