Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • New video up: a smörgåsbord of retro items

    My third video is now up on my channel. Mail had been piling up and in this video we'll be taking a look at what all arrived.

    It's a mix of smaller items to pimp some of my existing gear as well as some new acquisitions. And I finally tracked down some of those illusive 3" disks!

    This will probably be my last mailbox video for a while. If you want to see more of them, better start sending me mail :)

  • Just call me Cassandra

    In ancient Greek mythology, Cassandra was a Trojan priestess who offered to get it on with the god Apollo, in exchange for the gift of prophecy. When she later spurned his advances, he cursed her, so that her perfectly accurate prophecies wouldn't be believed. Cassandra made many dire predictions, including the fall of Troy, but nobody took her seriously. People laughed, and thought her mad.

    It must, I imagine, have been very frustrating for the poor girl because, no matter how often she was right -- and she was always right because, you know... Apollo -- nobody was any more inclined to believe her.

    In my railings against the tech giants like Google, Apple, Microsoft, et al., I feel I have become a bit of a Cassandra. Not because I ever offered to fuck Apollo -- I doubt I would be his type -- but because I keep being proven right, and still nobody believes me.

    Back in the mid-90s, I warned everybody I met that the world-wide web -- a new, shiny toy at the time -- would increasingly be dominated by advertising, unless we took steps to prevent it. People laughed at me. Nobody would pay to advertise on the web, they mocked.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Wrangling an e-paper screen

    I got stuck developing the Hand Held Maneuvring Unit (my gemini browser device concept). The problem was that the e-ink screen I bought, a 3.7" one from Waveshare, wasn't behaving right. At least as far as I understood at the time. That demoralised me and I didn't pick the project back up for a long time - maybe a year? Last weekend I finally picked it back up and had another crack at it.

    [...]

    For those not familiar with e-paper/e-ink displays, think of an e-reader like a Kindle. Papery-looking screen that's comfortable to look at. It's a grid of cells that each have black and white coloured particles in them. When a voltage is applied one way the black particles come to the front, the other way the white particles do. When power is removed the screen stays looking the same! So when you're not changing the screen often they can be very low power.

    Those particles take time to be convinced from the bottom to the top or vice versa, and they can get stuck, leaving a "ghost" image. To combat that, a "full refresh" of the display does some rapid switching between fully black and fully white, before displaying the intended output. Of course that can be quite unpleasant to look at so you don't want to do that every time something changes. A "fast refresh" will just change the whole screen to the new output. And display controllers are smart enough that they have 2 buffers for screen content - one for what's currently displayed and one for the next frame. For a "partial" refresh the controller will change only the pixels that have changed between the two buffers.

    The display I bought is a Waveshare 3.7" e-paper display which interfaces over SPI. The controller chip built into the display is a Solomon SSD1677 (as far as I can tell - Waveshare don't say but their commands match). Waveshare sell a small dev board based on an ESP32 with the circuitry needed to drive the display. That's what I'm using for development of the HHMU.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Lagrange v1.20 mobile betas

      New mobile beta builds are available for iOS and Android.

• Programming

  • 🧰 Turning a Folder of Git Repos Into Project Launcher

    Since then, my workflow has evolved a bit. The script below is an updated version with a few quality-of-life improvements, mainly around usability and integration with my terminal and tmux workflow.