Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 2025 Week 31-48: Photos

    When our ferrets first wake up, they are quite slow, as are most animals. One adorable aspect of their lethargy is that their tongues stick out slightly from their mouths. Mocha displays this trait as she arouses from one of her hammocks.

  • 🖼️ xkcd: Website Task Flowchart #3175

  • Ucant Gemlog: RMCs vs ASB

  • Future of your place challenge

    I have more ideas for the future of Kentucky's banks and roads, crime and food, panel housing neighbor- hoods and repair shops. Sadly I don't think I'll have much time to write for a while. So I'm asking for help.

    In December, write about the future of where you live or somewhere you lived that you know well. Don't write pure doom. Dire things may happen, but assume most durable institutions (in Kentucky, particularly county government!) will continue to exist and do their best to adapt according to their definition of public good (which might not be yours!).

• Politics and World Events

  • The future of primary care in Kentucky

    It starts in some corner of Kentucky. Maybe Fulton in the southwest, maybe Paris in the northeast. A county fiscal court modestly subsidizes a primary care physician practice to retain the service for the community. It goes unnoticed til it's repeated by another fiscal court in another county, another practice. There's a letter to the editor, approving or complaining, a facebook thread or a lawsuit.

    Legislators in the Kentucky General Assembly will privately discuss counties sponsoring primary care providers. Then the Kentucky Senate or House will assign the issue to their Health Services committee.

  • Resilience

    When leadership speaks of resilience, I hear they're going to cut slack out of the system until it's people's resilience that saves the company instead of good management. And then they'll cry crocodile tears about the burnouts. Whenever somebody else wants to increase resilience, the silent alarm goes off and I'm looking for the next dysfunctional decision being made at the top.

    I want this system to change. I suggest the following approach: Speak up, get up, leave the desk, and never come back.

    On the personal level, of course, things are different. If I see friends and coworkers stressing out and being fragile, what they need is resilience. Surprisingly, the same approach often works: Speak up, get up, leave the desk, and never come back.

    I'm playing this for laughs, but it's also true. It worked for me, at least. I changed from programming to documentation because I didn't want to work on site at the customer's location, I didn't want the pressure of due dates and constant issues, sprints, plannings, retros and all the other fuckery.

  • Back Facts

    This is something I just have to post, because it affects many people and in my experience, even highly educated persons often do not know a lot about back pain (if they are not orthopedists). It is a direct quote from the NHS site I linked in the sources, but I wanted to share it with the small web, too.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AEVNSUH Wordo: SENDS

• Technology and Free Software

  • Because feelings

    Something I've learned recently is that I might feel one way about a particular technology (atomic Fedora distros, for example), and think it's the best thing ever, and then at some arbitrarily later time feel a completely different way about it and not want to use it anymore. Then, at an even later arbitrary time, I might think it's the best thing ever again. There is no rhyme or reason to this, and I know it's kind of irrational.

    I struggle finding a goldilocks distro because my personal constraints are variable at arbitrary times, and sometimes these constraints arise after some negative experience with a distro, even a relatively minor one that interrupts my activity flow. Then I have to do some weird calculus or non-linear programming (emphasis on the non-linear) and may end up back where I started.

  • Tim Holyoake Turns Your Raspberry Pi Pico, Pico 2 into a Classic Sharp MZ-700 Microcomputer

    Vintage computing enthusiast Tim Holyoake has taught the Raspberry Pi Pico, Raspberry Pi Pico 2, and other RP2040/RP2350-based development boards a new trick: emulating the Sharp MZ-700 microcomputer.

    "When I first started thinking about writing an emulator for the Sharp MZ-80K in September 2024, I decided that I was only going to attempt that model and no more," Holyoake recalls of the project's beginnings. "15 months later (and a surprising RetroChallenge 2024/10 win) and here I am with an MZ-80A and MZ-700 emulator as well. Never say never, I suppose. The code is scruffier than I’d like it to be, but it does seem to work reasonably well."

    Holyoake's original focus for the emulation project was to deliver performant and accurate emulation of the Sharp MZ-80K, an all-in-one microcomputer launched in 1978 and built around the eight-bit Zilog Z80. While the MZ-80K was a popular machine in Japan and Europe, though, 1982's MZ-700 was considered a major upgrade thanks to the addition of color graphics and the removal of the built-in display in order to reduce its price.

  • My first WinAMP skin

    It's been a while since I last updated this website. I was busy with many things and couldn't think about anything to write here. But for few months I have been working here and there on my Doom-themed WinAMP skin.

    I got idea for it while browsing winamp skin museum[0] and noticing that none of the doom skins utilized elements of the HUD from 2 classic games. I thought that it was injustice to not depict such iconic element of the franchice and so with the help of skinning atlas tutorial[1] I set out to work on my own skin. I begun with main window, takinng many elements from HUD and wall textures while also adding some fun touches like scaled-down sprites of Doomguy, cacodemon and rocket in progress bar. I feel like this is best part of my work. Equalizer had me stumped for a bit, but after taking a look at resources extraced from doom I decided to center conept around torture spikes. After bashing two different variants together and placing big spike altar between gain and frequencies it was straightforward to take the rest from elements of hell castles, where these elements appear.

  • Wanted: Better Efficient Route Metrics

    Google Maps has an obsession with putting me on highways and having me do crazy manouvers such as having me cross 3 lanes in less than 500 feet or make an uncontrolled left across 2 lanes of traffic on a 55 MPH road. All in the name of average speed. Is there navigation software that uses route metrics that are better at giving you a reliable ride and keeping you safe?

  • Internet/Gemini

    • On Grandstanding on BBS

      Weighing in the risk of escalating the drama vs. having a safe, hate-free place for discussions, I cannot remain silent in light of recent abuse of BBS and myself.

      BBS is a place I've enjoyed since its birth, to exchange opinions with other Geminauts. It's value is very much in the ease of starting and continuing discussions with others. Sometimes we agree, other times we don't. Occasionally discussions get heated. I've had my mind changed a few times by sparring (sometimes with too much gusto) with smart and better-informed people here.

    • On Grandstanding on BBS

      As I said when the same issue arose a few months ago, I'd advise clseibold to take a break.