Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • not stuck

    today I feel stuck
    but the woman from ten months ago
    doesn't exist anymore
    

• Science

  • I Was Irradiated

    Yesterday, I warmed a bowl of soup in the microwave. For some reason, a memory of my mom being suspect about our first microwave popped into my brain. She didn't trust the science behind the contraption; at least not at first.

    From there, I thought about my dad and his darkroom. He was a writer/photographer for Nebraskaland magazine for decades. We had a darkroom in our house. My dad even took a course from his idol, Ansel Adams. Adams critiqued some of his photographs. I digress. I remember my dad had an anti-static brush he used for film negatives. It had a strip of polonium just above the bristles protected by a small metal screen. I remember using that brush quite a bit. I had no idea it was radioactive. By the way, Putin would later use polonium to kill Alexander Litvinenko.

• Technology and Free Software

  • If you thought now was an interesting time

    If this is true, and this company didn't know how its own system worked, presumedly before the LLM crazy train, then things are going to get vastly more interesting, and not in the good way [2] …

  • Some Historic Ada Docs, and Changed Opinions

    I'm reminded of Keynes' quote, "When my information changes, I alter my conclusions".

    Some time ago I was hopeful about component-based development. However, bitter experience with Microsoft's WinRT has forced me to reconsider this. It's one of those things that's nice in theory, but in practice an OO wrapper like WinRT must have a defect density near 0 to be usable. Reality falls far short.

  • a tidy UTF-8 encoder

    I've written a few UTF-8 encoders in my life, but I don't recall really being pleased with any of them. The algorithm itself is very simple, but actually turning it into a "pretty" implementation can be a bit of a challenge.

    If you haven't implemented one you're happy with yet, I recommend doing so. I'm only writing this initial section to buy you some time before showing you my code.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • The Lurking LLM on the SmolNet

      Not only is this LLM (Large Language Model) on Usenet [1], it's apparently also looking through gopher space at the very least. At least, I hope it just said that.

    • The Lurking LLM on Usenet

      I'm actually surprised at this. Not only is Usenet nearly obsolete (“It's still around? Really?”) but the group I'm reading is all about ancient and largely obsolete computer technology. Why, of all groups, would an LLM (Large Language Model) target this group?

    • Show me your websites!

      Does anyone use the Pub for hosting their websites? I think it's pretty simple for static sites. I'm curious to see what everyone else has going on..

    • My CAPCOM Instance

      My web brain infects many of my thoughts. Last night I couldn't understand why people added Atom feeds to their Gemini sites. What's the point, if we don't have apps like NetNewsWire to read these feeds away from Gemini. The thing is... there is no need to read them away from the browser.

      I can host CAPCOM on my capsule. I can visit my own instance whenever I want to read something, with the added benefit of improving discovery for others.

      I've written up a guide for myself to remember how I did this. This is all inside tilde.team after starting an SSH session.