Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Episode 55

    In this episode I talk about gargoyles. Monsters who are cold and disinterested but absolutely insist on peace and quiet. Perfect centrists, so to speak. Also half devils with their bat wings and stone skin, and thinking themselves to be perfect because they don't have any wants. And also nothing to do but stare down on us. Brrr!

  • August Questions

    I have been curiously unmotivated, phlog-wise, the last month or two. Much of my mental energy (such as it is) has been directed toward how we might move toward more digital sovereignty in the context of Canadian academic libraries. I have some ideas, but I don't feel quite ready to write about them yet, even in the informal, low-stakes world of the phlogosphere. It's a big topic.

    At the same time, I'm loathe to let a whole month go by without writing something in this space. So, once again, I owe a debt of thanks to Christina, whose Five Questions[1] save me from having to think up a topic myself.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Simulating an RC Network with an Electronic Analog Computer

    Implementing this as in the diagram above, I got drift in the output of the integrator that provides V_c(t). To fix that, I put an 8 MΩ resistor, the largest I had on hand, into the feedback loop for the integrator, parallel to the capacitor. I.e., across output and summing junction.

    Here is the oscilloscope output.

  • I did not get the memo, because if I did get the memo, it went straight into the spam bucket

    My biggest spam folder by far is the one for emails addressed to my registrar email address. It gets spammed because I've been using it for years, back at the time when WHOIS information was public and you had to pay extra to hide it. So any emails sent to my registrar email address not from my registrar got filtered into a specific spam folder (and yes, I think I might be the only person to filter spam into different folders). Email from my actual registrar is filtered into another folder, where I get notices about upcoming domains expiring.

    Today I just happened to notice in the registrar spam folder that Network Solutions was sending me emails about an expired domain. That's weird, I thought. I haven't used Network Solutions in decades. I first used Network Solutions back in the late 90s, but I pretty quickly switched to Dotster which I found to be decent enough, and when they finally stopped the upsells for services I don't want or need, they got bought out by Web.com several years ago. Web.com was … meh. Very slow, not many upsells, but damned if I could change my payment method throught their website (I had to update my credit card info with a new expiration date and security code and it was impossible to do so via the web; even tech support had issues with changing it so I had to switch to a new card—literally, how hard is it to give you money, Web.com?). So Network Solutions telling me I have an expired domain just seemed weird.