Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Looking at 2026

    With the publication of "Shadows of the Upper Peninsula" mid 2025, I finished a goal I have been wanted to do for a very long time. I have written many stories in the past, probably a couple of million words worth.

    Some involved my fantasy character I made in 1993, "Leetaur". There is a story behind the name, which is not for this post, but kind of became my online handle after I started working on a book back then called "Blood Fire". After I started reading Terry Brooks' books, and realized he used that name in one of his books, my "Blood Fire" book is currently called "Quest for the Artifact", part of my "Sons of Vulaar" series.

    "Quest" is still not done, even though I have over 60,000 words.

    "Shadows of the Upper Peninsula" came about because of my love for both ghost stories, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I have family up there, and my mother loves ghost stories. My subject and plot of my first book was very much influenced by wanting to write something my parents and brother would enjoy.

    Also, a special thanks to Tash for allowing me to use her D&D character Lantashi as one of the main characters, and for all the advice on how she would react to different situation. If I could have left your character as an elf, I would have :).

• Technology and Free Software

  • Linux Anti-Minimalism

    Today I felt like installing neofetch on my VPS. For no good reason, really, but why not.

  • Diode Function Generators

    I've been interested recently in building a classic diode-based variable function generator. The basic idea behind it is that a diode can act like a switch, not conducting when reverse biased, and otherwise conducting with low resistance. This is not exactly true, but it is close enough to be practical for this application. So, using a diode in conjunction with an amplifier — in the negative feed back configuration — you can cause the output voltage to rise in a linear fashion, for a range of input voltages. Also, potentiometers are used to bias the diode toward the reference voltage — e.g., toward negative 10 volts — which alters the specific point — i.e., input voltage — in which the output voltage starts to rise. Another potentiometer can be used to change the slope of the rising voltage. When a number of these diode modules are combined together, and fed into the amplifier like standard inputs, the effects can be summed together to create a straight-line approximation of any arbitrary function.

  • Inkscape color management for dummies

    If there is something that I've dedicated time to learn and understand it is "Digital Color Management"; this is the discipline that allows colors to be properly rendered when you move from a medium to another.

    Color management had been a nightmare for decades: software unable to understand colors, monitors unable to display colors, any vendors using its own method to display and rendering them, until the industry came up together with a standardization with Adobe as flagship master, leading the troop!

    Basically it means that I learned how to use color management with (and within) the Adobe software. For years, before to dive into the free software space, I used to live in the bubble where (gaphic) design meant basically: "Apple/Hardware + Adobe/Software". Some would call it youthful mistakes.

  • Trying a Rhodia Webbie

    We've bought a Rhodia Webnotebook the other day, to replace our Leuchtturm1917 we used on and off to journal in 2025.

    Info on the notebook

    The Webnotebook exists in several colors, like the Leuchtturm1917 ones. In this case, we picked a blue one. We wish we could have picked a different color, but they didn't have many others with dotted paper.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Posting to antenna (for the first time)

      Sorry for the spam. I'm trying things out, to see how geminispace