Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — UDEHNQC Wordo: REDON

  • Sparks

    It's not every day you get to see rain and sparks dancing high above together.

    Today was one of those, except the sky was paint and the rain was kvass.

  • House Flood

    I had planned to write more frequently in my capsule's log during 2026. I managed to write for three days in a row earlier this month, which is already unusually-frequent for me. Then, last Saturday, the drain hose popped off the back of our laundry machine, and water partially flooded our basement. To make matters worse, the room directly under the laundry room was where I had decided to store many of my electronics.

    Several things worked in our favor. I usually store devices, cables and other equipment in labeled zipper bags. Those items were protected from the deluge. We were home and awake, and we were able to catch the spill in less than an hour. Some of my family volunteered to come over and bring fans, towels and dehumidifiers. We even own a shop vac, so we could clean up much of the water ourselves.

  • Rationality

    John Gruber on changing his mind

  • 🖼️ xkcd — 16-Part Epoxy #3194

  • In which ieve runs 5 thousand meters

    I started running in November after approx 21 years of not-running. I did cross country in my first year of high school ... I didn't hate it but I was also disinterested in everything, and once I got yelled at enough times for screwing around, I elected not to do it again the next year and never really did much of any physical exercise for the next 21 years. (Not because of the yelling, just ... was more interested in vidja games and then whatever came next.)

    But now I decided I want to be skrong and have an active lifestyle and be able to do cool things ... so started running. Tiny little bits at first - running 30 seconds and then walking 30 minutes. Then a little bit more at a time. Apparently I'm an old man now (at 35 lol) and my musculoskeletal system is absolutely the limiting factor in how long I can run - calves are the gas.

    But read and watched youtube videos (Steve Magness) and fixed my gait (landing more under my body weight rather than feet way out in front of me, increased steps per minute / cadence), started strength training a few times a week, hitting protein goals (JFC 130-150g per day is difficult...) and voila, knees stopped hurting while running (until my muscles got tired anyway).

  • Friday is an okay day

    It's Friday. Work has been pure chaos. Home has been peaceful and nice.

    A weird pizza with cheezy crust, on the other hand, turned out to be a disgusting, but kinda smart invention, fairly tasty, but I wouldn't buy it more than once a year.

    I'm back to reading books. This is the year I will make time to read books. Between 2004 and 2019, I've read consistently 12 books a year, most recommended by friends and internet people I trusted. Between 2020 and 2022, I've read about 50 books per year on average, which I guess officially makes me a psycho. But around 2023, I gradually dropped the habit and lost the drive, over all the life stuff that's been happening. Well, life stuff, however persistent it be, doesn't fly as an excuse anymore, so I'm back to 12 books/year goal, and then we'll see. I'm starting with the comfortable number I know can make me happy, because it makes no difference to make it performative or game the metric. Instead, I want to experience the world again through the books, carefully imagined and written by the authors, polished by their editorial teams, and published to the point where I can buy them and read them. Let's see how that goes.

  • making yogurt

    Pre-heating the milk to boiling or near boiling, allowing it to cool, adding the cultures, incubating 24 hours, chilling for 12, and not stirring until after chilling results in the firmest and most consistent outcome.

  • January 15: Teaching my four-year-old to read

    She loves stories. We're voracious readers. Thanks to her I've read aloud The Wizard of Oz, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Betsy-Tacy, Tomie DiPaola's chapter books about his childhood, several chapter books I'd read as a child, many German, Russian, and black American folktales, and now we're reading Little House in the Big Woods.

    I had to stop reading books at bedtime because she'd stay up whispering and thinking. She reads to me or I read to her at the kitchen table. In her room, a few poems or nothing now.

    And she loves ballads that tell stories. She lustily sings Folsom Prison Blues, Let It Go (from Frozen), and Christmas hymns. She makes up her own. She's at home with words.

• Technology and Free Software

  • T H R E E - D E E (cont., 2ofx)

    OK, where was I? Oh yeah, 3D Blu-Ray.

    Fast-forward to now, where I am thinking about 3D Blu-Ray again...

    I decided to try hooking up the Xreal Air glasses to the 3D Blu-Ray player to view 3D videos. After many attempts, no dice. I could get 2D, but not 3D. I think some external HDMI box from Xreal is needed for it to work, but I'm not even sure if it would work with my 3D Blu-Ray player, so I'm not going that route. Also, I'm not even sure if SBS 3D is compatible with whatever gets outputted via HDMI.

  • T H R E E - D E E (cont., 3ofx)

    So I found some tips about the conversion on the surface webz and decided to test it out. I brought out my old desktop rig that I use for video stuff and attached an old M E M O R E X external USB Blu-Ray drive, which I haven't used in ages. The rig is running Debian buster->bullseye. I thought about doing a fresh install, but decided that I did not want another project on top of what I was trying to test out. Also, I spent enough time on research already and just wanted to get it tested out.

    The first Blu-Ray disc I tried was...uh...a family video...of my kids running...around outside...at night playing in traffic with...uh, glowsticks, shot with the 3D camcorder that burned the video directly to Blu-Ray, yeah, that's right, uh, that's the ticket! makemkv was already on the video rig so no problems there. Output file was about 35GB, which took about an hour or so.

  • Pragmatic Retrocomputing Dogfooding

    For my FRST business, (slash-personal-computer-entrepreneur-cough-woz-cough-cosplay) I've mentioned my plan to utilize my own collection of vintage computers in everyday use. I mean to demonstrate the ongoing value that personal computers can offer when designed well, putting the user first.

  • Gen AI on Your Raspberry Pi: A Hands-On Review of the Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2

    Raspberry Pi is back on the artificial intelligence (AI) bandwagon again, announcing the latest entry in its family of accelerators for the Raspberry Pi 5 — and this time it's focusing on generative AI, particularly large language models (LLMs).

    The Raspberry PI AI HAT+ 2 is built around the Hailo-10H coprocessor, delivering a claimed 40 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute at a reduced INT4 precision. It's also joined for the first time by 8GB of dedicated LPDDR4 RAM, giving it the grunt required to run LLMs with up to 1.5 billion parameters.

    Is this a $130 way to get your foot in the door of the generative AI boom, or just more hot air inflating the AI bubble? Let's find out.

  • THAT: Lorenz Attractor

    During the lunch break, I setup the Lorenz Attractor circuit, one of the example circuits in the THAT manual. I find that the easiest way to setup these example circuits is not to duplicate the patch panel diagram, but rather to make a copy of the analog circuit diagram, and then to work through making those connections. I highlight each connection line, after making the connection, and then I highlight the component after all the connections for that component have been completed.

    [...]

    My view of the attractor is a result of using fast repetition mode (REPF). I found that if I extend the simulation out to longer times, with REP mode, that the attractor always collapses to the origin after a few seconds. Presumably this is due to dampening in the system, or perhaps from the coefficients being incorrect or unstable.

  • Tribefinding

    When Web 2.0 started taking over in the late 2000s, suddenly, finding one's community was incredibly easy. Whichever niche or nerdy interest you were into, new tools for connecting over the internet made it easier than ever. (and of course all these tools had open APIs and FOSS clients galore! I remember connecting to Facebook Chat in Pidgin). For a brief, beautiful moment, it felt as if we nerdier folk were vindicated and were finally able to ride off into the golden sunset having found our people and secure in our nerdinesses.

    However, it seems this had the effect of killing everything once considered nerdy from the inside. Now, those of us who resist the normie-ification and who still hang around outside the fringes have again found ourselves with difficulties in tribefinding.

  • Summer of upgrades (Part 4 network)

    This story should start during the summer of 2025 when it became clear that my living area was getting connected to the fibre network. However, I should start a little earlier.

    I used to have a unifi USG router. The one that was released in 2014 and was good for networks during that time. However it appeared to get no successor. After much requests by anyone a new professional USG like was announced in 2020 and in 2023 followed by the real successor in the form of the UXG pro and lite. One of the previews of the new UXG lite called it the Monkey Paws gateway refering to the tale of the monkey paw with as red line "be careful what you wish for". Eventually my UXG lite, having a 1GB network port and 500Mbit download on the modem was getting only 130Mbit max. I considered this a problem with Telenet or Orange. It is very known in belgium that both don't neccesarily get along and make each other's work very difficult sometimes. I considered the max 130Mbit an outcome from these troubles.

    When the fibre network was announced in my area I consdered this the starting point of some network upgrades including fibre compatible router with 10Gbit. Since I was already completly in unifi the UXG fiber was the go to choice. When installed this one and checking my network speed I never thought I would see this, the monkey paw gateway really had done it. Even though the benchmarks marked it as fully reaching 1Gbit it appeared that real life usage was very limited with the new UXG fiber easily getting the promised 500Mbit. In case I offended anyone at Telenet or Orange, this is my sincere apology.

  • Sand Castles: the hollow, market-based politics of AI and Canadian Liberalism

    In the uproar over the recent Canada-Alberta Memorandum of Understanding, which rolls back almost all of Canada's emissions regulations and clears the way for a new bitumen pipeline, one of the more overlooked aspects was the language around AI data centres. The MoU calls for "the construction of thousands of megawatts of AI computing power", which would almost certainly either eat up any new electricity generation from renewables in the region, or result in burning an enormous amount of gas that, in an ideal world, would be left in the ground. [1,2]

    It's headscratching at best, and infuriating at worst. But for argument's sake, let's suppose you aren't bothered by the environmental and social impacts of building a bunch of hyperscale AI data centres in drought-prone northern Alberta, and you're convinced that AI is important and necessary and useful. Even then, the economics of these massive facilities don't make any sense, according to computer scientist Nicholas Weaver, who points to the dramatically reduced cost of running inference either on-device or via on-premises clusters, with the trade-off being a small drop in performance. [3]

  • Wavelet Lab Is Back with Two New Open Source Software-Defined Radio Modules, the xSDR and sSDR

    Wavelet Lab, best known for its compact uSDR software-defined radio module, is preparing to launch two new open source SDRs built around Lime Microsystems' LMS7002M field-programmable radio-frequency chip: the xSDR and sSDR.

    "xSDR is a compact, single-sided M.2 software-defined radio designed for seamless integration into modern computing platforms," says Wavelet Lab's Andrew Avtushenko of the company's latest hardware design. "The 'x' stands for 'extended' — xSDR delivers extended bandwidth in the same minimal footprint as our previous model, uSDR. With 2×2 MIMO [Multiple-Input Multiple-Output] RX/TX [Receive/Transmit] channels, a wide 30MHz–3.8GHz tuning range, and up to 122.88 MSPS [Mega-Samples Per Second] sampling, xSDR is a flexible platform for embedded RF, wireless research, signal intelligence, and rapid prototyping."

  • Internet/Gemini

    • In which my Gemserver stopped working... again

      I wrote my own Gem server. I already had a website and a little Linode slice, the smallest one for $5/month, and I like hacking stuff together so it made sense to write my own. As far as I know it's the only one written in Crystal Lang, which is a lovely static typed / compiled language with Ruby-like syntax.

      But it's been being a brat. The overall server works, the http server works (nginx), in fact the linux server and nginx had both been happily chugging along for 2 years uptime.

      And then ... the only way I can figure out how to get my Gemini server to start responding again is to reboot the whole Linux server.

      So, if you're trying to hit ieve.me and it's not responding, it's because my janky server janked out again.

    • New SpellBinding — solution

      Please update your bookmarks! The old server will be shut down in February 2026.