Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Have I turned into a "Prepper"

    The reality is that my life in the past 5 years has been slowly evolving to more self sufficient lifestyle. Hobbies and projects that I have been interested in have been moving me naturally towards a more self reliant future.

  • Slowly Integrating Yoga

    This past month was positive. Much thinking that led to some personal changes.

    As side news, I now have a religious stand... Which is no stand whatsoever.

    The society I am in, and the culture I have inherited, gives too much importance to religion. Well, at least this is my take of it. Which, I think is not beneficial.

    My new religious stand is no stand. I am not agreeing with the notion, and the concept, of religion; to begin with. My opinion is that religion is totally overrated.

  • Prima

    One of the most decadent experiences in regard to consumable luxury items is breaking the seal on a canister of pipe tobacco. If you have $8 of material wealth blocking your way to spiritual enlightenment, this is a good candidate for one of the ways you might rid yourself of it. (I wrote some petty argument here against just giving it to charity, but it doesn't hold up even as a joke and is besides the point.) Fermentation does wonders, and even the most boring, immature palates have (unknowingly) enjoyed its pleasures. The sugars of the tobacco plant are at work in that compressed puck of shredded leaves, like some stateless perfumed bundle which becomes crystalized in time the moment you open the lid. And there, a chorus of strings, woodwinds, (is that a synthesizer?) rises up to meet you. As the days and weeks go by, these will fade out, got a little flat, and fade away completely, to be replaced by the environmental noise.

  • 🖼️ xkcd — Where Babies Come From #3127

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ADEGOPY Wordo: FARCI

• Science

  • The ten rules of field recording

    Did I end up with more than ten rules? These observations are so general that I strongly suspect someone else has come up with them before me, maybe slightly differently phrased.

    Field recordings can be made indoors as well, but then some of the points above might not apply. Still it's important to choose a good location. For a few years I lived in the centre of the city, next to a square with lots of people passing by all the time.

• Technology and Free Software

  • “Stable”, I repeat to myself

    On one hand, so much for being mostly updated on Debian Stable.

  • Motivation for using AI -- or a lack thereof

    I recently talked to one of our senior devs about AI tools. He was pretty enthusiastic about it and recommended that I'd try them. And then he mentioned one very important point:

    "It helps you do the stuff that you don't want to do!"

    This never occured to me before. This was an eye-opener.

    There are very few tasks that I would consider a chore, at least not in this sense. I don't get frustrated or bored by *what* I do, but by *how* I have to do it.

  • Influential games

    @Ashigaru@dice.camp mentioned how D&D 3.0 was really important for him at the tjme and @dereisenhofer@metalhead.club mentioned him playing DSA (Das Schwarze Auge, i.e. The Dark Eye). And I thought about my gaming history.

    I moved from The Dark Eye 1st ed that I played as a kid and again as a 15-year old to AD&D 1st ed when I was around 16 because a Canadian exchange student said it was the original and obviously it had to better. Some mere months later my group switched to the new AD&D 2nd ed because obviously new had to be better. And then my interest waned.

  • Thoughts about our own Digital legacy

    Whilst in the UK last month my brothers and I came across an old leather case of my fathers. It contained hundreds of letters sent between him and my mother.

    It's a treasure trove, part of history and I can't wait to sit down and read them all! Here is an extract written by him to my mother from his Royal Navy ship, HMS Glasgow on 24th February 1946. I particularly like the formality and style of writing. A sign of the times, I guess.

    Makes me wonder about our digital legacy we eventually shall leave behind. Who from my family is going to be interested enough to explore GeminiSpace or even my regular blog? How interesting or searchable and discoverable will that be?

    Or will I just disappear into the mire of irrelevant dross as if I have never existed?

  • About (2020–2025)

    When I started this capsule in late 2020, I thought to myself “How can I make it so the work of writing for the Internet is as pleasant as possible? How can I keep the friction of writing as low as possible?”

    I settled on having no build step for the site itself, like I would with Hugo (a popular and very good static-site generator). I would just write, and then reupload everything when I wanted to publish or update something.

  • Feeds

    Because I’m lazy, for some definition of “lazy”, I write a changelog in YAML and then convert it to JSON, which makes it a JSON Feed.

  • WebP

    All the WebP images I’ve made available here are losslessly compressed. You can verify this yourself by running

    fish
    strings file.webp | grep VP8
    

    and verifying that the string “VP8L” is in the file. You can also just look at the file in a text editor like Notepad if that’s a more familiar tool.

    (A mere “VP8” means it’s lossily compressed, “VP8L” means losslessly compressed, and “VP8X” means it supports alpha channels, animation, and metadata. A WebP file can be both losslessly compressed and have extended stuff.)