Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Day

    If you define a day or "1d" in shorthand as 86400 seconds, then you are done! However this definition ignores various annoyances. At least for now some (Earth) days may be longer the 86400 seconds (or not, if the leap second is smeared in behind the scenes), which will not bother most calculations. Another problem is that this oblate mudball does not appear to rotate with the precision of the celestial spheres as some once imagined, so 86400 seconds is pretty close but there are error bars and it's a moving target over time, and there are choices of frame of reference (closest star? distant stars?) that almost agree with one another.

  • Society's task

    In my 20s I helped save some old-growth forest from clearcutting. Victory is "for now." Everything that exists can still be destroyed, but we saved it. The next old-growth forest I tried to save was felled around us. We hadn't found enough endangered species.

    Trees I came to love Maxam reduced to decking, siding, mulch, dimensional lumber. Open understory, emerald with moss and fern, gone. Sentinels over the bay stood longer than my country, anchored moisture to earth and prevented drought, gone, never to return.

    One forest gone, one saved for now. We have all these scars to show. Our little defenders braved torture and jail, long legal processes, restrict- ions on speech, travel, and association. One died in the forest we saved.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Some fancy stats! 📊

    I am still in celebration mood, time to write down some stats!

    [...]

    IF you remember I started a project, almost two years ago, it is a project were I invested all my spare time available and my residual strength; and where I infused a lot of hopes and expectations!

    I built everything around this project: the brand, the website, the advertising, the communication; the last missing piece was the product!

  • Some Linux stuff for October (bad batteries, good Zauri)

    This September and October at work has been a bit too busy so I have had little time for anything else, Moreover, I have got some flu or something like that.

    The battery in my MNT Pocket Reform died in mid September. It was not a surprise - the device have had quite high power consumption even when off so the battery had to be charged often. I am not the firs Pocket owner with dead battery.

    So I now travel just with a phone and a paper notebook or with the big MNT Reform 2. To my surprise, the Reform 2 makes little change in terms of portability but a big change in productivity, It seems that the big screen (12.5 vs 8) and keyboard with normally sized keys are important. The bigger machine occupies almost all the desk space in trains but can be placed more comfortably than the small one, This also helps a lot. Battery life (4 hours) is not a problem as the Pocket with its more effective battery was only marginally better.

    For situations when I do not take a laptop I have undusted my Dell Bluetooth keyboard, My Fairphone 5 works well with it. Only the integrated PDA stand is smaller than such large device needs.

  • Programming

    • FreePascal webdev

      Let's face it, the www has become a disgusting cesspool of horrible corporate excrement. As such, when we needed a web store to sell our art, the only viable option seemed to be to build a site completely from scratch.

      Shopify is a terrible company, firing employees for not using AI (1), as is pretty much every other off-the-shelf platform out there.

      Now, I absolutely loathe web development with the fury of a thousand suns. To make the experience slightly less painful, I decided to implement the entire back-end of the website in pascal - a programming language I am quite fond of.