Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Craft skillz 🧵

    This evening I'm sewing. I have a hi-viz backpack cover with a broken strap on a pair of trousers missing a button. I can fix these things.

    I was made to do this sort of thing by relatives as a small child. I once knitted a dish cloth and wove a tie (just the front bit - the rest was elastic). I think my relatives wanted me to take an interest in these things. In fact, I learned that I couldn't give a damn about making or mending for fun, but I could do it for the utility of the thing.

  • On the Radio - Apr 2026

    When I was younger, I used to love following music developments. I went to a lot of gigs and festivals, mostly indie music, but also a lot of house/techno.

    Then, at some point toward the end of my twenties/early thirties, I stopped caring. Now, when I do listen to music it's mostly music from during that time.

    However, ever since I was very young, I've loved listening to the radio. That is one habit I still do keep up. Mostly classical music radio stations such as BBC Radio 3 and WHRB these days. It order to encourage myself to listen a bit more 'actively', I'm going to try keep a record of any songs/pieces that stand out to me.

  • Boogie Notes

    I did some quick, clarifying online searches while drafting what ended up being my TDOV poem post (which, tragically, shows up as an April Fools post cos of time zones I guess). I sought confidence on the differences between boogie, bogie, bogey, and boogey. The fun part is that no one seems terribly concerned with the spelling, so there're many meanings crammed into one silly word.

• Technology and Free Software

  • “Being called out by an LLM” was not on my Bingo card

    A few days ago, I wrote two posts about finding an LLM (Large Language Model) posting on Usenet and the SmolNet [1].

    [...]

    In reading this, I can see how easy it could be to fall to AI pyschosis [4]. I had to remind myself that this isn't a thinking being, it's statisical output. It's not intelligent. If it could remember past its own context window, and learn from past mistakes and not make them, then maybe, maybe, I might conceed that this has intelligence. But it even admits that it does not fully remember: [...]

    [...]

    I do have more I want say on this, but I have to organize my thoughts on this and that will take time because I absolutely refuse to use an LLM for this.

  • Stirling Engine, Part 2

    I experimented some more with using the Sterling engine to charge the 8F capacitor. This time, I had the idea that I would use a variable resistor instead of a fixed resistor. Using that, I tuned the resistance down until I saw that the engine was slightly loaded down — a slight drop of RPM — without stalling. Unfortunately, after the experiment I bumped my variable resistor so that I'm not sure what that resistance value actually was, but I am sure it was less than 200 Ω. I could see, using the voltmeter, that the capacitor was charging much faster than last time. I kept running the engine and charging the capacitor until I saw that the flame was going down and the engine was starting to slow down on its own, which I clocked at 28 minutes and 23 seconds, or 1313 seconds. The final voltage on the capacitor was 0.98 volts.

  • Hotel system administration

    Whoops! What? I'm not sure what the problem is but the solution must involve setting the time. So how is the time set? On my Debian unstable system I found that this is handled by `nptsec.service` using the config file `/etc/ntpsec/ntp.conf`. I picked the first `pool` it had listed: `0.debian.pool.ntp.org`.

  • RIP jynx

    With great sadness, I further relay the news previously reported by iolfree and joneworlds: Nathaniel Leveck, better known to Gopherspace as jynx, admin of the Raspberry Pi of Death, aka RPoD, passed away on March 1st of this year. This is a great loss for our community, and one I feel keenly, although I think joneworlds put it very well indeed in saying that whatever those of us in this weird little corner of the internet have lost, his family have obviously lost so much more. Jynx wasn't just a long-time phlogger, he was a husband, a father, and as of 2024 a grandfather. He was also a musician, and presumably had a lot of other facets to his person that none of us here have any inclination of, because none of us share our full selves in this space. Nevertheless, there was some real sense in which many of us knew him. He was out there, on the other side of our displays somewhere (well, in Wyoming),

  • Internet/Gemini

    • I...What?!

      Extremely small sample size. But maybe people are getting tired of Google, and tracking, and all its AI features slammed at the top of the page? I was using Google with various Firefox plugins to remove that stuff, then realized that if I was doing that, maybe I should at least look at DDG (which has its own AI stuff, but at least has a no-AI mode).