Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Antiperfectionism

    I'll explain by example. A few months ago, I started tracking my monthly spending so I could understand better where my money was going. I created a budget for myself using this lovely piece of software called GnuCash¹. Then I created dozens of accounts, put in my fixed assets and liabilities, entered each receipt as a set of transactions, and averaged my spending over time in order to create a realistic budget.

    I followed my budget until I reached my financial goal. It sounds like everything went as intended, but recently something occurred to me: I didn't need to use double-entry bookkeeping and track everything down to the last centavo to reach my financial goal. It was like using a bazooka to kill a fly. I could've met my goal by just doing a few rough calculations and changing some habits.

    Trust me, there are many more examples I could give of me optimizing things that don't need to be optimized, but I think I got my point across.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Messages in Bottles

      Right now, I'm up too late, having a drink, listening to Tangerine Dream, and diving fairly deep into some internet forums I like to frequent. It's nice, and it's a very specific vibe I have been cultivating for decades.

      You see, I grew up in the middle of nowhere and sort of desperately pined for connection. For some reason I got the impression that things like radio, TV and the internet, especially after midnight, were windows into deep unknown and unknowable worlds which fascinated me.

      In the mid 2000s I discovered a local public access show which many locals of nerdier proclivities remember fondly which aired long after midnight and consisted of music videos and other sundry things I really enjoyed. I was introduced to some of my favorite music through this.

      This is indeed how I discovered the Pub in particular and Gemini in general. The Great Pause of 2020 afforded me many opportunities to spend many nights exploring the Internet. I found many interesting places (including the Internet's best-kept secret... if you know, you know) and met many interesting people during this time.

    • Audio Streaming in Lagrange for Android

      I've been working on improving Lagrange's Android port this week. It has been a bit of a learning experience — of the major computing platforms, Android is probably the least familiar to me.

      Prior to the Beta 46 build, audio support has been somewhat broken on Android. The platform-independent Vorbis decoder that plays audio through SDL has been limping along while other codecs haven't worked that well, if at all.