Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • softening

    I look at you 
    with softening eyes
    the corners of my mouth
    lifting into a smile
    that doesn't look like one 
    if you're not paying attention 
    I look at you 
    with softening eyes
    and you don't even know
    

  • Nullish gets a library card

    I recently visited my local public library and got a library card.

    I walked in and sheepishly explained to the nice librarian that yes, I used to have a card (issued in 1994, when I was but a wee lad) but alas: it's gone missing. No, I don't remember my card number either. And no, I really haven't used the library system in a while. She seemed slightly amused, which I appreciated, because I thought the whole thing was a bit funny too.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Re: Dead Ends

    I too am someone who tends to have a lot of things I want to do and behind me lies a wasteland of discontinued projects. For a while this bothered me. But something interesting in my work life showed me how to change that mindset.

    I've been a hardware and software developer for almost 30 years. I've worked on projects from embedded systems and industrial control to advertising, consumer electronics and the medical field. I've released a ton of different projects in over a dozen different programming languages. There has been a lot of things out in the world that I designed and wrote, and yet today the only thing you could find in the wild is what I'm working on at my current job. One company couldn't replace me with a single engineer so they found it cheaper to kill the product line. One company went under during the pandemic and all our clients had eventually moved on to new vendors. Product lines upgraded and moved to entirely new systems since I left and none of my code would be relevant anymore. Add the fact that I'm a Team Lead and my job has more meetings than head down coding time, I'd be willing to bet that the total amount of code in the wild for things I got paid for is far less than the small open source projects I write for myself that almost no one else uses.

  • Looking to Increase the Strength of Your 3D-Printed PLA Parts? Give Them a Shake, Researchers Say

    Vibration, normally an unwanted force that serves to ruin the finish of your 3D prints, could be harnessed to deliver stronger PLA prints on fused filament fabrication (FFF, also known as FDM) 3D printers — at least, according to researchers from the University of Ha’il, the Higher Institute for Technical Sciences Tarhuna, the University of Sfax, and the University of Sousse.

    "Material Extrusion (MEX), particularly Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF), commercially known as Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), has become one of the most widely used additive manufacturing technologies for producing polymer components," the team explains by way of background to the work. "However, the mechanical performance of printed parts remains limited by weak interlayer bonding and internal porosity. This study investigates the effectiveness of controlled low-frequency bed vibration in improving the physical and mechanical properties of PLA components manufactured by vibration-assisted FFF/FDM."

  • DOS on USB key bit me

    I'll probably write on more than DOS topics soon. I backpacked 50 km with my 75-year-old dad, my third- party's candidate for US Senate made a major speech in the same forum as his Republican and Democrat opponents, and I celebrated 19 years sober. But the scrapers finding their way through https gateways to gopherspace are giving me pause. So DOS it is.

    My kindergarten-age kid got really into keeping a daily diary, using SvarDOS's native editor. She laboriously wrote a line each day, under the date, like this:

    Saturday, July 26, 2026

    I had a good time at memaw and popas. [ie. papa's; her grandpa's]

    Well, sadly, I didn't back up her diary or my to-do list. Evy unplugged the netbook it was running on, which has no battery, and most of the filesystem, including the docs folder where those textfiles lived, became corrupted and unreadable.

  • Games

    • Why I use 2d6 for my role-playing games these days

      Recently I was complaining on fedi about old texts I had written and offered 2d6 Math as an example. @randomwizard@vivaldi.net had a different question, however: Given that the PDF talked a lot about converting the rolls to percentages (and these being easier to reason about for humans), why was I still arguing for using a 2d6 system instead of a d100 system?