Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Animal friendship

    When I grew up we were told not to anthropomorphise animals and I thought it was the right thing to do. But it felt wrong. Much later I read a treatise by Schopenhauer on the foundations of morals and he argued that it all starts with compassion – and more specifically, I remember a point made being the empathy with suffering animals. That is much more in line with how I feel these days. I can watch the birds and some are shy and some are greedy and some are cautious and some are bossy and I think to myself that there is no denying that they have an inner life, a personality. They know when we stop and look at them. They know when they’ve been spotted and they don’t like it. So they know of us as agents. And all of that without going into the stories of animals catching human attention so that humans can save their babies and the like. I’m totally in camp “animals have a soul” so to say.

  • Squirrels

    This morning after breaking my fast and partaking in coffee consumption, I went to the kitchen sink to clean up. While washing the dishes, I looked out the window and observed the two fat brown squirrels that live in the big oak tree in my backyard chasing each other horizontally around the aging oak. Just doing laps running after each other around the tree, not falling off, like they were immune to gravity. Around and around and around they go! It looked like they were having so much fun! Not sure how many laps they did, but they were doing this for a few minutes until one of them climbed vertically further up the tree, out of sight, with their friend following along. I focused my attention back to my dishes. I wonder what squirrel tastes like.

• Technology and Free Software

  • MNT Pulls the Keyboard, Trackball From Its Pocket Reform to Grace Even the Tiniest of Desks

    Open hardware specialist MNT Research, the firm behind the Reform family of laptops and an upcoming ultra-compact desktop, has launched its latest device: a standalone version of the ortholinear keyboard and trackball originally designed for the Pocket Reform.

    "Equipped with a micro-optical trackball, the MNT Pocket Reform Standalone Keyboard makes for a comfy couch or desk setup that doesn't require a mouse," the company writes of its latest launch. "Small in size and light in weight, the Pocket Reform Standalone Keyboard is an ideal fit for cluttered desk spaces, browsing the internet (or watching movies) on the couch, coding, reading (or writing) papers, communicating with your peers."

  • Ssh apps

    I setup an ssh kiosk in open access like a webpage, the password is empty and there are no keys.

  • M PLUS 1 Code - Monospace Japanese (CJK) fontpack for Lagrange

    NOTE: the link is deliberately BROKEN, as I do not wish misbehaving bots to download this ~47MiB fontpack. Please, if you share this link, share it in a similarly broken fashion, or else link directly to _this_ page instead.

  • HAL

    Possibly this is a Hardware Abstraction Layer, or a computer in some work of fiction or the other (not the one with the Wookies). There are rumors the letters are an off by one of something else. A computer can brute force the possible "off by N" for a given acronym, so HAL has the variations

  • Re: Database Merge

    The reason for this all comes down to atomic locking. Being able to take over write control of the Database and fend off any other write attempts until you are done. This feature exists within SQLite, using both file locking and journaling. For situations like a Gemini CGI script where one may receive a random double hit or two in a day, the functionality works just fine. Most scripts won't notice that an `open` call takes a few more cycles to complete.

    The suggestions for handling race conditions, even/odd id's, only works when you either have atomic locking support or have a producer/consumer worker pool that can consolidate multiple independent databases. When creating a massively large database system this makes sense. But when I'm creating a gemlog, the choice for SQLite over Postgres or something heavier was on purpose. Handling the race condition by reducing double hits is overkill. I'm seeing between 200 and 800 views a day. At that rate even SQLite is overkill. I don't get two people loading the page or commenting at the same time.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • participating in a letdown crisis, rainy sort of day, and updated website (cybersec) -::-

      ah.

      an exasperated sigh seems to permeate my entire being.

      i am forever sailing from collapse to perceived moment, from now into henceforth. the present is never still. every instant seems to bloom into an impossible lattice of branching futures. each choice, each hesitation, each molecule dancing one way instead of another. perhaps even smaller. every crossing is material. every path is real. every possibility continues somewhere, all at once, forever.

      the world i inhabit now bears little resemblance to the one that existed only moments ago.