Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🖼️ xkcd — Early Arthropods #3199

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ADEKQSU Wordo: SPICY

  • Stargazing Sketch: Lyra

    I woke up earlier than expect on Sunday morning (2026-01-25) and discovered that the morning weather reports sounded tolerable, if not ideal, for stargazing. So I headed outside around 5:30am with my binoculars, after properly suiting up for -10 ℉. Most of the skies were covered in a thin layer of clouds, making naked eye stargazing very difficult, but I found I could still see a lot of stars with the binocs.

    Between the clouds and the light pollution, I could only see a few of the brightest stars with the naked eye. Also I am not as familiar with the AM arrangement of the celestial sphere. So, I couldn't actually tell what constellations I was looking at.

  • Waiting Isn't a Waste

    The first book I finished reading in this new year was called Waiting Isn't a Waste by Mark Vroegop. It was nonfiction, a little suprising for me, because I don't read a lot of nonfiction. I prefer to escape into a fiction story. Even when I was a kid, I hated any book or TV that I suspected to be educational. Now that I'm grownup, I like to read some nonfiction, but still mostly read fiction.

    My pastor's wife loaned me this book, and it was a short and easy read, with a lot of help on how to wait well.

  • Professional Troublemaker

    It seems like I'm paid to find trouble. Maybe that's not the job description explicitly, but that's what I have been doing for years and continue doing and I haven't been fired, although I am counseled to "pick my battles" and "decide which hills you're going to die on."

  • Star Wars If Only Star Wars

    Say that, through some freak accident or alternate timeline, the only piece of media in the sprawling, decades-long Star Wars space opera franchise is the original 1977 film, complete with its year-plus-long theatrical run and the widespread audience acclaim that it got; and that you are now in control of the direction of the Star Wars franchise. Where would you take it?

    This is a question I've had in the back of my mind for a bit. The reason it's so fascinating is because, unlike the sequels, prequels, and eventual full media empire that would fill the Star Wars franchise with its extensive worldbuilding, intertwined storylines, massive cast of characters, and more (for better and worse), the original Star Wars movie is a very straightforward, simple, and self-contained film by comparison, establishing the core of the Star Wars world and leaving the rest of it wide open. From that foundation, and that fanbase that you gathered from that first film, there are simply so many ways the story can go that can be difficult for someone so steeped in the current Star Wars lore to even imagine - some of the decisions that Star Wars would make, of course, are wonderful and contribute to excellent filmmaking, while others are more debatably so, and it's worth considering simply how different the story could be.

  • Crochet 2, 3, and 4

    I love how soft the Facets yarn is and the interesting colors it comes in. The aqua and yellows reminded me of the sun and beach, which was nice to think about in dark January. But I was a little disappointed that I wasn't gentle enough either during steam blocking or when I hung it up on a metal hook, and I accidentally ripped some of the stitches at the very top. It has not unraveled yet. Needless to say, I won't be giving this one away. If I did this again I'd probably choose more demure colors to go with the sweet dewdrop pattern, and I'd be much more gentle when blocking.

• Technology and Free Software

  • LVDT Position Sensor

    The simulator at my work uses LVDT position sensors in the actuator legs. This got me interested in LVDT position sensors and wondering if I could make one, at least a toy one. My main source of info was this Web page:

    Linear Variable Differential Transformer (LVDT) Basics | TE Connectivity

    Some initial problems I ran into was finding the spare wiring, and also figuring out what to use for a tube to wrap the wire on, i.e., without having to spend any money. The tube needs to be strong enough to hold the coils, but also must be sized right to allow the core to move smoothly along the inside. After going through some junk pieces of metal and plastic that didn't work out, I found an interesting trick on the Internet, of building a tube out of paper. The basic idea is that you just keep rolling up paper around your rod, until you have something strong enough to hold the wire wraps. I used a bunch of old sheets I had already written or printed on, so I wasn't wasting paper.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Posting from Lynx...

      You know... some text-based things still work just fine. I am currently posting from Lynx, in a terminal, on my phone.

    • First video is up, the making of...

      Finally, the first video is up on my PeerTube channel. In this first episode of Scandinavian Retro I explain what the peertube channel is about, do a quick tour around the new retro room, look at a number of items that came in the mail and do a quick test of two of those items: the Amstrad CPC 464 and the 6128.

    • Bookmarks

      I keep an organized list of Web bookmarks in my personal Zim wiki. The entries go back almost 20 years, and I've now saved almost a thousand links in total.

      I suppose keeping bookmarks is itself is a slightly anachronistic habit: the Internet is much more centralized than it was even ten years ago, and if people keep track of their favorite content at all, it's in the form of liked Twitter posts or saved Instagram reels. However, I find that some of the Web's most interesting (and useful) information still comes from standalone sites, so I continue to bookmark them. There's lots of neat stuff I would never have found simply scrolling social media.

      Slightly stranger, perhaps, is how I manage my bookmarks. Specifically, I almost never delete old links. I mark them as dead, and I try to back up as much of their content locally as I can from a scraper like Archive.org. If an equivalent service has replaced an old one (like a favicon downloader), I sometimes replace the old link to point to the new service. But for the most part, I hold onto all my links as-is, even after they no longer resolve anywhere.

    • Finger: a detailed timeline for changes on my envs.net account

      You can get a detailed timeline of changes I do on my envs.net account on my web site, Gemini page, Gopher Hole or the shell itself with using 'Finger' on dan@envs.net like this on the command line: [...]