Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • decadence and ruin

    mouths watering 
    only by the thought 
    of a golden crisp forming
    over the hearty richness
    behind the oven door
    

  • Socialist computer museum

    Hello, thanks for clicking, reading and being there.

    Recently visited the ''Rechenwerk Halle'' with a mate to see some computers from the German Democratic Republic.

    [...]

    Obsolete way of prototyping circuit boards. Both ends of 30 AWG wire get stripped and wrapped around a pin header.

    Circuits in the 60's and 70's running at 1 MHz with TTL IC's didn't mind the crosstalk induced by the wires and tall pin headers, can still be used today on rare occassions.

  • The Dominion of Minutes

    We are often slaves to time. Our lives are dictated by the unstoppable passage of hands around the clock. I must be at work by 9:00, so I must leave by 8:15, so I must arise at 7:30... I am guilty of letting the clock dictate my actions, or at least influence them unduly.

    Perhaps it is an artefact of how I was raised. Perhaps my parents were anal-retentive about timeliness. I could assign blame to them or to God or to my environment or merely to my humours, but blaming will not change the fact that I am ruled both wittingly and unwittingly by time. I recognize that having such an attitude towards time is unhealthy, but I am afraid I do not know how to change it.

    Time is awfully inconsistent. Some hours feel as if they were seconds and some seconds last as long as days. Chatting the night away with someone dear to you can make time flow as Niagara Falls, but holding a plank is as slow as the tortise.

    I, unfortunately, am a mere mortal, and I am limited insofar as the next man who can only spend the ~56700 waking seconds each day. I've been trying to get around to the book "Time Management For Mere Mortals" but there is so much to do, so much to read and so little time. I lament the fact that you can only buy this as an eBook from Amazon. And that they've made it harder for me to download it so that I can send it to my non-Kindle eReader.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — VOPRSUA Wordo: PURRS

  • There's a van Gogh joke in here somewhere

    Bunny went to the local Michaels Craft store [1] to pick up a project, and she returned with a small

  • It might as well be July 17th all year long

    The calendar emoji is useless and misleading since the example date is so clearly readable 📆 that people don’t understand that it’s an ipsum. Even people who know can misread it. It’s only good if you’re actually talking about literally July 17th (WhatsApp can go to heck).

  • moon things, part 1

    (hi, i'm vaguely back!) i know i mentioned my moon planning previously but i'm not sure if i ever expanded on it. basically i was missing a monthly rhythm and just "observing" the moon, my feelings etc wasn't really doing much as a replacement. it was a bit too abstract/detached from the physicality of living. but then i remembered people actually do things in accordance with moon phases and tried to give that a go instead. i've been doing it since last year and it's been very helpful! i feel like i do more of everything by following the different stages of the lunar month and placing intentional focus on the different activities.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • De-corporatize your Internet

      We, as average-Joe citizens of whatever country you happen to be in, find our lives more and more under the control of Big Tech.1 Their grasp is, unfortunately, tighter and tighter on Society as a whole: from the control over the propaganda which we see –let's face it, you're not immune to propaganda– to the financial transactions of daily life and even interpersonal communications. And when power falls into the hands of the few, the many tend to suffer. Thus, it behooves us as real people to stand up to Big Tech, to shepherd our data well, and to vote with our dollars and our attentions. Let us no longer stand as dumb masses while they dribble stimuli into our dopamine-deprived minds. Rather, let us liberate our sources of information, and sap the power of Google and co. and move the Internet as a whole back to its original purpose: an equalizing information-sharing service that works for the betterment of all, rather than the information oligarchs. This article may sound like the ravings of a madman or a tinfoil-hat pursuer of ideals, but mass change can only happen when one person decides to say something. That's me, I'm that person. I will no longer sit idly by and remain silent when our world could be bettered.

      [...]

      Allow me to make an analogy. Let's say that Meta's platforms are one mall, Apple's are another, Google's are a third, Twitter's are a fourth, ByteDance/TikTok's are a fifth, Microsoft's are a sixth, Reddit's are a seventh, and so on.

      Let us purport that there the above's slop-posts make up one-quarter of the total lessees (and that's a very generous estimation).

      If I were to go shopping, I'd have to wade through that quarter of junk before I get to the good stuff. Because of the sheer size of the complexes, navigation is difficult and I often find myself distracted, enraged, or deceived before I get to where I wanted to go in the first place.