Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — EWLORSK Wordo: VIRES

  • iNaturalist

    It's a "citizen science" project that asks regular people to look for and report observations of wildlife (and wild plants, fungi, etc), submitting photo, sound or video evidence, wherever you happen to be: Out in the woods, on a farm, on an urban street, in your kitchen where you spot a spider under the sink. The idea is to get people looking everywhere, not just where expected, and crowd-source a map of where a species shows up over time.

    For identifying what you're looking at, there's image-recognition software that can usually help narrow it down, and other users who might have more expertise than you at telling hummingbirds apart can look at your photo and say, "Oh, that's definitely an Anna's hummingbird."

    Sometimes it gets confused, like when it told me a pigeon was a hawk, or gave me a list of wildlife that might be in snowy woods instead of trying to identify the tree.

  • Tove Jansson’s Moominpappa at Sea

    Let’s sail all the way out to the sea to a tiny speck of an island where we can explicate and externalize and incarnate our hitherto unspoken grawing worries and fears, Liminalize the subliminal, break on through to the other side, scratch and breach the subdermal in a land of shortening days and dwindling lamp oil.

    That’s what the Moomin family does in this 1965 classic, penultimate in the Moomin series and sort of a sister book to the 1970 Moominvalley in November. At least, that’s how I always thought of it because the Moomin books, the eight illustrated prose novels (well, one of them, the best one, is a short story collection) are presented as one set, the full-on picture books as one set, and the comics (Newspaper strips) as one set.

• Technology and Free Software

  • A short rant about "democratizing" genAI, hobbyist software etc

    As you might have noticed, my break from phlog posting had been extended by a week from what I'd been planning. Too much had been going on throughout this month, so I definitely needed to keep my attention span narrow enough. I promise that I am going to eventually return to the previous topics like homebrew VMs or abacus, but right now I'd like to rant about the state of genAI for "mere mortals" and some other adjacent topics without a particular structure. So, here's my chain of thoughts (no pun intented).

  • Internet/Gemini

    • 12th issue of magazine about small web