Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Guess I'm a Fuzz Guy Now

    Many years ago (late 00s?), I bought a Big Muff Pi, the iconic, big box version. It was big, it was unruly, it was good enough for the music I thought I was going to write. I ended up writing a lot but recording none of it, not able to find a band (and if I'm being honest, not having the courage to put myself out there and really look for one). I put it away. I played a lot of classical guitar. It was a solid decade and a half before I felt the itch again.

    The last year I've been playing around with using my guitar for making drone and ambient music, but I've also been getting into drives and fuzz. Call it a mid-life crisis. Drives-wise, I think I've found what I'm looking for (a combination of the EHX Soul Food and Boss BD-2), but for fuzz, the field feels more wide open. My Muff is loose and aggressive; I've got a TC Rusty Fuzz, which feels a lot tighter (it's apparently based off the Boss FZ-3). And a month ago, I got the Earthquaker Devices Hoof, a pedal based loosely off Dan Auerbach's Green Russian Muff. It's a silicon-germanium fuzz, with four knobs: volume, tone, shift, and fuzz.

  • 🖼️ xkcd — Day Counter #3228

• Technology and Free Software

  • 🖥️ Reusing Old Computers with Arch Linux and DWM

    Modern operating systems assume fast CPUs, lots of RAM, and constant background activity. Older machines can't keep up - but that doesn't mean they're useless.

    With the right tools, they become fast and usable again: as servers or as a personal computers. Today we're not focusing on home labs or servers. We're gonna make an usable personal computer even if it's considered obsolete by modern standards.

  • Leicmin

    I haven't posted in three months. That isn't to nothing has been happening, only that I was so focused on the “now” that I didn't really have a chance for any retrospection (which is effectively what a lot of my posts are) or idle thoughts (which cover most of the rest). Part of that is how my thoughts work, I withdraw from everything when I'm struggling with problems.

    There is always the usual family crises (we lost a family member last week and there is a good chance we're going to lose a close one “soon”), work pressure, and the difficulties of being a parent.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • The Way You Make Me Feel

      I'm quite fond of the global architecture of the Geminispace. We all have our little personal spaces. Some of us host their own vessel like I do, others rent a room in someone else's mothership. But at the end of the day, we all add stuff in our little digital garden. While this could sound like we are solitary, writing blog entries in our little corner of the internet, entirely unaware of what is happening in our neighbors' space, the Geminispace is actually so far from this.

    • Bubble v10.0

      It is now mandatory to confirm that an email address works before Bubble will sent notifications to it. Previously, one could have entered any address, with typos or intentional malice, and the system would happily spam the address indefinitely.

      The confirmation process is very simple: when you set the notification email address, Bubble sends a confirmation message with a link back to the Bubble instance. Opening the link flags the address as valid. You can manually request resending the confirmation email in case you suspect there was a problem.

      Existing email addresses have been automatically flagged as confirmed, but I will be manually unconfirming ones that are bouncing or otherwise not working.

• Programming

  • That syntax highlighter I wrote

    Now, one of the biggest features I added is the code highlighter. Since I use lightweight building-blocks to develop bonobo further, the Markdown parser I use doesn't provide any code formatter. Fortunately, it allows me to write one myself and inject using a convenient callback struct. And even more fortunately, I often work with compilers. So I knew exactly what to do and how to do it.

    Writing a basic syntax highlighter is relatively simple: it is just a lexical analyzer (or a tokenizer, if you prefer) that reads a token (a number, a keyword, an identifier, a symbol, whatever) and re-emits the same token, but colorized. In my case, it emits an HTML span tag with the right color and the token itself inside it.