Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Back in Japan

    I got back a few days ago and jet lag has set in again .. and just as I was getting over it in the US. It is currently around 03:23.

    I walked 10,000+ steps a day and did a number on my feet, but I drank it all in and took a ton of photos. I have to clear off my cloud storage and develop lots of film.

  • Another New Year

    There are three beginnings of the year within a single year. The calendar one, set for the beginning of January, the one that predates it, when life awakens in the spring and the youngest of them all, the start of the school year. And so it just so happens that my life is still strongly tied to that last one, even though I haven’t had anything to do with school for a long time. Summer is still the time when I devote more days to rest than at any other time of the year, and above all, my life becomes exceptionally disorganized. And when August ends, I begin a new cycle that will last, with breaks, until June. New projects, often new resolutions, learning anew how to battle the accelerating pace of time, stress, and the gathering darkness, but also the immense power of a wave of nostalgia and the energy gained over the summer, channeled into new action.

    Today marks the anniversary of J.R.R. Tolkien’s death. Just three days ago, I returned to his prose not remembering about this fact. It will be a great adventure, just as it always has been. I’m certain of it. I’m taking my time, using a free moment every two or three days.

• Poetry

  • hunger

    the hunger for something 
    huge and different 
    and hugely different 
    bursts out in small portions 
    start new hobbies
    learn new skills 
    gather knowledge 
    make building blocks 
    for what's next
    

• Technology and Free Software

  • Lies, Damned Lies and...

    I have been extending my FEA (Finite Element Analysis) software [1]. One of the things I have been working on is a 3D FEA module). I have several specific uses for it but it's probably not interesting here.

    It is written in Tcl/Tk and is compatible with Tcl/Tk 8.0 to ensure smooth work on my SGI machines. There are some C libraries (mostly to speedup computations). Nothing special. I confess that I use AI to helping me with this (it's actually useful as I was newer good in debugging and in searching in libraries documentation).

    The basic package is a for 2D beam-only problems. Quite sufficient for most of civil engineering. The 3D package is for solution of problematic details and so on. The 2D thing works quite good and in acceptable speed even on a 100 MHz MIPS R4000 CPU (it is not exactly fast for tasks like stability and dynamics, of course).

  • I Don’t Have a Smartphone…

    "I don’t have a smartphone," is what I tell people and professionals nowadays. This allows me to cut the crap about companies insisting that I install their app or restaurants wishing that I scan a QR code to access their menu on a small screen.

    "I don’t have a smartphone" is, according to my experience, the easiest explanation, the shortest way to force people to get their shit together and take the required actions to allow me to live without being glued to a small screen dependent on a huge American megacorporation.

    When I buy something, from a small kitchen appliance to a car, I’m now forced to get formal confirmation by the seller that I will be able to use it without installing one, two or three different apps. I kept the count: in the last year alone, I had to argue against the installation of 18 smartphone apps. Just in my toilet, I’m supposed to have an app for the seat, an app for the flush and one for the ventilation.

    It is quite fascinating because if you assume using each app for only 3 minutes per day (which basically means opening, closing and does not include doing the upgrade every other day or debugging some problems), that’s nearly 1 hour of your day! 22 full days of your year (assuming 16 waking hours per day).

  • I don't like built-in batteries

    The other day I was giving a remote talk at work and the battery in my headset ran out about 30 minutes in. This was despite the device being fully charged before starting.

    The headset is quite old at this point, so I'm not blaming the battery. It's served me well.

    No, what I'm frustrated with is the fact that, as is often the case, the battery can't be easily replaced.

    Although it probably is possible to disassemble the headset, source new battery and solder it in (and I have done jobs like this in the past), I just feel that this shouldn't be necessary.