Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Napping in the mountain

    I nap a lot lately.

    In my hammock and in my couch. I'm tired. My last transition was brutal. I lost a good friend, in the strangest of way. No fight, no drama, just separated by a lake. It's harder than I admit.

    We created a reality, hidden from the world. Tucked away in the mountains by the lake. A comfortable world, where everything was possible. Time would stop for a moment.

  • Cultivation

    No kids to Karate yesterday, only a tree teenagers and four adults, so we did a lot of sparing. It was really nice to spar, I could show off my boxing skill that are coming back to me.

    It's not a karate thing to spar, you look for the one punch that will end the fight. We were also just using our hands, which is a massive disadvantage for them.

  • 🖼️ xkcd: Chemical Formula #3200

  • Come visit Kentucky (for real)

    Come visit Kentucky to canvass and roam outdoors.

    Stop arming Israel, no permits for uranium enrichment or data centers, arrest ICE agents

    The Kentucky Party started in 2024 from the movement to stop arming Israel. We got a presidential candidate on the statewide ballot. This year more than 20 candidates are running on our ticket for local, state, and federal office. We recruit and get them ballot access. Their job's to win.

    Our US Senate, US House, and KY House candidates are using their campaigns as bully pulpits to force action. Should they win, even better.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ABGINRZ Wordo: BELOW

• Perspectives and World Events

  • Ice is devastating

    Wow. That was an epic ice storm! I've never seen anything like it. You see, I live in the Nashville area and we got hit with a killer ice storm this past weekend and we're still reeling in its aftermath.

    I've experienced a few extreme weather events in my day, but I was unprepared for the devastation caused by the buildup of ice over the course of Saturday night. A freezing rain / sleet mixture fell in earnest all night and well into Sunday afternoon. By 7:30A, the trees had started popping and crashing. We lost power thereabouts. It was a long, cold day. I spent it attending to a variety of preparedness exercises. Being under-caffeinated, one of these exercises was to pitch my tailgating tent over our patio and set up my camp kitchen. That manual coffee grinder I picked up last year was suddenly very practical and I thoroughly enjoyed my afternoon moka-pot.

    I have to attempt to describe the sound -- it was unreal. I am not exagerating when I tell you that there was not a single minute that day in which there was not some kind of loud pop or crash ringing out from the woods surrounding our end-of-the-cul-de-sac home. It was uncannily similar to gunfire. It was disconcerting, to say the least. I was not especially concerned about our home being struck, as we have a mostly-safe margin, but I was concerned for our many neighbors with big, old trees near their homes.

  • The Prayer of the Flowers

    This will be a rare post in English. I recently read a collection of short stories by Lord Dunsany and got struck by this one in the light of the never ending chase for alleged AI everywhere, global warming and batshit politics that seem to be popular at the moment.

  • Hate and love

    I'm torned, but I know. The quickest path is the middle, close my eyes, enshrine the past, with a smile like dried flower with beauty but without scent

  • On letting go

    This morning I realize that the process of letting go has to be tainted in some sort of gentle appreciation of what was.

    It seems easier to let go of something I hate. Or at least, it feels like I'm letting go of something if I dislike it.

    But to put a judgment, to attached an emotion to something that happened in the past, re-enforce the bond to that event or that person.

• Technology and Free Software

  • This Smart UPS Controller Cycles Button-Operated Devices to Boost Runtime, with a Neat ADC Hack Too

    Pseudonymous maker "universalgeek56," hereafter simply "UG56," has designed a gadget that aims to deliver improved runtime for uninterruptible power supplies (UPSes) — by cutting "vampiric power" and running connected devices only part of the time, with a side-order of a clever hack to get access to the otherwise-hidden analog to digital converter (ADC) on an Espressif ESP-01 module.

    "Power cuts? Remote locations? Antarctica. Sahara. Garage. Summer house. Pluto? Or anywhere closer, where every amp-hour actually matters," UG56 writes of the project. "This is a simple, brutal hack: make any button-operated device — pumps, heaters, boilers, freezers, humidifiers, aerators, generators — run in smart cycles instead of nonstop, dramatically extending runtime autonomously. Just an [Espressif] ESP8266 pressing buttons and watching battery voltage — quietly keeping things alive longer."