Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • New Tea

    On 'Blue Monday', where people are meant to be at their lowest after the Christmas blur and the pervading darkness, why not try a new tea?

    This time I have Legend Of The Limelight, a blended sheng pu'erh from Mei Leaf. This is a 50/50 blend of a dry stored Yibang from 2005 and a wet stored Gushu from 2009. This mix of wet and dry storage gives a curious mix of flavours and smells. I bought a cake as I couldn't get a sampler and well.. I thought lets spoil myself.

    For today's session, I am using my clay teapot for brewing. It should reduce some of the minerality. I will try the gaiwan for another session at some point. I am writing this after 7 infusions. The colour of the liquid is a dark amber colour. The smell of the liquid is a mix of leather, fruit and menthol hints. The wet leaves are similar in smell buit with less leather. The taste is a series of sensations. At first, you get the dried fruits mixed with old book. Then a menthol/camphor flavour and sensation hits the side of the tongue. This fires along and you are hit with a mineral, drying effect on the tongue. As you breathe in, the menthol/camphor sensation remains. It is a curious rush which sort of just clicks. Alongside this, you feel this tea in the mind. I feel floaty with focus.

• Politics and World Events

  • ACME Brand Oneness

    This oneness, mind you, is authentic 100% bonafide Greek-brand and therefore Western oneness, not the fake Eastern sort, nor the kind you might get from licking a toad. Some damnable critic would then point out you now have at least two onenesses, when there properly should only be one oneness as sourced from the relevant Platonic plane. Or, some might wonder how or why Greek-brand oneness is better or different than all those cut-rate Eastern onenesses, presumably made in a sweat-shop by slave labor. This was quite the simple matter for a wager-prone Pascal: obviously, the local team is better than the one from Shelbyville.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Using a Roku at a Hotel

    With smart TV’s having embedded streaming apps, and the hotel’s custom interface just begging you to log into your service on their TV, why would you even bring a Roku or other streaming device to a hotel?

    I’ll tell you: I don’t trust devices I don’t own. Hell, I don’t even trust devices I do own \*cough\* cellphone \*cough\*. So while bringing your own device only brings a modicum of data privacy if someone is still on the network monitoring your wifi data in the hotel, at least you’re not logging into an unknown hardware device.

    Now, hooking up a Roku in a hotel used to be easy. Use the USB port or hook up via HDMI, grab the remote and switch inputs. Well, now there are “hospitality TVs” that have custom interfaces, and for reasons unknown, security features that disable things like changing the input, _even when you use the buttons on the TV itself._

  • Using a Roku at a Hotel

    I posted this on my blog, which conveniently cross-posts to gopher via the Writefreely blog platform I'm using.

  • Groups

    When my wife and I visited the United Kingdom in 2023, we flew on an Airbus A380 with British Airways. The flight was packed: 485 passengers filled the double decks, and 22 crew members operated the aircraft and staffed the cabin.

    I find myself reflecting on that flight every now and then. 507 human beings, from all walks of life and due to all kinds of varying circumstances, stepped aboard that aircraft one sunny May evening. All of us passengers had occasion to buy a ticket on the same route, arrive at the same airport, go to the same gate, meet the same crew, cross the same ocean, arrive at the same destination, and disembark at the same gate--all at the same time. We were all brought together for a few fleeting hours.

    What's weirder to me is looking back on our lives afterward. The odds are almost certain that that group of 507 people will never be in the same place at the same time again. Some of them might have already passed away. Some might never fly again. Some might never have another occasion to go to the US; some might never have another occasion to go to the UK. Some might simply have other schedules, other demands on their time, other leisure destinations, other plans with family and friends, other hopes and dreams. Regardless, that group will never get back together.

  • Lorentz Attractor with CRT Scope

    I remember I have one CRT scope, a Tektronix 620 X-Y monitor, which I borrowed from a friend a while back, for some vector graphics experiments. It is rather long — about two feet from front to back, so it is a rather inconvenient form factor. I don't think it would be convenient to use as a general purpose scope, vs. my four-channel digital scope. But it is nice for X-Y mode, of course, and also has a Z port which I think must control the intensity. There is also a TTY port though I'm not sure what it is for — presumably it takes TTY voltage inputs and shifts them to the scope input levels.

  • T H R E E - D E E (cont., 4ofx)

    The overnight processing reminded me of, ahem, public domain downloads from back in the commie BBS days over 300 baud + dialup. GOOGOOGOO over Punter protocol. Start the download before bedtime and before the end of any BBS session time limit (while tying up the phone line) and hopefully the file writes to the 5.25" floppy successfully. At least there is no upload/download ratios.

  • 2026-01-19

    One of the great things about the FOSS world is that if you have a specific computer problem...someone probably already wrote a utility to fix it.

    In today's episode of cool linux tools, we are talking about 'fatsort' and why it is great.

    So let's start with some background. As an elder millenial, I absolutely refuse to pay for music services like Spotify to play music in my car. Nay friends, I only trust my USB flash drive and all of the MP3s that I've acquired over these past 30 years.

    Like most modern'ish cars, my Honda supports reading MP3s from a USB flash drive and you can put your MP3s into folders and the Honda will have a rudimentary file browser that allows you to choose the song. I should note that my Honda is a 2018 model...so the head unit is a few generations behind.

  • Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots

    What I like most about teaching "Open Source Strategies" at École Polytechnique de Louvain is how much I learn from my students, especially during the exam.

    I dislike exams. I still have nightmares about exams. That’s why I try to subvert this stressful moment and make it a learning opportunity. I know that adrenaline increases memorization dramatically. I make sure to explain to each student what I was expecting and to be helpful.

    [...]

    Of 60 students, 57 decided not to use any chatbots. For 30 of them, I managed to ask them to explain their choices. For the others, I unfortunately did not have the time. After the exam, I grouped those justifications into four different clusters. I did it without looking at their grades.

    The first group is the "personal preference" group. They prefer not to use chatbots. They use them only as a last resort, in very special cases or for very specific subjects. Some even made it a matter of personal pride. Two students told me explicitly "For this course, I want to be proud of myself." Another also explained: "If I need to verify what an LLM said, it will take more time!"

  • UUGear's Witty Pi 5 HAT+ Offers Time, Temp, and Voltage-Based Power Management for Any Raspberry Pi

    Embedded and hobbyist electronics specialist UUGear has launched a new option for powering your Raspberry Pi single-board computer: the Witty Pi 5 HAT+, with integrated real-time clock and power control functionality.

    "Witty Pi is an add-on board for Raspberry Pi that brings real-time clock (RTC) and power management functionalities to your Raspberry Pi," UUGear explains of its latest hardware design, brought to our attention by CNX Software. "It can define the on/off sequence of your Raspberry Pi, perform power on/off actions based on temperature or voltage thresholds, and significantly reduce overall energy consumption."

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Grenzland

      For a while now we've been talking about moving our Discord server community to IRC. I've been running a server, @kyonshi@dice.camp has been running a server, we networked them, and so on. I really like how the use of web apps like The Lounge have been helping us get there.