Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Pain

    Around the middle of December 2024, as i was about to head down a flight of stairs, i slipped, and fell forward. i managed to grab the handrail to stop myself falling more than a couple of steps; i ended up grazing my leg to the point of bleeding, but didn't think anything more of it.

    A week or two later, i developed a permanent headache.

    Around the middle of January 2025, i was diagnosed as having had an cervical arterial dissection[a].

    A few weeks after that, around the start of February, i developed COVID for the first time.

    In May 2025, i developed significant lower back pain, which gradually expanded up my spine.

  • Pets or space exploration: which represent the more egregious waste of resources?

    Not everybody is thrilled, however. After all, the extraordinary cost of space exploration rankles, in a world where many lack for food, healthcare, and education. Rockets are, some reasonably suggest, wasteful and decadent.

    I don't know whether space exploration will turn out in the end to be good value for money, or not. But I know what definitely _isn't_ good value:

    Keeping pets.

    I've never understood pets. I've got nothing against wildlife in general, and I understand that some people need working animals. Seeing-eye dogs for blind people are a marvellous innovation, and I can understand why you'd rather have cats in your granary than rats. But I've never felt the inclination to share my living space with non-humans.

    I'm in a minority, though, at least in the UK. Almost every household has at least one pet animal, and many have more. My local supermarket stocks almost as much stuff for dogs as it does for people; it certainly stocks more pet food than human baby food.

• Technology and Free Software

  • The CodingFont Game

    I found a nice little website, where one can choose between 28 coding typefaces in a knockout tournament. While single-elimination systems have their drawbacks, it’s still quite entertaining to find the typeface you like most from all the choices. The names of the knocked-out typefaces will be revealed at the end.

    I liked IBM Plex Mono the best of all the typefaces at 20px size. Maybe I should try it again with 16px.

  • Command History of My Life

    Some people keep journals. I remember things like a terminal history. Not everything. Just the commands that mattered.

  • v1.0.0 - Breaking Changes (MfGames Writing Setup Flake)

    As the chained updates go through, we've managed to update this project to use the new options-based format of mfgames-project-setup-flake[1].

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Discord Issues

      Recently my wife and I, on her insistence, switched to using Discord for messages. I'm not thrilled about it, but we switched to it from Facebook Messenger, and the change gives me one more reason to eventually close my Facebook account entirely.

      Almost immediately, I began having problems with the Discord app. It would silently die in the background, and when it did, I would no longer receive audio or haptic notifications when I received a message. A notification would appear in the pull-down panel, but no bubble would pop up; I had to check it proactively in order to see that I had a message. This led to my wife sometimes waiting several hours before I got back to her.