Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Prims and Evans

    Last night I dreamed that I traveled far and wide through many distant lands. What did I see there? A scientist named Professor Meme and his friend, who went by Joe or Jake or if it was Robert—you know how dreams can get fuzzy—and their buddies, a couple of clown comics of yesteryear.

    They explained to me that “Everyone in this land is sorted into one of two categories. Evans, who have an even number of teeth (usually 28, 30, or 32), and Prims, who have a prime number of teeth (usually 29 or 31).

    Evans have higher salaries and love vanilla and comedy and yellow clothes. Prims do all the housework and love chocolate and drama and orange clothes.”

    Through the life-changing magic of dreams I had been granted the super power of “vector space analysis” (which is how I knew it was a dream because in real life I can't do those things) so I traversed their realm and saw that yeah, for the most part, those traits did cluster together. Usually. But there were plenty of chocolate lovers who told me in confidence that they wouldn’t mind a good comedy every once in a while. And the whole thing about lower salaries turned out to be a pretty big point of contention! There were a lot of traditionally-minded folks clad in orange who said they were glad to do the housework, they were better at it than their yellow-draped companion who always left the butter out anyway and broke plates.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — BELUNTM Wordo: SUCKS

  • Garden Room Complete

    I sat down to write this post over a year ago and found it very difficult to get started. That ended up blocking other things I wanted to write about, but, finally, I found to motivation to fill this one in.

    The garden room is done! Since I finished it last September, we've made good use of it as a place where the baby can have his own space, as well as somewhere I can store roots and wood and books. It has power and a sofa, chairs and a table, and I built an integrated worktop along the north-west wall. Outside remains unpainted, but inside is a lovely bright yellow. I haven't plumbed in the sink yet, and perhaps I never will.

    About three tonnes of sand and a tonne of lime went into the rendering and plastering of the walls, in the end - far more than I'd expected. It was hard, heavy work, and I managed to give myself tendonitis - of the foot! - twice while getting it done, along with innumerable lime burns. I bought a cement mixer, which helped enormously, but meant I had to work quite large loads at a time - and my technique was ever so slow.

• Technology and Free Software

  • FreeBSD 15.0 on the ThinkPad T480 - Efficient, Stable, and 8 Hours on Battery

    The ThinkPad T480 has long had a reputation for being one of the most practical and robust laptops for engineers and developers. It’s built like a tank, easy to maintain, and works brilliantly with open-source operating systems.

    Over the last few months, I’ve been tuning and optimizing **FreeBSD** on this machine with a very clear goal in mind: **reach the best possible power efficiency without sacrificing performance or usability.**

    After a good amount of trial and error, firmware testing, and sysctl tuning, I finally reached a sweet spot. A setup that reliably gives me **6–8 hours of real battery life** under normal workloads.

    This post documents that configuration for anyone in the BSD community who wants to make their ThinkPad a genuinely mobile FreeBSD workstation.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Known Gemini Caspules sorted by number of URLs