Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Family Stuff

    TRIGGER WARNING: disturbingly violent threats (very tersely described), childhood trauma (largely undescribed). Skip to the “Family joys” section if you are at risk to such triggers.

    Had a difficult conversation with my adult daughter, the middle of my three children, about trauma stemming from my parenting of her. Rough things to hear.

    There were things she had to share that I cannot accept—that are decidedly not part of my reality. But too much of it rings unfortunately true. Much of it due to misconceptions, misunderstanding, and ignorance on my part. Ignorance of her autism, ignorance of the trauma that corporal punishment breeds (spankings, though they stopped when she was about 5 or 6). Especially, ignorance of what was going on in her head during her youth, including some misperceptions, distortions, and confusions between how I viewed patterns of behaviors and misbehaviors on her part, versus how I viewed her, as a person. There was apparently a deep-seated conviction, from around middle school, that I disapproved/judged her as a deeply-flawed person, and not merely disapproving of a season of poor choice-making.

  • Reading outside

    Yesterday night was a nice, warm mid-August evening. Where I live dark usually equals cold, but at this time of the year we are moving away from the white summer nights while the last warmth of the summer still lingers on. The rest of the Europe has been scorching under a heatwave but here this summer has been - or at least felt - quite cool since July.

    I was sitting on our backyard patio, reading a book and enjoying the peaceful evening after a great day of activities (book shop, art exhibition I understood absolutely nothing but appreciated the look of the pieces, dinner with friends and their doggos). I kept reading as long as I could, expecting the cooling evening to drive me inside with the sunset, as it had done pretty much every night. Well, last night it did not, and I stayed outside until it got dark. I could have retreated inside to keep reading my book but instead I wanted to stay outside, enjoying the warm-ish and dark evening so rare in these parts.

  • Why "kunulo"?

    "Kunulo" is an Esperanto word. It means "companion" or "partner". It just seemed appropriate. I wonder how many Esperantistoj there are in Geminispace?

  • CHEAPER SHOPPING

    I've been noting my six-month weekly grocery shopping spend averages since 2021 and posted about the observed inflationary trend in 2022-08-06.2Inflation.txt, with updates following, most recently at the end of 2026-03-29.2Week_thoughts.txt. Over that time I've been trying to reduce my expenditure by buying larger bulk packs (to the limited extent that it's possible) and generally trying to economise. Not because I litterally can't find the money to pay more, but every saving is more money in the bank or invested in shares, earning on its own and there to fall back on if my income does drop too far, or ideally so one day I can retire and live off it entirely. It's an obvious approach to me, so much so that I forget it seems to be an unpopular one in the general population. But maybe something about the routine of working for a pay cheque numbs people to the meaning of the money they receive, and they just presume it will be provided to them forever? I guess that is how the system is contructed, but I can't see myself ever placing that much faith in it even if I were to work for someone in a regular job.

    Anyway, to tick one more thing off my weekend to-do list, today I calculated my average grocery shopping spend for the six months to June this year and got a surprise: $36.97/week (AUD). A decrease! It was $39.04/week in the six months to December 2025. Since then there's been the whole Iran War oil chaos, so, though I haven't been watching individual prices that closely, I've assumed some price increases would be passed on from increased transport costs. Apparantly not, or some other factor is masking it. Since the local supermarket stopped delivering paper catalogues I did write a script to query the undocumented API that the Australian supermarket chains use to generate their online catalogue (yes, except for ALDI, they all use them same company, SaleFinder, to do this for them) and show just products I'm interested in*. Maybe that has helped me find more specials that I've been missing before?

• Technology and Free Software

  • limiting internet use - method assessment

    i thought maybe to start i could have one day a week of no tracking, just do whatever? an easy mode? or would that be too distracting, actually - un-doing the hard work of the other 6 days? i kind of tried it on wednesday (wednesdays often see me tucked away into the bedroom while partner's in work meetings) but it felt idk, boring. unsatisfying. so maybe that's not the way...

  • config.sys - is it the expanded memory manager?

    I'm writing this on my daughter's computer system. Some tinkerers from Ukraine, and Solderpunk, emailed to encourage me to continue documenting the sorrows and joys of my DOS-from-USB-flash exploration.

    In non-computer life, my daughter babysat a 3-year- old family friend for four days of daycare closures. On the fourth day, amid torrential rain, we all went to a flood-prone part of the wilderness, talked about floodwater dangers as we looked at the raging brown torrent. Then I tied a guideline, ford- ed the kids across, and we walked a couple miles in the deep, deep woods.

    On the drive home, daughter announced they started a union. After deliberation, their demands to management: No cutting trees and Elsa may not freeze hearts.

    Now, back to my occasional quest to make a live-USB distro for kids that's as good as Paul Blair's FUZOMA from Liam Proven's SvarDOS-based usb-dos.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • limiting internet use - feelings

      how does it feel, doing less time-wasting on the computer? obviously the internet-time-wasting behaviors stem from boredom, but they also kind of produce more boredom? it's rare to read/see something that gets me to stop scrolling/watching and go do a thing. being off the Big Internet for most of the day does not in any way eliminate boredom, obviously, but it kind of lets it breathe. there's room enough to feel out what i /might/ be in the mood for, or just to try stuff. or use my tried and tested method of "i feel like crap anyway, might as well make use of the bleh and go do the things i don't like doing that must be done".

• Programming

  • Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, E-books

    Writing the recent post about Literate Programming, and the bit at the end about its creator, Donald E. Knuth, made me nostalgic to read The Art of Computer Programming, again. Originally conceived as a single book with 12 chapters, it is now an only-partially-complete set of 7 volumes, not quite 3½ of which have been completed/published, each one containing only two (enormous) chapters, each.

    As mentioned, in order to create this work, he had to create the system with which it was typeset, the font format for that typesetting engine, and the fonts themselves. While creating the ponderous work itself, he also could not satisfy himself with existing programming languages, so he created a new one, specifically for writing the concrete code examples within the book in (a machine language, absent a machine—“MIX”). And then later rewrote/modernized it (“MMIX”).