Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Food Forest Update #3 (exciting again!)

    When I planted bananas last year I planted pups of two different varieties that I got from a friend. Now the other original banana pup is pushing a flower and has a few pups of it's own. Yay! Since we got all excited about successfully growing bananas we have gone on a bit of a spree adding more banana varieties to the yard. I converted the singular banana plantings to banana circles. A banana circle is just digging a pit, throwing a bunch of organic material in said pit and planting bananas around the pit. The organic material breaks down into nutrient rich compost/soil that feeds the heavy feeding bananas.

    Over the course of the summer we've gone from 2 bananas to 9 different varieties plus one plantain. A number of them are dwarf varieties, a couple are tall and one is in between. The one that I think is medium sized I'm calling a mystery banana for now. It came from a food forest place we stayed at for my birthday and they didn't know the variety. They just told me that it was taller than dwarf but not full size. I'm keeping the dwarf varieties together and the tall varieties together so the tall ones don't shade out the short ones. We added a banana circle in the front yard with a few of the dwarves. There's another circle with a couple more dwarves by the back alley. The first one I planted is a tall type and my other tall type is going on the other side of the circle with that one once it's big enough. Here is a list of the varieties we have now.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ABDILRS Wordo: HALFY

  • Society Should Be More Accessible to Autistic People

    I recently bought a few chairs to furnish my apartment. When I scooted one across the floor, it made this awful noise¹. I couldn't stand it.

    So I went for an easy DIY solution I found online to correct it. I just used box cutters to cut a small cross in tennis balls, like so:

    Tennis Ball²

    Then I used my index and middle fingers of both hands to peel back the four flaps of the tennis ball and slide it onto the chair legs. The final result was... silence³.

    Much better.

• Politics and World Events

  • Another month has passed in Gaza

• Technology and Free Software

  • 2025-08-06

    I'm currently testing a #Mobian kernel patch to improve battery life on the #PinephonePro and it's looking promising (about 3 hours of continuous use instead of 1 hour). If you'd like to try it out, download the linked deb file onto your phone, install it, then shutdown your phone and remove battery, wait 10 minutes (to reset the battery meter), then boot into the new kernel. Note that suspend doesn't work in this kernel. Let me know if you try it out.

  • Reverse-Engineering Game Boy Advance Games (and General Reverse-Engineering Advice)

    As I wrote at the end of my previous post, I left a bunch of loose threads in my reverse-engineering because I just didn't feel like continuing unless I have something specific to research lol. However, if I'm leaving some leads as an exercise for the reader, I figured I should write some tips for someone new to reverse engineering—not that I'm skilled at all, I just know the very basics. This post is going to be focusing somewhat on the GBA and using it for all the examples just because that's where I'm most comfortable and like spending my time,[2] but the bulk of the tips should be applicable to reversing any embedded program.

    To start, while I'd like to say that “anyone can do it!”, in realistic terms you really do need prior knowledge. Trying to follow a decompilation or disassembly of code that was likely janky even in its original source code isn't made any easier by not knowing how graphics work on the target system. In general, I'd say you should understand *the basics* of how to work with the target. You don't need to know every detail, but enough to make a homebrew program that displays basic graphics and can read user input, etc. At least have some resources at hand for looking up memory-mapped I/O registers and memory regions dedicated to specific tasks.

  • Some New Nintendo e-Reader Reverse-Engineering

    So recently I've been doing a bit more reverse engineering of the Nintendo e-Reader[1] for the GBA. The really really cool RetroDotCards[2] project released late last month and I've been having a great time playing the games; and it's inspired me to dig into a few aspects of the e-Reader again (and make some previous research actually discoverable).

  • Why I prefer human-readable file formats

    When I say *human-readable file format*, I'm referring to text-based files that can be opened, read, and understood without the need for any specific software or proprietary interface. They include formats like Markdown, JSON, YAML, INI, TOML, CSV/TSV and even fixed-width text files where the content and its structure are visible, transparent, and editable in a simple text editor. Unlike binary formats or database dumps, these files don't hide their meaning behind layers of abstraction. They're built for clarity, for resilience, and for people who like to know what's going on under the hood.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • How It All Began

      This is the full recount, to the best of my recollection, of how I joined the pediverse. First, we have to go back, way back, to before I knew paraphiles even existed in public social spaces. I was on twitter at the time, browsing my feed as I normally did and, if memory serves, there was a “callout post” telling people to avoid a certain account. The account in question was a zoophile. This immediately piqued my interest. I'd always kind of known I was a zoo, even though I wasn’t fully aware of the word for it. I grew up sheltered and even after I got out of there, I still didn’t learn the word for zoophiles until quite a while later. I can’t remember the exact post or even the exact person they were “calling out”, although I wish I did. All I remember is that seeing someone being open about an attraction to non-human animals made me immediately interested in seeing if I could find more people like this. I bookmarked the post for later and started on making a new account. There are a few reasons I picked Breebee. One is that I felt it was inconspicuous enough that if my partner saw it she wouldn’t think anything of it. Another is that I like the way it sounds. A third is that it was far detached from the name of my main account at the time. Once it was set up, I retrieved the post from my bookmarks and followed the user in question and made my way over to their follows. I figure zoophiles must tend to follow other zoophiles. I was right in this assumption and started following a good few accounts. I was fascinated that there were this many people like me on such a public platform as twitter.