Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The long way around.

    Haven't found myself in these parts for years, lot has changed on main street. Almost unrecognizable, not really my type of place anymore to be honest. If memory serves, there's a quiet alley off the main street, something a little more my speed.

    As I wonder down the street, I almost miss the branching street. Taking the path less traveled, I spot a familiar glow in the distance. As I approach, a sign becomes clear; "The Midnight Pub".

    I step inside.

  • happy new year, bartender

    and all other customers

  • New Year's Resolutions

    I can hardly tell what my New Year's Resolutions will be, or for that matter, if one particularly needs resolutions to start the new year.

    I suppose one would be to me more authentic to myself, as there have been days were I haven't felt like me in a while, and I start to miss myself a little more.

    2025 was a very strange and turbulent year for many of us. For obvious reasons, I like to call it the "year of fear", as one would often view it on various news platforms across the internet and social media.

    Nevertheless, one can only hope that 2026 turns out to be a better year than this one.

  • December 31: Seventh day of Christmas

    In flesh and in truth, Christ's humble, physical birth in pungent stable amid soft, scratchy hay as rain dripped through holes in the weathered roof, tore down temples that forgot the needs of enfleshed people.

    Ancient Mesopotamian temple bureaucracies pardoned debt every Jubilee, freed slaves, so no oligarch could accumulate more power than the city-state. They taxed for the state's needs and to fill the storehouse with food for all in times of famine.

    Descendents of Israel came to live in Egypt because Jacob counseled Pharaoh to store against famine, then Jacob ensued the brothers who mistreated him were fed when famine came.

    If it isn't pardoned, debt compounds, disposesses, enslaves some, and enriches others until it produces greed, sadism, civil war. Isaiah and the prophets asserted Jubilee would be proclaimed again!

  • 2025 Comes to a Close

    Cleaning

    I think the most impactful thing I did this year was heavily cleaning my room and office. They were not in great shape and I was ashamed to have anyone go into either of them. Sure, they still get messy from time to time, but it's a heck of a lot easier to spruce things up now than before.

    Computer/Internet Breaks

    I took quite a few of these this year, usually so I could focus on doing particular things. Unfortunately as a result, there was one particular individual who decided that these breaks were signs of mental health decline/collapse and decided to break all contact with me. Not exactly my favorite thing to come out of the year, but I have moved on.

  • Reflecting on 2025

    I wrote a reflection post at the end of 2024, but didn't make a goals post in early 2025. I want to write a reflection, but I don't know that I had a set list of goals to review like I did last year. I won't have this problem next year; I've already created a bingo card of goals. And don't tell anyone, but I've already started on a few of them.

    [...]

    Mindful computer use

    This is something I've been wanting to work on for a long time. I finally accomplished some real things I can point to regarding that, including spending 2 months without youtube.

    I'm currently on a two-week streak. On top of that, I'm not spending quite so much time locked in consumption. Reading a couple posts about resilience, doing things scared or alone, etc. have helped motivate me to get out more. Plus, just having friends around who invite me to stuff.

    In all, it's been a really good year for me. Next year's goals center a lot on gaining confidence in myself - pushing myself to actually spend money and time on my hobbies, actually put effort into learning transition-related skills, actually put myself out there romantically. It's going to be big. I'm excited to begin.

  • End of Year

    And again a year ended. And as always I'm glad it's over. Although this time the end of the year was not such a pain as last year, which was a real struggle. My mood was relatively well at the end of the old year and I had a lot to do, especially with my GTL Gemini Tinylog Reader/Editor fork from @bacardi55, who seems to have abandoned the project. And because I use GTL myself I didn't want to let it die, I think I inherited the project now together with the 'official' Tinylog list.

    I'm also still working on my Evennia MUD/MUSH now called 'Iridum'. It won't be a MUD in the classical sense, not even a roleplaying MUD but a place for people to create their own virtual text environment. So I hope every visitor will become a 'Builder' and shape the world. I'm still not sure about the content I've created so far. It's not very big yet, but I want to leave the building to the users anyway. Until now it has only 5 rooms: The Welcome place, an office, a little forest, a 'building shed' and a Forum room which is part of the office, where everything concerning the MUSH can be discussed. I also created some kind of mailing system so users can send messages to users currently not logged in. It was a lot of work and I want to publish the source code too for people who want to utilize the real powers that MUD creation offers. It's all Python3 so the language is not that difficult but it needs time and effort to invest for people to create some interesting things. But I think I'll take all efforts into the code and hope that the world (and code) won't become too messy. I'm also not sure how the interest in this text environment will turn out. Maybe all the work will be a big failure. I won't know until I open it up for the world. But that may still take a while.

  • A CHINESE NEW YEAR

    Curiously the annual music festival seemed to end before New Year's Eve this year. No bass notes reverberating from the distant glow of lights, and no mini fireworks display to watch while the sounds of their countdown reaches me. I did see a few glows from more distant fireworks somewhere, and hear rumbles from a seemingly different direction, before going inside to watch the rest of the display in Sydney where they pretend to set the bridge on fire every year. Actually I turned out to a grass fire just next to the music festival that afternoon, which got fairly large considering there was little wind, though was largely out by the time I made it over there and just did blacking out.

    To make up for that lost time I'm meant to be starting work now, but I get lax working on public holidays, so I'll continue trying to get to my point. In the last evening before the routine calendar apocalypse, I watched the first part of "Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks", "Rust". I'm not exactly recommending this documentary series to everyone, part one is over four hours long and it really is too long. The fact it's apparantly highly acclimed furthers my conviction that a requirement for film academics to consider a film "great" is that it's actually damn hard work to watch. There are some pretty shots, and emotive moments, but it's so sparsely edited that it feels more like raw footage for a documentary than the finished product.

• Science

  • Midget Slide Rule Part 3

    I tried a few square root problems with the A Scale. The A Scale is fairly simple, except one must remember whether to use the first or the last half of the scale, depending on the number of significant digits.

    The Midget slide rule has a Binary Scale, which is basically the A Scale but with fractions marked out instead of the decimals. Working with the Binary Scale is a bit complicated mentally, as (1) not all the marks have fraction labels, so you sometimes have to work out in your head (or on paper) what the intermediate marks represent; and (2) there is a change on order of magnitude between the Binary Scale and the A Scale, so e.g. 1/4 on the Binary Scale points to 2.5 on the A Scale.

• Technology and Free Software

  • One thing

    Have you ever suddenly realised something about yourself that provides a basis for understanding many of your quirks? Like most people, there are certain things that I find fascinating. Lots of technical things. Lots of technical ideas. Certain games. Recently I found a common thread that seems to connect most of them: that of tiny isolated worlds.

    Here are some examples:

    - Computers house incredible complexity within a physically tiny chassis. The cheaper and smaller the computer on the outside and the bigger they are on the inside, the more fascinating I find them.

    - Certain computing environments have always drawn my attention much more than others. Smalltalk environments for instance. These are whole computers contained in an image. Every time you boot up smalltalk it is all the way you left it. It's self-documenting and you can change anything. You can live here if you like!

    - Another example of this is FORTH. Similar to Smalltalk systems, FORTH systems offer computing environments which can be built on and completely reconfigured from the inside out with their own built-in editors etc.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • [rant] It's impossible to find something I don't already know

      Search engine are fucked up, LLM ... not usefull ... worse than search engine.

      Advance search does not working as expected, I wish I can grep the internet.

      Sometimes things I search didn't show up until I put in exact word/paragraph I already know.

      When I started learn about programming, there are only English resource, Thais resources are very hard to find, or machine translated (almost everything that indexed on search engine), now there are only LLM or very low-quality.

    • Alexa Kay's Gemlog: Bookmarks Page is Live!

      I was inspired by apalrd's post[1] on setting up a Postmarks server. Postmarks federates public bookmarks so you can easily subscribe to them from a Mastodon, etc., account. He and other creator on YouTube have pointed out the importance of human recommendations to find good stuff online.[2][3] Algorithmic discovery was already problematic before this year, but the slop apocalypse has only put it on steroids.

    • Capsular Gemlog Manager

      My entire gemlog is now in a single file, index and served with a specialized Fornax server from RAM. No disk.

      I found myself no longer gemlogging, because it became too annoying to deal with hundreds of files! And indices! And making sure names work with dates... And keeping all the links working across the entire site...

      I just append a gemtext entry to the end, run the indexer and the server reloads it.

    • Last Phost!

      OK, it looks like some of you have already made the jump. I am still in the past for several hours for the time being.

      I will be making the jump at home alone again, like I did for xmas. I have no problems with this and I would actually rather not be around drunk people in the rain, like on xmas. I enjoy my solitude when I can.

      This is day 176of60 of The Occupation (OMFGWTF?!?!) [1][2] I am still surviving and have had to implement some boundaries for myself for damage control (from myself and others.)