Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Stories

    Plato hated myth and would have poets banished from his Most Excellent If Perhaps Hypothetical Of Republics. He of course invented his own story to replace their stories, with his being obviously superior in every which way. Those with a penchant for seeing everything as contrasting binaries might trot out mythos versus logos, or stories versus reason, even if the reasonable folks are indeed telling stories of their own. More recently Carl Sagan had a talk "Is There Intelligent Life on Earth" and of course a story to go with it. (By various indicators: no.)

• Technology and Free Software

  • Potentiometer Calculator

    When two potentiometers are chained together, the fractional voltages are multiplied. I.e., if you set the two potentiometers each to output 50% of their input voltage, the final output would be 25% of the first input voltage, or hopefully something close to that depending on several actual engineering details, in particular:

    * the accuracy with which you can set each potentiometer to a desired fractio n * how much the result is skewed by the second potentiometer loading the first one

    * the accuracy with which you can read the output voltage

    An interesting question to explore is how useful such a calculator would be in practice, especially compared to a slide rule. Decades ago, there were several educational computer kits — I think I've seen at least two different brands on ebay — which allowed users to experiment with this basic idea. I do not own one of these kits, but I spent some time studying the instruction manual for the Edmund Analog Computer Kit.

  • Tsufai's Scrap-Built Floor Sweeper Is an Ultra-Low-Cost Minimum Viable Product Take on a Roomba

    Anyone dismayed at the news that Roomba maker iRobot has entered into bankruptcy proceedings may be wondering about building their own robotic cleaning devices — and if you want something simple as a starting point, mononymous maker Tsufai has released designs for a floor-sweeper driven by nothing more than a battery and two motors.

    "I designed this robot so you can easily build one with the parts at home," Tufai writes of the simple machine, which lacks any kind of controlling computer system. "It does a pretty good job wiping the floor and even turns when bumping walls, cleaning far beyond its weight class! I've seen ones that work with vibration or fans, but they don't work very well, this is better!"

  • power outage

    Strange night, in the dark, in the cold. I wasn't motivated to start a fire. The power was out, and I was tired. Looking at the outage map, it was about to be fixed, but it ended up being a longer outage, almost 6 hours.

    Woke up many times. I kept on hearing her voice, as if she was calling me. I woke up at 2:30, then I checked the outage map, power was to come back at 2:32. What a strange coincidence. I waited 2 minutes, and then power came back.

    Should I get out of bed and do something? What? I stayed in bed, resting from the previous day.

    It was a big day at one of my client. We were switching over from a previous network storage to a new server. I didn't think much about it, but it was surely draining to be on the spot like this.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Comments on Formatting Gopher Posts

      Sava.rocks talks about formatting gopher posts with 'fmt' [0].
      
      
      The fmt tool does work, but is simplistic in its formatting - a more
      featured tool is 'par', which like fmt, operates on a STDIN/STDOUT
      stream. Here is a basic usage example, which formats 'file.txt',
      left-justified to a width of 68 chars:
      
      
          par 68 < file.txt > formatted-file.txt
      
      
      But par (and fmt) are best used from within your editor. Here is how
      to format an entire text file from within vi/nvi, left-justified to
      a width of 68:
      
      
          !Gpar 68
      
      
      Use '68j' if you want the text to be fully justified (all lines will
      be exactly 68 chars wide).
      
      
      Or, you can add lines like these to your .exrc/.nexrc, which maps
      Alt-q to format the current paragraph (this key binding is taken
      from emacs fill-paragraph, which is what I am used to), or Q, which
      formats the entire file.
      

    • Discord IPO, again

      If you're in the position to host things for your friends, here's what has worked for me and my friends.

      Set up an **IRC server**. We used ngircd because it can federate so now we have a little network of two servers. That's good for resilience. There are more modern IRC servers but they don't federate like that. If you don't need federation, then by all means pick something new like Ergo.

    • Don't use UCEPROTECT Spam DNSBLs!

      It's probably already known by most mailserver admins, but *PLEASE* don't use the UCEPROTECT Spam DNSBL blocklists to block spam, if you want to receive email at all.

      They're just a rip-off and they are mainly used to extort and blackmail mail administrators to make themselves buy off the list, just to be readded later, to repeat the whole process. And for mail administrators: DON'T PAY THEM! They are scammers!