Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Egoism

    I’ve been traveling through the deepest reaches of space for a while now. I only caught a glimpse of something that looked like a form of intelligent life, but I’ll never know for sure; I couldn’t verify its existence.

  • good enough

    it's very hard for me to find when something is good enough. sometimes, this is a nice thing: I'll endlessly check my work to find any error I can. however, there is also the fact that I have to deal with endlessly checking everything I do. I never stop thinking. my brain has become numb to the constant chatter inside it at this point. there's always a discussion. always a war. always a bar fight, and always the silent back and forth. an infinite tug of war that no one can quite win. there's always stuff left from before.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Misunderstood Universe

    Someone complained that they had completed about 30 sites and had gotten no escalations, as compared to a previous day where they had gotten a bunch of escalations. One response to this is "yes, and?" as the universe is under no obligation to make the dice behave as you feel they should, where the escalations "ought to" occur at some fairly constant rate.†

    These sites in EVE Online are claimed to have a 5% chance of escalating, and these escalations are desirable because loot. With a monte carlo simulation we can get an idea of what one might expect from 30 attempts with some odds of a (maybe‡) big payout. The code checks for escalations (5% odds) in 30 sites, and tallies the number of escalations found in each 30-site run into an array. Then the check-30 loop is repeated a huge number of times, allowing us to answer such questions as "given a million 30-site runs, what are the odds of getting zero escalations? (You can sometimes do this with probabilities maths, but it's easier for me to write a program, somewhat wasteful of CPU, but so these things go.)

  • Resonance, Tank Circuits

    I had this epiphany moment last night, as I was dropping off to sleep — after working through some AC circuit problems — where a lot of the fog about parallel RCL circuits and resonance cleared up in my mind. The next morning I found myself working through related questions in my head, as I was getting ready for work. Then later I found myself surrounded by pages of scribbled resonance calculations, and also building and measuring a little RCL network with some spare micro-henry inductors and pico-farad caps.

    In the last post, I mentioned my Pickett N-16-ES slide rule includes specialized scales for calculating capacitive or inductive reactance. Another nifty set of scales, the C'r and L'r scales, along with the frequency, wavelength, or angular velocity scales — whichever you prefer — can be used to solve resonance problems. I familiarized myself with that, and was getting the same results as when I did it with the generic scales. Basically how it works is that, when an arrow mark is pointed at a certain frequency, then the C'r and L'r scales are lined up such that, where ever you move the cursor, the capacitance and inductance combination shown is resonant. So, you just need to know two of those three values, and the other one will show on the appropriate arrow or scale. There are another set of scales to help you with calculating the exponents.

  • DeX

    I got this used Samsung Galaxy S22 phone for dirt cheap that I wanted to use with Samsung DeX. I have heard about Dex in the past but have not had a chance to mess with it since I have not had a Samsung device that ran Android. I have been hesitant to own one of these devices since I keep hearing about privacy concerns, but I figured that I'd bite the bullet and grab this one on the cheap. Also, this device is not my main device and will mostly be used for testing.

    Samsung DeX is basically a "Desktop eXperience" for your mobile device. It allows you to connect a keyboard, mouse, and monitor to your phone. I have been looking for something m0ar portable than a laptop or the Steam Deck to work with the Xreal Air glasses, something that I can turn on and off easily without having to deal with shutting down or worrying about suspend/hibernate issues.

  • Why desktop Linux is growing

    As much as many GNU/Linux users would love to act like the growing market share of the OS family is people coming into the light, I believe the most overlooked reason is that PCs are very slowly being phased out of common hardware. Smartphones are making up more and more of the hardware composition of the web. Granted for anyone who knows what they're doing or even just how to type, a computer with a full, physical keyboard is a better option. But there are a growing number of normies that only have a smartphone. The idea is attractive to me, as long as you have some good docking solutions.

    [...]

    I think predatory pricing models (i.e. subscriptions) are also pushing more and more people to look elsewhere for solutions. I, like many and likely most others, got into GNU/Linux because the two normie options have become fucking terrible. First of all, I hate Rotten Core. They hate their customers, so why wouldn't I hate them? Second, Windows stopped doing what I wanted it to do and did more and more things in the background without my knowledge or consent until a breakthrough moment revealed some of the seedy crap Windows 10 was doing in the background.