Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Book review: Momo

    As per ushe my reviews can get pretty spoileriffic because they are meant for writers who like to think about books they have already read rather than for readers who are deciding what book to read. But if you’re wondering whether or not to read Momo, do it, it’s great.

    It feels weird that I never read Michael Ende’s Momo until now since it feels like I’ve lived my life as if it had made a deep impressions on me early on. And lately it feels that way more than ever.

  • Ultra Introverts

    I came across an interesting article about ultra-introverts, those who spend most of their lives away from others, typically by working or just being awake at night [0].

    I've long identified as an introvert, and I've often thought I could go for very long periods without human contact. I am quite content to be alone with my thoughts, or books, or whatever other solitary pursuits I can find.

  • bipolar

    No more mice.

    House is getting back to a better rhythm. I still have a couple guests living here. As much as I love them, I feel I am still unpacking from my summer. My cooler is still in the entrance, still need to be cleaned.

  • breath wave

    Twelves mice, two sauna later.

    Something shifted. Memories of what I want to change. A realignment, it feels good.

    I wonder, can I navigate with the sensations within me? Have I become hyper sensitive to the path I take.

• Technology and Free Software

  • The Songbird Puts Teensy 4.1-Compatible Audio Processing in the Palm of Your Hand

    Texas-based Operator Services Corporation is preparing to launch an open-hardware gadget deigned to put flexible audio processing capabilities in the palm of your hand: the PJRC Teensy 4.1-compatible Songbird.

    "Songbird is a complete, ready-to-use solution for your audio projects," the company says of its design. "It is compatible with the Teensy 4.1 Arduino core and Audio library. You can use it as a standalone device or plug it into a compatible USB Type-C audio [host] device such as a smartphone or computer. You can write your own sketches without any soldering involved and make your own musical instruments, audio-based art installations, and sound inventions. Several example sketches are also provided that you can use immediately such as an MP3 player, voice recorder, ukulele tuner, and phone call recorder."

  • Sorting out the clutter

    They're right, of course. The world is finite. There's only so much space. That's probably just as true of digital stuff as it is of physical stuff, though I think it would be foolish to imagine that we're anywhere near the upper limit of what's possible with digital storage. (The first hard drive I ever bought had, I think, 48MB and seemed unimaginably huge) Recognizing that there are limits is the first step towards a truly sane economics. Nothing can grow for ever.

    I think that's the most important contribution to the world that the small internet and "salvage computing" can make to the world. Learning to make better use of what we have is surely better feeling that you must always go out and get something new.

  • Using BlackBerry Bold in 2026

    Because.

    And I believe it should be enough. But I'll play good and explain a little bit more :)

    Starting from a young age I was always fascinated by BlackBerry devices, they are so cool in design and in engineering senses. Slick, pretty, full keyboard that is actually usable, size that is comfortable in hand and at the same time works great with touch screen.

    Man, these devices are something else.

    But when I was young I did not have money or a way to buy one of them. So when I got older, I bought one from Aliexpress just because it was cheap, and it brought me joy.

    I remember that when it arrived, I put my sim card in it, tried to call my other phone (I always have two, one is private, another one is just for spam calls and work), it worked, then I opened some site, got a ton of errors. Then I moved the card back into my spam phone and BlackBerry went into the drawer for more than 3 years.

  • Marching ants

    I was watching a tutorial on YouTube recently. It was a pretty long-form guide to the GIMP. Some time into it, the author mentioned an ever-moving outline of the selected area that he referred to as "marching ants." Those "ants" were simply white pixels that were constantly moving in one direction around the outline of the selected area. It made me wonder.

  • An AI made me laugh 🤖

    OK, so now I can use C: by its secret synonym, and the computer occasionally says it likes cheese. The message is infrequent so I forget about it, and then sit at my desk chuckling when it appears.

    So where does the AI come in? I'm fairly AI-phobic, but I'm expected to use it at work. Questions were asked when I used fewer credits/tokens than everyone else. So this week I've been getting it to write regression tests. It's boring. I'm occasionally approving its request to do something, and occasionally finding it some input files that it needs. I'm not quite redundant yet³.

    When the AI runs stuff it loves PowerShell (yuk!) but occasionally it starts the plain old command processor, and even more occasionally gets the output "I like cheese!" which it notices, describes as "stray output from something" or "terminal noise", and decides to ignore. But I'm very happy and laughing at the AI having to deal with some nonsense that I put in there to amuse myself.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • What's the catch?

      **SPOILERS*** I talk a little about the movie The Backrooms. If you haven't seen the movie or the web series and want to go in clean, skip my post.

      Over the past month or two I've had a handful of run ins with AI and AI-adjacent situations that have made me start to question this timeline. While I'm sure most of us in the smolweb would love to talk about anything else, I'm beginning to wonder if we are moving into the next phase of agentic AI.

      AI has been around a long time. At least the first kind has been. AI used to be any sort of system one created with a extremely narrow target that incorporated a lot of prior data to come to a conclusion. In the early 2000s I wrote an application that would take pipeline layouts and hardware replacement sales info to create a system that could look at your setup and determine what would wear out the quickest. That was AI back then. There was a lot of that type of code out there. We were never worried about that code taking over the world and no one expected it to do more tasks than the one it was explicitly designed for.

    • LoRa BBS specification + flashing the RNodes

      Friends visited me who have experience building wireless networks with LoRa ("long range") radios. We worked on realizing my idea of a BBS (bulletin board system) for children/teens in my town.

      We got most of the way there in two days of sweating in my muggy garage.