Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • OTHERPEO.PLE

    I had a rather baffling interaction with someone last week, that brought to mind a similarly baffling interaction with the same person, 27 years ago.

    That first interaction I had come to think of - when I thought of it at all - as "the Oddest Dating[?] Experience of my Life." And yes, the question mark is significant.

    The experience in question covered a period of about a month in the autumn of 1998, which means I would have been about 4 years out from the end of my then- most recent significant relationship. The reasons for that seemingly endless period of single-ness aren't really important. Let's just say that due to certain life choices I had made along the way, I found myself in a place where I was not perhaps the most eligible bachelor in town (read: seriously under-employed well past the age where it's socially acceptable to be a penniless student). However, by the fall of '98 I was well on my way to turning things around, employment-wise, and beginning to hope that might have some positive impact on my dating prospects.

• Politics and World Events

  • The Labor Wars

    So I've been reading The Labor Wars by Sidney Lens, which is an overview of organized labor history in the US. Specifically things like the Molly Maguires, steel strikes, mining strikes, rail strikes. Most of those strikes have casualties. Like people get killed striking for eight hour work days, getting their pay back after it's docked, and because their jobs pay so little they are literally starving to death and can't afford housing.

    Interestingly enough, even talking about labor organizing led to several prominent labor organizers going to court facing life sentences. Usually sedition laws were used as a pretense. Kinda like if you accused someone of being a terrorist today. People were framed and everything! Security companies like Pinkerton would infiltrate their organization and try to encourage bomb-making or just plant evidence to entrap people for organizing strikes for an eight hour work day! And on top of that, picketers got shot. And in each of those major strike campaigns, there were gunfights between strikers and a combination of National Guard, police, and Pinkertons.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Complete Fred Fish Disk Catalog

    Fred Fish collected and published a great collection of public domain, freeware and shareware Amiga software between 1986 and 1994. He made over 1000 disks. It's one of the best resources for older Amigas, like the A500, as most of these programs cannot be found on Aminet or elsewhere. This is the full catalog of the disks, to help with finding what you're looking for.

  • ODV-GBS-C scan converter and ODV-II Composite/S-Video adapter review

    There are several upscalers and adapters on the market that make it possible to connect old computers and video game systems to modern TVs.

    I decided to buy the ODV-GBS-C scan converter and upscaler with an ODV-II Composite adapter. They can be found at several retailers, I went with Amazon Sweden for the quick shipping and no import tax. My choice was motivated by the number of features and connectivity options, availability and the reasonable cost.

  • I need to chill out

    Over the past few years I’ve worked to close the gap between my values and my lifestyle. I finally gave up dairy, I deleted all those Big Tech accounts, I’m hardly flying and driving, I’m building connections and becoming friends with my neighbors and committing to my neighborhood. There’s still work to do, but I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished and I think I deserve to be.

    And though this work continues, my next project has become evident: I need to chill the fuck out and learn to be more patient with the people in my life who aren’t doing these things.

    I’ve known for a long time that I can be an asshole when I don’t mean to be. It doesn’t happen as much as it used to, but when it does, now I act like a judgmental asshole specifically.

    Which does me no good. I’m grumpy due to the weight of perceived slights and betrayals that literally have nothing to do with me. And even if I was a true ideologue, someone only cared about furthering my causes (which I clearly am not), being a snooty jerk isn’t the way to do that.

  • Connecting the Amiga 500 to an HDMI display

    I got the urge to connect my Amiga 500 to our living room TV, with the goal of playing games together with my family from the couch.

    The problem is however, that our flat screen TV is fairly new and has only HDMI inputs.

    Lack of connectivity is only part of the problem. Another issue is the supported resolutions. Most Amiga software uses either PAL/NTSC lowres or hires-interlaced resolutions and most modern TVs can't display these correctly, without conversion and processing. Even those that can handle 240p, often interpret it as 480i.

  • alpaca 2025 workshop notes

    notes about our workshop: Introduction to the qiudanz technique: computational transformation of minimalist movement sequences, for the Alpaca Conference (Algorithmic Patterns in the Creative Arts) sharing a workshop.

  • Workbench 1.3 - Enhancements and programs

    The first thing many who get more seriously into the Amiga retro computing hobby do, is to replace the original operating system with the latest one.

    Or at least with the latest official (3.1) version. But there is something special about keeping it original and use it like it was back in the day. Trying to get the most out of it. It's not as fancy and convenient as newer versions, that's true. But I think Workbench 1.3 is often dismissed as something unusable by modern (Amiga) standards, despite it being far more capable than you'd think.

  • ROOPHLOCH 2025

    This post is my entry for ROOPHLOCH 2025, a challenge to write a publish a blog/phlog/gemlog post outdoors and without being connected to any hard wire.

    Last year I participated in ROOPHLOCH, but my post was simply written from my backyard while connected to my home WiFi. This year I decided to invest in the challenge more seriously: I write this post while not in range of any WiFi signals at all. My setup involves tethering a Raspberry Pi 1B to my smartphone's mobile data connection. My laptop, which is about 70 feet away and out of range of the hotspot, communicates with the Pi over Reticulum using a pair of RNodes.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Weird website ideas

      ’90s website vibe (think Geocities) but it aggressively uses P3-only colors in large solid blocks and not just in passing (like in photographs of flowers)

  • Programming

    • Making ALPA (Assembly Language Programming Aid) work on C64

      It's still a challenge. The printing of the book is not perfect, it can be hard to read at some places and it struggles with PETSCII characters. It's also confusing with the spaces being all over the place.