Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • current crafts

    i'm not sure i'm going to finish it? i have all the keywords and i did a prototype card in procreate i didn't really like. i think if i do them at all it'll have to be by hand on paper, in their target size. the problem is i've never worked in that size with that thick a line (if i want to preserve a woodcut look, like the historical mass TdMs). the figures have to be small enough for there to be room for some background/scene setting, while also preserving some interesting detail and facial features/expressions etc. it's surprisingly hard to do. kind of not feeling it right now.

    but for whenever i do feel like it - i've already prepared all the templates with the titles in place. just need a pencil drawing per card, then i'll scan it all in and do the carving, that's the fun part. then some stenciled colors - easy.

  • Country Road Coffee Anshan

    Recently I visited China and spent a while in the north-eastern city of Anshan. Anshan is famous for Anshan Steel, once the largest industry in China (during the early period of industrialisation of the People's Republic of China). It also has some nice tourist attractions that we visited, such as a zoo with two lovely pandas, a giant Buddha carved from a single block of jade, and the Thousand Mountains national park.

    I found a lovely coffee shop near where we were staying, Ri Changxuming Cafe. Actually, this is just how my phone translated the name, I'm not sure how to actually write the name in English. They had the name "County Road Cafe" also printed, so we will go with that as their name.

  • Star Trek (—not actually about Star Trek)

    It was a small, church youth-group event. Barely that. A few young teens, myself barely out of pre-adolescence, getting together to watch a movie. Maybe it was a sports game, I dunno. It wasn’t fantasy or sci-fi, so it was boring and dull to me. Can I watch Star Trek: The Next Generation instead? Because I’m kind of a little shit, and have yet to develop any real self-awareness, or genuine politeness behind my dutifully-memorized manners. There’s a TV in just the next room, I can watch it there. Zachary declares that he’d rather watch that, too, and goes with me. I don’t know Zachary, he’s Jeremiah’s friend. I barely know Jeremiah, either. But it’s his house we’re at. I think.

    So we watch. Jean-Luc and Geordi and Data and Dianna. Star Trek isn’t boring. Star Trek is never boring.

  • I'm retired and it feels so good!

    Well, I try my best
    to be just like I am,
    but everybody wants you
    to be just like them!
    
    
    They sing,
    while they slave...
    
    
    and I just get bored!
    

• Programming

  • ODEs in GNU Octave

    In short, after learning a few basic interface details, you can use Octave to get a numerical solution for any system of non-linear ODEs. The interface can only work with first-order ODEs, so that any higher order ODE must first be broken down into a set of first-order ODEs. Thankfully, all higher-order ODEs can be converted into a set of first-order ODEs through variable substitution, and the process for doing this is not very difficult, though it makes the code and comments more cluttered and verbose. From Internet research, I see that MATLAB has a function odeToVectorField which is meant to do that conversion step for you, but as far as I can tell nothing like that has been implemented in Octave yet.