Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ACHKORW Wordo: PLAYS

  • Young fogeys

    At work I taught teenage boys a group about how stressors and triggers differ, and how recovery differs. It's one of my standards I can teach with- out prep, and it isn't paternalistic.

    The boys started out cynical and dubious, but I was being real, and the group wasn't a tired retread of something they'd heard a thousand times.

    One of the boys is a homeschooler who got in trouble with his dad for drinking at a friend's house. One shot his mom. One has grown up in dozens of foster homes and residentials. Two hear voices telling them to kill themselves, which indicates early childhood trauma that overwhelmed their coping capability. One walked in on his dad molesting his sister.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Summer of upgrades (Part 1 Desktop upgrades)

    On June 12 I bought a new GPU for mini-ITX Streacom PC. Meanwhile I thought to fix the cabling in my pc, from a complete cable mess I went on to PSU cables from Cablemod so the cables would fit nicely in the case without a unmanageable overflow.

    I installed both the cables and GPU (a Powercolor Radeon RX9070 Hellhound) only to find out Linux Mint was not compatible with it. Let's be honest, I never really liked Mint, I used it because it was the best of the rest. Gnome 3 and further never felt like a reasonable choice anymore since the Gnome 3 overhaul, XFCE was my choice if I would run a low end pc and my KDE experiences dated back from 2011 (If you know, you know). So Linux Mint was my choice out of misery. I was still using it several years later until the Radeon RX 9070 rendered that choice useless.

  • Win11 surge

    Win11 is causing a mass exodus of users. They're getting millions and millions of complaints, according to one video[0]. It seems like the video voice is AI, so I can't bear to like it, but I like what it's reporting.

    I left Microslop's desktop OS years ago. I still have to deal with it at work, but I'm just glad more people are switching to Linux because it results in a surge in hope for humanity. It sucks that it takes corporate and shareholder greed run amok to cause it, but I like the fact that people are looking for other solutions when one is clearly overstepping the lines and not looking out for the consumer.

  • How I wrote my first Famicom/NES game and why it can be fun

    In my first post of the year, I had described a recently discovered roguelike card came called Scoundrel and how I began porting it everywhere. Famicom/NES, however, remained one of my goals that seemed unreachable. Well, in fact, provided everything had been done right from the beginning, that goal turned out to be much closer than it appeared.

    NES development is often associated with bare 6502 assembly, loads of sprite and sound design and a lot of tedious work that can only be supplanted with proprietary, vendor-locked constructors like NESmaker. However, all of that is not entirely true. In fact, you can create a game for Famicom/NES completely for free, without drawing a single sprite or writing a single assembly line. Yes, you still will need to know some hardware internals and you'll be limited to 32x28 text mode (unless you opt for 64x56 TGI mode which is rather slow and not worth exploring), but other than that, you can code for NES in pure C, which is exactly what I've done when porting Scoundrel to this platform. The repo, by the way, is in the same place as before ([1]), and the "Releases" section now contains ROMs for every currently ported retro platform, including Famicom/NES in NTSC mode.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Re: Mercury Protocol and TLS

      I can certainly see value in Gemini's insistence on using TLS. Even though the guarantees of authenticity are very limited due to being allowed to use Trust-On-First-Use certificates, it's still nice to be able to have some of that between browsing sessions, even if only to know that the server that you were communicating with yesterday is still the same server you are communicating with today. There's also a certain value in encryption in reducing snooping and making sure that an entire given document is produced by the same author.