Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • For Alicia, Original Piano Composition

    A piece I wrote for my then-new girlfriend, now wife, Alicia, in 2019. Played on a Yamaha NU-1 “hybrid” piano. Something toward a Romantic/Impressionist piece.

    I believe that, when I composed it, I had written at least most of it out as sheet music, by hand. They’re long lost, now. I’ve lost the piece in my fingers, too—only this recording remains. I’ll have to transcribe from the recording so I can relearn it again.

• Politics and World Events

  • 1712-02-30

    The short version is that from 1700 to 1712 Sweden used a unique calendar somewhere in between the Julian and the Gregorian calendars, trying to smootly shift from one to the other, but then gave up and reverted to the Julian calendar, which caused the two leap-days in February 1712.

    Searching the Swedish Royal Library's newspaper archive, I was hoping to find some contemporary mentions of this. Surely something unusual like having the 30th of February would make the news? Sadly I did not find anything in the newspapers I skimmed. There are not that many scanned newspapers from 1712, probably because not many were printed.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Say no to AI

    Yesterday I got a text message from my saying that she had listened to a podcast episode I had recommended and now she was thinking whether I was trying to avoid AI completely and how hard that must be. I replied saying that no, it wasn't too hard. Just read and write and search like you did in 2022. And I do like some parts of artificial intelligence: the identification of plants and birds! What I don't want is AI in my search, in my documents, in my chats, in my calls. Which is why I'm happy to have found How to disable or avoid intrusive AI by Jessamyn West. So many ways to opt out!

  • The cloud giants

    I'm listening to the Tech Won't Save Us podcast episode How Cloud Giants Wield Their Power Against Us All with Dr. Cecilia Rikap where she and Paris Marx talk about "control without ownership" and how the cloud giants are essentially in charge of everything. All the AI companies being financed by them, all the consultancies helping companies and governments to move to the cloud, all the startups taking advantage of the cloud deal, the AI tokens, all the academics on the payroll of cloud giants, all the open source software developers laying the ground work for tools that end up on the cloud … to me it feels as if cloud computing enables most of the economy to work just like roads used to enable most of the economy to work in the previous century.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • [Repeat] Failure to Implement Outgoing Email Server from Scratch

      It has been a goal of mine for a while now to implement my own outgoing email server. I thought "How difficult could this be? I can already set DNS records for vigrey.com, so this should be possible, if not decently easy." Oh, how wrong I was...

    • limiting my internet use - brainstorm

      what to do when i most rely on it, like meals or evenings when i'm tired? two different use cases:

      eating: i feel it's akin to body-doubling? it's like i need something progressing to help me progress, even if it's eating, even if it's food i like. i could read, but it could get messy. i could play backgammon but that's not really in the spirit of things. if it's breakfast that could be "check mastodon" time, but what about other meals and snacks? is that what the 1 good video is for? meal company? ideally i'd just be ok with "being present"... i can see how it could be good practice, but i'm hesitant to just go all-in, for all the meals to now be an exercise in mindfulness or something. feels too much.

      tired, want to relax: hmm some kind of craft prep-work that doesn't require decision making? or like, spinning? with music or podcast? reading feels like too much brain-engagement. this is usually an evening thing, so i can always try to do a final pass on some chores, they don't require much thinking. if it wasn't the summer from hell i'd enjoy just sitting out on the balcony. this problem will remain in wet or super cold weather...

• Programming

  • git commits without messages

    90% of the time when I am making git commits, it is to save progress or make a small change that explains itself.

    I don't know why I was trained to write git commits with every commit before.

    Anyways, for the past 3 years I just type `gc` to commit and occasionally if I want to leave a commit message, I type `gcm`.

    Not sure what inspired me to write this today, but hope it helps someone.