Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Extreme Enlightened tree, Minecraft edition

    Bunny and I were running some errands when we decided to stop and get a bite to eat at a local restaurant. Outside I saw the most amazing enlightened tree I've seen in several years [1]—it was like something straight out of Minecraft [2]:

    [A tree with white Christmas lights covering the trunk and green Christmas lights in the canopy, looking very much like a Minecraft tree] But unlike Minecraft, this tree canopy is a cylinder and not blocks. [3] [4]

  • Error ID10T: PEBKAC

    Another errand Bunny and I did yesterday [1] was to pick up a new black ink cartridge for the printer (which cost about half the price of the printer, but that's another rant for another time). We got home, and I replaced the cartridge. Later that night, Bunny attempted to print out The New York Times Crossword Puzzle [2], as she does every night.

    Only it did not print properly. No black was being printed. We futzed with it for some time, and Bunny was able to get enough of the crossword puzzle to work with it, but overall, the black was problematic. I was fearful that we to buy a new printer.

  • Loon Pond Meditation

    I am seated on a log at Loon Pond. It just snowed yesterday. There is at least five inches of snow on the ground. All of the color that used to be here has been flattened out. All of the plants are either brown, or gray, or tan. The water used to be blue; it is now a murky brown-gray. The trees have left their foliage behind; all of them now are just a dark gray. And of course, the sky is gray also. It's not one color though: at the zenith, everything is light, and there is almost a bluish tint to it; but, as your gaze approaches the horizon, maybe ten or fifteen degrees above, there is a solid, darker band of dark gray; but, just before the tree-line in the far distance, the sky returns to a very light gray again, with shades of blue.

    It seems like everything should be dead by now, and perhaps most of it is, or at least it's asleep, but there's still quite a bit of motion and life here. The wind is the most lively: strong, eastward winds, pushing, billowing the tree-tops, pulling up snowdrifts, creating continuous ripples across the lake surface. Winter is the time of year where the wind is the strongest. It's where most of its power can be unleashed, as there is a distinct lack of foliage and buffer to keep it at bay. Now that we're entering a time when the jet stream is further south, that means that there is also a greater propensity for polar winds to come through, and they have their own character about them. They roar over the canopy, giant powerful blowing feelings. You can actually hear the atmosphere being pushed around, hundreds of feet above your head. It's not just the sound of the tree branches hitting each other, as you can hear it out in clearings also. It's a whistling noise, but it's also a bit of a thundering noise. It's a sensation that instills a feeling of fear, or mortality. I am grateful for that. Something as simple as a gust of wind can remind me of my impermanence. The great, blowing power of the atmospheric winds above me are stronger and more permanent than I am on this earth. If I were up there, I would be swept away and killed very quickly. And even as the trees around me are all dead, they still protect me. I am also grateful for the trees.

  • Fog

    I was never going to be able to see, the path which was laid infront of me.

  • Drawings

    I signed up for a drawing class this year at the local worker's institute. The autumn semester is over for now, and I've really liked it! Two of my friends also joined the same class, which makes it that much more fun to go, since I get to socialise with them. Seeing your friends in an adult life becomes saddeningly difficult as time goes on.

    My friends have wildly different drawing styles and things they focus on, so comparing our drawings is a lot of fun.

    It's a quite open-ended concept - the class visits different places in the city, and you draw whatever you like from the vicinity. The teacher comes periodically to discuss your progress, your subject, and making observations and giving tips to the drawing. She's a really pleasant and encouraging person, and I quite like the concept of the class. The class also makes sure I actually draw sometimes, it's something I like to do but often forget about. It also lets me observe the city and figure out new aspects about it.

• Technology and Free Software

  • This “Internet” camera is only 21 years old—it should still work, right? Right

    One of the errands we ran today was stopping by the storage unit to retrieve the Christmas decorations. While there, I saw a box containing a D-Link DCS-900W WiFi-enabled Internet camera [1]. I have no recollection of having ever bought it, nor using it. No clue, but I thought it might be fun to play around with it. How hard could it be?

    For starters, you need Windows to configure the device. The CD (Compact Disc) that came with the device only had two types of files on it—PDF (Portable Document Format)s and Microsoft executables. Undaunted, I figured the device might also some with a web-based interface. Or at least, I hoped it did. Not only did it come with Wi-Fi (and the antenna had definitely seen better days—it was only later when putting it back in the box did it start disintegrating, but I'm getting ahead of myself here), but it came with an Ethernet jack. Easy enough to plug into the “wireless service unit [2].” Then I just had to find it on the network.

  • Too Many Tabs

    I switch between windows with Super-J/K, or Super-C to switch within a frame. Firefox: Ctrl-Tab. I can also use Shift-J/K since I use tridactyl. Vim: gt/gT to switch tabs, :bn and :bp to switch buffers. Tmux uses Ctrl-b+n/p to switch tabs. Weechat uses Ctrl-n/p to switch chat buffers. There's probably another combo for emacs, but I'm not that advanced of a user yet.

  • Stealth ships in Kinetic Energy

    Regarding Kinetic Energy and space combat, I had decided early on that I didn’t want the lasers and sandcasters from Classic Traveller nor the missiles from Macross. The lasers seemed not to work all the well in or reality, sand seemed way to heavy, and missiles … I just kept wondering how they would work.

    It didn’t take long, though, and @eldadoinquieto@mastorol.es asked me about missiles and self-propelled projectiles. That made me think about the situation some more.

    The first argument against missiles I has was about payload and delivery. Missiles can’t correct their path all that much unless they are slow. And if they are fast, then something that’s even faster and works with kinetic energy is going to be better than something that needs thrusters for course correction and explosives.

    The second argument I had was about the kind of game I wanted run. It’s not obvious to me that having torpedos makes the game more interesting. Unless there’s a need for a kind of U-Boot mini-game. But that’s not how I see ship combat going.

    @mdhughes@appdot.net argued that the railgun could shoot torpedoes and then the torpedo can course-correct. After all, the space ship drives are already breaking the laws of physics. It really all comes down to the size of these implausible engines.

  • Please Disclose AI Contributions to Your Work

    If you're working on a creative project that others will see, such as an online journal like mine, please disclose A.I. contributions to your work.

    I personally have very little interest in creative works like books, websites, blogs, movies, music, and artwork that was produced by A.I. and I think many people feel similarly. We like getting to know the human(s) behind those works, through their works. We like discovering what motivated them to create it and what experiences they had that went into it.

    We know that A.I. could produce it a million times faster and better, but the process by which it was created also matters to us. As I said back in my entry "Automation and the Meaning of Work¹", there are certain activities people just don't want to be automated, even if they can be automated and the end product is better by some objective measure.

  • Programming

    • Semantic versioning is hard; let's go build a rocket

      Wow! I found another bug from the depths of time [1] in mod_blog [2], or rather, CGI (Common Gateway Interface)Lib [3], which mod_blog uses. And again, this goes back right when I first wrote the code, possibly back in the late 1990s. And again, it's amazing that it took me this long (less than an hour ago) to trigger it!