Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • in verse

    my friend says I need a poetic man
    and you speak to me in verse
    

  • 11 June 2026

    And sick again... it all started a bit over a week ago with a just slightly rough throat, but nothing that bothered me that much. In the night the sudden urge to run to the toilet and practice a bit in competitive diarrhea woke me up and i kept practicing until i collapsed back into the bed in the really early morning hours. During the day i was okay-ish, but in the afternoon a sudden high fever and general feeling of "oh please let me die!" forced me first on the couch, later into the bed. The following night was... not nice, but got better after remembering that we had a stash of 800mg Ibuprofen still sitting in the medicine cabinet. The next day the fever was gone but my throat felt like if somebody first used an iron brush on it following by sweeping it out with Draino. Over the following days things got better, i attended work as normal (having a single office in a remote corner of the building has its benefits) but every evening i just wanted to hit the couch. This Monday, whatever unworldly abomination this bug is, returned... this time with head splitting headaches which finally let me throw the towel and forced me to stay home. The headaches stayed from Monday to late Wendsday and finally left today (Thursday)... oh boy, that was not a nice experience at all!

  • irezume

    When I learned design, I would watch design movies, read design book, talk design, study architecture, buy some design tools. I also did an online training, somewhat similar to what I am doing now.

    Now it's tattoo. So I bought a tattoo magazine, some books, and I watch tattoo movies! Yesterday I watched Irezumi, which simply means tattoo, a 1966 Japanese drama set in the Edo period, by Yasuzo Masumura.

  • trees on the lines

    A danger tree on the power lines. The power will be cut from 9 am to 1 pm. That's a good chunk of the day without power.

    Tai Chi at 10am, I have to pick up some cleaning product before that. I'll be cleaning the house one more time.

  • new arcana

    i got inspired by something camelia elias and friends did once. they paired different triumphs (the entirety of them, twice) to arrive at new cards (different people, concepts, titles), and made a majors only deck based on that. i don't know if i want to actually make a deck like that, but i like the intellectual exercise, i'd like to try it out.

    at first i thought i want to do the whole exercise twice - once in a very structured way (pairing cards intentionally, based on their sequence), and once completely randomized. but even just going through the first set is proving difficult. even if i'm not going to make the cards, they have to be... make-able. the concept/person needs to be able to be illustrated/imagined. devil + wheel cannot equal "samsara", at least not for me because i have no idea how i'd illustrate that.

  • dance

    hand on waist, a tight embrace,
    split up now, turn face to face,
    then three steps, contact again
    waiting for your gaze again.
    

• Technology and Free Software

  • The TOS episode "The Ultimate..."

    The TOS episode "The Ultimate Computer" aired 58 years ago. The Enterprise is chosen to test a computer which automates ship operations and Kirk finds himself being replaced.

  • Re: The TOS episode "The Ultimate..."

    Funny when it happens to someone else (but not really): check.

  • Seeed Studio Shines a Spotlight on the XIAO Family, Launches New Community Project Hub

    Seeed Studio has announced the launch of a new platform for those building projects around its XIAO family of ultra-compact microcontroller development boards: the XIAO Project Hub.

    "Since the first XIAO board landed on desks around the world, the community has done what it does best — build," says Seed's Kezang Loday in support of the new platform. "Tiny drones, cyberpunk pocket watches, handheld lightning sensing device, wearable AI assistants, wireless keyboards, edge-vision cameras… the range of what people create with a thumb-sized board never stops surprising us. [Now] we're excited to launch the XIAO Project Hub — a single, open home for the best XIAO projects from across the community, all in one searchable place."

  • AI is Coming for Your Serifs!

    I was just reading an article in Wired about how some AI companies trying to seem less worrisome and more human/personable by adopting serif fonts. To some extent sans serif fonts can be associated with a less than proffesional impression or something. Apparenly Marco Rubio has the State Department change their default font from Calibri to Times New Roman. "DEI" from the Biden era. I disagree on that last part; if anything it was just laziness and MS setting Calibri as the default and I'd been hearing people's complaints about Calibri more than a decade ago.

  • The "Steady Hand" Programmer Blows EEPROMs for Your Retro Computing Projects — By Hand

    Pseudonymous classic computing enthusiast "interrupt_tv," hereafter simply "TV," has built a device designed to bootstrap the ROM chips for homebrew single-board computer designs — by letting you enter the data into physical programmable read-only memory (PROM) chips by hand.

    "Steady Hand is a digital circuit for programming EEPROMs [Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory chips] by hand," TV explains. It's inspired by [a] video by Ben Eater, where he creates a circuit for programming an EEPROM using DIP switches and jumper wires. Steady Hand is much more ergonomic than his design, though it is somewhat more complex. While Ben Eater provides the 'how' inspiration, the 'why' inspiration comes from Jeremiah Orians' stage0 project, and the general concept of bootstrapping: creating a computer software environment from nothing. When building a homebrew computer, one would typically use a significantly more complex modern computer to write the homebrew computer's software to an EEPROM. I created Steady Hand as a first step towards resolving this problem."