Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 3 weeks in

    Three weeks into my new life.

    Six weeks since the solstice, where I stopped watching tv. Two weeks since I started boxing again. Last week I also made a point to only work on my main computer, if I want to procrastinate, I can do that somewhere else. Not sure how much I'll stick to this, but it seems pretty healthy.

    Without any lover in my life, there isn't much that push me forward. But it feels different. I'm motivated to focus on my own practices, on my own cultivation and liberation.

  • Elder Cedar

    The clouds were stuck, low in the mountains. I climb up the trail to reach them. It feels protected, hidden, to walk in a cloud in the forest.

    I feel disconnected, thinking about the future. Boxing and becoming better at it, my lost love and how I can move on. I wonder, am I not grounded, are my shoes disconnecting me from the soil energy.

    I take off my shoes, and right away there is a change in my thoughts. There is an exchange happening with the ground, and a calmness that infuse my body.

  • Feeling Silly

    I feel silly again.

    Telling jokes, singing songs and laughing at myself. The energy is good. A night of (dream) party, lot of (dream) sex and (dream) girls. I'm very thankful my dreams are balancing my energies like that.

    I was definitely off last Friday, my energy cultivation wasn't moving in the right direction. I partied over the weekend, two nights in a row, tequila, mescal, late nights and drugs. Nothing too brutal compared to some of the weekends in the last few months, but enough to drain some of that energy out.

  • well well well...

    another pipe has burst somewhere in the house, which is the bad news.

    the good news is that it's possible this will be covered by our insurance, so hopefully the deductible isn't that high.

    the medium news is that i may have to push back on my trip to austin from summer this year to winter, or possibly even spring next year. it all really depends on the next few months and how bad this pipe situation is.

  • Where have I been? An update

    I have been away for a while, so here is a little update on what I have been up to.

    I have been back to walking at least 10K steps per day. I am currently on a 30 days streak! I also finally picked up running again: let's see how it goes tomorrow, as we are expecting rain. I have been running in the cold and dark at 6 am. Can I also run in the cold, dark and wet at 6 am?

    I booked an endoscopy since my stomach pain has been really bad for quite a long time now (over a month!). It is most likely caused by stress, but a test to see how messed up things are won't hurt. (Well, it will most likely kind of hurt while I am getting it, but that will be just some temporary discomfort). On the plus side, I have been eating very healthy recently, as stomach pain is a great motivator to stop drinking alcohol and eating too much. I cut off almost all coffee (I drink it once or twice per week), all alcohol, and fried food.

• Science

  • Stargazing Sketch: Gamma Cygnus

    On Saturday morning (2026-01-31) I did not get up until around 6am, but the skies were still dark, and also clear. True night was just ending, but I thought that the beginning of astronomical twilight might still be rewarding, so I headed outside as quickly as I could.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Jonathan Broadwell Unveils New Serial Wombat 8B Smart Expansion Boards

    Maker Jonathan Broadwell is back on the crowdfunding circuit with four new additions to his Serial Wombat 8B development board expansion platform: a high-side driver, low-side driver, infrared transceiver, and an I2C multiplexer with input/output expansion.

    "The Serial Wombat 8B is [a] microcontroller preprogrammed with firmware that turns it into an I2C peripheral that provides smart I/O [Input/Output] expansion to solve common interfacing problems — ADC [Analog to Digital Conversion], PWM [Pulse-Width Modulation], servo, GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output], rotary encoder reading, H-bridge interfacing, and more," Broadwell explains. "As a separate microcontroller it can offload annoying or interrupt intensive I/O tasks from your main board. It's open-source firmware running on an inexpensive [WCH Electronics] CH32V003 microcontroller. The hardware designs are open-source hardware. You don't program a Serial Wombat board. You command it in real time like any other I2C device using available Arduino, Python/MicroPython, or C# libraries."

  • Tcl, AI and IRIX

    I have asked one undisclosed AI to write a simple CAD-like tool in Tcl/Tk. Well, after several tries I now have a cute tiny app to make lines, arcs and circles (and basic dimensioning!) which has been written in pure Tcl/Tk 8.0. And it is very fast even on the 33 MHz MIPS CPU.

    It wasn't easy but still easier than write the code in this nasty language with all its brackets.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Hello World

      I've only just discovered this pocket of cyberspace this past weekend, and within those couple days I was already transfixed! As a 34yr old millenial I'm too young to have known the proto-web of true BBS systems nor Gopher-holes; I did get to grow up experiencing the early world-wide-web when it still felt human, and I miss it.. I'm sure the sentiment is largely shared around here.

      I'm new here, but I already see potential; though I lack a developmental outlook - I see myself more-like a computer-mechanic, I can perform well with spatial reasoning tasks and I know the rudimentary architecture of computer design; I'm sufficient-at-best at troubleshooting a problem, but I wouldn't know how your code works unless it were heavily notated..