Gemini* and Gopher

• Politics and World Events

  • German states don't try to fight climate change; they want to exploit it

    As I was working on my private notes, MDR published a mere ticker update that can't be linked where it's stated that the state of Thuringia wants to expand its funding of orchards but not in terms of granting volunteers more money, instead they expanded their list of fruit trees eligible for funds to now include various nuts, apricots and peaches.

    If it wouldn't have witnessed the sheer endless incompetence and overtly economical interest of my own local administrative district office, which unsurprisingly is plagued by nepotism and their cronies, not once but more than FIVE times, three times being directly being at the receiving end of it, this would be the most obvious case of intentional greenwashing. Unfortunately, and thanks to various press outlets and Twitter/X preachers, this term is reserved to big industries and academics resort to "greenwasting", which actually implies good intentions, rather than, uh, economical profits. But let's address the orchard funds first.

• Technology and Free Software

  • I Also Got An Xteink X4

  • Using Verilator and other EDA tools

    `verilator` and `gtkwave` are open souce and `vivado` is free for small FPGAs. These tools are not well integrated together but they are good enough for small designs and free.

  • Announcement: Public Reticulum Gateway Node

    Reticulum^ is a software stack and collection of tools for building networks from a wide variety of hardware. Nodes can send data over the public Internet, any Ethernet or WiFi interface, packet radio, LoRa, serial lines, and even stdio. It's designed to send data reliably in extremely rough conditions--it can work with bandwidth as low as 5 bps--and security is built into the fabric of the protocol in a way that can't be disabled. Reticulum aims to make it easy to build independent networks using cheap self-owned and operated hardware.

    A few months ago I bought a pack of LoRa ESP32 boards and set up Reticulum on a Raspberry Pi 1B running DietPi. Despite the age and slowness of the hardware, Reticulum works perfectly well, and I use it as a Reticulum gateway node for my regular computers.

  • Doing what we can where we can

    I think it's kinda silly when people are like, "but you're still using LLM-tainted $technology, therefore you're a hypocrite!" when we're trying to make changes in our activity flows to reduce our personal LLM footprints.

    It's like when someone points out that a leftist vegan is using proprietary software or driving a gas-powered vehicle.

  • Smol computers

    So I have had the idea for a while, to build a small handheld computer based on a micocontroller board (or mcu), run ulisp on it and write me a set of programs I want to use on it.

    But I am bad with prototyping PCBs and don't have a workshop with the tools necessary to make the mechanical parts nice I opted to spend the money and order a PicoCalc. It's pretty much exactly what I had in mind in terms of architecture. And if I'm honest with myself, if I'd attempt to build my own it'd be a lot more frustrating, probably more expensive and likely to end up on my shelf unfinished, collecting dust. I'm not an electronics girl.

  • The unexpected emotional rollercoaster of deleting old email

    I had taken immense pride in storing and categorizing years of email, both personal and professional. I had gone down the rabbit hole of creating filter rules, thoroughly testing them, creating folders and sub-folders, etc. Usually, I'd have a generic inbox from where I would sift and put away, even cron/system emails that I didn't need to keep; it is very helpful though to be able to refer to a system event based upon timestamps of email, etc. Given the rise of cloud email, at least in a professional setting, it always nagged me that those emails are available, despite having been read by who knows, or worse, given to some LLM as training data.