Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • warm bodies

    a good sleep won't fix this
    the rest and recharge 
    needed for my revival
    requires such safety 
    only the presence 
    of another warm body
    could offer
    

  • The General 🎥

    Today I did it again. This time it was The General with Buster Keaton, and it was entertaining. It's a silent film - the version on Wikipedia doesn't even have music. The story is about a train chase in the American civil war, with plenty of visual humour, stunts, and a love story. I cajoled someone else into watching it, and after some initial scepticism we both enjoyed it.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Haiku - Clear Sky, no cloud in view

    A field report on Haiku OS Beta 6, the lean successor to BeOS for the local, single user desktop. The piece looks at why the system feels surprisingly polished after 25 years of development, how it differs from Linux and BSD, and how the project borrows drivers from the BSD ecosystem.

  • First 3D-printed slide rule

    The scales, from top-to-bottom, are a linear L scale, a CI scale, and a C and D scale. These are not all the scales I would like to have, for sure, but they are enough to do multiplication, division, log (base 10), and arbitrary exponents. The latter two functions, especially arbitrary exponents, will often require some pen-and-paper work as well due to some algebraic manipulations that you must keep track of.

    The scales I've printed are a little taller than usual — I'll probably make those more narrow when I have more scales I want to fit in. Currently I have to write the numbers on by hand. This is not too much of a bother, but I have to write in pencil first to avoid mistakes. And it would look better if I had a finer ink pen.

    The cursor is some tightly-wrapped transformer wire. The wire is a little thicker than a typical cursor line, which is costing me some accuracy, but is good enough. Unfortunately the bracket holding the cursor is thick and opaque, so I can't have a cursor on the back side of the slide rule, meaning that this is a one-sided slide rule.

  • Microsoft, Positioning Windows as "the Best Place" to Run Linux Workloads, Launches WSL Containers [Ed: Microsoft's EEE, to prevent people from running actual Linux]

    A personal note: hahahahahahahahahaaaaa.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • ROOPHLOCH 2026 round up

      Somehow, the calendar year is once again three-quarters complete! September has come to an end and with it so to has the eighth(!) instalment of ROOPHLOCH. If you made a qualifying Gopher or Gemini post before the end of September 2026 in your timezone but have not yet notified me of the URL, please do so as soon as possible! All of the posts which I know about so far have been listed at the link below.