Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • simple day

    The kid got into the cookie jar. The problem is, these were pot cookies.

    We drove right into some family drama. The mom was feeling bad about the kid who was now high, the dad was just being weird. The kid was crying. I ask if they had activated charcoal pills. They didn't. I offered to buy some as I would like to have some anyway for the festival.

  • The era of nostalgia

    Last night at a music festival, during the set for Matchbox 20 Rob Thomas made a comment about how he started the band not thinking that one day their music would become nostalgia for a generation. One of the previous band's lead singers had made a comment about how MB20's album was the soundtrack for his parent's divorced. This is what triggered Rob's comment.

    It got me thinking about how no one really thinks about the things they make as being this long running part of the history of humanity. No one sets out creating music or making a movie or writing a book with the intent that it will span decades or centuries and become iconic. And yet so many actions turn out to be much more than their initial creation. In the past two years I've seen a bunch of bands from when I was a kid. Their songs were the background music of so many of our lives. But I never really thought about how they just wanted to make music. It just happened to be the right music at the right time.

• Games

  • An Introduction to Shogi, a Japanese Chess variant

    I'm not any particular good, but I enjoy playing Shogi (将棋/しょうぎ/shougi) when I have the opportunity to do so. Which isn't often, as few people know about it, and for many that might otherwise be interested, distinguishing the (traditional) pieces by the kanji characters is too daunting.

    This post isn't intended to be a comprehensive guide to Shogi, or even how to play it. It is intended as an attempt to entice Chess enthusiasts to contemplate looking into Shogi, while also providing some additional information about it. It's probably way too many words for that purpose, but here we are. I've spent too much time on it already to be willing to pare it down for focus. 🙃

• Technology and Free Software

  • Testing from my phone

    Just testing out my new gemlog system. Hopefully this post works.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Syncing Sucks, New Gemlog System

      There was a discussion over on BBS about what everyone uses for gemlogs. Not wanting to be the odd one out I decided to change from flat files over to a database solution. With a bit of caffeine and an hour the other night out popped a python script that could read from SQLite and recreate my old gemlog. Migrating my files took a little bit of vim macros but it was fairly easy to get it all up and running.

      Then I decided to tackle comments. Again the concept was simple, but it had one fatal flaw. SQLite doesn't update mtime on files in a normal way, and Syncthing doesn't like that. If I continued to only edit the file on one system all things were good. But when the VPS would update the db file and the sync needed to go the other way all of the sudden everything was out of order. Once that sync was broken I couldn't update any part of my site, blog or otherwise.

    • Testing out a new Gemlog system

      Nothing much of interest as of yet. I am testing out a new CGI gemlog generator I'm working on. It uses SQLite for storage and a few shell scripts for creating posts. I hope that this will be easier to use and still be mobile friendly via termux.

• Programming

  • Re: i was corrected on the internet about my inefficient use of awk today

    My departure from Windows happened way back when Win95 was released. My parents bough a new computer and I got the old one. Some friends and I went to a computer convention and came home with a box of 3.5 inch floppies with Slackware's base install on them and I never looked back. Going from Windows 3.11 to a terminal definitely set my trajectory as a computer nerd.

    awk was one of my first enlightenments with the whole Unix philosophy. The idea of a language who's purpose was to process individual lines of input and perform a complex layer of functions on top of that data was eye opening. I had been doing Pascal and C programming in middle school so I had the basic of programming down but the idea of a specific purpose language was cool.