Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • New Year, New Organization System

    I don't even know how many ways, how many different times I've tried to get organized. Complicated systems, simple systems, paper analog systems, elaborate digital systems. Getting Things Done, Personal Kanban, Cal Newport style stuff, just using a simple notebook, just using a single page word doc and printing that out every day, whiteboard next to my work desk, day-book planners.

    I mean, I've been struggling with this crap since middle school when we got those holographic planners which were used mostly for making noise by running your pencil or fingernail over the cover more than actually planning anything...

  • Orange notebook

    Got myself a new orange notebook.

    I need a place to have my streams of consciousness, my secondary brain, to help me figure out my life. Sometime gopher is not the place. I feel it creates more noise, which might not be as interesting to you the reader.

    Sometime I just need to write my thoughts, multiple times, in different ways, until they congeal into something that I can let go of. I've already written 4 pages in the first 4 hours of my purchase!

  • I hope this isn't an omen for the year that just started

    I start the car up, and immedately I'm alerted to low presure in the front left tire—it's only 27psi (Pounds Per Square Inch) (or 1.9kgf/cm^2 (Kilograms force per square centimeter) for those of you deficient in the Imperial System of measure and weights) when it normally should be 35psi (2.5kgf/cm^2). No problem, I thought. I'll just haul out the air compressor.

    Easier said than done (have to move the lawn mower to reach the tire valve attactment, and I have to move several miscellaneous items to extract the compressor unit, then find an extension chord, etc.) but I finally had it set up, turned on, and started to inflate the tire.

  • 2026 Already Off to an Amazing Start

    This morning I got an email from an old friend, one I haven't seen in a dozen years. She and her family have moved to my city; it's been a long time, sorry, sorry; would I like to get together sometime?

    Very grateful for whatever cosmic luck led to this. We were friends as teenagers in the late 90s, online; talked on ICQ and AIM and message boards and both kept online journals pre-LiveJournal, when that was a thing. We sent each other little letters, mixtapes and CDs, care packages. I moved to Ottawa in the mid 2000s for a year, and we became irl friends. I didn't have any other friends that year. I hung out with her and her then-boyfriend. We went to the pub. We saw a show or two. After that academic year, I dropped out, moved half a country away. As is often the way, we talked a lot less.

  • Animal Crackers 🎥

    The Marx Bros film, Animal Crackers, just entered the public domain and you can watch it on Wikipedia

    ...so I did. I was disappointed. They mostly pointed a camera at a stage show, and didn't seem to want to do a retake when something went wrong. One time this was a positive thing: someone switched the character names, letting Groucho ad lib. But several other times people seemed to be trying to remember the next line, and we got to watch that awkwardness.

    There's lots of wordplay humour, but it's often lost because the characters are over there on the set, not near the camera. The famous line about the pyjamas is barely noticeable. I wanted them to use two cameras and do some editing. The film would be a lot shorter, and the gags would be funnier.

  • Name Names

    Names made from names! Usually funny, and thus sometimes reviled by serious people who insist we already have better names for these names.

• Politics and World Events

  • Why does the Electoral College exist?

    The Electoral College [1] in the U.S. is a controversial aspect of electing the President, but not many people understand why it was done. That's why I find “Why does the Electoral College exist? [2]” video so good—it goes into the history of why the Founding Fathers picked such a convoluted scheme to elect the President (and I did not know that direct election by the population was on the table). It basically comes down to the Founding Fathers distruct in direct democracy and the fear of large population states running roughshod over less populated states. Also, while democratic institutions have been around for a about two thousand years, it had never been done at a country level (cities, yes. Countries, not so much). As such, the Founding Fathers were treading into uncharted territory and given what they knew at the time, I don't think they did all that bad.

• Technology and Free Software

  • THAT: Cables and Dividers

    Up until recently, I've been connecting the oscilloscope probes directly to the jacks — or rather, the spare patch cables connected to the jacks — in order to get the full 10V output. However, I've found that this is a messy and bothersome approach, since the probes need to have both their positive and negative clips hooked to something, and the probes end up laying awkwardly across the work bench in various positions. Consequently, I switched to using the designated RCA output ports. THAT includes four RCA output ports, not counting the RCA trigger output port. Directing signal to these four ports is simple, as you just have to make a patch connection between whatever jack you want to monitor on the board, and a labeled jack on the bottom right of the board. These are labeled X, Y, Z, and U.

    As far as the connections to the oscilloscope: I did not have any RCA to BNC adapters, and I didn't want to spend anything buying them — the budget being very tight — but I did have some old junk BNC cables laying around, as well as some RCA cable. So, I cut the RCA cables up, and the BNC cables, and spliced them together. This was a bit challenging as the signal wire was very thin, but I did a good, solid job of it. So now I have three RCA<->BNC cables, and could make some more later. I'm not sure if using spliced cables is a good idea in general — with questions about characteristic impedance and such like — but hopefully that is not significant at these low frequencies we are dealing with here.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • So Long, and Thanks

      I'll get straight to the point. This gemini capsule's domain name will be expiring next month and I won't be renewing it. This .xyz domain was one of the first I ever registered back when it was cheap and I was a broke college student. While I'm no longer broke or a student, the .xyz TLD also isn't cheap any more. I've been consolidating and have already migrated many of my services from my .xyz domain to my .com domain, and the ones I haven't I'll be retiring instead. This gemini capsule is one of the latter. I'll be taking it offline after the domain expires, likely around mid-late February.

      [...]

      The gemini protocol and its community are awesome and are what first got me into blogging five years ago. Ever since then I'm pretty proud to say I've been more or less consistent with it. If you want to keep up with my posts, here's the link to my website.

    • Re: So Long and Thanks

      I feel always a little sad, when I see somebody posting a "Good bye and thanks for all the fish" article. I think I never talked to him but he is known in the Gemini space and I liked his posts. It always gives me the feeling that all the good ol' gemini people, which are well known and have formed the space are leaving, because Gemini isn't the right thing anymore, at least for them.

    • Xobaque does RFC 5005

      Very few blogs (this one?) support RFC 5005 "Feed Paging and Archiving". Xobaque is a search engine that doesn't crawl the web. It gets fed using feeds. That makes it the ideal companion for web rings, blog planets and the like. And I just added blog crawling using RFC 5005 to it.

    • How I Post on Gemini

      I've seen a couple of posts discussing how folks post on Gemini and I think it's rad that this tiny little corner of the smolweb allows for so many unique ways to participate. Having read these posts, I thought I'd share my super simple (by most people's standard here on Gemini) posting workflow!

      A few years ago I started learning bash scripting, which coincided with my introduction to Gemini. I created a simple script that asks me what post I want to write, and upon selection, either opens the document on my page that I can add to, or if it's a gemlog, asks me to input the name of the file I would like to create. I write all my posts in vim for what it's worth.

    • Small Thought on Dupes

      A few days ago I was looking through the website cozyleigh.studio and perusing their selection of gorgeous lamps. Their Zen lamps are very cool but also very expensive, and with shipping, they're way outside my budget. This got me thinking about Dupes, or duplicates, that are usually cheaper knock-offs of popular brands. I was thinking of the numerous people in my life that would look at the Zen lamp, see the price tag, and just say "Oh I'll just find the same thing for cheaper on Amazon".

      I don't use Amazon so this isn't something that I think about, but it had me thinking about dupes. For this specific lamp, I thought about what would happen if instead of buying the actual lamp, people just bought a dupe.